skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If this is intentional, that's an interesting idea. Once the concept is out there, it is a lot easier for someone to role their own competition. If there is going to be competition anyway, have some control and/or a stake in success.

If a site gets to the point where it is a substantial business, they may well want to partner with Stackoverflow more closely anyway to get features, advice, access to whatever revenue generating plan they come up with.
What happens when the user wants to install software that's not in one of the install's default repositories? The web page walks them through adding another repository URL to their package manager GUI [which is YA of a dozen]?

Then they're in roughly the same situation as a Mac OS X user installing new software, which I agree is a pretty crappy situation to be in. But, we somehow muddle through, and if the software does have an apt or yum repository, it means keeping it up to date is automatic and handled by system-standard tools, unlike the vast majority of Mac software, which in the best case provides their own update mechanism (which is usually not quite as offensive as all the little update icons that end up on a Windows machine by the time it is fully functional, but it's still really irritating).

Mac OS X instead relies on a convention of bundling all necessary files together into an app bundle that's self-contained (and represented as such) and thus can be treated by the user as a cohesive, unitary Thing.

Yeah, I know. I've worked on a couple of very large "Things" of this sort in the past, when making packages of software I worked on for Mac OS X. I didn't call them "Things", though. I called them "Big Balls of Crap".

It's a horrible kludge that barely works, no matter how much you want to call it "empowering". Is it empowering to have the system make it trivial for a user to overwrite new versions with older, possibly insecure, versions without warning? Is it empowering to have no standard location for files of various types? Is it empowering to make it impossible to replicate an installation stack automatically across many systems using standard tools? Is it empowering to make software that cannot be managed from the command line? Is it empowering to have no standard mechanisms for knowing what is installed and what version? Is it empowering to possibly be running old and insecure versions of dozens of applications without even knowing it? Is it empowering to only have the features that the application bundler thought to include...things like checking to be sure there's enough disk space, checking to be sure the destination paths exist and are writable, keeping a record of what files ended up where, etc.? I've installed Mac OS X software that failed to do all of those things at one point or another, and ended up with a broken installation, usually without warning.

Look, if you like the pretty picture that applications display when you open up a dmg file or a CD, and you like the big shiny icons, and such, that's great. But don't hold up a gigantic gaping misfeature in Mac OS X as a positive thing. It's really not.

The average computer user is not better off with a dramatically worse implementation of package management, just because it usually won't end in tears.
Why they have blurred their faces though? Or they blur all the faces on streetview?
Sorry for the self link, but I'm really interested in feedback from folks. It's at about draft three right now and there's plenty of room for changes and additions. Thx!
And all of the above presumably helped him to co-found a successful (in a make-something-people-want sense) startup. Not too bad after all, eh?
Did Facebook ask me if I would be happy if they did this kind of data-mining on my status updates?
Embrace China’s Homegrown Computer Chips
Why I Am Excited About the iPad
Tallinn is definitely a nice place nowadays! If it does not work out for you, Helsinki is just a short ferry ride away and Stockholm is not too far either...but unfortunately both are quite a bit more expensive :)

Edit: That is, it is relatively simple to check for jobs in either location and even go to interviews while still stationed in .ee
Californians in general drive both better (more safely) and more courteously than drivers in Minnesota, but even with the bad weather here, some Minnesotans bike. I feel much better when my wife is on a designated bike trail than along a roadway that has car traffic.
really great tool. Hope to use this soon for one of my applications!
> I know that at least a few publishers are willing to go the no-DRM route.

RPG (not "computer RPG") publishing has been in a post-DRM era for several years now.
Because most people who declare themselves to be in an open relationship on Fb aren't in an open relationship. It's most often done just for the sake of being silly or telling everyone who your "BFF" is. The latter is more likely the closer you are to being a 16-year-old girl.
I very much doubt that. Generally, either the publisher or (sometimes) the developer owns it all. In the case of EA, those entities are the same. I can't see EA open-sourcing anything, ever, though.
Freakin AWESOME! Thanks
A strike seems like the perfect time to introduce automation.
This one is 1kb
http://www.usabilitypost.com/2009/05/29/the-1kb-css-grid-par...
StuffBuff Social Bidding System
We got her into hospice last week, and are moving her to be closer to family this week.

She still thinks it's all temporary, though. One on level she knows the doctors can't do anything, but on another level she really, really, really wants to believe that it'll all just go away if she ignores it enough.

The emotions of the parent when they get older and die was something I was not expecting, and it's definitely the hardest part.
Linux Foundation chief on MeeGo
One of the things that comes to my mind is this:

Craigslist is widely described as leaving 90% of the money on the table. Most people don't think this is why they are this popular. They could have monetised more categories or cities and still kept their position. Maybe.

But maybe they did exactly what was necessary to become the number 1 classified site. What if the right amount of revenue for some top 200 site (or network of sites) is really a couple of million?

