skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My last job, about 80% of the systems were Solaris, 15% AIX and 5% Linux/Windows. Granted, this was a large financial institution.

The place prior to that was about 90% OpenBSD, 10% Arch Linux. A startup.

And before that, probably about 25% Linux, 40% Windows, and the rest were a good balance of AIX and Solaris, at a community college. For what it's worth, the college was using Solaris for students to play on, and Sun curriculum for "UNIX" courses, with the thought that students could go get Sun Certified when they're done with the class; and if they did so, wouldn't need to take the final exam. I'm not sure that'll be an option in the future.
Green Consumers more likely to steal
If it were a site that helped bootstrappers self-organize, then it would be a great idea. Otherwise, it would just be more government control and a likely source of fraud.

I hate to be cynical, but as it turns out, I'm really good at it.
It doesn't mean to never use SQL, nor that SQL is bad — it means to widen your horizons; to not immediately assume that whatever you want to store, the best way to do that must without a doubt be in an RDBMS.

For years now, people have been using SQL as the default way to store things — and to very rarely use anything else. NoSQL simply means that there are other options. Widen your horizons.

I don't see how that is inflammatory.
I think it is a fine idea, but I don't think it will be effective. Has the average person become heavier or lighter since the introduction of the Nutrition Facts Label on packed food was introduced in the 90's? The issue is the length of the feedback loop and the power of momentum. I saw some other stat that showed even after heart attacks only 30% of people changed their lifestyles.
This isn't to say that all teenagers only use 800 different words a day. I'm sure some do, but there have to be some that only do so to communicate effectively with their peers. I know that when I was in high school, using large words really didn't get many anywhere with my classmates.
The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan

One of the few books that I think really everybody should read.
IPad Guided Tours are up
It's interesting you say that, as a sibling poster says they've been able to (not that we know all the details or if they have a US based card - I'll ask!).

That said, several years back I got around these restrictions a few times by putting in my valid address but then selecting, say, NY and zip 10001. Some card validation systems back then obviously just used the first line of the address and ignored the zip if the card wasn't actually a US one. I couldn't believe it worked either and hope payment systems are a bit more robust now ;-)
> Maybe reddit is consciously doing this.

Maybe. :) In fact, we use reddit quite a bit, and the flashy ads annoy us just as much as the rest of you. We do our best to keep the ads relevant and non-annoying.

If we could afford it, we would just turn the ads off, but sadly, we have to pay the bills somehow.
But every nutritionist says "calories in, calories out"; that effectively counting calories and eating less is the only sure way to lose weight.
Yes, keeping archives open. It's a shame, really, especially because I had hopes for the potential of that site.
I'm a huge fan of classic literature. It's a much different perspective of society and isn't necessarily written for ease-of-consumption.

The Count of Monte Cristo
Time Machine or Invisible Man
Frankenstein

One of my personal favorites which you won't be able to put down: Dracula
They will understand what a Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Yale graduate can bring to the table.

How about people attending less prestigious schools?

Now, having personal contact and a network throws all of this out the window.

Exactly, and this is part of what makes open source exciting. Want an internship at Google? Becoming a key contributor to Chromium OS is arguably a better strategy than going back to school, because if you're good you can get a Google employee to notice you.
They are the former chief financial officer working as comptroller, the onetime marketing director who is back to being an analyst, the former manager who is once again an “individual contributor.”

I am curious about how many of these people were "overemployed" during boom times?

