skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Why do they persist?

Because they have a systemwide mechanism for doing precisely the same thing rubygems is trying to do with Ruby, that system has been in place longer than Ruby itself and has proven to be one of the major strengths not only of Debian, but, in similar implementations, of all Linux distros.

We have explored this before - if Zed wants a Ruby that works his way, he should install a separate one, like Python developers do with virtualenv or a source tarball. Then his gems will be, hopefully, installed somewhere sane out of the way of update the system.

If gem installs its libraries on the wrong place then, it's a bug with gem, not Debian.
Spamhaus Releases The Spamhaus Whitelist
Two traders arrested for exploiting weakness in HFT algorithm
Yes, the word 'hacks' somehow has become appropriate.
And you're forgetting that there are "end-user" programs that depend on those libraries as well, so they really do need to be packaged up.

I'm not forgetting this. I don't think the user's programs should use the same libraries (or even the same language install) that the distro's programs depend on. This way, if the user messed something up (like trying to upgrade a library), the entire distro wont be hosed. It's a really bad idea from a stability, security, and design standpoint if you don't keep these two things separate.
ARM handles signed and unsigned numbers equally. Addition and subtraction are the same operation whether signed or unsigned. Multiplication of 32-bit numbers with 64-bit result has both signed and unsigned versions. Condition codes can test for both signed and unsigned relations.

As for the real problem, you are right on the mark. Mixing signed and unsigned can result in a negative number being interpreted as a large positive number with unpleasant consequences. However, casts will rarely remedy this in a safe manner since unsigned to signed conversion where the value is outside the range of the target type is unspecified by the C standard.
I mostly agree with you. However if you've ever tried to explain those concepts to a bunch of PMs, you'll quickly discover that it isn't worth the complication of trying to describe things the "right" way. There are more important problems to deal with.

My one point of disagreement is that dynamically it is a bandit problem. The reason that I disagree is that the things we are tracking and trying to optimize have very strong time dependencies that aren't obvious. (Behavior varies a lot by time of day, day of week, week of month, and month of year.) Therefore attempting to dynamically optimize can very, very easily go astray. That's not to say you can't do it. For instance I am quite supportive of using dynamic techniques to explore a multi-variate space. But in the end I wouldn't be comfortable unless you did a classic A/B test to validate the results.
That's not the suggestion I give to non-technical users, that's the suggestion that I give to you that took the time to learn what OpenId is but complains about it.

What I tell website developers is to add a login with Google, Yahoo, ... + OpenId (Google and Yahoo are openId providers) and each will redirect users to the correct OpenId endpoint (the one from yahoo, the one from google or your own).

And I don't say anything to non-technical users. They will see a "login with Yahoo" or "login with Facebook" or "login with Gmail" and they won't even ask me questions about OpenID. The ones that know what OpenId is and have their own custom URL will use it. Others will use the endpoints provided by Yahoo or Google and won't know what OpenID is and they don't need to.
Frankly, I'm really surprised this took so long. The mechanism by which a phone call is routed/made is a compliment to the iPhone, and hence any direction Apple can take that commodifies the process is good for their core business (making great devices). I'd love to see Google start competing with AT&T on the value they provide to the iPhone.
Since gems are packages themselves, why can't some clever rubista write the missing gem2deb and gem3rpm translators?

Why can't Zed do it and fix the problem instead of ranting about it?

I know I won't. It's not my problem. This is a WONTFIX bug for me.
How I handle my mail
This video contains content from Sony Music Entertainment. It is not available in your country.

Darn it!
Argh, couldn't they have come up with a less clunky name??
I'm based in the North-West (near Liverpool), but I travel a lot. Sometimes these meetups coincide with my being nearby and I can distort my travels to catch them.

This one would've required minimal distortion, but just hours before it was announced I finalized my travel plans for the Thursday and Friday, so there is now no slack available.

Shame, really. The potentially quieter venue really appeals to me.

ADDED IN EDIT: Thanks for the downvote - nice to know that honest feedback is appreciated. I'm still trying to work out if I can change my plans and make it, but it's interesting how a single action by a single anonymous person can have such a negative effect. I'm not sure if I care to bother any more.
> Why should the author report a bug when it's the incompetence of the Debian maintainer?

