skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No, in that case we have it, it just doesn't have wide adoption. All of the trappings of the typical office of 1995, (Ethernet LANS, WYSIWYG word processing, windowed OS) we had back in the 1970's at Xerox PARC.
Post-PC is just a statement about where the growth is. It doesn't mean PCs are suddenly useless or going away.
Totally agreed here. I understood it only because I literally lived with Euler's identity as a signal processing engineer for many years.. and even I started to lose him near the end when he was going at 100mph through some of the most crucial steps in the derivation, not necessarily because I didn't understand it, but just because he was going through the tricky steps too quickly.

Cool to watch, but not very useful, IMHO.
Take a look at the TREC (Text REtrieval Conference) website - http://trec.nist.gov/ . The published papers are very enlightening.
As someone who hasn't used Hg before, I'm curious -- what are some examples of Git commands that are better executed in Hg?
I find it hard to believe that some programmers don't believe in the huge productivity differences between developers.

Of the people I personally know, there's absolutely no circumstances under which the slower developers could reach 1/5th of the speed of the fastest developers. There's just a huge gap and it's not just methodology. If you haven't witnessed it, you must have been put in very homogeneous environments.
Entertaining, but hardly useful: the only people who would follow any of this are those who already understand it. Those who don't would be hopelessly lost.

But definitely a lot of entertainment value for those who already understand -- even if only somewhat -- what's being discussed.

Basically stand up comedy for mathematicians. :)
Plots would really help that table.

Edit: OK, I messed around with matplotlib and made a couple plots. This kind of data is not my specialty. The bottom plot groups the different Democratic and Republican categories into just Democratic and Republican.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/407960/political_parties_and_educati...

The strongest trend seems to be that people in the "strong Republican" group increase with educational attainment. I made the (poor?) assumption that teachers are most likely to fall into the graduate degree category, thus the bottom plot.
hg histedit, hg revert, hg update -r{any revspec}
Ask HN: What is Vertical Online Advertising?
Hi HN, I was just doing some research and I stumbled on the word Vertical Online Advertising. Of course I tried to Google it, and find out what it meant, however, I couldn't find anything useful. Can someone explain to me what that term means?

Thank you
I updated my stepmother-in-law's iPod touch 3g from iOS 3.something to iOS 4.2, and it required a full backup and restore.
Transfer music and data from/to the device using your favorite OS and well-known applications, for one.
The tutorial needs work. How would I know what's a good place to build a city? Bigger problem: I explored a little bit, and then suddenly I couldn't do anything anymore with no explanation.
AOL Layoffs in India
You asked it in another part of the thread [1] already, see the answer there.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2292474
Apple's version of iTunes on Windows is so much worse than the Mac version, that I can only assume it is intentional. For example, only one user may run iTunes at one time on a PC while multiple users can run it on a Mac. It also shits all over your registry. As a long time Mac iTunes user, I've been pretty frustrated with the Windows version, which I started using 6 months ago.

The counter point, however, would be my experience with iTunes and the iPad. Before I had a PC I borrowed an iPad which had just been reset. When I hooked it up to my Mac to connect it with iTunes, I discovered that it was incompatible with OS X 10.4. My mind was blown; how could the iPad not work with their computer when I only bought it 4 and a half years ago?! It works with XP!

So I don't know, maybe iTunes sucks everywhere, just in different ways.
Why Entrepreneurs Are Winning
Are we witnessing YouTube’s big fumble?
Charlie Sheen on UStream.tv Tonight at 10 (Eastern)
- Haskell (at least GHC) + Darcs
No - iPad's don't let you manage your music collection.

I assume the no-delete is to reduce the risk of people accidentally deleting things they've just paid for, given that that's the only way to get things on to the device.

Interestingly, you can delete videos.
You are not alone. I've been using Mac OS X for two years and can't belive why the company that came up with iPad and iPhone still

- have global menus (who really wants that with todays screen resolutions and two monitors?)

