skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The one thing I always hear Americans say when they visit this side of the Atlantic is that there 'is so much history here'. And with space at a premium in a large part of the cities here the urge to tear down and rebuild is just as large or larger than it is in the US.

But I think that it goes deeper than that. Some of the buildings are so old that they should have fallen down long ago, it's just that there is always somebody that thinks that to repair it is the better course than to throw it down. Having a lot of historical buildings around you and near you sets the stage and it would feel unnatural to remove one of them and replace it with some modern house. When an old farmhouse burns down it usually gets rebuilt.

A big part of this is that all over europe there are heritage commissions that have a keen eye for what is and what is not of historical value and a relatively large amount of money is pumped in to maintaining those buildings that are deemed valuable. It isn't rare at all to see a 16th century building where I live (nl) and I know a couple (churches, mostly) that are older than 800 years.

For me the main reason not to tear it down is that destruction is easy, creation is not. By respecting that which was created by those that came before you get a deeper appreciation for you place in the world. Rather than document what the Sistine Chapel looks like and tearing it down (extreme example, ok), we have the original to look at, which gives a completely different sense of perspective on history. There is a reason why millions of tourists flock here to see these things with their own eyes, an image of a thing is not a replacement for the thing.

That goes for buildings, but it also goes for other works of art.
My house, in 1905 and last year: http://big-old-house.blogspot.com/2009/09/then-1905-and-now-...
great question, i used to wonder what the heck my development manager was doing all day, then i became him. currently i work in a mid-sized company (150+).

if developers and designers could work out effective processes while maintaining everyone's happiness/career growth, but at the same time pump out good product then yes, you don't need a manager.

perhaps smaller companies are able to make good decisions quickly and don't need to be bound by so many processes, and i imagine happiness is really unimportant to everyone in these types of environments anyway because everyone's already a masochist, but anytime you have multiple divisions with different priorities then you need someone. decision making processes typically become difficult when there are too many involved.
>Europe is worse-off than America

Citation and qualification needed (e.g. Switzerland certainly isn't worse off than America).
before you really get financial traction (from paying users) it should be low (imho around the 50k) as you set the expectations for the rest of the team. One way to still get some cash upfront after the seedround closing is to have in your seed agreement that the company's debt twds you (the amount you invested either in cash or salary not paid) be repaid in a slump sum. You could do the same after the seed: salary should be 80k but you just get 50 and the rest will be repaid as debt owed when Series A comes in.
A reasonable summary, but one that demonstrates some misunderstandings of the Linux world. To deal with the issues point by point:

* FreeBSD has better performance than Linux? This is, as you almost concede, no longer true.

* Lack of kernel modules an advantage? Hardly. Linux loadable kernel modules produce no extra performance overhead, but make life a lot simpler for everyone. The only extra 'bloat' is having ~100MB of drivers of which you probably only need 10% or so. If this an issue for you (ie, you're running an embedded system) you can of course cut down the modules to only those required, or even compile into the kernel just as with FreeBSD.

* The GCC compiler and toolchain aren't optimal, and I fully expect a major Linux distribution to switch to Clang/LLVM in the not too distant future. If this is a success (and I expect it to be), I wouldn't be at all surprised to see most/all Linux distros switch. This isn't a Linux vs FreeBSD issue, this is GCC vs Clang/LLVM - a battle I believe Clang/LLVM will win.

* As far as I'm aware TrustedBSD offers no more features than SELinux, and the Linux ACL system, but maybe I'm showing my lack of BSD knowledge here.

* Xen and VMWare virtualization is there but not 100% in FreeBSD. They're rock solid on Linux, which also has KVM, a very viable alternative to the two.

* The development branch/stable kernel approach is irrelevant - people don't use Linux, they use a Linux distribution (OK, OK, a GNU/Linux disitribution :)). In most distributions point releases are binary and API compatible with .0 releases (RHEL 5.5 binaries are guaranteed to run on RHEL 5.0).

In conclusion, is FreeBSD good? Undoubtedly. Is it better than Linux? It's hard to make a case for that. It has less device support, less software support and a massively smaller user base.

FreeBSD is nice to tinker with, but it doesn't offer enough benefits to justify putting production software on it. It's great to learn about the old school UNIX way of doing things, but that's not what I want to be doing on a live server.
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Dental caries can kill - that's how the guy that played Lorne on Angel died - so we're talking about more than "cutting down on a few bucks of dental care expenses".
Why would Excel need to be replaced? It's good software.
I think it's Edinburgh, it's built on an extinct volcano though. It's probably a health and safety requirement.
You are right, that looks pretty dramatic.
Must be some kind of lense distortion as
other posters are pointing out.
I have a counter solution: go to a more expensive country to live. Things will cost more but the pay will be higher. It's probably going to have a lot of other advantages as well.

