skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To answer your three points:

1) Hindsight is always 20/20 right? People were predicting that the no keyboard thing was such a deal breaker than together with the no replaceable battery, it would make the iPhone a failure.

Obviously nobody here it's arguing that the iPhone is better because it doesn't have a keyboard: hey, if you could have your cake and eat it too, why not? But the point is that you need to make compromises, and by removing the keyboard Apple bet that the inconvenience was going to be more than made up by the advantages. Apparently they were right.

2) Yes, they were considered to be lacking though not as much as you think. In fact, many people complained about the iPhone because it couldn't do everything their smartphone could. Also knowing you have a problem, and knowing how to solve it are two hugely different things.

3) The point was about netbooks. Many people bought them as a secondary computer, to carry around, browse the web, etc. The iPad may or may not be a netbook replacement, but it is not being considered as a replacement for your main computer.

Apple had the balls to take a bet (as did Asus with the original netbook, imho) and won. Now suddenly it was obvious, not a big deal, etc.. etc...
I got the impression that was a performance trade-off. UTF-8 decoding/encoding isn't free.
F5 Friday: Seconds too Late and More than a Few Bytes Short
Free Will and Job Performance?
I wonder how many dictionaries people will buy when they hear their colleagues using words that they don't know.
My office claims to try to eliminate interruptions, and it's better than it was before, but there are still far too many. Most recently, during a massive emergency, the general manager came down and sat in the office and demanding to know what we were talking about at all times, how long it would take, and why it had to be done. For hours. I haven't seen anything that disruptive in years, and during the worst possible time.

Most of the rest of the time, it's other developers bothering me. I've been here the longest, so I know the answers they are looking for and so they ask me. Constantly. Even stuff that's been in the wiki for years.

But as for the 'do the real work at home' bit... No. I do everything at work. Home time is for me. If they want me to be more productive, they'll provide a productive environment.
True, to be more precise, the GNU C library has it in the sysdeps/unix/mkdir.c file:

[..]
char *cmd = __alloca (80 + strlen (path));
(mkdir command line parsing)
status = system (cmd);
[..]

That's right, it just relays. I'm not sure how it gets to the kernel. I suspect with a system call somewhere.

What I know is that it arrives in the kernel, in the fs source files: namei.c for the vfs part and <fs-name>/namei.c for filesystem specific implementations (that are called by the vfs code in the end, I guess).

Ps. Feel free to correct me. I only concluded this by poking around the sources a bit, not into kernel development myself.
Nice img. I do remember another version in a ruby-oriented blog with a bear in place of the rex. Can't remember where.
Maybe the post has been updated since your comment, but clicking the screenshot leads me to the website...
To be fair, many of the laptop issues have less to do with Linux and more to do with the hardware manufacturers. There's lots of hardware out there, and the manufacturers just don't produce drivers for anything but Windows. Certainly, the community has contributed buckets of drivers, but "stuff just works" on Windows and Mac laptops because hardware has support for those OSes.
But then futures contracts don't give "an idea of future scarcity". How does your current statement mesh with your previous one?

It seems like the conclusion is that no one thinks they know enough about future scarcity to be willing to place bets on it.
I wound't mention it at all if i were you. Would you hire someone who is very likely to leave soon ?
Twilight Review – Bella Stinks. Edward’s a Mormon.
Agreed. Working on projects on your own time isn't threatening, and show initiative.

Working on a startup on your own time says you're a short-timer and they shouldn't hire you.
An Open Discussion Of My Personal Business Strategy
Why inheritance sucks
z<enter>, z. and z- work for this too.
Ask HN: room for a new forum platform?
Stackoverflow obviously raised the bar for Q&A type forums. Whilst that format might not be suitable for all use-cases, so many sites seem to be implementing the old web 1.0 forum - e.g http://mailwatch.co.uk/forum/

I'm guessing many of these are self-hosted too. What opportunity do you think think there is for a updated, threaded, hosted forum service is? What kind of features would you want?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1620052
Better get cold fusion working, or find a way to mine asteroids profitably...
Better is to train your staff not to accept interruptions, from anyone, ever, unless it is URGENT-EMERGENCY.

Train your people to respond, when interrupted, "Please write me an email about what you need and I'll check my email when I'm ready" and you will see productivity soar.
Doesn't work for me - crashes every time I try to start a video call.

Problem reported to google, will see what happens.
Rising the price or not selling is not a solution. Not only we are running out of helium, but also any other substance in the earth is concerned. The solution is a big factory that analyses the air, water, or any other mix of substances to extract the substance we like and classify them. It can also create a mix, like H2O....

