skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A camelduck, from one of Neal Asher's worlds ? Must be harmless, don't remember it being written up. (So, the runcible network is up ?)
I think he has a good point. Paul Graham and YC make it seem like creating a successful startup is easier than it may be. In reality, only a few succeed and the majority just fail miserably. But since we only hear success stories, it makes it seem more often than it is.
Ask HN: What's up with Jobspice?
I haven't been able to access the site for about a day now - particularly unfortunate for me. I know they're YC, so does anyone know when they'll be up and running again?
"It would be nice if you could work on your own projects at work in the open as long as you weren't accessing internal company servers."

That sounds like a job description for working at home as a freelancer or remote employee.

On the internet, nobody can tell if you're an entrepreneur.
South Korea Navy Ship Sinks Near North Korea After Explosion
Sadly, I'm graduating in 6 weeks. I think I'll have to figure it out on my own.
They look like they're up now.
I'm not at all dismissing your point, but there are a few things about India which make it a special case:

1. India was one of the greatest cultural and intellectual centers of the world before interference from foreign western nations. I don't remember who it was -- it might've been Robert Cowley? -- but one of the historians I read recently made the point that if a culture develops a certain level of sophistication, it will tend to try to return to at least that level again in the future. That is, civilizations have a "cultural memory", and India in particular would have strongly benefited from this effect.

2. Post-colonial Indian government is modeled in significant portions on parliamentary structures, especially British ones. I think it's a bit disingenuous to dismiss the influence of British government in India.

3. Mahatma Gandhi. India was fortunate to have a cultural leader of his magnitude; he was an amazing individual, and I don't think it's hard to imagine a very different modern India without him.

4. You might want to edit some portions of the Wikipedia article on India; it tries to give the impression that there has been more violence and trouble since the end of colonial rule. I don't know enough Indian history to cite it one way or the other, but if you think the opposite is the case -- and you can support it -- then it would be nice for WP to get updated.
> It's important to teach your children that there are times when they need to focus on things that don't necessarily interest them

Why do you need to teach them that? life does that when you pursue something you are interested in. Whenever I want to achieve something there are things I don't want to do that are necessary to do what I want.
Twitter isn't exactly the poster-boy of great naming. Names grow on you when you use them more. GIMP, I'll give you, though...
Done! The DOT format support is finished, update Gephi to profit from this feature. http://gephi.org/2010/new-graphviz-dot-csv-and-ucinet-format...
that's exactly what it's doing
That's definitely a fair argument, and I don't think we are as opposed as I thought we were. The idea of building from scratch is appealing, but I think nation building is a really hard problem. I honestly think we don't have the experience or methods to fix politically bankrupt states, but perhaps you are right and perhaps we do. Either way, I think a shift in viewpoint (to "everything else", as Barnett calls it) is really important.
"You might want to edit some portions of the Wikipedia article on India; it tries to give the impression that there has been more violence and trouble since the end of colonial rule. "

This is the WIkipedia link on post Independence India.
http://en.wikipedia.or/wiki/History_of_the_Republic_of_India

Which part gives you the idea that there was more violence in India than under British rule? There was massive violence just after Partition (partly during British rule and partly after Independence). The resulting hostility with Pakistan has given us three wars and a couple of insurgencies. As the world is beginning to find out these days, Pakistan is a haven for all kinds of interesting people and ideologies.

Sure there was and is violence (of all kinds) in India after Independence.

No one claims that all parts of India were or are oases of peace and calm all the time. But they weren't under British rule either! India is a very diverse and unevenly developed country. When violence happens the government (like all governments elsewhere) tamps it down.

Also I am not dismissing the influence of British institutions like Parliament. I am disputing the idea that we are worse off today than we were under British rule (as lionhearted tried to claim, based on some poring over maps or whatever). This is a completely laughable claim, to anyone who lives here.

If India is a "special case" for whatever reasons, say so. Don't make ridiculous claims (like lionhearted did) that we "declined" since independence. You have no idea. Ask someone who lives in India what they think of this idea.
I'm curious- What advantage is there is to using the external drive on boot, rather than have automounter do it on login?

Also, the Ubuntu Restricted Driver's manager did't handle the card? How unusual. I've had it handle the majority of WiFi cards I've thrown at it. I suppose that's a compatibility issue- If Windows weren't pre-installed on a new PC, people would have to install drivers there, too.
Did you just list bugs specifically shortlisted by Ubuntu as minor, easily fixed interface issues and use that very work to argue that they're not focussing on these things?
Some of his arguments are crap. How is extensive platform support a detractor? Wouldn't you want your language to work on as many platforms as possible? I'm not sure how "outdated" stdlib is, but just because the code was written years ago, that does not make it "bad". New ways of implementing certain things could actually be slower. Can't say for sure since he has no real examples.
FYI: I dislike python for its syntax, but I can see why people like it. I just use perl for most everything that people would do in python.
Job postings on HN are discouraged.
A couple of weeks ago (apropos http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1180434) I looked up the 'advertising' at
http://doc.bazaar.canonical.com/migration/en/why-switch-to-b...

