skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This comes up a lot but it always misses one aspect of this. Microsoft has returned many many billions to shareholders and continues to do so with a quarterly dividend. When they started along this dividend path they made a large special dividend payment to shareholders. This makes these kinds of comparisons very difficult and of questionable meaning. One of the reasons companies like Apple don't want to pay out a dividend is that keeping the money in the bank drives up the stock price. A business with 1 dollar in sales is worth X. A business with 1 dollar in sales and 1 dollar in the bank is worth X + 1. This simple effect makes it easier for the stock to climb and options of executives to be more valuable. It does not necessarily make the business any better especially after a certain point when there's enough money to withstand downturns. This is why market caps are a not a good way to compare businesses. You can consider things like return on assets, net profit margins etc. and see if those feel like better measures of the quality of a business. After a certain market cap, I think it's more correct to look at a business as large or large enough rather than an important measure of something.
Yes it is already live, all you need to do is click the "Check for new messages" button on the inbox page and you'll be notified with a sound and the new message will be highlighted.

I just checked and made sure it is still working as it is suppose to (Firefox + Safari). Ill try Chrome as well.
" estimates that a hacker who gets 1 to 2 percent of users of infected machines to purchase the software can pull in over $5 million a year in commissions."

Why am I not using my computer security knowledge to do this? haha
Fiber Economics - Why you don't have fiber (yet)
Raynish4altyd - Blog
Arguably having slightly unfamiliar syntax that has long term benefits (like lisp's parens) provides an excellent filter against programmers who you really don't want in your community, anyway. I find that people who obsess over syntax are often the ones who know the least about programming and computer science in general.

That said, some syntax choices are horrifically bad, and make simple things hard. But lisp's parens are not an example of this, just the opposite.
I came across autojump a while back, but I have an aversion to 'learning' systems in that they can sometimes conflict with muscle-memory (you expect a certain thing to always perform a certain action, but through training it now does something different)

I've just reinstalled it to check out, and I've noticed a couple of things that I dislike:

1) it doesn't seem to consistently tab-complete (j <tab><tab> returns a bunch of __1__/some/path entries)
2) It's not easy to cycle through/view multiple matches
3) I'm not sure how to modify the database (eg: when I complete a project and archive stuff, I probably don't want to jump there anymore, even though it might be quite highly rated)

cdargs deals with most of these things in a better way, but doesn't have any of the learning features. I've used it now for a few months, and I'm in the process of hacking at it a bit to make it fit better into my workflow.

One useful tip that applies probably equally to both is to add something like:

"\C-f": "\C-a\C-kcdd \t\t"

into ~/.inputrc for a binding style completion.
Several people have already side-swiped this issue, but let me say it straight out: the main advantage of OSS is that, if you really need to, you can dive in and fix bugs or add your favorite features ("scratch your itch").

I don't think this happens as often as pure OSS advocates claim, but it's there.

Think of OSS as having the ultimate guarantee: You can fix anything, if you really need to.

Otherwise, you're just working with a black box whose ultimate behavior (bugs or features--really the same) is beyond your control and even understanding.

(Believe me, I've spent decades working with various black boxes (OS and application APIs), and it ain't all that fun spending a good chunk of your life second-guessing the API vendor and working around their bugs.)
Little debate for the UK's Digital Economy Bill
Markets vs. Monopolies in Education: A Global Review of the Evidence
How To Defend Your Reputation
The Disney Studio lacked resources at the time of Robin Hood production, and reusing animations was an easy way of saving money.

If you watch lower-budget animations, like made-for-TV animation, you will see animations being reused all the time.
Hmmm you previously had links to various companies. Did you remove such for a reason?
The author began his career as a software engineer. Once that career provided him with independent means, he began a very fruitful career of full-time educational policy research.
Writing A Biography Essay
Are you preparing for your term paper? As part of the assignment for the term paper, do you need to write a biography essay? If yes, then here are some tips that will help you in your task
I find one thing a bit unbelievable. The author says Chrome OS is meant to kill Windows. I don't believe Chrome OS is meant to kill Windows...From what I read it is more of a new style of platform developed for Netbooks and less powerful devices. There is no way that something like that could kill Windows in my opinion. Aside from that, I really don't believe the anything happens when Apple passes Microsoft. Some of Microsoft's bigger innovations aren't out yet, such as their new Mobile 7 phones and even Project Natal, which comes out for Xbox 360 later this year and could give Microsoft a big Holiday stock push.
If all schools were private, we would have better schools at half the price? Sorry, but this guy needs to learn what "profit motive" means.
Flagging, seems unrelated to hackers
Juggernaut (Easy real time Ruby on Rails)
Agreed on all points. I suspect the problem is that characters such as Gates and Jobs, who are focused visionaries don't leave much room in the highest ranks for people like themselves. To put in another way, put two Steve Jobs' in one room, and only one will leave.

