skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I just installed Xubuntu on a new laptop. I was blown away at how beautiful it looks in comparison with Ubuntu. I'm very glad to see Ubuntu get over it's fetish for its old ugly color scheme.
more like purple drank
Really? I thought they were getting a bit more of the web2.0 vibe with the openness in the design, and a lot less. I'm thinking more along 37signals guys.
Wow. Thanks for reading, I guess.
So let's see here. Being a monopoly in music distribution and telling suppliers where else they can sell their stuff. Hello, anti-trust!
There's a helpful slideshow (viewable as one page) of Google's many mistakes.
This is a sign that the Apple vs. Microsoft battle is over. Previously, Apple and Google felt the need to cooperate against Microsoft. Apple believes now they have won.
Not quite the same, but reminds me of joshu's comment about wishing he hadn't sold delicious to Yahoo http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=754339
Global Aid Hurts Small Haitian Businesses
How did apple and Microsoft ridiculously complexify file management. Why is it so hard to add and delete files ? Why do I have to sync with special software? Why can't the damn thing (zune or ipod) be the disk that it is? All about locking in control.
I don't like the tour at all. At first I thought it was just a single page of information until I saw the little "click here"-style link at the bottom. I think something like the navigation here ( http://www.slate.com/id/2245644/ ) would be much better.

I also notice that on the home page, while you say a great deal about what 80 legs can do, you don't say a single thing about what it fundamentally is. This always bothers me. Makes me think of the typical terrible business site that never says more than "We offer solutions for your business needs," which means nothing to anybody. "Crawl and process web content with over 50000 computers" could be selling anything. It could be selling a book about how to set up a web crawler. It could be selling a datacenter. There's nothing to tell me that this is a service which lets me submit jobs which will be run on your machines and from which I can get various forms of output.

I'm also bothered by the meaningless numbers on the plan comparison page. What is 1x speed and 5x speed and 10x speed? As far as I can tell as the reader, these mean nothing at all and are just random numbers someone made up to get me to buy a bigger plan.
This is a more complete intro to git & GitHub: http://www.espians.com/getting-started-with-git.html
Do you want some random dude looking at your adult daughter trhough one of these.
If you need to do any sort of benchmarking for Haskell libraries, I can't recommend Criterion (and Neil Brown's package Progression[1]) enough. It handles all the details for lazy evaluation (NF vs WHNF, pure vs IO, etc) quietly behind the scenes, and uses a well-designed statistics analysis library to calculate the final numbers. Don Stewart has written a short introduction, Modern Benchmarking in Haskell[2].

It's worth mentioning that Criterion can be used for anything that can be called via the FFI -- I'm using it for benchmarking Python libraries, for example.

[1] http://hackage.haskell.org/package/progression

[2] http://donsbot.wordpress.com/2010/02/23/modern-benchmarking-...
Who's going to report Mahalo? :)
As long as this random dude never meets my daughter again, I don't give a damn.
Not he, she. @saragregory
Your post is self-contradictory and illogical. You say to forget about privacy, then acknowledge that some privacy is important, then suggest that privacy invasions don't matter as long as they happen to a lot of people.

Most of us recognize we're more likely to get hit by lightning while winning the lottery than be saved by one of these machines, and as such oppose their use.
Commercial software for Ubuntu could really help its adoption. Currently commercial software is pretty much limited to things like Maple.
How's that FLO mobile TV working out for ya, Paul?
And they allowed commenting... big mistake.
Valve Leaks Teaser Images for Announcement of Steam (and Games) for Mac
I exist too!

http://www.opera.com/
Almost nobody likes Big Brother (even if it supposedly doing something for our own good).
Well, theoretically, maybe they would like to switch platforms if the "intern" could do it?
Acme was written in the '80s, and the author of wmii and dwm states it inspired his ideas. Acme was based on Oberon, which Wirth wrote so long ago that he had to build his own hardware to run it on.
I don't understand why it's insulting. I assume that the editors and senior reporters have been on the paper for at least an academic year - otherwise, I don't see how they could become editors or senior reporters. So the little money they have goes to the people who've put significant amounts of time into the paper.