Can such a site survive VC or does the option of staying a certain size disappear??

Starbucks was a perfect example. They new exactly where the business was going if constraints got lifted. More stores. Potentially tens of thousands. If they were less capitalised they would have to go slower but they knew where they were going.
A step in the right direction for social e-commerce? It's getting better ... but still isn't there yet in my opinion.
In my country buses have a driver and a charger, who collects the fares.

Some companies started replacing the chargers with automatic fare collection equipment. But it turned out they weren't allowed to fire the chargers. So there's still a charger in each bus who will sell you the ticket so you can put it into the machine. Oh, you bought a ticket before boarding? Well, the charger still has a job to do: to ensure you do use the ticket (the driver can't do it because the gate is in the middle section of the bus).
How to spend $1.5 trillion without Congressional approval
Yehar's digital sound processing tutorial for the braindead
I hate replying to my own post, but I just want to point out that the Node.js server is running on a Prgmr.com VPS with 128 MB RAM. The server is currently using 1.5 - 2.7% CPU and holding steady at about 43 MB of RAM with 70 connected users.
Why not hide all submitted answers until 24 hours after the question is posted? Once this interval expires, there would presumably be enough of them to be shuffled and presented without any sort of fastest-gun bias.

Optionally, question submitters could pay for "Urgent" status, where the submitted answers are posted as they come in. No ratings or votes would be accepted for the same cooling-off period, however.
OMG the privacy implications of this will create a huge BUZZ!
Joel and Jeff don't create the content for the site, the communities do. The fact that other communities haven't moved into their sections en masse is not their fault. It's YOUR (ie. everyone else) FAULT.

For example, I tried to get the Grails community to use StackOverFlow when the site first started and their attitude was that they would rather just use the mailing list and sift through Nabble.

http://archive.codehaus.org/lists/org.codehaus.grails.user/m...

The problem isn't with StackOverFlow, it's with the other communities refusing to adopt something new. "After all, IRC is where all the best people hang out...who needs this .Net thing..."

I'm currently learning Lisp. You wouldn't be able to get this kind of an answer on a mailing list or on IRC.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2264267/generating-a-quiz...

This .Net/C# site just made it easier to learn Haskell, Lisp, Erlang, Scala... a little irony not to be overlooked.
Goldman Goes Rogue – Special European Audit To Follow
I switched laptops last November and have been having a Linux just works experience ever since. Previously I'd been on a System76 pre-installed linux laptop where I was paying them to make sure it works. This time I just walked into best buy and walked out with a dell and installed everything myself.

All hardware worked out of the box including wireless and suspend.

I started reading OMG Ubuntu (http://omgubuntu.co.uk/) which clued me into some good productivity tips and also some bling. I like Docky as much as I ever liked the Mac dock. Ubuntu Go is the Ubuntu equivalent of Quicksilver.

Even stuff I expected to be hard, like my Verizon USB 3G card, was easy. That in particular has been a moderate pain on other operating systems but was just a drop down option in the ubuntu networking widget.

For times when I need to be mainstream compatible I run Windows in Virtualbox. That's how I sync my iphone, play online poker, run Quickbooks, etc. Plus laptops come with such enormous hard drives, I felt like I could leave myself a dual boot option in case I wanted to play games.

Overall, I'm much happier having my day-to-day operating system match my servers. There's just something nice about having a dev environment that's so close to my production environment.

I wrote a longer version of this here:
http://www.stubbleblog.com/index.php/2009/11/linux-on-the-de...
Check out how http://hunch.com gets people involved, there are some good lessons there.
Can't one do this without going tens of thousands into debt (unless one has scholarships or grants)?
That is reasonable, albeit something i regret at times.

I have many friends who develop open source software but resist Linux. I have been working on Linux desktop for some years, but at times it is irritating to no end, especially in the realm of design. I often advocate for Linux, but it is still messy, it is not for everyone.

interface design seems to be a real problem for open source apps, few manage to get it polished enough, and mostly on web apps, not on the desktop.

