skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The thread doesn't at all clarify why (it is), and actually gives a counter example.

For those who compare the before and after output of 'free', stop it. Yes, the numbers are (sometimes drastically) different. It doesn't matter. The kernel drops pages when it needs a page, and for the general case, this does work. But, as the linked LKML thread states, there may be a pathological case that you are not expected to hit (10 million+ files, and 40 Gigs of ram). For that specific use-case, it did make sense.

The reason this is a bad idea is because dirty pages cannot be freed, which is why it is recommended to run 'sync' first. Unfortunately, on a busy system, pages will get dirty in between the sync and the drop_cache, moreso if you're doing it in a shell. Those dirty pages can then never be reclaimed (due to how drop_caches works, and because drop_caches is only intended for benchmark testing).

(link to same thread but threaded http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail//linux/kernel/1009.1/02943...
What Should the Government Do About Airports?
I've just been playing with the Facebook API for a toy project (submitted here: http://news.ycombinator.net/item?id=1743486), and utterly agree - the documentation is not even barely adequate.

The other irritating thing is when you eventually discover that there's a bug, the best response you see is "Hi, sorry this is a known issue" with no resolution date or even rough idea of whether it'll be fixed in the next year or not.
Their blogs acquisition seems doing pretty well, look at engadget
$2-3k? Um, sure, if you want to pay an attorney to do something that anyone can do. From uspto.gov:
"The application filing fee for the TEAS form is $325 per class of goods and/or services, while the TEAS Plus is $275 per class, but has stricter filing requirements, than the regular TEAS form."

I've got several trademarks registered. Takes a few minutes to select the appropriate class and a few more to register the mark. No sense in paying an attorney and we're in agreement that it should be done. That name "insurance" can be worth a lot.
Remembering things is VERY important. It means you have an instant grasp of the code base, the APIs available to you. It means you can solve problems much quicker than someone who only has a limited memory, or uses auto-complete all the time.
The data science Venn diagram
To be honest, it seems like you just wrote a script that scrapes all your comments from hacker news and then posts them to your blog.

Unless you add something to your posts like images, and some context, I'm not going to be revisiting your blog. I'd just stay at the source (Hacker News) where I can find lots of great comments that are all presented in their context. The voting system does a great job of picking out the best.

I think you do have interesting things to write about, I just think you need to do more than copying and pasting your comments.
ABS, traction control, stability control, multiple clutches, power steering, lane drift alert, automatic breaking, seatbelt pretensioning.

I can go on.
"Don't load up your Kindle with a ton of crap books because it is a pain in the butt to find the one you want. Unless absolutely necessary, you are probably better off keeping a small collection in it."

Now you can create folders to manage your books, which is a lot better.
If we're talking about a box that primarily performs firewalling, let's call it a "firewall" instead of a "router". (Although as I said above, routing is still necessary in IPv6.)
Too little too late? China's rare earth threat prompts US action
But that argument also applies to stored program electronic computers - which are also 40s/50s tech.

So we have the technology to get a large enough device far enough out into the solar system quickly enough for it to make a difference and to engineer all of this within a limited timescale? I don't know about that....
Anybody else think this is the first ever professional looking Linux distro they've ever seen?

Congrats to the Ubuntu team.
clickable link to the list http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_AOL
"Security will need to be addressed accordingly." You say that as if it were a small thing. Indeed, as if it were a thing with a known solution. In reality this "security" issue of consumer pcs directly on the internet is a bigger problem than v4 address exhaustion. Today it is perhaps a multi-billion dollar a year problem due to worms, viruses, botnets, ddos, etc. Intentionally making the problem worse is a recipe for catastrophe.
How is FreeType intrinsically better than the Windows font renderer? Microsoft has the advantage of subpixel font rendering (aka ClearType) although admittedly that because it's patented (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subpixel_rendering#Patents).
Verizon's phone trade-in program and some phone values
FYI: a public IP can cost anywhere between $0 and $25/year in Eastern Europe, depending on the ISP.
1 out of 50 makes 2% of success, that is very very low rate
How to encode video for mobile devices (iPhone/iPad, Android, etc.)
It think it just depends on the company. I moved from NZ to NYC and worked for a software company there (just north of the city in White Plains) for five years. There was a good crew there that went out for drinkies on a regular basis. Someone would mosey round the office about 5:30 and give the nod. Most of my mates there were ex radio guys / DJs and originally from somewhere else in the US though.

I knew a few people who worked on Wall St and they seemed to socialize with their co-workers too but I also knew one chick in publishing who had a similar experience to you.

Conversely I now live in Edinburgh and my team only goes out for drinks once in a blue moon. Of course much of it depends on personal circumstances such as if you're young and single or have a family with small children.

