skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ballmer is in an odd position. You may be able to justify firing based on the stock price. But if you look at earnings/profit the man has delivered good growth.

Now you can say, "MS has missed the big trends like mobile devices and search". This is true, but at the same time they've really nailed the enterprise. Not sexy, but they went from people saying, "MS is a desktop OS, not a server" to them being one of the dominant server software providers. From Windows Server to SQL Server to Sharepoint to BizTalk.

If I were Ballmer and my head was on the chopping block my argument would be, "I've made us essential in the enterprise. This is revenue that we will see for decades. Sure, the consumer market I didn't do as well, but given a choice I'll take the less glamorous enterprise market. Why? In the consumer market you can go from market leader to struggling to make a profit in one product cycle (see Nintendo and Sony in the past decade)."

I'm no Ballmer apologist, but I just think there's an argument. Although really the stock price is hard to argue against.
Are you sure?

90% of VC backed startups fail. What do you think that number is for angel backed startups?
I didn't even know that support was in there. Then again I haven't installed java on my computer in years.
I think Perl's market success came largely with the internet, and the need for CGI script (though it was popular before then, as a sysadmin tool, it really took off with the net). It's hard to replicate that market success, without some similar wave (true in general; I'm not singling out perl).

Damian mentions some cool features; but I'm getting a Lisp vibe: clever people use it, they develop cool new things with it, but it doesn't attain market success (aka secret weapon). Damian himself is a clever guy (though you only hear of his over-complex stuff, the 3 he mentions, using latin, haiku and whitespace); eg. mjd too is great (http://blog.plover.com/) and of course Larry. As in Lisp, these clever ideas get adopted into other languages (eg. today, even Java has Perl-style regex).

Fitting in with this is the psychographic profile of the wish to not be standard - to do things differently - which is great (crucial) for research and development; but becoming less great for later stages, such as production code.

My personal view is that both standard and non-standard are important, though necessarily antagonistic.
OK, I understand better. Just a point left:

> [e-mail sucks at] group conversation.

Maybe you actually meant that web based mail sucks at group conversation? Or that e-mail sucks at live group conversation? If so, I agree.

Now, if you actually meant what you wrote, I disagree for 2 reasons: (1) in my experience, forums and mailing lists are basically the same, once filters are set up. (2) centralizing most of my communications to one gateway is far more manageable than having to check several web sites. 2 inboxes is one too many. E-mail notifications help, but at this point, I'd rather use e-mail directly.
Look at the card, this post's url is some of the only text on it.

(which would make me think the same care & attention should be put towards this post as his resume... typos [e.g. Opeh instead of Open in the final sentence]? really?]
I'll trollishly bite. I just read http://search.cpan.org/~flora/Moose-1.05/lib/Moose/Manual/Co.... While it does look like a good library that I'd be interested in learning if I'm ever forced to code Perl for monies again, I don't see anything special in it that isn't in other languages or couldn't be implemented in them as a library.
there are some significant differences between petroleum and water. For oil, using it involves a chemical transformation that won't be reversed except on geological time scales. Using water often leaves it in its native state, with a cycle that returns it to the environment in a geologic blink of an eye. Still, the authors make a compelling argument that, not only can there be a peak water, but the US passed this point around 1970, apparently without anyone noticing.

Indeed, but since (as mentioned) water is nothing like oil, the concept of Peak Water hardly matters. I hear the US also passed Peak Rubik's Cube in about 1983 and nobody noticed that either.
Reasons to hate any programming language
10 Must Have iPad Apps for Designers
With it’s larger screen, multitouch capabilities and ultra-portability, the iPad is an ideal tool for designers, particularly when it comes to working on the go or going to client meetings. The following 10 apps are sure to be useful at times, from simple sketches to keeping track of your thoughts, make the iPad your go-to device when you’re away from the office.
It is not applicable unless you plan on running your code on only a specific CPU (and by specific CPU I don't mean that you plan on running only on x86, I mean you only plan on running on the Intel i7).