The advertisement is for a new staff member. I assume new reporters don't get stipends either. So I don't see why it's insulting to treat this staff member the same as other staff members.
I don't like it. They should just try to mimic OSX...
All I can say is that 99% of personal projects I've worked on are much nicer in terms of test coverage, deployability, documentation, and maintainability than anything I've worked on with a large group of paid ("professional") developers. Like I said, developers working on their own projects optimize for productivity; documentation, test coverage, maintainable design, easy deployment, and so on all save time and make the project more enjoyable to work on.

Personal projects have enormous time pressure on them; instead of "can I build this by the amorphous deadline in three months", it's "can I build this feature and still get a few hours of sleep before work tomorrow". That's a whole order of magnitude (or two!) different from paid software development. That harsh evolutionary pressure has brought out the best techniques, because these good techniques increase productivity by so much.

In the corporate world, there is too much negative inertia and too little incentive to improve productivity, so people just do whatever, and "whatever" is not usually the best way to be productive. (Write some tests, and your coworker just breaks them the next time he wants to make a quick fix without thinking about design. Now there are two problems, and it ends up being easier to just not write the tests; it's better for the app to break in production so your manager allocates you a chunk of time to fix it. And so the cycle continues; the software getting buggier and buggier, until you need a team of 100 people just to keep it alive.)

I will point out that not all corporate paid development is like this. My $work at a large company is very much like an open source project; there are shared libraries that everyone uses, and if you change them, you need to update the docs and make the tests pass. Your own stuff that nobody else uses; do what you want. It works very well. But of course, it's not Java or C++ :)
I disliked the Dark theme for ubuntu 9.
I haven't looked at Android yet but my experience with Objective C and the iPhone SDK is exactly the opposite of his - I found everything about iPhone development painful. As far as I could tell, Objective C does not work the way my brain does. The Interface Builder does not seem well integrated or make interface design "a joy" - it felt like more a hindrance than a help. The SDK does not make simple or common tasks easy, and the DRM is an absolute nightmare, often preventing a project that worked yesterday from downloading to the phone today for reasons that are mysterious and inexplicable even when surrounded by official iPhone gurus willing to poke at it. ("try reinstalling your provisioning certificates" is for iPhone developers what "try rebooting" used to be for Windows users.)

So maybe Android would be just my thing.

Is it possible that having programmed for the Newton using Newton Toolkit/NewtonScript spoils you for all other mobile development environments?
The GTK themes seem terrible to me. Not only did they move the top buttons to the left (good luck explaining to mom why she won't find the X where she's used to) but also it looks very inconsistent. Also the colours... It looks like one of those old themes why your friends still make fun of your Linux.

The web theme looks like a generic hosting company' website. Or like a hardware manufacturer.

I love the mission though, "Light" is a very good selling point for Linux. You might not agree about that for Ubuntu but more Ubuntu = more Linux = yay.
Site down and google doesn't have a cache link up. Can someone post a summary?
I'd love to also hear a comparison with WebOS. From what I can tell by a cursory glance, that's a dream environment to develop for. Of course, Palm has to put it on something with decent hardware...
Based on this posting it's obvious they need to come to grips with a few things.

1. unpaid internships are not a sought after opportunity for programmers.

If a coder wants to build work experience it's a trivial exercise to track down an Open Source project to contribute to. Benefits include working with some of the best developers in the world on projects that are used around the world. By way of comparison what can you offer?

2. iPhone app developers are in demand. So much so it's easy to find someone willing to pay you to learn how to write one.

3. You've listed .NET and LAMP, this is a clear indication your server space is an unsupportable trainwreck and your IS/IT services are operating with no clear goals in mind or are being interefered with by management.

