skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The post (marketing article) says nothing and doesn't identify what vendor they are trashing. As far as I know my 'IaaS' vendor doesn't retain root access. The article makes almost no sense, it starts be trashing iaas, then suggests paas, with out attempting to explain any difference between a 'platform' and 'infrastructure'.

The only thing missing from the article is an affiliate code on the enstratus link. Then it would be fully clear who wrote it and why. Has anyone not selling something ever uttered the phrase 'deploy best of breed solutions'? I think not.

If my current iaas vendor retains root access then I certainly don't want a more 'managed' solution.
KeePassX has been available for Linux for a while now. http://keepassx.sourceforge.net/

I may try running kepass on Mono now to get all the features of version 2
3%-7% that use the button are most likely power users. It would be unwise to disenfranchise them as they are the ones who normally advocate your software to their friends (regular users).
So, how did they cook the grains? I don't think Neanderthals had pottery, so they weren't boiling up oatmeal or any soup.
strong-ai-mode
Of course, there's the question of "Where do the curators get their news"....

HN contributions don't just materialize - they're often posted by people who scan large amounts of material. Via RSS, usually.

Then again, those users are certainly savvy enough to use RSS without a browser button.
Mono and keepass has been working great for me on linux, you do have to install a few extra things to get it working on ubuntu and xdotool with a higher version than is supplied by 10.10 if you want autofill.
This. "Every website should not look like a NASCAR advert for every sharing service in existence."
If you're going to do something like this at least put some effort into not getting shutdown.

Buy your own domain with private whois, servers in europe, etc.
The Curse of Connected TV
Sure, you could make an argument that 3%-7% is enough people to justify keeping the feature. Or you could make the argument that while it isn't enough, because they are the online non-shopping version of Alpha Consumers, it's worth keeping it to help get the browser promoted.

However you cannot argue that it has to be kept because every regular user wants this feature - statistics don't lie, clearly the majority of users don't care.
There are people moving towards an open source implementation of high scalability cloud services. For example, the OpenStack project at http://www.openstack.org.

The main pieces were contributed by Rackspace and NASA, but dozens of other contributors are involved in the project now.

Full disclosure: I work at Rackspace.
In chrome at least you can install a plugin to add an RSS icon to the URL bar. Easy enough for power users.
One example of good restriction to the "C" library is the lua reference implementation - because of that it can compile for lots of platforms (well 32-bit and above) without a problem.

Another one is zlib, and lots of more.
That's of course all very true, but not very pertinent, as Ruby's support for convenient Japanese encodings was, for the longest time, as broken as all its haracter set and character encoding support. Ruby has never been a language for developing in Japanese or for developing for the
Japanese.
Good tip. Start with a shebang!
kinda cool to see creative commons has recognized unlicense as a legitimate alternative for dedicating code to the public domain.
Rant: Eat Food. Not Too Much. And Sometimes Plants.
I only indirectly depend on browser based RSS feeds as I use Google Reader. Which does precisely what I want it to and is available without regard to browser.
Prediction: ScienceLeaks will be taken down within 1 week. The only reason it wouldn't be shut down is if nobody uses it.

The copyright holders for academic journals have a huge financial incentive to crush ScienceLeaks. The law is on their side, right? ... and why would Google Blogger defend ScienceLeaks? They prefer people to use Google Scholar instead.
Educated Into Complacent Stupidity
Really HN? We're upvoting this? No offense to the commenter, but we can do better.
I never thought putting two or three lines of elisp code in my .emacs file for every package was such a big deal. Actually, as much as I love apt-get on my linux box, I also like the (perceived) feeling of control when I modify my load-path and add a (require) or an (autoload).

I never had the feeling that I need a package manager to handle my external packages. Thinking about that now I guess it's because the packages I use share little to no interdependencies. I'd say that it's the latter where a package system has a really strong point.