I know this recession has made many competent people loose their job and become willing to accept less, but bubbles and boom times often see companies try to grow fast and become willing to accept less qualified people to fill some positions too...
The Conquest of Mexico, by Bernal Diaz -- a conquistador who traveled with the Cortes expedition to Mexico City to overthrow King Montezuma. Incredible, true story written by someone who has actually there. An unknown land; the clash of two cultures; the clash of two religions; temples to angry gods; hoardes of gold in hidden rooms; human sacrifices; alliances; mutinies; enslavement; first description of Tenochtitlan, the city on the lake; the destruction of Tenochtitlan; and more.
Given what was said by a sibling poster, was that with a UK credit card or do you have access to a US card, etc? (Or was it the old spoof the state and zip code trick that's known to work from time to time?)
The other author (also my frosh Calculus prof) did a TED talk a while back:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4vqr3_ROIk
A datastore library on Google App Engine for Clojure
I like Brad, but sometimes he comes off as a narcissistic princess. If the VC already said 'no', it doesn't hurt at all to ask for a referral, the worst that can happen is they'll again say 'no' or ignore you.
You are exactly right. There is no harm in asking. What's the worse that can happen, they say no?
Where Is The Fold [News.YCombinator.com]
I agree 100%. His response doesn't make sense from the entrepreneur's perspective. Using his strategy, no one would ever make cold calls because they are annoying to the recipient. But the bottom line is they work enough time to make it worth the effort. In this case there is no downside to the asker. I have no idea if asking for such a referral would ever work but it seems to me this is a good example of nothing ventured nothing gained.
The self-serve advertising system has been a win for me, both as an advertiser and as a reddit reader; so until Coca-Cola and Viagra ads start showing up in the ad boxes, I'm sure that lots of redditors will still keep the AdBlock exception on their machines.

Advertising from people and companies you perceive to be your peers or "at your level" are surprisingly tolerable aren't they? (The Deck's inventory is another great example) It's the ads from megacorps and bottom feeders that are annoying.

For example, I'd love to see ads from other HN members (ONLY) here on HN, and I'd even pay to run some myself.
> Exception of type 'System.OutOfMemoryException' was thrown.
On the other hand, many people also drive vehicles with manual transmission because doing so yields measurable improvements in both power output and fuel economy. Vehicles with manual transmissions also tend to be more predictably controlled in adverse weather conditions. Interestingly, but not necessarily surprisingly, these points translate quite directly into the NOSQL argument.

The downside to the manual transmission is simply that when you don't care to exert more driving effort in a given situation that doesn't benefit enough from the increase in enjoyment, power, economy, and control, you're better off with an automatic in that situation. As before, this aspect also translates rather nicely. :)
I laughed when I read your post. I exchanged emails with him before and you described him perfectly.
Not necessarily. I've run out of books to read, so I figured I'd crowdsource for new points to start from, go beyond my current scope.

I figure there are lots of books people can recommend here that are relevant to my interests, so why not ask?
I agree with the premise, but disagree with this comment 'A system that tries to be everything to everyone will often require so much configuration and maintenance by its users that, while they may become experts at setting up your software'.

The art of simplicity isn't to dumb down things, but to make the complicated simple.

If there are so many settings, features, etc. that the user must 'learn', then you have a problem. If all the features that a user wants 'exists', and the user doesn't need to 'learn' them, then you are likely on the right path to simplicity.

One method to manage layers of complexity is to 'hide' the more advanced features until the user starts looking for them or needing them.
Some recent engaging reads:

* Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational

* Christopher McDougall, Born to Run

* Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers

* Jeb Brugman, Welcome to the Urban Revolution

* Richard Florida, Who's Your City?
You will not be wasting your time poking around the great stuff in http://classics.mit.edu/Browse/index.html

One of my favorites is Caesar's The Gallic Wars, because it's so amazing that we have his very own account: http://classics.mit.edu/Caesar/gallic.html

Josephus' account of The Jewish Wars is amazing.

Marcus Aurelius' Meditations is a must-read: http://classics.mit.edu/Antoninus/meditations.html
Good stuff in the SciFi section there! The culture novels in particular are great! My favorite Culture novel so far is 'Use of Weapons'...
NoSQL For The Rest Of Us
You don’t have to be Google to use NoSQL
It would, but Amazon's AWS policy has never shown any indication of being managed like that. They'd done a reasonable job of keeping prices low, making them cheaper as the underlying infrastructure is cheaper to run and adding options (spot pricing, etc) that can reduce how much you pay dramatically in some circumstances.

