skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My main take away from this post is that you shouldn't make bad assumptions about data formats.

However, my Linux experience is much like the author's: assume you'll get something to work, find out what's missing, apt-get to the rescue.

The problem for me is when things go out of date. I try to install something and it triggers 250MB of seemingly unrelated updates. In all fairness, that usually happens when I build stuff from source, not when installing packages.
I'm surprised enough by this to say 'Way to go, Apple!' I don't often cheer for corporations, but Apple is actually sticking their neck out on this one, and I have to applaud them for that.

I'm sure they have ulterior motives (developers might leave if they fear lawsuits) but Apple could easily have ignored this and gotten away with it, I think.
Why you should learn COBOL
What to do about Facebook?
I agree with most of what you say, but (probably because I come from academic research) disagree with the spirit. This sounds a lot to me like a grant propsal:

Team: "Hey, we think <Algorithm X> is an untested and potentionally hugely powerful way to filter spam.
Our test script did awesome. We want to bring it to scale and make a product out of it."

Investors: "Hey, that sounds like a good idea."

<Months Later>

Team: "Nope, <Algorithm X> is a dead-end. Here's the remainder of your seed money."

If they failed, then company failed before anyone ever invented in them. They failed when they decided to even try the idea out in the first place. The investors failed by backing a technology that wasn't going to work.

The product was a failure, but the team and business weren't necessarily failures. I can defintely see why a company would want to re-up. Both sides would have obviously preferred bringing cash in hand over fist, but I'd say that this outcome is far more positive than having a product that works and a business that fails.
Presentation Consulting - Teach companies how to improve their presentations: Duarte http://www.duarte.com/

Famous, because they made Al Gores Climate Change presentation.
Pretty exciting considering how far we've advanced. In the 1960s (an era when humans walked on the moon, even) we could do little better than send probes on flybys of planets and return a handful of low res photos and other data. The Mariner 4 mission to Mars returned less than 700 kilobytes worth of data, and left us with the impression that Mars was very much more like our Moon than anything else, it took many later missions for our more modern understanding of Mars to firm up. In contrast, Dawn uses ion engines to rendezvous with not one but two asteroids, and will study them with an impressive suite of instruments including an incredibly advanced imaging spectrometer. Each image that Dawn takes will return orders of magnitude more useful scientific data than the entire Mariner 4 mission. Meanwhile, there are other missions such as the Mars Science Laboratory, WMAP and Planck, JWST, JUNO, which are equally as astounding as measures of how far we've advanced in just a few decades.
>> his argument is basically 'Linux couldn't open a file that everybody else could, but by dicking around with random half-assed documented tools we could do it anyway!'.

May be one could even interpret it like 'there are a lot of software vendors who force their users into proprietary solutions and formats but with Linux at hand, limitations could be worked around to get things done'.

Perspective, isn't it?
Technical limitation: SMS are 160 characters. 20 chars for username and 140 chars for message.
How come? What's causing it?
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Since I had to go through all this trouble, I also wanted to take care of all the duplicates and all the junk, to have a single source of truth for my phone numbers - so I deleted everything from my phone, which in turn deleted everything from Google, and that export was a backup that I uploaded to Google's Contacts again. It's weird, but that's what I did to get what I wanted.

This file I also processed locally with a script to merge entries that had different names / different phone numbers, using some heuristics I came up with.

I agree that SIM contacts are a common problem, but there should be an easier way to handle it.

My main problem was that there is no option to upload your SIM contacts to Google and no proper tools to get rid of the junk, only a merge option that functions differently in Google Contacts than it does on Android.

And the contacts export only exports on an external SD card -- now this seemed really weird to me. I actually had to go out and buy an external SD, otherwise I couldn't do it.

Don't get me wrong, I love Android and I love Google Apps, but if you're going to implement synchronization, you also have to give the user the proper tools to take care of legacy.
Unless Apple regularly sell giftcards to retailers at significant discount, there's more than 50-10% markup.

My sole means of paying for iTunes purchases is via giftcards because they can always be obtained for a discount of between 20-25% if you look. A retailer here was recently offering them at buy 2 get 1 free, or 33% discount.
I don't see how this has anything to do with "Linux" - if anything, it shows how powerful google/the internet and the open source community is since nowadays you can expect to be spoon-fed a solution for almost every problem you can come up with.

And I think "Linux IS great!" articles at this day and age are pretty much unnecessary - this battle has been fought (rather) long ago.
Same here.
Obama I particularly don't like. But even if they backed a candidate that I liked it would still give me a feeling that it's not a professional company.

If I absolutely needed it then, well, a need is a need, it has to be met.
But when you're not sure if you need something small things like that get important and that is going to be most of their customers probably.

Each to his own. I don't like businesses that can be easily associated with a certain personality, views etc. (like Apple).
Ex-Goldman Sachs Banker Starts Hedge Fund Analyzing Japanese Blog Traffic
I think he's hiring (or not hiring) operators and technicians and the fact that there's a safety training program involved hints at some danger in the workplace. In that position I would also prefer someone with a clean drug test although I would still worry that they show up stoned on their first day and get their arm into the extruder or whatever.
I fully agree. Ask the leading scientist a couple of hundred years ago what they thought of going to moon. They too could've demonstrated how preposterous the proposition is by imagining all kinds of sci-fi energy sources and it would still seem impossible to them.