So the people who excel in companies like Microsoft and Apple can't be the same kind of uncompromising visionaries like Jobs and Steve, they are almost by definition the best #2 guys in the industry.

I expect that Apple will slowly turn into Ballmer-era Microsoft. Profits will climb for a while, but the new leader won't likely have the guts to attack new markets and develop revolutionary products. For if the executive did want to do those things, he would have started his own company 20 years ago.
Ask HN: Focus Points For Incubator Final Round Presentation?
For those that have "been there, done that" what are the areas to focus on for a short presentation (5 min of slides, 5 min Q&A) given to a potential incubator. Logically I'd think you'd want to cover:

1. what our startup does
2. why is it relevant (what problem does it solve)
3. what have we done so far to test our thesis (showing pilot data when possible)
4. who we are (as individuals) and why we (us as a team) are capable of managing this company
5. what mentoring would be ideal and what we would do with any funding.

Are there other items to include? Which area's deserve the most attention? Thanks!
[if we replace public with market education] we would have better schools at half the price, and be freer too. We would also be a more just society, with only the customers of education bearing the costs..

There's a problem: the freedom of a market system is especially in contradiction to justice with respect to education. A child in a poor family will end up at the worst of the educational institutions, harming that child's equality of opportunity. With reference to Rawls' Theory of Justice and the original position, a just society should not put up with this.
Sam Harris is saying some important things, namely that there is an objective morality. (See his TED talk: "Science can answer moral questions.")

Sam Harris is not an Objectivist, and he most likely did not come to his conclusion about morality via Objectivism. However, if you agree with him, I think you'll find that Objectivism develops these ideas much more completely.

Objectivists are atheists - we know that the supernatural (God, werewolves, ghosts, gnomes, etc.) do not and cannot exist, and what is good for man stems from his physical and mental requirements for survival (therefore it is objective.)
The Value of Good Design
I've also found the CTRL-r shortcut quite helpful in Bash. Most of my commonly used directories and commands are near the surface this way, it works on almost everything without installation, and I'm usually in a directory where those commands would make sense.

Although, it doesn't really help if you need to jump to an obscure part of the filesystem.
Discussions about the educational system are both frequent on the site and germane to the creation of hackers.
Why? Hackers can devise ways to create better schools than what we have now. To do so, they would have to learn why the existing ones failed.
Efficiency, perhaps?
After edit: I don't think this thread should be auto-killed by flagging. It seems to be on-topic as the guidelines define the topic of the site.

The writings of pg, the founder of this site, on education policy are what drew me to Hacker News. The guidelines say,

"What to Submit

"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The world will be a duller place if hackers have no interest in education policy.

See pg's articles related to education:

http://paulgraham.com/nerds.html

http://paulgraham.com/hs.html

http://paulgraham.com/college.html

http://paulgraham.com/wisdom.html

This list is not exhaustive. A lot of hackers think deeply about education, and that interest shows up in many of their writings.
Wow, this is heavy a propaganda piece. But, I still found it interesting due to a wide range of well executed logical fallacies.

What I would like to know if this has a more formal title? But to blast public schools is not the purpose of this article. Is it just misdirection a transition or what, because I often see the form. (X is bad) (I am not here to talk about x) (Let's do Y)(But, Y is not tradition)(Who will be bold enough to try Y)
If public schools were abolished, I would have had a much better education.

After high school, I had to delay adulthood for years to deprogram myself and learn that learning was not pain!

Public school was a prison for me. I learned far more at home by reading books and experimenting with my computer on my own than I ever learned in the classroom I was mandated by the state to attend.
If all schools were private, we would have better schools at half the price? Sorry, but this guy needs to learn what "profit motive" means

I am sure you never heard of a libertarian in your life before.

I am pretty sure supply and demand play a roles in determine if we will have better schools at half the price.

I mean we're might not even be talking the "public school" system model where teachers teach inefficiently and ineffectively.
why is this on HN?

I mean, libertarianism is all nice and wonderful in theory, but when you ask those Austrian School guys to give some example of functioning libertarian society all they can come up with is Iceland under vikings or Somalia nowadays http://mises.org/daily/2066

REGULATION VACATION CELEBRATION!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QDv4sYwjO0
Competition brings about better efficiency. As soon as learners have the power to shop, they go where they get the best value.
_The result has been the only free country in the Arab world, the recent election of a secular leader, and a dramatically higher standard of living._

What's your definition of freedom? Please cite source of "dramatically higher standard of living". According to wolframalpha, the GDP per capita is $780 in iraq (rank: 198 in the world).

