skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
VOTE: between this and galaxy tab, which would you buy?
I've had several HP/Compaq notebooks over the years. Linux support has been mostly Ok. Last year I bought a MacBookPro with 4G RAM and VmWare Fusion. It ticks all all boxes, all metal case, good battery life, WiFi roaming works very well, including remembering where to use proxies and where not to. Based on my experiences I can recommend the MBP without reservations. Check out the student discounts on AppleStore site.
There is a reason that Debian is being singled out, which you ignore - Debian likes to add lots of distribution-specific patches to everything they package. Other OSes/distributions are not as problematic, because they are much more likely to ship software as the author wrote it (unless it's ridiculously broken and unmaintained and important.)

Also: why should software authors have to write bug reports to Debian?
Not surprised to see this question, pretty surprised to see the answer (from David Cohen):

http://ask.techstars.org/what-if-we-outsourced-the-developme...
I use an anti-RSI application when this happens which auto-reminds me to take breaks and notices when I cheat (monitoring keyboard and mouse activity). I also always use an external keyboard with nice keys and an external mouse for long stretches on my laptop. I switched to mousing with my left hand instead of right.

I learned dvorak, and some people swear by it, but it didn't change much. so, I switched back.
Ah, sense! This is similar to Google's move into credit card and mortgage comparison shopping (read: lead generation).

Arguably Google is a beacon of transparency in the latter industry, and I say that as someone who a) has spent time researching the business and b) don't hold with the majority geek/HN view of Google as being the Universe's Love Child.
JQuery Panoscoper Plugin: Make anything into a 360° Panorama
-3^5 = -(3^5)

Not to defend that guy or anything.
I just came here to post in delight about his quote:

> I’ve worked in the stuffy corporate world. It was an extremely valuable learning experience, but it was so — stuffy. It needs more monkey.

But it was a fleeting moment of delight. Damn you timf :)
Choosing a Content Management System (CMS) - Kentico CMS Review
Revisit: Real Time Definition
Maintenance of Laboratory Water Baths
Absolutely. Explosions in the Sky and Monkey3 are favourites of mine for coding.

It's also easier to deal with lyrics in foreign languages, simply because my mind can't latch on to what's being said: Sigur Ros (an Icelandic band) are also on the coding playlist.
As a physics grad student, I'd love an aggregation site (like Digg, Reddit, or HN) which had the quality of discussion of HN but with a focus on academics instead of IT and startups.

I'd love this to reach a critical mass, but I doubt it.
Handy Web Typography Tools
Yes, but the interesting question is why? Many large corporations indeed use Java, and the often-touted reason is safety and/or speed. Is that still a valid answer in today's web dev world? What would you recommend that AT&T for example uses if they could start all over again today?
Launching using Agile
Asking your employees to waste time in commuting, and then promoting a nap "to improve productivity"? Looks shortsighted to me.
Yeah, because it's impossible to be a skilled C programmer without knowing this stuff by heart.

/rolls eyes
Few atheists are willing to really embrace the moral nihilism that a materialist philosophy seems to require.

My dog does OK with a philosophy of pure materialism, I figure I can, too.
We don't need Scheme++ to implement .... (c) Brian Harvey, a famous CS61A teacher. ^_^
I've always thought that it was a bad idea for Linux distros to package any language libraries at all. It seems like a lot of repeated work and your users will probably end up needing to install things manually in the end. Things will require the lastest version of gems, new and essential features will be added, etc. Just give your users a manual on how to install gems (or pip, or whatever) and let it be. The users of language libraries are exclusively programmers after all; I think it's safe to assume they can handle library installation.

That said, Zed is blowing this way out of proportion.
With 1000's of packages, and 1000's of maintainers, saying that "Debian" likes to patch "everything" is a pretty big claim.

A lot of the patches that do go in make whatever package integrate better with the rest of the system.

> Also: why should software authors have to write bug reports to Debian?

Because there's a bug?

> "Even though the piece of software I asked aptitude to install requires these libraries to run, they refuse to install it."

At first glance, that sounds like a packaging bug to me, with Rubygems, not with one of Zed's packages. The best thing to do in those cases is report the bug, rather than attempt to "make Debian pay" (for the thousands and thousands of hours of work to give you a free operating system, presumably?)
It's actually more sensible for you to say "God doesn't exist," because at least it's possible to get two people to agree on exactly who or what Superman is.
yea--I thought about this myself and that's always the rub with efforts like this.

but in this case it only has to reach a critical mass within a research group (yours) for it to be useful (http://www.phygg.com/phygg/groups.php).
I haven't found another one that automatically puts a URL to the file at Dropbox on my clipboard.
The author mentions that code becomes wrapped in a bad way, can anyone confirm that?

