skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is the only picture I could find:

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3590/3621951455_9632ff862f.jp...

Apparently root weave was done away with in X11R7.5, who knew? (Can still be enabled with the -retro flag.)

Congrats on a very slick web app, btw. Often when I see a project posted here I think to myself, "I could have done that, but am too lazy." :-) However, your idea is highly original and superbly executed. Well beyond my ken, not that that means anything.
One 'problem' with this modus operandi is that some companies use the big releases as selling points. It is interesting that the Chrome team does not feel the pressure to do this. Especially considering how heated the browser war is these days. Everyone seems to think Firefox 4 is going to be the salvation, for example.

On the other hand, the silent updates are a blessing, and good features are another way of attracting users.
Google Wave Morphs Itself into New Offerings
> Irrelevant. Look at any standard of living study.

Hmm. You don't think that people's preferences tell us anything?

> They'll all have most of western Europe above the US for the average person.

American poor people are stereotypically obese and have multiple cars and big screen TVs. While those things are bad for them....

Oh, and they have free healthcare too. (Never confuse insurance with healthcare.)

It is true that the gap between the poor and the rich is greater in the US, but by that measure, hunter-gatherers were better off than modern europeans.

> Most western European countries have more incoming migration than they are comfortable with.

As does the US. However, immigration pressure comes from everywhere.

Why is comparing the pressure between {your favorite western European country} and the US irrelevant?

> I also think you'll find that migration pressure to the US has started to slow. You may still have a large amount from Mexico but that is about opportunity, not a testament of the US being the place to be.

Huh? Opportunity is surely one factor in "place to be".

That said, I agree Mexico vs the US doesn't tell us anything about US vs western Europe, just as Turkey vs Germany doesn't tell us anything about US vs Germany.
I have a similar section in my .bashrc via a somewhat hackish loop (or two):

ESC=$'\x1b'

# Terminal color escapes
colornames=(BLACK RED GREEN YELLOW BLUE MAGENTA CYAN)
for i in ${!colornames[@]}; do
eval "${colornames[$i]}=\"${ESC}[3${i}m\""
eval "BG${colornames[$i]}=\"${ESC}[4${i}m\""
done

# There are holes in this sequence, so it doesn't loop nicely
BOLD="${ESC}[1m"
DARK="${ESC}[2m"
UNDERLINE="${ESC}[4m"
BLINK="${ESC}[5m"
INVERSE="${ESC}[7m"
RST="${ESC}[m"

styles=(BOLD DARK UNDERLINE BLINK INVERSE RST)

# and the PS1-safe versions of the above
for i in ${colornames[@]} ${colornames[@]/#/BG} ${styles[@]}; do
eval "PS$i=\"\\[\$$i\\]\""
done

Having color escapes in shell variables comes in handy from time to time (like faking 'colordiff' with sed).
Ask HN: How do you keep track of new libraries/projects
I've been developing with Ruby for several years, and sometimes I fall in the trap of thinking that I know what the right tool for the job is, especially when we're talking about plugins and libraries. Yet everyday I stumble across new libraries that are better and are already followed by hundreds of persons that I didn't ever hear about.

Now I'm wondering how you hackers keep track of new libraries and projects. I'm particularly interested in Ruby and Rails projects but I think the discussion would benefit from a more general approach. Do you subscribe to some rss? Some aggregator like rubyflow.com? I'm curious to hear what you do.
There are ways to avoid creating a cover-up culture. Avoid playing the blame game. Concentrate on solving problems rather than jockeying for advantage from problems. Concentrate on solving the root cause of problems rather than getting rid of symptoms of problems.

It's very, very easy to go down the wrong route on this, it's important to build up a strong culture of honesty and engineering integrity and that starts with people in leadership positions (which may not be people in the highest management positions).
I am never sure what niche MongoDB is supposed to fill.

If I want a large cluster to handle "big data" Riak or Cassandra seem to fit the bill better.

If I want speed Redis is great.