But anyway, I'm looking forward to the new feature. I could image it'll be fun to browse a package directory and just randomly try new extensions out, just to see if I like them and be able to get rid of them as easily as I've installed them.

Cool.
SuperGenPass is good if all you care about are website passwords. I also need to save passwords for FTP/SSH/Internal Business Apps. SuperGenPass won't be helpful and I would definitely prefer to use one solution for all my password needs.
Having just read the post I disagree. The post clearly says that most current vendors place significant restrictions on the software and networking layers in their cloud. As someone who has used GoGrid, Rackspace and AWS I can concur with this position. You have a lot less control over your cloud servers than you do over say a dedicated server.

CloudSigma are an IaaS provider who presumably take a different approach.

Overall I think it is a valid point for them to make, especially as it seems that a lot of these restrictions are vendor created.
Xat 2011 Analysis
The implementation of RSS in Firefox was always an "ultra-lite" version that I doubt will be missed by any serious RSS enthusiasts. A full-featured RSS reader feels a lot like a mailing list, so I think it's appropriate to keep RSS in Thunderbird rather than Firefox.

In some respects, a web-app RSS reader (like Bloglines or Google Reader) is better. You can access your feeds from any computer, the read/unread status is kept synchronized between PCs, and the centralized web-app arrangement makes more efficient use of network resources. Better to have Google Reader poll a site every 30 minutes than to have 10,000 Firefox installs each polling it every few hours.

The only browsers I know of that ever had good in-browser RSS readers were Opera and Seamonkey. But even in those cases, RSS was included as part of the mail client, not shoehorned into the browsing paradigm.
Seconded. Even after years of using Emacs, I still have to stop for a moment every now and then and think: holy shit, what a motherflippin' piece of software!

...and I get really happy :-)
I frankly never got into RSS until I started using RockMelt about a month ago. Now I use it all the time to tell me when there are new Hacker News post, etc. But unfortunately the only clickable link for the Hacker News RSS takes me to the story, which is often an external link. If I want to see the "discuss" of the story I have to manually go the website and find the post and click the discuss link. Perhaps RSS needs a more robust protocol that wouldn't require others to make their own API. Then I think browsers like Rock Melt might bring this new kind of RSS to the masses.
Ah, but just because glibc doesn't call the fork() system call doesn't mean the kernel doesn't have one. :) I bet you could still get to by calling something like __glibc_old_fork(), or at the very least a manual syscall(SYS_FORK) should work.

POSIX itself doesn't even use the words system call, only function, to describe them.
Somebody alert the guy who collects amazingly complicated infographics right away!
Why should this particular <link> incantation receive special treatment over others?
From concept to launch in 24 hrs and why there's no reason you can't do this too
wikipedia tells me it is because S stands for the latin word summa.
I have used RSS for years now. I check google reader about as often as I check hacker news. I start my morning off with a cup of coffee while I read my feeds using Reeder on the iphone or ipad.

Not once have I used any of the RSS features of a browser. I really don't see the point. I guess google doesn't either.
The " || exit 1" is unnecessary. Just use "set -e" at the top of the script once.
I'm not sure how to pass the clearly understandable Khan academy style test, but Gilbert Strang of MIT has a series of 35 excellent lectures on Linear Algebra, starting here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZK3O402wf1c
Obviously, I'm not Alex. But I'll take a crack at it. Seems to me there's an echo-chamber quality inherent in any community of like-minded individuals.

For example, if I sourced my tech news solely from HN, I might imagine that large corporations consist solely of oblivious, slow-moving dinosaurs incapable of writing decent software. But if I had http://cacm.acm.org/ showing up in my RSS reader, I'd be exposed to a somewhat competing view.

To me, the value of RSS is the ability to subscribe to a few sites I wouldn't normally bother visiting. It's not hard to remember to check HN. Remembering to swing by corporate IT and Microsoft-focused publications is a bit tougher. RSS can help with that.
If you are doing academic work you can easily apply for membership to any of those libraries

Warning: Pet peeve alert.

