skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I never actually did the LFS process, but I used various linuxes as a main desktop for about 4 years.

It depends what your goal is. Linux from scratch will mainly teach you (wait for it) how to build linux from scratch. Systems that are not quite "from scratch" but are lower level than Ubuntu (eg, Gentoo, Arch (others?)) will also teach you some of this. I used Gentoo for years, and after compiling about a dozen kernels in a row to get things to work how I wanted, I guess you could say I'd learned something, if only 'what kernel options I want to enable on this hardware'. :)

But building Linux won't really teach you to _use_ it. If you want to be a power user in the long run, your time (and LFS will take a _lot_ of time!) might be better spent learning your shell/package manager/scripting language of choice in greater depth, compiling your own kernels and adding them as options in grub/lifo, that sort of thing.

All that said, if the LFS process sounds really appealing to you, go for it. You'll definitely learn _something_, but just maybe not as much as you're hoping.
c.f Jacques Barzun: ``People ask if I believe in technology in the classroom. Of _course_ I believe in technology in the classroom! What do they think a blackboard and chalk are?''
You could try using something like Gentoo first. You'll get to learn a lot, just by trying to set it up on your system. And even then if you feel you need to dig deeper, you could try LFS.

LFS is something which people can use to create their own distros (I think I read somewhere that ArchLinux was created using LFS), which reminds me you could even give ArchLinux a shot. Pretty nice distro. ;-)
I set my desktop to pause music when I lock the screen (and play again on unlock), it's really useful.
I wasn't invalidating the criticisms themselves actually. I was suggesting that there were a lot of repeat criticisms that we all know and hear all the time. 80% of the page are the same criticisms of syntax, keyword names, prefix notation, and structures. One could probably reduce the length of the page by a significant amount if they just replaced it all with a single <ul>.

The criticisms of Lisp are nothing new. The language has been around for a dogs age. There are going to be people who will never like parens or silly keywords like cons, car, and cdr. Personally I find it equally silly when they claim such superficial reasons are why Lisp is a terrible language. Every language has to deal with some amount of this weak argument. Lisp is no different, so I have no qualms with the argument itself.

If Lisp doesn't work for you, it doesn't work for you. It's no reason for "hate". :p
There wouldn't be, that's why technological progress is always hampered by politics.

And if the economical system would be a pure capitalism, we'd get there anyway, but unfortunately people feel the need for government regulation, which produces more scarcity and monopolies, ultimately hurting innovation (e.g. DMCA, DRM, patents, or my recent favorite, Net neutrality).
If you are using CoffeeScript, I wrote a little tool which essentially does the same, but is much less complex (IMHO): http://github.com/chrislloyd/roast

When compiling all it does it does is inline the files you have requir'd.
what is so nasty about such a merge commit?

From the article:

Merge can be used when you want to merge a feature branch back into your development branch. That way, you’ll be able to see when you merged in what in the future because you have that merge commit I called “nasty” before. It isn’t, really.

I've come to prefer merges for this case. It reflects reality - you really were developing on a separate history for a while, you're not interweaving bugfixes from master with feature work, etc. And it visually (and logically) groups the commits for the feature, so it's very easy to review or revert the feature as a whole, instead of having to figure out exactly which commits in the big linear history are relevant (or having to religiously tag every time you do anything interesting). The current git visualisation tools (gitk, gitg, gitx) aren't very good at displaying histories with interesting merge structures, but I confidently predict someone will release an awesome dotviz-based history visualiser soon which makes it easy to navigate forests of branches and merges.

That said, as the article describes, rebase does handle conflicts (syntactic and semantic) better than merge does. Because it rebases a commit at a time, you have to think about how the upstream change affects each change that you made in the feature branch, which means you're much less likely to resolve the conflict in a way which breaks some subtle assumption you baked into the code two weeks ago.

I've sometimes taken the approach of first rebasing my feature branch onto the latest master to resolve any conflicts, and then doing a 'merge --no-ff' to explicitly create a merge commit to get the visual history marker.
Quicklisp is a package management system. QuickBASIC was an implementation of BASIC.
Blackhat SEO games Reddit, blogs about it
good web design practice

Who's good design practice? The world moves on, web apps are build with JavaScript, people now respect JavaScript as a decent language that has it's quarks and the DOM has been tamed by the toolkits. The best in the industry are flocking to JavaScript based web application and abandoning the contorted server side frameworks in droves. Why? because the programming model is simple, the separation of concerns and disciplines are clean and the ability to prototype rapidly on the front end is not bound by the rigor that the back end requires.
"I've read recently that slouching is actually easier on the back than sitting straight"

Any chance you might have some reference to where you read that? I'd be interested in seeing how they did the study and what sort of results they came up with.
>creative people will do creative things on tablets. Uncreative people won't.