The big reason is that S3 uses REST and a / request on a bucket is equivalent to the 'listObjects' API call. They'd have to figure out a way to deal with legacy clients who use this REST method to list a bucket.
The shuttle uses 4 separate 1.2MHz IBM AP-101 operating in lockstep / redundant systems, with a 5th running an independent system. I assume the fifth is setup in case of software failures.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_AP-101

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

PS: It's easy to forget just how old and hacked together the Space Shuttle is: Historically, the Shuttle was not launched if its flight would run from December to January (a year-end rollover or YERO). Its flight software, designed in the 1970s, was not designed for this, and would require the orbiter's computers be reset through a change of year, which could cause a glitch while in orbit. In 2007, NASA engineers devised a solution so Shuttle flights could cross the year-end boundary.[38]
My workstation, I say, my workstation laptop sucks
Okay, I sent you an email.
* Daniel Quinn - Beyond Civilization (an easy read about what's wrong with today's society, why, and how to fix it. Not political, rather what you can do yourself. It was a real eye-opener to me)

* Jared Diamond - Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (Jared Diamond is a geographer who writes about societies and civilizations, and how they tackle changing conditions)

* Herfried Münkler - Empires: The Logic of World Domination from Ancient Rome to the United States (Münkler writes about different historical and contemporary empires and hegemonies, why they did what they did, and why they failed early or managed to stay for centuries. Very non-political and matter-of-factly)

* Ursula K. LeGuin - The Word for World is Forest, The Earthsea Saga (Science Fiction/Fantasy, LeGuin is pretty different from most sci-fi-writers. Earthsea is pretty standard magicians/dragons-fantasy, though)

* Ryszard Kapuściński - Travels with Herodotus (Kapuściński was a Polish journalist who traveled a lot. Here, he tries to walk in Herodotus' foot-steps. Basically, a modern day Herodotus)

* Jules Verne - All of his books are worth reading. Visionary and engaging.
an probably some of the most audited code on the planet
Here is an article about developing the 'perfect' software that runs the shuttle:

"They Write the Right Stuff"

http://www.fastcompany.com/node/28121/print
Early iPad apps to cost twice as much as iPhone apps
The Four Steps to the Epiphany by Steven Gary Blank is an excellent book about startup engineering.
Flatland (http://amzn.com/1607961024)
It's the End of the Life as We Know It and Linux Feels Fine
Yeah, that requires a lot of work for us too. We rename files to their MD5 hash, but it requires a post-processing step in our deployment process.
The idea of people being "overemployed" is described in the Peter Principle which states that people rise to their level of incompetence. Maybe it is reversing itself a little.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle
The Road was also another excellent book by Cormac McCarthy. I'm not sure about his other books but this one was a really easy read.
> The government would be the funding source, set a few high level rules, and otherwise stay out of the mix.

That's more or less how public health care works in Canada. The provincial government runs the single payer health insurance organization, and doctors' offices / clinics are essentially small businesses that treat their patients and then invoice the insurer for the publicly insured activities they performs.
well it was just in the link, so most people never even saw that.

That might have affected the CTR, but shouldn't have affected the conversions.
Cash is cash, how one is treated is whole new ballgame.
I believe this will just keep the moderately health conscious people being health conscious but will leave the ignorant unchanged and continue to make poor food choices. Take McDonald's packaging for example. They have been putting nutrition information on their packages for some time now but do you think that deters Joe Blow from ordering his super duper extra large king size Coke and fries?

Do you really need nutritional information hitting you in the face to realize that deep fried chicken that you're going to eat is bad for you?

It's not as if they use this information to decide between a hoagie and a salad. They use it to decide if they should get the huge hoagie or the one a couple of inches smaller.
Think & Grow Rich - Napoleon Hill

Taiko - Eiji Yoshikawa

Alexander of Macedon - Peter Green

and +1 for Staunch's choice:

Meditations - Marcus Aurelius
Richard Dawkins' "Selfish Gene" and "God Delusion" are excellent reads.
I remember my Digital Circuits prof saying the Apollo Flight Computer was constructed out of thousands of NOR-gates.

At the time I was struggling to comprehend how to construct a basic circuit, so I was wow'd (and still am).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Guidance_Computer
So easily demolish them.

