skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here's a legal way to print money: change the font
Technically this is very cool but conceptually there are just so many things wrong here I don't know where to begin.
One nice feature of upstart is its ability to start services, disk checks, etc, in parallel. This will dramatically decrease boot times on modern systems. ( http://www.linux.com/archive/feed/57213 )
Yay open source! Yay linux!

This is why I'm slowly backing away from anything to do with linux.
Hey...when I purchased my 1st generation iPhone the 2nd week it came out, I jailbroke it and had Apache + php installed on it. I was then writing & running scripts locally. After awhile I found a decent UI framework and was using it to handle all my scripts. It was pretty cool being able to bookmark the scripts on the home screen and making appear to be a regular installed app. Anyway, here's the link to the wiki of the framework, it would be neat if someone took this and ported it for the ipad..the code is pretty damn simple so it shouldn't be much work....

http://code.google.com/p/iui/
I second this idea, pretty smart and I've done this before with some of my projects
I would say XHTML/CSS is extremely useful to master, as they are basic markup languages to display how your website looks.

From there you can go down a few different paths, JavaScript being the frontend path for fancy UI effects and PHP/MySQL seem to be the matching database and backend programming language for most web 2.0 apps today. You can learn all of these languages online through tutorials and help forums, it'll just take some time
Nobel Prize Winners by Country
Incentive engineering v. Econ 101 (creativity, criminality, etc.)
I'm a long time HN user that just started at Twilio so I'd love to talk to you about your app. Can you email me at jsheehan@twilio.com if you want to talk more?
Is this any better/worse than using something like charles proxy?
I just started at Twilio two days ago so I don't have an answer for that but I'll see if I can track someone down that does.
The linked pdf on crime & economics is also well worth reading:

http://law.fordham.edu/assets/CorporateCenter/Black_-_Fragil...
I guess this would be a good time to point out which came first (Windows 3.0 = 1990).

This kinda thing reminds me of the Amazon comments about Diane Duane's "So You Want to be a Wizard - 20th Anniversary Edition" being a "ripoff" of Harry Potter. Time is hard.
I enjoyed his "curious choice" description of Apple choosing to go with default wallpaper that looks like a series of deep scratches on the screen. Glad I wasn't the only one who gasped "crap, it's scratched!" when I booted it up.
How Your Compete Rank can Directly Affect your Blog
Unfortunately with that system when people change carriers they have to remember to notify you. (full disclosure: I work for Twilio but I have been trying different SMS techniques for years so this comment stems from that experience)
On Wed, 2010-04-07 at 14:12 +0000, Thomas Krause wrote:
> The problem is, that you don't know this script is
> dangerous before you executed it.

Then you should not execute it.

Scott
--
Scott James Remnant
<email address hidden>

Brilliant. Exactly what you want to hear when a seemingly innocent vendor init-script just erased your harddrive.
what a lousy maintainer
Something else to checkout with Google and QR Codes is Google's [QR Code Chart API](http://code.google.com/apis/chart/image_charts.html). It is the most dead simple way to create QR Codes that I've found.
very interesting. Bill O'Reilly wouldn't like that.
Unfortunately this is not the smart geek that they are looking for. He's worse than a normal consumer: he's a power user. Note how he's not done any benchmarks at all, he's just insisting that this must be the cause because the handholding Linux distros he's familiar with all use swap partitions, so OS X must just be retarded or something.

Paging is fucked in OS X, but this isn't why.

He focuses entirely on its use of swap files, which is not a problem at all, especially since the middle of the 10.5 betas. Before that, the system would only allocate new swap files and never do compaction or reclamation, so if your filesystem was normally within 10G of being full, it could page its way into filling it, and grind into a performance hell orders of magnitude worse than what he's complaining about (for years I had to reboot every 100 days or so to reclaim swap). Insisting on using fixed swap partitions made sense twenty years ago, but it sure as hell doesn't today as long as you do GC.