So, um I guess YMMV.
The problem I have with it is that it implies quality-of-life is tied to earnings. That's like saying a single mother working two jobs has a better quality of life than a rich socialite. I know plenty of women who are perfectly happy to be homemakers, work part-time during the day, or teach so that they can enjoy family life.

"Gender equality" the way they measure it here seems to be saying that men and women should ideally live the same. Freedom of choice and equal rights is what matters, and I don't feel that this metric even comes close to measuring that.
There is clearly a debate going on in this thread regarding whether or not we are running out of address space/whether or not we need truly globally routeable IPs, etc. Assuming that we do need to go the IPv6 route, for a second...

I wouldn't really expect any businesses to go the way of IPv6 unless there was some kind of 1) Financial benefit, or 2) A law that required them to do so. Otherwise, there is really no reason to spend any time/money on it (Even if it is negligible). I can't find the source, but I believe at one point (maybe still) the Japanese govt. was providing cash incentives (tax benefits, etc.) for businesses to go the IPv6 route.
Geeks Win Software engineers are the highest paid people that work from home
You'd probably still have issues if you tried to live there. Your legs can support twice your body weight if they need to, but can your neck support a double-weight head? Human spines are already pretty under-spec for their task, so people living in 2g gravity would probably suffer from a lot more back problems.

It's a pretty small-beer problem on the scale of colonise-another-star-system problems though.
what a stupid topic...
A good place to start is RON, which is a MIT PDOS project that Frans Kaashoek and Robert Morris (that one) were involved in:

http://nms.csail.mit.edu/ron/

I had a funded startup in '99 doing this stuff (in our last year, we adapted the MIT Click Modular Router to the same idea).
Wow, it worked. Thanks!
This is a popular idea on HN. You're only a customer if you pay. But, it's an oversimplification. A better definition of a customer is a user who's presence increases your profits.

One way customers increase firm profits is by paying. But, in two-sided markets customers increase profits apart from what they actually pay. An example of two-sided market is a dating site. You could charge men and women. But, if you charge women more, fewer will join, and the site becomes less valuable to men. The optimal solution may be to charge women nothing so you can charge men more. But, you're kidding yourself if you think that only men are your customers. The men are paying in cash, but the women are also paying by increasing the sites value. Indeed, it is likely that one non-paying woman is worth more than one subscribing man.

Facebook users are also customers. They're paying Facebook with a lot of valuable data and eyeballs.
It's been a while since I used either IPv6 or Windows XP, but if my memory serves, IPv6 on XP worked just fine. It did require a trip through the install-a-protocol dialog box, which I agree is rather clunky; however, it did work, and once it's installed, there's no further configuration to be done on the client.
No, my point was that universal healthcare makes it irrelevant if he is employed or not, he'll get the same care anyway.
If Polio counts, then small pox MUST count. We did an even better job with small pox than polio.
I guess a bigger bummer would be if the planet's core doesn't rotate. Apparently, it's the Earth's rotating molten iron core that generates the magnetic field that protects us from harmful radiation.
We worked with Athol Foden at http://www.brighternaming.com/ (he has a lot of self-service resources on his site as well) to file the Bootstrappers Breakfast trademark. We paid about 1/4 of the rate that George is quoting (Athol is not an attorney) and had no trouble getting the trademark. If you have a complex situation you may benefit from an attorney, but I would take a look at the self-service resources on Athol's site as well.
https://www.arin.net/policy/nrpm.html#six
I think that Techcrunch will enter the DeadPool once Mike Arrington leaves (2-3 years).
I am the same way. I read to further my knowledge... sometimes. Other (read: most) times, I read because I enjoy the immersive experience. Taking things from that and putting them in long-term memory isn't really part of the agenda. If it is, I take notes. That helps!
if we think about another acqiositin they have made this week, they paid $65M for "5min" a site which curently have 200K videos! that is far too much by all means.
If anyone was to ask me what do I come to hacker news to read, I would use this article as an example.

I cant think of anything more valuable to wannabe entrepreneurs than seeing the inner thoughts of people in the middle of it all.
Official Hands on Review of Apple TV
This looks to have the hallmarks of a rather successful troll, and I really wish I hadn't gone near the article.
PG, please add a 'collapse' link for comment branches
Reddit has a function like this. It is a big time saver when browsing large discussions and seems simple to implement.
Virtually any number between $1 and $100/yr seems reasonable to me. Consider: for the rare (and hopefully rarer and rarer) cases where you need a "native" IP address, 1 will almost always do. Meanwhile, all these prices are feasible (in a first-world kind of way) for individuals, but untenable for wasteful use by company IT departments.

$6.5MM/yr may not sound like a dealbreaker for a F-500's /16, but that's actually quite a lot of headcount.
Dancing Quadrocopters
Perhaps; but in the case of English-French-English Google translator does pretty well:

You'll never find an automatic translation program which spits out exactly the same text after a double translation --> Vous ne trouverez jamais un programme de traduction automatique qui crache exactement le même texte, après une double traduction. --> You will never find a machine translation program that spits out exactly the same text after a double translation.