For v2.0+, they quote 1.0 sec commits on the Firefox 3.5 repo test (vs. 1.1 for hg, 0.35 for git).

[Pointers to binary data performance figures (e.g. repo size deltas vs. SVN, etc.) gratefully accepted]
"Does anyone think the pyramids could have been built by a free population of well-fed and prosperous peasants?"

That's actually the current theory. The theory that the Pyramids were built by slaves has fallen under question."Archaeologists now believe that the Great Pyramid of Giza (at least) was built by tens of thousands of skilled workers who camped near the pyramids and worked for a salary or as a form of tax payment (levee) until the construction was completed, pointing to worker's cemeteries discovered in 1990 by archaeologists Zahi Hawass and Mark Lehner." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_pyramid_construction_t...
The first three bugs I linked to have been open for 5-6 years, so yes I'm saying they're not focusing on these things.

It's not solely Ubuntu's fault. A lot of the issues are upstream. The screensaver settings bug was closed as WONTFIX in gnome: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=316654

Says the maintainer of gnome-screensaver:
I don't have any plans to support this. My view is that any screensaver theme
that requires configuration is inherently broken.

Yes, because it's not like I'd ever want the pictures screensaver to grab images out of a directory besides ~/Photos/.
There are unfortunately still people to whom the part you quoted isn't obvious, and who think the rest of the world is a pain in the ass rather than a very big opportunity.
Well, that's unethical. How would you feel if you had employees who were doing such things while you paid them?
> The U.S. mandate for its incursion into Iraq, and the justification for the predictably subsequent civil war, was to end human rights atrocities in a foreign country.

I seem to recall something about weapons of mass destruction as the main reason going around when we invaded Iraq. Did I just hallucinate that whole thing? Because the human rights thing sounds like a huge retcon.
I competed in Hack-U at UW this year! I was surprised to see a familiar face in the movie.

After Yahoo!, what is next for you?
Being able to do a partial checkout (your package and its dependencies, on the head branch only) is essential for us and it's not a workflow Git supports at all.

Collecting check-list points ;-). Thank you, this is a very good one. Anyone know off the cuff about Bazaar and Hg ?

(P.S. Are you one of those Perforce users with large amounts of binary data ? Those use cases being ignored is giving me pause about the whole DVCS hoopla, e.g. here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1219082 )
I have not found this to be the case. I use Windows full time at home and have used various linuxes full time at work, but I always found that it was easier to correct Windows' pain points (e.g. by installing Cygwin) than it was to fix linux (how to get a decent feeling UI?).
By definition LTV includes a discount rate, I'd bet he's using one.
Yeah, CTMCP is becoming a SICP-like acronym. Here's the for Dummies version

http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/VanRoyChapter.pdf
When will Ubuntu get an integrated backup solution? Sure rsync combined with cron works, but it keeps it out of reach for your average user (or even your lazy one).
I was just reminded of one example: if "they" knew that we knew such-and-such detail about an airstrike, they might (1) be able to identify our method for intel gathering, or (2) be able to identify our source, which would get our spy killed.

It's the same principle as "loose lips sink ships". Sometimes harmless-looking individual details are actually the key to keeping our guys safe in hostile environments.
FWIW, I haven't been reading lionhearted's statements that way at all, and it's part of the reason that I've been jumping in here. I think that he's largely correct, within the scope and context of the original article.

i.e., I'm not getting any sense of "fundamental inferiority" from his statements. Rather, he's been saying that the resident populations have generally been more peaceful, and more prosperous, during British colonial rule. The bits of world history that I've been reading lately would support his case. (I keep flipping through my books in the background here trying to locate the specific examples that I know I've read.)

You're also right that the British colonization tended to be exploitative, but that's a different argument altogether.

For me, I'm resolving the two arguments by comparing the violent anarchy of the Congo to the oppressive British rule in, say, Burma. If I had to choose to live as a native of one of those countries in the relevant time period, I would definitely choose British colonial Burma over modern Congo, and if I had to go in as a female, I would beg for Burma. That's not to say that Burma would be ideal, but just that I would be less likely to experience as much misery.
This article has to be a joke. Assuming you have a modern contract (non-compete, IP assignment), working on your startup at work is stealing from your employer. Doing a better job hiding your tracks doesn't make it right (or legal). If you are found out, you could lose ownership of all that work.