Paging on OS X is much higher latency than any other modern unix, but the fault lies with how VM works in the guts of Mach, not some userland configuration trivialities. Chapter 8 of Amit Singh's Mac OS X Internals has details of the implementation but doesn't go too far into why it sucks.
Would this also make a difference on a Macbook Pro? It seems that it should... When I look in my /var/vm I also have a collection of incremental swapfiles in there.

I also get lots of slow-downs when closing apps - exacerbated by the fact that I swapped my MBP's hard drive for a 5'400rpm, bigger one, which means disk IO is even slower. Anything that reduces disk IO would be welcome.
As the old joke goes, IBM is good at 2 things: shooting self in foot and reloading.
so what's the conversation around the dinner table like? =)
Boingo Wireless: iPad Already Popular Device At Airports
Honestly, that helps.
Oh oh. There goes growth (cheaters, and there are already many complaints from users that the new feature isn't working properly). Must've been scared by the Yelp lawsuits.
Gerrit: Google-style code review meets git
Thanks, it's not a fickle fancy, been looking for others for maybe a few weeks? In the meantime, I'm hacking at it, both in other domains and the side project itself. It's something I like, and while expensive for a side project, not super expensive. I'll see if I change my mind when the code is closer to done!
ARM programming, where do I start?
It's even better than that:

First 100,000 Amazon SNS API Requests *per month* are free
I'd like to read it from someone who is a sushi lover, but doesn't make their living writing about how great that restaurant's particular chef is.
What makes me sad is the disproportionate amount of money and efforts that the US seem to spend on military projects instead of civilian ones(1). Surly the US did and do great civilian projects, but maybe it's greatest achievements are in space where there's also military motives. While it's European countries and Japan which have developed efficient and high speed civilian transportation.

(1) I mean engineering oriented projects like train, cars, telephone networks etc. not academic research where the US clearly is great.
Buying identical socks. Increases my chances of finding a pair.
Maybe they're not working hard enough. Larry Bird and Michael Jordan both said they were the first to the gym and the last to leave. My point here is simple: there are no shortcuts to success (other than rare exceptions).
Awesome, I am a proud supporter of the Atlas beta so I might use this as an excuse to dive in. :)
I would pay a large sum of money to enter this - specifically, up to $0.50/expected iteration, minus electricity costs - if I were allowed to write a computer program to play for me.

That suggests that the real resolution to this paradox has something to do with transaction costs. I wouldn't pay more than a few bucks to play manually because I don't expect to have time to play more than a few times, so the low-probability high-payoff events will probably never happen. I would pay a lot more if I could automate it, because then my cost per round becomes negligible, and I can rely on pure math.

This may be why most normal people don't found startups (they don't expect to have enough chances for their lottery number to come up), and why quantitative hedge funds can trade profitably (they can take advantage of arbitrage opportunities that most investors overlook because transaction costs make it not worth their while).
There is also the "throw money at it" fix for this – an SSD. I've been enjoying one, of the Intel X25-M G2 variety, it solves VM paging/thrashing slowness very nicely and is hella fast to boot.
Tell HN: newly funded startups, get your investors together
A (currently stealth) startup I invested in last year had a get-together, hosted by their law firm. They included all the employees, the angels, and the institutional investors.

They showed off their early prototype, which was exciting to see.

As an investor, I found it quite excellent. I got to interact with the early employees, which was exciting. It's probably also helpful for them to have exposure if they go on to start other companies. I got to meet a bunch of VCs and other angels I've only seen in paperwork.
Such a lack of any failsafe behavior in a script that can potentially erase whole disk should have been against all reasonable policies that distribution's init scripts should have. I'm not a fan of Ubuntu, and I have very, very low opinion about it, but still, there must be such guidelines and policies. If there aren't, it's the primary bug.
Reserve your Railscamp AU tee
This is like some kind of real-life Ocean's Eleven.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1030989
Seed stage startup buys Veoh
Wow, what a great story!

I'm surprised the thief only served seven months in jail. I can't imagine it being that lenient today.
You could have invented zippers
http://imsoocd.com/2010/01/04/calendars/
I don't see how they can really stop cheaters until they do something like force businesses to post a unique verification code inside their store (or print on the receipt) that changes every day, and require that code to get any rewards.

