skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I mean, if a small band of hunter-gatherers is led by a single tribal leader with complete power, he can pay them nothing. But that doesn't mean he can make ICBMs for peanuts.

Why not? He captures or pays off someone from US who has the know-how, and if he has an industrial base, natural resources they sure can do it. That is what the soviets did.

A lot of their technology was pirated from the West. The atomic bomb, or most of the computer chips and operating systems (by the late 70s).
Thanks for details. I know about ending with .99 but had not heard of .79 but it falls under the same rules. Even though I know this, as a consumer I don't like it so I charge an even $25.

I think the difference between basecamp and your app is B2B vs B2C. I happily pay for things that help my business grow. I'm more hesitant to pay for things as a consumer. RIO is easer to justify to business. But that said, I think there is enough pain in the wedding planning processes that you can find the right price point.
This post is awesome, but I do have to argue your point on FreeBSD 5. The release might have been very structured, but for me it was a gigantic clustercoitus that caused me to turn my back on FreeBSD.

Just one of the many annoyances: The package manager would attempt to use gunzip on the new packages which had been tar/bzipped and thus binary package installation was completely borked for a good while after release. I ended up having to manually patch the package utils.

I agree with everything else. It's amazing how Open, Net and FreeBSD work together on a lot of things, particularly hardware support and userland performance. The BSD Way (all of it) is a great comfort to me, and knowing The BSD Way ahead of time really helped me out when I went to start working on big enterprise platforms like Solaris and AIX. I fear many GNU/Linux admins would take much longer to adapt to how things are done on those platforms than someone with a really solid BSD background.
While the refinements of OS X and the Apple Mac hardware have been big sellers for me, it was ultimately, the combination of a beautiful and intuitive GUI coupled with an underlying Unix system. I know Windows has got Cygwin, it just "isn't the same" though.

My story began with a $200.00 laptop and GNU/Linux. I spent four days installing and configuring GNU/Linux (Ubuntu) on that poor laptop; I should have been more diligent about checking up on hardware compatibility... The roaches were X.org and the f'ing wireless card. This laptop was $200.00 for a reason. It turns out many of the parts inside of it had chipsets from unheard-of Taiwanese companies (this is were diligence would have saved me time and money); therefore, they were largely unsupported or had nasty hacks to work with it.

After four days, I had X.org finally working the way it was supposed to (including the nvidia graphics card binary!) and after wrangling ndiswrapper to the ground, I had a fully functional laptop (shutting the lid didn't sleep it, and X would freak out when I would lift the lid, so not "fully" functional).

Life was good for a little while until Ubuntu came out with an update. I figured a system update couldn't be too bad and went for it after backing up all my data. After that update, X.org stopped working, the wireless card stopped working, and none of my previous steps to get either working worked. I decided to give up on that laptop and reasoned this: OS X has a beautiful GUI, Unix underneath, and everything seems to work "just right". I bought a 13" Black MacBook that day.

Ever since, I have had 0 problems with it. I'm a heavy user of the command-line and compile a lot of software on it; updates don't break things, and Time Machine can rollback anything (not just data) if something does break. That's good software.

Now, I'm not hating on GNU/Linux by any means - this pivotal experience was four years ago and I'm sure a lot has changed since then, not to mention my choice of hardware could have easily moved me in a different direction had I been more fastidious about checking the hardware compatibility lists. From that experience, however, and observing the community as a whole over the last few years, one thing is obvious to me: GNU/Linux isn't meant for the desktop (speaking of everyday users here, not RMS or your sysadmin). OS X is a desktop operating system, Windows is a desktop operating system (I'll never touch windows again, now that I've had Linux and OS X), Haiku (the BeOS fork) is a desktop operating system (for which I have high high hopes).

