skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
War-and-Peace as a comic strip
<strikeout>Insights</strikeout> speculations on the performance of Microsoft's big clusters (and the services that depend on them).
It's called the "Samsung Galaxy Player", and it just got demoed in public today after being rumored for a while. It even has 16gb of onboard flash instead of continuing with the SD-card-only farce that the other Android manufacturers have been going along with.

The reason nobody else has been attacking this market is because the iPod touch has been priced much cheaper than any of the Taiwanese OEM shops can compete with — it only costs a little less to make than an iPhone, but costs $400 less! Apple is purposefully cutting their margins on it far below their other products.

Samsung can actually compete since they're vertically integrated. They don't need to be producing millions to get the volume to meet that price point — as the manufacturer of CPUs, LCDs, and Flash, they are volume.

This will be the first real attempt at competition in this space since the Zune HD (which was originally more expensive, but later discounted). No, none of the Archos PMP products count, they're stupidly expensive, sucked balls, and the Android ones shipped ancient broken versions with no Google apps or Marketplace.

EDIT: Looks like it might not be sold in the US, and it'll be significantly more expensive than the iPod touch at €229 for 8GB and €299 for 16GB.
Building current trunk weekly != release. It was acknowledged that those "releases" are not what people in the "real world" are waiting for (http://use.perl.org/~pmichaud/journal/39411). It was fixed with Star which is a release for "early adopters". It's polished alpha by another name. It's only one little step ahead of vaporware. Can we get over it now?...
Ask HN: What do you use to monitor site uptime?
Title says it all. Basically just looking for a dead simple way of monitoring a webserver that will alert me when it's not responding.

I realize there are a number of services out there but currious what people are using these days.
Get Linux Power on Windows using Cygwin | ICA
" A trail of dust debris from an incoming meteor may take much longer to dissipate in the mesosphere than a cloud of the same size lower down."

Making it even less likely that it would all land in the same place.

Adding unusual atmospheric phenomena on top of everything else just makes this more and more absurd.
The upscaled UI elements suggest a touch-based OS X in the near future. Anyone else think so?
That is an awesome service. But why are they tracking so few privacy policies? Where, for example, is Facebook?
That’s a pretty sloppy article. What Jobs demoed and what was somewhat impressive (and what this article might be referring to) was seamless switching from iPad to Apple TV in the middle of watching a movie. That will be possible with the next firmware update for the iPad. That will presumably work for other content, too, like photos and music. What this means is that the iPad allows you to immediately and seamlessly throw much of its content on the TV screen.

In my opinion that’s a nice gimmick – if you have $99 to spare why not? – but not much more.
The way they work is exactly the problem. Considering there's a lot you can do in iTunes, it makes more sense to have the control buttons apply to items independent of where you're browsing, as for example, Windows Media Player. The current behavior is confusing and pointless.
Before opening the article I was expecting an article about US-China relations.
The article asks the question of when individuals entering a relationship should bring up debts. Being a bit more optimistic, and hopefully more relevant to the world of startups, I'd like to ask the opposite question: If you're entering a relationship, when is the right time to mention that you're rich?
I've been emacs curious for a while now... Sorry vim.
> Building current trunk weekly != release.

I agree, and that's why we've had a documented and polished release process for almost three years now.

Existence is a binary condition, and binaries have existed for (almost) three years. A claim of vaporware is trivially dismissable FUD.
It seems to me that work hours, vacation, and pay are some of the few things that are really negotiable before accepting a job offer. What if each person simply negotiated for themselves how much vacation time they felt is reasonable, along with a salary adjusted to the amount of work they plan to do?
Awesome, thanks! I'll update the gist.
Regardless of her portfolio, I spotted two typos on her intro page alone.
You are remembering it backwards. 2000, and XP (because it was the consumer version of 2000) were much better than Windows 98, Windows ME and NT. This is why the poster says they were good OS, they were so much more stable, you could actually leave your machine on for a while.