Scientists routinely complain that the public unfairly brands them as isolated ivory-tower eggheads whose work is too insular and rarefied to have any relevance to the real world. They also complain that the general public has a poor idea of how science actually works: People often view it as some kind of alternative religion in which the priests stand in front of documentary cameras wearing white coats and handing down dogma.

Then these scientists turn around and publish most of their actual writing and almost one hundred percent of their data, data-driven reasoning, and detailed experimental design in journals which are prohibitively expensive to read unless you're currently affiliated with a university. Which is, in turn, exorbitantly expensive, either in cash or in opportunity cost.

Trying to understand science without reading the primary literature is like trying to understand jazz by reading the New York Times and watching the occasional Ken Burns documentary. Reviewers do write a lot about jazz, and they go on an on about how important and highbrow it all is, but if you haven't actually listened to a jazz piece for more than two minutes you're never going to get the point. Jazz is about the music. Science is about the detailed methods and the data and the literature.
RSS is not dying.

There are very few individual users of it but there are literally millions of web sites that use it. Almost everyone on the Internet uses a portal site of some kind and the only way to be included on one of those sites is RSS/Atom feeds.

So as long as people want to use RSS for a personal reader it will be there to do it. And there will always be RSS readers because every programming environment I can think of has a pre-built library for feed reading meaning a programmer could whip a reader up in under an hour.

As far as the button disappearing from browsers that just makes UI sense. Chrome Browser taught the rest of the industry that most people hate clutter in their browser. So buttons that 93% of the users don't use are being taken out. But they can be added back with a simple browser extension/plug-in/whatever. So even here the people who want to use an RSS reader aren't losing anything

(and even without an extension/plug-in/whatever any user savvy enough to be using a reader will know how to cut and paste a url)
Robert Scoble says he was told (ostensibly by someone at Google) that the Google Reader team has been largely disbanded, and that the project is no longer maintained. He's mentioned this a couple of times on Quora, on Buzz, and on his blog.
Are people lining up because it's Android or because it's Meizu? It may likely be that Meizu built their brand enough to cause the lines, not Google's Android.
just b/c rss is dying, thank god too, doesn't mean syndication is dying. already ideas like pubsubhubbub have provided realtime syndication in a more compact format.

The web is just moving to realtime and ingesting a big long text file and determining deltas sucked. For that matter, XML as a data transport vehicle should end in favor of more compact and type friendly solutions like JSON.

Don't be so alarmist that a crappy tech is being phased out. Now, where's my Tandy 1000.
Excellent! thanks
I think that most of the problem with IaaS vendors, EC2 in particular is that the IO throughput is absolute shit. I've never had a problem with the software I'm allowed to run on EC2, I've always had a problem with its horrible IO throughput.

There is also a lot of comfort in knowing everyone else is running the same kernel and there will be some difficulty in executing various exploits for the hypervisor.
The API doesn't solve the real problem of vendor lock-in and the OpenStack API is basically the Rackspace API with all those restrictions. We posted regarding this previously at http://bit.ly/fSJZ79 . It isn't fundamentally bad but it just reinforces the same restrictive model.

It doesn't answer the fundamental points we raise regarding false constraints imposed by vendors such as yourselves (not specifically aimed against Rackspace) like:
- bundling of resources
- fixed instance sizes
- software level control by the vendor
- filesystem visibility by the vendor
etc.

We have taken a different approach. Our point is there are many approaches and implementations to IaaS and the current larger ones impose many restrictions on customers and are much more like traditional hosting type models on something that can be a lot more open and flexible. We are talking about the true sense of 'open'.

Why not allow customers to have control of their operating systems, networking and server instance sizes? The underlying virtualisation platform supports it. That means the vendor is actually choosing to impose those restrictions on the customer in their software. We choose not to. Its just a different approach.

