skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
as a huge fan of Babylon5 myself, I must commend the author on this analogy. For me, this makes perfect sense.

Also, I just decided, that it's probably time for a rewatch - it has been two years now since I've last seen the series.
Don’t Be a Victim. Protect your PC from Viruses and Malware
Computer infections are becoming a more common problem every single day. Users have to deal with the problems of having a Trojan horse, malware infection, spyware infection or a virus infecting their personal or business computer. However, computer infections do not have to be a daily part of your life.
If Math 55 is any indication, yes.
Yes, fair points and I understand it's a tiny slice of a massive pie.

Maybe I respect tax dollars too much, but I did get a somewhat annoyed reaction about the way spending tax dollars was so flippantly worded in the article
Wow! Sounds exciting, full of opportunity and risk. have to be a special person to take advantage of that policy. And that's what they say they are looking for - special people.
I prefer the way Apple does the UI.

I tried the netbook release 10.04 for a week on older hardware; in the end, I felt like I had to jump through another hurdle to get to an application - what I mean is that it was a two step process through the global menu. Dialogues end up a bit messy. It felt half way there - I'm glad though that Ubuntu are at least trying something different.

I removed my top panel by accident in Gnome yesterday, and was thinking about abandoning it, but I placed it back, mainly for the date and time and system resources widget thing - that I like to keep an eye on in case XYZ app gets out of control.

Notification icons are useful, but they should complement proper applications. How do you select wireless networks in Gnome without the wireless icon thing?

I'm one of those that starts to flail if I can't do it on the command line, let alone some system menu.
Can anyone give some background on this? I just switched from Windows to Ubuntu, and have just started to familiarize myself with OpenOffice.
Does anyone know what this means to the future of the project?
That sounds like a herculean load. Everythign running at once?

Does shutting down all the applications and re-opening them help? Something's got to be eating all of your RAM, and it's hard to guess without seeing top/Activity Monitor.
FTA: When Kaggle offered to sponsor a port of my TrueSkill C# code to PHP, I thought I’d finally have my first real encounter with PHP.
Somewhat related. I have a 12 year old laptop with a broken CDROM. Is there a way to load a lightweight linux using floppy disks or some other method?
Patents and Trademarks for Start-ups
Trademarks for start-ups promotion started on October 12, 2010:

http://www.pinskylaw.ca/News/news.htm

Patents for start-ups promotion started on October 25, 2010:

http://www.pinskylaw.ca/News/patents_for_startups.htm
Singular value decomposition. It continually amazes me how many problems -- from noise reduction to Netflix prediction -- SVD can be usefully applied to.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_value_decomposition
A colleague of mine is meeting Bill Gates in the near future and is pretty nervous about the interaction...

A colleague of ours (HN name spolsky) met with Bill Gates in the past and was pretty nervous about that interaction:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html
Clicking on the subscribe link leads to a PayPal page with the cost: $0.00. Strange.
Forget Realtime, Sequoia-Funded Taykey Shoots For Pre-Time
You're ascribing a lot of authority to an article. It really bears no indication of the deliberation, or lack thereof, on the part of those setting the budget.
If there was no government then gangs would take over.
HAHA. At least I know who downvoted me ;-)
water, diet Dr. Pepper, trying to replace that with lemonade because it's cheaper/healthier and I still get the sweet taste.. but I do love soda. (: Also Yuengling, PBR.
It would depend on what I am tuning my life for at a particular period fo time.

Earlier, I used to tune my life with the purpose of filling two of my biggest bottlnecks to reaching my dreams, experience(/knowledge) and money.

I used to work long hours at my regular job to learn as fast and as much as I could. Then I used to go to another city on the weekends to do weekend work and make more money as future capital.

My way of living also used to be dead cheap (it still is, but with a different focus though). For a year earlier, I used to live in a 10' by 8' bedroom with just an airbed and the rest of the room filled with the all the rest of my belongings.

