skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The news media keeps saying that Borders is going out of business in large part due to e-books. But I have a hard time buying that.

I got a kindle six weeks ago and I love it. I think I've made one purchase and it as $2.50 for scrabble from EA games. I have yet to buy a book, but I've been reading a lot of the free books on it. I have a hard time spending a lot of money on ebooks though. The local library is too good. I realize that due to my cheap-skatedness I'm probably an anomaly...

Interestingly, a close family member works for a local used and new bookseller with a nearly 100 year history. They have struggled mightily in the last 5 years or so, and now are unable to get a loan from any major bank because the bankers say e-books are going to put all bookstores out of business.

Has anybody _exclusively_ begun using ebooks? I think amazon's real-world bookselling are a much bigger threat to the likes of borders and the local bookstore than it's e-books are, but maybe I'm just smoking crack.
+! Definitely find a partner
Borders is trading at 86 cents a share

I will never understanding stock markets and valuation of publicly traded companies.
I really love their reference to running arpspoof as "a sophisticated modification of the Address Resolution Protocol Table" as opposed to "brute force flooding of the Address Resolution Protocol Table".
Five Sins of Tech Journalism
I think there's not much benefit of staying on Leopard if you run an Intel Mac these days. The upgrade cost is pretty cheap, and the benefits do developers are quite heavenly.

I've been keeping Leopard support in TapeDeck because it's been pretty easy to do so, but with the work I'm doing on 1.4 right now, I've been tempted to hit that kill switch...(But I won't.)
Ah, okay, thx - I didn't realise.
Ask HN: What new things are you planning to do this year?
To Sharpen your Mind
Before I made a brief foray in the land emacs, I used tabs in VIM rather than leveraging the buffer system (I came from a Windows world, so I was used to tabs in other editors). Then emacs opened my eyes to magic of buffers, and when I returned to VIM (for various reasons), I found buffers to be better than tabs, especially once I first learned the commands, and then updated my .vimrc with a few useful shortcuts, particularly for split views.
I don't know if that's the original, but there have been many such 'pranks.' IIRC there was a video circulating a while ago showing the reactions of people at DEFCON who had their connection hijacked to redirect to goatse (or was it all of the images were replaced with the goatse guy, I can't remember full).
No abuse here? It's tastefulness, not abuse.

It will be interesting to see if he releases another game called "Beat the Puppy" or "Tazer the Baby".
1) Tell your friends about your idea - If they are out in public, and worth pursuing, you will be less likely to abandon them

2) Create an idea journal - The world may not be ready for some of your ideas, but in a few years, who knows.
There is a 1 person, but it requires trust. And trust isn't beside the point, it's part of it. That trust is part of the intimacy involved in sharing a secret, and it is part of the bonding between two people. If you confide something that important to someone you care about, that may strengthen the relationship.

"How do you know? How do you really know you can trust me?"

"I don't. That's what trust is."
I'm not sure of the details. I vaguely recall there was a version mismatch with the provider's API, and at one point they were sending UTF-8 data when the header said UTF-16, or vice versa.
so all this time you where primarally talking about roads and libraries?
How the devil did this get injected into Hacker News! <checks plug>
Microsoft Numbers of 2010
Nowhere near that narrow. I'm talking about the totality of the social contract.
One reason is that Microsoft's implementation was compatible enough with Sun's to pass tests but not to perform much useful work. Without MS's active participation, most enterprises wouldn't benefit from interoperability.
Being able to just type in my name and password on some new laptop and having all my stuff immediately available to me has a pretty cloudy feel to me. I’m not sure whether you should call it “cloud”, though, that only seems to be unnecessarily confusing.

By the way, using my definition you would be perfectly justified in calling some pretty old technology “cloud computing”. A Gmail account you access with IMAP (vintage 1986) would be the prime example.