That sums it up excellently. Aside from making a great device or service, your success is atleast in part determined by the group of early adopters. In the case of the iPad, the early adopters are, by and large creative professionals and they do what they normally do, overcoming the limitations that the device itself poses to creative work.
>the auto repair hobby has a lot to recommend itself

I knew a guy who said "I like older cars because I can work on them". And he did. Every weekend. I vowed I would purposely never learn how to work on cars so that I would never be tempted get involved in such a tremendous time sink. The worst thing about the hobby is it tends to insert itself exactly when you don't want to do it.
I played around with this briefly this weekend in a clean SBCL install on my linux box and it worked beautifully. Very nice work Zach.
Not all successful people have very high SAT scores, not all people with very high SAT scores are successful, but I would guess among very successful people there will be disproportionately many people with very high SAT scores.

Anecdotally, Bill Gates and Paul Allen come to mind (I think one had perfect score and one just a tiny bit less).

Also Drew Houston of Dropbox put his perfect score on Y Combinator application (which pg put as an example of successful application despite Drew having dreaded single-founder handicap :).
From an old comment of mine:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=735499

The admission test itself is surprisingly simple. There are actually two of them and you only need to pass one. The first test is the Wonderlic and the second is a test designed by Mensa. If you fail both you don't get to reapply. You never learn your score. You're only told whether you passed or failed.

The tests contain nothing like those ridiculous Mensa brain teaser books. They're the types of questions that most reasonably intelligent people can answer fairly easily. They're not unlike the questions you see on the online Mensa practice test or one of those tickle.com IQ tests. What makes it difficult is that you've got insane time constraints. You end up with about 12-15 seconds per question. One test is fill in the blank and the other is multiple guess scantron. You basically have to be writing your answer while reading and solving the next problem. The person who proctored my exam said that there's about a 60% failure rate. It probably says more about the people applying than the actual test, but I thought it was interesting.
If you build it, they won't come, unless...
Agreed. I'm in (at one point anyway) the original British & Irish Mensa. It seems that out of all the bright people who are in Mensa, only the pompous arrogant ones tend to turn up and organize meetings so they can hear themselves talk.
Quite recommended if you want to learn more about how a Unix system, and Linux in particular, is put together.

I installed it a long time ago, and I remember learning a ton. I suggest that you dig deeper into any topics you read about in the manual that you haven't heard before. I remember lovely all-nighters learning about dynamic loaders, binutils, object files, ELF and ld and so on :)

When I used to recompile the kernel I also learned a lot by trying to figure on my own whether some options should be enabled or not. This resulted in several unbootable kernels, but I also learned what was IPC, NUMA, the IO-APIC and other stuff that wouldn't come my way otherwise.

The downside is a lot of time spent waiting for stuff to compile before you can move on, so make sure you have complementary material for those times.
I used LFS exclusively between about 2001 and 2003. My motivation then was mostly the fact that every distro sucked so badly. That's no longer the case, but I definitely recommend it as a learning experience. Afterwards you'll no longer be intimidated by the prospect of having to track down any distro-specific bug that a package maintainer can possibly inflict on you.
Why Do Facebook and Google Own Different Patents Over Foursquare?
Gameboy Emulation in Javascript: the CPU
Yeah, Gentoo and Arch are both good (or were when I last tried them, several years back).

Daniel Robbins is also working on new Gentoo kernels and portage trees (and has a _ton_ of Linux documentation/tutorials) over at http://funtoo.org
I'm also skeptical of the idea of an iPad with a 7" screen, mainly because typing on such a screen would be far worse than on the current one.

However, such a thing would probably be a lot more pocketable than you'd think. My Kindle 2 (9" diagonal and 3/8" thick overall) fits very nicely into all of my inside coat pockets.

The Kindle 2 also weighs less than half of what the iPad does, which is important; I thought about having a giant pocket sewn in to some of my jackets, but then I realized that I'd need a counterweight on the other side, and I actually got as far as starting the weight-and-balance calculations before concluding that this was getting silly. The counterweight idea would require keeping the jacket buttoned all the time, anyway.

A high-density-screen iPad the size of the Kindle 2 would be worse for movies, photos, and (especially) typing, but I could have it with me nearly everywhere, not just places where I am willing to carry my nerd bag.
1) Why exactly do you want to be a "Linux power user"? That doesn't sound like a real goal; you might want to elaborate.

2) Why exactly have you been pondering over it for so long? The cost of trying is next to zero. At worst, you'll end up with an unusable test machine, give up, and try something else. Simply going ahead and trying is probably better use of your time and energy than pondering for a long time and looking for advice as to whether you should try.
I let my membership lapse, I couldn't see any benefit to it at all. It was only helpful in that, because of my patchy education (and in the words of a friend with a similar problem): "by the time I left school, I didn't just think I was stupid. I knew it." So, it reassured me I had something going for me and gave me the confidence to tackle things I might not otherwise have tried.

