skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am not going to say that the current packaging scheme is ideal, but to say that Ruby shouldn't be packaged at all on systems like Debian and Redhat is to ignore a lot of the very real good that has come of quality package managers like dpkg/apt and rpm.

One use case would be if someone, say a sysadmin, wants a good bug tracking system for internal use at their company.

apt-get install redmine

Fetches Rails, Ruby and so on, and sets it up in a default, reasonably secure way (as far as I know, I haven't the Debian version myself).

That sort of thing is pretty commonplace with PHP web applications under Debian and Ubuntu. Granted, if you're going to hack on and modify the application in question, yeah, you may want to get it and install it yourself, but when things work well, a good packaging system lets you install and work with code that perhaps you do not know intimately.

I think you're making the mistake of viewing the world exclusively from the point of view of a Ruby developer. What would happen if you had to deal with different systems to install, maintain and upgrade the Linux kernel, Apache, Postgres, Sqlite, Ruby, GCC, Perl, Python, Gnome, and various submodules used by them? There are times when it's necessary to install your own version of something, but it's awfully, awfully nice that you can "choose your battles", and really only do that with stuff you care about and follow closely.

Sounds like Linux in the days when you installed Slackware and then just upgraded stuff by randomly recompiling bits and pieces every now and then.

BTW, I would hope that we could skip any "angry disagreements" here. Passion will do more than suffice!
It's not quite clear to me why rasterising of all things is slow. I realise GPUs have a separate rasterisation unit, but other than that, the ALUs are designed for this type of workload. I haven't experimented with latter-era GPGPU APIs and languages, but random memory access in a basic rasteriser sounds suspicious. Bouncing rays? Sure, that'll destroy any locality of reference, but mapping triangles into screen space? No way.
> Dig up the biographies of any of the people you listed and you'll find that they devoted enormous amounts of time an energy into their work.

See the second paragraph here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2061319
Mockup-Driven Development
Walking slows progression of Alzheimer's, study suggests
and they say artificial intelligence isn't making progress!
Google's motivation was to encourage exactly what the FTC did by coming up with a compromise position that was politically realistic. Making it something that a major carrier could sign up to was part of their goal.

In short they were attempting to make it easier for the FTC to do exactly what it did.
Book sales themselves already promote the book's ideas as long as readers keep buying it. Why should they also fund further promotion?
(2) wasn't my problem; it's problems I've seen (repeatedly) in irc, as I said. For some (random) examples of people with issues related to bundler (ghost gems, gems that can't be found though bundler itself installed them), see the last handful of posts on this thread: http://yehudakatz.com/2010/09/30/bundler-as-simple-as-what-y...

As for the primary use case being web apps, I suppose that makes sense, except... Except that the Ruby community (or large parts of it, at least) are now suggesting that all Ruby development be done using bundler. And bundler itself also includes a jeweler-like/hoe-like tool to jump-start new gems.

I don't want to overdo it: I don't vehemently object to bundler, but it's size, dependency chain, strong opinions and (to me at least) apparent desire to take over the gem ecosystem make me a little worried.
Couldn't agree more. This basic piece of functionality has almost more potential power than AdBlock Plus, given how ubiquitous search has become in every day web use, and how awful spam is becoming in the process.
I think the fact that most historically creative people were nite owls, and the fact they score better on iq tests (see http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200911/intelligence-...) could be linked to the solitude that inevitably happens when you're up late.
Looking for co-founders
Looking for an awesome front-end person / UX person to explore some early stage ideas with. I can afford to work without funding for some time, ideal person should be able to do the same, but more importantly, have to have a good portfolio. email me at aurem00@gmail.com
good one!

(I had to google for reference :)
A link to the article text rather than the photo gallery might be more appropriate

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/print/2011/01/largest-cave...
holidays, christmas & new eve
So, here's a question I have as a Win32 developer, which may tie in with the whole what-is-POSIX topic. What does the API documentation mean when it refers to C calls like "fputs(3)" or "lseek(2)" (as in the example here: http://linux.die.net/man/3/fseek )? How are these different from 'normal' fputs() and lseek()?