Sounds like a terrible idea, but it's the revolution we need for the next 100 years, if we really want to continue development in the planet Earth. If you are not already aware, fauna and flora are already doing it for thousands of years. And yes, they did it successfully. The sun could be a valuable energetic resource.
You asked not to be criticised in one of your replies. You want to know how to be less rude, not just take flak, right?
The trouble is that rudeness/arrogance is a problem that requires humility to overcome, and gaining humility involves accepting criticism either from other people, or yourself.

If it was coming from yourself, you wouldn't be here asking. You have the choice of accepting criticism, or not being helped - there are no shortcuts.

Long story short - you're a bit of a prick, and you need to get over it if your request here is genuine, ie, not just a pantomime designed to fool yourself into thinking that "at least you're trying", as I suspect it might be. Ask yourself that first.

(As you may have noticed, I'm a prick too... I just don't care. I see myself as I see all people - monkeys in shoes, who somehow think that they're so much more. That I'm a prick is a trivial detail in the wider scope of the fact that all of humanity is, collectively, a prick too.)
Build/buy your dream computer.

What's the limit tho?
This is great service, quite well-known now. I'd have thought they were a prime acquisition target for Google et al.
True, point taken (and I upvoted you as an apology). However your post still came out as a bit of a "Geez, Apple wasn't that special", though admittedly then I went a step too far and just assumed you were posting some anti-Apple stuff. Sorry for my prejudice.

However a few things to say. The Nokia messenger was imho awesome, but it did not caught on, and eventually Nokia itself killed it (only to revive it many years later).

I thought the Ericsson P800 (correct?) was great, and I still do. However I also think it's representative of part of the problem too: Ericsson didn't feel like losing anything, they crammed it with everything imaginable. It had a touchscreen (for a stylus) but you could use it with a keyboard. Why? It didn't seem like they believed it that much. Sure, you may say the problem was that the OS at the time could not allow you to do everything with a stylus, but then the question is: why didn't Ericson worked on that? They had control of the whole system!

MyOrigo, I admit I never heard of it.

So yes, apologise and I never meant to say that Apple is some kind of genius of the tech world, and that nobody else innovate: there's a lot others too, and there are a lot of problems with Apple products too.

But I think Apple has a tendency to play harder, to really take a bet. For the iPhone (as before the iPod) they shopped around for just the right piece of tech, often discovering some small startup nobody had heard of until then. Maybe they would change the interface (like the clickwheel). They would get a whole software stack on top of it, just tuned for that specific product. They would spend ages polishing it, and most importantly if they think a technology is better, they would have no problem neglecting any alternative.

Think back at other companies. Why they don't do that? I would imagine if Ericsson found risky to add a touchscreen, the idea of spending many years perfecting such a phone, creating the right OS, using the right tech, removing some stuff... just maybe to release it 3 years later after spending a _lot_ of money, and finding they failed would be a huge loss.

Apple seems to take these bets (and to be honest sometimes they lose too). I think that's why the iPhone was really much more of a discontinuity than previous smartphones.
Styli seem to work pretty well for Nintendo with their DS. Much easier to see what's going on without a finger in the way. Sold over a 100 million of them and made ridiculous profits too, which seem to be the Apple fans' metrics of choice when it comes to success these days.
well..

IMHO, people start on businesses with the assumption that it is going to be a success. But that assumption turns out to be true only a very few times. When there is such a high chance of failure its just smart that you also make plans for such a negative possibility.

An exit strategy is to ensure that when you give your idea a try, you should still come out unscathed if it doesn't work out and if possible be still make some money to try out your next idea.

It is just like insurance, you don't buy it because you want somethig bad to happen (well.. in most cases :)), but in case it happens.

If you are a programmer, this may make more sense - there is a reason you have 'if... else..." and not just 'if'
Life's Assumptions
Sadly, everything he says is true. I wish someone would slaughter Python or Ruby the way yosefk and others have done for C++.
4G mobile networks: From Russia with bandwidth
I agree with your argument, and I upvoted you for that.

But that graph? Seriously???

A bit of a Job's fan? ;)
Another Android Developer's Sales Numbers
Setting Up A Webgui Based Print Server On Ubuntu Server Using SWAT, CUPS & SAMBA
here are my numbers to compare, including install base, etc. I wonder how representative these are of the market as a whole.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1620072
Intel's McAfee buy is a Buffett-like play
let's see.. ascii is 4 bit. UTF8 is 8 bit. Is this really an issue on todays computers?
Facebook Places: Don't Let Other People Tag You
Quora has also dramatically raised the bar. If you haven't already, go join and ask / answer a couple of questions. It's slick, efficient and impressive to use.

My feeling is that, for forum software to really be useful (and lucrative), it needs to be usable by businesses. That means allowing customization, probably allowing file attachments, and integrating with a wide variety of software via APIs or installable plugins.
South Korea to block North Korean Twitter account
I read an article recently that said many, many people actually can't tell the difference between active and passive voice. I had a hard time believing it, but seeing mistakes like this in an otherwise well-written article lends weight to it.
Well that answers the question once and for all!
It's time to presume the web is guilty
I don't think the stylus is really that bad. In fact it may be better in some situation. But if you really think it's so great, then let me ask you this: why does no smartphone now come with a stylus?