Going forward they should seriously consider picking a single technology stack for your web services, it'll cut the support workload in half and make finding talent a lot simpler.

Anyone versed in both LAMP and .NET is out getting paid $80k+ a year with full benefits.

Journalism majors might still be jumping at the chance for an unpaid internship but developers definitely are not. Tell the university to cough up a budget for the position or (much better) start making journalism students take web design and development classes.

After three years building websites for the 3rd largest newspaper company in the US I can tell you that there's nothing quite as useless as a journalist who doesn't understand the web.
You are assuming the random dude to be purely random which may not be the case...

Plus using your logic you will not mind your daughter strip in a room full of random guys, hoping that will be the first and last encounter.

Meh, adult daughters can decide on their own anyway up to what levels they are willing to make themselves seen.
Maybe "the hell with privacy" was too strong. I reacted this way because my feeling is privacy is often an over-used excuse not to comply to a security measure.

And actually my point was not that these invasions should happen to a lot of people, but that they are fine as long as the collected information are immediately disposed and have no consequence in the future.
Google further personalizes search, now with stars
Shotput Ventures 2010 summer application
midVentures25 - first Chicago-based startup demo day, 3/11
Frankly, I think that Western Union isn't in the business of caring. They make a healthy margin on every transfer, and serve a segment of the population that has a strong disinterest in having to extensively document their identity, source of funds, etc, sometimes because the funds are "dirty" sometimes because the sender or recipient isn't "fully legal", etc.

It's against Western Union's interest to extensively document everyone and every dollar that passes through their systems. I'm sure they comply with the legal requirements placed on them, but I doubt they go WAY beyond that, for doing so would not be in their best business interests
My other favorite is looking for a technical person for whom they will "split the profits". Your local CraigsList "computer gigs" section will be filled with these.

My favorite recent:
"We are a couple of mompreneurs who are launching a business geared to moms.
We are looking for someone, preferably a mom so you will already have knowledge of the target market, to help us with website design, online promotion etc. etc."
http://vancouver.en.craigslist.ca/rds/cpg/1621222670.html
It's not a skip-list. It's a single-linked list, except that it may contain more than one "next" pointer per item. This way you could traverse it by either one of the next pointers, so you could keep the list ordered by 2 predicates at the same time.

Doesn't sound very useful in practice to me though. The interface would be complicated, error-prone, slow in many use cases, and this functionality can be much more simply be achieved by keeping two lists of pointers/references. It's also more or less obvious, so I'd be surprised if no one had done that before.
If people are complaining about their articles getting cut, doesn't that mean that they care about those articles and would maintain them? Wikipedia is actively spurning volunteers and reducing that "finite number" with deletionism.
If this was on Mixergy, the title would have been: "How a college dropout built Omniture into a powerhouse & sold it to Adobe for $1.8b"

Doesn't that read better?

All kidding aside, I've got to interview this guy.
Congrats and good luck to the 25 startups, here's the list: http://midventures25.com/?page_id=14
Original article: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Brand

Not sure why neither sources or HN links to it.
Reverse-engineer graphed text for fun
I used to be the online manager at my college newspaper (http://mndaily.com).

Working in the newspaper publishing environment is challenging for programmers. For instance, while online advertising made up a sizeable portion of the paper's revenue many of the salepeople at the paper had no idea where the ad spots were on the site or even what a CPM is.

Also challenging was working with different departments that had different workflows. We had to support the editorial process, the sales process, the hiring process, etc.

But wanting to get programmers for nothing is crazy. The programmers at the Daily were among the highest paid employees (only editor-in-chief, controller, and president were paid more than the online staff I believe) there and it would still takes months to fill a position with someone who had any competence (knew HTML and could write something more than Hello World in PHP).