Best wishes,

Patrick
CEO
CloudSigma
http://www.cloudsigma.com
drallison, you posted the link in the first place??
OT: General flight rant:

2 things (note - this is all from a 'economy' flyer standpoint)

1) The quality of my flights is almost always determined by the passengers around me - crying babies, rude/loud people, people too large for the seat next to me, etc. These factors play far more in to me having a good or bad flight vs AA/BA/Virgin/Continental/United/etc.

2) Boarding is insanely stupid. I'm not sure I could come up with a worse way except to say 'everyone get on whenever' (even that might end up being better in some cases). What needs to happen is to board by seat position relative to the windows - window seats should board first, then middle seats, then aisle seats. The time spent waiting for people who are in an aisle seat to get up, let window people get past, then repeat the process for middle-seat passengers is crazy. It's painful to watch this process play out in slow motion when it's so simple to fix. At least try it - I've been flying on and off for 25 years and have never seen this approach tried, nor heard of it being tried.

Granted, the 9 levels of 'special' customers (silver, advantage, bronze, elite, elite plus, gold, bronze+, etc) might be miffed if they didn't get on 3 minutes before everyone else, but the average time for boarding passengers would be reduced.

Rant over...
This is plain-old piracy and I'm a little surprised to see it getting up-voted on HN. There are plenty of open-access journals, but most scientists choose to publish in closed journals instead for a variety of reasons. I think the results of research funded by taxpayers should be free and, indeed, that is now required by the NIH and there's a huge resource available here:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/

However some of the research published in traditional journals is funded from elsewhere and, as such, I can't think of any reason why we "deserve" free access to it.
I hate to write this down. I was born in 1961, and I watched all the Apollo launches, moon landings and splashdowns. I got a degree in Aerospace Engineering. I worked for 2 large defense/aerospace companies.

NASA spends the money in the same form of "white welfare" that DoD spends its money. DoD and to a lesser extent, NASA, exist to funnel taxpayer money to a few large corporations, and a flock of smaller, less publicly recognized corporations. No competition exists between these companies. No real government oversight exists either, as a large portion of the money is "black budget".
Well, I guess I should have waited for this discussion to reach a conclusion :) I read in Advanced Linux Programming (the famous ALP book) that fork() as well as creating threads via pthread library use clone() in the background. Any ways, the discussion here is quite informative!
Verizon Purportedly Snatching Up iPhone Domains
...girls were much more interested in using computer tools to generate content, while it was the boys (or adult males) that were more often providing (writing) the tools.

Sample of one, agreeing with your comment:

I'm female. I learned a little (x)html and css exactly for this reason. A friend liked something I had written and posted to an email list. She asked if she could publish it on her website. I said "sure". She later let me post more stuff there. Then she couldn't keep up and gifted me all the code. I knew absolutely nothing about code or running a website. I didn't even know what FTP meant. I started playing with the code by copying and pasting new background colors into the code. As my site grew, I had to figure out better navigation techniques...etc.

My sons are dragging me slowly into playing a wider variety of games by de-emphasizing all the "macho" stuff I hate (like the fighting) and emphasizing how much each game is "like" something I do like: Simcity. They didn't get me into playing stereotypical guy games by telling me it was wrong to be so girly or to have the objections I had. They sold me on it by showing me what was in it for me that fit with my "girly" interests.
Reading the frontpage of social news aggregators is much less schema-expanding than reading larger bodies of work from individual authors. This is especially true since content written for news aggregators tends to be infused with the sorts of biases that these aggregators reward; in the same way that NYT articles tend to favor establishment interests and authoritarianism, content written for HN is often tinged with Internet-inspired scientism, masturbatory theses, topical gossip, and all other manner of nonsense and pseudointellectualism.

