skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Where are the groupies (the hot chicks)?? I've heard they're a common fixture of the Valley Startup scene.
> Has this been done already?

A more general approach which also covers python/php modules as well as system packages, configuration files, installed software on /usr/local , .. is blueprint https://github.com/devstructure/blueprint / http://devstructure.com/

What it basically does is to analyse your system, create a list of packages and files, save it in a git repository and allows you to export it to various different formats like shell script or puppet or chef.

Btw. this is IMHO a really big deal. Not only can you clone your environment easily, but it helps you to create a managed environment as you have at least a starting point to create your puppet manifests/chef recipes or at least shell scripts. And as it uses git you can easily use it to create distributed configuration backups of your systems. Oh and as the default output format is JSON you can start to create webservices showing the state of your servers/create a more convenient overview about your systems.
"no one is using version control systems, most people hardly know the difference between a CMS and a framework, most still update their websites with FTP, virtual hosting is still a scary beast, cPanel is the norm, they still refer to web apps as "scripts""

Wrong. At least where I work. But I do still call web apps "scripts" because 1) I'm old and 2) that's what they are.
That's like saying someone who listens to a sales pitch and then doesn't buy the product isn't adding value to the economy.
I didn't approve any profile image update! I used the website 10 days ago and never since! And today, voila, my profile picture has changed!
People are forced to trade, here is how: When the government needs a loan to cover its budget, they get it from the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve are charged to coin new money to provide the government (see wikipedia Federal Reserve, subheadings: 'Elastic Currency', 'Lender of Last Resort' & 'Central bank'). As the Federal Reserve increases the money supply, the value of the dollars in your pocket/matress/bank account go down.

Since the value of currency evaporates, the only way to maintain your savings is to have it in a non-currency form. Stocks are a pretty liquid asset. This pushes people away from savings and into speculation (the stock market), where many lose their shirts.
It is difficult to understate how good Patrick was.

BoS has some of the best speakers in the business. Some you will have heard of - Seth Godin, Joel Spolsky, Geoffrey Moore - some you won't have heard from even if you have heard of them - Peldi at Balsamiq for example. http://businessofsoftware.org/prevyear.aspx

Patrick only had 7 minutes 30 seconds but he rocked the house. He will be back this year we hope.
"[...] monopolistic corporations that defend themselves against competition by giving "good enough" clones of their competitors products away for free."

I don't quite get how does this apply to Google. Who exactly is that competition and how do they threaten Google?

To me it seems like they're defending against Microsoft-like tactics when someone owns a part of the path between Google and its users (the browser, OS) and tries to leverage that to harm Google's business. I don't see how what Google does stifles innovation.
Another from Edinburgh here.
Corrected in a followup comment:

http://perlmonks.org/?node_id=451236
It's only broken if you don't get the joke. Asking someone to review and merge a patch for strfry() is, if not unreasonable, then at least something that's reasonable to say "no" to.
I assume

s/understate/overstate/
HN guidelines(in discussion of what Is not proper to post): "Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon."
Please do not post politically charged links again.
Groupon and Facebook just raised some pretty major capital ...
No way. I'm from Bolton also!
I have a few 30 hour weekend projects I could turn into web apps easier than iPhone apps. There is no way anyone would pay 1-2 dollars just to use these apps on the web (among other things). I don't build anything unless it has utility and in this case, the utility is the few hundred these apps could bring in with only a few hours of dev/ui time. In this case an App is the way to go. Obviously, I don't expect to make big money from these apps. But the few hundred I would make just from putting the app on the store and doing some half ass marketing makes it worth developing.
This talk summarizes a big chunk of what people submit to HN.

The arguments about bootstrapped vs funded, lifestyle vs selling out, lean vs not, MVP vs GDP, internet celebrity worship - all covered pretty well in an hour.
Anyone know if goroutines are still implemented as native POSIX threads in gccgo?
http://www.favilous.com
Thanks, rabidsnail!
This seems confused.