What might be new is that the users usually don’t have to care about the technical details. When you are using IMAP you have to enter server names and other yucky stuff, that’s not the case with Dropbox.
What does the shadiness of the tactics have to do with their effectiveness and their aim? If they're shady, they're shady.
You are. You are the certificate authority, and you're trusted. Anything you sign is, by definition, valid.
At least the birds are birds and not penises. Flying penises with bombs that attack buildings full of pigs would be wrong.
Well, for what it's worth, this thread was the first "complaint" about the name. I expected that to happen on YouTube first, but it was actually HN - go figure.

It's really tough to separate the name from all other factors influencing downloads, but I haven't seen any evidence it's hurting.

I think the name is pretty effective, for a few reasons: the most common reaction when I tell people the name, by far, is genuine laughter. I'll take that over polite interest any day. The name is descriptive, anyone who knows what Whack-a-Mole is can make an educated guess about this game (although it's probably cuter than they would expect). And yes, it is a tiny bit naughty - no one ACTUALLY wants to whack a kitten! - which is what makes it memorable, without crossing into offensive or controversial for controversy's sake (at least for the vast majority of people).

Do you have suggestions for other names? I can't think of anything good - "Tap-a-Kitten" or "Tap-a-Kitty" sound a lot more bland and unremarkable. Lots of R-rated names I can think of, but that's the last thing I want to get into in this thread :p
Skywing,
There's a quote in one of the Assassin series books by Robin Hobb that's very apt.

There is no losing. You keep fighting until you win.

In a way what you're giving up on is not an idea. You're giving in to your fear of what it might mean if you don't succeed with the idea.

And it's ironic - because the only way you could fail is if you give up.

*

My recommendation would be to make a list of 100 ideas you've had, then give it a week to add on as many ideas as you like.

Then identify the 10-20 ideas that fall in the intersection of your natural abilities and passions. Then pick 2 and start working on both of those with a stated amount per day and with no leeway for changes until end of 2011.

So you commit to 3 hours a day on these 2 ideas - every single day. No matter what happens.

*

Also your devotion should be to the product you're making and to the execution of the idea. Once you've decided on the 2 ideas, then it's not your job to visualize failure. It's to execute and to visualize only success.

*

At some level you're scared of failure and you just have to grow some balls and take a 100% shot. If you have a son down the line, or already have one. What would you want him to think of his father as -

Someone who worried about what users might say about his work and quite without releasing anything.

OR

Someone who made something magnificent - who fucking cares whether anyone else sees the magnificence or not. It's you making it for yourself, as an artist. If you're happy with what you make then nothing else matters.
Indeed, (My)ISAM isn't really comparable to Postgres with regard to features anyway (transactions, for one), even if it is faster that's not a fair comparison. Only InnoDB is...
We have a bigwig in digital content at Simon & Schuster writing a guest post for us next week. We'll pass these questions along.
Maybe I should have been more clear. You're comparing between species.

> But the whole span of love and sex are covered
> pretty well by other animals, and the physiological
> and even psychological mechanisms are pretty much
> the same across the bored.

I think that different things are covered by different animals. You can aggregate the whole body of 'non-human animals' to say that 'animals in general are the same as humans with respect to how they approach their sex lives.'
Appears to date to 2006. Goatse prank in 2004. You win :)
They liken it to counting cards in blackjack, which gives you a mathematical edge. They aren't getting a mathematical edge here, they are cheating. I am very interested in how they figured out the key combination that makes this possible, and how they are able to "persuade" casino staff into turning on some (obscure?) option.
Some datacenters (eg the Miami IPX/NAP) use flywheels the size of large trucks to provide failover until the generators kick in. They are seriously scary machines up close.
Good God I love this guy... I have been thinking the same thing for a few years now. I am holding tightly onto a couple T60p Thinkpads with 4:3 UXGA screens just because there is NOTHING on the market right now I would want to develop on. I really wish there was a way to make this point to manufacturers.