As has been pointed out innumerable times before, the test only measures a specific kind of intelligence and doesn't provide any indicator of how well you will do at life.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1774854
Adaptive brake lights: http://www.ece.cmu.edu/~ece549/spring10/team7/index.html

Currently licensed by Bosch and integrated into at least one test vehicle.
Note: there is literally no relationship between a country's 'Starting a Business' rank and their 'Closing a Business.'

http://plixi.com/p/50051085

This seems odd to me, but wonder if anyone has an explanation as to why this might be?
I took the test when I was 16 or so. I don't remember those type of questions (not saying there weren't any), but I recall material that covered spatial relations (when this patterned cube is rotated which one of these four could it look like). The big factor was the limited time to answer a large set of question in each sitting.
Here come the Windows Phones
I drink a moderate amount of alcohol to ward off insomnia. I guess this wouldn't work if I had chronic problems sleeping, but I find sipping a sweet nightcap or maybe a glass of wine while reading a book or watching TV helps push me over the edge into sleep.
How To REALLY Find A Technical Co-Founder
Ask HN: Review my experimental app
I have compiled a LFS distribution four times, it's good to see how the system is built, you'll learn parts of the system that are very important but not much people understand how they work (PAM for example), there are more things to learn as well (metrics of the system) and some other stuff that will not learn in LFS.
It seems like 2 is improperly specified:

>2. Jane went to visit Jill. Jill is Jane's only husband's mother-in-law's only husband's only daughter's only daughter. What relation is Jill to Jane?

Here's the reasoning I think they want:

Jane's only husband's mother-in-law is Jane's mother.

Jane's mother's only husband is Jane's father.

Jane's father's only daughter is Jane.

Jane's only daughter is Jane's daughter.

But wait! Just because Jane's mother has only been married once doesn't make Jane's mother's husband Jane's father! Children can be born out of wedlock. So Jane's mother's husband could have had a daughter who isn't Jane. What does that make Jane and that person's daughter? Absolutely nothing.
A merge is totally fine, if you really are merging something. But in the case of feature branches you often have the situation, that you work on a very isolated thing. Simultaneously, someone works on the branch which you branched your feature off. You want to get the current state for some reason. By using a merge you would add complexity that is not necessary at this point, because it would just originate in the fact, that you branched off sometime sooner. It would not really be a merge in "content". I find rebasing in this occasion perfectly suitable, since it removes this layer of complexity that noone needs at this point. You just pretend to have branched off later, which is alright. When you are finished with your feature you use a regular merge to get back in your dev branch, since now you really ARE merging something.
If you go with Orange on the phone you can get 35CFS/mo for phone + 3G. They have a deal going for 10CFS off per month of all plans. The high end for a programmer is higher if you consult, and there is no real downside to contracting in Switzerland.
"$0.99/mo doesn't even pay for the time it takes me to type $0.99"
I know - I read the article (and I am very fond of package management).

It's just the name. I know it would be absurd for Microsoft to a) resurrect the brand and b) do a Lisp implementation, but, still, in some part of my brain, it did bring back memories.

I think the right analogy would be to Python's "pip" utility.
Even when I'm wearing glasses, which admittedly, is mostly when I'm on the computer, I always find myself slouching forward, or really tensing up my shoulders. I should probably just strap myself to my chair.
I built a linux from scratch a long time ago (before that page existed). You'll learn a lot about how a linux distribution is put together, but that isn't in itself particularly useful.

Such knowledge seems most useful if you're working on some hardware device with linux embedded -- where it will be interesting to know about all the parts you can leave off or replace with smaller alternatives.
If we assume that most people want the largest screen that they can comfortably carry around with them, there are a lot of people who could fit 7" in a purse-like sack, but can't fit the 10" iPad.
And the record for the longest time spent underground.
Rebase makes long-lived branches much more manageable.

Everyone who's worked with one knows that long-lived branches are a bad idea - the performance-improvements branch that the intern started last year and has been running on beta for a while but hasn't really kept up to date with the new features we added on production. The time required to merge one of these seems to grow faster than linearly with the time since it diverged, and a year-old branch is basically impossible to merge.

However, long-lived branches happen (features get shelved and then picked up again, refactoring gets postponed due to deadlines...). Rebase doesn't make long-lived branches a good idea, but it makes them much easier to deal with:

* you can rebase once a week and keep your branch up to date (to avoid the superlinear growth of merging effort). You can just about do this with frequent "latest changes from master" merges, but it clutters the branch history, and merge commits complicate things if you ever need to rebase. (Also, anyone who tried to do this with Subversion probably got shivers down their spine at the thought of merging the branch back in after all those merges from master.)