While I know times are tough this is pretty disgraceful. College newspapers offer a good opportunity to get training in programming and allow prospective coders to start working with teams and real projects. But doing it for no pay really makes it a non-option.
I'm assuming the dude is a professional and is merely doing his job, like any woman shall assume her gynecologist is a professional doctor and not a peeping tom.
Maybe you're right - but he still comes across as a self-absorbed jerk, and that's his own doing.
It looks like a doubly linked list actually is covered by that - a doubly linked list just happens to use opposite orderings on the two references. I'm going to go out on a limb and claim that we had doubly linked lists before 2006... or 2004 (is that the filing date?).

Other prior art: about a gazillion structs with multiple list_head members in the Linux kernel.

I'm guessing they don't have actual programmers review software patents?
"Ubuntu dumps the brown" is a particularly bad pun.
This feels like Reddit to me. It's a quick laugh, and lets us feel smug in our shared values. Not informative, insightful, or hacker news. Flagged.
We're working on that. e-mail me if you'd like to talk =).

-Marcio
While the images don't seem to want to load there's a good writeup at:

http://www.jonobacon.org/2010/03/03/refreshing-the-ubuntu-br...
In this case, it's apparent that they have a pre-existing system. Of course, why that system is in both ASP and PHP on both Linux and Windows, I have no clue.

Given that they have MySQL on there twice, I'm going to guess it was a "write down every technical term that anyone knows" kinda thing.
Aaa now I finally get the South Park episode! It was about this dude?
Forget about the adult daughters; what about children? Aren't these machines generating child porn every time a child walks through it, and turning the viewers into criminals as soon as they see the image of a child walking through it?

Or do children get to bypass the scanner, giving the terrorists useful mules for carrying forbidden objects onto the plane?
Interesting - our hospital written policy is that SSNs must be encrypted when stored. Other PII is somewhat less restrictive.

But, we had a high-profile case where a server with a file of SSNs and patient names was hacked. There was no evidence the person(s) who hacked the server ever knew this particular file existed, but it generated a bunch of headaches here. Maybe policy makers went off the deep end in response.
Actually, it's an old idea and very useful for exactly that: different orderings. It's used extensively in the Linux kernel, for example, where structs contain multiple list_head members.
The real WTF, as they say, is that this would shoot up the HN main page. It's good for his loyal readers that he makes a conclusion posts, but there's not really a point in posting this on HN so that people who don't read his blog can know.
People don't want Wikipedia to be dump for all possible information.
Stop Wasting Time on Bad Movies
Wonder how much Asus paid to be the computer pictured for "10.04 has arrived" (which I assume will be the homepage for awhile after launch?)
Not necessarily. I think people are more likely to complain than do the grunt-work of active maintenance. It's certainly easier to do so. And creating an article doesn't indicate commitment.

I think there are problems - from what I've seen, people outside of an area can be too quick to judge notability. But I find the attitude that nothing should be deleted naive.
1. Probably true in that most demuxers don't read matroska tags, but it's standardized (and has been for the past 5 years or so) at http://www.matroska.org/technical/specs/tagging/index.html

Whereas ogg metadata is codec-dependant. In practice though, most (not all!) codecs in ogg just use vorbis comments, where the only official tags are http://xiph.org/vorbis/doc/v-comment.html

2. Mozilla's C++ style guide hasn't been updated since like 1996, when C++ was still grossly compiler-dependant. It shouldn't be taken as anything other than a sign that that's the era in which Mozilla is stuck.

And actually Safari supports AVI in <video>.
Cloud computing jobs 378% higher than a year ago
http://www.to
I think that blogging, especially the feedback you get from a successful post, tend to be seductive. So you continually think about that next blog post, even when you have nothing to say.

This is why I've decided to just write to get something out of my head and there's no other outlet.
"... it turns out there are only 22 ..."

Yes, you are right. I missed that even after click through. Do you have any idea for the miss reported hits?
I agree. I also see no point in making a different theme the default one, because you can easily change it to another. And also because most people would be updating their distros and would not notice any changes.
Allright, I'm down for $100 for the same terms, my email is in my profile so you know how to reach me.