If they could bring English-Latin translation to English-French translation level I think that would be acceptable.
There are serious regulatory issues in the US with issuing real equity to a crowd. We worked around that problem by building a distributed model, inspired by the Open Source GPL.

Just like there is no such thing as a "Linux Corp", but rather hundreds of individuals exchanging code through a license, we built the same model with a twist. In effect, our license says "if I contribute to your project and you make money, then you owe me some percentage back." That percentage is really virtual equity.

So in effect, we have created a way for people to issue [virtual] stock, that can at a later stage, be converted into equity from a real corporation, once the project becomes successful enough that it requires real management.

It's at http://fairsoftware.net of course :-)
> don't agree with the view that NAT is evil

NAT is a nightmare for p2p applications. For algorithms that send short messages to many different peers the overhead of using STUN for every connection is enormous. See eg http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.81....
Derelict is an enabling library for D which provides more bindings than LWJGL, on Linux, Mac OS and Windows. You get native code and no plugins are needed. Just sayin'.
I think the site will continue to grow and it will grow in the same way as Engadget and TMZ have at AOL. However, it is going to suffer when Mike does leave, but by then the brand will be amazingly strong.
I don't see it among the languages to 'translate from' here:

http://www.google.com/language_tools?hl=en

It is available as "Google in your language", but that doesn't help me at all.
Thank you for pointing this out, I had no idea. I've always been curious about D and at the same time am looking for the ideal toolset for cross platform game dev. Definitely going to look into this.
I don't know how you're managing to read this as any form of language-prudishness. I'm not saying "startups should not hire Java programmers." I'm saying "startups should not hire programmers who have only ever programmed in one language," because they will either be inexperienced, or remaining willfully ignorant of the breadth of the field available to them.

By coincidence—not by any flaw of Java or the generalist programmers who happen to know it and like it—the language that will most frequently appear on the resume of a single-language programmer is Java. This means—in the same way that given races of people get tested for given congenital diseases because they are statistically more likely to be afflicted by them—that if you're interviewing a programmer and all the previous projects listed on their resume are Java projects, it becomes more important to ascertain whether they know any other languages, because they are statistically less likely to.

This point is just a combination of the famous and well-received "programmer vs [language X] programmer" rant, and a bit of Bayesian analysis to determine which people applying for "programmer" jobs (i.e. generalist jobs, of the kind needed in startups) are most likely to actually be "[language X] programmers" instead. If you trained a spam filter on generalist-y-ness, it would flag Java as having a high correlation[1] with non-generalist-y-ness—that's all I've been trying to say.

[1] ...which is very explicitly not causation, I think I have to remind everyone at this point.
I liken learning to throwing cooked spaghetti against the wall: some sticks, some slides off. The key to being smarter is to make more stuff stick to the walls, whether you can do that by making the knowledge more "sticky" or like what I do, which is to throw even more against the wall.

To twist a phrase from Glengarry Glen Ross: "ABL - Always Be Learnin'."
Your vision for a migration to IPv6 involves everyone getting a new home access point, so that devices can autoconfigure from their ISP instead of from the Linksys box in the living room?
Hmm, the French version is actually pretty well done.

Perhaps it's an intrinsically harder problem, though, because Latin's grammar is less English-like?

Still, you're probably right in that the Latin version is just significantly worse than the French.
I hear ya, but these things are just as important. Poor user experience is a bug and graphical tweaks and updating the indicator platform was much needed. I will admit windicators, multitouch and head tracking parallax should take low priority, but most of their designers wouldn't be fixing driver bugs if they weren't turning up the pretty.

With the latest stable 10.04 I have had very little trouble if any. Granted I am on a ThinkPad. When I ran it on a Macbook Pro and its slightly tweaked "standard" hardware it ran like crap and took a lot of coaxing to get up and running until I just gave up and got the right hardware for the job.
Because FreeType does it too, in fact FreeType employs every single trick there is: bytecode interpreter, hinting, subpixel rendering, etc. But it has an advantage of being configurable i.e. it doesn't follow "all size fits all" path. Slight hinting + subpixel smoothing with enabled bytecode interpretation yields incredible output on high-DPI screens.

However, IIRC there's a Microsoft-made utility that allows you to tinker with ClearType settings making it more high-DPI friendly as well (doesn't come with Windows but search for it on their site)
Generally speaking, trademark applications aren't difficult. If you're a detail-oriented person and don't mind doing some reading, you can absolutely do it yourself.

The main advantage to hiring an attorney is that if you run into an opposition or if the examiner has an issue with your application, an attorney may be better able to persuade the office that the opposer is without grounds.

