skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The lock screen of Vanilla Android is the only think keeping me with SenseUI. I wish I could get the SenseUI lock screen on CM6. (Can I?)
I cannot imagine why this legitimate comment would be voted down.
Isalmon..shoot me an email. I have some experience with B2B businesses and am located in New England. (cpj1357@gmail.com) I've been looking for a technical person to work on ideas with.
Quote of the article: "I fantasize about buying an industrial-grade stapler capable of punching through three journal papers and calling it The Dissertator."
Photoshop Me
You should think twice before you upload your image to some suspicious forum. Here are the reasons why!
An American PhD sounds tougher than here in the UK, or at the very least significantly longer. Here, you get funding for three (or sometimes four) years and I don't know of that many people who have left their programmes.

Why is there such a big difference, and is there any data about how this this reflected in later careers?

I would guess that the advice of "only do a PhD if you want to be an academic" doesn't hold as strongly over here. Does it?

(Disclaimer: I say this as someone currently debating whether or not to do a PhD, but who doesn't want to be an academic.)
I really like the term "pragmatic cynicism."
Freaking hilarious. And if it's not a real business, it should be. Seriously. If I was a bible-believing member of the Rapture Right, I'd want my pet taken care of after I was taken.
Just buy seeds on the Internet?

Also, I've heard conflicting reports about growing mint indoors over the winter; some sources say that mint needs to die down in the winter and won't survive year-round growing, but others don't mention it. Should I just plant two pots, one indoors and one out?
Yeah. I'm not crazy about the XML thing either (as I noted in a footnote) but all we're using it for is a trivial way to dump an AST that's easy to specify.
Safari is based on WebKit, which is definitely open source.
There's just something about this story that left a bad taste in my mouth and turned my stomach. This is a quintissential example of lawyers behaving like scum. I'm not saying that companies shouldn't keep their patents updated. I am saying that it's greedy, sue-happy lawyers going around essentially trying to wring free money from companies. These people are simply the latest iteration of patent trolls, only with a slightly different shade of scaly green skin.
Hello, my name is Reginald and I am a Socialist
For simple uses, there are several free git hosting services. Assembla offers unlimited repos and 2GB for free, while ProjectLocker offers unlimited repos and 500MB for free. There are some limitations on tools and sharing and users, but for personal use, these can act just like another repo in the cloud, Yet Another place your private code is copied. No private server maintenance required.

If you do want your own private server, VPSs are getting ridiculously cheap. lowendbox.com relays the latest offer of Open VZ 512MB, 20GB of storage, 1TB of bandwidth, all for ... $3.60/month. At those prices, your backup strategy could simply be to have two, or three, from different vendors. These cheap VPS hosts can just disappear one day, so never have this be your only copy of anything.
> Why would you want to keep it as it is?

To learn as much as possible before you irreversibly change it.
For my first year introduction course in my three year Software Engineering college course, we worked in C. Now, it's a great language, but scared the living hell out of everyone in the course. 80% failed the course (could be saying more about the teacher than the students or the course material), and 30% of the people in my class dropped the entire program because of this introduction. It scared them right out. Now, since schools are in the game to make money, driving students out in the first semester is not a terribly bright idea. Java is must better suited to beginners than C, but change colleges if they keep teaching you Java.. you can learn everything you really need to know for business in one or two Java courses.
Imagine two groups of students in two different environments. If students in the bad environment are incapable of realizing significant gains regardless of their teachers whereas students in the good environment are likely to manifest gains no matter how bad their teachers are, then comparing deltas won't help. What you'd need to do is rotate teachers into a variety of different environments. I mean, even a mediocre teacher should produce significant gains for a class of wealthy students: the more mediocre the teacher is, the more private tutoring her students will get to compensate.

Consider graduates from selective engineering schools like MIT. They tend to be very good. Does that mean that MIT is really good at undergraduate education? Of course not. In fact, MIT is pretty bad at undergraduate education. But that doesn't matter because the world's best engineering students are desperate to attend MIT and MIT can pick and choose.