You never want to be in a race to the bottom.
I wonder how many install anti-virus apps. You could probably make a fair bit selling anti-virus/firewall/anti-spyware apps for the uneducated.

I have a N1 and have never seen the need for a task killer. Quite odd that people would install one.
'Old' in Europe is more like this:

http://pics.ww.com/v/jacques/buildings/dscf1025.jpg.html

or this:

http://pics.ww.com/v/jacques/buildings/dscf1021.jpg.html

The oldest parts of this building date from the 12th century:

http://www.engelmunduskerkvelsenzuid.nl/images/foto_kerk_2.j...

I've actually had an office in the 'carpet factory' in Toronto, which was an industrial revolution age textile mill, amazing building, white pine roof beams that were easily 1 1/2' on a side in the section that we were in.

Fortunately some of those buildings remain, but an enormous number of them got torn down.
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i disagree with your first point, management and leadership are fundamentally different disciplines. management is more about execution and risk mitigation whereas leadership is more about strategy, vision (as you stated), and perhaps thinking outside the box to create change, change is risky. though i do think you need both to move up the proverbial ladder.
Actually I should have pointed to Dave's own site.

http://500hats.typepad.com/500blogs/2010/07/moneyball-for-st...
That's true, but ultimately what causes wars might have to do with the impulses of people as much as with the "international situation". While institutions can be put in place that seem to make war less likely, people today are not that different from people yesterday.
All the others are repetitions of the same positive points. This is one of the first one to list many negative points. This is an awesome reality check for anyone considering to apply at Google: they are just like any other large company, in that you need to be weary of managers, because their goals often don't coincide with yours.
Poll Everywhere is hiring a Rubyist with a Personality
ffs man, I'm with you on the US not being the place to be at the moment but Romania??? If you're going to call someone out for not being traveled you should at least avoid listing places you clearly haven't been to yourself (if you have been there and still recommend it then you have some pretty low standards. Don't expect anyone else to adopt them on purpose).
That's so cool! My house is also from 1905:

http://pics.ww.com/v/jacques/buildings/neatspot/07042007224....

It's a tiny little farmhouse, I spent 2 years rebuilding it.
When respected people in the field value your opinion and perceive you as their peer.
No, but I think you replied to the wrong entry.
Are you saying you made a sort function that sorts reversed, and named it sort? What's wrong with sortDesc?

I think you should be more careful with following conventions. Everyone knows sort sorts ascending.
Wikipedia's general counsel, Michael Godwin, is pretty good at writing these rather biting replies to legal threats while nonetheless still hitting the actual legal points. Fun fact: yes, he's that Godwin.
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'What Europe can be quite proud of is how not only war was avoided during the last decades but also that war was made less likely over the decades.'

Whaaaaaaatt??? Does sound any bell to you the names Yugoslavia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Croatia...?
Follow the "done some sums" link she talks about, and this is a salient bit:

This particular design, Summer Blackwork, retails for $9. Of course I have production costs, wholesale discounts, distributor fees, etc. so I don’t actually make $9 when I sell one. (wouldn’t that be nice?!)

That to me suggests the industry is ripe for disruption. For production costs I assume that means software (Photoshop? I actually don't know) which could, potentially, be made cheaper. For distributor fees, well that's something the internet is good at for digital goods like designs. I'd be interested in seeing a breakdown in the other costs she alluded to.

Another thing to look at: Etsy lists some designs:
http://www.etsy.com/search_results.php?search_query=machine+...

Some of them are download only and it would be good to see how these designers handle sharing.
Apparently the rest of the world doesn't deserve battle axes. I would have loved to enter. Totally need a battle axe.
Ask HN: Are web security seals worth the money?
Hi All,

Our company is a leading provider of financial services. From our website we gather a lot of client information. We are currently looking into security verification seals to give clients some reassurance that their information is safe.

At the moment we are looking at Trust-Guard & Truste. Does anyone have experience with either of these providers? And if so what has your experience been?

Thanks,
TST
Rents are highish, but if you're looking out of the city a room in a 2bed is about 1k SGD.

Food is as expensive or cheap as you make it. From $4 a meal. The cheap hawker food is generally excellent. Sadly booze is a bit expensive.

Dev hires from 3k / month for grads full time. Possibly a bit less.
They could compete with the government. They would need better, more integrated products for that than the tool the government offers. But of course, to do that, they would need a vision.
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Suggestions for Tech Documentaries?
Hoping something along the lines of ...

* Pirates of the Silicon Valley

* Triumph of the Nerds

* Download: True Story of the Internet
Ask HN: Identifying The Anonymous User 
Hello Hacker News, it's been a long time since I've asked you guys something and I figured this place was the best place to ask this question:

What are the best or most efficient method to identifying a user without the use of accounts, destroying privacy, or demolishing anonymity?