edit: my other gripe about many of the new wide laptops is the addition of a number pad on many. This forces you to type shifted to the left since you can't move the keyboard relative to the screen. EVERY wide laptop that offers a keyboard with a number pad should also offer a standard keyboard that is centered in the unit. This could easily be done with filler plates on either side.
Wrapping text really muddles code. Ideally commit messages should have a different interface than your code, but in some cases people are going to be looking at it through a tool that is in more of a code-oriented space.
It's not a hoax or hype. It's more like a performance art piece or a thought experiment. The creators live http://www.selectparks.net/, specifically http://selectparks.net/~julian/
Using Creative Commons RDFa for attribution
Linode's Fremont DC is owned by Hurricane Electric which is also being mis-represented.
Yep... as I remember it, XML RPC was "specified" by Dave Winer, and it was really sloppy. As I remember, there was no discussion of character encoding in the spec, and if you read the spec literally, you actually HAD to generate invalid XML documents because the spec was written by someone who did not understand that there was such a thing as character encoding and that it was important. And Winer absolutely refused to add features or to allow any kind of process by which XML-RPC could evolve into something good enough to use. Then the Microsoft people who brought you COM in all its baroque loveliness got their hands on the concept and made an industrial strength, godforsaken, complex thing called SOAP. The problem with SOAP mostly stemmed from the fact that they thought that all the work would be done by compilers and IDEs and so forth... they thought all the programmer would do is click a button and hey presto they would be able to run one object on one server and another object on a second server, and who cares what happens on the wire protocol? It's the compiler's job! But that's a terrible recipe for interoperability.
People aren't linear functions. People treat information with the severity they think it has. So the notion that someone can't keep a "bigger" secret because they betrayed a smaller secret does not hold.
Many libraries have EBook lending as well.
I stopped using SOAP in the shower a month ago and have never felt cleaner. Showering is a more efficient process now:

- I spend less money on resources (SOAP, lotion, etc)

- I get clean faster -- SOAP used to slow me down

- Using someone else's shower is easy, I just take my towel. I don't have to worry if their SOAP is compatible with me.
It got boring because it wasn't part of a platform that could extend it - or be extended by it. It's like an operating system that only has a drawing program.

Edit: let's say the Aibo was an open sourced software plus blueprints for a 3D-printer. Anyone who wanted a "walking"-component for their robot could simply download it and build and extend it themselves. You could even run the entire thing in an emulator and then just press "print" when you wanted it in the physical world.

Now that _is_ disruption.
Case Study: Developing the Humanair Air Purifier
So, no YC companies on Rails use Heroku? (or is that lumped into Amazon?)
That's the exact reason it's a particularly horrible commercial though.

She says "cloud" to refer to her machine. If she had turned it off before she left the house, would "the cloud" have gone away? It sticks out as being egregiously nonsensical because it violates the only remaining common property of what "the cloud" might ever have meant.

The hackneyed and (mis)appropriated uses of "cloud" are almost innumerable at this point. But up until that commercial, at the very least they all agreed that data "in the cloud" doesn't become inaccessible if your home machine or ISP is non-functional.
I think it is healthy. I talk myself out of ideas every week. The best idea would definately come back to you. I had an idea in October last year, talked myself out of it and it came back to me early this year and i have already built a MVP for it.
> Anybody care to comment on why SoftLayer is so predominant?

My guesses are: (a) they provide dedicated servers that are comparable to Rackspace but at a lower cost (but with a support trade-off), (b) they also offer cloud computing and storage instances that are decent (in my experience).
Insight: There must be some value in Comic Sans if…
I operate a server management company.

We we have worked with many providers, including all of those listed.

We continue to recommend Softlayer for leased dedicated hardware needs because of the features they provide, and the solid network infrastructure (although they do have hiccups on occasion).