Already done, quite effectively, by other people.
Perhaps providing a 10 or 20 second sample free -- right there on the page linked to -- would persuade people to do the email sign-up in order to get the rest of the screencast.

Without a sample, we really have no idea what it is, nor whether or not it would be worthwhile to take the time to do the email signup. For example, does it show coding happening in an editor? Some kind of graphical program? Is the output animated? We really can't tell just from the title if it's something that would interest us.

+1 on offering ogv format, btw. :)
<pedantry>your XML failed to parse</pedantry>
If you're feeling really introspective, His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman and Demian by Hermann Hesse.
Django + Fabric = easy multi-stage deployment
I've been reading The Lost City of Z by David Grann. Really enjoying it:

* The Lost City of Z

* http://www.amazon.com/Lost-City-Deadly-Obsession-Amazon/dp/0...
For more top-10-list writing advice goodness, see also: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/feb/20/ten-rules-for-wr...

And the ur-text of all writing how-to's: Lester Dent's master plot formula for pulp fiction (Dent was the author of the Doc Savage pulp novels):

http://thelastreveal.blogspot.com/2010/02/lester-dents-maste...
The Stranger (L’Étranger) by Albert Camus is an excellent novel. I'm sure many HNers can relate to the main character.
> The problem is that most software applications couldn't take advantage of all those cores, even after investing hundreds of millions of dollars in computer science.

This is such a tired argument. All these problems have been long solved in Computer Science. Intel had 4000 CPUs in its Paragon System in the 199Os.

The software has been around long enough, my particular lineage is : Newsqueek, Alef, Limbo, Go.

The commercial world chased the Mhz (2 oxen or 1024 chickens? as Cray put it). It's not my fault you all thought C++ and Java was the way to build the future. It wasn't in 1995, it isn't now.
That, and it was built a few decades ago.
"The Logic of Failure" by Dietrich Dorner

This is a particularly good book that ought to be spread around more.
The effect of giving computer vouchers to poor people in Romania is that they go to places that will exchange the vouchers for money, and then lie on the questionnaire about what they're doing with the computers.
Did an interview with DHH a few weeks ago. We talk about Rework, Rails3, and some personal stuff like his passion for racing Porsches.
And now it’s going to the junkyard. Together with the shuttles that never lived up to their aspirations. Sad, really.
The editorialized title of the submission may have its problems, but "Correlation != Causation" and equivalent statements need to be consistently downvoted because they, as on every other site where they have for a while now been equally if not even more overused, have become the lazy man's catch-all content-free retort.

Much of what we take as certain once started with observed correlation. This trend of immediately and automatically discounting observed correlations will likely do more harm than good over time, as one would be hard-pressed to hypothesize and later prove (or at least fail to disprove, in the scientific sense) causation if one's habit were to always blurt "correlation != causation" in the face of new information.
I haven't used KVM yet since my pony laptop doesn't have VT support, but I've used VirtualBox which is great. Its Seamless mode is amazing. After using it I've switched from VMWare Server to VirtualBox.
And it's 260 engineers to write 420 KLOC. This is why software is buggy; it's to expensive to make it not buggy.
I apologise because I struggled to find anything but the leak from a little while ago. I couldn't find a comprehensive list of donors.

No Governments and corporates is obviously a good policy. But that does not mean individuals with an agenda are not involved. What if it came to light that, to pick a random ott example, senior Chinese officials were personally donating?

All I'm pointing out is that it is unclear where their complete funding comes from; making it difficult to filter for any bias. If they take no personal payment that becomes a little easier, for me anyway, to sync.
I don't get it. Why would you want to ban anyone from Twitter? If you don't like how someone is behaving, you can stop following him/her. If they are link-spamming, you can report spam. Is there any problem with those solutions?