With the way it's set up now, can't I just use my computer to send whatever HTTP request my iPhone sends, but with bogus coordinates?
Totally cool. The headline can act as the tl;dr summary, but basically they found 3 different species in the same family in this weird corner of the Mediterranean. They don't need any oxygen because they have something other than mitochondria in their cells to produce energy.
I added a complaint to the bug report
I sincerely hope I have the honor of working with Ron one day. The values described here are hard to come by and the same ones that I was taught to value growing up. The values of honor, loyalty, and timeliness transcend "money".
Google is making real money with Android, and even if it's a loss leader it's just another medium to expand their search business. They can afford to lose the millions in Android develoment and they still come out winning.
hey I like this one
http://www.codinghorror.com
and may I suggest other people do the same if you feel this maintainer probably won't bother to fix it
You know you can go to https://www.google.com/calendar/render?

Google Calendar is also blocked where I work, but using https does the trick.
So if someone pre-generates a strange file-format for you - it's almost as simple as my 5 year old nokia.

Or there's a 17 step process.

The way the iPhone handles it's ringtones is a step back from how most normal phones did. (// Note to American readers - if your carrier blocks a function - it means you have a bad carrier - not a bad phone)

The iPhone excelled in having a great browser. And looking gorgeous. As far as Phone parts go (crap reception/quality, struggles with group sms, ringtones, etc) it was a step backwards from most phones on the market. Now that might be an acceptable trade-off, but it still needs to be stated.
If you force-quit / SIGKILL the app, it won't bother to page as much of its bullshit back into memory as it's terminating it. I'm kind of baffled by the continued presence of graceful shutdown procedures in an age when everyone does recovery on startup anyway.

The problem isn't that the 5400rpm drive is 'slower', but that the average latency is higher (though only by about 1.5x) -- it likely has higher streaming bandwidth simply by virtue of greater areal density.
This is pretty typical with women from my experience. What many women fail to realise is that few things are more frustrating to a guy than being presented with a problem and not being given the opportunity to solve it. If a women does this too many times to a guy, eventually the guy will avoid talking to her because she is making him feel useless.
Blame the carriers, not Twilio.
Women embracing web communities while men vacate them
It also has shitty performance. 32-bit emacs on my windows machine at work can't open a 300 MB text file for analysis. Turns out that 32-bit emacs uses a 28-bit pointer (256 MB file size limit, 64-bit emacs handles up to 1 million TB). So, I tried splitting the file. Here's my result:

On my home machine using linux / bash / cat | head+tail: about 4 seconds

On my (slower) work machine using cygwin: about 10 seconds

Using powershell: writes about 100-200k / sec (so about 25-30 minute if it ran to completion), but it chokes around 64MB. I know, you can write a bunch of .net code in powersheel and get non-terrible performance. That's not the point; idiomatic code should not be unusable.
What doesn't fit the "Jobs = closed platform" paradigm is NeXT. It came after the Mac, yet was a comparatively open platform.
From what I understand this service is completely opt-in via the customers email address. I'm not sure you could actually send unsolicited messages.
Thanks for your commentary. This is exactly why I feel it is such a good thing to share one's ideas openly. I agree these are not concrete ideas - they are more of a reminder for me next time I'm looking for a project. E.g. "sound-gen in flash" is basically to remind me that it is now possible to synthesize audio in Flash dynamically. You can fill an array with 44,100 bytes (0-255) and it will play that for one second. This would be a very logical extension of my research project: http://chir.ag/493 and http://chir.ag/493/water/ that was done using a Java Applet. I figure Flash work pretty well for stuff like this too.

