skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ralph Peters wrote a very thought provoking essay in 1999 "Our New Old Enemies" (see http://www.usamhi.army.mil/USAWC/Parameters/99summer/peters1...) that anticipate developments Africa:

"From child warriors to fanatics who revel in slaughter, man's future is written in man's past."
I’m really surprised that something as distinctly American as Facebook could enter the German market with the force that it did. Germany had its own very successful Facebook clone long before Facebook started its international push but Facebook is so far fighting a very respectable fight (13M vs. 16M visitors).

I wouldn’t have guessed that. I really wouldn’t have thought that Facebook could be as successful in Germany as it is. I don’t know whether that means that the rest of the World matters more for Facebook than the US – but there certainly seems to be enough room abroad to be successful.
Science can answer moral questions
The argument against 'too big to fail' presumes that such a thing doesn't exist. I.e., it isn't government's role to prop up corporations, regardless of the effect their failure _might_ have on the economy. In that view, deregulation, even if it encourages companies to become large, isn't a 'problem', so there isn't any inconsistency.
I would recommend a solution called imagesilo. It is made by digitech systems and is sold through a reseller network. It is very powerful and can do all you ask and more. Numerous healthcare companies and financial institions currently use the system. Data is transmitted in a secure manner and the data is encrypted while it is stored. They also sell a package called PaperVision which is very good.
He says "Ubuntu has been" so perhaps he means he has been CTO and consultant at different times.
Some people:

1) get bored at their day job.
2) need it to pay the bills.
3) can't get motivated to try out new technology, unless there is a REAL customer willing to pay.
I hope that one of the approaches you try is recursive on who tends to vote for whom.
I am not trying to troll Linux. My apologies. I really want Linux to be successful for consumers. I just feel like they are jumping the gun saying the latest Ubuntu release will be the release that changes consumers. I think there are still big issues with Linux in general that makes it unsuitable for everyday consumers.

What about apps? A few of the apps they are used to will be cross-platform. Most will have a linux-y replacement, but some commercial software they were using on Windows or OS X just won't be available for Linux.

Even today I am wrestling with getting the right video driver that doesn't break hdmi audio, and fix the overscan on my hdtv. I know that bugs are an inherent problem with software, it breaks that's all there is to it.
Yes, after installing themselves as the local aristocracy and landowners, and relegating the natives to serfdom.
AVG Rescue CD Cleans Your Infected Windows PC
I made the "switch" a few months ago to Ubuntu 9.04. It's not smooth at all. It regularly hangs (The current window fades gray). All I am doing is hacking django and browsing the web. Flash doesn't work. That might be a Firefox issue. Flash does work in FF 3.5, which I installed, but it installed as a separate browser, not an upgrade.

Also, my volume is too low to listen to music or watch movies, which was a bummer because I just moved and don't have a way to do either of those things.
Linux will be used by regular people when the manual editing of configuration files is no longer necessary.
Yoga: 3 Benefits of Yoga For Children
The 7 Types of Angel Investors - What is Good For Your Startup?
Be patient and keep at it. Sometimes a campaign will run for weeks before it will find a good spot and come alive.

My CTR's are between 0.5% and 1% on the content network (which is a totally different market from search).

In my case the CTR is directly proportionate to the number of times I can use the word "free" in the ad. Sometimes changing just a single word can double the CTR.
UR said something, in a similar, albeit more verbose manner. His essay was at least entertaining (and certainly thought provoking.)

http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009/08/from-cr...
While true, the original business agreement often allows them to change unilaterally.
Bugs Everywhere: a distributed bug-tracker
Welcome to the club.

In my opinion, anybody who's trying to become better at what they do probably start out feeling this way. I know I did, and I still do sometimes.

Your level of skill and the fact that you're working hard at becoming better at this is what will earn you respect among people. Nobody worthwhile will dismiss you because you're just starting out. Nobody was born knowing this stuff, they all worked hard to it.

I can certainly relate to not being content with your current position. Knowing fully that you don't have to exert a lot of effort to become good. Its not enough, you want to become great. Uncontrolled, this can become destructive behavior though, so watch out.

Personally, I think you're on the right path. Just remember to stop and smell the roses every once in a while.
Wondering if bug tracking could be distributed and integrated with VCS, I just ran into this (bugs-everywhere), a LWN article, a few blog posts, but no discussion on a social news site. Hence my first posting on HN...

It seems an ideal solution: bugs lie with the source, and the "social part" is left to the VCS workflow and the (web) interface.

Do people have practical experience and feed back with this kind of tools ?