I used KDE for years, and switched to Gnome when KDE 4 was too messy to deal with. now that KDE 4.4 i think ii might give it a try, but from online video i wasn't too impressed
Needs position:fixed
What is a use case in searching everyday text webpages for which regexes would help, in your experience?
Thanks for clearing that up. I read somewhere that he had children, but wasn't aware that he worked for a living.
You might find reading _The Box_ ( http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0691136408/conmanlabo... ) interesting. When shipping containers were first used in 1956, the various longshoreman unions were really unhappy and fought quite hard to keep the status quo.
Just to clarify the above comment, there is a UITextView, but it's one typeface/size only.
Downmod me all you want, I'm just interested since to me my statement was sort of obvious.
It was not a licensing issue that prevented id game assets from being released. Carmack wanted to share the technology, the knowledge, so others could learn from it and improve on it. Letting people play doom/quake for free was not the purpose at all.
Why not robosubs?
This is also the main I'd go with incorporating first.
How do I integrate this with an existing member mysql database?
You have only 3 questions. If you formulate a hypothesis like "A is True, B is False and C is Random", with a naive approach you will waste much more than 3 questions just to test this single hypothesis (and statistically, it will be false, so you will need to test more).
They also refer to this on their website at http://www.zebraimaging.com/html/lighting___display.html
I really like the trick of determining the identities of 3 gods with just two yes/no questions. Simple, just ask questions that might make their heads explode. :)
I used to bike a lot in SF. Then I realized that in less than a year I had a roommate shatter an ankle on market street and need surgery, a friend get hit by a bus and had to wear a neckbrace for months, another friend shattered a shoulder and also needed surgery, another got doored and had back problems, and I also got doored, but was fine. Though my bike was messed up. Great bike culture, but not very safe.
> This page curl will almost certainly be a piecewise linear approximation using a triangle mesh whose vertices are animated according to the user input.

I honestly can't tell if your being facetious here or not. There are certainly much simpler ways of pulling off this effect; ask any Demoscene participant.
Youtube turns 5
I do use an adblocker, but even before I did, I think I'd just used the web so much that it was almost like my brain had gotten used to the general pattern/shape of ads on web pages to the point where I just unconscionably ignored them.
It's not about legal tender; that's just a way to exchange value. It's a brutal truth, but worth is defined by what resources people are willing to give up for something. If they are not willing to trade their resources for yours, you have NOT created real value, but destroyed it, by consuming resources that people would pay for and creating something they won't.

In the same vein, railing against profit is ridiculous; Profit is the difference between your inputs and your outputs. If you don't create a profit doing something, you are again destroying value. (It's perfectly legitimate to have a profit in non-monetary terms, though. In that case it's you who is making the decision to trade more resources for less, because the process or result has value to you; You decide on its worth, and pay the price.)
Yeah, I had seen your numbers, but I was referring to some sort of larger study on the matter.

As for Slashdot, I always sort of wondered whether or not the appeal to those advertisers was less clickthrough and more name recognition. That is something that I think is a bit under-rated. I think that matters when evaluating products - I know that I tend to favor brands that I've heard of in some way vs something completely unfamiliar.
I can't even imagine the legal repercussions of giant robotic trucks killing motorists. I would be cheaper to keep hiring drivers than paying tens and hundreds of millions for wrongful death suites.

After enough accidents, many municipalities and states would prohibit such trucks, that would render them useless.
History of Work Ethic
This may be very interesting to some of you.
Bug report: when reading a website, I typically click the middle mouse button once in some whitespace, then gesture around to scroll slowly. The polling mechanism used here seems to dismiss the autoscroller. Firefox 3.6 / Windows XP.
I feel old when I read articles like this because I remember back when Linux was difficult. I meet new Linux users all the time who almost can't believe stories from the bad old days.

Anyway, we use Ubuntu at my office, and we're super productive with it. I would recommend it to everyone.
"Good design can't fix broken business models."
Is success inversely proportional to user growth?
I've been mulling over something for a while and thought the experiences and research of this community might help.

Every company is slightly different, so my question is more about understand the following curve:

Company success versus user growth, specifically initial user growth and consumer facing apps/services

* How long does one spend trying to drum up survey results, adwords, prototype users or real users?

* If that takes a while, does it mean your chances for success are lower?

* How does one get better at publicity and traction?
From your comment, it seems your political indoctrination is more important than cost (monetarily, level of quality, breaking of relationships, etc) of an education.
They should use the same data to make a followup post which states that happy people are more likely to find a partner or that sad people have little chance of ever getting married.
I don't think the two situations are entirely comparable.

The decision to purchase music is squarely on an individual, whereas in colleges I think there's plenty of politics involved in bribing committees to keep on using the newest editions of books, thereby practically forcing students to purchase certain books.
Fractals Revisiting
Show:GivingTurtle.org, Ask:Improve conversions?
Working for a living? I thought he was a tech blogger.
The threat of force is still force.
Oh boy! this is awesome.
For Nokia, I don't think it's anything to do with Android (in the narrow sense) and is about far more than Intel's money. It seems to me that some years back Nokia took the view that phones are just another computing platform. Taking this view, actions like the Trolltech acquisition, Maemo, the Booklet 3G and this announcement can be seen as one cohesive movement towards Nokia offering the full computing stack.
In the US, regulation of robotic long-haul trucks will probably be almost entirely at the federal level (interstate commerce). So I doubt municipalities will have the authority to prohibit them.
I hope this blunder will help hearing less about him. His book "American Vertigo" mentioned in the article was horribly written, with sentences going over multiple pages for the only and clear goal of appearing like a great writer.
That type of question is probably covered in their Terms of Service.
Yeah, great example of how facebook does not understand privacy. Why should I care if its anonymous or not, I dont want them to be even able to find out that kind of stuff about me!? It's like they dont even understand how far reaching this is; their finding out about the happiness of millions of people and they disguise it at as some kind of "V-Day Trivia". This shit creeps me out.
Seems like a good way to leverage the platform!

