skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
alternatively, for Terminal, set -o vi

I also bind H to ^ and L to $ with

bind -m vi 'H: vi-first-print'

bind -m vi 'L: end-of-line'

(not OS X specific, but related)
Ask HN: How do you get your first power user? 
In pg's 5 Founders essay (http://paulgraham.com/5founders.html) he references Paul Buchheit's advice that "it's better, initially, to make a small number of users really love you than a large number kind of like you."

I write a blog (http://joonreport.com) and I've been struggling to get a small number of users to really love it. So I'm hoping the HN/YC community could chime in on how they got their first power user (in my case, reader)? Where did you find them (did they find you?) / How did you find them? How did you get your first user to love what you're doing -- to love what you've created?

For example:

-Did you email your friends explaining what it is and hopefully it just clicked with someone, at which point, you engaged in a constant dialogue with them?

-Did you submit your work to as many bloggers as possible, with the goal of them writing a story?

If you get a story, it seems to me that this may generate some initial traffic, but I don't think (I could definitely be wrong) this is the best solution to getting your first power user. Getting that first user who really loves you.

Anyway, any input you provide is much appreciated.
I like the idea but it is not a startup. Agree the font is too close together. Remove the user counts for now.

You've done the easy part, now comes the hard part.
Mosquitoes eat flowers (nectar) not humans.

Blood provides some protein for eggs, but is not the primary food for mosquitoes.
I absolutely love Io, and my favorite "feature" of the implementation is the ability to modify scripts in real time and have the changes take place immediately, for better or worse ;)
I prefer return values over exceptions in languages that make it safe and easy.

Haskell does a pretty good job, I think.
With Maybe or Either, you have to check it to extract your value, but if you are doing a lot of things that will result in/use the results of Maybe/Either, you can just operate in a Monad that makes them the default.

Similarly, languages with multiple return values make you explicitly ignore the return value.

Exceptions have their benefits, but I have a personal preference for return values because they make it explicit in the interface. Also, I find that it makes more sense to handle various success and failure scenarios in the same bit of code instead of writing a best-case flow and assuming that exceptions will be thrown and errors will be dealt with somehow.

Exceptions are great if you can't continue due to programmer error, but most cases where people use exceptions are just expected execution paths that (in my view) make no sense to handle via non-local control flow.
Perhaps the only reason we're running out of IPv4 addresses is because you can still get large blocks of IPs for questionable reasons like "IRC vhosts" and "proxies"...

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.org.arin.ppml/8304

Plus, both internet connections at my workplace gave us 6 IPs without us even asking for them.
I don't know. Of course it's nice if a language has an informative homepage (which Io does), but I think languages shouldn't (and probably can't) be judged at a glance.

Instead of "quick stuff", I'd rather have a (possibly peer-reviewed) paper about the language.
Recently I saw a poster by a wierd but beautifull Dutch organisation called Loesje, translated it said:

"It was a day like this one that Marco Polo set sail to China.

What are your plans for today?"

IMHO it's not about where you are today, it's about where you might be tomorrow.
After upgrading to 4.0 my phone was pretty laggy. Some apps were worse than others. Maps was almost useless, would hang for 20 seconds while not responding to touches.

However, 4.0.1 seems to have fixed most of the lag issues. In fact, I think 4.0.1 runs better than the 3.2 I had before upgrading.
Don't skimp on your peripherals!

I see many fellow programmers buy and use the cheapest peripherals they find, and it bothers me. They are tools of our trade, and we will spend thousands of hours glued to our peripherals.

Getting a decent keyboard/mouse/headphones/monitor will make life a little more pleasant for a very small upfront investment.
Ask HN:  Job market for general technologist?
This stems a bit from the "Does reading HN make you feel like shit?" topic.

I'm in my early 30s with no college.