Softlayer has a great support team, fast server deployment (1-2 hours) and full management capabilities - power strip reboot, IPMI KVM, OS reloads, etc..
No, more like 'yay for anarchism!'
Hire multi-skilled people even if each skill isn't perfect.
Read "Security Analysis" if you are interested in valuations; and can stand a heavy tome.
Quora has helped me learn Django faster...
The "Dolt" button
If you bothered to read the first couple of paragraphs of the report, it would tell you that most of the poor are not working poor (by choice). If you skipped ahead to the tables, you'd realize it also tells you that only 12% of the poor work full time for at least 27 weeks/year.

You are committing a logical fallacy. You are acting as if I made a blanket statement rather than a statistical one, and refuting only the (obviously false) blanket statement.

If you want a report on leisure, rather than simply not working, here you go: http://www.bls.gov/news.release/atus.nr0.htm

That doesn't specifically carve out the poor, but it shows that people with low income consume 30 min/day more leisure than the highest income groups. The "not employed" (a category which encompasses about 80% of the poor) get considerably more than 30 min/day.

Sorry if the inconvenient facts get in the way of your moral posturing.
Launch: Highrise redesigned for 2011
That's fine, because you've made your intentions clear. In that case, if I'm not willing to budge, I'll let you know that, and we can avoid a meeting. I've had people do it exactly as I described, and it's an infuriating waste of time for me.
This is obviously some kind of awareness campaign, but it makes me wonder where the joke ends. Did anyone actually make the device (it certainly is possible) or is it just a hoax news article?

This made me laugh though:

"a Nokia N900 phone turned in at a police station in the area had a number of images of the device on board, along with these two photos, taken just minutes after one installation in a large Starbucks in the central suburb of Mitte, east Berlin. Note the black hat worn by what may be a colleague in the first photograph."
The term cloud was already here in 2007... So this fad is there for the fifth year. I'd rather consider it a long time trend. In the end, like client-server or mainframe, it will stay in the background but be masked by newer trends.
for the sake of clarity: could you tell me what you think should be the upper bound as a percentage of my income in this social contract should entail?
Your Odds of Various Autoimmune Disorders
Try clicking around on that site. Most of the links all just go to 'newstweek.com' and none of what are apparently meant to look like links on the frontpage actually go anywhere. The only page that actually functions is the 'article' page. The only links on the page go to:

* http://hotglue.org/

* http://julianoliver.com/

* http://k0a1a.net/

Both of the photos of the supposed perpetrators link to the home pages of the same guys that are in the Copyright notice at the bottom of the page. So far as I can tell this is a total hoax.
I'm sorry that the (very creative and funny) name for your app is causing people to troll here. I think it's an awesome name, and I honestly may not have clicked through to read your article had the name not caught my attention.

I'll pass along some good advice I've heard: Acknowledge and accept suggestions, ignore the haters.
Hot and tasty Tropo docs, fresh out the oven.
Little Known Factors that Can Affect Your Conversion Rate
"Borders is trading at 86 cents a share and has a market cap of 62 million dollars. It has around 700 locations valuing them at less than $100,000 per store"

That's a pretty shocking figure if you ask me. It's hard to believe when you hear about some startups raising a few millions over an idea without any business model... (e.g. come to mind the young though very popular Path and Flipboard: $2.5M for the former, $10M for the latter, and I imagine valued in the same range as Borders for these rounds)

I know that comparing web-startups to a brick-and-mortar business is not as simple as that, but it does put things in perspective.
I much prefer getting the ebook version if it's available. I seem to actually read my ebooks since they're always with me. I also find myself re-reading my ebooks more. My ebook transition was initially assisted by my wife's insistence that we had no more physical place for more physical books. I still get technical books on paper, but even then I first look to see if there is even an ebook available.
Skype's Ghost of Christmas Present
I'm planning on learning Python and R. A career advisor gave me some very bad advice at 16 ("you're too old to learn programming properly") and I intend to rectify that this year.
StarLisp is basically Common Lisp with parallel-map and parallel-reduce and a special vector data type for them. You can do data-parallel operations over arrays trivially, but it's not clear what array chunk size tradeoff you need for a given problem on today's small core count machines. It might make sense to bring the approach back when there's 100-core machines around; that would basically be a CM-5 on a chip.