GCC has some macros where you can specify if a branch is likely or unlikely so the compiler will optimize the code for you based on which cpu you are compiling on, but at higher level languages you would have to do this by hand. The performance gain from this optimization will be negligible compared to if you had spent that time trying to optimize something else.
launchd
"A business founded on the values of a generation, such as Facebook, has to keep up with, and respect, evolving lives and needs."

I don't think the problem was with keeping up but rather staying the same service. Facebook needed to not evolve and remain the same way it always was when it was first conceived.
Full text: Microsoft CEO Ballmer's memo on Allard, Bach exit plans
Haskell bindings to Webkit, plus "cabal install gtk2hs" works
I have seen Damian's amazing presentations and I still feel sad for what's happened to Perl since he became a strong influence.

I believe he is the one who has most encouraged the tendencies which led to the Perl 6 debacle. His strong charisma has made it acceptable to have the following attitudes in the Perl 6 effort:

- Actual use by mortal programmers is boring; satisfying your desire to be brilliant and clever is what matters

- Complexity and obscurity are fun. Perl is good or popular because the language is complex, therefore the next version of Perl should be even more complex.

Perl 6 really has nothing to do with Perl 5. It's more like those movies that say "a movie by the producers of $THING_THAT_WAS_AWESOME" which neglect to mention the script and the director are different.
The problem is, several of my acquaintances told me that "everyone is on Facebook". When talking to them, the burden of proof is on my side.

But I have a good case.
Comprehensive C Archive Network
Do you (or anyone, really) know of a place with a decent definition of how AGPL code needs to be treated?

I'm not clear about what the line is that says "everything from this point must have its source released" versus "all this stuff is OK to license as you please"
Braintrust - The TCDisrupt Braintrust
This is very cool. Geekout aside: I have a micro-SD card (it plugs into an SD card for housing). It's about the size and thickness of my little finger nail. It holds 4GB (ie 5 CDs; 4000 novels), and it's near the bottom of the range.
I just bought a Lenovo T510 with an Nvidia video card. I installed F13-beta on it a couple of weeks ago. It was magical.

- Video card works out of the box using the nouveau driver. I just yum install'ed mesa-dri-drivers-experimental to get 3D desktop. All free software, no proprietary drivers.
- SUSPEND WORKS OOTB!
- Skype video and audio work flawlessly (installation still a pain on x64, though. But that's skype's fault).
- Webcam works out of the box.
- Flash works in chrome without issue (installation not automatic, but this is fedora)

The auto installation of print drivers failed for me, but at least the framework is in place to improve this in the future. I imagine it will get fixed soon.

Yes, you can make jokes about a linux fanboy being impressed with things that Mac/Windows have had working for years. But Fedora (and Ubuntu) are making demonstrable, regular improvements. The desktop experience has dramatically improved in just a couple of years. What will things look like in another two years?
Once PS3-only, Insomniac to bring IP to 360 via EA Partners
Has anybody been able to pin this down to a particular version number?
see also the novel I posted here on Hacker News defending the way Ruby 1.9 decided to handle strings with:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1163684
Yet a lot of people use dvorak. Or QWERTZ or AZERTY.
5 eur each apparently. Although that probably doesn't include the soldering.
As a BSD user, I recall some of the porting problems were because of the reliance of ALSA instead of OSS. Anybody know offhand if it still uses ALSA?
Actually he does say how much it costs:

"Clearly, it is not the cheaper business card in the world (about 5 euros/piece for a small batch order), but it is a (relatively) small price for having a card in your pocket that has more CPU power than the computer that led the man to the moon."
The closest I've seen is a minimum term for sign-on bonus, school reimbursement, or moving bonus. Work less than X months and you owe the company back either. But just minimum employment term for start-up training? Training new employees is just part of the cost of doing business and the risk of them jumping is just part of doing business.

