skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is no storage policy yet for the beta. I was thinking of storing the visits for a certain period of time, with the ability to save selected visits forever. The beta will give me an idea on how much storage I should anticipate. I am currently storing data in MongoDB's GridFS.
Forever is how long I'm willing to wait to play this game, in that I have little to no excitement and don't care if I don't play it within my lifetime.

I loved Duke, he was a hero of mine. Now, because of fucktardRealms his franchise has died, he's now associated with the most successful money-hole ever invented and it's going to have to be a complete reboot to even hit relevancy now.

Seriously kill Forever and start a new game called 'The End' and release it in 2012. (Edit: I'm serious, do a parody alien-Mayan end of the world, cash in on the popular hype, sell it to a new expanded market and then do Forever)
The part about him filling in the form on microsoft.com and having it tell him that what he input was invalid is particularly hilarious.
I'm sure there is a lot of good science happening in climatology. I'm not so sure, however, how much of the sound science is of the predictive variety, and how much is merely concerned with historical reconstructions. Being able to do the latter doesn't give you the ability to do the former, especially if the system is complex enough / chaotic.

What I definitely can take issue with is the way the science is presented to laypersons, especially laypersons with an intellectual bent. Granted this is mainly not the work of the scientists themselves, but neither do they seem to do anything to discourage it.
I'm surprised you have to use the command line to change such an option in an Apple product.
Add to the list SQL Server 2000 and above, and Visual Studio.
My name is Douglas Engelbart and Windows was my idea before Alan Kay, Bill Gates _or_ Steve Jobs.
It seems that the only perhaps significant difference is apparently the crossing out of the words which state in so many words that google will use the date only for the purposes allowed under this privacy policy and no other purpose.

Edit: Indeed after reading the plain version the words seem, and apparently above are not really necessary. The change might not be entirely significant, but it might in many ways be compared to the principle that the government can do only what is authorised to under the law while citizens can do anything that is not prohibited by the law.

Whether it is significant that google has chosen to move from the former to the later I am not certain. They surely have the right to, they are not a government, but it is a significant change, rather than just trimming.

Thus, unlike previously, they do not need to adhere to their privacy policy. They might therefore be free to, well I do not know, we will find out soon.
>The relationship between the fundamental forces (strong, weak, gravity, etc.) and certain other constants in physics that, were they slightly different, would rending the whole of existence something entirely different.

As we know it, and are you sure it's possible for them to be different? Given that evidence grows that they're all related, they may simply be a single force, which is why they all seem to be "finely tuned".

I've heard the first-mover argument, and I think it's the best anti-atheist argument. It neatly turns the whole argument into "God just exists" or "the Universe just exists", and as we have no conclusive proof for either, it comes down to your choice / belief.
Weird, considering that the very well-known free game Frozen Bubble is written in SDL/Perl...
Excel for Windows was much better than Lotus 123 for Windows. Lotus basically took the DOS version of 123 and added some menus for it. It never did feel like a fist class GUI app.
Is SEO becoming a dying specialisation?
SOs login has always been a fucking pain. No surprise there.
Almost all releases of the NT line were good (including Win 7).

Was there any OS contemporary to NT 3.51 that was better than it at anything (beside win 95 when it comes to compatibility with more software & hardware)?
"Wouldn't it be nice if we could abstract some of the low-level details of different socket types, connection handling, framing, or even routing?"

Perhaps I'm missing something, but wouldn't this make ZeroMQ a Modern & Fast abstraction of a Networking Stack?
It's also not so good for the visually impaired because you can't really provide an audio version of the challenge, whereas identifying the letters in a random string is easier to present as audio.
Funny, I find Python to be more stable than Perl, the one that needs multiple versions on the same system, and the one with modules that fail to compile without tweaking compiler flags.
I don't see why a grant from Phillip Morris would be any more or less suspect than a grant from the American Cancer Society

Doesn't Altria have a long history of pushing fake science about the health effects of smoking on smokers that directly contradicted its own internal research? The American Cancer Society has no equivalent scandals in its history. The fact that Altria spent many years actively lying to the public about the health effects of a dangerous and highly addictive drug it was selling seems relevant in assessing its credibility.

both are large organizations which depend for a lot of their livelihood on one possible outcome of such research

This comparison seems...not right. If we invented an absolute 100% cure for lung cancer tomorrow that cost almost nothing, the American Cancer Society would still have plenty of funding. There are a great many cancers that have nothing to do with cigarette smoking.
"Some languages are closer to how you see a problem."

And how you see a problem is strongly influenced by prior programming language experience.

You often need to determine if a language will become easier for you once your mind groks how it represents problems, and if, in the long run, the effort to reach this comprehension is worth it.