I think this method holds promise, but like the GP, it is hardly a silver bullet.
People specialise earlier in the UK, so a PhD in the States requires a longer run-up to get students to the point where they have sufficient background in a particular field to do research in it.
I feel left out:

#11. Start a startup while doing the PhD.
Installing gitosis was probably the most error-prone and miserable experience I have ever had in Ubuntu system administration. Solid as a rock once I got it up, but man, at the time I had to cobble three different blog posts together with a bit of bubblegum. Obligatory disclaimer: my mental model for both git and sysadminning is not as good as the mean HN reader's.
Spell Checking with Vim
>>> To keep them valid, companies must pay maintenance fees every four years.

I wonder how many patents are invalid because of neglect.
There's nothing mutually exclusive about hackers vs. consumers.

I both hack and consume in prodigious amounts.
Java Synchronization (Mutual Exclusion) Benchmark
I've seen a couple of similar small 'businesses', verging on spoofs, that offer the ability to relay a note or a message to any of your loved ones left behind after the rapture.

I generally don't like the tone of the people behind these things - dig enough and you always find a bit of 'look at the silly religious people hurr hurr hurr'. I'm sure all of us have irrational beliefs of some sort, and if can you put yourself in the mindset of a believer in the rapture, it's actually quite responsible to be concerned about the state of one's affairs on Earth after your sudden disappearance.

Unfortunately 'the rapture' in popular Christian consciousness has died down a bit since the Left Behind series wrapped up. The peak time for this sort of business was close to a decade ago.
On the contrary, follow specifically does refer to a continuing future action.

"Follow that cab!" doesn't mean just for one block. You expect the driver will follow that cab until you tell him to stop following it.

To agree with you, however, the cab being followed need not be aware of your continued future action. They can speed up, slow down, stop, U-turn, do whatever they would do if you weren't following them. To your point, "follow" is not "interactive". It's active for you, passive for the one being followed.

It's therefore the perfect word for Twitter's button.
Betahouse is a coworking space and its principals comprise the hub of the entrepreneurial community in Boston: http://betahouse.org/

Microsoft NERD is a space offered by MS for a lot of tech events, a partial listing of which is: http://microsoftcambridge.com/Events/tabid/57/Default.aspx

For more info, follow these people on Twitter, they will give a good lay of the tech land:

http://twitter.com/jonpierce

http://twitter.com/GalenMoore

http://twitter.com/ScottKirsner

http://twitter.com/sbroderick
The differences are more than US versus UK. It's more US versus Europe.

I spent a semester in Ph.D. school in Denmark, and I noticed what you describe: 4 years guaranteed funding with a boot at the end.

What this means is that at the end of four years, a student has to staple all the papers they wrote, back-solve for a unifying "thesis" and then defend. No matter what.

In general, this is why Europeans Ph.D.s tend to need a postdoc, whereas American Ph.D.s can (usually) transition directly to faculty jobs.

The US Ph.D. student is encouraged to hang on and continue publishing with their advisor while they're on a hot streak and for as long as the grant funding lasts.

This allows US profs to turn the last couple years of their Ph.D. students into postdocs paid at grad student wages.
My poorman's offsite backup script involves zipping up the repository, encrypt it, and mail it to GMail. The task is scheduled daily and works pretty well.
Earlier this year, I moved from SVN to git when I found I really needed better branch management. One thing I found is that hosting a git repository is a lot less straightforward than hosting a subversion repository, particularly since fewer bug tracking systems have adequate support for DVCS at this point. Trac seems to be lagging behind Redmine in this regard.

If anyone is interested, I created a library for deploying git hosting (or SVN hosting if you really prefer) on a VPS with Redmine project management: http://github.com/ericpaulbishop/redcloud

Git hosting is provided via gitosis, not gitolite since there is no redmine plugin for gitolite support. It runs on Ubuntu VPS and uses Nginx with passenger compiled in as the web server. PHP via php-fpm can optionally be compiled in too, in case other sites on the same box need PHP (as is the case for what I'm doing).
I'm currently up to 3 x 24" monitors, and am doing my level best to talk myself out of a fourth. The luxury is nice, when you can waste screen real estate without a care, but it's as addictive as heroin.