I have absolutely no problems with anyone else making these apps or buying the domain names including screenshotnow.com. In fact I expect others to either make these apps or completely obsolete them by making other things that work even better. I move things down to the 'baked' section once I find something has been already made well. E.g. I wanted to make an equation solver/calculator-creator using JSMath. It would let anyone with very basic math skills to create say, a mortgage calculator using simple formulas. Then anyone could fill in the variables to get the answer. And you could share your calculators with others. One day I found this: http://my.instacalc.com/calc/429c5824467344b29f3dbdb57c58498... and it does almost exactly what I wanted to do (though I would have a different/nicer UI).
Similar posting regarding the state of the community at Ubuntu:

http://www.fewt.com/2010/03/bye-ubuntu-it-could-have-been-fu...
very well done.

i wonder what the effect would be if you simply increase the paging size, as he describes, without creating the separate partition. this solution might be more appropriate for those of us who simply want to avoid the beachball-of-death, and aren't to hung up on speed.
There is a similar language bridge in unofficial Arc: http://awwx.ws/lang2.
Stardust Particle System Tutorials - Anatomy of a Papervision application
Maybe I'm the only one, but I have a mental picture of my calendar using the upper-right quadrant of a Cartesian Plane. Days are on the X axis, Hours are on the Y axis. Events go from bottom-up instead of top-down like in all physical day-planners. I formed this mental model when I was very young, which may explain why I can't stand any calendaring apps today.

Does anyone else do this? I've seriously considered contacting a calendar manufacturing company to print "Cartesian Calendars" in this manner... or if any such thing already exists, please let me know!
An HTTP proxy will only capture HTTP traffic; this setup can capture other traffic as well.
I'd have to echo the XHTML/CSS suggestion. Becoming proficient in just those two allow you to make robust, accessible sites, limited only by your creativity (and perhaps your client's requests). It might help also to study HTML5. After these, devote some time to JavaScript.

With these you'll have a nice little front-end development toolkit.
Seems like it can stand in as both your init daemon and your process monitor, replacing (for example) supervisord. I guess that means one less config file, at least?
Avro it is: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-926
I guess I'm just not sure that it is a higher standard for the average non-computery person to have to learn a bunch of otherwise-irrelevant-to-their-task computer junk. Am I worse off for not [having spent the time to] know much about my Honda works? Occasionally, yes; but, overall? Definitely not!
My Favorite Thing About the iPad: No Writing/Logo/Other Crap on the Bezel
Crudely worded and some unnecessary finger pointing here, but your point is correct, to some extent.

As they say, it's 99% perspiration.

As far as DHH and JF pitching a part-time work ethic, I think you missed the point. DHH frequently talks about his building of Basecamp, and he said that you don't NEED to be working 90 hours a week to make a successful product. Since DHH only had 10 hours a week that he could use to work on Basecamp, he advocated for making every single minute count.
Measuring complexity
This is exactly why I built Notifo, to solve this problem... especially for webapps/services that don't have native mobile apps. I am going to be playing with SNS very soon and hopefully get some example code up to show SNS/Notifo playing nicely together :)
We may have flippant maintainers once in a while, but open-source is actually a protection against that, not a liability.

Anyone can take care of this bug and release their own patches and spins with any given bug or set of bugs or set or features implemented/removed/whatever in open-source. If you get a flippant maintainer of, say, a component of Windows, you're just going to have wait until one of his bosses decides a given bug is a large enough threat to the company to demand it gets fixed. This can be a very, very long time, especially where only edge cases are affected, where you have no option to do anything but beg someone to listen to you. With open-source software, you can fix it yourself, you can hire someone else to fix it, you can put something else in its place, you can do anything! One of these options is obviously better.
I like it. Here are some suggestions for anyone expanding this idea:

- make each of the main boxes a little bit narrower so you can have a full week (1+6) in the top section, and a full second week (including full-sized weekend days) across the bottom

- make the "flow" obvious somehow. A thicker line separating the top boxes from the bottom would help. Slightly darker or lighter background colors as you get farther from "today" would help as well.

- squeeze in navigation controls: a big "today" button, and forward/backward day and week arrows (in the day and week areas).