The tricky thing is determining if a language will become easier once you reach that Ah Ha! moment, or if it is intrinsically hard (for whatever reason; typically poor design).
Feel free to vote me down, if you're all about karma... :-)

I asked because his claim went against what I've read on the subject. I don't really know, since I haven't really been working with web development for a couple of years (which is why I started with "Interesting").
The issue here though is that Bill was trying to download MovieMaker. I bet when Bill talked to the MovieMaker team he was given a demo of MovieMaker already installed on a computer.

With that said, at Apple the website feels like an extension of the company. WIth Microsoft the website seems like a standard site for a corporation.
If you take the rope from 0T to >30T instantly, then you will have all the weights lift up. As long as you keep the rope tense, they will all rise with different accelerations until they hit the top.

If you apply tension over time, even very quickly, then the lighter weight will rise first.
And my point, which you get to at the end of your msg, is that a mathematical or logical error can invalidate a hypothesis regardless of the subject matter of the datapoints being measured.

If you say 10 nuclear reactors + 10 nuclear reactors = 25 nuclear reactors. I can prove that wrong mathematically without knowing anything about nuclear reactors.

That's all I'm saying-- you don't have to necessarily have to know something about the subject matter to prove it wrong logically.

Likewise, I can evaluate a statement on the correlation of datapoints of a genome without knowing anything about what a genome does or is. (assuming you have defined the datapoints)
Most of those are "mee too products". Not breaking new ground, and certainly not the best of options.
I agree, when you consider when products were released and compare it to similar offerings at those times, many Microsoft products are (or were) "decent". I would add these:

- Windows 95: Not perfectly stable or technically very groundbreaking, but a good enough combination of usability and features to be considered decent in my mind and millions of others at the time.

- IE6: great at the time. Some of the standards it doesn't support didn't exist when it came out. Also, IE5 introduced the Microsoft.XMLHTTP ActiveX control, which was the foundation for XMLHttpRequest. If that wasn’t created by Microsoft at the time, AJAX almost certainly wouldn’t be as ubiquitous as it is today.

- SQL Server 20xx: Perhaps RDMS's aren't your thing, but they're very much needed for now, and Microsoft's can certainly handle most relational db needs.

- .NET 3.5+ and C# 3+: If you want a statically typed language and platform, anything .NET 3.5 or greater are at least ok.

- ASP.NET MVC 2+: Not quit the same as a dynamically-based ROR or Django and they also don’t give you a default ORM; you pick it, but its solid and improving. Source code is available; contribs aren’t.

- Visual Studio 2008+: Again, not some crazy vim/emacs setup, although plugins can somewhat help simulate that, but these definitely don’t suck at all.

- IIS7+: Just because it’s not Apache doesn't mean it isn't decent. It is quite powerful and secure.

- Windows Server 2003+: Never had bad experiences with these.

- Microsoft Security Essentials: Very good and free antivirus.

I’m sure there’s more, but it is an exaggeration to say Microsoft hasn’t made any decent products. Certainly some of these don’t seem as good overall when accounting for the licensing costs and associated culture/stigma that comes with working in Microsoft shops, but many of products in and of themselves are decent.
> Windows 2000 and XP were very good operating systems

I by no means am some Microsoft hater, but I'm amused about this tinted rose glass nostalgia for XP. It's easy to say XP is a good system now with the maturity of three service packs and the bad taste of Vista still in our mouths, but I remember all those years ago much dislike of XP around the internet. Among other things, it was a security nightmare that wasn't even fixed until SP2. You put release day XP on your machine and put it on the internet and you're machine will be probably hacked within the hour.

On the other hand not to many people stuck with Vista. A fully patched Vista installation works just fine nowadays. It still has higher system requirements, but those requirements are now 4 year old systems.
NYTimesOpen Meetup: different models for attracting developers to a platform
My dad always told me: 'the phone is there for your convenience, not for for anyone else'. If I don't feel like fielding a call at a given moment, I simply won't pick up. But I'll take texts or emails anytime!

What about emergencies? A certain protocol exists for friends and family in double-ringing the phone which always gets me to pick up immediately.
I invited some of my developer friends to support my project. I didn't know who has a HN account and who doesn't, but these are all real people.
I'm currently writing a web application with perl catalyst...
Yup, now they just need to actually do that with quite a few of their own products and we'd have two happy, completely different corporations that don't release sh*tty software from time to time.
Is it? I thought this was a level of abstraction higher? The premature optimizer would want access to the raw sockets this is built ontop of. I could be misunderstanding, though, I've never used it. The idea I have in my head is,

ZeroMQ: Send a message, other side either receives full message as a single payload (or nothing at all? or an error is raised? I'm not tototally sure).