Start with a TESS search on the USPTO's site for live applications. Read up on the US and International Classes that you might want to use and decide which are applicable. If you run into similar names in your desired class, it might be worth talking to an attorney about whether your mark is likely to be allowable. Pay close attention to the specimen requirements if you're doing an in-use application as compared to an ITU. A defective specimen that doesn't establish the elements for use as an identifier of the goods or services can be problematic.

You might also see if your IP attorney is willing to walk you through the process the first time and then just answer questions on an as-needed basis. You could also work out the application on paper and just ask an attorney to look it over and use that form to fill in the information needed to file electronically.
I don't think that it's fair to compare the AOL of old (Before May 2009) to the current company. There have been a lot of changes happening there in the last year.

That being said I will be paying attention to see what happens and I'll be interested to see how AOL handles some of the issues that will inevitably come up.

As far as the making an exit knowing that your company will likely die, I don't think that applies in this case, MA and staff will still be around, and it seems like the deal is structured so that in general not much will change. Its the marginal issues that I would be more worried about.
You can't count how many ways Facebook wrongs developers.

I had three more sections planned out, but said the heck with it, they've already taken so much of my time.

You are totally right, though.
I'm assuming the 51% thing is just a control thing yeah?
Any deep analysis of geo-engineering spills a plethora of questions onto the table.

e.g.

* Who is in charge? China? the US? England? India?
* If the governments of the world can't get things done in Copenhagen, why would they get things done with geo-engineering?
* What happens when one country feels its agriculture would benefit from more sunlight and wants to reverse a process or otherwise change something?

and so on
Any deep analysis of geo-engineering spills a plethora of questions onto the table.

e.g.

* Who is in charge? China? the US? England? India?

* If the governments of the world can't get things done in Copenhagen, why would they get things done with geo-engineering?

* What happens when one country feels its agriculture would benefit from more sunlight and wants to reverse a process or otherwise change something?

and so on
Don't take this the wrong way but your blog confuzzles me. What are you talking about and what's going on?
I don't understand why Microsoft Excel removes leading Zeros if a column in "0058"? In open office the column is correctly displayed as 0058! This is without having CSV data changed to +"0058".
Square using social media stats for credit checks and fraud prevention
P2P is a nightmare because every application is expected to provide its own connection fabric. In a content-addressed overlay network --- and there are many huge deployed examples of these deployed --- you wouldn't need to do the STUN chicken dance every time you wanted to add a peer.

If this all sounds hand-wavy, well, it's already the mechanism used by the exchanges and ECNs to route stock information, and it's already a mechanism used to build CDNs. It's a considerably more straightforward evolutionary path for the Internet than forklifting out every IPv4-aware device or software package.
Maybe try reading more memorable books? I remember "Lord Of The Rings" :-)

Don't know the books he mentions, but the titles alone sound a bit like "I really should read this to prove that I am an intellectual".
You can't possibly prefer Windows font rendering simply because FreeType can be configured to render exactly the same output. What Ubuntu ships by default is drop dead gorgeous on high-DPI screens and really nice on regular monitors, but you can configure it to render text indistinguishable from Windows. ArchLinux has alternative "clear type cairo/freetype" packages that are just that.
The wires in the switching system are not exactly hot and neutral; they are hot and disconnected. Neutral is connected to the mains (mains has two connections, hot is the high voltage connection, and neutral is the connection at around zero). In this case the wire between the bulb and mains is neutral, the disconnected wires between switches are, well, disconnected.
Usability problems are almost 10x more common on business apps than on web sites
The novel-writing analogy is a bit off, because the novel elements you mention are higher level than a single API call would be. They're more like a subroutine or algorithm level. IDEs don't really do that.

An IDE's functionality is more like a screenwriting app's formatting of a script as the writer writes.
Generally related to the UI, but from a technology viewpoint - this release will use Freetype 2.4 which is the first released that is not patent encumbered by Apple or Microsoft (all those patents expired in May)

Though Ubuntu has always shipped with the patent encumbered stuff turned on, but I think we are going to see some interesting innovation in font rendering going forward.
I don't relate at all - I believe I remember the content of every book I've ever read, and the main takeaways of it.
When I read that headline I was instantly reminded of YouTube. Google should buy Twitter because it's got a massive user base that they will find impossible to monetize as well? Doesn't sound like a good deal to me.
I have a poor memory, and it's difficult for me to describe books to friends after having read them. But I know for a fact that they shape me. It comes out in the way I behave and the opinions I hold.
I think the statistics are misleading. In cases where the number of "accidents at intersections" fell, I'd like to know whether the number of accidents between the crosswalks fell, while the number of accidents leading up to the intersection rose. I have personally witnessed people either speeding up to beat the camera or slamming on the brakes to avoid getting a ticket. I'd bet that the number of rear-end accidents on approach to camera-monitored intersections increased.