I also stopped cooking and became dependent on cheap, lean frozen foods from walmart and ethnic stores. In my view, when doing two jobs, the cooking and cleaning is an utter waste of life and time that can be better spent acquiring knowledge, including how to make money.

Later, I started a company while working fulltime. Then I started tuning my life to let me do that. Cut down social life and other thigns to a bare minimum, still lived cheap provided it didn't cut my ability to what I had to do, cut down the earlier weekend job.

Now I spend time learning stuff that would enable me to run my company better, execute ideas better, reaching out to my friends who might be insterested in joining what I am doing.

i still dont' cook and clean, waste of time especially when you know how to eat cheap. The airbed burst a few years ago, now I sleep in a sleeping bag on the floor - good way to remind I haven't reached my dreams yet and not oversleep too!
Lazy Hackers Unite: Firesheep Boasts +104,000 Downloads In 24 Hours
http://www.orbicule.com/undercover/iphone/?
What was the original memory leak?
I was a little disturbed by the glib comparison between Nazi Germany and the IRS. Also, I think there are a lot of people who do not "suffer" under a redistributive welfare state, but rather suffer less than they would without the redistribution.
Definitely technical: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_BASIC
I've spent a bit of time with the 11" Air and, lemme tell you guys: this thing runs simple apps really well. Safari's icon bounces once, then Safari is open. iPhoto is pretty quick. Even bloated iTunes doesn't take a million years to back up an iPhone or scroll through iTMS.

Here's the problem, though: Siegler and I can't talk about intense applications. I don't know if it can't handle RAW file editing in Lightroom/PS, Starcraft II on high settings, or developing in Xcode. The benchmarks Siegler quotes show the Air is worse than the 13" Pro at handling these intense apps (Handbrake, PS, VM software). [1]

Someone cracked about how Siegler's activities consist of "blogging and scrolling through Twitter." For anyone who does that (i.e. your average college student), this thing will be great for years.

For more intense apps? I have my doubts. And the Air might be fine right now, but what about upgrading two years from now? What if system or available memory become an issue?

[1] http://www.macworld.com/article/154596/2010/10/macbookair_be...
I am not considering 3rd party patents, but Apple's. If Apple includes some patented tech into a contribution to LLVM or Clang, what guarantees I have they will not sue non-Apple downstream users?
This is a sarcastic retort to the common advise given to MBA/business people who look for technical co-founders, by technical people on HN:

I'm completely aware of that. It's just that I don't read HN for sarcastic retorts, I read HN for interesting viewpoints.

Further, it's a sarcastic retort to an article (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1820495) that doesn't require one; the original blog post is by someone who comes from a non-technical background but taught himself enough to be useful technically, and the top ranked comment contains excellent advice on how to attract technical co-founders.

"Just learn to code yourself, and don't ask precious me for my time."

The people who receive this response generally aren't offering much. They don't talk about their success in selling stuff in the past[1], or the money they've raised previously, or the beta customers they've lined up. If you're going to pitch yourself as a non-technical founder, you need to talk about your relevant strengths. A good idea by itself just doesn't cut it.

And finally, advice to "do it yourself if you can't find anyone else" is sound. If you can't find someone to take care of the business side, learn to sell, learn to figure out how much you need to spend to get a customer and so on. If you can't find someone technical, learn to code a bit. Just making the attempt shows others that you're not the kind of person to let obstacles stand in your way.

[1] And frankly, if their pitch for a cofounder is this bad it bodes poorly for them selling product later on.
Then why would there be a risk of data loss during a version upgrade?
It isn't very usable/gui-customizable as of now. I'd like an ability to move the "superbar" to other side of the screen, for example.

Visual part doesn't rock much either.

