skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Look, I understand that combining gcc/binutils/glibc is a complete clusterfuck that needs some patches (each of these projects is "individually" at least somewhat sane, but they don't like working together at all), and I understand that there is a lot of shitty code in the average desktop environment. Really, some patches probably are necessary. (Although there's a whole debate about feeding them upstream that you could have at this point.)

But why does Debian split up Postfix (well-written, actively maintained) into a zillion different packages stitched together by dynamic loading, instead of just configuring it properly? Why does Debian fuck up OpenSSL?
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> generally markets for things no one wants don't exist.

This is not an excuse for predatory practice. By this metric, there is a market for crack, why would you despise honest crack dealers, they're simply satisfying their customers after all.
I agree. The word 'hack', while we're on the subject of surreal paintings, would be more appropriate for some of Dali's works such as 'Gala Contemplating the Mediterranean Sea which at Twenty Meters becomes a Portrait of Abraham Lincoln' (yes, that's the full title). As the name of this work suggests, it is a painting of a woman looking at the sea which, when viewed from a sufficient distance, becomes Lincoln's portrait.
http://www.authenticsociety.com/about/GalaMediterraneanLinco...
I'd rather they return the youth during which I was a Debian maintainer.
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The trick is to insert a glottal stop between Libre and Office.
This is an Ubuntu package problem, not Debian. In case you didn't notice, Ubuntu is built from a snapshot of Debian /unstable/. They call it unstable for a reason, I guess.

On Debian stable "aptitude install rubygems" followed by "gem install rake" just works. This looks like a completely gratuitous rant, I've seen Jed Shaw better inspired.
Here is my beef with Debian.

A lot of the software they package comes with unit tests. Those unit tests have a purpose. They are meant to see whether or not the software as configured and installed, works.

Debian systematically strips those unit tests out, and never runs them to see how much stuff they are shipping already broken. Why? Why not package the unit tests as an optional package, and make sure they have a wide variety of systems in different configurations running them to notice problems?

I can't count how many times I've tried to install a Perl module from CPAN, found it was failing its unit tests, installed the Debian package with it, ran the unit tests, and found that the unit tests said the package, as installed, was broken. It's not as if the package developer didn't try to tell you you were missing something. Why throw that information away?

If they did this then they'd automatically catch a lot of problems that currently get missed. Heck, insert a test for ruby gems that says, "Does this software start?" They'd have caught this bug automatically.

Until Debian catches up with standard best practices, I completely can't agree with the meme that they run software better than everyone else. It isn't as if unit testing is a new idea. It has been pretty mainstream for most of the last decade. Some were doing it earlier. Perl has been doing it since the 1980s.
Thanks, BTBurke. Good point. Indexing the entire content of the page so that you can search for anything within the page is a big part of what we do. However, there are several other things we do that we were trying to show on the landing page. For instance, we have an Easy Reader that shows only the essential content of the page without any ads, headers, menus, javascript etc.(similar to the Safari Reader/Instapaper Text View). The current version of the landing page is an attempt at bringing out all the stuff we do/plan to do.

You are right, though. We need to keep iterating on the messaging of the landing page until it is obvious to users within a few seconds of seeing the page.
Create a wrapper function for a one-line statment? Sure, it's more readable, but it's Unpythonic.
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That has been done before, just not exactly that way. Remember AOL?
No interest in selling them. More interested in building something useful.
Dynamic HTTP caching on AppEngine (CDN like)
They insisted on the .org because it is a legal issue. From Wikipedia,

> The project and software are commonly known as OpenOffice, but this term is a trademark held by a company in the Netherlands co-founded by Wouter Hanegraaff and is also in use by Orange UK,[8] requiring the project to adopt OpenOffice.org as its formal name.[9]
They are able to do this because the amount of balance on the card, and the features of the card (not certain which ones) allow them to operate this card as a gift card, rather than a "Bank Account" which is what the PATRIOT ACT defines the other such cards as.
Debian does have general policies and a culture. (Yes, we could say it's just a bunch of files on a bunch of FTP servers, but we can agree that that's stupid, right?)

As to the bug report thing, let me clarify: why should upstream authors have to pay the support cost (in e.g. time and negative impressions of them) for bugs introduced by Debian's packagers?
Did Oracle buy Sun to strip it and liquidate the intellectual assets? What's their plan here? It seems like they have zero interest in building the products.
except that here '&' is for the reference operator

and any C/C++ programmer who have spent few days with the language will never be confused by that

see http://www.cplusplus.com/doc/tutorial/pointers/

----
This reference to a variable can be obtained by preceding
the identifier of a variable with an ampersand sign (&),
known as reference operator, and which can be literally
translated as "address of".
----
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Whatever you do, don't start playing Minecraft.
> why should upstream authors have to pay the support cost (in e.g. time and negative impressions of them) for bugs introduced by Debian's packagers?