* when the branch inevitably conflicts with master, it's much easier and less risky to resolve the conflicts a commit at a time, rather than resolving them all at once as a merge would force you to.
By using a merge you would add complexity that is not necessary at this point, because it would just originate in the fact, that you branched off sometime sooner. It would not really be a merge in "content". I find rebasing in this occasion perfectly suitable, since it removes this layer of complexity that noone needs at this point.

What exactly is the complexity you have in mind here? (I'm not trying to be contentious: I honestly don't see it.)
I always though that was set by the vendor correctly. Oh well..

I always liked the definition of true in Forth (all bits set to 1). It really made it a lot easier.
More advice on raising money, for first-time entrepreneurs
Has anyone really ever seen a real phone virus?
Conséquences des coupes budgétaires sur les emplois verts
You could try this:

http://www.nadachair.com/

It feels good for my back, but everybody is different.
India Plans to Develop Its Own Computer Operating System
That's an excellent point actually, I should have included that somehow. If founders are of a very disproportionate level of wealth then that can create a lot of friction.

One of the reasons is that for one co-founder the business is a life-or-death matter, whereas for the other it may merely be a way to get through the day in an interesting way.

I've seen one such situation up close and it caused a lot of trouble.
Seems to be the same tech as Nintendo's Wii Vitality sensor, according to this summary of the patent:

http://www.siliconera.com/2010/10/07/nintendo-patent-shows-w...
It's not just the home screen/keyboard UIs, though, it's the UI of the apps themselves. Many iPhone apps written for a 4" screen don't feel at all right on a 10" iPad screen (though admittedly some do without much tweaking, like the home screen), so lots of apps would need to come in iPhone/Big iPad/Little iPad versions. Of course, at some point, developers don't care enough to tune for each and every size, so you might end up with a decrease in general app quality.

On that note, it'll be interesting to see how Android deals with this. There's certainly a place for 7" tablets... and for 15" tablets, too.
Thanks budman.
You test your UPS with a live machine connected ? Seriously ?
It took me through many years of my student life with an enough-to-survive income (like $2000 a month). I never tried to expand hard beyond this, because that was enough for me. So I'm no whiz marketer, just aware of the different things I tried and what worked for me.

I really don't know how to find someone, I wrote the emails myself. What I know is how to talk to people to close the sale - and most of it is just about making people feel secure, and going above what they expect.

Aggressive pushing almost never works for me. Just be nice, see if your product really solves their problem, point out what they will save in time and money, and make sure you are there for them.

To do these type of selling you need someone smart and who has empathy with people. Then just monitor the emails they send to make sure they don't sound marketey or selling too hard. Also, they should not get a customer too excited before purchase, cos the customer finds it hard to back down then, so usually just disappears. The customer wants to feel like he chose you, not like you forced him to buy by being so friendly.
Live from Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 launch event -- Engadget
Is it just me or is the one about word similarity extremely arbitrary? There's any number of reasons you could come up with for any answer.
When you merge the dev branch in the feature branch, you create a new commit with 2 ancestors. While this is all done very well in git and allows for perfect inspection, it makes it nonetheless harder to follow the history of your feature branch, since now you have two sources for changes. I just find it easier to make the history linear in that case, because it is easier to analyse in retrospect.
It's less about me and more about people that don't know about shortcuts like this.
Can someone summarize the impact (no pun intended) of this?
I have implemented LFS once, so I'll be happy to give you my impressions:

1) The LFS manual will get you to a base Linux system. Think of it as the minimal system required to get you up and running and nothing more. You will need to use BLFS or something else to get yourself to point where you will most likely be comfortable (especially as an Ubuntu user).

2) There is no package management by default. The manual recommends some ways to handle this including rebuilding the entire system from scratch (!) when you want to upgrade. So, after all of the work you do (which is mostly watching things compile) you are still responsible for maintaining all of your installed applications. For the average Linux system, this is a lot of packages.

3) All of that said, it is an interesting process to go through if you would like a little more insight into how a Linux system works, assuming that you take the time to understand what you are doing (and why) and not just blindly follow the manual.

Shortly after completing the project (completed over a weekend), I found that I had learned a lot but had no desire to maintain the system. I believe (don't quote me on this) that the creator of Arch Linux started from LFS.

In the end, I use Linux Mint. It's like Ubuntu with a better organized interface (IMHO) and more attention to visual detail.

Should you try LFS? Sure, why not? It won't kill you and maybe it will spur some new project or idea in you. Worst case scenario, you spend a few hours rebuilding a machine.

Hope this helps.
Wow Ed, are you trying to see if there is a per-user cap on submissions in 24 hours or so ?

12 and counting :)
(At the risk of sounding like a broken record...)

(At the further risk of alienating everyone younger than me; I'm only barely old enough to remember records, and never actually owned any...)

Get a standing desk. No slouch. Good stuff. Treadmill gizmo is completely unnecessary.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/6187080.stm

Not a link to the source but a decent article surmising the findings.