If I want a schema-less SQL-like (but not SQL) database, MongoDB?
Intel to Pay Nvidia Licensing Fees of $1.5 Billion
very niice! how much?
> I think they mean $20 worth of value be it gold or some other bankable theoretical material. Originally us dollars were tied to physical gold assets.

While dollars were originally tied to physical assets, I'm asking about what the central bank give me today for my 20 euros or dollars.
I realize the "Death to the Shaw" spelled out by the first
word of every seventeenth page was supposed to be a joke

According to the Amazon search facility, none of the 26 instances of the word "death" appear first on a page. So yeah, I think it's a joke.
Yeah, ice certainly isn't going to do something that plastic if it's -50C...
I still like the basic premise -- leveling up etc.
Test prep is a big industry.
Excellent reference! This is going to be handy for "->" and "->>".
Lack of silent updates was one of the key reasons I switched from Firefox to Chrome (speed was another.) Seemed like every time I opened the browser to view a webpage I needed to see that very moment, Firefox would pop up an annoying update prompt that I'd keep clicking out of each time.
"Note that you will have to repeat this process every time you upgrade your Mac OS to a new patch release (10.6.5 -> 10.6.6)."
A 9 month old's amazing brain
The various test images, including the rootweave, can be found in Xorg/XFree CVS:

http://webcvs.freedesktop.org/xorg/data/bitmaps/

In the past I've read analysis/explanation regarding the various test images, why they were created and how they should be used, but that was a very long time ago. You'll probably need to do a bit of digging to find such information.

Pure beauty is commendable as well as commonly desirable. Pure function is also commendable but far less commonly desirable. A blend of both is often superior to either.

I think would be unwise to cater function solely towards people doing debugging since it would severely limit the market, but making something both gorgeous and useful will have a stronger appeal than just gorgeous.
Unfortunately, for whatever reason, you picked up a completely inaccurate impression. Caltech is theoretical to the point of disregarding many practical applications in many fields.

Theoretical math is hugely important, popular, and a major department within the Physics, Math, and Astronomy division. Personally, I found Caltech to be far too theoretical for my own liking, as a former aerospace engineer.
"but I could also launch a competitor to them if I felt so inclined."

Do you have the experience to make the card-reader hardware? The iOS software? Do you have the cash to have the device produced for sale?

Perhaps you do have all those things at your disposal, but the vast majority of people don't. I would say that simply by virtue of being hardware, the barrier for entry is at least high enough to eliminate most of the "garage hacker" types.
I brought up this exact issue with Peter Norvig from Google, that Google is essentially subsidizing spammers to corrupt the search results that his group is charged with improving. He diplomatically sidestepped the question.
AMD CEO Dirk Meyer resigns
I don't know if this is what happened to the reluctant hero of this story, but if the database really had hung, and wasn't responding to "sensible" methods of shutting down, what are you supposed to do besides kill -9? (By "sensible" I mean something the DB could trap in order to finish saving a consistent state to disk - shutdown command, -INT, -QUIT, etc.)

(I'm not excusing trying -9 as a first resort, but if a process is deadlocked (or pegging the CPU in a tight loop) and won't respond to -QUIT, there's not much else you can do.)
I am writing my master thesis on free & open source mathematical tools. To my shame I have never heard of SageMath, it never came up on my radar. I had heard of Numpy, scipy, matplotlib, maxima, Octave and others. I know that custom software is written in Fortran and C/C++- Why had I not heard of SageMath? Are there any other large open source mathematical projects that may have escaped my notice? Please enlighten me.

The aim of my thesis is to discover why proprietary tools like Maple, Mathlab, and Mathematica have flourished within the mathematics world given that theorem proving and calculating seem to require access to the algorithms for verification processes. I aim to interview the leaders behind both proprietary and open tools to see what drives and motivates them. This video by William Stein http://www.sagemath.org/help-video.html on the SageMath website goes a long way towards answering some of my questions.