They are just as capable of saying "that's a Debian bug, go file a bug report there". That's a small price to pay for being open source, in any case. Debian certainly picks up bugs that are intended for upstream, and there are certainly instances when Debian maintainers have been quite helpful with fixing them. And others where they haven't been. With that many people there are bound to be some really good ones, and some that are below average...
Third-party binaries suck, but you can compile from source, you know...
How to Get Bought by Google, Facebook
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> What is the alternative?

If Debian made it a policy to change packages as little as possible (which is not "not at all"), these problems wouldn't show up.

Also, yes, your shiny PostgreSQL package now matches every other Debian package, but it is different from every non-Debian PostgreSQL install out there. Zed wasn't talking about lock-in for nothing.
The Butt-Ugly Fish Book has a great section on this: http://www.amazon.com/Expert-Programming-Peter-van-Linden/dp...

In fact it's filled with great sections - go read it if you haven't.
Spam, obviously.
no, but you will certainly never be a skilled C programmer if you don't reckonize a reference

even me a noob in C I can see that it is indeed a reference (as I said I m a noob =))
One thing that complicates your situation is that your customers are not the users; your customers are the e-commerce sites you sell to-- the end-users are their customers.

This makes "Have you talked to your users?" a bit more complicated.

My pivot suggestion: "e-commerce mixed with social" is a great niche, but I don't think your MVP has nailed it, yet. I'd move away from the emphasis on real-time, and think, rather, about "How can I leverage social networks to support the sales process?" Note that one of the tough nuts to crack is the chicken-egg problem; the more content that's produced by end-users, the more valuable the service is-- but you need to prime the pump somehow.

As I mentioned (via email), I'd love to talk to you in more detail about possible ways to do this in my particular sub-niche (online bookstores), but I imagine that a lot of the stuff can generalize.
Awesome paintings this is truly some great art. But how in world did this get on the front page of HN, this is reddit material.
It depends what resources/requirements you're working with.

If you're just a bunch of dudes in a room building simple software on your own, you don't need a PM.

If you're a bunch of dudes building more complex software (various moving parts) who need to interface with different vendors, part timers, outsourced stuff (e.g. design, copywriting) and have critical deadlines e.g. customer expecting your product on 2010/XX/XX - then you'll probably find it a lot more useful to have a PM :)

I will say though that a PM who cannot jump in and get his hands dirty coding or designing, is probably not so useful in the early stages.
That's hilarious. Users of Maven and CPAN represent a "critical mass of small-scale developers"? Holy shit.

A similar idea was voiced a few days ago, specifically regarding Java libraries (http://fnords.wordpress.com/2010/09/24/the-real-problem-with...).

My response remains the same: Debian (or what-have-you) is but one distro among many, and those of us that treat such things as important but fundamentally commodity deployment platforms have no wish to spend our lives babysitting whatever package manager happens to be on the operating system we're using that month/year/whatever. Further, plenty of people have plenty of good reasons for deploying on Windows and OS X, so using tools that work well there make sense.

The priorities of the various linux distros aren't everyone else's priorities – which somehow seems to come as a galloping shock to some.
> Everything about Debian's approach is in rabid opposition to this.

This is not necessarily true. There are many Debian packages that can be installed in parallel. I still have gcc-2.95 installed and that hasn't been available in the Debian archive for years. It is named properly and doesn't conflict with any of the newer gccs. So it is possible to make parallel installs.

> They want to scatter the files all over their precious FHS.

This is true. And as a Debian user, I support them fully. I don't want to learn some stupid Ruby package directory convention. I already know if I install a Debian package that the configuration files go in /etc/packagename and the docs are in /usr/share/doc/packagename. Every package is like that and consistency is a good thing.

I think the Debian Perl maintainers have gotten this right. They have a program "dh-make-perl" that will download a CPAN package and make it into a Debian package. This really gets you the best of both worlds. Hopefully something like that will get written for Python and Ruby (they haven't had their CPAN clones out for as long as CPAN, so give it time).

> On top of all of that there's their release cycle where they freeze all the packages at a particular version number for several years for normal users.