I think you really should go to debian.org and demand they return your money.
No. Unless you count a couple of small lines-of-credit with our local bank, which we took as backup in case some initiatives failed (hiring an API programmer, expanding the office, etc).
"The value of your business is the value of your best of several products times a multiplier. You apply the multiplier once for every time you have a good idea. The number of good ideas you can have in ninety days is 90 divided by the number of days it takes you to prove an idea is a good idea."
His Nov.2009 blog entry on ZFS data deduplication is a pretty good primer:

http://blogs.sun.com/bonwick/en_US/entry/zfs_dedup

P.S. also, the 2008 pics with Linus. I suppose there is no further story to go with those ...
These paintings are... amazing. I love this guy's style. I wish there were a game stylised like this (it's sort of like Braid, but somehow better). Thanks for this post.
Direct link to artist's site: http://www.yerkaland.com/
This article doesn't really explain why go-oo.org was not sufficient. Nonetheless, I wish them all the best (but will continue to use LaTeX.)
Ask HN: I have some generic Twitter usernames - what should I do with them?
I have 'query' and 'dir' Twitter usernames. I built a simply query service and attached it to these accounts (not up atm, moving it to another server tonight) but does anybody have a better idea of a good service to build around these accounts?

The service I built only had support for weather queries (ie @query weather <postcode>) with the intention of adding more services. What else could I add along with weather etc?

Willing to listen to any ideas or if anybody wants to work with me on building something more useful at these accounts.
Good point. Confidence intervals that shouldn't be trusted too much, but confidence intervals none the less.
Oh sure. I have an authorised overdraft, with some fairly standard rate of interest. It's when you exceed that you get hit with exhorbitant fees. Most high street banks charge ~ £30 pounds for exceeding this as far as I am aware. And it's when you're gonna exceed your overdraft that suddenly 2000% apr doesn't look so bad.
As far as the article goes, this new solution could very well be just a different version of the Simplex method, which can also solve this kind of problem.

As some already said: better article needed.
"ARM handles signed and unsigned numbers equally."

Yep, you are right.

I wrote this in a hurry and forget that what I was thinking about was arguments passing in functions. C compilers has to "trim values" if the parameter are not signed int.
This is far from being a rant. It's a concise exposition on the Debian/Ruby issues.

Thanks for posting the link, but being labelled a rant, I nearly didn't go there. Just want to encourage others to read it for an excellent explanation of the issues at hand from the guy who is doing the work.
I spent a few minutes thinking about why I would want this service. It wasn't immediately clear to me what benefit it would provide over something like delicious or just standard bookmarking features in your browser -- then I got it... it indexes the page and lets me search for what I'm looking for later using the full content, rather than just the tags I assigned or information that can be found in the URL or page title. That's something you might want to make more obvious for users that only spend 30 sec on your landing page. Bring out the value proposition right away in simple language, rather than making them wonder what the difference is between filtering, crawling, indexing, recommending, etc.
> also (I think?) have a registered Facebook Application to go along with your site.

Can you please elaborate on this? I thought it was just the meta tags that were needed?
Pair programming is a vile stench on the world that is software development. Damn socialist hippies.

Seriously though, I have used Textmate and e, neither run on Linux (very well irt e), Textmate is no longer active development and neither is e (the recent forced upgrade to 2.0 and the fact that you had to pay AGAIN for something that wasn't updated for two years and had no significant update from 1.4 to 2.0 except that you had to pay again is what led me to just start using vim).
building java app servers such as with websphere and weblogic
Thanks wazoox. Do keep the feedback coming.

You're right. We should move the account creation page under SSL.
I think it plays on the psychology of concession. If you make me a concession then I'm more likely to do you a favour.

They're saying, "We've made DRM, but we don't want to inconvenience our paying users, so the DRM will be incredibly forgiving and infact can be easily circumvented by someone with little technical skill".

I think their potential customers would look at that and be more inclined to buy the games, because it appears they've been done more of a favour when a company cuts back on DRM, even at the expense of their potential income, as opposed to if they simply released the game for free.
These are great enhancements!

Particularly, no $@ clobber, non destructive substitution, the news octal escape, the faster shift.

These I'm more doubtful :

New given/when return, why is that? new package block, why not... don't know if it's really worth it.

Anyway kudos for all the great work.
I was in TechStars class '07, with IntenseDebate. I really enjoyed the TechStars experience and have greatly leveraged from the network I was able to build.

Incubators are generally looking for good teams and less for the perfect business. It's a growing process finding the right thing for the team to do, but if the team works well, you have a much higher chance to create a good business. As for learning as much as possible - ask questions! Everybody is there to help, and even just touching base with your fellow "classmates" is very useful as it often helps you to avoid problems you might've run into otherwise.

Isaac Keyet
California Home and Design Directory
Chdresource.com is your online home and design directory! Find comprehensive data about home and design companies or service providers in California.
I don't generally listen classical music but when it comes to coding/hacking; post classical romantic era (1815–1910) European art music is the magical ingredient of productivity for me.

Action: Tune in to `Frédéric Chopin' or `Franz Schubert' channels on Pandora/Last.fm

Result: at least 2X productivity compared to sans music environment.
Relevant sections:

DOMESTIC DOMAINS- ... Upon receipt of such order, the domain name registrar or domain name registry shall suspend operation of, and lock, the domain name.