I currently, probably, do fewer things in the GUI than most OS X users; I use the Visor extension for Terminal, I have a fully customized ZSH shell, and I pretty much live inside of full-screen Emacs - but I do love interfacing with OS X. Fan boy? Not quite, my choice is more of a logical and rational one arrived at by much experience and experimentation; if Haiku gets to a reasonably stable stage, I'm sure to switch to that platform more in support of diversity than any irrational emotional attachment.
It's what we're doing right now. Time will tell if it works or not, but our e-mail capture numbers indicate that it is working.
Ok, I'll bite. What are the other 2?
1. I really don't think this is the job of a marketplace with tens of thousands of entrants. In the Android world there has been a heavy push for QR codes to apps, so I seldom ever browse the market, and instead read reviews and blog entries on apps, following the QR codes to those that sound interesting. I'm not sure why developers think that someone else should do the promotion for them, and all classic promotion vehicles are still necessary.

3. So is the Apple market. There are 300+ fart apps (probably much more by now). It is absolutely true that the Android market is full of junk, but don't say that as if it's the exception. 99% of iPhone apps are make money fast garbage.

4. Spam is definitely a problem, and it should embarrass Google that they haven't dealt with that. On the "shady things with data", sorry but your iPhone is far more susceptible to this.

5. Bullshit. On the iPhone there was a novelty aspect that is quickly fading away. I remember having peers gushing every day about all of the apps they purchased. That has faded away and now they use a very small cross-section of top tier apps.

"On the other hand, I'm looking forward to what Meego and Win7MO will bring for us developers"

Indeed.

"I hope they will follow Apple's model of having tighter control"

This is such a bullshit myth. Apple's "control" is superficial and facile. That you promote it shows that you're a bit gullible I suspect.
I'm working with a friend on a text based bulletin board system written in C# that uses SSH rather than Telnet or a modem and supports many of the features of an early 90's -ish DOS based Dial-up BBS.

... I and a few of my friends miss the old days so we'll probably be the only ones to make reasonable use of it, but it's a fun hack project for me and I'm learning a lot about SSH in the process. It's not OpenTG and I'm not that developer (he's doing one in Ruby so his project is probably more interesting to folks around here). Still in the very early stages so nothing works yet and I don't have a code repo setup.
Jalak Jobanputra VC on women entrepreneurs & venture capitalists[video]
Could you report back how the cold calling works? I've been thinking of doing some of that but I have no idea what the ROI will be on it.
Lets assume we have 20k opened FDs.

In case of poll(), you have to transfer this array of FDs from the userland vm to the kernel vm each time you call poll(). Now compare this with epoll() (let's assume we are using EPOLLET trigger), when you only have to transfer the file descriptors once.

You might say the copying won't matter, but it will matter when you have a lot of events coming on the 20k FDs which eventually leads to calling xpoll() at a higher rate, hence more copying of data between the userland and kernel (4bytes * 20k, ~80kbytes each call).
I could be falling into this trap to some extent, but if you think about my background, I'd probably be less likely to fall into it than just about anyone else in the world. If anything I'd worry that I'd be inclined to discriminate against attractive people, not in their favor.
I've used FreeBSD since the mid nineties (it's what I cut my teeth on, Unix wise). I've also been using Gentoo images over at Rackspace for a while now. From a basic standpoint, the two are the same - one command and off it goes, with a well thought out set of "pre-cooked" installations ready to go. However, I have to give Gentoo credit for being a bit smarter about dependencies. On the other hand, the structure for the actual portage tree is....less preferable than FreeBSD's layout for the ports collection. Also Gentoo's portage can "mask" certain builds, basically deprecating them in a way that's really hard to turn off, and that can get annoying at times.
Parallelize Your EC2 API Calls with Python, Boto and Threading
We had one after http://workatastartup.org
A DSL in 5 Languages: Ruby, Python, PHP, C#, Java
I'd like to believe that's true. How about perception, though? I've taken a year off now... am wondering how I'll be perceived when I start interviewing again.
Google Launches Multiple Account Sign-In for Multi-Google Account Holders
Agreed. The marketing (blog text) was impressive. But you lost about 90% credibility by having essentially 0 followers on twitter. For a site of such broad appeal, you should be way higher than that.

