skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Mr Rabeder decided to raffle his Alpine home, selling 21,999 lottery tickets priced at just £87 each."

Now there is an idea. Anyone wants to shake real estate?
I work at RWW, and I just thought the thread was too funny to not share. Sorry your comment got voted down =/

Also, about the earlier "incident," we've discussed it internally and with the HN dude who was involved, and it's sorted. Our writer didn't know she was crossing a line.

Ultimately, we like the interaction here, and we try to post stuff on HN that the developer/startup community might find interesting, amusing, and informative.
The Australian government is looking to enforce an internet filter.

You can read all about it here: http://nocleanfeed.com/learn.html
It would be brilliant if President Obama could bring this up as a discussion topic when he visits here, next month.

I've noticed some intelligent and balanced commentary from the US State dept recently regarding Internet censorship, democracy and human rights.
A green Valentines Day
I'm surprised how negative most of the comments here are. The guy's views are a bit extreme, but in my experience there is a lot of truth to what he's saying. In a perfect world you'll have brilliant, self-driven employees; you can give them great conditions and direction, collect status reports once a week, and everything will get done. In a real world this is nearly impossible - most smart people are not self-driven, if you give them good conditions they'll sit around and browse the web all day. Think how much this applies to most of us! Unless there is uncertainty and a reasonable degree of pressure, most people won't perform well. Employees that are smart and self-driven are one in million, there aren't nearly enough of them for thousands of businesses in America.
Some of us like Star Wars, others prefer Star Trek. All of us support injecting a little humor into our sites, though :)
OS X has what is probably the most aggressive set of software optimizations aimed at increasing battery life, and no GUI to configure it. The only options you have without delving into command line tools are to turn down screen brightness, disable wi-fi and bluetooth, turn off extra processor cores, and quit applications. Fortunately, the defaults work very well for any common real-world use.

Windows offers pretty good configuration options for power management, including setting maximum processor speed (as a percentage) while running on battery or on AC.

The author seems to be blurring the lines between fixed tasks like transcoding videos and interactive tasks like games. It's not at all obvious that transcoding with a single-threaded app saves any power over the duration of the job than with a multi-threaded implementation. Most laptop CPUs don't have the kind of power gating that are on the latest chips like the Core i7, so even if no instructions are issued to a core, it still draws some power.

With interactive tasks, the only way to save power is to do less, so that the CPU and other components can spend most of their time waiting for the user while in a low-power state. Predictive caching and speculative execution increase the responsiveness of a system on average, but at the cost of performing some tasks whose results won't be used. The only real take-away from this article is that apps that might be used on the go should provide a way to disable these techniques.

(It's important to note that games don't do a lot of this stuff, so there your only options are to turn down the eye candy and the frame rate. A good example of how to accomplish this is Torchlight's netbook mode.)
It's a few things. Both the communications minister and the PM are, despite being in the Labor Party, actually quite religious and conservative. There is a very strong wowser attitude from this government in particular which has resulted in increasing taxes on alcohol to discourage young drinking and various other forms of "nanny state" initiatives. We need to be protected from ourselves it seems.

Also, there is a single Australian senator (Steven Fielding) from a religious right party called Family First who holds the balance of power. His support is often required for the passage of government legislation, and the strong suspicion is that deals on things like internet censorship have been done behind the scenes.

Finally and most critically in my view, we have no enshrined right to freedom of speech or expression in our constitution and most Australians are too apathetic to demands these rights, and protest the government's actions.
This guy's arrogance is just a little over the top.
For me, it was watching Linus' Google talk on git, and then reading some tutorials, and then just doing it.

Linus: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8
GitReady: http://gitready.com/
Pro Git: http://progit.org/book/
A short little bit about git's internal model: http://eagain.net/articles/git-for-computer-scientists/
GitHub's Git Cheat Sheet: http://github.com/guides/git-cheat-sheet
A successful git branching model. gorgeous workflow and pictures. http://nvie.com/archives/323

Also, if you have any questions, feel free to email me. The only reason someone should be using SVN now is if there are institutional reasons or if you use lots of large binary files. I'd rather you send me an email about something that seems hard than give up and use an inferior tool. I'm not an absolute git master, but I've ended up explaining it to most of my classmates, so I've given that explanation a few times already.
In war it's called a scorched earth policy.
Another question is what happens if you don't "flattr" anyone within a month. Does the money roll over to the next month, or is it lost to the house?
10 must-read eco books
> "I increasingly got the sensation that there is a connection between our wealth and their poverty," he said.

One of the most dangerous fallacies in the world. Wealth does not create poverty.

Poverty is the natural state of humanity - we evolved from being apes and crawled out of jungles, caves, and forests, and have been fighting nonstop to improve our lot. The question shouldn't be, "How come some people are poor?" but instead, "How come some people aren't?" Poverty is the natural state of affairs.