I've never seen the One True Explanation of this anywhere, probably because it's something that Linux/BSD/POSIX/whatever people learn on day 1. The question seems to be strangely un-Googleable.
How To Become A Link Building Expert
This tutorial will transform you from newbie to link building expert. The tutorial describes the most effective link building strategies that you could use right away to give your website a boost in SERPS.
Property rights, as far as capitalism is concerned, are an artifact of law, not some fundamental philosophical truth. For capitalism to exist in a given domain, the government has to enforce property rights in that domain. That includes everything from cap-and-trade (where there are property rights to air emissions), water rights, real estate, equity in businesses, and yes, even copyrights and patents. Whether any of this actually constitutes "property" in a philosophical sense is an especially worthless genre of philosophical argument.
If the company is rotating him to positions that aren't his line of work, or what he studied for then I think it's a perfectly reasonable reason - he should be prepared to explain it more than "I didn't like it" - because that would be an issue, but otherwise I don't see the harm. In the end he needs to be sure that he is making the right choice in leaving and deal with the consequences if it's the wrong decision - or possibly be happier else where if it's the right decision.
The site does a real nice job of explaining what without giving me reasons why.
Has anyone considered that crap like RubyGems, RVM, and Bundler is a symptom of us as rapid (read: careless) developers not being able to manage our code and our releases in an organized and well-ordered manner, not a symptom of poor package management by distributions?
No one said it does. The point of that anecdote, though, was to suggest that "pure poundage" is (perhaps counterintuitively) a really important factor in producing good things.
Even if the article is long is well worth the reading
"Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing." --Jimbo Wales, Slashdot interview, 2004

http://interviews.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/07/28/13512...
Unplugging and just staring at the wall for a couple of hours alone is good for creativity. It tends to lead to a good mental environment for "image streaming". "Image Streaming" is watching a movie in your mind made up of as many memories and things you can imagine pieced together, usually focused on a particular topic. It's basically a way to access the enormous power of the right-side of the brain.
That's gorgeous. Reminds me of the kind of scenes you see in adventuring video games, only more intricate.
The single most important technology that TechCrunch left out: JavaScript and HTML5 (yeah, yeah, yeah, I know it's more of a spec than a separate technology).

More desktop like apps will enter the stage in time for cross mobile compatibility. Yehuda Katz's joining SproutCore is a very good sign of things to come. Node.js will hopefully make it on to production at a lot more startups.
>Nope. The most effective habit of highly creative people is persistence, the ability to work and work and work while resisting burn-out.

But if that persistence is applied to 8 hours a day of meetings and 3 hours of email, it wouldn't lead to anything impressive. The days/months/years of persistence must go toward "creating" not just "working." The author made the case that most creativity happens when you're alone with your thoughts.
Link that doesn't try to print the page: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2011/01/largest-cave/jenki...
If you're serious about building a product, 24h isn't gonna cut it. Don't drag it out, sure… but there's more to a product than just a proof of concept.
I really wish there was a license that forced developers after a certain amount of profit/time they would make their code open source. I would buy a lot more software if I knew I was supporting something that is useful and would soon be free for all. That sort of license could be really beneficial for developers who want to work on small open source projects full time.
JWT: 100 Things to Watch in 2011
Felicia Day's five things learned in 2010
FT.com / Life & Arts - Lunch with the FT: Biz Stone
I thought the list was applicable to doing startups as well. Sometimes, these are things that you don't really realize what people are talking about until you experience them yourself.
How to build a social entertainment website
am probably contributing late, but i have recently worked on something that might solve this "rss hunger" or at least provide a better alternative eventually. am calling my creation "razor" and it runs right in the brwser, is totally free, doesn't sacrifice privacy to corporations, is customizable by the user (only knowledge of regular expressions required - in case one wants to craft their own feeds)

i've developed my solution as a firefox addon, and you can download it from here -- http://fixx.yolasite.com/razor

i'd never used rss feeds before (probably wouldn't have invented razor then?), but razor is different and to me is more powerful!

i use razor to check newest stuff from hacker_news using the following saved razor-expression:

http://news.ycombinator.com/newest)))<a href=".+">.</a>%%%>[^<]<%%%[^>].[^<]((([0-9]+.ago---[0-9]+.point---\sby\s---^[0-9]\.$---^\s\(.\)\s$---^[0-9]+[ ]comment.\s$---^\w$---^\s[\|\[]\s$---^Feature Requests$---^Y Combinator$---^Hacker News$---^(News\s)$

It might look "geeky" and intimidating, but check the above razor link (it has docs too) and you'll see why this solution is promising.

nice feeds hacking!
Europe’s Young Grow Agitated Over Future Prospects
How do international books fit into this?

Lord of the Flies and Tolkien among others are British books. If they enter the public domain in Britain, does that enable Americans to use them even if they are still copyrighted in the US?
Always enjoy reading articles like this that describe the process of reverse engineering a particular technology or device.