If the question is too hard, how about if you're just limited to no accounts?

EDIT: I should have specified "Anonymous in the way that 4chan users are anonymous to each other."

EDIT2: The thing that got me thinking about it was this https://panopticlick.eff.org/
For my thesis, each chapter was a separate LaTeX file, with one master index file that pulled it all together. I didn't use version control then and in retrospect, perhaps I should have.

One thing I did that saved my a: daily backups. My hard disk actually died 3 days before my deadline. These days I would also use Dropbox.
> If you use a two-word representation, you can't atomically set a value

On 32-bit architectures. 64-bits architectures have atomic XCHG and CMPXCHG operations.

That being said, the plan for Jaegermonkey is to upgrade jsvals from 64 to 128 bits so that's not the final solution. However...

> Is their JS engine inherently single-threaded only?

Yes, for certain values of 'yes'. Each script runs in its own context. There can be many scripts and many contexts but each context is only executed by a single thread.
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From what I've heard, the politics are an order of magnitude worse than in the average corporate environment.
I found a beer in the fridge! N+1
IMO the long domain name adds to the awesomeness.
Yeah, these guys are competing with Xobni.
At my former employer, we had the same experience. Upgrading or installing a new package was always a pain and required you to jump through hoops while tracking down all necessary upgrades. And then it still broke. Switched to Debian, never looked back.
Sorry, Josh, there's no chance we know the same people. Further, for the people I know, the best form of introduction is a good peer-reviewed paper of original research, and I can't find any for you.

Yes, the work executes as software, but the crucial work is not software or computer science; given the crucial work, the software is routine. On my Board you'd have to understand the crucial work, or I'd be at risk of you going all a-flutter and doing something destructive to the company.

Suggestion: Good work can usually be planned well. And it really is possible to evaluate good plans; it's been done often enough in the past. Your 'heat seeking missiles' are curious but do indicate some poor planning. "If you don't know where your going, any wind will take you there." "Measure twice, saw once". Good plans are tough to find; it's faster and cheaper to sift through the plans just between the ears and then on paper before charging off in an expensive way in some one direction. "Typing [software] is no substitute for thinking."

Has Ms. Herron learned to use e-mail yet, or is she still losing messages? She must be bright if she has found a good connection between her English major and information technology entrepreneurship.

Josh, I don't think there is anyone in your company with a technical background that would make me want to hire them, including for my Board.
My main reason for no longer running FreeBSD (which we used for quite a few years) is that since I've switched my desktop environment to Linux I got caught time and again by small differences between the servers running FreeBSD and my dev box. So I switched everything over to Debian or debian derived distros. Ubuntu notebook remix for the laptop, Kubuntu for the desktop and straight debian on the servers.

Other than that, my experience with FreeBSD is that it was absolutely rock solid and bullet proof, uptimes of many years with machines pumping out data at a pretty decent clip for the time we're talking about.

*BSD is not always as fast with supporting the latest hardware or adding a new feature or technology but what's done stays done. Linux tends to yoyo for a bit before settling.
"Crossing the Chasm" - Geoffrey Moore (for company in general, can apply to web co)
Technically you are right, but most of Europe sees that as the des-integration of Yugoslavia, which would make it a civil war rather than a war between nation states. And I think you meant to write Serbia instead of Yugoslavia.

The other countries getting involved was to stop worse from happening.

From what I know about that war it was basically something that was bound to happen the moment Tito kicked the bucket. He was - like Saddam Hussain in many ways - the person that kept the spring-loaded component parts in an iron grip which some mistook for stability. Once the counter force was gone the various parts flew apart and started a war to try to gain the upper hand.

In Yugoslavia you could say that there never really was stability, only a temporary lack of opportunity to continue the fight.
Intel was telling everyone they needed 64-bit (more accurately, post-32-bit) technology long before AMD created x86-64. It's called IA64, EPIC, or Itanium. Intel made a huge gamble, betting that the next-generation of CPUs would be founded on a radically different VLIW type architecture.

But Intel goofed. Because they didn't factor in how long it would take to fully develop the new architecture (something that takes multiple iterations). The first generation of Itanium was hugely expensive, didn't run x86 code well, and couldn't easily masquerade as a plain Jane x86 machine. (Not to mention the problem of having to modify code so that it could be re-compiled for IA64.)