This is never more obvious than when I'm somewhere with mixed levels of wealth. I'm in Northern Thailand right now. The poor in Thailand come from little villages where people barely subside on rice farming. No one "made" them poor, they've been poor for basically forever. Sometimes the poor farmers leave and go to the city to try to make money and make a better life. So they work in rather unpleasant jobs (construction, cleaning, cooking, etc) for far more money than they would've made subsistence farming. No one's making them poor - the jobs, unpleasant though they are, are far more pleasant for them than where they came from.

Wealth comes from people who coordinate, manage, invent, develop, streamline. People are willing to pay for these things, so the producers become wealthy. In turn, the wealthy people can purchase things from the poor people - which makes the poor more wealthy too.

More can be done. But the idea that making things people want and improving the world and getting compensated for it is creating poverty is false.
Isn't it funny how dangerous wealth can be to your well-being?

I used to always want the fastest computer with the largest monitor and the most comfortable chair. But I found that none of that helped me write better code. In fact, it hindered it because I was too concentrated on my tools and forgot that what mattered (code) came from my head.
Study Shows States Can Legally Implement Feed-In Tariffs
I tried to figure out how to make xargs read from a file
instead of stdin, and was unsuccessful.

"xargs -a <filename>" First option described in the man page on Red Hat.
Man, I never understood before the problems they must have faced just with people nearby watching and suffering from dust and ash inhalation. It COATED BLOCKS.
Ancient Man In Greenland Has Genome Decoded
I don't think he ever believed that the connection was really true. I think he just realized that he was not doing enough to help those who were not as fortunate as him.
Pixar exec to join Twitter as CFO
That said, Facebook doesn't care. :)
If they have a skill and you don't, why should they come work for you?

Because talented people don't spontaneously self-organize. Your example is a bit silly - you're talking about people with a lot of money, stellar reputation, and great leadership skills. Most skilled people don't have any of these things. Working for someone with leadership skills is the only option they've got. If you happen to have enough charisma to get people to buy into your vision, you really don't need to know how to code.
In a very real sense, Bingo Card Creator is the Perfect Table Plan of bingo cards. I have a notebook from ~3 years ago somewhere listing audacious dreams for the future. It includes the line "I want to be like Andy Brice when I grow up." (Incidentally, I still have a year or two to go to catch up to where he was 3 years ago.)

He's also forgotten more about AdWords than I'll probably ever know. (Note that if you were to graph my ROI on AdWords it would on a very good day hit one of the minima on his graph.)
Where Microsoft Makes Their Bucks (Infographic)
The Chinese censorship that Google is pulling the plug on?
I don't see any mention of his wife's opinion on this.
The really stupid thing about this is that most of the kinds of material that Conroy makes a big deal about (child porn, fetish porn, etc) is already banned on Youtube. The kinds of things that they're asking Google to go the effort of filtering are videos about things like how to do graffiti, and information about euthanasia. Not really worth it, is it?
I'm still not sure I follow. Where does the "ton of code" come in? The boilerplate code around spawning new threads? The painfulness of that task varies widely amongst OS-level threading primitives, user-level thread libraries, and other programming models that let you do tasks with dependences like Cilk http://supertech.csail.mit.edu/cilk/ or TBB http://www.threadingbuildingblocks.org/ .

Personally, if I have a DAG of tasks to do, I prefer to encode that DAG in the structure of my code by breaking independent chains into separate tasks/threads/whatever and feeding that to some piece of software to do the scheduling for me, rather than roll my own scheduling in a potentially bug-prone and unscalable way. For the example shown, either is perfectly fine, but if you have hundreds of outstanding jobs with a more complex dependence structure, I'd rather not deal with scheduling myself.
"All the money will go into his microcredit charity, which offers small loans to Latin America and builds development aid strategies to self-employed people in El Salvador, Honduras, Bolivia, Peru, Argentina and Chile."

The sad irony is that microcredit/microfinance works best when it's not a charity - further there are numerous examples of microcredits that do operate as charities and who end up squandering money on inefficient operations than reaching the poor because of how their performance is measured.

As you point out, the idea that wealth comes from taking from the poor is not only wrong, but often harmful to the very people those like this donor claims he wants to help.
I concur.

I think not wanting to implement this type of workplace for my small service based company is exactly what's been keeping us from taking things to the next level. For us, it's been worth it to have a relaxed work environment with happy employees, but I'd be lying to myself if I didn't think it came at the cost of some decreased profits. I also find myself questioning our motivations for doing such -- is it just easier on us, as owners, to have a less stressed workplace? Are we afraid of being disliked by employees? Are these good reasons?

Anyways, the article does sound like a nightmare for any technical person, where creative liberty and freedom to innovate aren't fostered while under micromanagement. However most US businesses, despite HN's demographic, don't fall into this category.
could be a GNU vs. BSD thing.
"This is the first time the whole genome of an ancient human has been analyzed, and it joins the list of just eight whole genomes of living people that have been decoded so far."