I'm sure there are US companies that try it, though.
too much water goes to users that don't pay a market price. that means subsidies or shortages, as it does in other markets.
I bought a LaserJet 6MP on ebay about 5 years ago and upgraded the memory to the maximum. It's served me well since for general text printing.
Hah, thats a nice and easy way to mirror shell piping, though I personally prefer it without the extra (unneeded) punctuation.
If anyone from the Chrome/Chromium team is reading this, I want to say a big "Thank you". Chrome is great software, and it's making my life better (I probably spend something like 50-60 hours a week in it). I'm sure it's the case for many others too. Keep up the good work!
It hardly matters until we pump all the aquifers dry. At that point a majority of US crops will be reliant upon rain water, which won't be enough to sustain the farms in the west. Much of Oklahoma, Kansas, California will revert back into the Great American Desert (as it was known before).

For a great book on the subject, check out http://www.amazon.com/Cadillac-Desert-American-Disappearing-...
No joke. A 6-pack of blades in Perth ran me $50. Ridiculous. I bought the handle for maybe $10.
with BP's recent successes in the gulf, water and oil will soon be one commodity, making this distinction academic
There are several groups they could go after:

a) people, often students who run their entire social lives on facebook, have 1000+ friends, and spend a long time every day on the site. Often students. Probably don't have much money -- but you might be able to get them hooked with small payments. Also, market it as a gift thing. Your uncle doesn't know what to get you for chrismas, but knows you spend a lot of time on facebook and has no problem spending $20 for a present. Also something to buy for the girl you're flirting with (and yes, it likely is that gendered). Livejournal made this work very well. In this situation it doesn't matter _what_ you offer for the paid account, just that it exists as an option.

b) anybody using it profesionally: event promoters, venue owners, bands, etc. May not deeply like or understand FB, but getting it right is worth serious money to them. Simplification, information management, statistics, maybe tech support.

c) Professionals who know nothing about facebook, but feel they should have a presence there. Sell them a service with lots of hand-holding, maybe integration with tools they already use.
The icon didn't update on opera and looked a bit funny.
Good point. For one of the feeds I tried, I got something like the following: "Feed not found. PostRank will try to index it, so try again in a few minutes." Also if you look at PostRank Topics (http://www.postrank.com/main), you can see rankings for posts older than what's present in a site's RSS feed. So it does seem to do some archiving.
Developers should know how the layers beneath them work. Sometimes that means they have to be exposed to information that could be "dangerous" if they use it in the wrong context. Such is the risk of education.
Twenty-One Women Entrepreneurs Reveal Their Favorite Business Books
I'll second that. I have a Brother HL-4040CN. I use it for cardstock modeling (www.worldworksgames.com). As in, printing lots of full, dense pages in vivid color.

Several hundred pages in, I'm still on the original cartridges.
BP prepares for 'Top Kill' procedure to contain oil spill
On the other hand... I installed fedora on my laptop (from ~2006). It went flawlessly.

I went to install windows7 on it. Oh, wait. There are no drivers available. Stuck with no touchpad scrolling, the incorrect resolution, no hotkeys... Google around, some users of similar models report that the vista ones work, if you install them in the right order, manually downloading each from the vendor's site one at a time with fancy file names like SODAL-BLAH-nnnn.exe.

Lately it is really easier for me to install Fedora or Ubuntu than Windows. I'm not sure its because Linux got easier, either...
Data Interaction Patterns (A comparison of caching strategies)
dude, you're freakin' me out. amazing.
Reshma Sohoni of Seedcamp: Lessons learned from 21 startups - Leancamp
It holds just as true, but I can't think of a case where it would be worth worrying about. For example, accesses to main memory are much more expensive than mispredicted branches.

Unless you're also concerned with how Python or Ruby stores its values internally, you don't need to think about the speed of conditionals. It's really only an issue if you're writing the Python or Ruby interpreter itself.
Given Chrome's tab and menu positions, Chrome feels great with XMonad.

(Posted via Chrome x86_64 :))
This is the sort of thing a good VM's JIT should handle for you.
yeah, but you probably would have to stand out there for several minutes before that would work at most companies :-)
fantastic business talk by Ed Catmull (pixar co-founder) at Stanford http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2h2lvhzMDc

btw: I find it hard to believe that Toy Story 3 could be any good (because of the "3"). Is it?
Steve Case Recalls When AOL Almost Bought Yahoo For $2 Million
Y'know, I use a Gillette Fusion. The blades cost about four dollars each and consist of six tiny wedges of high-strength steel sharpened to sub-micron precision and coated with a layer of tetrahedral amorphous carbon.