I'm tend to read more tech books than other genres, so if code becomes hard to read, then the Kindle would not be for me...
It's always sad when someone's dreams are shattered. But what I don't get is why a bookmark syncing service needs venture capital, employees, a CEO and whatnot. There may not be a business model that supports all that, but there may be a business model that pays for the labor actually required to provide a syncing service.

In a way this is like shutting down all the cafes that failed to become Starbucks.
There are plenty of confusing order-of-operation things in C, especially around pointers, but is "&x + 1" really one of them? I basically know nothing about this subject and it's still pretty clear that the & would take precedence. Would you balk at that expression if x were an int pointer?
Actually, the Ruby and Rubygems Squeeze packages have been in quite a flux lately. One of the more recent Ruby1.9.1 packages broke Rubygems completely due to some changes in the Ruby 1.9.2 source and they way they handle gems. The latest version of Ruby has really integrated the Gem package management system into its core. It has therefor been decided to stop building a separate Rubygems package for the 1.9.x series and let the Ruby1.9.x package deal with gems.

Have their been clashes between the Ruby and Debian communities? Yes! Are we all working toward a solution? Yes! Will it happen instantly? Unfortunately no, but I think the two groups are now talking and are making some good progress. Keep an eye out for some good stuff in the future.
You don't get why a bookmark syncing service needs venture capital, employees, a CEO and what not?

Web applications don't just grow on trees ...
I sympathize with frustration at poor software packaging, but the proposed solution seems completely disproportionate to the offense. I also don't see any real evidence presented for the assertion that Debian's policies are based on a corrupt motive. What OS is actually pure and innocent of technical flaws and bad policies? If I recall, openSuse is in bed with Microsoft, Ubuntu fails to contribute code to important projects, Fedora is really just Red Hat's beta testing, etc. One of the pains of open source software is that things you write will probably be messed up in lots of ways by other people. If seeing software packaged or modified in ways you don't like makes you angry and advocate retaliation, is that really consistent with the philosophy of a free software license?
shameless plug I have been working on a similar thing in the last few days: http://github.com/lehmannro/commithero

It's based on the commit history rather than local actions and should work on Git, Subversion, Mercurial, and Bazaar. I am still low on achievements (about half a dozen implemented) but tried to make the API for third-party achievements as easy as possible; patches welcome!
Still, having to earn money is a valid concern. Music does not seem to be a promising way to go about it.
It might be worth re-evaluating this rant in the light of Lucas Nussbaum's (Debian Ruby maintainer) recent "mythbusting and FAQ" post:

http://www.lucas-nussbaum.net/blog/?p=566
Great article, thanks a lot for posting this.

I do have one question: is the goal of all the companies to raise addition funding rounds? Or, do some startups still want to work without raising the extra capital, but rather grow organically (37 signals style). I guess another way to ask is: do you force (or even strongly expect) companies to get extra funding on demo day, do you let them choose (and they always choose to get more funding), or do some startups actually not get extra funding?

I ask because, from your article, it seems like most of the latter part of the cycle is geared towards raising capital, and I had always assumed that not raising capital was also a viable option for startups.
Oh, sorry! I transposed the words.
LibreOffice tells Oracle to fork off
Why I finally decided to do a startup just after college.
I don't know. Stakes are certainly high for canonical Drexler type nanotech. You'd figure a lot of the governments would've loved to have an edge there, if it was possible or within short leap from current technological base?

Government taking charge for research certainly worked for the space race. Among all the countless grants and fellowships in nanotech you'd hope it would yield at least something resembling the original vision, at this point.

I sort of can relate to your point B, and perhaps it's not even just the Asian nations.
Umm, that's a little bit an unfortunate name if they ever want to expand into the german speaking part of the web.

(It's 'f*ck' in german.)
The ASUS UL series are really good, they look like cheap MBP knockoffs though, I have a UL30VT myself. Very pleased :)
Sure, it may not be promising as in the sense that it'll give you a stable income and what not, but if it's what you /love/, then why still do the menial stuff in your life, such as pleasing others and worrying about the small things? At least, that's the general trend I tend to see nowadays.

It merely served as an example, but I hope it gets the point across.
Entrepreneur Michael Smith on building your own home from earth and straw
Techcrunch Disrupted by AOL: The End of an Era in Tech Blogging?
Unfortunately, I don't think it's uncommon to take out a new payday loan to pay off an old one, in which case the raw dollar amounts become more significant quite quickly.
I'm confused: how is this a version of ASK HN? It's clearly an early beta deployment of a product from the TechStars startup Sponge <http://getsponge.com>. Considering all the activity in the Q&A space lately, this title seems unnecessarily hostile.
Was first compiler developed by a woman?
Creator of ZFS, Jeff Bonwick, leaves Oracle
The role of a project manager primarily filled the gaps in the Review and Monitor processes, I dun quite see the need for such a role in a startup environment where it's not part of the core stuffs. - a PRINCE2 pm.
Tell HN: China Unicom hijacking net requests to spam customers
FYI to anyone in China that China Unicom (中国联通) is hijacking browser requests to spam its customers. Requested webpages are stuffed into an iFrame and flash advertisements are loaded in the bottom-right after page-load. This appears to be a new form of spamming, since there isn't much detail about this online. Some more information here in Chinese for the curious:

http://jevosun.blogbus.com/logs/75696663.html

This is happening to me on maybe 1/300 requests. Which is enough to be noticeable and irritating over time, but not enough to make the ISP's behavior immediately obvious. I only made the connection after seeing the advertising appear on my own website and investigating out of concern my server had been hacked.
The weight of an object is defined as being equal to the force exerted on it by gravity. Take the object far away from any celestial bodies and you'll find it weightless. Toss it into a black hole and it's weight will approach infinity.

For the sake of simplicity, lets imagine that the internet is uniformly distributed on the surface of the earth, as a single object. You will find that the gravity of the earth pulls the internet from every direction with equal force, and assuming the internet is a solid object, the net force is zero, since the opposing forces negate each other. So in essence, the internet as a single object is weightless, even on earth.

So that didn't work out. Lets instead assume that the internet is divided into numerous parts so that the weight of each one can be summed together to give a meaningful answer. So what is the internet? Is it the servers that run it? The huge cables that run below the oceans? Or maybe internet can be best thought of as the information it contains. Then what is information? Is it the magnetic direction of the molecules of a harddisk? Is it the dents on a CD? Or something else that can be thought of still being "physical" in nature? Or does information on the storage devices only truly become information once it is observed and digested by a human mind?

How much calories would it take for a human brain to go trough all the information on the internet? After finding out, use the calories to calculate their mass by E=mc^2.

Or maybe the internet is the biomass of the humans involved in it? The biomass of the users? Internet is after all, an "international network". Is it a network of machines or a network of people? Are people the whole bodies or just the brain? Is the brain just the gray mass or it's whole history of nature and nurture? All the way to the big bang? Could it be said that the mass of 1GB of data is the mass of the whole universe, since you need humans to give meaning to data and you need universes to support human brains?

I have only more questions for you.
Webcasting – a New Opportunity for Exposure
>Second, there is no luck involved. No cards, no dice, no randomness, no chance.

This is incorrect. The chaos of the "Well I'll do whatever/either are perfectly valid options" especially in opening moves is very luck centric.

It's like saying "There is no luck involved in yelling fire in a crowded theatre", when if you're the poor sot getting trampled, it's quite clearly a mishap of chance that caused you to be in that position.

This same sort of situation happens over and over in Diplomacy. There is no particular mechanism such as dice or cards injecting more chance into the game, but the random chaos of what will X do or Y do when both are equally valid is just as unpredictable, especially when you look at the bounce resolution rules.
Ask HN/PG: Is there a list of YC alumni with their contact details?
I thought there was such a google doc but I can't find it through searchyc or google. Does anyone know where I can look?

Thanks
The end of APB: how players feel when an MMO goes under
I wrote this in the TC comments, and will echo it here:

"This article was not very well written IMHO. The big exit was for the Tech Coast Angels investors who had over 100x. Criticizing Zappos for their 1B+ exit vs Green Dot's 2B exit is an awful argument. Not only are they both in the low billion dollar range, but Sequoia forced Zappos to sell. This was widely publicized in Tony's blog post about it.

I've heard Steve speak give a keynote, and he had a standing ovation. Truly an inspiring entrepreneur. He deserves every cent he earns from the IPO."
You have to burn a lot of bridges to do it and it leaves a mercenary mark on you and the company. I think it's more likely to destroy morale by making you bitter about each other's ownership than to actually get you to fire each other as an economic choice.
Xmarks shutting down in Jan
do you have use xmarks?
[Disclaimer: I'm not a Ruby developer, but have developed in plenty of languages, as well as being a sysadmin for a fair while]

IME, separate package-management for each and every language is more painful than the problem he is describing.

Rubygems, CPAN, whatever other languages use.

As soon as you install things outside of the distro package-manager, it has no idea what is going on with those packages and so continues to think that they aren't installed. If there was a way to get the package-managers for language libraries and the distro to play together nicely and work for dependencies etc then this would be OK, but as it is it's a bit of a sysadmin nightmare.

Edit: I thought that installing distro-supplied packages into /usr/local was against the FHS?
I can only agree. If something doesn't work, and you think debian has screwed it up, type

reportbug rubygems

and write up what's wrong. It often takes quite some time to fix stuff, but often it is fixed eventually.

