skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Limor Fried (founder of Adafruit) gave an ignite talk that was posted a few days ago. From the looks of it, most Open Source Hardware outfits are grossing around a million a year.

http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2010/05/03/million-dollar-baby-...
Bingo. You can also avoid the fun Enum.IsDefined that comes with it.
> Do people actually buy phones because of this tactic?

Yes. While I worked at RadioShack almost 10 years ago, asking about cellphones would frequently net me a sale and a large cash bonus. At the time, I would get an extra bonus (in addition to the cellphone bonus) for selling cellphone accessories, too, so if the customer said "actually, my cellphone battery has been running pretty low..." or "the clip keeps falling apart!" I could usually sell my way into an extra $15-20 cash in my pocket.

I don't remember exactly how much I made, but asking these questions were both required by managers (I can guarantee there's a piece of paper printed weekly in the back room of every RadioShack with the handset count per employee) and lucrative enough to double the base pay.
Great post, resonates with my reply here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1334915
Interesting. KonaB should probably have submitted the definition on http://crypto.stanford.edu/pbc/notes/zdd/zdd.xhtml

That would have been more accessible than talk about American states.
Well, you might want to look at other declarative language paradigms (which you can of course be neatly programed in Lisp) such logic programming (e.g. Prolog) and defining functions through pattern matching (e.g. Haskell, Qi).

There's some serious power there and in the latter case it's general purpose.
We use exim mail server, and I believe the settings are configured to our web-host's defaults. Where would go to view or configure these rules?
What I was getting at is what happens when you get things that don't fit neatly into a database slot. For example, if you have a database that can store photos and text files, what to do with a document that has text and photos in it (like a newspaper article) -- store the text in the text DB and the photos in the photo DB? How does the DB associate the text with the proper photos?

The point being, electronic media is by its nature something that tends to defy whatever categorical schemes we come up with for organizing it, whether they be flat, tree-like, database-oriented, tags, or whatever.
Hm. Maybe a "hinting" gesture would work well.

Tap in the upper left corner, and all clickable text/borders becomes distinct (tinted background, etc).
> So, let's try to make your post into something more informative.

No, let's not. How about you keep your condescending attitude offline.
Was there any genuine content in there?
Great post, bebeastie. I thought your post was really top quality and you raised some interesting points in it. I especially appreciated your insights near the end of the post.
Presentation seems to be ancient and the Python code is fugly with camelCased identifiers. :-/
This article includes a script that will perform a consistent snapshot of an XFS-formatted EBS drive (in linux).

http://alestic.com/2009/09/ec2-consistent-snapshot

Consistent snapshots are needed when the disk contains multiple files that must be kept in sync with each other - such as a database's data files and the journal. If your DB gets its disk snapshotted while these files are out of sync, the DB will need to recover the missing data by replaying the journal. Not all DB's can do this reliably for all types of changes (e.g. MySQL's MyISAM engine is fragile in this regard). So you need to make sure that the files in the snapshot all reflect a consistent state of the disk.
I find that Google gives me better results when it matters. So although DDG has been my primary search engine, there are times when I'll enter my query into Google and get something that better satisfies my information need as either the first or second result, whereas I might have to look further down the list on DDG.

That said, I do love DDG, and it's still my primary search engine after 2 months as well. I switched based on the privacy policy (no personally identifiable information retained), ability to use HTTPS, and the nice infinite scrolling implementation, and unless these things change I'll certainly continue to use it. The combination of these, plus the generally impressive quality of the search results, make it really great.

Kinda solidifies the notion that you can compete on more than just the content of the search results list.
SparkFun is awesome, but sometimes I need to have that electronic piece right away so I can finish my project this weekend. It would be awesome if there was enough of a market to have electronics parts stores in most cities.
And people do use it. I have worked on a mind bending .NET call centre application within which the entire state of the program is stored within untyped, globally accessible datatables.

It's down to the old "with great power comes great responsibility" idea.
> "why don't Chinese netizens protest loudly against such policies??"

Here in the West we take the right to protest quite for granted, as this post demonstrates :)

Not ragging on you at all, really, but who exactly would the Chinese protest to? How would they do so? And what would prevent them from being jailed or worse for their efforts?
There's only one sushi-picture in there, and two cheesy ones of other things. The One ring and an aircraft.
Unlearning CVS/svn is the truly difficult part of learning git.

These complaints could only come from someone who has used CVS/svn in the past and expects git to work exactly the same way.

Are there any extant articles of someone who has never used source control at all before having these problems with git specifically and not other SCMs?
And Git just works. At least on the same level as not expecting "rm -rf /" to "read mail really fast".
Shanghai: The Rise of the Global City
Euro bailout. Now banking risk morphs into geo-political risk
> That would make sense, if C# was more powerful/expressive than Python, Lisp or the like.