So there are still plenty of complete genomes yet to be done as the technology becomes less expensive. More cases will result in more information about variations among human beings.

"Biologists used to think that DNA would be found only in the cells at the roots of the hair, not in the keratin of which the hair shaft is made. But it now seems that the cells become incorporated into the growing shaft and their DNA is sealed in by the keratin, protecting it from attack by bacteria and fungi."

That opens up the possibility of complete genome sequences of more ancient persons. Permafrost is great for preservation of human remains. There will never be this level of detail for many persons from tropical zones.
Birds of the same feather flock together.
They have done so already. There is sample code.

I presume they'll have a standalone Buzz application at the 2.0 or something similar. That will let an established gmail-only social graph generate lots of activity and use, seeming enticing to yahoo and hotmail (and all third-party email account providers) users that can now join/be invited in on the social-web-2.0-sharing fun.
Austrian-born physicist Lise Meitner, ‘Our Madame Curie’
List of Essays Written by Bill Gates
Yes, we fall in the group of "alternate distribution channel". We have a TV for movies, no cable. I occasionally watch the last part of football games on it. We do occasionally get TV shows via Netflix, and there's a couple of shows I'll watch online.

We just don't have time to use a full subscription. It's not like we're sitting at home staring at the walls wishing we had cable. So if we paid for it, we'd either not use it (waste of money), or stop doing something we're already doing--which would either be something we like already, or needs to be done. So either way, it just doesn't seem like a good idea.
Mobile TV Tries to Break Into Prime Time
this is hilarious
It makes you want to double check if Scott Adams isn't pulling one of his pranks again just to see how far he can take it. Catbert?
This is somewhat true, and it is the reason I started watching Lost. But I just don't think that a kid (or adult) is going to be that socially backward just because they didn't watch a TV show. I mean, sure--you hang out with people who like the same stuff that you do, so you have stuff to talk about normally. Fine. But it's not like you seek out stuff to do just because--not because it sounds interesting--but because you want to be able to talk about it. Sounds like a desperate way to get friends.
Exciting Online Auctions
Online shopping offers a wonderful shopping experience to many of us because of various benefits it brings to us. There are different types of online shopping sites. Some online shopping sites are like our regular stores that we visit, we need to pick the product of our choice and pay for he product and there is yet another type where you do not just pay for the product of your choice but you make an online bid for the product of your choice.
Just flattr yourself each month, to be sure =)
I agree that two parties can equally be wealthy, but that doesn't mean one party can't step on the other's head to get wealthier faster.
I almost never use <

It's too easy to make a mistake and type >

..and that can ruin your whole day.
What's amazed me as my kids are growing up is how easily they learn from TV. Something about the medium just is able to stick stuff into their heads like nothing else. I'm talking about educational stuff at the moment (which is the majority of what they watch), but obviously there's plenty of things to learn from all programming, and not all of the lessons are exactly what you want to be teaching.
It's a lot easier to share a database across 128 threads on a single machine with uniform memory than shard it across 64 dual core machines with gigabit ethernet.
Perhaps it's just in man's nature to feel guilty, and guilt is not always correlated with one's direct actions?

Look at science-fiction movies. Why is the robots turning on their creators and killing us such a common theme?

Perhaps some catholic western philosophy of guilt, sin, and deserved punishment is at work.
I don't think MS ever did use VSS...from what I remember, they used a modified version of.....Mercurial?? Or maybe something else. Can someone else can be more specific?
Instead of "sort | uniq" you could just use "sort -u"
Wordpress. Hands down.
What I've noticed is that programs have gotten more...in-your-face, loud, obnoxious. Kids cartoons now are so frenzied as to be seemingly seizure-inducing. More mainstream fare is more deliberately attention getting. Many many shows are based on public humiliation now, which just completely puzzles me. Obviously it sells very well, but I just don't see the point.
Shadowed gray text on gray background is hard to read!
The end of corporate computing
Photographer decides to fight back when newspaper steals CC licensed photo
But I bet getting rid of the monitor, pc, and chair won't improve your coding productivity either.
Quote: "Communications Minister Stephen Conroy referred to Google's censorship on behalf of the Chinese and Thai governments in making his case for the company to impose censorship locally." Well , this sounds like referring to chinese standards to me, and it seems to just be a first step, they already imposed censorship on other stuff, not quite sure what it is exactly,a kind of blacklist: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_Australi... so if you give these Guys the power to filter everything they don't want you to see, they will use it, google has a search engine and this search engine help peoples " find what they are looking for " so I think maybe they should figure out how to educate people to not look for some kind of content and not ask google to do that, and maybe some parents to do their homework with their kids looking for porn and other sensitive content.
There are some forms of poverty that are created by wealth. Poverty didn't destroy the environment; The creation of wealth did.