"Lazy evaluation brings time into the picture"

Lazy evaluation changes the programming language semantics; but time, per se, is not "brought into the picture" in any visible way - if the specific time of evaluation were visible, the program wouldn't be referentially transparent.

"In point of fact, the simultaneity constraints inherent in lambda calculus have been shown to make it unsuitable for issues involving concurrency (like multithreading)"

Functional programming is particularly suited to parallelization, but concurrency demands a different approach, but it depends on the application domain.
New iPad 2 Apple's Smart Cover - منتديات قروب الساهر
Here's the newspaper site if you care to visualize the tracking: http://www.zeit.de/datenschutz/malte-spitz-vorratsdaten
At first I was a little bothered by the idea of a "preschool dungeon adventure". But on further reflection I suppose it says something positive about our culture that the term "dungeon" has lost it's association with "torture chamber".
>Apple, in particular, are considered a paragon of UI excellence, yet many of the decisions they make SOUND downright terrible.

And some, like the UI of iTunes and their elimination of the right mouse button, are terrible.

I don't see Apple as innovative on the UI front... more so in terms of visual design.
Your wife might like this: http://www.ubit.ch/software/ubitmenu-languages/
This is interesting, but margarine is (a) pretty gross, (b) culinarily less useful than butter (the milk solids in butter are put to use in a variety of systems), and (c) probably less healthy than butter because of trans-fats.
That association is comparatively recent anyway, probably Victorian or later.
Being in the Emotion Business - My Thoughts
There is no meaningful difference between trial and error and without trial and error. It makes this no less of an algorithm.
you know what? my wife is at the living room trying to study and we have a 4 year old son that I have to keep busy today. I am a big fan of RPG games and I really liked this idea, going to see if it works with him :) thank you!
IOS 4.3.1 jailbroken #ipad2
There are more, but this is enough to show a bit of a pattern.

And you do have a good point about distressed shareholders vs distressed businesses. But either one can drop the sell price (aka, make them undervalued).

Nebraska Furniture Mart http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nebraska_Furniture_Mart (Sold at age 90).

Dairy Queen: (35% of it was owned by a 75 year old named John Mooty when BRK bought it in a takeover)

Ben Bridge Jewelers (Chairman and a majority owner was 75 when sold to Berkshire: http://www.historylink.org/index.cfm?DisplayPage=output.cfm&...)

Flight Safety http://www.beezernotes.com/wordpress/?p=4229#comment-30045 (Sold at age 89)
Boojay: A wrist friendly language for the JVM
Is there an example somewhere that involves compiling more than 1 file?
http://www.google.com/codesearch?hl=en&start=30&sa=N...

Seems to say it isn't used. I also contest that it _is_ broken. I cannot find a man page that promises that it uses a uniform distribution; one could even argue that such a function should not use an uniform distribution. For example, randomizing the non-uniformity of the distribution depending on the phase of the moon would, IMO, be a good idea for this function.
Help 3DS in Alaska do some Market Research
The demo is extremely impressive. The "porn" soundtrack is quite annoying though.
Language of the month: Dead in the water
At the time described in that story, RIM was reportedly not handing over the encryption keys to anybody. What happened?
Thanks for asking. I'm not saying having oen or two CEOs for a company is good or bad, I'm saying the post is trollish and doesn't deserve to be in HN. Let's see: it has no content, only an opinion that a company is going to do badly because something the co-CEO said and because their new product is going to have a feature (android) that gosh, is not the latest version. Also the original author mentions having two CEOs as a big deal but there's no indication of this being a problem in the past, it's like a tabloid article.

The problem is that any post talking about android, mobile, RIM, Apple, tablet is "hot" and likely to get upvoted even if it's crappy.