Vista is and always will be a dog.
Ask HN: Python+Ruby hackers - which OS/distro are you using?
I was reading somewhere that a good way to choose an OS is to use the same one that your future communities will be using, so I was wondering - what OS are python and ruby hackers using? If Linux, please specify the distro, as that is basically what I am choosing between.

I am sure there would be no issue with Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Mandriva or OpenSUSE, so it makes sense to use the one most of you guys are.
trading money for vacation is called unpaid leave. most employers are happy to accommodate that.
Sublogic made Flight Simulator. Microsoft later bought Sublogic.
A Weekend with Node.js
It will be strange to live in a world where Duke Nukem isn't vaporware. It's status as vaporware has always been one of the basic tenants of the internet as I know it, up there with Rule 34.
I'm gold ranked, but I think the time the person spends honing their craft is important too.

You want to look at what kind of code projects (if you're hiring a programmer) they have in their portfolio that they made of their own accord.
No. this is discussed in TFA.
Learn with Node and do a ClojureKnockout?
> SharePoint

You must be kidding...
> they have a right to do what they want

The first thing the auditors do is go through the HR records, find out who hasn't taken off any vacation time or sick leave for three years. That person is raising purchase orders and signing and counter-signing the approval forms or otherwise doing something so Byzantine that if they leave it for a single day, it will come crashing down on them...
I think "excellent" is nowhere close to any adjective I would use to describe it.

You may consider it good, as long as you have never, ever used anything more sophisticated than a network share to manage your documents.
I recommend self-employment. You get all the unpaid time off you want! (And, if you're selling software, it is "unpaid" for a very curious value of "unpaid" in which your bank account actually does get fatter on a daily basis.)

Mandating any form of compensation transfers wealth from people who would not choose to avail themselves of that compensation to people who would. I tend to think these transfers are generally unwise and/or unfair, and would prefer to leave them up to negotiation among the parties.

For example, "You can have up to a month off" has real costs for the business. Consider what it does at companies with one owner and one employee, for illustration: the business is mandated by law to virtually shutter itself one month out of the year. It is cheaper to have redundancy in large corporations where everyone is a cog, but it is not free. To the extent it is not free, that cost is implicitly tied to workers, and it competes against other forms of compensation, such as wages, regardless of whether they choose to exercise their vacation options or not.

One could easily imagine a situation in which workers -- say, young single workers -- would prefer wages, or flex time, or "all you can eat Amazon books" over the unexercized option to be single and bored at home.

(Though I'll grant there is one nice bit about everybody having vacation time: it alleviates a bit of a collective action problem, since time off when your friends/family have to work has shockingly lower utility than time off when they do not.)
>>>Anyway this thread is now being flooded by Apple iFanboi's, thus no point in making logical arguments.<<<

Look it's of no use whatsoever being a rude asshole over here i.e. HN. You called me an idiot not too long ago (see: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1651363 ), and it appears that you like to insult people willy nilly if they don't conform to the mold of your expectations. That isn't the point of HN.

The sad bit is that you're missing out on the things that make HN beautiful; having your beliefs questioned and learning new things from amazing people. So, open up your mind a bit and you might love what you see. :)

Take care.
I feel a profound sense of relief that we have moved on from "Why WoW is the New Golf".

I suspect that I might actually be able to play Starcraft without it taking over my life. Though I have so far been loath to test this theory.
brilliant; insightful; lucid. this piece deserve front page of the utne reader, let alone hacker monthly.
IIRC, the Linux of the time had trouble with multiprocessors and ran on ext2. Nevertheless, I cannot imagine someone giving up a fully functional Unix environment to go back to a Windows box. Lots of mouse clicking for much less power.
In Defense of Home Ownership
This is old, from the Web 1.0 world and inspired by Philip Greenspun's book "Database-Backed Web Sites" but it's dead-simple and it works:

http://uptime.openacs.org/uptime/

Oh, and it's free too.
I did some work at the #3 retail grocer in the world and they have an improbable amount of cobol and cobol-apps running as of 2007. Some of these were running on old IBM mainframes from the 80s and perhaps even 70s, including some exciting IMS databases.
There's evidence that Apple is considering it: http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/08/23/apple_filing_s...
Personal Injury Lawyer Sacramento
If you ever need a personal injury lawyer and live in Sacramento, contact Demas & Rosenthal. They get the job done.
Makes me wish I'd jumped on the wagon sooner and gotten my skills up to par.
No one (so far as I know) is claiming that it's obvious that taking more vacations (than is normal in the US) increases productivity; only that it's true. Your argument is entirely devoted to demonstrating that it's not obvious, and has nothing to say about whether it's true.

(Is it true? I don't know, though it seems very plausible to me. It's certainly commonly said, and really not all that counterintuitive.)
http://couch.io/jobs we are looking for people to help build the next generation of the web.

We have people from around the world. Send us your github url.
Wikipedia: As of 2009, multiple Perl 6 implementations are under development, but none are considered "complete". As noted in the history section the language design itself is still subject to change. No implementation will be designated as the official Perl 6 implementation; rather, "Perl 6 is anything that passes the official test suite."[12]

If that's changed, you should probably go update that. "Pre-release" is generally understood as a synonym for "not complete", right? There's no complete, finished implementation of the Perl 6 spec, right? Is the spec itself finished?

It's like you can't say anything about Perl (either one) on Hacker News, not even mildly complimentary things, without someone jumping on perceived slights.
Look at what Gates has done since he loosened his grip at MS. The Gates foundation's global health and global development programs have done tremendously important work to reduce human suffering in the 3rd world. Nothing Gates could do at MS would come even close to what he is doing now to make the world a better place.

Compare to Steve Jobs who knows how to make wonderful shiny devices that cost more than what many in the third world will make in a lifetime, but who has done very little when it comes to philanthropy.
The most difficult thing with Ubuntu that I have noticed is properly configuring and using a scanner.
Starcraft 1 players are acceptable too, but I imagine there's a bit of a "you're too old" discrimination associated with it.
Definitely better for that - I can feel good playing one game and stopping, which is essentially 15 minutes or so. I'm glad I never played WoW... sounds like it could be bad in terms of being a big time suck :(
Seems quite silly. Singing along with music is a gas. Do digitally purchased albums come with lyrics? I remember paging through the cassette and CD liner notes, singing like a tonedeaf banshee.
At least from what I read, TFA only discussed how the debts relate to divorce.
RTS games always seemed to me like nothing so much as a test of how much manual busy work somebody will tolerate.

If I were to hire people based on their ability to play any game, it would be Go.
StarCraft players do not have a monopoly on the virtues listed in this article.
You mean "Users" as in "People who signed up to take a look at the hyped new feature"?

Sorry, but I'll be more curious to see how many people actually use the service in 6 months from now. The first reviews haven't been exactly glamorous.
You are forgetting these iTunes use cases:

- Select a track and push Play.

- Select an album and push Play.

- Select a playlist and push Play.

- Select iTunes DJ and push Play.

These are fundamental to iTunes. It is neither confusing nor pointless.
Mastering an extracurricular activity can be very good for your work ability. This article's list is StarCraft-focused, but similar lists could be made for several other games. NetHack taught me to type thousands of characters in a row without making a mistake or losing focus, and to use absolutely every resource; Descent taught me to visualize space and motion; Left 4 Dead taught me how to stay cool under pressure.

We need not limit ourselves to games, either. How many useful skills does one acquire in the process of becoming a quality musician, playing competitive sports, or raising a child?

I wouldn't advocate only hiring good StarCraft players, but I would advocate looking for people who are awesome at something.
Awesome Small Software: watch
>"I just want to write a little Twitter API script in 5 minutes"

In that case you would use Out-of-band/PIN Code Authentication. See http://dev.twitter.com/pages/auth_overview.