It's doesn't match the air of authority you project on social media tactics.
Off the top of my head, thoughtfulness, energy, and a good relationship between the founders.
Thanks drx. We are still struggling with trying to find a catchy name for "meal swaps". Suggestions will be greatly appreciated. Would it be interesting if users could name a meal swap after them?
Assuming a bunch of us didn't ditch them for the RSS feed after the annoying ads showed up.
Objective-C Tuesdays: concatenating strings
Bootstrapped, Profitable, & Proud: GitHub
A friend of mine runs http://www.doorknobads.com/, selling physical adverts by neighborhood. Your geographically targeted email marketing service sounds very promising. I'm looking forward to seeing what you do with it.
"This feels a little like meaningless link bait till then". Spot on.

When I saw the title of the article I assumed that they already got the 10,000 sign ups and were explaining how did they manage to do it.

As I was reading through their list I was getting more and more skeptical. Some of their points make sense, others, simply don't ring true.

I then checked their Twitter account and saw that they had (at the time of writing) 93 followers. Really? 93? Not that I think that Twitter followers is the most useful metric as a measure of interest in a web-app (or that Twitter is really useful as a marketing tool for that matter) but for people that claim to be riding the waves of the viral marketing and that seem to put a lot of value and effort into increasing their Twitter and FB numbers, 93 followers sure looks a little low.

I had to come back to the comments in HN and to read carefully the title of the submission again to realize that they don't actually claim to have the 10,000 followers yet. Only that they want to reach that number. And they hope that the steps outlined in the article will help them to get there.

This misunderstanding may well be because English is not my first language, but even so, it still smells like link bait to me. I'm pretty sure that almost everyone around here will have his own opinion on how to get 10,000 sign ups. Until that opinion has been proven to work in real life, it's still a hunch, not all that useful.
I did take pains to stress this was my perception, note that GoogleMaps is not the same everywhere, neither I suppose is MM or BingMaps.

>I don't remember Multimap having aerial images before Google

Here's a good review from 2005 of the situation in the USA, http://www.webpronews.com/insiderreports/2005/05/24/msn-vs-g... ; I'm not in the USA.

From 2003:

"The public web site http://www.multimap.com provides a range of free, useful services to assist with everyday life.Key features include street-level maps of the United Kingdom, Europe and the US; road maps of the world; door-to-door travel directions; aerial photographs; weather forecasts; the London Underground map; links to location information; and services such as hotel, restaurant and entertainment booking.Multimap.com, which was recently voted Best Internet Service in the World Communication Awards 2002, attracts over 6.3 million unique users every month and is one of the top 10 most visited websites in the UK." (http://www.directionsmag.com/mobile/news/index.php?duty=Show...)

From 1999:
"Aerial Images, Inc. and UK Perspectives announced today that high-resolution color aerial photography of all of the United Kingdom will be made available for viewing and purchase on the TerraServer(TM) at www.terraserver.com ." (http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-54597413.html)
http://vaginagame.com

I know it's stupid but I can't stop working on it. Apparently my 7 year old mind finds it hilarious.
And THIS.

More startups would seriously dilute the process. It would ultimately end up hurting everyone more than helping a dozen or so more founders.
Not yet. We are working on a user profile page where this would be possible. Thanks for your feedback.
The long term studies of technical degrees vs 'soft science' hasn't been looked at in depth on a national scale with relation to earnings and salary. These studies are just beginning.

From AACRO: after 10 years the earning potential for an engineering degree drops below someone with an English degree. Technical degrees are way more valuable out of the gate while soft science take time to develop.

To put it into other words: where an engineer can make 65k right after graduation an english major will start at 35k. The engineer's salary increases on par with inflation while the english major increases substantially over time and overtakes it on average at the 10 year point. The paraphrased quote from AACROs lobbyist: 'we're seeing through earnings study that technical degrees go stale over the career of an individual, this is shown when comparing the average english major vs the average electrical engineer' There's alot of background nuance (politics) there behind the study but the idea hasn't really been broached before in higher ed. It's really quite interesting to look at on a US scale, but that data hasn't been collected yet.