NONDOMESTIC DOMAINS- ...
a service provider ... shall take reasonable steps that will prevent a domain name from resolving to that domain name’s Internet protocol address

a financial transaction provider ... shall take reasonable measures, as expeditiously as practical, to prevent ... its service from processing transactions for customers located within the United States based on purchases associated with the domain name
its trademarks from being authorized for use on Internet sites associated with such domain name

a service that serves contextual or display advertisements to Internet sites shall take reasonable measures... to prevent its network from serving advertisements to an Internet site accessed through such domain name.

Source: http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=s111-3804
Yes, that "It's simply a tactic to make sure that you are stuck on Debian." was, and is, an absurd claim without a shred of support.

He also says that "it is sadly pure business and has nothing to do with open source, quality, or culture." which is pretty odd, given that Debian is a non-profit, voluntary organization.
Why the question mark?
If all you need is secure password syncing, you should check out LastPass (http://lastpass.com/).
I've actually added a "Post Series" box now on each of the Reading List pages. Hopefully this will improve nav somewhat.
Good point. Judging from http://www.documentfoundation.org/supporters/ , which apparently includes Novell and most everybody, they got their ducks in a row.

However, not everybody seems thrilled at http://planet.go-oo.org/ ...

P.S. more coverage over at http://lwn.net
If you allow forks under a different name, then someone will put it into Linux distros with that name. Just look at Firefox/IceWeasel. Or CentOS
I'm pretty sure that "this rant" in the parent refers to Zed's post not Lucas's. The parent's point being "we should look at Zed's rant again after reading this discussion by a Debian Ruby maintainer."
Obviously, he should spend just a few hours in the shoes of a package manager. Honestly. What would it be without packages/ports? A mess.

The only people trying to make it bearable here are the package/ports managers and yet they don't get any kind of reward for their job. They have to come up with crazy tricks to make things just work because people who write software are unable to write proper install notes, list dependencies correctly, etc..

This process is heavy, slow and doesn't always produces the expected results (there's no doubt about it). So people thought it would be great to have just language-specific package management systems and make it unbearable again. Alright. I personally never use them and install stuff at hand unobtrusively.

Now, do your job. Go fill a bugreport. Or better yet; fork. This is not discussing things, this is not helping. Tears don't help.
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Implementing OSSTMM Strategies Creates Value
Got the same error, so I can't tell which video it was supposed to be. But it looks like this video uses something like it: Chairlift - Evident Utensil - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuzXVeugvYc
Really?? That's some strong opinion, which I disagree with.
what does prayer have to do with anything?
I used Debian on the desktop for 2 years (2008-2009) ... the whole time the Iceweasel package (their repackaged Firefox) has had its renderer broken, making some web pages unusable for me ... this wasn't a problem if I manually downloaded and installed Firefox, and it finally got fixed just before I switched to Ubuntu.

It does have the best software repository ever, but boy how much it sucks when something's broken.
Hear hear. Nothing strikes fear in my heart like a /usr/local hierarchy filled with a million random versions of random programs. BTW, if you are going to install something into /usr/local, at least use a cheap and easy packager like GNU "stow".
To be able to duplicate anyway, probably.
That's too bad. ZFS (along with crossbow) is one of the best things in Solaris/OpenSolaris.

I was about to say Oracle has a serious human resources problem, but I noticed that, maybe, the problem is in calling humans "resources".
Doing More with Less
im sure your history on HN proves otherwise, but this almost reads like a veiled attempt to sell twitternames you've squatted.
Zed didn't file a bug report, he wrote a rant. Writing a scathing blog post isn't very helpful and probably won't reach the actual person who can fix his bug. Filing a bug report will.
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The approach that rubygems works terrifically, and is depended upon by the Ruby community — you can trivially install as many versions of the same gem as you want to satisfy the dependency requirements of other gems and apps. Library authors can fix mistakes and take advantage of new functionality in other libraries without worry.

Everything about Debian's approach is in rabid opposition to this. They want to scatter the files all over their precious FHS. They want to install as few versions of libraries as possible, and where multiple versions must be installed in the best case the names sre mangled because apt does not have a 'slots' mechanism (average case they use the mediocre 'alternatives' system, worst case there are multiple independent depgraphs!). 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 (and regular 3-6 month periods on the 'bleeding edge'), after which they start mutilating random patches from upstream as 'support' instead of just shipping the new versions.

You're right that there's no way to reconcile this fundamental schism. You're wrong about which community is breaking everything.
The given/when replaces the kludge that is SWITCH I think. I like the new package block. I am not exactly sure why though. Thanks for the link.
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Dam Peculiar: Switzerland Slicing Into Italy
This has been done, by several people. The problem is that the resulting packages don't fit with Debian policy, and in a few cases result in file collisions. If we want to mend the situation, we need both sides to agree that the solution is suitable.