I'm not advocating you stick with a 9" screen, but be careful with the lure of adding monitors!
Thanks for the help, they all look like great providers. Its going to come down to customer service (as it always does).
My personal experience* is that some of that failure rate can attributed to students not understanding what a PhD is for. It is a qualification to conduct research... it is not about creating something cool/interesting and/or useful (particularly not the last one). It's about the journey not the product.

Unless you intend to stay in academia, the qualification probably won't pay off in terms of a higher salary vs. the years you wasted. And if you do intend to be in academia, be prepared for a long (possibly indefinite) wait before you get a permanent lecturing/research position. Post-doc life is not easy.

* 3 years wasted working on a PhD, no thesis submitted in the end, walked away back to the real world.
PragPub Issue 15, September 2010
Because of the vaguely insurance-oriented tinge to the business model, though, it does raise a very key issue:

If you're (the hypothetical "you") so committed to your concrete, literal beliefs about rapture, why won't you put your money where your mouth is?

If my faith in the imminent end of times, or some other, more minor prophecy of my faith burned with the strength of a thousand suns, I would cash out all my assets and put them in a betting pool in support of it!
Startups for the Rest of Us podcast #9 discusses it frequently, see transcript, search page for "freemium" http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/episodes/episode-9-our...
That paper is pretty interesting, but is just an overview of the actual tutorial on writing the compiler, which is here:

http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~aghuloum/compilers-tutorial-2006-...

Unfortunately, the tutorial seems to be in a draft state, with a good amount content still needing to be written ("FIXME"s throughout).
Sounds awesome dude. Wish I could say the same things about my job. Enjoy it.
>If the US does resort to protectionism, it would put at stake the massive revenues that american companies are getting from foreign markets. For many of the Fortune 500 companies, the foreign markets are the fastest growing markets and in many, they have started being more than 50% of revenues.

Increasingly it seems that the interests of American companies and the American people cannot be reconciled, and we must choose. I for one know where I'd throw my lot.
Interesting thesis. Is this for a masters in econ? or what?

I'd look at the levers that are required in freemium models for them to succeed:
- high conversion rate from free to paid
- enough value in the upgrade proposition
- market/product fit (many of these freemium products fail there)

this is a fascinating topic for a thesis. keep us posted on how it goes.
There's nothing "missing." Anything you want can be installed.

Other proprietary OS's provide you with a desktop environment that is more about fashion than usability.

Linux has choice. That's a good thing.
Oracle is like the C++ of databases; Postgres is like the C#. Oracle is ugly and complex, but it can be made to do amazing things that no other RDBMS can do. Postgres is really fast out of the box for 90% of most use-cases, but it still can't do the things Oracle can.
Or those that didn't participate in placing their lives online will hold the pasts of others against them (i.e. the new 'power elite').
Fun With Set Theory and Lisp
I almost mentioned that. I did start-ups my last year in grad school (and for the year after I graduated). It almost killed my Ph.D.

Now that I'm a prof, I'm actually recruiting locals in start-ups to come get a Ph.D. with me. I feel like folks that can excel at a start-up can also excel at a Ph.D.

I also assert that someone with a start-up mentality should be able to get a Ph.D. much faster than a "regular" Ph.D. student.

The razor-sharp focus that a start-up needs is perfect for blasting through a Ph.D.

I'm looking for ways to make the two experiences synergistic and complementary instead of antagonistic.
It should have been made clear to you, and the other authors, in the email - regardless of if a tweet was sent out 2 weeks ago or not.

The publisher can't assume that you read and follow everything they write. The entire agreement and disclosure should have been contained in that email to you, so you have nothing to apologize for (the fact that you didn't know that there was no free issue until you saw it here on HN says that there was a flaw in the communications process).