I have worked for a large company for 10+ years. Originally started doing helpdesk, but quickly worked my way up into the IT side of merger & acquisition integration (I've been the technical lead on the integration of many companies you've heard of). I did that for many years and now I'm in a department that does technology consulting for our fortune-500 customers. I put together demos to showcase how tech can both be "invisible" and be used to solve their business problems.

I enjoy my job, am paid reasonably well, have good benefits, etc- no reason to leave. However, reading HN, I see lots of job postings... and it makes me wonder - if I ever do get laid off, where would I go?

I'm passionate about technology, just like most of you reading this. The problem is - I don't specialize in a single area. I really enjoy dabbling in everything. I'm good at picking the right tool for the job and integrating different technologies to come up with a solution. I write a bit of PHP, I've done a bit of C#, a bit of iOS, a bit of hardware (mostly Arduino based projects), etc. I can write fairly well and speak semi-intelligently to CxOs, at least for my education level (or lack thereof). I set myself apart from co-workers by being able to come up with quick & dirty solutions (for proving a concept, for example) extremely fast.

So, HN, if something were to happen to my job, where would I go?
Insight, "CuteFund: adorable"
I know where you're coming from, but I think that's a little judgemental. Most people are either affected by or extremely concerned about poverty and welfare - I don't quite follow how cognitive dissonance comes into it.

Maybe people don't think of responding to this, a large scale study, with personal anecdotes. There are plenty of amazing posts on HN in response to other stories.

Surely it's valuable to understand more about ourselves, what affects us, and how we can offer effective help, even if the process can seem a little clinical and heartless.
You are right but I want to get a conceptual evaluation for now.
| Original iPhone | |
| iPhone 3G | iPhone 3G S | iPhone 4
-----+-------------------+-----------------+---------------
CPU: | 412MHz ARM 11 | 600MHz ARM 11 | 1 GHz Apple A4
RAM: | 128 MB | 256 MB | 512 MB
What was the social network with public relations between people that failed because the "follow" was symmetric?
Backups are all well and good, but really they aren't going to save you unless you are also doing frequent test restores. Only when you've acted out your worst-case scenario (with a set of virtual machines and a recent set of backups) and managed to restore the system without problem do you really know that your backups are adequate.
Starving the Beast or Free Lunch?
While I do respect your larger point...

The reason why they don't have pretty often is because they can't afford abortions.

A lot of the research in that article was done in the UK, where cost is not really a factor. Abortions are covered by the national heath service. Also, there are no parental notification rules or any similar barriers that make it so hard in the US.

Contraception is also free, and so I don't think it is completely unreasonable to speculate that many of these births are actually wanted and to examine the reasons for them, as the researchers are attempting in the OP. Whether their theory is actually correct, I don't know.
> Where, exactly, do you propose drawing the line?

From TFA: "We welcome the court's rejection of terms of service violations as triggers for criminal liability, but will continue to work to demonstrate to courts that not all technological measures are created equal. If the measure seeks to control access to or use of data, then evasion of it is almost certainly criminal. But if the restriction merely seeks to impose owner preferences or terms of service on otherwise authorized users, bypassing it should not be a crime."
I also noticed Ars becoming much more anti-Apple as well as sensationalist. Articles like Siracusa coverage on the antenna press conference as well as his twitter feed seemed oddly vindictive to me.

http://arstechnica.com/staff/fatbits/2010/07/unanswered-ques...

I found it unsettling considering Ars has been a top source of tech news for me in the past that I thought was very even and thorough.
I think the blog post should rather be named "How to tell journalism from blogging". Simply because you can be a journalist without devoting yourself to journalism (just like you can be a programmer without really doing any good programming).