I would like to look at this problem space from all angles, economic, ethical, scientific, you name it. I would welcome ideas on research strategies and any and all pointers. Speak up now, no matter how trivial you think your idea!

Thank you tomrod for posting this, thank you.
"But what about reliability? AT&T is horrible! Wrong. AT&T might be horrible for you, but it works just fine for me."

Wow... didn't realize that a network's reliability is determined by the reliability attained by a single user on the network. Perhaps "that depends on who you ask" might have been a better response than "Wrong." :-)
Book Review: Growing Object-Oriented Software
But the main difference is the perception of the students. It may be the same underlying structure, but it's from a progression standpoint as opposed to the traditional back and forth of grading.

This TEDxUniPittsburgh talk speaks to this concept: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tg55pdNMxw&feature=relat...

Quote: "This has a number of powerful psychological motivators. One of them is no matter what you do in the class, anything you do is forward motion. As opposed to a normal class, when you get a bad grade or something, it takes you back a step which is very demoralizing. Game designers would never put that in a game, because they know people hate it."
Wow, that is lovely! Can you do a blog post on what you did and what you used? Well done
Re: point 2, I'm sorry, that's just a deconstructive comment that I can't possibly agree with. Derrida is really de Man. /grin
Would you admit someone with a fascinating and very impressive personal project who also clearly hates school and barely got C- in all subjects including math and science?
I'd rather see the words scored by how much more frequent they are here than in English in general. E.g. http://wry.me/blog/2010/04/08/quantitative-tolkien-studies.h... analyzed The Lord of the Rings that way, with a link to the code.
as far as suggestions it really needs the undo button.

Also the new button really needs to be more prominent
>All the teacher did was change the names of things; the underlying structure of the class is disappointingly standard.

The name of a thing is an integral part of the thing. Often, solving a problem means reformulating the problem in different terms.
What's the best way to make sure it's nearly impossible for someone to find your datastore on Google? Name it Shard (I guess "replication," and "failover" would be just as bad). :-)
Start Up Camp - London Ontario Canada 2011-01-13
The closest thing Linux had to App Store was Lindows' Click-N-Run.

Typical Linux repositories, while very useful, don't address the important point — payment.

App Store is for commercial software, while Linux distros usually even put "non-free" software in separate silo.
> And this is a problem, why? Why shouldn't there be a female equivalent of a fencing team?

What's the definition of "female equivalent"?

Doesn't the validity of your assumed "should" depend on the definition we're using?

> However, his deep hatred for programs to achieve social equality leads him to have beliefs that are very very worrisome from a racial and gender equality point of view.

Are you suggesting that all current programs to achieve social equality are worthwhile, that none of them are bad? Or is it just that any criticism is necessary wrong?
Here's a bunch of shell scripts I hacked up take pictures when certain events occur on linux. Could be extended to handle the lid opening or coming out of sleep, although I have a feeling that xscreensaver detecting may already handle most of that case (because I think the screensaver gets activated, or at least the screen is locked, automatically when the lid is closed).

https://github.com/thwarted/picsofourlives
The name we use for things, how it's displayed, is often very critical. While the underlying structure might be standard, it's how the underlying structure is changed and displayed to the end user.

Take any FPS, and it can be broken down to a simple point and click. The underlying actions are essentially move the cursor to a spot and click. It's everything else that makes it a game.

So while I agree, that he didn't change the underlying structure too much, how that structure is displayed is what makes it special.
You can hit "replay" bottom left -- it'll replay your cleared silk.

And yes, the UI needs some changes -- I'll be updating stuff and A/B testing it during the course of the next several weeks.
Are names unique, as IDs are (supposed to be)?
It was really, intensely frustrating at times. I was almost certainly a bottom 10%, if not 5%, at Caltech. It inspired me and pushed me into moving into a different, non-typical field for the average Caltech student where I could still be the best among the cohort. From another, less charitable perspective, Caltech proved to me that I couldn't be a top--or possibly even a very good--engineer, so I just gave up rather than struggling to get better.
The problem is that this is all a lot harder than just news discovery. I don't just want a news item that is relevant to me; I want a high quality news item. I also want to reward the news source for its high quality.