For Pythonistas, my little Twitter API script uses tweepy.py. Thanks to http://jmillerinc.com/2010/05/31/twitter-from-the-command-li... for the steps involved. As an exercise, you could scrape the required PIN with beautifulSoup or similar code to eliminate one step.
I am looking for one or the other, I am doing both right now and am looking for someone who can offset one of them very well.
I wonder if they didn't want to do a Buzz in terms of making all your private information suddenly public, and might ease into features such as scrobbling over time. The amount of spam on there is probably their biggest problem at the moment. It is hard for me to objectively judge as my market segment isn't catered for at all in terms of features. It will be interesting to see what the rest of the population think of it. To me it feels far to much like it has been designed to drive consumption of 'popular' music and 'me too' buying.

EDIT:
The top 10 pop chart artists all seem to have around 100k followers, will be interesting to see how it goes.
That's a shame, because you'd rule out great companies like Quora, Dropbox, Posterous, Gaia Online, and Serious Business.
I'm not sure he needs any "music-related credibility" (whatever that is) to make valid points about Ping. I'm pretty sure all he needs to make valid criticisms of Ping is:

1. iTunes (check)
2. the desire to use a music-oriented social network (http://www.last.fm/user/swizec - check, I think)

The only thing I can think of that might disqualify him from having, uh, cred here is that he already has a last.fm - I bet Ping catches on best, if it remains as it is now, with people who haven't sought out a music/social network, but see Ping in their iTunes, hassle-free, and decide it's pretty neat.
Are you talking about programmers, or engineers?
IMO, there's more important things to choose an OS based on. Especially since Python and Ruby are both well-supported on all of the unices.

Find an OS that makes you happy. Like the Mac interface? Go OS X. Like tiling window managers, and automatic package management? Go linux.

FWIW, I use Ubuntu 10.04.
It's not a strength. Poorly-defined, fundamentally broken behavior is not a strength.
Without too much effort I can translate this to:

- only hire white males

- under 25

- without much of s social life beyond other < 25 year old males

- but if your target market is under 25 males and you don't plan to deal with government laws that will screw you because of the the bigotry.

Then you're good.
I find I'm most productive if I work for 6-8 weeks, then have a week off, then another 6-8 weeks, etc. It helps clears the mental grogginess that builds up and kills my productivity. So that's about 5-8 weeks a year (but they have to be evenly distributed).
I see - yes, most of the masters whose .emacs.d file I've had the privilege to look have been from the old guard.
After you're sure she likes you for reasons other than you're rich?
$60k would be great if that were all income, but the majority of it isn't. After everything is accounted for (product cost, equipment depreciation, studio space, updated samples, advertising, etc), the profit amounts to 20-30% of it We spend about $1500/mo here just on studio rent and utilities.

I won't go into your second paragraph, though, because that mostly boils down to a difference of opinion.
That would be fine, except that in typical job negotiations there is a severe imbalance in negotiating power. Companies like to treat all their employees equally, and (almost) no vacation is easiest for them, so that is what one ends up with.

The same argument explains the need for some regulation of the maximum working hours/day, lunch breaks, etc.
I suspect that the iTunes UI Manager's job strongly resembles an Admiral's position. On a regular basis, I can see minions dragging the latest victim out of Steve's office while he intones, "Apology Accepted."
throw windows out the window, use linux, problem solved..play guitar hero with all the spare time...
Having just used GWO for a project because it was a requirement (GWO is integrated with Shopify), I can now much more enthusiastically endorse Visual Website Optimizer.
This is true, and I think it accounts for a lot of the difference in quality between their products. But in this case, it sounds like there just weren't clear, enforced rules about integration, interoperability, and usability. Not once in the email does Gates reference an existing, company-wide set of standards. Even a company like Microsoft is capable of having and enforcing such a thing, and it would actually boost productivity over the long run. If all the different teams are doing their own thing and subject to an off-the-cuff usability review only after they've shipped, they will ultimately spend more time making revisions than they would have spent targeting standards from the start.