Things like netiquette are useful when you broadcast your messages and some people are likely to read them even if they don't know you directly. But in a service where you have to opt-in for each contact? Why complain?
I ran an ad about a month ago. Paid $20, got 81,196 total impressions and 2,922 clicks. Definitely a success.
According to a WikiLeaks member, they publish all true and false documents together with a judgment whether they think it's true/false and why. For example, they published a fake Steve Jobs medical report together with a note why they considered it a fake. They do have criteria (e.g. no self-made write-ups, no publically available documents), but nothing against boring or false stuff.

http://blog.chaosradio.ccc.de/index.php/2009/08/24/cr149-wik... (if you understand spoken German, that is)
Having it on the package is a little different though since you don't find out about the calories until after you order. When the counts are before you make the decision it may have a more profound effect.
But OpenSolaris is still open source. If the community believes OpenSolaris is such an important asset to lose I am sure they can pick up the development if they want. And we already have the most important OpenSolaris technologies in FreeBSD so it wouldn't be that big of a deal anyways.
"Money Ball" by Michael Lewis is great. It's about evaluating talent in new ways to exploit market inefficiencies in baseball.
The Innovator's Dilemma
On the surface, yes, less calories eaten than burned will result in losing weight, but only following this rule on the surface is dangerous.

* Do you get enough of the necessary nutrients?
* Do you eat so little that your body starts to reduce it's metabolism?
* Do you have exercise program that continues after you stop a reduced calorie diet to rebuild the lost muscle tissue (your body burns both muscle and fat tissue when compensating for the missing calories)?
* After the diet do you return to normal eating habits, or eat a diet that is balanced against your physical activity?
Hey Guys,

Greg from WakeMate here - Because we have not publicly shipped any units yet, there are no reviews of units just yet. We will be shipping out the first units at the end of the month so you should be seeing some reviews soon. More detailed information will be posted to our website and blog.
I also liked most of those. I'm just reading Blindsight, wonderful.

The only one I hated was "Market forces" by Morgan. It felt like reading "The Pilgrim's Progress", but with Chomsky as Jesus -- a little bit too heavy handed in political propaganda. For that kind of stuff done in a fascinating way, check Ken MacLeod's "The Stone Canal" and following.

(Asher got a little too much of Space Opera for me, in the end.)

For sf, I'd add Greg Egan (Stross has been mentioned multiple times).

I'd also like to recommend the worst author I used to buy books in hardcover from -- Robert L Forward. The guy couldn't have written a believable character to save his life, but he had some cool physics ideas. RIP.

For fantasy, which I didn't see mentioned, I'd add Scott Lynch, most stuff by Jack Vance, the black company series (Glen Cook), Joe Abercrombie and Vlad Taltos (Brust).

Dawkins' Selfish Gene has been mentioned. Steven Pinker was interesting.

Edit: Re Schoeder, I've heard good things but not read anything yet. Thanks for advice and kick to start.
One egg isn't going to do it. One egg gets you <200mg of choline, if I remember my research right, while you need more like >1000mg/1g to really see piracetam's effects. My DNB scores improved more with piracetam+choline than just piracetam: http://groups.google.com/group/brain-training/browse_thread/...
I suppose it isn't that inflammatory if you have an uncommonly liberal interpretation of the meaning of the word "no". Most of the time it's used with a meaning similar to "not" or "none", rather than "yes, if it's the better way".
The Selfish Gene was probably the most important book I ever read. It fundamentally changed my understanding of the world.
I'm drawn to mongo because it's easier to make changes to my data structures. I do wish, though, that it had a better query language. Something a little more structured. Some kind of structured query language. Queries-as-nested-json structures are kind of annoying.
I finished a bottle of Huperzine-A a little while ago. Did apparently zilch for me - no subjective effects, no side-effects, no apparent effects on DNB, etc. (It was from Source Naturals, which is apparently reputable enough that I discount the possible of counterfeits.) In comparison, I did notice effects from piracetam, eg., or fish oil (http://groups.google.com/group/brain-training/browse_thread/...).
OK, but bottom line is, "singlehandedly" is the wrong description.
The Prince of Nothing series of books by R. Scott Bakker
+1 to Snow Crash
Is Quora Worth $86 Million? Or $100 Million?
Isn't that Pilgrim's corpse floating down the river? :-)