(Note that by Debian policy, dependencies that are only for some actions of the module might not be hard dependencies, but "recommends" dependencies; but you can configure apt-get/aptitude to install those for you too).
Facebook is an overly pervasive, cookie tracking, click hijacking, non-privacy respecting nuisance. I have an account, but I only log it in from an "incognito" window where it can't set cookies. And if your website wants my Facebook, I regard that as an up front signal that you intend to trample all over my privacy and exploit information (such as my friends) that is none of your business - I won't sign up.
I definitely get pain from the mouse rather than typing.

Professional Quake players have names for the different styles of holding a mouse. I believe mine is called The Claw, where my palm is a few inches above the matt and I guide the mouse using finger tips on each side, like a bear scraping across the desk.

I notice that when I have pain I have lapsed and my palm is flat on the desk causing a v-shape between my hand and forearm and tension on the back of my wrist.
But if you want to read code that says that, you either have to know, or go look it up. If someone writes code like that, I figure they are probably hacking a kernel or something, so they know the precedence rules and expect anyone reading the code to know them too.

Me, I looked it up. He only said not to compile it, not that you couldn't learn something at the same time.
> way to get the package-managers for language libraries and the distro to play together nicely and work for dependencies etc

Yes, hacking the language's package manager to talk to the distribution package manager is probably the only way to really go about solving the problem in an elegant way, and even that is not without its pain points.
An aside to his point about Google.

400%? In the UK we've got companies charging over 2500% a year for payday loans.

While I accept these are high risk, there surely has to be a limit?
Ah, that makes far more sense. Thanks!
i use the MS split ergo keyboard and mouse - worked a treat for me. you need to be a touch typist though.
Beermat maths...

With 20% of their user base (450k) on 10,000+ subscribers per month ($150 pcm) I make that $13,500,000 per month.

And with that being 65% of their total revenue, they are making a cool $20m a mth. Not bad, not bad at all.

Edit - forgot that not all 450k are paying, their maths state that 13.33% (4,000 paying of 30,000) are paying. So actually they are making about $2,6m per mth.
That's funny, I hadn't heard of Green Dot until a couple weeks ago. I received a Green Dot card as a gift and was frustrated with the required phone registration process. They immediately asked for name, DoB, and SSN, apparently because the PATRIOT act requires it. This seemed like a pretty big invasion of privacy for something I didn't personally opt into. They will also kindly deduct $5.95/month from the balance every month that it goes unused (which is illegal in many states, as far as I know).

Fortunately they will cut you a refund check if you ask for one on the phone. Note to (monetary) gift givers out there: cash is still king.
Aren't there several YC companies who do searches of browsing history?

At the moment I rely on Firefox awesome bar, but I have a nagging feeling that it is not reliable (keep not finding sites I was sure I had bookmarked). So a better way to search and organize bookmarks is still being called for.

I can't imagine that there isn't a market for better bookmarking...
> pain points

Absolutely, but this problem has been around for a long time, and fighting with distributions on how to get it to work won't help anyone.

Of course, it also means that if you install a buggy version of a library from, say, CPAN then you could break distro-supplied packages... I guess it depends on which you value more: distributor-provided testing or being able to install out-of-band packages onto your distribution more easily and with proper dependencies.
have you tried it in latest beta-branch? it's gotten a lot of features in the last month or so.
Who said anything about security? I would take a "Facebook only" login system to imply that the creator of the website makes bad decisions. I'd prefer to not hand over data to people who make such poor decisions.
That seems like an odd feature. I mean, useful in some cases where the size of the array is statically determined, but kind of fiddly and not the same across such unusual things as function calls.
I suspect that's the norm rather than the exception. And as such, it can be planned for. It'll certainly slow your expansion (hiring people is hard when you don't know where you'll be located N months from now) but it shouldn't break the company.
Yes, I was wondering about the YC process as being involved in a London start-up, the dream is obviously to take it to YC and the Valley.

Has anyone here on HN got into YC from London?
I've always found this one of the easier things to do when setting up a website... And I do, do it correctly.
Research Essay Writing Guidelines
A research essay is an essay based on thorough independent research. Whatever, the writer’s opinion, the essay needs to be written in an unbiased manner. Unlike other types of essay, this essay has a certain format which needs to be followed. This will enable easy writing.
Hi. Certainly we have talked to our users, but feedback has been sparse, and they don't seem too interested in getting engaged in the process. We have been sending personalized emails but very few users came back with feature-centric feedback, but only technical issues (e.g. "we're not sure how to integrate", "doesn't work via HTTPS protocol", "where do I click", etc.).

What is the normal level of feedback from users? We have set up GetSatisfaction forum, but activity has also been sparse.
The winners of the Javascript 1k demo contest have been announced
Hasn't AOL basically destroyed anything they bought?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_AOL

Or at least let dust grow and cover them.