- needs the worlds best trackpads because their laptop keyboards have misplaced ctrl and their default keybindings are so inconsistent that users would be lost without a good pointing device.

- forces developers to use the fn key to reach the function keys, but even then, maps some of the F-keys to operating system functions.

- doesn't get multiple desktops? Don't ask me why they ship them, because their window management is so broken that multiple desktops just doesn't work, at least not for me.

This becomes increasingly frustrating as

- none of the other manufacturers "gets" tablets even less ships them,

- none of them was capable of coming up with mag safe,

- Microsoft doesn't have the balls to stop OEMs from crippling a perfectly good enough (for less advanced users at least) operating system

- and Canonical have crippled Gnome to the point where you can't shut down your computer without either using a pointing device or resorting to a shell.

Edit: Forgot iTunes. Try have someone who doesn't know iTunes burn a cd. (Hint: You have to make a playlist out of it, then burn that playlist to a cd.) Also tried to tidy up this rant.
This article assumes that having zero forensic footprint left on your storage device is a bad thing.

I'm still waiting to be convinced of that presupposition.
Sometimes explaining the path you're on is more work than its worth and a distraction from continuing on it. People can't really accept what you believe about it without some proof that its valid, which you can't supply because you're discovering it.

You're probably not going to gain any confidence from such an interaction. You may even come off like a wing nut. So keeping things to yourself until you have something solid and a way to explain it can be best.
That's how I got through all my uni assignments that required UML. I just hacked it together in the agile style and then generated UML diagrams in svg after the fact.
The industry is full of buzzwords, hype, and snakeoil, alas. ECA is one example, and I'd argue that the EDRM is another. The EDRM was good a few years ago but hasn't really evolved to reflect current, and developing practices.

ECA describes a part of the process that was hard to do in the early days because the tools didn't support the faster iteration upfront. As people realized the value of that iteration, the tools improved and the term gained power and marketing presence.

In other words, I agree with you.
They can't mirror automatically - it always appears to the app as a second window.

There are games (e.g. The incident) that use this to let you play on a TV, and things like Keynote can display the presentation on the output and presenter notes on the device itself.
I probably wouldn't pay for such a book - only because (for me at least) I wouldn't want a whole book - just a very good multiple page tutorial.

An FYI more than anything, and that might just be me.
Follow up to our HN name-badge-printing story: We're now revealing "View"
Crowdfunding is not about funding but about the crowd
You know, comments like that disparage by implication anyone who finds value in PHP or SVN. That's a big chunk of the development community. It tears people apart rather than bringing them together. Maybe you should redirect your energy from snark and criticism toward something more constructive.
>"How much experience will I need before I can start to expect making the 'average salary'?"

Assuming that "average" refers to median, half of all people earn less and therefore there is a significant chance that you may never earn it.
Chapter 7 bankruptcy doesn't even sound so bad if you don't have dependents. Although next time around you'll probably have to find someone else to guarantee that lease...
Recetas de Cocina: Patasca (6 Porciones) | Engrandece tus Conocimientos
No, not that M, the other M, the one called Max
I suppose the source meteorite could have been ejected matter from an impact with another planet that harbored life; i.e., a sort of "meteor vector." That, to me, seems far more plausible than life developing out of nothing on a meteor or comet in space.
That table is fairly old, but even using that table, more people with bachelors or graduate degree lean left than right (3392 v 3278). Historically, those with degrees leaned right. It's been trending left and I wouldn't be surprised if this was the point where the lines crossed.

Here's more recent data (http://www.gallup.com/poll/118528/gop-losses-span-nearly-dem...), and as you can see Republicans have lost 10% of college grad support since 2001. As you can also see, in 2001 most with college grads slightly leaned Republican. By 2009 it is hugely slanted Democratic. This is consistent with my theory that the data you provided where college grads slightly lean left was one of the first years where the lines crossed and its been an exodus of college grads to the left ever since.
So, you can't sync your music with a Linux machine. That's it, really?
Agreed, that was similar to what I've seen with other programmers and with my only education. I profited greatly by taking engineering courses for a while, and they teach how to problem solve. I've also observed that others who have had a similar experience do well with problem solving (but also those with math background, which is counterintuitive to me). Small sample sizes for both, but they have been pretty consistent.
Hi Hacker News,

After our bootstrapping story that we wrote on HN (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2222522), TechCrunch wrote about us, and we're really excited to finally reveal our product, View, to the public.