Virtually every productive activity has negative externalities, and to deny those is as naive as thinking of wealth as zero sum. It's not zero-sum, but it's not monotonically positive either.
here in china, people regularly sleep on desks. long work hours is also very normal here. the hacking issue in reality probably means, watching amazon's and other website prices. and adjusting newegg's in response.
The State Of The Internet (Infographic)
I love how this http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1116881 is also on the front page just a few entries up.

I imagine that these two men are so diametrically opposed that if they ever came into direct contact with each other, they'd instantaneously cease to exist!
Obesity Epidemic in Children: Can Friendship Help?
Expense isn't a problem when you have a multibillion dollar company who wrote their own filesystem to use custom designed free software on custom designed low power servers redundantly spanning over cheap disks in energy efficient custom datacenters and no uptime guarantees.

For most companies a new Exchange cluster backed by RAID SCSI disks and a backup system upgrade isn't a trivial cost.

Edit: yes, Google did it cheaper, but that's not because IT people were lying, misleading or dismissing - it really is expensive to do 'properly'.
Poverty does destroy the environment. Look at the pattern of development for any country. The environment gets worse and then better because once people stop worrying about putting food on the table they start worrying more about the quality of the food they eat and the air they breath and are often willing to pay a premium (not to mention to protect their own property rights from polluters).

This is why East Germany was by far a worse polluter than West Germany, similarly for North and South Korea, etc. Thinking that virtually every productive activity has negative externalities may be true but should also take into account the much greater positive externalities.
Somebody has been watching "Fight Club".
Warming to the Yankees - A Story of Betrayal
Report Warns Silicon Valley Could Lose Its Edge
Us too.

edit: I should expand by saying that we've been working ridiculously hard to update and knock out bugs in our infrastructure to prevent more outages.
TripAdvisor's 2010 Top Dirtiest Hotels
I hear what you're saying but this is over the top:

One of the most dangerous fallacies in the world.

It may be a fallacy but, it's certainly not dangerous. At most it's a slight counterbalance to the ongoing concentration of wealth and power that's happening globally.
I’m chatting with someone who hasn’t set a username, and it shows in iChat as uUSERNUMBER@chat.facebook.com. Might work on both sides.
My friends and I have been posting a lot too, but mostly we've been posting "YOU BUZZIN BRO?" and "Buzz sucks".
Would You Pay $895,000 for This Business? - You’re the Boss Blog
There seem to be a large number of comments on the possible effects, motives, and general thoughts about Google's effort, but I'm intrigued with what it's going to take to get them to consider a particular community or city. Will they be partial to urban or rural neighborhoods? Densely- or openly-developed communities? Newer or older cities? Will demographics play a role?

I'm sure they're going to be considering all of these, but short of keeping my fingers crossed and filling out an application I hope some part of Austin, TX gets on the map.
Recoupe your Windows PC after a major virus attack 
A computer virus attack on your system can render it crippled in many functional areas, leaving you helpless with glitches galore. It can change your registry entries, change security settings, delete/modify Windows files/Start-up items or run processes in the background. This can affect the performance of your Windows PC, which makes it vulnerable to even more virus attacks and unsuspected problems.
yes. the actively hostile UI of git is the only reason i can think of that makes a difference between hg and git. they are functionally identical (though hg is far better documented to boot). i've been screaming this from the mountain tops for years.

oh, and -another- aliasing system on top of bash's is just stupid, so don't even mention it.
A Small Bank Finds a Way to Make a Troubled Loan Program Work
Is This What It Takes to Run a Small Business?
Poorer people on average probably take less care of their environment than richer people, but that's not what I'm talking about. Them _becoming poorer_ isn't harming their environment. It's the derivative that's important.

Someone is becoming very wealthy pulling oil out of the Niger delta, but the people living there are becoming much poorer as a result. http://234next.com/csp/cms/sites/Next/Home/5524695-146/niger...
I've been following Dustin for a long time, but I can't remember why. What has he done again?
"Poverty is the natural state of humanity - we evolved from being apes and crawled out of jungles, caves, and forests, and have been fighting nonstop to improve our lot."

Uh. You can only be poor if there's a monetary system in place however simplistic. Poverty and wealth are two sides of the same coin literally.

EDIT: The flawed logic of viewpoint is even clearer when you consider "Are apes poor?". What could that possibly even mean?
Worse, this poll http://www.news.com.au/technology/internet-porn-we-dont-look... indicated that most Aussies supports the idea of an internet filter!
This couldn't possibly have anything to do with last week's announcement that Google's going to be providing information to the NSA, could it?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02...
Remember that Newegg is an American company and must abide by American law, not Chinese law.

Also, this is really non-news. The lawsuit has not yet been found to have any merit.