That's not just a Debian thing. %$#@! RHEL still ships a 2.6.18 kernel in their latest release! There is a certain class of people who are very, very conservative with their software upgrades. Debian Stable and RHEL appeal to those types. If you aren't one of those types, don't run them--instead run Debian Unstable or Fedora or Ubuntu. Those stay on the bleeding edge most of the time.
How To Guarantee Enthusiastic College Students
That's the point though. Very few questions (and even fewer interesting questions) have 'perfect' answers. Saying that A+ or 10 is only given for perfection is equivalent of saying A+ or 10 does not exists as a grade and the highest grade is A or 9. And then we start the discussion all over.

Now (on a slight tangent) I'm in no way saying that best kid in the class should always get the A+.
At least it's better than go-oo.org.
Of course I was glossing over details because I was not attempting to point fingers at any specific administration or make it a partisan debate. Historically, deficit spending with the rationalization that it is stimulative has been done by both parties.

Debating whether we should have cut taxes to stimulate the economy or paid down the outstanding debt would be worth debating if we were comparing two situations with no ongoing deficit.

Everyone in government's job is to operate the government with a balanced budget, every year. IF they do not do this, they have failed. There are plenty of political incentives for irresponsible individuals to endlessly spend to buy political power, influence and to feather their own nests.

In an ongoing deficit situation they have already failed in their primary job of delivering a balanced government budget every year (on average). So I see little point in debating whether, having achieved that, tax cuts or paying down debt is more beneficial to the economy.

That said, the regulatory and tax burden on our economy is unacceptable. You can't pretend to give a damn about the quality of life of the american people and support high taxes, inflation and deficit spending. This applies to both parties.

You argue for rasing taxes, but we are currently running record annual deficits and have only continued to pile on future obligations, bringing the current net present value of all future obligations to over $200 Trillion. (in a recent estimate, though I can't say how accurate it is, whatever the actual figure is, it is well beyond "irresponsible" and into "suicidal" territory.)
The efforts of both Zed and Debian are based on the same corrupt motive: self-satisfaction

As the upstream developer, Zed wants to make sure that his software is distributed in a manner that is useful to people and actually works and shit. This gives him jollies.

As the distributors, the Debian contributors want to fullfil ideological goals, fit everything into their neat hierarchy, assuage neckbeard sysadmins that the version number is sufficiently ancient (not that the software is, given the distro patches), pretend to care about people running it on the PA-RISC port of Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, wank about licensing, and reach consensus. This gives self-important teenagers and manchildren all kinds of joillies.
That would be $200k, but still not enough to make your conclusion any different.
Ubuntu Font Family
I think the story of "forking" system packages for local use needs improvement.

And for all Debian's adherence to standards, it's unfortunate that one couldn't be agreed upon for source packages, 'apt-get source' is a mixed bag.

This makes it a royal pain to maintain forks, because now you have to be up on three or four source packaging formats, in addition to getting the final binary format to comply with the standards.

For the parts of the system where you don't care, using the distributor provided packages is fine.

But when you do care, it is often simpler to just use pristine upstream rolled into your own deb as a starting point for managing package versions at your site.
Agreed. To Oracle, these are just pawns in a game. The winner of the game (which is always Oracle) gets to fund Larry's next yacht.
Let's say that 1 in 10 payday loans are written off, and one in 10 payday loans companies fail. What rate of return to you need to make it worthwhile investing in this industry (the capital has to come from somewhere). What if it's 1 in 5?

I don't think this business is a licence to print money, the various providers must be competing with each other...
Actually all it means is "we see our main competitor as Microsoft".
Object-Disoriented Programming
Some of his reasoning can be found in posts in that thread

http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=6273.0

I like to think that 'interesting decisions' are what make any game fun but that alone doesn't explain it... ludology?
The alternative to expensive credit isn't cheap credit. It's no credit at all.
s/Ruby/Ruby, Perl, Java, Python

If everyone thinks you're off in the wilderness, you might want to check yourself, maybe just a bit.
AccountNow is another one and has a much higher limit for how much you can fund to your account and keep there ($10,000 vs $2,500.) These services are quite valuable for people who are unable to get checking accounts because they got themselves reported to the "chex system" which is basically the equivalent of a bad credit report but only used by banks.
"Cisco has also seen those kinds of bad contracts as well as 'systemic open-source problems' at companies it was interested in buying, Adams said. Cisco will have to consider how much it will cost it to get out of those contracts or correct those issues, and whether that cost makes the acquisition worth it."

Systemic open-source problems?? Correct "those" issues???