We hope you guys are excited about this as we are!

Thanks for all the support, Hacker News!
(And also, thanks to the beta testers--you guys rock.)

-Felix and Zac :)
The right is against workers having the power to quit their job and find a better one? I was completely unaware of this.

Could you tell me when the Republicans stopped being abolitionists?
Because the growth in devices that Jobs describes as Post-PC (which incidentally includes android) is much greater than the growth of the PC now.
Barring a new remote dining edition of Grubwithus, I'll have to wait for the Winnipeg dinners for YC alumni. :)

But in all seriousness, I'd love it if someone would consider taking a glance at our application. People who should know have been telling us we're on to something, but I worry that we're just not communicating that effectively. I could pledge to eat during the feedback process if that helps.
I thought 25 minutes was pretty mediocre for the bubble game, and re-did it without any copypaste etc (not that I had any bubble game libraries available) and was surprised it took me about 35 minutes. It was really a typing test more than anything though. Amazing that even bad students would need 20 hours for that.
Money has made more happiness than has poverty.
An OT FYI: the /showcase page shows 'Get Satisfaction' twice.
Who said anything was a replacement for anything? I'm giving examples of content creation on the iPad to someone who said it couldn't do content creation "at all". It doesn't mean everybody should switch to it completely for everything, that's ridiculous.
octopus merges are rare in the git.git repo:

$ git rev-list --merges --parents --tags | awk '{print (NF-1)}' | sort | uniq -c
4409 2
22 3
5 4
3 5
1 6

So there's been a total of 31 octopus merges compared to 4409 typical two-parent merges.
Sugata Mitra: The child-driven education
I don't disagree that Facebook ads might work for certain product ("Check your IQ online!") but for a lot of product, they are never going to match up to search-linked advertising. Facebook can target ad by demographic (you're a teenager, you like skateboarding) whereas Google can target an active buying moment (you're searching for a new helmet.) The former is more similar to the old paradigm of television advertising at target demos than the new world of targeting actual purchasing behavior as it happens.
It's not that large. During periods of the year when teachers work, they only work about 38 hours/week.

http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2008/03/art4full.pdf

The fact is, teaching is an incredibly easy job. Teachers work less than other professionals, they get incredible vacations, and ridiculous job security.
"Being poor/impoverished is a mindset, being broke is a temporary condition."

I'd say being poor/impoverished is a lack of money and a lack of friends or family with money (otherwise whose couch are you going to crash on?). (Only) being broke is just the former.
FYI: (a little outdated) http://www.w3.org/TR/turingtest/
Anne Taylor at NFB.org in Baltimore can suggest an accessible one. I'm afraid I don't know which is considered best right now. If you have something really new I'd love to get a look at it from the accessibility perspective.
Maybe not for CentOS as a project, but it can be disadvantageous for CentOS as a community. If you are running CentOS, and run into some new bug, you cannot easily back out or cherry-pick patches.

A more interesting question is how this affects Oracle. In Unbreakable Linux 5 they replaced Red Hat Enterprise Linux' 2.6.18 kernel by their own custom 2.6.32 build.

Since Red Hat is pretty agressive at getting changes merged in mainline, Oracle can profit from their work anyway.
Windsoc does look like a good idea, implementing individual APIs is a pain. I'm no YC alum, and I'm not sure if there are any competitors providing the same service; but it sounds like a promising service.
This is completely off-topic, but I've been seeing this weird style of quotation marks occasionally for a while now. It uses two backticks at the beginning, and two apostrophes at the end: ``quoted''. If you're not using TeX, doing that will generally look pretty weird. So why do we still see it?
Also, if a methodology change speeds up the slow developers by x%, it will probably speed up the fast developers by x%.