PS. After a few moments looking at bugs-everywhere with mercurial, I found it would gain much from a plugin integrating it in the 'hg serve' interface.
Linux tarball size evolution
Ed Catmull of Pixar: Keep Your Crises Small
If you haven't seen it, I recommend Steve's movie L.A. Story. It's a comedy, a bit quirky but genuinely funny. Non-spoiler: early in the movie look for Steve driving on a freeway, passing by a guy on the side of the road who's trying to read a freeway sign.
Edit: I spent a fair bit of time going country by country through a historical map for the sake of discussion, to elaborate on an uncommon point of view that might benefit thinking about. If I'm mistaken on the facts, or you disagree with the sentiment, would you care to discuss instead of just downvoting? I've spent a fair bit of time studying history, warfare, trade, and the rise and fall of civilizations, including British history, and I'd be happy to hear opposing points of view.

> Yes, after installing themselves as the local aristocracy and landowners, and relegating the natives to serfdom.

There's a map of the British Empire here:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/26/The_Briti...

Almost every one of those regions has been more peaceful, stable, and prosperous than neighboring non-British managed regions. Almost all of them saw a decrease in prosperity once they left the British Crown, with only a couple exceptions.

Burma was literally the wealthiest country in Asia under British rule - nowdays, not so much.

India? Much further along than Pakistan and its non-British governed neighbors. Serious decline in prosperity, freedom, and safety; massive increase in religious violence and resurgence of the caste system after the British pulled out.

The United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand obviously turned out quite well largely modeling British systems of common law, trade, treaty, military organization, and government.

Egypt? Incredibly wealthy under the British, not so much under self-governance.

Ireland's a mixed bag, the British did some good and bad things there. I'm a quarter Irish and a quarter English by the way, and the British legitimately did some good things. The religious infighting was nasty, but Ireland is quite prosperous today, all of the UK is along with Wales and Scotland.

The African countries were much better under British Rule than non-British rule.

And then there's Hong Kong, which is where I am right now. Any doubts there?

Oh, I forgot Singapore, and having done jobs in both Malaysia and Singapore, who are neighbors of the same ethnicity, climate, geography, and natural resources, there's no doubt that Singapore is much better off.

So was it serfdom under the British Empire? Was it bad? You tell me - would you rather be under British governed Burma, or Burmese governed Burma? British Egypt or Egyptian Egypt? British Hong Kong or PRC Hong Kong? British India or Indian India?

I missed the island countries - Maldives, Sri Lanka, Fiji, Bermuda, and the rest of the British Caribbean and Polynesia. If you had your choice in 1700, would you want to be in one of the British governed islands or the local governed islands?

Yeah, self governance? Not high on my list of priorities. Sane, good governance, minimal violence and corruption, safety? High on my list of priorities. Again, keep me safe and leave me alone, and I don't care so much that I have a say in the government.
"Writing a blog post like software is sloppy thinking"
We have that law currently and it doesn't stop drunk driving. Until people become rational actors (which they manifestly are not), we cannot just stop at prohibiting outcomes, but also must prohibit means to some degree.
Hardly. You're just quibbling about loose language, not outlining a contradiction.

What the author means is that the only way to stop the existing movements is by stopping their leaders. That will stop the movements, but it doesn't prevent other movements from rising in their stead.

In fact, the author makes a very convincing case, argued over much more than two out-of-context sentences, that the way the system works at the moment makes it impossible for any principled leader to arise, since any time one does, criminal ganges will fund his opponents (presumably until he's dead) and perpetuate the "un-wars". This strongly implies that whilst killing the leaders might stop their respective movements, it won't stop the endless cycle.
Offtopic, but you know I never really thought Code Complete was that inspirational. But that's probably because i read it after having worked for a few years in the industry and seeing my fair share of bad code and legacy systems.

Of course it was still a good read, and the topics covered were well researched, but not really a life changer for me. Did anyone else feel the same way? It seems that everywhere I go, people say this is THE book to read.
Ask HN: highly concurrent, available, non-blocking server
> Instead, I should have found something good to say, because I know there are plenty of good things I could have said.

I disagree, criticism is much more useful than flattery.
I really, really disagree with your ideas.

This isn't "politics". Sure, the Chinese are playing politics by publishing this, but this information is quite valuable, and it should not be viewed as political trickery.

These are things most Americans ignore and need to know. I was not aware of many of the topics in the article, and feel much more informed now on a number of topics.

You don't need to accept the article as being "right" or "wrong" -- it's just a collection of factual information. You can take what you want from it, check sources, apply this knowledge to situations in your life.

Dismissing this as a political boon is foolish. Did you even read the article?
Quoting from the final para of the article:
There's a lot of money "rest of world" and I suspect that will only be more and more true over time.