_http://www.iraqbodycount.org/ estimates about 100,000 civilian deaths from ALL sources_

From the IBC website: "it should be noted that many deaths will probably go unreported or unrecorded by officials and media."

The Opinion Research Business (ORB) poll estimates the deaths to more than a million. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War). The IBC has got the lower estimates. I'm more confident to the ORB and even estimate more deaths.
That's very useful. I've got it installed already.

Here's a small patch to it to make it work without your dotemacs: http://github.com/avar/ibuffer-git/commit/59674f

And here's what I had to do to get it working with my dotemacs which uses autoloads instead of loading everything at startup: http://github.com/avar/dotemacs/commit/9bd611

One day I'll figure out how eproject works, and customize-variable, and everything else I haven't looked at in Emacs yet :)
Providing subsidies to poor learners is a distinct policy from providing general subsidies to lousy oligopolistic providers.
Correction, spooky present.

Right now children can effortlessly destroy the lives of parents, family members or teachers... by spreading exactly those kinds of lies.
On second thought if you use symlinks I'm pretty sure this is atomic:

ln -Tfs $dir $symlink

Where $dir is the name of a directory and $symlink is the name of a symlink.
A child in a poor family will end up at the worst of the educational institution

Yes -- but only due to the ill-conceived ban on slavery.

If it were legal to do so, companies would buy shares in the future earnings of children in exchange for funding their education.
Cute and very very true. Definitely worth taking a look at.
harming that child's equality of opportunity.

Why make education all equal? Why not provide the best education as we can with what we can.

Is voluntarism not a principle in your book? Can't church and charity help people?

One way to look at this is that being rich beget more being rich. Those who have more money than others will have a head start in life, no matter how you spin it in any other way.

Should people start taking money away from rich parents who want to provide their children with the best education money can buy?

Look at it in another way, do you really think public school system really help people? Look at schools in the cities. They're seem to be providing an unequal education compared to suburban schools.
I vote for REBOL. Syntax is really basic, yet really powerful. Can do graphics, simple animation, connect to the web, can accept web connections and is really small.

Basic applications at http://musiclessonz.com/rebol.html rebol tutorial include a painting app, e-mail sender and a calculator.

Syntax is the real winner. Keywords, "" and [] is basically all. No silly semicolons, curly braces or whatnot.
What happens to the companies themselves? Nothing.

What happens to perceptions? Probably something.

There's always mistrust of the biggest player. If Apple become's the most valuable technology company in the world, their propensity to control their stack will be even more a focus for the media.

I think Microsoft will relish being an underdog for a change: "Clearly we're not a monopoly. We're not even the biggest technology company in the world."

Even if both companies change nothing, they will be seen differently.
Hey, thanks for mentioning Hackety! I'm the maintainer now.

The site is now http://hacketyhack.heroku.com/ , and we're gearing up for a 1.0 release in the next few weeks. There's been a lot of work to get Shoes 3 ready, and once it's done, I can get 1.0 out the door...
It doesn't add up. 230 consultants, average pay $400,000 each.. that makes "only" $90 million.
I find it amusing that he is honestly arguing for the default throughout most of human history and calling it a bold move.

Clearly the public education system can be improved. But, what is so often forgotten is private schools greatest strength is choosing their students. Harvard does not try to educate people of below average intelligence or poor academic backgrounds. And they are also willing to kick people out far faster than public schools. Because of this they can provide a level of education that is a step above, or at least graduate people who are better than average.
The Difference between Nerd, Dork, and Geek Explained by a Venn Diagram
I love Ruby, and it made perfect sense when I started learning it at 13. The syntax is so natural.

The only issue is what she wants to do with it. I was tilted a bit towards wanting to do "real" programming, so I had no problem with the fact that I've still never actually done anything with a GUI (well, the browser is basically a GUI for your Rails/Sinatra apps).

There are ways to do GUI's with Ruby, and it doesn't look too hard, but it's not as simple as it would be in, say, VB, or probably even Java. But don't give her VB or you'll scare her away from coding forever.

If she does want to do GUI's, you could checkout http://shoes.heroku.com/ Never used it, but I hear it's pretty good.
No, you do not get brilliant engineers or engineers at all for that price.

Thing is, perhaps most things don't need engineers.
In the long term, we are fated to "succeed." Thermodynamics is on the side of our disappearance.
The first mechanism you cite indicates you didn't read the article. The second is either tongue and cheek or indicates a big misunderstanding of science.
Visiting stars in "practical" times is one thing. Colonizing a galaxy is another. The latter can be done through hops of just several light years in a matter of decades, using technology we can already envision. Laser sails and fusion drives let a civilization like ours colonize a galaxy in the space of a few million years. Fermi's paradox stands.
It's not hard to imagine that happening - or more likely, the fraction of civilization that is capable of advancing society fails to reproduce, and the part that does reproduce isn't able to advance society.