If you're going to work on a startup while employed elsewhere, you need better separation than this. Do your day job competently and quickly, then go elsewhere to work on your startup. Get up early, do your startup stuff, then get to work at an acceptable time. Or do it in the evening. But trying to mix the two while at your employer's office is a recipe for disaster.
Networking advices from legendary Silicon Valley networker, Heidi Roizen
Still timing out for me. I'll try another computer or a proxy first.
Ubuntu is not a Democracy
It depends on the stage of your business. A young American startup with limited resources should focus on getting the product right before it starts worrying about localization and monetizing international traffic.
Yes, it is particular to the contract and state laws. Most decent contracts state the employee will "dedicate appropriate time and effort to completing assigned tasks". Of course this is vague, but putting in 10 hours a week is a sure way to get fired. If it turns out you were spending 30 hours a week on your startup at the same time (and depending on other company resources used, etc.), your startup work may not be owned by you.

Most likely, you'll just be fired for non-performance but depending on the circumstances, your employer could sue for ownership. This would especially be the case if you went from Microsoft to Google or something similar.
Startup Profile: Traxo.com (Mint.com for Travel)
other languages he could've included:

- F# (my fav)

- ocaml

- common lisp

- scheme

- python

- lua

- factor
That TED talk was incredibly enlightening. Political Bankruptcy really seems to be as important to rebuild as Economic Bankruptcy, as a county that is politically bankrupt will never be able to maintain stability.
Have you tried the readability bookmarklet?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=501970
It would be nice if you'd also see how prosperous and wealthy the locals of some of these countries were just before the British invasion and when British just left. You'd see a great fall in wealth and prosperity of the locals during British rule (especially in India).

Post Independence India did take some time to stabilize thanks in part to the partitioning of Pakistan. However, overall Indians have indeed had a better life since British left us. This whole notion of British rule was better than sovereignty is not true, especially for India.
yea,

It is like his website is out of toner.
The key element people keep pointing out in founders - persistence - is the same even if it's a single-founder comedy startup. Martin worked for over a decade before his big success, then branched out with the same determination into acting and writing. I know it seems strange to admire a banjo player with an arrow on his head, but I really admire the guy.
Ask HN: What's the best way to get started with NVIDIA Tegra?
I'm looking to build a device based on NVIDIA's Tegra and I'm not sure how to get started. There's a form for OEMs to contact NVIDIA about developing for the device and I've submitted that but the message that pops up after submitting the form makes it sound like they're only working with large customers right now. Is there a better way to get started?
we didn't work for F500 clients (way to boring); we sold them innovative software - a small start-up selling million dollar + software to F500 is the definition of entrepreneurship.

we want hackers in ycombinator mold -- young, passionate, tenacious - with the right mix of hard core technical, UI and design, and plain entrepreneurial business skills to drive both new user and return visits. bi also enjoy working with this sort of individual. (got to be fun since i do not need to do it for the money) these are the sort who can take on an existing industry and re-invent it. happy to hire 2,3,4 however many good ones i can find. from the little i've seen in india, most young hackers would not get an opportunity like this: 100% US style working style - full freedom, big mission, zero bureaucracy, etc - for experienced serial entrepreneur. basically the best way to figure out how to do is to do it once for someone else who knows how to do it and has all the funding and infrastructure in place
Jared Diamond describes a case of a man having "visited the farm" and then being ill with fever. Diamond cited the case as a possible transfer of "crowd diseases", originated in animals, to humans.

"Guns, Germs and Steel", Jared Diamond.

EDIT: horizontal disease and horizontal gene transfer are very powerful forces in evolution. The distribution of human populations on Earth today owe a lot to such crowd diseases (whatever the means by which they got into humans from animals; inhalation of sprayed out rhinoviruses or eating raw meat has been proven sufficient in cases.)
Do you want the mohguls back?

Before the British most of India was ruled by arabs, I'm sure you can cede sovereignty to Iran if that seems like a golden age.
#2 - Write down ideas so that you don't forget them.

Wow, truly great stuff.
Look, udais is spamming HN.
I hadn't heard of that; that would be very interesting. At the moment though I'm somewhat skeptical of this. Given the estimated effort required to build the pyramids at the time, compensating the workers would have impoverished the rulers of early Egypt.
Moreover, plenty of countries never colonized by Britain have adopted the parliamentary system: Japan, France, German, Russia, Spain, etc. Indeed, it is pretty much the default system of democratic government adopted by any democratizing nation.
They don't just have one server in one location. They're not stupid.
Exactly. I had to reload the page to see it. Once I tried it out, it seemed like a pretty cool idea. It just needs some smoother execution.