One exception to this is when workflow/task splitting is properly done. Then the "good devs" can do the hard stuff, and create the toolset/primitives for the rest to used to build the product. This split will make the "lesser" devs more productive while making the "good devs" the same amount of productive.
Ask HN: Facebook alternative, are users willing to try something different?
Same as above.
I've found git to be a ---- nightmare to use. Part of that is inexperience, part of that its UX is a turd compared to hg.
I certainly have seen huge gaps in apparent ability. Usually, the "slow" programmers simply don't know how accomplish certain things - for some tasks, I am infinitely faster than an "average programmer" - for example, if the average programmer doesn't understand what a recursive descent parser is or doesn't understand that a database require logical constraints.

However, a team's productivity can be made N times greater if said adopts a coherent process, including education to fill in the gaps of "unproductive" programmers.

It is certainly true that a certain percentage of unproductive programmers would rather quit than upgrade themselves. I've worked with them. But a management approach of demanding a willingness to learn will give you an environment 100x more pleasant than a management approach of shouting "we want A-players". And said approach might indeed improve the total productivity of the team.
Thank you for your feedback. There are competitors providing something similar, but not in the way we think developers require. They're also more focused on selling to large corporations rather than working with smaller ventures.
Placeholder images from flickr tags
Hi, I just created this little web app in a few hours a would like to get some feedback about how to improve it.

http://flickholdr.com allows you to get placeholder images in the size of your choice, but getting images from flickr according to the tags passed. This means you can get placeholder images that actually tie in why the theme of the site you are building.

Comments and criticism welcome!

Thanks
It is not a violation of your civil rights for an unmarked
car to follow you around and watch you.

Surveillance without probable cause most certainly is a violation of your civil rights. Following you 'everywhere' includes following you on locations where you have the right to freedom from unwarranted 'searches' under the Fourth Amendment. For instance, the Fourth Amendment has been ruled to cover the curtilage[1], which means the FBI is not allowed to continuously watch you in your garden from said unmarked car, unless they have a warrant to do so.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Amendment_to_the_United_...
Yes. Kenneth Cole pulled a great stunt when he first started out. See http://www.fragrancex.com/products/_bid_Kenneth--Cole-am-cid...
Once you get to the graphics/interaction they are great.
I recommend:
* Try to embed a live-game into your main page, it took me 2 minutes to navigate the options until I could get some graphics on the screen.
* While you're at it make sure you embed a fully mature/active game so that we can see how awesome it looks when the screen is full of stuff.
* The UI flow is very non-intuitive, perhaps you've invested most of the dev in the game itself but its hidden behind a dozen screens that are hard to navigate.
S&P Downgrades Toyota Bond Rating
Is there any reason you wouldn't email as many YC founders as it took to get feedback?
My gem/service for live video/audio in Rails. Suggestions?
Make it touch compatible. I want to play it on my ipad.
There isn't much else that can be cut. At the local level, education spending dwarfs everything else.

Nationwide, at the local level, more money is spent on education than on police, prisons, roads, welfare and healthcare combined.

http://usgovernmentspending.com/piechart_2009_US_total
Actually feet, inches and pounds are imperial terms.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_units

Metre (cm) and gram (kg) are SI-units (International System of Units)
Ask HN:  Please destroy my startup idea so I don't waste time on it
Problem:

1.) Hard for Content Newsletters to Find advertisers and sponsors.

2.) Very difficult for startups who want to advertise in newsletters to find similar newsletters to advertise in. (no central location - have to find advertise area on website for each newsletter or email publisher directly for smaller newsletters)

This isn't just something that's new for newsletters. I believe this was inherited from direct mail from magazines and publishers. I remember pursuing a startup idea in high school, looking for ways to reach out to highly targeted magazines, and being pointed to a directory in the library. And even the library didn't have that directory.