What? My comment makes sense, even if C# is worse than Python, etc.
On my blog (http://neosmart.net/blog/) I'm running our own "PerformancePress."

It's a WordPress install with a custom frontend. So you get a mind-blowing admin interface, and light-speed frontend. Updates to the frontend are a PITA when it comes to syncing new features with the backend, but for the basics (posts, comments, pingbacks, and.... that's it! It's a BLOG!!) it does the job.
Effort Underway For Defensive Patent Pool For Open Source Developers
I don't know the author of that blog at all, but I upvoted it because I thought it was a great article.
goog app engine doesn't work with tornado =/
Yes. The times I used CVS or subversion were more frustrating than learning git. Especially with all the server setting up you (used to?) had to do. And all the warnings about never using the filesystem-native renaming tools.

Git can get complicated later on, when you are doing complicated things. But on easy things, git is easy enough.

(And so are darcs and mercurial and the other modern version control systems.)
At least unless you are doing something like --force or --hard. But you should be smelling that those commands do something potentially non-recoverable.
There was some Mixergy interview where the guy at IMVU or somewhere was saying that it was trendy to measure progress the Agile way, by lines of code written, whereas it was more accurate a metric to measure progress by learning.
For the meta description tag all you need to write is:

<meta name="description"
content="<%= @context[:description] || 'Default description' %>" />

Definitely a wordpress killer from an ease of use perspective, or not...
There has to be room to fill this gap. Radioshack still has some cables I've needed, but it's missed some as well: ie- mini sata cables for slim optical drives.
Says Guy Steele in "Why Object-Oriented Languages Need Tail Calls" (http://projectfortress.sun.com/Projects/Community/blog/Objec...).

(Just to provide your claim with some supporting arguments.)
It's sad how the Chinese government don't seem to realize that they're impeding their own people's progress and global competitiveness, especially for business that requires innovation and speed, with such moves.
Google, Social Media, and Progress: It’s Happening. Deal With It.
You clearly know little about flash if you think its still using a decade-old implementation to do animations.

Additionally, flash uses HW acceleration where available, so your first point is moot.
Does Dropbox depend on Amazon S3? How independent of that?
14 years of development can't do much against the fundamental complexity of whatever the product is supposed to do.
How do you know when to stop thinking though?
>> "marketplace enormity doesn't increase the pleasure of the buyer"

You're asking why it's a negative for eBay and Craigslist that they aren't small (i.e., that they have a lot of listings), but I think the quote you took from the article is saying the inverse - that it's not necessarily a negative for Etsy and Threadless that they are small. In fact, I think Jason does recognize that being bigger is an advantage:

>> "Clearly the value of a marketplace increases as it grows — both as a business and to the buyers and sellers."

As to your second paragraph, I agree it comes down to you meeting the needs of your niche in some way that is better than the way the big boys are doing it (that is, of course, if you are competing directly with them). There is nothing, in principle, stopping them from replicating whatever you do to create an advantage. And you certainly won't win just because you have a smaller market. But there are a lot of products (like the t-shirts on Threadless) where relative obscurity increases the value of the product. There will always be consumers who shy away from the mainstream offerings, in some cases because the offerings are mainstream.
You mean a spec, and an implementation, right? ;-) (http://github.com/tonyg/reversehttp) While I can't speak to its popularity, I'll note that it works with plain ol' HTTP, no reliance on SSH in sight, meaning building a client for the protocol is a piece of cake. If you need a client implementation focussed on something other than Ruby Rack, you could probably whip one up in an hour or so.

I personally don't think popularity or how long something has been around have much to do with the merits of technologies. Fitness-for-purpose is much more interesting.
Looks sane to me.
The tracking pixel is for tracking the stats from the web requests, the websocket is for updating the actual admin interface (from what I understand).
A lot of my UX guidance I get, I get from my wife. Sometimes she's not like your normal user at all (she used FreeBSD for a year, although as an end user running Gnome). Sometimes she is (she hates the Mac's maximise button not maximising the screen - she also hates having to CMD-Q instead of closing the last window).

She loves the iPhone. She finds it easy. She has trouble posting images from her photo album to facebook - does she go to camera, photos or facebook? This is the problem with the app paradigm. It's essentially a variant of the folder hierachy. She can play music from her 'music database' on iPod. Why not on last.fm? (bearing in mind that the average user is not aware when it plays something she owns whether or not it's stored locally or streamed)

It sounds as though superficially it makes sense, but without a clear understanding of what owns or uses which database you're still reduced to a folder-oriented paradigm - it's just in this case folders are applications and the data can live under any or all of them.
The point is, CPU hog compared to what?
When I saw the title of this HN post "Let me Duck Duck Go that for you" and clicked on it, I was expecting a blog posting about how why DDG doesn't have an easy enough name to ever catch on.