I'm still waiting for Twilio to accept payments outside the US though... Only limited to the trial otherwise. Hopefully it'll happen someday!
"wouldn't trust your fortune to cow poop" sure I would, if it kept as well as gold

edit - and smelled as well
Interestingly, even if the number of fatal accidents caused by robot trucks was less than the number of accidents caused by human trucks, it would be unacceptable to the public.

The number of fatal accidents would have to go close to zero.
It's not just the economy, it's the way we're watching the government try to fix it.
The only thing you're not including in this equation is votes. Union leaders simply need to convince lawmakers that it's in their best interests to pass favorable legislation limiting the adoption of new technologies. It's certainly been done before.
For our goals and rationale: givingturtle.posterous.com
I've gotten a great deal of positive feedback, yet I'm struggling to a) get donations, and b) get people to sign-in and vote.

I know this is a classic question of sorts, but I feel like there's something really important/interesting/innovative to be done with this site.
Sorry if I sounded condescending. I didn't know the specifics of your system (is it mostly on the server side, embedded, etc...?) so I couldn't give you any specific advise.

The sort example was merely a metaphor for design for scalability vs. optimization for performance. Perhaps better examples would have been dividing the server side portion of your application into asynchronously invoked services is design for scalability. Rewriting some of these services in C or OCaml, switching from JSON to Protocol Buffers, switching from an HTTP server and a layer 7 load balancer to a custom non-blocking server and ZooKeeper (for cluster membership) are optimizations for performance/stability/cost.
Why can't they just tell me on the start page what they are. MeeGo, SchmeeGo... I have no idea what this is about.
I think there's also the implied "or they will kill you" to encourage a non-brute-force method. While this one in particular doesn't mention any death threats, most problems of this kind do. I mean, why else limit yourself to their constraints, if not to preserve life / sanity / coffee / beer?
In the past year the price of gold has been at record highs. Why this encourages scared people to buy is beyond me

Because people are heavily influenced by the "panic! panic!" media nowadays.

Supposedly things would "never be the same again" after September 11 and the industry for comedy would collapse. Then we were meant to be dying of avian flu.. and then swine flu. And then the economy was meant to collapse some time in 2009. And then.. oh yeah.

Another panic, another year..
that's a rather odd way of reporting numbers. "negative 5% more positivity than average." wtf?
DevCentral Weekly Roundup Episode 122 - A Slacker In Our Midst
Under the assumption that the pirates could not compromise the command and control system, or simply cut the rudder and steer the ship manually.

But yes, it was these points that led me to suggest robot ships.
Correct. Scarcity does not equal value, and scarcity alone does not make a good currency. However, gold is not only scarce, but also durable, divisible, and portable. The unique thing about gold is that its value is actually in its intrinsic suitability as a currency, more so than any other substance on earth.
now if only i hadn't switched to mac about 5 years ago...
See You in Forty Days
Modern merchant vessels are already highly automated, to the extent that crew compensation is a fairly small component of total cargo costs. Trying to reduce the crew further would be chasing diminishing returns.
While it's possible to build a vessel that navigates itself from port to port they will at least need some engineers on board to fix equipment when it breaks. It wouldn't be safe to leave a robot ship drifting powerless in mid-ocean. The crew is also able to do a lot of routine maintenance during transit. Without a crew, the ship would have to spend longer in port just to have enough maintenance time.
It's true, there are no first mover advantages on the web anymore. If you have an idea that doesn't exist already, it's probably for a seriously good reason or it does exist somewhere and is performing poorly enough that you can't even find it after browsing 10 pages deep on a keyword search. What i learned from Ben Horrowitz, was that you need to find something that does work and has current market share (and market size), and make it 10x better. Making things 10x better and going after a defined market is the way to go. Forget the trending discussions of 1995-2005 that consisted of 'finding web concepts that no one had hacked up yet'.
This isn't like fiat currency where it's based on "our faith" like they taught us in school. It's expensive as it is because of a) some decadent people's actual demand for it b) other people's expectation for said decadent people's demand for it. Usefulness as a currency I suppose can raise the price, but only because there is an expectation of actual utility in the hands of a final consumer, somehow or other.

Really, I think gold is interesting because it's rare and thus coveted.

edit - no offense if you enjoy gold, I was just making sweeping generalizations for expediency
That's already done. Most large ports require a licensed local pilot to board each ship and guide it in and out.