Since people seem to think that I am in the wrong so fine, I've been in HN since the beginning, tried to do by humble contributions but there's a lot of aggression and the quality of posts has nosedived. I guess I don't belong, so I'll exit quietly.
Microsoft Goes On Purchasing Splurge on IPV4 IP Addresses
Can someone post a link to that Password JS that said how fast it can be cracked
A month(?) ago someone linked a script that displayed how quickly a input password could be cracked. I can't seem to find it anywhere anymore. Does anyone know the link?
Nate Silver on the Times Pay Model and the Economics of Reporting
Triunfo del amor capítulo 112
I don't think this is so much about SVN vs Git, I think it's more about bringing MacRuby development to where the center of Ruby development attention is.

More people will click around new source commits and become inspired to make their own contributions.
Technical Aggression.

I prefer more people standing against intransient word & law. (Much is called Standards, or Rights.)

Codes hold you.

Our support systems could allow critical viewpoints better.
thanks -
This is Palm we're talking about. I don't know about you, but when I hear "Palm", I immediately think of people in suits and ties squinting at little screens to see where their next meetings are. Palm traditionally sold products to business people.

If memory serves, before RIM moved in, Palm owned the enterprise handheld market. They could do it again if they tried.
You will when if Google decides they're afraid of your product giving you some leverage and decides to give a clone away for free to undermine it's value and damage your business.

Exactly the strategy that Microsoft used to destroy Netscape.

It stifles innovation because they don't need to do the hard work to advance the state of the art. They just need to copy the work that's already been done and let the free price and privileged advertising position do the rest.

It's good for Google, but bad for the rest of us. You can say 'but don't users benefit from getting stuff for free?'. Well yes in a way, but we all lose because of the stagnation it causes.

Again, pretty similar to what Microsoft has done in the past. It may be very hard for corporations that have a quasi-monopoly to avoid falling into this pattern in general.
Yes, this is irritating, not unlike the RedCloth gem.
I guess that partly is because they got competition that showed such things are possible at all (http://clang.llvm.org/diagnostics.html).

C++ is notoriously hard to parse, and even harder to produce useful error messages for.
Why is Color named "Color"?
7 of the Best Free Linux e-book Tools
I get the feeling the author's total knowledge of functional programming comes from reading -1 comments on Slashdot.

> It's theoretically possible that the 'f()' or 'x' might
> change between the lazy evaluation of step one and the
> lazy evaluation of step three million. Trying to prevent
> that is what we programmers call a 'hard' problem.

I don't know of any functional language that allows values to change during evaluation.

> Trying to run functional logic in two or more
> simultaneous threads can raise serious problems, for
> instance.

The whole point of using functional programming in multithreaded applications is that it doesn't raise such problems. The data are immutable; one thread doesn't affect the other, unless the programmer explicitly uses stateful constructs like pointers.

> Myth #2 - Functional programming is 'different from' imperative programming.
> [...]
> On the other hand, 'imperative' is also used as a
> contrast to 'functional', on the basis of really poorly
> defined terms. The most common version runs something
> like, "imperative languages use assignment, functional
> languages don't".. a concept I'll jump up and down
> upon later.

I've never heard this definition. Ever. It simply doesn't make any sense; of course functional languages use assignment.

> No, functional programming is not some kind of magic
> pixie dust you can sprinkle on a computer and banish
> all problems associated with the business of
> programming. It's a mindset-altering philosophy and/or
> worldview, not a completely novel theory of
> computation. Accept that. Be happy about it. At least
> friggin' COPE.

This paragraph is completely ridiculous. Functional programming:

1. Is not magic problem-solving pixie dust (obviously).

2. Is not a philosophy, mindset-altering or otherwise.

3. Is a novel theory of computation.

Whether a Turing machine and the lambda calculus are equivalent in power is irrelevant; they are, undeniably, different. Otherwise, there would be no point in using one over the other.