The worst part is that when you read HN you actually feel like you're learning, because you are. The problem is that you're not learning nearly as fast as you would be if you were reading books. It's the same reason why 2-5 year olds who watch TV are measurably learning, but at the same time end up dumber than kids who aren't watching TV because they're learning at a slower pace. The fact is that even reading a book about something as seemingly mundane as the history of American homeopathy will teach you more about life, the universe, and everything than six months of reading HN. (E.g. http://jama.ama-assn.org/content/295/13/1590.extract )
RSS never really caught on beyond a geek crowd. I've never used it.
Actually in our cloud there aren't any shared software resources between cloud servers which is why you can run any operating system you like. Each cloud server is a standalone entity in its own container. We feel this is a lot more secure and flexible.

With regards to IO throughput, this along with networking performance are two areas we identified and sought to address when designing and building out our platform. You might be interested to read my blog post earlier about benchmarking cloud servers and differentiating performance between clouds at http://bit.ly/a7CqV3 . Basically storage performance is one of the key differentiating factors between clouds. Again the performance has as much to do with vendor hardware and architecture choices as it does to do with fundamental cloud computing issues.

Best wishes and thanks for your feedback,

Patrick
CEO
CloudSigma
http://www.cloudsigma.com
What if we use text entry...but not from our fingers?
I assume he is a crank because his blog seems deceptive (at least the one article I read).

In the article that hit the front page yesterday, he discussed a possible scenario (a 30 year old becoming obese by age 50), and devoted 3000 words to the extra "sip of milk/beer" (above maintenance) that this person consumed.

He devoted 0 words to other 7 strips of bacon/day that this person consumed over a hypothetical non-obese 50 year old. I made some graphs which illustrate his fallacy:

http://crazybear.posterous.com/how-1-graph-reveals-what-3000...

If he wants us to assume he isn't a crank, he shouldn't be deliberately deceptive.
Agreed.

I once wrote a Python script that would parse RSS feeds and write emails in a maildir (or whatever is supported by Python); one was then able to read news from an MUA which was comfortable (Mutt by then). I lost that script when I did a 'dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda' before quitting my last job and realizing 2 minutes later that I forgot to backup many useful scripts I wrote over the course of my year and half in that NGO.

Being a smoking Frenchman, I'm tempted to be gratuitously insulting to the author but there's one interesting problem that could come from RSS' disappearance from browsers: the lack of visibility may very well "destroy" the format in the long term. Also, as the web is increasingly publicized, the incentive to remove a format that generates traffic but may hardly generate revenue might be high.
I suspect that they're lining up to see Jack Wong. I hadn't heard the name before, but it seems he's a bit of a draw all by himself:

http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/how-the-eni...

"Every time (Wong) makes a comment on his
company's online forums, there's this groundswell
of pandemonium around those posts."

so perhaps it's not so much the phone that they're going to buy...?
The top rated answer repeatedly makes the point that the entrepreneur must choose his investors wisely. The OP points out that the best way to have such a luxury is to be profitable early and then create a bidding war among potential investors. This will (hopefully) make it so that the entrepreneur will retain control over his board.
I'm going to buy a corduroy suit just for the occasion. I can't wait to walk around the office. "Vvvrrrip, vvvrrrip, vvvrrrip"
Exactly.(Riemann) integral is summation with infinitesimal quantities. (It was Leibniz who used long s to denote integration, though. http://jeff560.tripod.com/calculus.html ) Also, for discrete summation, capital 's'igma is used.
That's pretty much my point: the "A" in "ASCII" stands for "American", and software as a culture has remained plagued and characterized by that ever since. What I found remarkable about this post is that Ruby's development culture is distinctly not run in English, and it's creating the predictable amount of friction.

The Japanese are no less insular than Americans when it comes to actual belief in the independent existence of anything off their shores - I find it fascinating to see that reflected in the Ruby project.
They also employ 2 of the 3 creators of PubSubHubBub a technology specifically created to enhance feed syndication. It's also a project that was developed on company time (albeit 20% time) and is hosted on their GoogleCode website. AND Google Alerts was one of the first (if not THE first) to implement the technology.
Hemingway had the same advice for writers: Never stop writing at the end of a chapter.