Thus, in my opinion, using it as a default in netbooks is just a little too early. However, the vector direction is right, and we surely can have some nice things with unity.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1823836
this was downvoted, but it is true. Look at Somalia.
1. Star Division wrote StarOffice
2. Sun bought Star Division and forked, StarOffice commercial and OpenOffice free
3. Oracle bought Sun
4. OpenOffice devs decide to fork OpenOffice again, to spite Oracle
5. Oracle says fine, but we're keeping the name
6. OpenOffice devs throw toys out of pram, Oracle asks them politely to go home
7. OpenOffice devs "resign"
Some of the people already joined LibreOffice as far as I understand, so it means that OOo is basically dead. LibreOffice can be thought of as a natural continuation if they do the development (so far it's been only an organisation, without code releases, but those should come soon).
Agreed. The only good thing about Flash is that it is easy to block.
>It is also increasingly clear that the U.S. taxpayer is funding a vast array of clandestine activities of which they are only dimly aware

Increasingly clear? This book was published in the early thirties [1]. This has been totally clear for decades for anyone who cared to look. The quest is; what (if anything) can be done to make people care what the government is inflicting on other peoples in their name and with their money?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket
No, Really Uninformed is a whole nother level of ignorance. When pictures of Jupiter from Pioneer 10 were on the front page <\dated myself>, a graduate student in my Engineering school asked me "Jupiter is a planet, right"? Astonished, I answered politely "Yes, its the 5th planet". Then, and this is the good part, she asked "So, is Earth a planet?"
If it has a USB port you can use either an external CDROM drive or a USB key drive.

If it has a network port then you can make a network boot floppy quite easily. This just contains enough to get the system booting off of an image retrieved from a TFTP server over the network.
Bees solve complex "traveling salesman" problem
I think I agree with this article for the most part. In my opinion, for important things you need people on pushing the extremes so you can get to the healthy middle. My friend often quotes to me "If you get what you asked for, you didn't ask for enough", and I think people who make the extreme claims (there should be no secrets, all software should be open source) are helping us people that actually want a middle ground.
The high level summary is that once Oracle acquired Sun some folks became concerned about Oracle since even though OpenOffice was open sourced Sun and now Oracle still own the trademark on "openoffice.org". Right now the two project are probably pretty close in functionality and the file formats are standardized. In the future functionality of the project will likely diverge somewhat but probably not a lot.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1735052

http://www.documentfoundation.org/faq/
I do not think he is arguing against property rights. I think that forms of anarchy allow for property rights and other individual liberties.
Exactly. Let's kill the farmer, that way we animals can run things for ourselves.
Another perspective, its about 6.5 football (soccer) pitches and will apparently double to 13!

If they fill the the entire building with rows of cabinets spaced by 2m they would have 23.2km of cabinets, about 46400. Enough space for 1.85 million 1u servers... but I am just getting carried away now.
<quote>I believe that human beings are more likely to misbehave if they think they can shield what they are doing from public view.</quote>

I do not agree. I think that people are more likely to misbehave when they want to misbehave, regardless of a shielding mechanism.
Ask HN: Please review my startup - Stockyoo.com
I've been working hard on this for a few weeks now (around looking after my 3 month old son), and I'm about to do my pre-launch test (likely a few hundred GBP worth of Facebook ads targeted at a young demographic) to see if there is much interest.

I'd love it if you could check out the site and let me know what you think of it (concept, copy, design etc).

One thing I'm interested to know is if it's immediately obvious what the purpose of the site is at this stage, or if I need to make it more obvious.

You can find the site at http://stockyoo.com

Thanks!
The RefleX of Native XML Programming
I hate the fact that tech companies and observers gloss over the technical details of products.

It's hard to expect much of tech journalism when so little of it is actually journalism. We've collectively ceded the territory formerly occupied by professional journalists to fanboys and bloggers, many of us celebrating the fact along the way.