I generally really like Fred Wilson, but talk about stating the obvious. Given that the EU has a greater population, a higher total GDP, more broadband subs and equivalent or greater broadband penetration than the US - it also sounds a bit patronising. And that's before one considers the BRIC countries, or the rapidly developing internet economies in places like SE Asia.
The site I work for only accepts members from US, Canada, UK, Ireland and Australia. It has to be that way to combat fraud. The non-us traffic for other sites I've built has meant one thing: spam. If there was a way to better filter out fraud and spam from certain countries, I bet one could hit that 25% number easily.
The other real tangible benefit is $$$ certainly compared to the top end Windows releases, although the snow leopard price is hardly a deal breaker.
While I was first reading "The Cuckoo's Egg" when it first came out, I found myself asking "instead of laws penalizing the teenagers that are penetrating these open systems, how about making it an equivalent felony for putting into a production a system that has the service account userid/password 'field/service'". I wonder if a couple of public wrist slaps or stronger, depending on the damage, might have changed that course of history.
Sometimes that too can be classified. I do agree that should be disclosed at some point. But a third party indiscriminately leaking such material without understand the consequences is not a good way to do it. It could very well lead to many US service members getting killed, increasing Taliban support amongst the locals, perhaps even getting innocent Afghanis or Iraqis killed, etc. A better way is to get the necessary clearance, understand what's going on, and work your way through the legal chain. There is not a time crunch right now, and without a time crunch, it's best to stay inside the system.

The moral issue is very important, but sometimes getting focussed on a single moral issue can violate even higher moral mandates.
I agree with you except for the last paragraph about early sex education. If you wait until people are already having sex, it's too late.
As a grad student in Classics, I encountered a Ghanaian (who came to Boston to study Latin) who said that Ghana was very fertile and resource-rich, so the Brits (who were the strongest at the time) chose it for themselves, leaving the French all the scraps in between. ("People come to Ghana from all over to buy supplies. Togo?!", he laughed, "in Togo there is nothing!", which I didn't quite know how to respond to.)

If you assume that it's just British rule, that assumes that it's random.
CTR: 1.5% including content network (2.5% search only)
I'm being a bit cheap recently and staying around 3rd or 4th position (avg CPC $0.30-$0.60).

With adwords I focus on ad quality and click through rate over all else, the better you perform the more you are rewarded. Make sure you have enough impressions with well targeted keywords first and then over time adjust ads and phase out keywords based on performance.

Avoid tossing in the kitchen sink of keywords, do your research and make your list of keywords, focus a bit on the top and bit on the long tail (oh so much cheaper).
Upgrade to 9.10, it is much better for the web. I use 9.04 on my netbook and I get problems like that every now and then too, but my desktop is just fine.
I don't think this sinks to the level of blogspam. The OP made a summary of the original and added his own comments. I looked at the first few entries on the home page and most of them seemed to be in this format. There is original content here and the guy writes well. To call it blogspam is (in my opinion) wrong.

Note: Wikipedia defines blogspam as "the post of a blogger who creates no-value added posts to submit them to other sites".
> I haven’t used Mercurial, but this page indicates that the basic “clone” command does a full expensive branch, while the “branch” command does a cheap local branch. So this argument only applies to non-distributed VCSes.

I don't know how branches work in Bazaar, but Git branches are cheaper than Mercurial's when you factor in administrative overhead.

Local Mercurial branches aren't disposable, like Git's are. In Git, I often whip up and subsequently dismiss 3-4 branches when tidying up my repository history (for example when I committed something in the wrong place, committed with wrong log message, etc...). Mercurial branches live forever in the repository graph and I have to explicitly "close" them, while in Git I just forget about them and the repository does too.
Knuth: Table of Contents for "Selected Papers on Fun and Games"
Have I wildly misrepresented the remark you linked?
> Every year since 2000 has been proclaimed the year of consumer Linux

People have been overly optimistc in the past, but I think even the less tech savvy can use Linux by now.
Yes, I remember reading about this as well... Perhaps it does play a role whose 'share' hasn't been taken into account.
In general, you want to maintain a CTR above 1% or you'll find Google gives your spots to someone who actually generates revenue. This of course depends on the competition in your particular niche.

You don't make bingo card software, so it is likely irrelevant, but I get about 3.83% CTR on ads on the search network. (That excludes my holiday campaigns, which -- when Google actually approves them on time -- are so effective they should be illegal. 10%+) Things that have helped me: Conversion Optimizer, writing copy until it "clicks" with the users, and a few years of work.

By way of comparison, I only get about 2% or so on the content network.

After you've got a better CTR (and, not incidentally, are spending more money) you'll see Google offer you more impressions, and then you should start working on your CPA, because if that is doing poorly all the clicks in the world won't help you.

AdWords gets fractally complex if you're new to it, since you have to balance your business requirements against Google's interests and policies (which are not disclosed in a thorough fashion, change frequently, and are capricious and arbitrary). Best of luck to you.
Try both? Wait a few days, see which works better. It's better to have actual evidence for what works for your market
Well, yes, but if you can hit the US, the UK, Australia, and Canada in English, it does make English the most important language. That is, English is not greater than all the other languages, but it is greater than any other single language.