Also appreciated the mention of the rageagainstthecage exploit which looks like it could be used to enable a "full user data" backup to be made of a device. One of my complaints about Android is that even the "owner" of the device (without rooting & therefore warranty voiding) can't access all their own data files if an application provides no way of doing so.
But copyright can prevent you from accessing less-famous works. Some of these works are out-of-print, so you can't get them and the copyright owners are nowhere to be found. These lost copyrighted works are essentially lost.
That was my feeling back when 'we made this site in 3 days using Ruby on Rails!' was all the rage.

Frequently it was really 90% of an app. I like for things to be polished, have no error messages, handle all different types of input gracefully, and so on. The sites made in 3 days never did that. It's like 'the first 90% took 3 days, the last 10% took 3 weeks'. Details are difficult.

But then, that's where cutting out features or releasing an MVP comes in. If it's a really slim product, it's possible to make something usable, at least, in 24 hours. But why not just take a week or two and make it really good? There's no rush.
IBM Slide Presentation from 1975
and the opposite, connecting with people.
Prepare For The Geek Mafia
I think the answer is in the middle - however, I ask you;

Are you a coder? Where is your billion dollar application then? If one is so capable of building something, why haven't you built XYZ and sold it for many millions already?

If developers are so much more valuable than ideas - why isnt every single developer building something amazing?

Why is there so much crappy software, so many crappy businesses? -- I bet you'd say "well, it was a bad idea!" -- but if there is some amazingly successful company - you would say "Well, clearly that is amazing execution"

The fact is, rather, that idea folk need devs - and devs need idea folk.

I am a technical person, I design large systems and networks - but am not a developer. I am an idea guy to my developer friends - and we are always bouncing ideas back and forth.

To further your example - you are saying the architect who makes the drawings are worthless and its the contractor who pounds the nail that is the real builder.
There is also the view that governmental implementation of natural rights has little to do with the actual principles embodied in the rights:

http://books.google.com/books?id=MfgtAAAAIAAJ&printsec=f...
variable flight path bullets.
Avoid browser-specific CSS hacks with CssUserAgent (cssua.js)
That's a terrible analysis. I don't see how you can come to those conclusions at all from the way you conducted this "test"...

My deconstruction of this "analysis"'s mistakes here: http://swombat.com/2011/1/2/data-is-dangerous
I have seen this happen on several subjects, but as it has been over a year since I actively participated and followed Wikipedia internals, I cannot immediately give you a particular example.

My observation of this abuse of policy has been as a bystander by the way. I've never actively edited any articles on these subjects.

Typical subjects where there most certainly are well organized and ideologically motivated editorial cliques include US foreign policy, anything to do with Israel, Turkey and its history, anything relating to Islam etc.

Abuse of the notability policy is just one, but very effective, tool for censoring and controlling the content though.
His whole point is that you should subscribe to feeds from the browser chrome (using the meta tag), not from a link in the page itself.
Ask HN: How to learn command line?
I've done a decent amount of front-end coding (html,css,jquery) and some backend (php). But I never took the time to learn how to use the command line.

Should I? Where do I even begin?
>Ideas cannot be owned; they are like fire and can only be equally shared. We assign monopolies to make publishing feasible, not to ensure the wealth of two or three generations that live off of the creativity of their grandfathers without contributing anything themselves.

Here's an alternative ethics. Nontrivial ideas are not natural resources but are created by an author; just as a physical object is the property of its creator, ideas are an intangible property owned by their author. The author can deny others access to his ideas, simply by not-disclosing them (keeping them secret); she has intrinsic control over them. IP ownership is not a monopoly "assigned" by some intangible collective; it is the natural property of its creator. Publishing rights are not an artificial benefit created by government to subsidize authors (out of benevolence); they are contracts between an author and publisher, transferring specific and limited rights (not ownership). Publishers can be forced to pay the author royalties, not out of utilitarian reasons, but because they voluntarily agreed to such terms (the author having natural leverage, e.g. she can refuse to disclose his ideas).

>Ideas are assigned owners

Did you have that thought, or did the social collective assign it to you?
Astronomy pics from the European Southern Observatory (ESO)
Oh, I'm definitely not advocating building everything in 24 hours. Moreso, I'm saying that I think at this point it's possible for nearly anyone to round out their toolkit and prototype their ideas into a working MVP. Doesn't have to be polished or detail-heavy; focus on the minutia later, just get something tangible in front of users now.
> The product of a human being's work is rightfully his property

For physical goods "you can't take it away from me" always goes with "you can't have it"; I would say that "rightfully his property" here can only mean the first half of that (and so cannot entirely apply to information, where the two parts are distinct). If it meant the second half it would lead to absurdities where third parties can forbid things that have absolutely no effect on them, for example how resaraunts always have to make up their own birthday songs or how playing the radio at works can lead to fines...
-They generally have a higher capital investment costs. Most high tech devices cannot be prototyped by a guy in his spare time, unlike a web app.