The "razor" cost ten dollars and is basically a plastic stick.

I'm not sure the old razor/blade analogy applies to razors and blades any more. Maybe it should be the old printer/cartridge analogy nowadays.
Do you want your info to be public?
(*) y
( ) n
I think long term plan for upstart is to replace cron[1](generating events at scheduled time ...)

And some more general information here [2]

[1] http://upstart.ubuntu.com/faq.html#replace-cron

[2] http://www.netsplit.com/2006/09/01/upstart-can-now-replace-s...
Yes, sound on Linux is still using ALSA. The BSD work is all from contributions I believe. We have a 'media/audio/openbsd', but the contents appears to just be a stub.
Nifty, but I could see this causing aggravation on the backend (i.e. using the data from one generation of your form to another). Still, very flexible.
The Best Personal Finance Apps for Android
The cost of traditional energy (gas, electric, etc) is only going in one direction. In fact, the level of subsidies in those traditional sectors dwarfs those you mention.

That said, to your warning regarding politicians and "government run " industries, I couldn't agree more.
Thank you :)

Just here's link for a) http://www.livejournal.com/paidaccounts/
15 Things you didn’t know about Steve Jobs
Maybe a good time to pick up some PHO? http://www.google.com/finance?client=ob&q=NYSE:PHO
Tony Blair to Join Khosla Ventures
Luckily oil and water don't mix. They're like... wait, wait, there's some kind of analogy here...
Mass storage USB devices work on Macs too. Autorun might not though.
PicoLisp SBCL Benchmarks
I think you are misinterpreting this. All branch predicting CPU's will deal better with basic and regular patterns: 100 trues in a row followed by 100 falses. It's only with regard to how well they handle different ABAB-type patterns that they differ. Modern and more expensive processors are better at detecting more complex patterns.

The macros you refer to a are an even more minor effect --- they only affect what happens the first time through the loop. It's a tiny optimization of an optimization. Branch prediction is a hardware feature, and is going to happen whether you use these macros or not. It's the logic of your code that's going to make the big difference, not the macros.
Faceboocola Classic
I used to be employee #3 at a small startup. When I left, I gave 30 days notice so that I could help hire and train my replacement. In response, they told me to go home and refused to pay the 2 weeks pay they owed me.
Someone needs to create a standardized Social Network file. Then users could "download their facebook" then upload it to another social network.
Most of California's agriculture is the Central Valley. Surely that was never desert? It's got rain all winter and runoff from the mountains all summer.
I heard the story attributed to Lawrence Livermore National Labs, and they have fairly strict security (ie men with machine guns, lots of trainig). Probably has to do with the plutonium...
Thanks, I was specifically referring to the mac version of 'autorun.inf' but don't know the terminology :x
Entirely typical for the industry, they waste untold developer hours dicking around with a single feature when the could have just installed an open source CMS and gotten the feature (and all kinds of other stuff) as part of the package. Grade: D
>the concept of Peak Water hardly matters

It matters if we're using water faster than the hydrologic cycle can process it.
Newly open source BitTorrent protocol aims to unclog tubes
That's really funny and I'd almost buy it, except that J Allard is really well known for limited use of capitalization and punctuation. He signs his mails with a lower-case "j" which would be a weird e/r or maybe it is e/t ligature.
Yea, cause the New York Times could totally run off a simple Drupal install...

Grade: F
Good thing you left.
As far as I can tell it's been more or less stable for a while now :)
I was doing that for a long time. But switching to the rotary electric shaver was a great decision. It works perfectly and you don't need to change the heads for months / years.
The original article: http://blog.bittorrent.com/2010/05/21/%C2%B5tp-open-source-i...