As one that grew up knowing one of Sweden's most prominent journalists I can vouch for some extremely impressive skills that are needed in order to be a good journalist. It's very much about the amount of schooling and _continuous_ preparation you put into a column: a blogger may become successful merely venting his/her thoughts while a "true" journalist reads a book per hundred written words.
Ask HN: Is fixing real complex bugs worth less than shipping shiny new features?
I joined my company at a stage where they just had a major release, so I was tasked with fixing bugs in the existing system. I was pretty good at tackling complex bugs that nobody else could, so the more bugs I fixed the more bugs I got assigned. I also worked with real customers who reported those bugs, and made sure the fixes got to them.

After a while, new people joined the team, and some got to work on some new projects with some cool new features.

A couple years later, those working on new stuff got promoted faster and supposedly bigger raises.

They worked very little on the legacy code, if at all. They just implement new stuff, and ship, and get rewarded, even if nobody is really using what they implemented. Because nobody uses it, very little bugs are reported, so they can easily go on to the next cool new stuff. They have more visibility even though their work might not be that hard or valuable.

It seems this is the way things are, at least in my company. I wonder how things are in other places in the software industry? Is support/maintenance and keeping customers satisfied deemed less worthy and less valuable than shipping new features?
Is anyone else surprised that microsoft.com still has "emulate IE7" turned on?
Guide to Google Adwords: How your cost per click is determined
Here is another article I found on this, "Mac Delete Key Bug Demonstration".

http://gunther.web66.com/crossjava/Bugs/deletekeybug/
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLMNin-2p6A
Same here. I tend to avoid using it for just about anything. Thankfully, my girlfriend didn't upgrade hers when I did, so between the two of us we still have one usable phone until the iPhone 4 hits Canada.
I agree with everything you say, but the problem is, what is the minimum standard without people being comfortable?

Unfortunately, I know more than a couple in my family who despite having an iPhone and big screen TV, also have declared bankruptcy a few times, and will go on food stamps at times.
MixPanel Offers Realtime iPhone Analytics That Probably Won’t Piss Off Apple
My experience with iOS4 mirrors this. Being jailbroken, I have a few tools at hand to help avoid the "reboot once a day" approach a few other folks I know have resorted to, but I'm still finding the hardware significantly less usable than the previous release (for very little improvement in user experience).

I'm holding out hope for Android development to save the iPhone 3G (and 2G, for that matter). http://www.idroidproject.org/ No really, I'm quite serious. Froyo runs acceptably on my 3G right now, but it's missing a considerable amount of hardware support (specifically the PMU, which pretty much makes it impossible to use it productively right now, even for geeks).
Reminds me of finding out the hard way that "paste" is bound to Mouse3 by default in Gnome and that on some mice I'll occasionally scroll the wheel violently enough to trigger clicks.

Took a few times of finding random text in my code to realize what was happening, and even longer to figure out how.
A lot of newsroom editors and journalists would be better off if they read this article. It explains how journalism should be, but unfortunately not how it is. There are exceptions of course - the Economist springs to mind.

Unfortunately a lot of journalists don't live by the points set forth in te article. "A journalist is obsessed with the Truth." and "A journalist is a skeptic (and often a critic)." for instance are a joke to anyone who's seen their press releases copied into an article more or less word by word.

I know a few journalists, and they do indeed strive towards high standards. The problem is that since most news corporations, as we all know, aren't doing very well they're under pressure to churn out articles at an ever higher rate. And the journalism suffers. There is just no way they can churn out five well researched, skeptic, truthful articles every day.

Unfortunately for news organisations this is a bad spiral: Worse reporting leads to fewer readers which lead to cutbacks which lead to worse reporting.
It's great that you don't believe or "buy" that other corporations are better at handling disclosure than Apple, that Apple is maliciously sitting on bug reports, etc., because no one in this thread ever implied that.

Let me try to clear up my point of frustration with the whole untimely response thing.

A quick search reveals that MSRC (which you cited) receives something like 300 emails a day. I could easily be wrong, but let's assume Apple's volume is close to this number as well.

So that's 300 divided by 8 hours a day or about 40 messages an hour. Using my earlier example of a human simply replying with his/her name/contact, and a tracking number, we'll be generous and say it takes a half hour to do this, that's 16 messages processed by a single tier-1 security support staff in one day.