Solve that problem and I'll come over and hug you.

At least for me, news items I pursue fall into two categories - news I really ought to know (either on the local or national or international scale), and news that expand my understanding of the world due to the high quality of the presentation (think of the great magazine features, and generally the stuff you can get from places like givemesomethingtoread.com) but are not actually directly "relevant" to me.

It's actually the latter category that is harder to find (and where the fact that there is no good source-agnostic reward model for news sources causes me to feel most bad).
Mobile Payment App Square Pushes Forward With $27.5 Million Funding
Lovely.

Note: I'll gladly pay a few euros for the iPad version
FWIW, my editor has its own background color (vim in 256 color mode), so I wouldn't see the terminal background either way.

However, I like the idea in general, just not the implementation. It would be nice if modern terminal emulators (hello iTerm!) could adopt new escape sequences to do things like set a background color on the tab (like ZOC and some others support by client-side configuration).

There is still lots of room for innovation in the terminal, it's a bit sad to see progress at such a glacial pace. I'd actually pay for a terminal emulator that's fast (first priority) and then also makes my life easier with innovative features like the above.

For some reason all innovation in the terminal space seems to have died when dialup BBS went out of fashion 10 years ago. Most terminal emulators have even moved backwards and don't support ZModem anymore, which could be very useful to provide adhoc drag'n'drop uploads instead of the scp/rsync limbo that is so common nowadays.
Because they market infinite scalability, insane speeds, and they have a nice API. But people don't realize that, while the speed is fast, you're driving without a seatbelt, and the scalability story is more or less false. They do have a nice API though.
"...it takes you back a step which is very demoralizing. Game designers would never put that in a game, because they know people hate it."

I agree that people hate this (I know I do, at least), but game designers put that in games all of the time, regardless:

You just died ten minutes into the level with the finish line in sight--start over again at the beginning of the level.

OR

You are only allowed to save at particular save points. These are spaced out just far enough that you are likely to lose significant amounts of progress every time you die.
You ask a nice question - why no female fencing team? Well if a) there are students who want to form it and b) they will be good enough competitors for similar teams ok, but imposing it just because a male fencing team exist is stupid.

Regardless the color of the skin, of the eyes, or of any other ridiculous parameters only one thing matters : excellence.

You talk about social equality. But is social equality a goal to reach ? If so, would you care to explain me why, and according to whom ?

There are bright people, there are dumb people. Fact of life. I don't care how you try to make them into groups through the aggregation of some parameters I find ridiculous - all I see is the end result.

Trying to impose social equality means working against this natural repartition. This takes cash and energy that could be used differently. Even worse - the added burden from those who can't pull they own weight is put on those who could excel.

To me, excellence seems like a better (and fairer) goal to reach.
I'd love some control over the coloration and some ideas of how my mouse drags can affect the final result.
Geeks, hackers, nerds, and crackers: on language boundaries
We eventually settled on "Never edit your videos again" but maybe we should switch it back.

We were closer to "Never miss a moment," but the bottom line is that you can already never miss a moment by recording the entire 2 hours of footage.

...but then you have two hours of boring footage in need of editing.

That's probably more thought than we should ask of quick readers though. We'll consider switching.
I fully agree but I've always found the notion that universities can/should teach things other then academics a bit silly.

And strangely while many universities aim to do just that, I don't know of any who take it seriously enough to teach formal classes in self discovery or making friends and influencing people.