Though I think ars explains it better.
windows would be the best target probably, and hooks might not be the best idea, but you can capture all kinds of input with the apis documented on msdn.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms997537.aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms646293%28VS.85%29....

for example. although i'm not sure how good they are these days... i honestly can't remember exactly which technique i used but i managed to make a keylogger with excel/vba once with apis i randomly looked up on msdn - it was just to prove a point though, i haven't really done anything more elaborate than that.

the difficult bit is really getting code to run. that i have no idea about, but i've heard about exploits from time to time, usually when they are fixed :)
Cargo Cult Cryptography.
Materials Used in Modern Outdoor Patio Furniture
(*) n

Please confirm that you want each of the following 473 items not to be public:

...
I'm not that young. I spent a couple years picking up an MS and five years working before starting the PhD. Five years still seems like a long time to me. It's nearly 10% of my remaining life expectancy!

Sure, a PhD will open some doors. So will five years in industry: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1373334
Are there any recommendations for a good screencast program on Linux?
IMHO, the things that Perl really has to do are no so much the clever syntax designs and run-times etc. which while cool to people interested in languages and how they work, don't really allow the language itself to be used in larger scoped work. What Perl needs is a robust standard library that supports the kinds of things that people want to do with languages, like build interfaces, or solid web frameworks. Even better would be retargeting Perl to other languages, like a Perl->JS (so I can write Perl code for a browser) or Perl->JVM (so I can build the kinds of things I need that run on the JVM) compiler rather than building a runtime (Parrot), and re-targeting many languages to that platform.

Don't get me wrong, Parrot and Perl 6 are all worthy efforts. But I'm not sure they will have the kind of impact towards growth of the language and userbase that Perl needs. Perl desperately needs better OO syntax and support for functional programming paradigms. But syntax is syntax, libraries are what make a language useful in today's day and age.
Great. Now if there was a flashblocker that actually works, maybe I could switch.
I think this is a great example of a form mapping more cleanly to a key value store than a relational DB. Submissions to forms like this are documents in the sense that they need to be recorded as-is. If the user moves or changes their name down the line its actually a feature and not a bug that these records won't be updated.
Don't be so sure NoScript will save you.

You might be able perform the same attack using hanging HTTP requests to load a stylesheet and favicon at the bottom of the page. Defer completion of the requests for several minutes until it's likely the user has moved on to another tab. Stylesheet displays the hidden phishing UI, favicon is loaded. Bam, same effect.

Alternatively use a meta refresh tag to simply redirect to an entirely different page.
Any niche will eventually get filled, even the niche of "actual serious news stories for people who want to read actual serious news". In fact, the relative wealth of this demographic makes it a very attractive niche to fill.

Don't forget in all this fun handwringing that we're still a lot better off than we were just fifteen years ago. Back then it was a serious challenge to hear any news that didn't appear in a newspaper printed in your town, or didn't show up in one of the handful of TV/radio outlets you could pick up. Now you're two seconds away from reading any newspaper in the world.

... or maybe four seconds if you don't speak whatever language it's in and need to click Chrome's "yes, autotranslate this" button.
The FlashBlock extension works well for me. Give it a try:

https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/gofhjkjmkpinhpoi...
What is Jaundice | Early Symptoms of Jaundice
Courts can vacate arbitration award based on error of law in FEHA claim
It’s also finally stable for Mac: http://chrome.blogspot.com/2010/05/new-chrome-stable-release...
A PhD programme is ideally an opportunity to work on whatever you want, for years, in the company of smart people who are also interested in the same subject. You can use this time to try out different ideas and see if any of them take off. Having that shot is valuable in itself, even if you don't "succeed" with a research position afterwards.

This was my attitude going into the program. I'll get to spend five years working on fun problems! Even if I don't land a research job at the end of it, at least I'll have had five years of fun. But when I look at how bitter the people who are graduating now are when they don't get research jobs, I'm not sure that I'll have the same attitude towards things when I finish.

Yes, sometimes new ideas, connections, and skills come out of a PhD. Don't those things come out of working in industry, too?

You may end up teaching too much, you may end up working on projects you don't like

Yes. This. I feel like I had more freedom at my old industry position than I do in my PhD program.