- the very bottom right box could be replaced with "upcoming", and list off anything marked as a priority in the next few weeks after the end of this display.
Added my 2c to the bug thread. Reposted here:

From: http://www.ubuntu.com/education

"Above all, Ubuntu is set apart from other operating systems by its unwavering focus on simplicity and ease of use. Ubuntu's motto is "Linux for Human Beings" and every development decision and application has that goal in mind."
What he wants is The Week (http://theweek.com) and I must say it's a very good publication; quite subscription-worthy.
It's funny. I used to help out with the PackRat (Alamofire's Facebook game that came before Gowalla) Bluwiki site: http://packrat.bluwiki.com/ But due to some heavy-handed community leadership I ended up creating my own: http://packratwiki.com/ I'm not really involved with the operations of either (and don't play the game anymore), but I think I emailed you at some point or talked to you via your Talk page.

I might end up snatching this up out of nostalgia. Could definitely be more monetized (look at Wikia for an extreme example), but I'd be more interested in the community-building aspects of it. Is Nathan Richards going to stay involved after the sale? That wasn't clear.
Outlook's month view lets the scroll wheel scroll through weeks. I've never understood why everything doesn't do that. If I could get real Outlook on my mac I'd drop Apple Mail in a second. It's so much better of a program (even ignoring the exchange parts)
Another HN'er maintains this
(New Startup Ideas)

http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0Ag-R_ZlGO21NdE9HSWRk...
Yes, all the URL shortener does is redirect to the chart api.
I read the book about Ron they mention, Godfather of Silicon Valley. It is not a good book, but it is interesting in that it captures the fervor of the dot com era.

The really funny thing is that the timing worked out so that the dot com bubble exploded just before the book was finished. Rivlin therefore spends the entire book building Conway up as the world's biggest jerk. The book is a character assassination. Conway lets Rivlin into his life, and Rivlin is unmerciful. Conway is depicted as the personification of the excesses of that era. The book comes out after the market crashes and it had to hurt.

Then... Google hits. Conway was an early investor. He's back. His methods are validated, his fund returns profit, he starts new funds. They prosper. And now Conway is the king of the world again, and Rivlin is the douche.

Oh the ironing.
Uh, Seriously? Why would you run any command without knowing its purpose? Should they also disable 'rm' because idiots wipe their system with that as well?

Sure the maintainer is being a bit lazy about the issue but everyone always thinks their problems are the most important in the world. Everyone criticizing him is failing to question whether he may have more critical bugs, ones where a stupid user isn't involved.
Improve Your Workflow with the Split Screen Extension for Chrome
well, you could just add a negative sign in from of the times and just write bottom up with a standard calendar
Did Twitter's Top Investor Drop A Bombshell On Twitter App-Makers Today
Never flew a real mission? It was an experimental research tool. Or is Mach 6.72 not 'real' enough for you?

It was carried aloft, not into space, by a B-52.
Platform vendors in love
to reflect work-weeks?
Really? The actual runtime objects? Not the source code of the script, the exe file, or anything hokey like that but first class Objects as in OO and the particular instance that was sent the print message?
Ottawa-ian here too. I'd be interested on pooling up. =D
I LOVE this idea, I've always detested unnecessary and ugly branding that only serves to detract from the aesthetics of the product.
The wife probably shares everything with her husband AND her girlfriends.
Very interesting review. It's very hard to say this was sycophantic.

I was very surprised with how primitive the iWork document management was. Also, can you imagine being that constrained when web browsing? I need my tabs.
C programming language back at number one position
I'd guess the most probable reason is to reduce interface stuttering.
NASA’s Mini X-Plane Completes Initial Flight Testing
I was half expecting some crazy penalty like life imprisonment or death. Made me realise how out of touch I am with early 19th century Europe!
How Technology Changed American Politics
Mixpanel  (YC S09) Lands Chinese Social Game Developer Five Minutes
That bit about the difficulty of winning an argument with Steve was gold. To paraphrase: he's larger than life, he thinks faster than you, he has access to privileged information, and he's super charismatic. If you can get him to the point where he's reduced to insults then you've effectively won.