I am not saying that finger is better. But Apple believed it was better and worked with it. Personally I think it's an alternative. But why has everybody followed Apple like sheep? Can nobody else think with their own brain?
The title should have the prefix "GIT only"
It's tin eye, not tiny eye.
Dude. Laser tag in the office? That's awesome.
Back To School Electronically
Well, I'd be surprised anyone read (or would write) a 500 words article on the last 5 years of smartphones and assume it wasn't a gross oversimplification.
This really is a cheap way to get developer goodwill.

I cannot understand companies who pay developers 90k+ and then make them work on shitty "business desktop" machines that haven't been updated for 5 years or longer.

Sadly this is rather common.

My work machine is better specced than my home machine at my current employer, which is a first. OC'd Core i7, SLI video, SSD OS disk + 10K RPM data disk...I hardly ever wait for the machine to catch up.
Lol... I am sure it is... today. ;)

If history is any indication, we'll find that there will be different input systems for different purposes. There's no reason for extremisms in the tech world.

(personally I would love it if the iPad came with writing recognition and a stylus, even if the stylus was attached to the sleeve and not the iPad itself).
Assuming they haven't had practice at suppressing nonverbal cues, anyway.
Sorry, I see your point and I kind of agree, in the sense that I find certain articles with similar fanboism annoying. (though I thought this was made a complex explanation very short and clear).

But the whole point of digg/hackernews and similar systems is that the community decides. It's democracy. If you want personalised systems, I am sure there must be alternatives out there. But you can't (easily) have both. :)
Business at risk from mountains of unstructured data
Digital CSI: How to manage corporate investigations
There are other lighter-than-air gasses that could be used, e.g. hydrogen. Problem is that I think all of the practical ones are either flammable or toxic, maybe both---a bad idea at a kid's birthday party.
Thanks for that. I did look at clojure.walk, I just didn't look close enough.
I think everyone here has heard how great Lisp is from PG, and now Clojure is finally an accessible Lisp. I do quite like it myself but I agree that there's been an unusually large number of Clojure articles making the front page, even if they aren't very interesting unto themselves.
Using Automated Code Metrics to Improve Quality and Maintainability
Defence in Depth, with reference to British preperations for Sealion
Fascinating article.

But how can a company possibly stay alive for very long if, rather than confining itself to lying to its rivals to keep ahead in the competitive marketplace, it starts lying to itself and its own?

If your company's internal culture develops the practice of deceit - deceit between superiors and subordinates, deceit between superiors, deceit between subordinates and ultimately deceit towards customers - how can you expect the firm to remain fit for purpose for very long?

Who would want to live in a Stirnerite environment where everybody routinely bones up on Machiavelli and Nineteen Eighty Four and keeps the knives sharpened while watching for others attampting to stab you in the back all the time?
Chorewars: when to-do meets custom made RPG adventures
I find that not working on nights and weekends makes life more fun.
I'd join that
Well, i am doing compiler research, which means testing is mostly SPEC CPU. Sometimes i wonder if those measurements show reality, because every serious compiler is heavily optimized for these special cases. There is no 2x difference there.
ASCII is 7-bit (encoded in 8 bits - the high bit is ignored) and UTF-8 takes 8 bits for most characters, but can take 16+ bits for some characters.

Node is built for massive scalability on applications that (mostly) pass text from one source to another. Thus, having to convert the encoding of every string that passes through node can be a bottlenck.

Felixge has a good writeup of this: http://debuggable.com/posts/streaming-utf-8-with-node-js:4bf...
I hear Quora is good. But they only seem to allow login/signup via facebook.
Types were invented for optimization and used for verification later, weren't they?
It's not the size, it's the work needed to decode and encode data.

Node.js is really, really good at shunting I/O around - it's ideal for writing things like proxies and file upload handlers. With ASCII, the bytes that come in are the bytes that go out again. If you're dealing with UTF-8 and unicode strings every time some data comes in you need to decode it as UTF-8, then pass the unicode string around within Node, then encode it back to bytes before you send it off again.

That makes a lot of sense for a web framework like Django (in fact it's what Django does) but Node is more of an I/O toolkit, so that performance overhead isn't welcome unless it's explicitly needed.
The management consultancy scam
Infosec Island Security News Digest for 8-20-2010
UTF-8 takes 8 bits for most characters

It should be noted that "most" here presumably means "most characters in an average English or western/central European language text" as out of the ~2^21 (~2 million) Unicode code points, only 128 are represented using 8 bits in UTF-8.
If god couldn't redefine sin, then god would not be all powerful, which, in my opinion, is a requirement of being considered "god".
Ask HN: What's your Windows {web} development software set-up?
I just bought a new laptop recently and am in the process of setting it up for development on the go.