Once we are able to create viable new societies, societies themselves can evolve out of this trap. We may need space colonization before this can happen, however.
Wikipedia and sister projects prepare new, easier interface
I wrote my own utility which works a bit differently. Instead of calling cd, I call a different function which changes to a directory stored by an alias in a DBM database. Any time I'm in a directory that I know I'll want to revisit frequently, I call another function to save the current directory (by alias) to the database. Another shell function lists the current aliases in the database and what directories they point to.

It's a bit of a hack (a combo of Perl and bash scripting) -- something anyone on HN could probably put together in no time, but it does the job. I've been using it for 2 or 3 years now, and I find it to be extremely useful and a decent time saver.
Seven Languages in Seven Weeks: Io Language Day 1
He's fantastic. This guy saw the matrix and was able to write about it in a thoroughly entertaining way. I believe his 'All Things Considered' series inspired the name of NPR's daily program. If you want to channel him, download the audiobooks app for your iphone and you can stream him. Here's one of my favorite bits: http://www.classicreader.com/book/2281/13/
In any system, there has to be a "first". The first bacterial spore, the first amoeba, the first star, the first planet.

Why is it so hard to think that we could be the first?

Also equally curious, why MUST they look different? Maybe they're already here and they look just like us.
You don't really have to pay a dividend when you're stock is rising like Apple's is on growth. It's a fairly new thing for MS to pay one too and it's only because the growth ended. Since MSFT started issuing a dividend, Apple's stock has gone up over 1000% the dividend doesn't compare.
How Do I Get My Hackers Startup in TechCrunch and Mashable
It's not about individualism, really.

There are tons of individualists who would love to explore space and contaminates environment they touch.

Generally, democracies have nothing to do with spending money on oursleves, but free market does. All that mean is that the average individual have very high-time preference.

Meanwhile those individuals with very low-time preferences want to aim for the stars. The market can provide for them, too in the form of private space industries.

Do I view our presence in the universe as an evil? Naw. That's for scary folks who hate their own humanity.
I agree - Apple has a tendency to create good devices and then services around the devices.

iPod:iTurnes
iPhone:App Store

These services are great because they act as monopolies: "You want to make something for the device? You have to sell it in our store where we take a cut."

So far this has worked quite well and I imagine the returns on capital are huge.
That feature is on the way.
best of luck in all your endeavors
Thank goodness - someone finally said it.
I'd dive into EC2 if you're going to be experimenting. For my purposes it's great to be billed only for your exact usage. Transfers to and from S3 are fast and cheap too.
It seems like a big leap to me to take the problems of our generation and extrapolate them to be a (literally) universal explanation for Fermi's Paradox. I have the same problem with the apocalyptic explanations. Just because humans have built enough nuclear weapons to destroy our civilization doesn't mean all other species in the universe would have the same inclination.
Microsoft stumbled into riding a thriving software ecosystem with MSDOS and IBM PCs. They were able to leverage that into another thriving ecosystem with Windows. They did the same with the XBox.

A lot of Microsoft's recent attempts in the mobile world have fizzled. Apple understands such ecosystems, however. WinPho 7 will succeed or fail based on whether or not they get their ecosystem right.
exactly.. check out this "instructional" video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiwreHjQiqs
Everything you ever wanted to know about particle smashers
Random Spam
I haven't removed any links that I remember... which ones are you talking about?
good resource, thanks for your answer :-)
In one year.
The Israeli vs Silicon Valley Models for African Startups — WhiteAfrican
I was listening to a talk on The Singularity, and it occurred to me that that might be a good explanation of the Fermi Paradox. (Which is similar to the author's idea, but a bit different.) Basically, our minds are likely to "merge" with the Internet, allowing us to tap into the internet as our personal and cultural memory storage system. But we cannot extend Internet access into outer space, due to latency and the inability to make copies of the entire Internet locally. So the future "us" would be tied to the planet in order to have access to our memories, which would be very difficult for us to live without.
Carrots, Sticks and Lower Premiums
I would agree 100% with you except for some personal experiences I've had. I'm a full time Ruby developer who incessantly tries to pull all his friends, kicking and screaming, into programming - any programming - and naturally I push Ruby first, since I find it such an elegant, intuitive language.

To my surprise, though, some people just don't "get it". Where I see elegant, intuitive behaviour, they see incomprehensible magic. Where I delight in "objects all the way down", they find OO to be at odds with their conceptualisation and an unnecessary, unwelcome complexifying factor.

Depends on the person. I hate to say it but in many cases a less "opinionated about OO" language, like (gasp!) PHP, might be a better fit.