The Right Way to do it, in my mind, is to take a snapshot of the available gems, and convert only those versions of the gems to debs such that rubygems and the Gem constant aren't involved at all. This means that "gem 'foo'" gets thrown away (or replaced with a check that the correct distro package is installed), using the Gem constant is a blocking bug, and "require 'rubygems'" is at least a no-op. Files from lib/ should be installed to /usr/lib/ruby (or at a pinch site-ruby), so that "require 'foo'" just works. Anything that assumes File.expand_path(__FILE__,"..") is under that library's control is again a blocking bug (I'm looking at you, haml).

I know there are people working on this, so it's not entirely theoretical, but besides, these are all good ideas anyway.

EDIT: Oh yeah, dependencies. That too.
Because the gem format probably doesn't have a proper way to say "you must install OpenSSL such-and-such"? At least CPAN and Python's eggs don't have one...
The new name sucks, but so did "OpenOffice.org" (at least going by the Ubuntu package names, they insisted on the .org being part of the name).
I love ebooks, but I prefer to read paper books. The haptic and olfactory experience of reading a book is something that I've enjoyed as long as I can remember, and I won't give it up lightly. However, all those classics I've neglected to read are now a few clicks away and available for free. The cost of building my library of paper books versus the wide availability of free ebooks has made me a happy ebook adopter. There is one other problem, however.

I use linux at home and so cannot use Adobe Digital Editions or other DRM system. So, I have to rely on freely available, DRM-free files that I find on the Internet. Legally, many classics are available; illegally, many more. The upside to this is that not being encumbered by DRM, I'm free to share my collection. The downside is that it's been all too easy for me to become a criminal in the eyes of the law.
> Debian doesn't really work too well when you need multiple or new versions of software, or need something custom.

That's a fair complaint, and is also something of a complex issue, as there are tradeoffs between high quality integration, rapidly assimilating new stuff, the total number of packages in the repository, and so on.

However, Zed's mistruths about the nature of Debian (which is a volunteer-drive non-profit organization, not a business), are not:

"It is sadly pure business and has nothing to do with open source, quality, or culture."

"I did not write it to boost the Debian business plan"
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Measuring the ROR Bug in the Early MOS 6502
At least OpenOffice was something you could pronounce.
I didn't know about it, it's really great. It's sort of a synchronized keepass with better browser integration. Thanks.
To clarify this point: the Facebook platform is provided gratis, but there are no contractual obligations preventing them from yanking, changing or breaking the service. As a business, you must ask yourself how easily you could adapt if they were to do so. Is that a risk you are willing to take?

tl;dr: Don’t put all your eggs in one basket, especially if said basket has a history of breaking.
They work like a champ, though I basically got what I wanted out of it last night at home.

Any idea how far away you are from putting out something one might consider 'stable'? I'm in the government, and it's effectively impossible to use 'beta' code here.
Unary - still has higher precedence in C (over the bitwise XOR operator).

In case you mean exponentiation, these expressions would always be equal regardless of the precedence of the operators.
Link Building: Targeted Relationship Building Pays off 
In Link building, the weight of strategic relationship can’t be denied. Relationship building is the way through which you can widen your website’s reach. When other sites link to your website they are in a sense, endorsing your website.
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You're right that a bunch of what's broken in Debian stems from how naïve APT is — especially the lack of a slots mechanism (they just mangle the package names when there's no way to excuse it).

But the fundamental problem is purely social, not technical. Debian is always ready to introduce a new policy that would require them to screw with all the upstream packages (breaking things up, license wankery, dash, silence in valgrind, etc.)

Depressingly I find myself liking the way packaging is often done with RPMs, especially from vendors — they just make a directory in /opt that bundles any contentious dependencies, and just fucking works. Functionally there's almost no difference between RPM and DEB — it's purely social expectations.
> Also: why should software authors have to write bug reports to Debian?

What is the alternative? Should software authors be given carte blanche control of their own packages, regardless of their knowledge and commitment to the Debian platform and ideals? The goal is to make a working system, not to indulge every author that thinks their package is the exception to the guidelines laid out by the Debian members.

I have to say, I just installed Debian's postgresql-9.0 package and I was pleasantly surprised. They've packaged things in such a way that you can install 9.0 and 8.4 in parallel. Yes, it is different than the default postgres install. Instead of everything being in one directory they put config files in /etc, library files in /usr/lib and your db in /var/lib--just like every other package on the system. This seems like the right kind of packaging to me--it makes the system consistent.

Of course, for every good package like postgres there's a package with some epically stupid decision (netcat-traditional's "-q" patch).