How long will this last? I don't know -- probably until China and India have proportional GDP spending.
When I took pre-calc, it was a very basic and slow build-up to integrals and derivatives, IIRC.

We had already had two classes in algebra, one in geometry, and one in functions, statistics, and trigonometry.
You shouldn't have to manually install anything, in my experience. The package manager should take care of things.
This release has a different menubar color. That's nice, but it doesn't address the fundamental ugliness and disunity of the OS.

What Ubuntu needs is a change the magnitude of, say, OS9 -> OSX or XP -> Vista.
In my experience, most linux distro's battery management doesn't even match windows xp out of the box (no clear way to tune it). It is the only thing that is stopping me from transitioning to linux full time.
Sounds like I need to work on my ad copy. My CTR is less than 0.3%.

One of the things I am doing that I thought was clever, but perhaps, not so much, is including my price in the ad copy, on the premise that I don't want to pay for clicks from people who aren't willing to buy. Perhaps that's optimization that's better left for another day, however.
How to Improve Hiring at Startups
By the way, earlier this week we set up a company that had an older person that I would consider a computer-Phobe and he was comfortable with using they system in 30 minutes. Is there a legal reason that the system must be hosted locally? If so, then imagesilo will not work. If you would like I can get you set up with a demo and trial to see if it meets your needs. Not trying to sell, just trying to help. You're call.
I've separated my campaigns into CPM on the content network, and CPC on the search network.

My CTRs range from 0.5%-2.5% on Search, and 0.03%-0.3% on Content.

(Avg Pos is 2.6 on Search, 1.2 on Content)
Interesting, the satisfaction jumped from 50% to 80% in the span of 6 years (2002-2008). Do you know what caused the jump? It went above 80% in 2006, before the crash, so I don't think it's the economic differences.

At any rate, it's an interesting, yet somewhat odd report. Everything else I read tells me China is destroying itself in its rush to the top, so it's strange the Pew report shows such satisfaction.
In terms of absolute money number saved, yes absolutely. But how much do you value your time in terms of learning and setting up a different OS?
Not really, just that it's an "Executive Agreement", and not law, so it doesn't need Congressional oversight.... more or less, as I understand it.
When I think of the Bazaar metaphor I generally think free market, i.e. small units self-organising, to an extent, and order arising from their interactions. This paper thinks that it refers to some large, democratic, homogenous mob.
Think about it; how many adults have downright childish issues with math? Childish misunderstandings, childish opinions, childish beliefs? Coincidence? Bad motivation?

Right here. I taught myself programming and I got pointers (references, same difference) within the first week I started reading about php. I enjoy learning new concepts except for math. I really want to learn math but I am so afraid of just opening a math book and not understanding anything in it. (Posttraumathematic stress disorder?)
Your apathy about participating in decisions is not the best reason for having concern with that part of the document. A far better reason is the possibility of a tyranny of the majority.
Rankspeed: Use Sentiment Analysis to Get Product Recommendations from Twitter
That works for some people and has a negative effect for other people. I'm in group #2. Test test test.

You may already know this, but on the off chance you don't: if you match words in the query in your title or text, Google will bold them for you, which tends to increase CTR something fierce. You can do this with dynamic insertion ("Google it") or by organizing your ad groups in a thematic fashion, which is something you should be doing anyhow.

Pretend you're a pet store. If you dump everything into one ad group and write generic copy, it will typically not get bolded. If you segment your ad groups well, words about dogs in group Dogs match ads about dogs (thus bolding the ads), words about cats in group Cats match ads about cats (thus bolding the ads), etc. Plus since folks are in a searching mood you should make it abundantly clear that you have exactly what they are looking for. (Goes for the landing page, as well.)
Well, the story is that they wanted to buy AdMob but Google outbid them, so this isn't too much of a surprise.
Why easily looted resources make wars worse [pdf]
the only thing that requires an infinite band, is a non-halting program.

Sure, that's the only type of program that would use the whole tape, but given any tape of finite length, there's a (program, input) pair that needs a longer tape.
Did you try `diskutil eject` - possibly preceded by `diskutil unmount force` to get your DVD back?

Certain bugs and odd software interactions require the use of the command line to fix on every OS, as do problems that appear seemingly at random. I currently have a Windows 7 installation that started hanging during the boot process at classpnp.sys for about 5 minutes. A reinstall did not fix the problem. If I was a typical consumer, I'd probably send the computer in for warranty service.
When that kind of money is involved, it's impossible not to have affected the highest levels of the legislature, executive, and judiciary. I believe there have already been documented cases of folks with dubious affiliations funneling money to various PACs. That has to be just the tip of the iceberg.
That's because easily looted wealth, not poverty causes wars. (see my link - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1223098) The British empire took places with an abundance of easily looted riches, and now less benevolent rebel leaders are doing the same.