My Solution: BuySellAds.com type of website for content newsletter publishers.

My Minimal Test:

Advermin.com - Performable Landing page to see if there's interest in this. Landing page hooks up to mailchimp. For first few weeks, I'll send advertising opportunities from friends who own content newsletters - see if there's interest and if we can pick up steam.

Finding if publishers are interested by using howtosubscribe.com to find newsletter publishers.

My Concerns:
(1) Too small of a market. Some of the data from EasyUnsubscriber.com shows me that most email newsletters are from newsletters that are selling a product or service or are extremely interested in driving traffic to their blog.

(2) The larger newsletters (highest value customers) probably don't need someone to find opportunities because they're popular enough to attract advertisers directly.

Target Newsletters include content newsletters like HackerNewsletter and Startup Digest.

Final Plea: Please poke holes in this. Tear me apart. Spit on my ideas. I want to save time and focus full attention on easyunsubscriber.com if this idea isn't worth pursuing. All input appreciated.
IIRC all the 3.x and 4.x releases until 4.3 have. I'm wondering if maybe that was due to having developer builds installed previously? I assumed it was standard practice but you're making me wonder if I'm wrong about this.
Could someone please explain how teachers' unions protecting "bad teachers" from being fired is in the best interests of the teachers unions?

They get accused of that a lot, but I can't see how that would work for them. If my coworkers were making me look bad, I sure wouldn't want to associate myself with them. It seems to me it would weaken the credibility of the union and thus take away the power the union has to back me up.
2009 was basically the low-water mark for the GOP brand in modern history, so I'm not sure that those numbers are all that accurate now, but it's not a huge deal.

More to the point, the party gap in with college degrees is surely vastly smaller than the party gap in the private workforce vs members of public-sector unions, so it's sort of weird to assert that the reason teachers lean Democratic is that they're "more educated."
If you think police are intrusive, try God! Then, you'll stop worrying about police. Relax -- God's in control. It's His world.

God says...
actually holiness pernicious gnawing slippery indued dryness
vaster unthankful belonging regeneration regeneratedst
bereaved Carthaginian plenty retiring graceful Edition
Does preserved tree corresponding indulgent poor Whether
during weal speaking wayward hideous Hereat occurred words
goodness regardless submitting rites stated sacrificed
First Curiosity such cleared accuse feelings rising standeth
Example energy followest remembrances ignorant Forsake
recognises stirring cast punished bemoaned unstayed nourished
beforehand vice gladness faculties devoured bath one nostrils
glorieth confiding unrulily impious withstood sore unreal
ripened rude listing apostles gone vexed imparted weighing
punctuation familiar thanks unresolved distraction reject
your Envy lightly Artificer order Jew Instantly distrusted
keeper vowed prudent departure devoutness garlands herself
soundness infinitely obviously solemnise
This is added now.
Kinetic Wave Sculptures
I've e-mailed some whom I've already met, but I guess I've always approached it as I would speaking to investors, that cold pitches don't work. And I wonder what would happen if all 1600 applicants did the same.
Sounds really interesting!
How many developers over 40 do you know?
You can simultaneously find value in something, and have a sense of humour about that something's shortcomings. Learning to laugh at ourselves is probably the greatest thing humanity could do to further peace and happiness.
What you're seeing is actually correct. In MVC, the data and logic reside in the Model, with the Controller only handling communication between the other components.

Don't make the mistake of equating the Model with your Data Layer. They're obviously related, but not equivalent.

There are some variations on MVC where the distribution of responsibilities is different.
My site, http://Like.fm, is compatible with Last.fm's API for scrobbling and many services are already supported including YouTube. Adding support for music players is relatively easy, especially when considering Last.fm has already made the idea of scrobbling a commonly understood idea.

Spotify will be a problem for Last.fm IF they can continue being free for everyone, and convert everyone to their service. Otherwise a decentralized social network will have that advantage from being able to collect more users faster.
Awesome Ssh Tricks