If we now divide 40/received/hour by 16/processed/day we get that APS would need to add roughly 18 additional team members to handle a reporting volume equal to that of Microsoft.

Not from the valley, but it looks like tech support make around $50K a year out there, which we would multiply by the additional staff for: $50k * 18 = $900,000/year.

According to the conference call this week, Apple makes over $32,000,000 in _profit per day_.

Essentially, if Apple wanted to greatly improve their image and contact with outside researchers, they could take 0.03% of a single day's profit, and provide every person that submits a bug a with an immediate human contact and tracking number.

Hell if even if float these numbers up by several magnitudes, does it really sound like too much to ask?

edit: mathfail, but bottom line is still valid /done ;)
I see. There are two categories of conflicts to resolve: meta conflicts (like when you rename a file to "foo" on device A and meanwhile rename it to "bar" on B) and data conflicts (i.e. the example you gave).

We will formally describe meta conflict resolution in a separate post. Because resolution for data conflicts is very application specific, we will publish an API to allow application developers to write their own conflict resolvers. Meanwhile, we will try to provide resolvers for popular file types by default.

From the end user's view, in most cases conflicts are automatically resolved without being noticed. User intervention is required if automatic resolution fails or the user wants to manually merge.
You can recreate this in any browser. It's because data/input is not being sanitized/checked properly.

I forgot where the errors came from, but the originated at: http://www.collabrr.com/statistics.php. Try this string: ?user='

Go back and check those files/lines and make sure there are no blank lines or ";" being left out. I can't really tell you much about the problem without seeing the code. Hope that helps!
Finite Difference Methods - Derivative Approximation
No, your premise is wrong. Graphs are ancient within CS.

Linear algebra and graph theory do have some deep connections though.
I feel like an expensive mouse is trivial and unnecessary. Unless you are looking for a highly responsive gaming mouse but that is unrelated to bashing out some code.

I bought the cheapest 24 inch monitor and I saved $80. Three years later and I have no complaints what so ever.
We use it for Stylous: http://stylous.com/

Io is by far my favorite language. Steve did a fantastic job of removing everything that isn't necessary from OO, leaving a simple and powerful language.

The downside of using Io is that you'll end up writing a lot of libraries yourself, since there isn't a large community yet.
For autocompletion add

require 'irb/completion'

to your ~/.irbrc. If you want auto-indentation:

IRB.conf[:AUTO_INDENT] = true

If you're a Vim user, you can edit code inside of a Vim buffer with the interactive_editor gem:

http://vimcasts.org/episodes/running-vim-within-irb/

or for a more SLIMEy experience, you can try ScreenShell, which allows you to send code from Vim in one GNU Screen window to another running irb, or the interpreter of your choice.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1098876

If you just want to stick to improving the irb experience, the Pickaxe book has a good section on customizing irb:

http://ruby-doc.org/docs/ProgrammingRuby/html/irb.html
I would postulate that more than specific training, there are journalistic (sic?) conventions that you have to adhere to and that you learn during your course of study. I'm not saying that one cannot learn this on their own with some effort, but that most bloggers don't know or don't care to learn it.

To compare it to design/designing/designer wouldn't be accurate. There are certain aspects of design that natural artistic ability and skill covers, while in journalism there are rules (investigation, disclosure, etc.) that must be learned, you're not born with them. I've seen bloggers ignore these (ignorance, refusal to adhere to them, and so on) and some of their end products make me cringe.

Not to say that journalists themselves don't ignore this from time to time, take for example this recent Breitbart brouhaha, but I think it all boils down to the terminology: Bloggers would like to be known as journalists, and journalists would like to keep that distinction to themselves. Each have a case. But I think there is still a need to distinguish one from the other.