The reload was one thing and others have mentioned the confusion of the "try it" button. Maybe a "Try It" arrow pointing to that lower left corner would help? Then change the original "Try It" to "Sign Up".

Edit: To note that the overall site seems pretty cool! Keep going...
It's not the options, it's the actual power management. I have a netbook with XP and Lucid beta. The battery lasts 6 hours on XP and only 4:30 on Lucid. Both OSes are set to dim the screen and spin down the hard disk on battery power. The fan also comes on a lot more often when I'm running Lucid.
How so? He is still participating within the school's program. Just because his mom signs the field trip slip (or tags along herself) doesn't absolve the school from any and all responsibility for his well being. What sort of insurance policy do you think a school needs to fly a 13 year old from Connecticut to South Africa for a week? How about a 13 year old prodigy?

I'm all for Colin being able to have this experience - I absolutely would have been thrilled to participate in something like this at any age. I don't think the school has any obligation to allow him to participate in this activity however.
I think you missed more than just a paragraph as at least two of them made it clear that the writer is a ‘she’ :p

Edit: My bad, as a reply points out, he speaks of having sex with a woman not making him a heterosexual (and the second reference to the female chimp just said “wrong sex”).
Why So Few? Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics
Don't delude yourself that there's anything correct about storing the name of a branch in a commit, or that that's what makes up a proper branch.

When I receive a changeset in mercurial and see that it was made on a branch called "dev", that means nothing to me. When I get changes from several locations and they all say it was made on "dev", that helps me even less.

If it's actually important to you to know that a change was done on a branch called "dev" (and I doubt it ever will be), it's fairly easy to know just by examining the merge commit that brought it in.

In practice, I'd say it's just confusing. I wrote "hg log -b" initially for viewing logs only within a branch. As it turns out, you have to be really careful to name your branches since they can be reused (or worse as shown above) and it's very difficult to figure out whether a change occurred on a given branch or a different branch that had the same name.
Of course, this only really works if these small, willing to do anything for a customer, struggling companies stay in business. As these entrepreneurs fail to realize the return on their time/monetary investments, their enthusiasm may wane and the features will slow or stop, and the project may eventually just stagnate or get shut down. I guess it's good while it lasts, but make sure you have backup plans.
Neat. This isn't just an ajax front-end to a Factor interpreter on someone's server, it's an actual interpreter for (a subset of) Factor in JavaScript.
"Do you want the mohguls back?"

No, but I don't want the British back either. The Americans don't, the Irish don't, the Chinese don't. That's a major chunk of humanity right there.

"Before the British most of India was ruled by arabs, I'm sure you can cede sovereignty to Iran if that seems like a golden age."

You still don't get it. I am opposing the point that India after Independence is worse off than under British rule.
I didn't claim that the British were worse than the Mughals (The last Mughal emperor was a figurehead leader of the ragged coalition that fought the British in the Mutiny of 1857, but the armies facing the British were hardly "mughal" I could claim that but that is a separate discussion.

And since you bring it up, the Mughals weren't "arabs" (they were muslims which is somewhat different, but I am sure your historical knowledge shows otherwise ;-) ). and the British didn't fight or overthrow the Mughals. Their toughest opponents were the Marathas and the Sikhs.

So, yeah most of India was not "ruled by arabs" and finally Iranians aren't "arabs".

It is this kind of historical illiteracy and idiocy I am trying to counter.
Yes, and as soon as the colonialism became more expensive than it was worth we ended up with the Africa of the past 50 years. Even before colonialism, large amounts of Africa were ruined by warfare simply so the winners could sell the losers as slaves to the European powers--so if colonialism was an improvement for Africans when it happened, it's largely because it solved a problem the Europeans themselves created.

You'd have to go over centuries of history to really see if European interference was a net improvement for Africa at all. I can't speak to that particular question, but there's a lot of evidence to suggest that most of the Amerindians were better off before Columbus than afterwards. "I asked seven anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians if they would rather have been a typical Indian or a typical European in 1491. None was delighted by the question, because it required judging the past by the standards of today—a fallacy disparaged as "presentism" by social scientists. But every one chose to be an Indian."

http://spacecollective.org/nagash/5282/1491

discussed here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=934117
Snow Leopard price is technically an upgrade from Leopard, though I believe it will actually work from Tiger. This, and it's lack of user visible upgrades by design, help to explain why it wasn't the usual $150 dollar upgrade price. (Of course this is muddied by the fact that you generally buy a Mac with an OS included.)
Transcription rates per audio hour