Having said that, it's only right that Apple's marketing downplays specs, part numbers, and benchmarks (with some notable exceptions). Macs are great computers for the people who like them because of a combination of clever industrial design, polished software, and good hardware. Specs and benchmarks don't begin to tell you what it's like to use a Mac. Think qualia, not quantity.
It's not per se, but I'm not sure it's so bad to include them. The author has posted some clarifications on this point precisely in a second post http://continuations.com/post/1405992624/clarifications-re-n...
I was looking at the notification-osd guidelines yesterday. And in it there was an idea of your notifications moving to the screen that is selected. The way they determined this was a bit odd. I'd certainly want to change where they appeared. And I'd like a CLI equivalent, but I digress.

I abandoned multi-monitors in the end, because I got sick to death of the lack of keyboard control and the unpredictable nature of applications in that environment. Too many assumptions, like me having both monitors turned on. I'd rather think in workspaces, and be able to group apps to a workspace, or shift the menus easily to the one I was using.

I'm sure there are ways around it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenOffice.org#Governance
I completely agree that the size of the budget does not determine the value of the science. In my mind, though, the huge value in NASA comes in fulfilling our species wanderlust. The entire history of our species is filled with exploration; it is hard-wired into our DNA. At this point, there are few places left to do that.

On the other hand, I keep hoping the Higgs Boson (or a discovery soon after it) will hold the key to either anti-gravity or wormholes. There is no scientific basis for this, I just want to be able to fly or jump across space. :)
The argument is akin to "beef can give you food poisoning, so we should eradicate all cows".

Or "beef can give you food poisoning, we shouldn't eat beef". Actually, it sounds like he is saying "beef always eventually leads to poisoning" so I don't know if your analogy holds up at all.

Anarchy doesn't mean no authority, it just means the least amount of justifiable authority. People always associate Anarchy with chaos and lawlessness, which is not correct.

We will never see an anarchy society in our lifetime, though. This is more an exercise in idealism. e.g. the only type of political system that is ethically justifiable is anarchy.
> The fabric of the society that has advanced so far in the last 300 years is built on, at the very least, property rights and stability

And an anarchist would suggest that that's exactly why the problems that we have have manifested today.

Anarchism is something that's hard to have an actual discussion on. The word has too much baggage. Anarchists are viewed as utopians, there's been a lot of inter-faction arguing, and politics are frankly boring. The modern anarchist movement hasn't been able to connect their message to anything that's relevant. As much as I dislike CrimeThinc, they make a really good points in "Your Politics are Boring as Fuck"[1].

Even if you don't think that ridding the world of rulers is a good thing, fundamentally, anarchism's message of truly caring for people still holds value. Groups like Food Not Bombs, Homes not Jails, and many cooperative organizations do a lot of good in the world. You might be surprised to find that even the Black Bloc isn't just a bunch of kids breaking things, though this is endlessly debated every time the G20 comes to town.

1: http://www.crimethinc.com/texts/selected/asfuck.php
Agreed. I tried to eat it a Korean soup kitchen the other day. There I sat clueless with some murky broth and undescipherable dishes of 'stuff' while all around me Korean students scraped and mixed and ate with happy abandon.
This is good news. FYI, Clang/LLVM's been building FreeBSD for a while now: http://wiki.freebsd.org/BuildingFreeBSDWithClang
I like to consider myself an "anarcho-democrat" in the sense that I favor democracy and free market for all practical reasons, while recognizing that the state is a necessary evil, which needs to be distrusted, checked upon and controlled by the people as much as practically possible.
Can you explain more? How can property rights and individual liberties be secured without the police?
Leave Out The Kitchen Sink
The reason we ended up learning php at my company was pure market demand. We kept getting prospects whose websites written in php and we either learned and got the business or we said no and missed out. There is a ton of php out there, and if you want to build your business up on consulting revenue, its hard not to use it fairly regularly.
In this day and age, I think it would be corporations. The void left by no government would be filled by the second most powerful entities, and those are most certainly corporations.