In the meantime there's a StarLisp simulator you can play around with: http://sourceforge.net/projects/starsim/

When it comes to data parallelism, StarLisp's successor Paralations (http://www.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.08/08.07/Paralat...) is much more interesting because it deals explicitly with locality. Paralations' successor, NESL (http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~scandal/nesl.html) is implemented on top of Common Lisp, but it's a functional language with ugly syntax.

It would make a lot of sense to have something like StarLisp or APL for CUDA right now. Trying to do data parallelism in C is about the most brain-damaged idea ever. I don't know if anyone is working or interested in that, though.

Overall, I think the MultiLisp (futures) approach is a bigger win for general-purpose parallel programming than StarLisp data parallelism. Doing everything with data-parallel algorithms is hard - you're doing everything with array programming like in APL, but now you need to come up with clever ways to parallelize everything too. But the algorithms themselves are beautiful (read Hillis and Steele's Data Parallel Algorithms, my favorite algorithms paper: http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:efZTS1nDfBsJ:c...)
I think it's ridiculous to assume that all physical books are worthless. There are reasons to prefer physical books, after all; they're easy to carry around, they don't run out of battery or need any maintenance like charging, and they're generally much cheaper than an e-Reader. If you're not a heavy reader, and not many are these days, why would you spend $150 on a book-reading device? You still have buy the books you would buy anyway, and you have much more freedom buying individual books. e-Books may take a cut out of printed books, but I sincerely doubt they'll obliterate them entirely.

On top of all that, used book stores provide much more value than big commercial vendors like B&N because their selection is so broad and so cheap. Used books are in general perfectly fine to be re-read, so people seeking bargains on new books go there frequently; e-Books will generally not be discounted very quickly, there is no such thing as a "used e-Book".

The _real_ reason used bookstores are going to be around for a long time, though, is that there are A LOT of books out there. Even if someone was able to digitize millions of books, there'd be millions and millions more that would only be able to be found in used bookstores, especially with older books. Just go into your local used book store and ask yourself how much of that catalog is available on the Kindle, or will be made available any time in the foreseeable future. It's a pretty small percentage.
'Living as They Live': Should faculty and students live and study together?
Linode has http://library.linode.com/ too.
Could be, but remember that getting access to the store requires installing an OS update with a reboot, and that OS updates aren't forced onto everyone on their day of release, and that it takes a week or two for all users to be bothered with an update message. When you combine that with the rather low-key marketing (no marketing?), I think that 1 million is probably a lower bound on daily activity, and that it will only climb from here.
Perhaps not, but it's not unheard of. "Smart" bargainers sometimes resort to tactics like that, because they figure since you've already come this far to meet them, you'll lower your price just to get the deal over with. Which I generally won't do on principle, because that pisses me off.
Calling All Asterisk Users! Help proofread Asterisk:The Definitive Guide?
71% of students learn more about IT at home than school
I'm curious- If you're distributing through the AppStore only, and the App Store doesn't support 1.5, why maintain the code?
Tell that to the Amazon and VMWare CTOs. It is also a buzz word, but there is a real underlying change in it - which is the change of IT from a former "custom setup" to standardized automated processes. And it's making waves in companies IT departments because it shakes the old model.
There's also some graph issues here. For example, on the multithreaded one, it takes two seconds on 1 core. Ideal with full use of 6 cores would be (1sec/6~=0.167sec). The points at 6-8 cores are clearly above 0.1 seconds and probably below 0.33, but it's hard to tell.

Most of the literature in parallel (at least, in the parallel compilers space, where I work) plot speedup (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speedup) versus number of processors instead of seconds versus threads/processors to show how well a given algorithm and implementation scale. Of course, you have to be careful about what you use for the sequential (T_1) baseline, but it's much easier to understand the data in the graphs.