Meanwhile, AMD looked at the same problem and came to a different conclusion. Rather than a revolutionary new 64-bit architecture they thought that an evolutionary architecture was preferable. Simply fix up a few of the most glaring problems of x86 (such as a dearth of registers), widen the bus to 64-bits and call it good. They probably figured that since everything under the hood is all RISC/ILP-ish hidden behind micro-code translation anyway the instruction set isn't super important, as long as its semi-reasonable. They concentrated on maximizing performance for unmodified code and providing good benefits for using actual 64-bit specific code (such as more registers, well-engineered 64-bit memory addressing, etc.)

Itanium floundered while AMD64 became hugely popular very quickly. AMD64 processors ran x86 code faster than x86-only processors, so there was no reason not to buy them, even if you never ran any 64-bit code. But once you owned the hardware it was now just a matter of an OS update sometime in the future to upgrade to 64-bit. Allowing the x64 transition to be far more incremental and far less of a leap of faith than it would otherwise have been.

Intel quickly realized their mistake and tried to implement a version of x86-64 using the net burst (Pentium 4) architecture. This led to some really sad machines and a very awkward time for Intel as they were hit with multiple setbacks at the same time. Eventually they succeeded with a very substantial redesign of their hardware architecture (the core series) which paid huge dividends in the 2nd iteration as it proved to be far superior even to AMD's offerings.

It's not at all that Intel thought that the 32-bit world would last forever, it's just they that screwed up royally in figuring out where to go from there.

Note that finally, many, many years too late, Itanium is actually a decent platform now.
What's the context? When they use your website?

What do you mean by "identifying a user"? Simply knowing that they're the same person who performed a specific action earlier?
http://github.com/schacon/git-reference

An HTML version(ish) of the book
I couldn't figure out what to blog about, so I blogged about N+1...That's N+1!
Android doesn't show this as standard. You need a third-party app to show memory usage or kill processes.
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I'm not overly convinced. A big reason why most major corporations advertise so heavily is just because it's something that big companies do, it can be tough to buck a trend especially when billions are on the line.

But aside from that, advertising is a business expense that is fully tax deductible. For many big businesses the net cost of advertising is zero.
I edited to clarify: I should have specified "Anonymous in the way that 4chan users are anonymous to each other."

And yes, as in "same person who performed a specific action earlier".
How Microsoft may interview candidates has no bearing on what they may direct them to do once hired.
Oh, yeah, that Balkans thingie. Right. Kinda sucks, for officially more than a century now. The more things change …

I wanted to write “(except for the Balkans)” but ultimately didn’t and probably should have. Just two things: When I say “Europe” I was pretty much talking about western Europe plus a bit of eastern Europe (Poland, Czech Republic, …), also the situation on the Balkans is nowadays unlikely to cause a European or worldwide war (you know, like 100 years ago).
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ok, thats all nice, but if author is so much worried about his financial perspectives in US, he should look at other markets. Hey in Asia, even somewhere Europe after some research you can easily find that 6-8% safe investment opportunities. So retirement with 2M is still no problem if you are willing to open your eyes, and see that there is something going on outside US.
The apple statement is not true:

http://events.ccc.de/congress/2007/Fahrplan/events/2303.en.h...
http://vimeo.com/6955695
The Code http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0315417/ interesting even if you're not a Linux person.
in my fridge, N-1 rules
I read of a similar scheme.

Whenever you think you have N copies of data you should consider you have N-1.

Here's why :
Your work is on your computer and thumbdrive, one dies. Now you have only 1 copy with no backup.
The weird thing about unconscious competence, is that when things do become so intuitive and second nature I've personally started to find that I feel as if I don't know something.

If asked... I feel I can't answer. If interviewed I'll probably fail. Yet I also find that when put in front of a problem the solution just presents itself.

What's weird about this is that in feeling I know so little about things that I've 15 years experience in, I feel like I need to learn. So I expose myself to all opportunities to learn only to find that all tell me what I feel is evident and obvious.

This is close to what I take to be the meaning of "forgotten more than I've ever learned".

Whether this makes me an expert is debatable, I'd say no. I'd say that there was a re-learning stage after the last stage in which you acquire the means to understand deeply and to be able to communicate and pass on those skills. I'd say that an expert is someone who can pass on their skills, someone who can mentor others.

(I also find it uncomfortable writing a post implying I know anything)
...and there you were thinking piracy was just punk kids.
'cept you can change your weight, but not your race.
That's what we're doing over here in Europe.
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Can this really be true and how much respect is required? Consider Zed Shaw, who is quite clearly a very competent hacker.

A lot of people refuse to respect or give value to his opinion, much less see him as a peer.
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If something is tax-deductible that does not mean that the net cost of doing it is zero.

For example:

We have a turnover of $100, a tax deductible cost of $40, our gross profits before taxes are $60, say we pay 50% tax the net is $30. If we had not made the $40 tax deductible expense the net would have been $50.

So the net cost of stuff that is tax deductible is not zero.