I actually like the sillyness of the name but I'm not that fond of the name/logo of Duck Duck Go. I think it reminds me too much of Aflac.
There's 4 different interfaces that use the same OWA URL but function completely differently. There's the web based email that people typically think of when someone says "OWA". There's WebDAV, which uses HTTP or form based authentication (to pick up the proper cookies) and then uses special URLs and WebDAV HTTP verbs to perform actions relative to retrieving/sending mail, listings, calendar, etc (this is in the process of being deprecated I believe). There's Web Services, which is (if I remember correctly) a SOAP API that provides the same functionality as WebDAV (and some additional functionality) which has become the preferred method as of Exchange 2007. There's ActiveSync, which uses WBXML formatted message passing (it's more complicated, but more robust than WebDAV and Web Services). If you're using k9mail to talk to an Exchange server, it uses WebDAV. If you're using the "Work Email" app, it will use ActiveSync, Web Services and WebDAV, depending on which is enabled. If you're using TouchDown, it will use whichever of the three you select.

Frequently in configurations, WebDAV access, Web Services access and ActiveSync are all enabled when OWA is enabled for the Exchange server. It is only in rare conditions when you will see OWA enabled and not one of the three.
Or rather, it WILL use them soon. Mac HW acceleration isn't fully deployed yet, is it?

It seemed to me like the article is, "Well yes there are these problem areas but there is an alpha that fixes them, so the entirely line of criticism is bunk." Obviously I do not agree.

It's good that Flash is finally getting comparable video playback performance. It's bad it took this long. And I also question why most people care. Flash, no flash... all I care about is video. If Flash is an impediment, let's dump it. Does that make a few Flash developers sad? TOO FUCKING BAD. This is an industry where change is a constant, if you wed your career to a technology you've made a fatal mistake.
Interesting.

I like that concept.

Keep them coming.
Amongst my friends, the joke is that you need at least two cores, one for listening to music on Pandora and one for other things. On my quad core phenom II (Linux) Pandora uses nearly a whole core. There is nothing within Pandora that justifies such cpu usage. Same goes for video. A youtube video shouldn't be using 25% cpu (one core) on a decent quad core. (Note: windows and other variations have better CPU performance, but in Linux world Flash has never been very decent).
With tariffs, I meant import tariffs.
> DDG is an entire search engine coded by one dude in Perl.

DDG FAQ: Q. How do you get your results?

A. From many sources, including DuckDuckBot, crowd-sourced sites, BOSS & Bing.

E.g., see http://developer.yahoo.com/search/boss/ ...

BOSS (Build your Own Search Service) is Yahoo!'s open search web services platform. Developers, start-ups, and large Internet companies can use BOSS to build and launch web-scale search products that utilize the entire Yahoo! Search index.

BOSS (Build your Own Search Service) is a truly open API with as few rules and limitations as possible. With BOSS, developers and start-ups now have the technology and infrastructure to build next generation search solutions that can compete head-to-head with the principals in the search industry.
Not for graphics rendering on the PC (and then only in a future release), which really is pathetic in 2010.
The population bomb is already defusing. The environmental and resource limits might create some serious problems.
PHP Snippets - Distance Conversion
The joke I was making is many people are Simpsons purists and say Family Guy is complete crap.
Here's a link to the non-paginated version: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/04/ff_radioshack/all/1
Most Chinese use some version of Windows. The PRC built their own variant of Linux; it looks like their building off of the 2.6 kernel but (surprise, surprise) I can't find the source anywhere on their website.

http://www.kylin-os.com/products/os/features.html#googtrans/...

If you use Chrome, it has an auto-translate feature that works pretty well.
The `screen' is just a touchpad. It can display different icons and stuff, for you to click on with your hands.
Thanks. This is my first post so I appreciate the positive feedback. Hopefully more to come...
Amen.

It's quite amazing how many people think they can point the finger at some third party because they 'handed it off'. After all, if it's amazon then it's safe as the bank of England right?

But even banks can burn down and even amazon does not owe you a penny if they lose your stuff.

They'll say sorry, really nicely and maybe they'll offer you some store credit, comes in great when you have lots of free time, you can get some books. Maybe on how to back-up your data or so.

But if you are halfway competent you smile and take that backup and you continue your business, because the value of your business outweighs amazons liability by a huge factor.

Backing up is risk mitigation, if the risk to you is small then you can afford to live without backups, it means that the cost of backing up outweighed the cost of re-creation of the data.

If the risk is larger then you probably should accept that, and go do something about it.

Either way, the responsibility is yours.
Seems like I was on the wrong track. Exim should do the job.

Some people do SMTP on their own, without using a mailserver that fully implements the RFCs.

Read http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1151123 to get some more insight about greylisting.