While I understand to some extent the issues surrounding acquisitions of companies with products using GNU GPL'd code (just as an example), referring to open-source code as an "issue" or a "problem" is just asking for trouble.
there are more java and .net programmers out there than python/ruby programmers. hence a java programmer is easy to find, cheaper to hire and less disruptive to fire. This is probably one of the most important reasons why corporations prefer java/.net over ruby on rails/python. that said, when a programming language is around for more than a dozen years, it gains the tag of being reliable ( rightfully so).
Would you be willing to share the details of the algorithm?
Setting Up An NFS Server And Client On CentOS 5.5
Is it just me, or are the OOo .. eh, LibreOffice sources somewhat messy? Just checked out the build repo and the writer repo (http://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice), and I really have to wonder if this kind of arrangement is workable at all.

Now I'm not an insider, so I don't know, by from my lay-man perspective I think the first thing they need to do is clean up the repositories and project structure before anything else is done.
In practice, the reserve ratio has continued to decline, and in fact, via the fraudulent FDIC underwriting practices massive moral hazard has been created in the banking sector.

In short, banks can leverage as much as they want, and the FDIC will cover their butts if they fail, but the FDIC does not charge adequate premiums based on risk. Further the federal reserve isn't really a "lender of last resort"

In fact, the term "lender of last resort" is inaccurate, as the federal reserve offers rates on money that are lower than the market. They are doing this now as a response to a crisis that was caused by them doing it in the past (as I pointed out elsewhere.)

A lender of "last resort" would be one you could always go to, but who was expensive and therefore you were incentivized - "first resort" - to go to the market.
> If Debian made it a policy to change packages as little as possible (which is not "not at all"), these problems wouldn't show up.

No, but others would show up. Come on, these things are engineering tradeoffs, with both positive and negative aspects. Even where we disagree about the benefits and disadvantages, we should agree to disagree in a civil way, rather than calling for "in-person confrontations". There are certainly technical complaints to be made about Debian (I could make a long list myself), but Zed's attitude is way out of line.
Have you done any testing to see how many users you lose by doing this? There is, after all, a percentage of your users who will see your "login with Yahoo" message and not understand what you mean, then leave when they can't find a way to register.

You seem to think that number would be low. Experience with users & registration leads me to believe that it will be quite high. I personally don't plan to implement openID, so I can't do any testing. I'd be curious to see what your numbers say.
Ask HN: Should I translate this service into English?
Hi guys, I made this address/route lookup service. Its main appeal is the reductionist user interface: A full screen map and a small input for the address you are looking for. It allows you to store the addresses you find, find routes between them, share with others, etc.

The site is here:

http://www.findsted.dk

The service is in Danish, but the results are partly based on the GMaps API so you can find international addresses too. Just input an address and click 'Find'.

Would you use this service or do you think others would?

I was pondering translating it and launching it as a global service, but I am unsure what Americans and the rest of the world uses for this, and whether my service could improve/supplement that.
If you look at history, this has been the case ever since the founding of the Federal Reserve. This is not a failure of will, this is the way the system is designed. The system is designed to fail, because this maximizes profits for the bankers in the long run and for politicians in the short term. When the system fails, most of the politicians who propagated the bad policies will be out of power.

The federal reserve put us on a boom-bust business cycle, and those who understand the cycle profit from it. The fed drives up the boom, as they did with housing, and everybody who is smart makes money, then they raise rates and trigger a bust, and when that happens to the point where serious damage is going on, everybody buys up assets really cheap.

The politicians profit from this as well- during the boom they say "look at this boom I created!" and get reelected. During the bust they say "look at this bust the other guy created, give me more power!" and they get more power.

The ultimate boom, of course, is in the value of the dollar which is actually nothing more than a debt instrument itself. When it crashes there will be huge political opportunity to remake the country, including constitutional amendments or even a new constitutional convention. People will suffer, but there's nothing like a good crisis for the politicians.
If it had declared

struct { int x[4] } s;

...then &s, &s.x and s.x would all evaluate to the same address, but with three different types.
I consume more information offline than online .. I think.

Plan to make this a desktop utility as well, something that integrates with the desktop that allows you to right-click and "Zukmo" any given file. Even if you have to fake it by copying files to a temp directory and later sync them with your servers (why? better keep it private on users' machines.)

You will need integration with (MS|Open) Office sometime in the distant future.

Call Insync and see if you can integrate with their clients:

https://www.insynchq.com/

P.S. Nice clojure-like logo :-)
I'll second that. I've used HostGator in the past and they are very reliable for the price.
"That's a Debian bug" is not useful - you can only determine that after you have analyzed the bug thoroughly, and gone to the length of getting out a Debian system instead of whatever you're usually developing on.

But yes, some maintainers are very good and some are quite bad; however, Debian's policies and patch-happiness means that bad maintainers (can/tend to) do much more damage than in other distributions/OSes.