Oh: I'm not contesting that some soft science degrees aren't total wastes of money. Just that there will always be a place for a gender studies Harvard grad. We just don't need 10,000 of them.
No, OpenSSH is a part of the base system, and is included in a default FreeBSD install. http://svn.freebsd.org/viewvc/base/stable/8/crypto/openssh/
Who really sets global cybersecurity standards?
Awesome - nice move!
If you use vim then look at the vim-latex suite http://vim-latex.sourceforge.net/
NetBSD also supports kqueue
JavaScript will never support threads in the usual sense, as long as /be has his say: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roadmap/archives/2007/02/thre...

So JS won't need fine-grained locking in the foreseeable future.
In other organizations this is called a "death march".
What's your email? Mine is anony304 at gmail
There was enough inner-city decay and gentrification going on in the US, to make a comparison interesting even without a war.
How To Prevent Breast Cancer
Learning as much as I can about starting a startup. Scared and excited all wrapped into one, but the pull to jump in is getting strong.
Well, the number 3 was arbitrary, but let's say..

2) Spending 8 years advocating "deficits don't matter", then changing their opinion 180 degrees within 24 hours of a new President being inaugurated.

3) Writing screeds castigating liberals for being coastal elitists and out of touch on an iPad from the back seat of the author's car service, while drinking a latte on the way to yoga class.
> I'm sure a lot has changed since then

Unfortunately no. I have had your experience on two other laptops (each in the $1000 range). In one case, it was a Gateway with wireless and video card issues in linux. In the other case, it was an HP that I decided to update to the latest current Ubuntu, and now I cannot get it to sleep properly -- and it had no issues four releases ago (other than being behind the times). Both laptops work wonderfully with Windows.

It is pretty disheartening because I really enjoy working in the linux environment.
Here is another set with a similar idea: http://www.flickr.com/photos/edrabbit/galleries/721576231031...
Man, if only that was the truth here at KU. Everyone has shit parking here unless you carry a massive title or tenure. maybe 100 cars total don't have to hike up a hill.
Cool stuff. I'm working on a blog post talking about our use of Riak for Mozilla's Test Pilot project. Would be very interested to see examples of any of your MapReduce code if it is something you could share.
I agree. I like having a technical lead dealing with all aspects technical and a manager dealing with paperwork, burn rates, BS customer issues, politics, etc. This frees up the technical lead to do the required technical work.

The larger the company the greater the need from what I have experienced. Technically its not required, but I'd rather not be dealing with those aspects. I forgot where I read it, but I've heard the manager role being described as a sh*t umbrella. Its there to keep everyone below him/her clean so they can focus on their work.
> America's supposed moral superiority depended quite a bit on believing the rhetoric...

That is one thing that America excels at -- propaganda. Along with some other so called "democracies", it can at the same time install brutal regimes, kill and start wars all over the world _and_ somehow mentain its relatively stable propaganda image as a "peacemaker", "example of democracy", "human rights advocate" and so on.

Anyone who studies history or is seriously interested in the current world affairs will recognize the propaganda for what it is. But interestingly enough, very few Americans do. A lot of them have a very skewed image about their own country, they believe in "moral supperiority" that US has over any other country in the world.

The level of self-censorship and delusion even among "educated" intellectuals, the media, the majority of the population is astounding.