Check out your exim logfile to get more knowledge about your problem. In case you have trouble interpreting the data, just post an anonymised excerpt. I am sure somebody will help.
is this kind of activity by the Chinese government really sustainable or will the ever-increasing flow of information win-out? personally, i think it's only a matter of time.
AWS promises you physical redundancy, what they don't offer you is an ironclad guarantee that nobody, customer included will ever screw up. So you need backups. It's really simple.
I am a firm believer in not putting any certs, books you wrote, or conferences you have spoke at in your sig. IT can be read in two ways, one you are being pompous or secondly your a fresh out of school. Conversely the absence of them leave no impression. Anyone who would be making a decision on your employment will receive your resume which is the place for such information.
For the post-WWII generations 12 hours 6 days a week should have been the absolute maximum. 8-10 hours 6 days a week (with the 6th day less hours) should have been more normal.
No, he experienced a 'user error'.

And those happen far more frequently.
It's an interesting cycle, really. The hate perpetrated by the civilian to the servant is returned by aggressive actions towards the civilians and a less hospitable attitude.

Ideally, civilians should respect the police, and attempt to make a connection with those who are employed to serve them, while at the same time, the police should be accommodating for their constituents and dignify them much as civilians should.

The animosity can easily be attributed to the lack of respect and proper protocol for both parties. Someone needs to step up.

Alas, one can only hope for a better world.
Talent acquisition? [Not cited, just a guess.]
Yeah. I don't mind one sales inquiry - they are salespeople, after all, and I do find most RS staff helpful and knowledgeable about the consumer goods - but it does cross the line into being pushy at times. It's a shame, because I've always liked RS for having competitive prices on some of the geekier things, and think it's a mistake to focus too much on the consumer goods.

For example, when I got into DJing back in my 20s I was grateful to find my first cheap mixer there, and I still make regular use of my Radio Shack decibel meter, which works just as well but is way cheaper than competitors' models (about $50 rather than $90 for the next cheapest, or ~$200 and up - way up - for other models).

I don't really understand their buying policy any more either. They offer a bunch of cheap bad camcorders, but the popular pocket camcorders like the Flip Mino line, for which they are a natural outlet, are only available via the website. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, given their current identity crisis, trying to brand themselves simultaneously as the reliable old Radio Shack you know and love, and 'The Shack', which causes me to flinch in anticipation of being hit by a basketball every time I hear it.
Several months ago I came across an issue where it became obvious that a file in my Dropbox public folder was being blocked by the GFWoC (public files are accessed via the dl.dropbox.com domain). I ran some tests using online services that attempt to access your web resources from within the firewall perimeter, and sure enough my links were blocked. I am surprised that the rest of the story is only now developing.
I guess Chinese Newspeak doesn't have "freedom" in it.
And I thought 1984 was bad :(
Exactly, real people are hired to generate backlinks via blog comments. I consider it spam, but since the goal is to make a relevant comment, that's debatable. The example given in this post however, is automated. You don't hire people to write unique content and have them list keywords. That's the type of spam I'm referring to as automated.
What services do people use to proxy around it? Just curious.
This is why I love Haskell. Dealing with the type system and purely functional style forces you to think about the problem at hand before you do anything.
Oops, you are so right.

Thanks.
If you are catering to non-technical users, I would hope they wouldn't have to deal with zip files. Compression could be treated more like metadata, rather than a type of file (i.e. the filesystem transparently compresses them based on usage patterns or preferences).

But in general, I think there are two types of files: files needed by a user and files needed by programs. A good solution would make it so that the non-technical user doesn't need to know that the latter kind exists.
Most banal example is intervals in the real line (e.g. reals between 0 and 1), which show up all the time. But comfort with infinity is needed for other uses also, two examples being convergence and asymptotic analysis of practical algorithms (optimization, statistical estimation, signal processing, machine learning, geometric algorithms, ...) and showing that two classes of objects are equivalent. The latter is useful because it can let you switch representations of things according to which is more efficient in some implementation, or because it shows that two seemingly different objects are basically the same. Any class of objects that can be parameterized with a real-valued parameter (e.g. probability distributions) forms an infinite set, and it is often useful to be able to say things about a whole category of problems at once, even for practical purposes.
It's not quite like that. If you worked in a large office building, and went to the same floor every day, you'd probably learn just enough of the building to get to work every day and no more. I one were to place you randomly in the build ing somewhere you would likely be lost until you found some kind of marker or floor map.

Your average filesystem and computer user are like that: if images (or example) could be expected to always be in the same part of the filesystem, most users would have no trouble finding the one they want. But different applications use different default directories for the same things. This is like being forced to use a different entrance to a building depending on whether you plan to do paperwork or programming. To make matters worse, the floor plan and room numbers change periodically due to events of which you may or may not be aware.