(edited to clarify an opinion)
Does the opposite for me. I deal with such an endless sea of doofuses every day, it brightens my whole outlook to see that there is such a large number of driven, talented people in the world.
The part about log rotation strikes me as an anachronism, which, sadly, is still applicable due to naive default configurations.

Disk space is preposterously cheap, and even high-volume, Internet-scale text logs are small and low-bandwidth[1].

The problem isn't that disks fill up, but, rather, that logs are ever written somewhere that, if full, affects anything but the logging. The solution of a separate filesystem for logs has been around perhaps longer than the OP himself but only makes sense for a few, standalone servers.

Otherwise, the solution of remote syslog has been around for almost as long. If your logs are critical, you could even use two (for twice the price). Even the days of questionable reliability and small message size[2] limits are pretty long gone with syslog-ng.

This kind of thing, otherwise tedious minutae, is second nature to sysadmins. Hire one.

[1] It's the disk bandwidth or throughput which is still expensive

[2] That's on the order of 500 characters, old text pager lengths, not the newfangled 140 character sms/twitter cheapness. Hey, you kids get off my lawn!
Have you considered that an even and thorough approach to tech news may go through periods where it levels more criticism than usual at Apple?
I've verified this issue using TextEdit saving the file and printing it using "od -a".

I've also submitted it to bugreport.apple.com as bug # 8223684
It doesn't matter.

And there is nothing wrong with cross-posting stuff on HN. HN is deliberately designed to discourage long-form original material, so everything submitted here has to have been posted somewhere else.

Why repost stuff here?

A. Because you think that parts of the HN community might otherwise not see it, because it's buried in a sea of cruft on other sites and because some of us simply don't read other aggregators;

B. Because you are wondering what the HN community might write in comments.

These are exactly what HN is for so there's nothing wrong with encouraging it.

Of course, if you post A-1 Reddit-quality linkbait here some of it will inevitably get upvoted to the front page, just as water flows downhill, and this will be taken as a harbinger of doom. This, too, is our tradition.
500 Internal Server Error. Perhaps Apple made the article go away :-)

Here's a cached version:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
I decided to wipe my Mac, reinstall the OS, and see if that fixed it.

So reinstalling the whole OS was higher up the troubleshooting chain than just trying it out from your wife's computer? Err...
That's a different bug and is only relevant for Java apps. On a Mac, the backspace key is labeled "delete", and the key associated with the action most people refer to as "delete" is labeled with the delete special character[1]. Apple refers to this as the "forward delete" key. The bug described at the link you provided does not require the shift or arrow keys to be pressed and produces a different control character.

1 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delete_key
It's not for creating multiple google profiles, but for finding google profiles of other people.
New Orkut Flooding Script
I haven't encountered any bugs, but I do experience the random hangs + general slowness, and it's awful.

It seems like Apple was lazy and didn't test properly on older hardware (or perhaps didn't focus as much as they should have on, "is this user experience good?" on older hardware).
It's only fair to count Unix+Linux+Mac as one market if a single exploit could work on all of them, which I doubt.
The Realtime Web's 5 Most Endangered Words
I only wish I were so lucky as to have been spoiled by Postgres for so long.

My favorite quote from an experience DBA is "MySQL's biggest feature is that it's retarded." Sadly, as someone who actually likes technology and working with it, I can't possibly see that as a feature.

DDL Doesn’t Respect Transactions

My Oracle DBA friend tells me Oracle doesn't, either, not that this is any kind of excuse.

Maybe with the first-class replication in the 9.0 release, it will happen sooner rather than later.

I thought RDS wasn't so great on MySQL replication, either, or is that only if one wishes to do it off-AWS?
+1 for a very detailed summary of various mechanical switches and boards. A pity they glossed over the Alps switches, but few people know anything about them in detail. You owe it to yourself to get a good keyboard! Not all mechanical switches are noisy, so it's possible to use one without annoying your cube mates.
Rosetta Code  : similar programs written in various languages