In the ex-Soviet Union, we knew propaganda was propaganda. Except for some really crazy people, nobody believed in the system. Even those at the top. For example, it was interesting to observe how ex KGB agents, supposedly the ones most devoted to the communist cause, became uber-capatillists practically overnight in the quick grab of power and resources after the collapse.
This is true, the chancellor/president position really does the full time baby kissing for a University. It's hard to say that's not worth a half mil.
The Well-Plannned Life vs. the Summoned Life
What about NetBSD? Zed has already said he uses NetBSD, so if kqueue is there, he might add it to the mix.
Put simply, it's more integrated and unified than most Linux distributions. Instead of packaging this thing from here, that thing from over there, and ramming in this new toy from that place there, everything in each release - tools, userland, ports, kernel - moves in lockstep. The result is an OS that's very consistent once you figure out how it does things, and rock solid stable. It takes a bit more tweaking to get, say, your compositing window manager running - but once you do, you can be guaranteed it will keep running - even when you change or upgrade other things - with all the stupid consistency of a rotating planet unless you screw up and do something very bad. Also, in my experience, it's much more customizable than Linux. The kernel sources are included in the distribution, right there for the building, and the process of configuring and making your own kernel is fairly straightforward, even easy. Contrast with the closest thing I've seen on Linux, Gentoo - which is significantly more involved. That may seem like an obscure point, but if someone walked up to me and told me I needed to put a *nix on a server tomorrow and strip it down to get every last iota of performance out of that server, FreeBSD would be the first thing I reached for.
Ask HN: How do I find VC in Boston?
I'm interested if any of you have any good suggestions on resources for finding a VC firm in Boston that might be interested in a web startup.

Thanks!
That's true, but the author is looking at what's under the hood -- at the moment, ALL of those companies are heavily depending on Microsoft and/or Intel. In most cases, both.

Example -- IBM is still one of Intel's biggest server OEM's. And most of IBM's corporate environment runs in Windows. (For that matter, the same could be said for most of the bloated US Federal government.)

The author is also ignoring the fact that the Wintel duopoly has been making inroads in corporate markets, as well -- for years now Intel has pretty much owned the low and mid-range server markets, and is making inroads on higher end markets (in fact, the only thing that so far has been able to hurt Itanium meaingfully is... Xeon), and due largely to SQL Server, Microsoft has been making large inroads into those markets also.

Apple's growth in the PC market isn't harming Intel one bit -- quite the opposite in fact, because Apple's success is tied to Intel.

I don't think Intel's dominance is in any danger. Microsoft's is another story -- Intel will be able to gain a lot of mobile market share, because Intel has the best semiconductor manufacturing in the business.

That said, I think that ARM will be a tougher competitor than AMD, because ARM is already much, much bigger, and some the foundries making ARM processors for their partners are larger than Intel, even if they aren't quite as high-tech.

The declining margins in processors are probably why Intel's been going after the graphics market, the cluster-on-a-chip market (Larrabee), and doing the whole-system thing for the mobile market, rather than just the Atom chip by itself.
I come to this thread late but couple points:

1. Low return on money. That's because money itself worth more now; the Fed has destroyed whole bunch money via credit tightening. We have gone through an asset deflation phrase and the money you have can buy more assets now. It's ok to have low return on money for now.

2. Asset allocation. Should not just put your FU money in stocks or Treasury. Read up on asset allocation. Have better downfall protection and better return.

3. 4% withdrawal rate. Studies and simulations have found that annual 4% withdrawal rate of a portfolio can make it last for very long time adjusted for inflation. 4% of 2M is 80K, which can provide a nice living.

4. Count net worth, not just cash. That 80K makes a big difference with a paid-for house.

5. Don't discount Social Security/Medicare/IRA/401K/Pension. The discussion of couple millions of PRESENT day often ignores the age restricted retirement funds. Those can be substantial.
Techmeme shows only two links for BlackBerry Torch announcement.
Now that is a test. Thanks for posting that, it is the most interesting thing I've seen all day.
> Benchmarks are worthless unless...

There's a page for that! http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/flawed-benchmarks.php#app

> If you are using NumPy...

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/program.php?test=spect...
Why programming competition contestants use C++ and Java?
A personalized dashboard
I think the idea is really interesting. Even without a link, this is one of the few show/tell HN submissions that had me raise an eyebrow. Good idea, good work
If those hunter-gatherers are amongst the world's top scientists, then of course you can produce tanks and ICBMs for peanuts. And USSR had plenty of scientists and natural resources ;)