> Myth #3 - Functional programming is referentially transparent

This entire section deals with Perl, which is not a functional language (as it is not based on the lambda calculus). I don't know enough about Perl to state whether the authors assertions are correct, but regardless, they have nothing to do with functional programming.

The second half of section #3 claims referential transparency is impossible because it requires two values with some external equivalent meaning, such as "three" and "3", to be considered equivalent by the program. At this point I'm wondering whether the entire article is some elaborate prank.

> Myth #4 - Functional programming doesn't support variable assignment
> [...]
> According to Church's thesis, all programming languages
> are computationally equivalent. They all do the same
> things, and only the syntactic sugar is different.

Section #4 is already off to a bad start...in fact, reading further, it's just more of the same. Abject confusion, combined with a belief that Perl can be used to demonstrate functional concepts, yielding incomprehensible conclusions.
Cornell Will Reveal Secret Academic Journal Pricing
So what, if the spec says "jump off a cliff", you'd do it?

This isn't relevant to the technical issues at hand; it's just an insult. Exactly what I was trying to criticize Linus for doing. (That was actually the point of my comment.)

Are you all seriously thinking that Linus doesn't know about performance?

No, that's completely unrelated to anything I said.

I'm not familiar with the history of glibc here. I didn't read anything except the single comment from Linus that was linked to. And I'm only addressing the comments he made in that post.

You have not addressed what I actually said, at all.

I'm thoroughtly disgusted with the way I've been treated here, especially the number of downvotes I've gotten. What happened to the hacker news ethic of voting up things you like, but only voting down when someone is rude or malicious? Unbelievably, I'm now actually at negative votes. I guess I ought to take this as a signal that my comment was a disservice to this community, and consider that maybe I'm not wanted here.

By the way, I'm not interested in continuing this thread.
http://www.apple.com/macosx/lion/

“Say good-bye to manual saving. Auto Save in Mac OS X Lion automatically saves your work — while you work — so you don’t have to. Lion saves changes in the working document instead of creating additional copies, making the best use of available disk space. The lock feature prevents inadvertent changes from being saved and automatically locks documents after two weeks. And the revert feature returns you to the state the document was in when you last opened it, so you can feel free to experiment with confidence.”

Makes perfect sense to me.
This sounds like a solution to a non-existent problem.
Thanks for that article, very informative, but not necessarily conclusive. There are also a ton of comments that resonate with my concerns, about how random apps I haven't touched seem to constantly start themselves and run in the background doing who knows what - using CPU (battery), bandwidth, whatever.

At least one comment mentioned a significant battery life improvement after installing Advanced Task Killer and turning on its autokill feature, which I've been using a few months. I think I'll experiment a little and turn it off, and see if there's any noticeable difference in battery life.
Principles That May Make Your Work Better Or May Make It Worse
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/01/24/1842218/Linus-Switch...
Groupon is worth a whole lot more than Twitter because it has a realistic way to make boatloads of money. Twitter is influential, but that doesn't mean its stock is worth a lot of money. As far as I can tell, Twitter's business plan is something along the lines of, "advertising or something?". Groupon takes 50% of the money from each groupon sold.

Crocs, Inc., the company that makes those awful rubber shoes, has a higher market cap than The New York Times Company. That doesn't mean NYT is less important than Crocs, but it does mean that it is not as good at turning a profit.
So, they have the cost of integrating their platform with Android, and ... what benefit, exactly, over just using Android?

Obviously, if you can avoid being commoditized by maintaining your own software platform, that's great. I just don't see that RIM is bringing anything to the table with their OS:
http://apps.ycombinator.com/item?id=2263882
The first musical album that’s also a location aware iPhone app
I hope Canonical picks up GnuStep some day.