When I read "Market Forces" (scifi) I thought, very entertaining but completely unrealistic. In the absence of government, maybe not.
In theory, but not practice. Hobbes particularly, makes the point that without government, property rights are largely unenforcible. The strong will out.
ESR might not argue against property rights, because I'd bet he's an "anarcho"-capitalist. All other forms of anarchism don't believe in property, but ancaps do. This is why you'll often (well, in anarchist discussions, anyway) hear that "ancaps aren't anarchists."
Security flaw in iPhone 4
I think the NYT article (linked to in the NPR one) has a better, less metaphor-rife explanation of the current research.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/07/health/views/07mind.html?_...
Getting Started with jQuery Mobile & Rails 3
Do you know anything about what has actually gone on between those developers and Oracle to be so condescending?
Practical Uses of Ruby Blocks
I thought that as soon as you start introducing rights, you're talking about a libertarian
That's interesting, but for me a web browser only needs a width of about 80 characters! Apple owners probably have high resolution large monitors, so it would just look silly.
From Social News To Flight Search: A Chat With Reddit Co-Founder Steve Huffman
I think you just enter another message and Send, and the address is assumed from context. Cool but definitely not obvious to everyone (me).
I'm having trouble grasping the relevancy of this question. But regardless of that, how could you not consider the man smart? Steve Ballmer might be lucky, but Bill Gates is most certainly a very smart and talented man.

I would also add that it's not his intelligence that would intimidate me, but more so his wealth of experience. His bullshit detectors are probably off the charts, considering that he's heard and seen every business pitch known to man.

If I was your friend I would just try to be as honest and upfront as possible. You're not going to sell Bill Gates on anything, but you can convince him you're someone that's worth dealing with.
My take on the article is that the author is basically advocating less powerful central government. What he fails to recognize in the article are that strong state and local governments are part of the balance that the Constitution put in place and they work quite well.

Indeed, not only is strong local governance a good preventative measure against the unlikely military coup, it works for all kinds of things. Want socialized healthcare? No reason your state can't do it. Don't want a national war on drugs? California is about find out if one is actually constitutional.

When you have states with economies that are larger than most countries, there is no reason to be bumping so many responsibilities up to the federal level.
Apple have a damned good track record on their portable strategy; very few boneheaded moves have been made. If the new Air is THAT good, you can bet your b-hind that the new MB Pro incarnation will be THAT THAT good.
I was going to question that idea too. That book you just brought to my attention is amazing. A man in that time, speaking out like that? Wow.
A pretty poor argument for gun ownership...

If this was the case, then personal handguns should be made illegal, and assault weapons should be available to all with appropriate training.

Handguns aren't going to do much if the US government decides to ethnically cleanse a state.
I don't really agree with point 6. If a number of developers left, because of the new company, that would be throwing toys out of the pram...

If 3 project leads hand in resignation and some of them join the forked project... that's a beginning / end of something. We'll have to see how it all ends.

Also, it's not just the devs that forked the project. There's support from outside entities to keep that project going and make it as formal as possible.
A modest proposal re. Unity
I see evidence of this. Here's a plot of the spam I've received over the past few years:

http://www.solipsys.co.uk/images/SpamByMonth.png
Qakbot is No Laughing Matter
The binomial heap
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binomial_heap

It's a heap supporting merging in log(n). While it's usage might not be very common, it is a beautiful data structure.
Couldn't help adding this on:

Don't go on in the fear of another burnout. It will severely curtail your pushing yourself to your limits. Its only by pushing your limits and breaking them that you expand your limits. And it's by expanding your limits that you expand your capabilities.

Use the knowledge that you gained from your previous burnout to backoff when you are approaching another burnout. And if you did go through another burnout, use your experience from your last burnout to learn how to recover from this burnout. And then, keep pushing yourself on further.

Let the fact that you recovered from one burnout be a source of confidence. Thats one way to see it. The other way would be to keep going on in fear of another burnout and fail to try expanding your limits and capabilities.
He must have been already recognized as being very talented in mathematics to get accepted into the Ph.D. program at Princeton. They only accept around 15 students every year from all over the world. I wonder how did his talent demonstrate itself before he started doing mathematics professionally.