As mentioned in the other comments, I hope the publisher can clarify and be much clearer in his emails to potential authors next time around (perhaps publishing an 'authors' page on the website with a clear FAQ - ie. if the authors can expect their own copy, etc.)

I actually held out on insta-clicking to buy a copy when I read your comment (I still am), so clarification here will help everybody.
Thanks! There's a ton of great companies out there, just keep looking (or start your own) I just got really luck and landed this gig!
The extreme version is known as digital suicide: http://www.google.com/search?q=digital+suicide
An American PhD is mainly employed to be an assistant to their supervisor, and gets to study a bit on the side. An English PhD is mainly funded to study, and does a bit of assisting/teaching as an apprenticeship to become an academic themselves. This means that in England the candidate gets to spend more hours/week actually working on their PhD, so it takes fewer years overall.
Your reading is incorrect. In the United States (and most other signatories to the international copyright treaty whose name escapes me at 1 AM), copyright attaches automatically to any creative expression. Works in general default to copyright, not to the public domain.

The copyright notice, symbol, and date are advisory only, not magical runes with exotic legal effects. (Registration of copyrights gives you extra bonuses, but it isn't necessary to invoke copyright protection.)

Yes, taking them and hosting them would be infringement. So would republishing this comment, which has no date or copyright symbol but is copyrighted by virtue of existing. The usual rules about fair comment, etc, apply, and courts would hold that I've certainly given PG et al implied license to retain and display the comment as a consequence of writing it here.

I am not a lawyer, but I'm not wrong, either.
I think Palm really, really needs an unlocked, 4-band GSM phone that's not world-proof. The US may be a huge market, but the rest of the world would like the possibility of buying press and pixies. And I am sure Palm wants to sell phones.
I was actually thinking of exactly this analogy earlier. It holds also in that a lot of people use C++ because they think they need it but they could in fact use something simpler.
Unfortunately, Compilers is no longer a required class to get a CS degree. My (possibly flawed) understanding is that in the heyday, it was.

It's really a shame, because learning about compilers applies all that stuff you're supposed to learn about languages and automata theory, gives you an excellent example of how to design a large software system, gives you insights into programming language design, and above all demystifies the process of what happens when you compile your own code.
I think they should?
After all it is not that much that justifies the "s" in "cs"..
Quite a lot of people in the UK get paid as contract researchers (Research Associates or Research Assistants) where you pretty much get a decent wage to do work that will probably count towards a PhD.
You sir are awesome. I am in a similar situation and this information is very useful.

Out of curiosity, assuming I follow your advice to settle my debts, how would I go back to the US and re-establish a life there.

Would following the above advice constitute "bankruptcy" or would it simply result in negative comments on my credit rating?

If it would just result in negative comments on my credit rating, how long would they stay there?

Apart from securing a mortgage, car loan or credit cards, what other consequences would I suffer upon my return to the US? What would I be unable to do? Would it impact employment prospects?

If the credit collection agency violates federal law by claiming that they have ties back to immigration, what recourse do I have to file a complaint against them?
We just beat swarmation [pic]
Live by the patent, die by the patent.
When you say that the first 3 months 'didn't work out well' does that mean that you made a loss, or that you didn't make enough to justify the time that you spend putting the magazine together?

I would assume that your costs are your time plus the incremental transaction costs charged by the middle-man. Perhaps I am missing something?

(I can't work out, in my own mind, how selling a magazine online, to this community, with a $10 cover price can not 'work out well' enough to be in the black - esp. considering the response to the first issues. Perhaps some insight is in order - as I think it might be a learning experience for all , ie. what was your conversion rate? What are your costs?

This would be an interesting HN community case study).
(raises hand) my turn! (I fix these problems and other stuff for a living).

There are short answers and long answers to this problem.