I just saw the MacOS thread (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1618817) and I figured I'd ask the HN on what everyone's favored setup is, web development or otherwise. I've been using a Macbook for the past 2+ years that just gave away and I decided that Windows 7 was a good reason to move back to the windows platform, not to mention the $$$ i saved on a better specced machine.

Currently, I have:

Notepad++ (IDE)
FileZilla (FTP)
Microsoft Office
Chrome + Firefox with Firebug
Dropbox (To sync files across machines)
Paint.NET (For minor image manipulation)
Launchy (Application Launcher)

I was on the lookout for some more software that'd make my life easier.
-- Is there a good replacement for OmniGraffle Pro?
-- Also, what's the best tool for Screenshots (preferabbly a tool that auto-uploads to the web for easy sharing) like Skitch or Cloud App.
-- A good lightweight to-do list like SimpleTask

Thanks.
Whenever I need to ask someone a question about something, I take 2 minutes to do just one more bit of homework on the topic.

The goal to give my brain one more shot at figuring it out on its own. Either I figure it out and I don't have to ask anyone else, or I'm now more informed about the topic when I ask someone a question, and I've moved the topic back to the top of my memory.

When it works, I've learned something, saved someone else from being interrupted, and I get a little kick of "I did it all by myself!" satisfaction. Even when the trick doesn't work, the ensuing conversations are usually much more productive.
A site that collects all your "read later" lists in one place
Buuuuut iiiiittttsss sssoooooooo ssssllloooooooowwww. Seriously- we have root on box, but thought we'd be smart by doing OS X and just use VMWare Fusion for Win and Linux emu. VMWare is awesome to have available, but they would have easily saved money by buying us an additional box or two to run Windows for the IE testing. Anything that slows a developer down is wasting not only the time they lost waiting, but in flow interrupt and the morale and excitement level dropping. Also, even better would have been to additionally hire some resource(s) to focus on CI and QA, and maybe the QA resource could have worried about IE. ;) j/k
Ask HN: Startups Hiring?
another "we're hiring" link reminded me that its been a while since this thread last came up.. is your startup or any you know is hiring?
I am personally more interested in the C language universe.
Maybe Intel needs more office space in Santa Clara? ;)
What does it make a price per sq. foot for McAfee office space?

Also by acquiring a company with $2B revenues (and only $173M net profit) - they can do a lot of "creative accounting". The kind of large corporations usually do at the expense of shareholders and taxpayers...
Shrinking ‘Quant’ Funds Struggle to Revive Boom
Or Twitter, I think. But yes, it's a very odd choice to not allow (1) OpenID logins, and (2) basic registration - particularly given their early adopter audience.
maybe you're on the same subnet as someone who actually spams them.
Wonderful -- another nightmare to worry about.
I appreciate your candor. I struggle with some of the same issues, especially when it comes to finding new customers. I imagine a lot of other devs have the same issues.

I recently decided to take a similar approach, which I'm calling "quickie startups". The max timeframe to build a quickie for me is 2 months. It's not so much a desperate shotgun approach as it is just getting ideas out of my head, into reality and seeing which ones have merit. In my head, they're all winners but we all know it doesn't work out that way in reality, as evidenced by a few of your projects (and mine).

I definitely sympathize with your disinterest in a project once it's launched. Building is a fun, creative process. The let down comes when the world is apathetic to your startup and you feel more excitement about the next one, rather than trying to shove something people don't want down their throats.

I agree that you have to give it some time with each one and really try to find your market, but when you are bootstrapping, it's more cost effective to focus on the ones that users gravitate toward.
Yes, and it's pretty much harmless in itself, but since when does installing one package (esp. from a third party with no verification beforehand) install a new apt key into your keyring (thus allowing all packages signed by that key, no matter what they are) and reconfigure the package manager itself? It's ludicrous.
PS3 Jailbreak is Finally Here
Nokia to acquire mobile analytics startup Motally
Five Strange Fundraising Ideas
Here are five ridiculous charity ideas that people actually did, at least according to the Internet.
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http://www.worldpixelmile.com
Toronto mortgage
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Yes it is trolling, so please stop it.
If this thread gets started on each and every post that is somehow related to PHP it doesn't add to the discussion.

Go write the same thing in Ruby or Erlang or whatever if you can't stand the idea of software being written in PHP, or shut up.
At my previous job I had a 4 core Intel processor + 4GB RAM. Ubuntu as host and I regularly ran 3 guest Windows instances at once without any slowdowns. I guess it depends on how you do things: the host OS only really ran a terminal emulator + vim. Maybe it would have been different if I had a GUI IDE...
Surely you mean a 'frikkin laser beam'?