Sockets: write(), read() and friends. Other side has to make sure he has the whole message, otherwise read() again and wait, deal with errors on its own, etc.
Utterly unfair comparison. The Apple and Microsoft business models are so unlike each other it's almost inaccurate to say they're in the same business. Apple can get product quality to the point they do because they laser focus on a few profitable segments. Microsoft's business model --- not "what Steve Ballmer thinks they should be doing this month" but their underlying business model --- involves them serving 80+% of the market.

This is sort of like complaining that Safeway can't make ice cream as well as Ben and Jerry's.
Read the following and stop asking:

http://www.modernperlbooks.com/mt/index.html
Win2k being released was a huge blow to Linux at the time. Redhat 9 was so awful in comparison. I remember how a lot of developers I knew who had been Linux users actually switched back.
Er, he personally launched Xanga? I think not from what I have read elsewhere.

More like he learned how to code/design from being given work to do on Xanga.

Rewriting history there eh?
Have you ever had to support sharepoint? I don't know if I'd consider it an excellent product.
Ask HN: What is the oldest computer that you still use for production?
Someone in a thread about Perl wrote: ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1660670 ):

> I would not at all be surprised if some critical infrastructure that must run lest a bunch of people gets killed is written in PDP 9 assembler.

That piqued my curiosity, what is the oldest piece of gear that you've still got up and running?

I've checked my own stuff and it seems the oldest machine that is still in use is about 4 years old.

I don't care about things that you have lying around that 'might still boot' or that are kept for sentimental value, old gear that is still running production of some sort.
I think you need to start qualifying 'startup'a little more, particularly when the topic tends towards hair splitting.

It looks like the definition a lot of people use is one that includes your startup as a subset.

I find it so frustrating reading through threads like this that get all bogged down in semantic nitpicking. It also opens a door to a particularly annoying type of quasi-trolling or baiting. Maybe 'startups that exit' or something
Also because the major browsers have stepped up their rate of innovation. So they now either have:

a) Shorter release cycles and test phases
b) More changes made in a release cycle without a corresponding increase in the number of testers.

It reminds me of the Internet Explorer / Netscape wars (around the time of Netscape 4).
I always assumed that it tended to work out for "normal" users -- that sucks if it doesn't. I tend to be the sort of person who "[thinks that] development versions, experimental and unstable are for old ladies" (HT to xorg-edgers.) I'm pretty sure that condemns me to a life of resolving weird incompatibilities. I definitely don't personally trust autoremove as far as I can chuck it.

(edit: my experience is on Ubuntu, not Debian.)
That is hard to say. I would lean toward "yes" because Perl has had longer to ferment there. It is a hard call because Ruby "comes from" Japan, so it is hard to make a definitive statement on this question.
I had thought so too, but it's not as simple as the Wikipedia page makes it seem. The report does consider the possibility that the red 'dye' came from a meteorite which is thought to have entered the atmosphere and exploded, but rejected this idea because it was found to be biological (as opposed to mineral). At the time of this report, nobody had suggested any exobiological explanation, so none was considered or refuted. I would be wary of relying so completely on it for a few reasons.

First, the identification of the biological material as an alga of the genus Trentopohlia (which one?) was only visual in nature, and not confirmed by spectroscopic or other methods. Second, the material reproduced poorly, if at all, in growth media - except for a corn-based growth medium which had been incubated for over an hour at 60 degrees C (I presume before the introduction of the sample, their wording is a little vague). Lichens normally prefer a cool humid atmosphere; it seems Trentepohlia algae are particularly difficult to grow in culture, and I couldn't find any evidence of corn being the organism's preferred snack. There's no references so I'm not sure if this result is meant to be significant or not.

Third, while the report noted the widespread presence of suitable lichens in the area and hypothesized a widespread release of spores into the air as the source of the red coloring, in the 'further studies' section following the conclusion they note that this explanation depends on phenomena that are 'quite improbable' (mass synchronous spore release in lichens is not known or thought to occur) to 'not possible': strong vertical updrafts (ie thermals) would be required to lift spores up into the atmosphere; the red rains were observed to take place in the morning, but thermals do not occur at night; rains during the preceding night and early morning were normal and should have washed out any spores which had climbed into the atmosphere the previous day. A copy is here: http://web.archive.org/web/20060613135746/http://www.geociti...

I don't know whether this new theory has any basis in fact. I'm just pointing out the weaknesses in the default hypothesis, as observed by the authors themselves.
One thing that always made me scratch my head and say, "that seems hard" is Perl vs Ruby. I've done a bit of both, but Perl just looks confusing in comparison.