What happens to the bet if FB is acquired?
Really? ((loc + 180) % 360) - 180 = loc, wrapped past the antemeridian, for any value. Just detect sign changes, and reverse the range on the reversing side.

Seems to me graphics people have been doing this sort of thing for years. A similar, but more complicated problem: painting the texture on a 3D model (literally onto the rendered model), even across seams. That's general-cased, wrapping on a sphere is a rather trivial special case by comparison.

Granted, I haven't made any GIS systems, and the underlying structure may make it more difficult than this. But this is definitely a solved problem, are they just reluctant to modify their system?
What about the one I wrote in my basement?
Flash has never supported VP7, and the only VP6 on youtube was on self-encoded sponsored channels.
That reminds me of the Boyer-Moore string search algorithm. One way to implement B-M is with a bitmap of the characters in the query string, so that regions of the search space that can't possibly match the query will be skipped efficiently.
It might seem like Twitter's length limit is due to SMS but it's actually not.

Twitter's limit is 140 Unicode characters, which is subtly different from SMS's limit of 140 bytes (160 7-bit characters or 70 UTF-16 characters).
The patent system is broke. Patents are handed out willy-nilly and only later validated through expensive legal litigation. Somehow the work needs to be done up front, to provide transparency and reduce litigation.

Here's an idea. A tax on any product or service which is covered under a patent. The tax would be placed in government trust. If a patent is successfully invalidated by later litigation, then the court could award the successful litigant all or some portion of the collected taxes.

When the patent expires, the collected taxes is transferred to the Patent Office.

The intention is to increase funding for patent deliberation up front, and to create incentive for awarding enforceable patents.
While a lot of media outlets have been playing this up as some sort of tech holy war, it really comes down to the conversions and compatibility. Build a nice standardized site, and you can cut some (but not all) costs when trying to reach out for mobile users. Virgin's not taking sides, they're trying to make a profit.
It's not actually a pun, but an an unfortunate visualization.

But perhaps I'm just being anal.
Xubuntu is beautiful and fast. I like it much better than Ubuntu.
I don't see how this is different from medical school examination. Should we prosecute all "child doctors" (don't know the exact english term) as criminal as well for seeing naked children every day?
That does sounds like a disaster waiting to happen. If you're more loose with your cash than others, but don't have as many benefits or nice terms, you will systematically fund people who couldn't get cash any other way, leaving the really good prospects to people willing to commit more specifically.
I like this a lot. I am not one to care much about looks (I use xmonad at home and Windows XP with the blue background at work), but I think this is a really appealing theme that doesn't get in the way; very much like OS X's plastic theme. (Aqua got in the way, which is why Apple phased it out.) They describe it as light, and I think that's exactly right -- it's simple, not bulky, and colorful enough to be visually pleasing. I think people trying Linux for the first time with this theme will enjoy it. (GNOME itself has a nice MacOS 7 feeling that I also like. I think new users will also like it.)

I am just speculating, because I just do everything in Emacs. I'm only have GNOME around for evince.
I was under the impression that they reserved 20 7-bit characters for usernames in @replies, which would suggest that it is still limited due to SMS, no?
"We're the largest mobile device company in the world. Larger than Sony, bigger than Samsung. And by revenue... even bigger than Nokia." - Steve Jobs when introducing the iPad.

It looks like they are satisfied with what they've done, now they're just counting their chips. They are one of the big boys, the fat cats. Apple, as we used to know it, is dead.
You know what's gonna happen? Whichever boyfriend (or guy with a crush)[1] of a reporter there has the most tech knowledge is gonna get dragged into taking it over. I've been in that situation enough times (though usually with event stuff, not programming). That's basically the only shot they have at getting free skilled labor.

[1] - Not that girlfriends can't be programmers, but college girls seem to be better at roping guys into doing work for them than the other way around.