I remember the first days of GNOME, a Windows-clone in looks, with an ambitious acronym "GNU Network Object Model Environment". Are they anywhere near that acronym in vision today?
Inventing New Technologies and Markets
They follow up with why it's noteworthy in the very next paragraph: "Historians will tell you that empires collapse when they become too dependent on finance, but I’m not so pessimistic."
Is your sdcard slow, by any chance? A slow sdcard could affect performance if you -- like me -- keep most of your apps on it.
Yes, I know it's not "proper" open source if you can't sell it, but I think there is clearly a demand for that kind of licence.
Thanks for the thoughtful response.

I sort of agree with you but I think what you're saying applies to a different context.

As the person who was rudely lambasted by Linus pointed out, Fedora is not there to "get on top." It shouldn't be trying to go by the same metrics that Windows goes by. And this isn't an issue of supporting legacy software; if Fedora makes a particular decision, Adobe can just update their software to follow suit.
Hope this give the project more attention, because MacRuby is pretty good!
I'd say you've hit on the one reason that RIM hasn't actually died yet. :-) They really seem to be coasting along on that single advantage, which does not look good for the company's long-term outlook.
Do you know that to be true? Is talent at teaching really normally distributed across both genders?

It's completely possible that they are not. If they aren't then the neuroscience tells us that it's most likely cultural rather than biological but even that's only informed speculation at this point.
Bing News with Real-Time Twitter feed and Enhanced Entertainment Sharing
Thanks. This is an insightful comment and, yes, I see your point and agree with it.
If you ignore the photo-sharing capability for a moment, it sounds like they're trying to create a more accurate alternative to GPS. In the 1700s Britain awarded about £100,000 in "Longitude prize" money to people who contributed to the development of [accurate] longitude. I tried to figure out what that is in today's pounds and found a calculator that said it's £147,000,000.00 today. So if Color really can create an alternative to GPS for $41 million, it would be cheaper than what it cost to develop longitude :)

No idea if they can actually pull this off, but thought the Longitude Prize story is cool (thank you, "Stuff You Should Know" podcast, for mentioning it earlier this year).
Feel free to email me for more details (in my profile). Basically, I hired an immigration lawyer and created a hugely detailed business plan.
Come on, that's not fair. jonah's citing two ways men try to woo women (expensive dinners and making her laugh) and using them at as analogies for ways that companies try to woo employees -- either paying them better salaries or being a more rewarding place to work.
Great compilation. Quite true in some cases.
It's a problem because unlike other activities finance produces benefits to society only when it well, finances people doing things other than finance. Other activities are valuable in themselves.
[Please approach in a light tone]

I found you engaging and fresh in your approach (but I don't see that many presentations so what do I know) but to be uber-critical you spoke a bit too quickly at times. Usually this is an indication of nervousness but you appear to suggest (above) you have so much experience that this wouldn't be a problem.

Incidentally I suck at public speaking and tend to make nervous quips and self-deprecate (which tends to make one look worse) like you did with your "10 second [...] shoulda practised [...]" interlude. Did I mention that I'm a bit too heavy on the negative critique usually too ...

Couple of points/queries:

Is the colour of the guys you're selling software to relevant? You specify that they're white guys but I wasn't sure if this is a specific comment on demographics of people who buy software or if it was something else?

Second, knowing when a battle was doesn't make you intelligent though it might make you knowledgeable or nerdy. That aside Google don't appear to sell themselves on the issue of their customers presenting themselves as knowledgeable. Surely the benefit they sell most is simply "not wasting time looking for stuff" (Bing do the same, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLV_MTvshGg).
CyanogenMod Android May Soon Allow Users To Revoke Specific App Permissions
Ok, then, how does stealing sound? You can't really win this argument, man. No matter how you dice it, the FED is stealing from the American public to hand it over to financial institutions who then sell us back our stolen goods.
East midlands. But the southerners think I'm northern. So let's take their lead.
Very nice article, good overview of the planning and design process.
Will the government bail out the photo sharing sites when they fail?
"Do it enough, and you'll see users flee."

Unless there's no where else for them to go. :)
Kinect's AI breakthrough explained