I've no idea what Microsoft was like at the time, so maybe they did have such a thing, but if there was, I can't imagine it had much priority in the corporate culture.
Textmate 2?
We get it. You don't understand iTunes.

I have a saying: Never ask a computer geek for music advice. They'll always give you a stupid answer.
That's a huge generalization. Different games test different skills. Some skills apply to things like startups, some don't.

Disclaimer: I suck at starcraft, so naturally I disagree with this post.
i'm sure you meant it in jest, but it still really bugs me: this idea that startups shouldn't do anything but work. who does that, seriously.
>You are forgetting these iTunes use cases:

None of those are contradictory to the idea of control consistency throughout iTunes, why would they be? In fact, deliberately selecting something and choosing specifically what to do with it fits perfectly with the "Have the control buttons control items you select or can only be one other possible item" method.

If the behavior isn't confusing, then why does it stop the track, but not let you restart it, even though there's nothing else to control? That is perfectly described as pointless and confusing.
The Value of the Startup Product Manager
Most of the time you don't need some authority person's opinion to realize that something is a total mess. Your own experience is enough. That is what this email is all about - users will create their own opinion very quickly.

The another example is Java development. Everyone who run Maven2 build process (say to build clojure-contrib) will be amazed by a tons of a strange and useless messages, repeated downloads of what seems the same files (but, different minor version numbers) to unknown location. That process will took something like 10 minutes on 3G connection, while you have absolutely no idea what's going on (OK, I can figure out that it is a process of a recursive downloading and building dependencies, and because people don't care about migration to the latest stable versions, it will download half of internet.)

This alone tells me what is really happening in a Java world better than all Sun's brainwashing altogether. ^_^

btw, sudo apt-get install maven2 downloaded another 70Mb of shit (in case JDK is already installed). 70Mb for a apt+make replacement? Compressed Linux kernel sources are less in size.
Please send suggestions: ObjectFS API
I am the author of this doc.
Starcraft is probably as close to Go as you'll get as a video game.
At least they didn't use the word "jihad..." it is one thing to alienate your customers, but to bring a whole load of sensitive cultural bagage with it is quite another.

In any case, I feel as though both these strong armed legal tactics and the "jihad" label are really losing their strong meaning in these situations.
you just described most startups.
> What evolution+time describes is very much a strict, significantly-smaller subset of a God's capabilities.

The rational numbers are a significantly-smaller subset of the real numbers. Yet adding a countable infinity to both sides of your equation is just as useless as adding an uncountable infinity.

Similarly, "God did it", "there are a lot of universes", "we wouldn't be able to ask if we weren't here so it doesn't need explaining", and "evolution + time" can all be very unsatisfying answers to the stronger variant of the argument I described above. They're all essentially big wildcards, though some are bigger than others. Whichever argument you choose needs a LOT more detail before it becomes better than simply adding infinity to both sides of the equation.
It feels forced to me, and kind of content free. You could reasonably make the same argument for any number of activities (eg, being a parent, or playing soccer).

Unsurprisingly, the article focused on the benefits concerned with individual performance, rather than leadership or teamwork.
I ran a guild for a few years. It was a whole lot more work than running a business, with worse hours and more drama. Also, the loot sucked.

That said: Some people watch TV, some people put petroleum products on dead plant matter using animal hair, some people go watch fat men sing in classical Italian and they would have to read along in the handy little English guide if they hadn't known the plot for the last forty years. I killed imaginary dragons. It was quite fun at the time.

P.S. Not related to Starcraft, but nice job with the Japanese-learning startup. Cheers to your & your students' success with it.
Solaris 2.5 was a very solid OS and better than NT 3.5 in most respects unless a defining criteria for "better" is "runs well on PCs", which it didn't.

OS/2 was also a good OS for x86 PCs. At least as good as NT, unless, again, you want it to run software designed for Windows.
What's the difference between email spam and comment spam, exactly? Why don't online forums use Bayesian filtering to get rid of comment spam?