I know Ruby and Perl as supposed to be close, but when I look at your average Perl script, I just get confused instantly. Ruby of course I get. Yet when I try to read Python (which doesn't have a direct heritage), I quickly get what's happening.
The titles, organization membership, scientific prizes are of course a kind of authority, but they are not assigned based on authority alone. It is a whole system built upon peer review, reproducible experiments, verifiable hypotheses and so on.
Another idea along these lines would be to present a scene and ask the user how many objects are in the scene. It's a very difficult problem for computers to descern individual objects in a scene, especially if they overlap.
It makes $1 billion per year
I updated the title to reflect the year. I posted it because it's related to the Bill Gates e-mail about Windows Usability. It's from a similar perspective -- power user/programmer who has a lot of sway on the platform trying to just use it as a user.
How to go about learning Objective-C?
I want to learn Mac OS X development, and write applications that are useful, and make a little fortune on the side, if i get good enough. I don't really have much experience in any other languages. I've read "C in 21 days", but I'm hardly any good, and haven't written much code.

Is there anything I need to know, or any pre-requisites I require before jumping into Objective-C ? Do I need to learn C/Smalltalk first?

What books would you recommend?

Thanks for the help, and for reading this at all, love HN.
Many policies become "lawyerly" to avoid ambiguities and loopholes. What happens when you make it less "lawyerly"?
Common, how is this on the front page! - Flagged by the way - oh I can't flag.
Reimplementing LINQ to Objects: Part 2 - "Where"
Windows also lets you review whatever it is going to download in an update, so you can just disable the download of the X extra stuff that you don't trust signing up for.
Basically I think we agree but have slightly different definitions of mathematics and logics. I just think that purely mathematical errors are relatively rare (and hard to observe, since even where formal proofs are given they often skip a lot of steps, and require higher mathematics).
Not if he weighs less than 60kg. :-)
I've always found their openId approach to be pretty nice, actually.

I do occasionally find myself being automatically logged out for seemingly no reason at all but it only takes two clicks to log right back in.
I think by far the most telling part of this was this quote:

"Then it told me to reboot my machine. Why should I do that? I reboot every night -- why should I reboot at that time?"

No wonder he has no idea how horrible Windows is. He resets it every day.
Definitely need Ping for apps.

The genius recommendation engine is a start, but I've already gone through those and got what I want and now there's nothing new. Also, it only tells me about categories of apps that I already know I like and will use, such as photography apps and games. What if there's a whole new category of apps that I would find useful? Ping would be great for me to find those new categories.
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This is one consequence risked when an ISV is very public and explicit about how much money they make. The chance is always non-zero, but surely it is increased if you reveal numbers in public and they are large.

That said, I love Balsamiq and appreciate most everything he has shared with the public. And I think what this Chinese guy is proposing is scummy, at least in how he treats it.
Perhaps if iTunes didn't suck, and if I could use it in my browser of choice, I'd like it more. But as it stands I won't ever use it. Last.fm does everything I need and more, doesn't take up yet another spot in the in iTunes.
Google Liable for Copyright Infringement in Germany
German court concludes YouTube is guilty of infringement. This is a stark departure from US legal assessments of the video engine's legal liability.
Then they'd better find a new rite of passage, because ZeroMQ is turning into a category killer.
Oh I love downtown Los Gatos and Mountain view, but I wouldnt really call them "trendy', especially compared to Santana row.
Just curious, what ways you found python restrictive?
Thank you :)

We're a little embarrassed by all the bugs popping up. I hope you guys check back in a couple days when we have them all worked out.

And then we'll start making some improvements.

- a swarmation dev
Leverage. Operations and Training Manual
See at this point I would be far more amused than furious.

A legitimate, helpful response (although it IS SO's login, so.... eh) that's a little bit of a "hey quit being a douche" is actually a pretty good way to go about it from a PR standpoint, in my opinion.

But hell at least they respond.
I think people want products that are simple to use, not just simple. There's a big difference.

There are many products that have a lot of features, but employ concepts like progressive disclosure to make them easier for a wide range of people to use.
Duke undergrads create real-time campus bus tracking website
Funny enough, yes - but what if the end of the dialog goes the other way? Is it fair/appropriate for a customer service rep (is that what Jeff is?) to respond in this manner, no matter how they are approached by the user?

It feels like a gamble. You might win that user - or lose them badly, and reputation along with it.
An inflammatory jackass who doesn't know who Yo-Yo Ma is and who thinks Apple would ever consider Gravatar support gets this much interest on news.ycomb? And did you notice it's a self-submit? Classy.

Lately it seems like this discussion group has become increasingly anti-Apple. It didn't use to be this way, originally it was far more neutral. I wonder what's changed?
"Priority Inbox" available to Google Apps customers
The Perl jobs mailing list frequently has a dozen or more jobs internationally a week. I'd say no, Perl is far from dead, despite it not having the sexy factor it once did.