-Difficult to scale from prototype to production

-Most high tech manufacturing happens in Asia, which makes it difficult for US based startups to find and communicate with reliable partners

-High capital investment costs mean that it is difficult to decrease the per unit cost to the point where high margins can be reaped

These are just a few of the considerations, and aren't applicable in every situation.
There is no voluntary mutual transaction; the author doesn't consent to have his work forced into the public domain

In the absence of copyright the author would have no protection what so ever and would be at mercy of society at large. With copyright they gain protection from the public domain which we, the public, give them in exchange for the cultural creations this protection entices.

If they in exchange of this protection returns nothing to society (i.e. infinite retro-active copyright extensions), then we as a society should have no reason to provide this protection for them.

Basically Disney was able to build an empire on works found in the public domain, but they refuse to give the same opportunity for others to do the same. That is also very one-sided and society as a whole gains very little cultural capital and is forced to pay (again and again) for what they have generously provided protection for.

Make no mistake of it: If copyright law is one-sided, it is to the creators' and media-conglomerates benefit and not society.
I don't understand why they are so adamant about ads... A small adsense block (with 2 text ads) will cover all their expenses and more. It will not be intrusive and useful to visitors in most situations (as their content is well suited for a contextual ad system like adsense)...Also there is precedence in non-profits doing this like firefox with their google search deal (which makes them $100 million or so a year)
Building an RFID Proximity Card Cloner for $30
You need more data. This is not particularly significant.
Python-google-url: A python wrapper for the google-url project
Those are Unix manpage section numbers. fseek(3) means fseek in section 3 of the manpages. This can help to differentiate between a command line program and C function of the same name, for example. See http://www.december.com/unix/ref/mansec.html
I don't see what that has to do with anything. Public domain works can still be commercially exploited. The only difference is that LOTR wouldn't have sat in preproduction hell for years because of squabbles over the rights. Peter Jackson could have gone ahead and made his very fine movies — instead, copyright almost got him forced out of The Hobbit.
Actually for drawing Chinese characters it's not that bad. I plan to get an iPad for my parents so they can draw Chinese characters instead of learning how to type (there are many older generations in China who cannot type Chinese on a computer because they don't know how to do that).

I just wish the character recognition could be better.
This shows the fundamental flaws of trying to control the message
Maybe you should take a look at this:

http://home.comcast.net/~tom_forsyth/larrabee/larrabee.html

"Rasterization on Larrabee and SIMD Programming With Larrabee: Michael Abrash and I doing our double-act. We both talk about the instruction sets, Michael talks about the hierarchical descent rasterisation algorithm, and I talk about how we do basic language structures such as conditionals and flow control with our 16-wide vector units. We were both absurdly proud to be able to finally talk about the architecture we'd worked on for so long - it's not every programmer that gets to design their own instruction set."
Ruby’s "private" Keyword is Not Heresy
> If developers are so much more valuable than ideas - why isnt every single developer building something amazing?

I think a lot of this boils down to opportunity and guts. While everyone can have a billion-dollar idea, and many of them could execute parts of it (the coding, or the marketing, or whatever).

It takes a special set of circumstances and personality traits to actually make a billion-dollar idea into a billion-dollar business.

This is easily demonstrated by the startup community itself. How many homeruns are there? How many flops?

;)
It could well be a 'local optimum' - switching to English would slow things down for a bit, until the much larger pool of people who speak some English started to get involved, and a few to stand out, and take things to a level the smaller group could never have reached.
Yes, but will someone bother to create assets for themselves that disappear on their deaths when they do have people to care for?

Property isn't really property if you can't sell it or give it to someone else. Liquidity is very important to many people.

While undermining this will have little impact on the generation of a lof of crap, it will absolutely destroy the "long tail" for many valuable things that are receive little recognition when they are created.

I do recognize that we should only be handing out monopolies when it absolutely benefits society. These ridiculously long copyrights only exist because our legislators have put their own interests above the national interest.
Finding very little to disagree with here (except that odd stance on MDMA, but I don't so much disagree as find myself cold and uninterested on the issue).

Patton Oswalt needs to spend more time doing actual research on the state of geek culture and less time watching cat videos on Youtube. Shaking your metaphorical stick at the kids on your digital lawn doesn't make for interesting or insightful dialogue on pop culture.
No kidding! Emacs 23 even added support antialiased text for heavens sake. Who needs such a useless feature?
Sci-Fi Technologies That Are No Longer Just Fiction
I know this article is quite lengthy. Any feedback you have on my thinking process would be awesome and much appreciated.