The short answers try to fix quickly what the most likely cause of the problem is. If a server is being unresponsive this is most likely because the server runs out of memory or incurs in heavy disk I/O. For the memory problem find what are the processes eating up the memory. For apache lowering the MaxClients/MaxServers/KeepAlive helps. For I/O you'll have to look at the database (see error log, log long queries etc).

But that's speculation.

The proper way to fix the issue is to understand what's really causing it. A way to start is getting meaningful server utilization data and reviewing logs.

Spend a few minutes installing a graphical monitoring tool like munin or google's quicklook (I like these because they are lightweight, there's a ton of them like cacti etc). In a couple of hours you'll get a better picture of what's going on.

Review the logs, specially error logs.

I use a little script that runs every 15 mins and logs the most important stuff that is going on in the server, you can run something similar every 5 mins or whatever to find what's really going on: http://pastebin.com/Qv0J3WHY

Another tip is to set up a mirror test/stage server and benchmark the heck out of it; you don't want to make a lot of changes live in a production server.

I guess you can also ask the support people at Slicehost.

I'll gladly take a look at your server for up to 30 mins at no cost.
I assumed since Walmart stores was named as a defendant that other retailers could be named as well. As far as I know, Walmart doesn't do any manufacturing, even with their Great Value brand (citation needed).
To be fair, Microsoft has done a very good job of working towards actualization of their original very audacious mission statement.

"I want to have a computer on every desk and in every home, all running Microsoft software." - Bill Gates
The real point of disillusion came for me when I realized my advisor was so caught up in funding politics and jockeying for awards that he wasn't even looking at some of the research proposals we were sending out.
Running Ubuntu 10.04, I have a desktop that I feel is simple, elegant and beautiful. I used to envy my brother's nice looking desktop on his MacBook, but now when I look at it I think Ubuntu actually looks better.

Ubuntu runs smoothly, with simple but nice effects, clean windows and (since 10.04) some very nice themes. Perfect? No, but definitely in the same league as OS X.
I completely agree. What really irks me is when Mr. Stauffer claims he's doing "a service to the United States". Seems more like a service to his wallet.
Ask HN: When should we ask for credit card details?
Hey HN,

We (me and markbao) are Supportbreeze. We're working on our marketing pages now and we're not sure if it's better to ask for credit card details at signup or sometime after the trial expires. We know a lot of companies, like 37signals, ask at signup, but we don't have a free plan (for more on that, see here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1615416) and only offer the trial. So if we ask for credit card details, there is no way to trial our product without providing it. Will asking at signup deter people from trialing? Is it better to ask at signup or after trial expires?

Thanks.
Please let us know if your phone survives ;-)
Didn't mean to sound like I was being critical! I'm already a fan of this.
> I doubt there is any professional endeavor free of "politics and politicking."

There's lots of professions where decisions are primarily made on merit. Entrepreneurship is one of them.
If you send them this letter, they may stop calling you, but will figure out a way to harass your wife or your mother.
Tunnel everything through SSH
Deliberateness Is A Good Thing (or: Why VCs are slow)
Photoshop, Starcraft 2, I'd switch yesterday
Windows phone 7, Android, and market relevance
Watch this video: http://vimeo.com/14286740, you'll see Emily Olson, a TechStars Alumni, discuss whether such programs are worth it (together with alumnis from other incubator programs).

I completely understand how scary it is for a first-time entrepreneur to consider such programs. The value is not obvious for beginners, so they tend to focus on the perceived low valuation (6% of your company for $6K is not valuing you much!).

But everyone who has been through such a program will tell you that the valuation (or lack thereof) is completely irrelevant. By becoming a Techstars alumni, you earn a label and a network.

Your average angel for instance is inundated with pitches from entrepreneurs. They need to apply a filter. Do you have paying customers? Come talk to me. Are you a Techstars alumni? Come talk to me.

You can spend 10 years of your life build your own network of connections. Or you can be selected by one of those incubators and jump ahead of the line. How much is that worth? Ask the guys at Udemy, they just raised $1M from top angels. Two years ago, no one would give them the time of day.