Which you absolutely could seriously do. But no one does. I think this shows that those "other" things are not something universities truly aim to teach, but want to make use of in creating an environment which justifies the very high cost of education.
Hustler is the new 'non-technical ninja/rockstar.'
Ask HN: What are some books that go over execution, not strategy?
I'm looking for business/start-up books that go over how to manage certain things, whether marketing, sales, press, etc., and gives a tons of details on how to actually execute the plans, rather than theory. Does anybody know of a few good ones?
...and Vimeo launched well before YouTube, but YouTube was the one that sold for 1.6 billion dollars and was used to post the video in this news item.

First to the scene doesn't count for much, but longevity and being the user-favorite matter a whole lot.
(I got three responses of this ilk, so I hope no one will be offended if I just respond to the topmost one.)

I agree very much with your point in general. However, in this case, if I were a student in the class, I don't think this scheme would really do anything for me. I think I'd have the same reaction I expressed in my comment - saying "XP" instead of "points" or "level" instead of "grade" doesn't change the work I'm going to have to do or the effort I'm going to put into it.
In my experience as a TA, the worst obstacle in teaching someone something is when they think they already know it. There's nothing that can replace a bad grade and the consequent soul searching in these situations. A disagreeable experience for the moment can sometimes benefit you much more in the long run.
The biggest benefit of going to a public high school in the DC area was being forced to interact with kids from almost every background you could imagine.

But isn't it a bit odd you had to go to college to do that?

Wouldn't it be better if you had grown up in a neighborhood that would let you do that?

OK, you didn't and you're glad college provided you that opportunity, but isn't it a bit sad how much $ they charge for what is at its core human interaction?
Thanks for this link! I hadn't heard of them before. I just showed my wife and we're going to test out a few prints.
The change in perspective will probably be enough to provide some positive psychological benefits, but I think doing some actual restructuring would help, as well.

In most games where you level up, you get as many chances as you need. If you fail to defeat a mob the first time around, you don't forever lose the possibility of reaching the highest level. You just have to try again.

But, in this grading system, as in every traditional one, you only get one shot at each task, and if you score less than optimally on any one, your maximum possible level decreases.

That's a big departure from the usual mechanics of games, and one that I think could have a significant impact on morale.
Check out one of the daily deals in your city and scroll down to "Groupon Says..." (it's by the bling-wearing cat). This should give you a good idea.
This is factually incorrect. The endowment is separate from the operating budget, which is where JPL comes in as a factor. The endowment is large because of several 'home runs,' in the fundraising parlance, specifically Gordon Moore's $600M donation in 2003, the largest donation to higher education ever and hundreds of millions in smaller donations by the Moore Foundation, as well as other large ticket donations by successful Caltech alumni and LA notables, like Eli Broad. The JPL budget is separated out from the Caltech general operating budget, which you can learn more about here: http://annual-report.caltech.edu/

We were actually offered Los Alamos, too, after several security breaches under their UCLA managers, but our faculty board turned it down, resulting in UCLA getting the contract again. Amusingly, the result of UCLA management's security failings was that they got paid a higher rate for the same duties. Gotta love the government sometimes, heh.
Just wanted to point out that gay users of your service might take slight offense at the heteronormative answer you gave in your FAQ:

Is this a dating site?
Nope, not really. But you may meet someone of the opposite gender! ( Unless you don't want to. )
Most Interesting About Groupon’s New Round? Who’s Not In It
This is awesome! I'm also extremely jealous that you got to travel around the world and talk to smart people about interesting projects. Thanks for doing it.
what about couchdb?
> My passionate disagreement with the original author however is the belief you have to put making money above all else.

That's where the confusion is. That's not what the author intends. Basically what he's saying is that you can't just build something and expect to get paid for it. Switch out the word expect for "demand" and that might help matters. Just because you create something doesn't mean people are obligated to pay for it. Expecting that is wrong.

The author doesn't believe in putting money above all else. You don't even need to monetize early. But you need to have a plan. Just expecting things to work out all right is the wrong way to do it.
1/10 isn't bad odds. After your fifth app, you should have pretty good odds.
Yeah, I came in expecting something like a discussion of a grading system with options A, B, Incomplete and what effect it's had on students' learning/progress.