That's not the same as saying that space colonization is going to happen or that it's remotely within reach anytime soon.
Continuation-based web applications: just say no
This is really well done, design is really nice, everything works pretty flawlessly for me, and its quite addictive

As much node hate that is going around, stuff like this is exactly why it is getting hype, yes this was possible before node, but it was hard enough to not bother for fun experiments like this.
My dad have had phones since they where actually carried around. He has been trough most of the phones you can imagine including several versions of Android.

It wasn't until he got the iPhone that he stopped asking me about how to do things. He also recently replaced his laptop with an iPad. For the first time he is actually able to install applications himself.

The iPhone isn't perfect and not everything is as elegant as you would want it. But claiming that Android is superior in user experience (which the OP seem to imply) is simply absurd.

So you like what the Android do, you have gotten used to the Android you know the ins and outs, you have control of the OS worthy of a geek and then you have to change... Of course you are going to hate every second of the iPhone.

Just as I of course hated every second with the android phones I have had because I have been used to the iPhone.

But the real test is people like my father. People who are not attached to any specific phone and judge them by metrics very unlike the power users.

Yes I know there are people who started on the iphone and loved the Android and vice versa.
I do not mean to be mean but past history has proven that FSOSSpatents is an astro-turf Lobbyist for Microsoft with at times many of its so-called expertise being somewhat wrong and devoid of factual basis.
Once upon the time: http://literally.barelyfitz.com/
Schema.org vs RDFa
Who's making the specific predictions here?
Developers at odds with Tech Recruiters
Please listen, Google: we want a Google Scholar API
That scenario is impossible in an expanding universe. Regions of space eventually become disconnected from each other. There wouldn't be one computational entity overall, although there may be little dominant AIs inside these disconnected space bubbles.
Works now. I think the rest of the world got it with a delay :)
Triunfo del Amor Capitulo 164
Triunfo del Amor Capitulo 164 tells also about Leonela who is trying to cure herself of alcohol dependence. Docter Heriberto who help treat Leonela said that in addition to medical treatment, Leonela must have a strong determination to stop the bad habits and limiting hang out with people like Guillermo.
What a hard drive used to look like
Thanks! 1080p 30fps seems not quite there yet (though impressive for a tablet).

Preview for their lead game doesn't look "console quality" to me
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SY7lUziafr4 Though the first games usually don't max out the hardware and of course tablets will probably go through a few generations before the next console generation (excluding nintendo's Wii U), so it's only a matter of time. Just not there yet.

I saw elsewhere that it's not as powerful as the iPad 2 (though clocked 20% faster...)
5 Facebook privacy settings to check now
if I want to meet up with someone, wouldn't I just give them an exact location? if the nearest landmark is 5 miles away I don't see how that would be useful.
It's not criticism, i m just skeptical if this model can be scaled to big countries.
I like the idea - but please do not confuse this with security. While the canary might be activated, all of your genuine information has also been compromised.

I have thought about the security issues with gmail, especially for mobile devices (they can be easily stolen).

It would be really REALLY great if Google offered several account access levels - I could use a 'read only' account for my mobile device, which could also only give me access to the last 1 hour of emails for example. and seperate account access for use with 3rd party services (facebook, gtalk apps etc)
Why would anyone make an instance of abstract art?
How to Become a Computer Programmer (a guide)
Is Training Helping or Hurting Your Success? - Linked 2 Leadership
Not to nitpick, but the above linked post says that the author of Windows XP Unwired too could not get smssender.exe to work in command line mode, to send messages in a batch.
"so many pre-recession jobs were simply unnecessary."

Well, they can be looked at as unneccessary now, but at the time they weren't considered to be (otherwise they wouldn't have existed then, as they currently don't now).

It's not as if employers just suddenly "wised up" 3 years ago and said "hey, I don't need any of you - you've been 100% unproductive the past several years, so I will simply lay you off now". Employers are acting as much in their self-interest now as they did 3, 5 and 10 years ago.
This isn't Anonymous.
True, he's biased and HINAL.

Still FOSS PATENTS does report the story first, so pretty hard to avoid sourcing it. Acquire facts, disregard opinion if you may.
Many of the companies that failed were unproductive. For example, any company building or selling houses we don't need is unproductive.

It is ridiculous that 7 million unproductive people were cut. In actuality, it was more like 70 million people, productive and not, who were cut. This is only marginally more people than in normal times.

(Data gathered by eyeballing the graph here: http://modeledbehavior.com/2011/06/05/strolling-through-the-... )

The idea is that among those 70 million people (probably a bit less, if some people were fired twice), most of the productive ones found jobs. The remainder were not rehired.
Huh? Do you mean USAF doesn't care if Lightsquared screws up the GPS reception for civilians? Or do you mean they don't care if Lightsquared gets screwed?

If the first, presumably it would also interfere with USAF uses of GPS. And I don't think they would be entirely free from pushback, especially from commercial aviation and the FAA.
I would be very surprised if the Gobi Desert, and Antarctica, and any other inhospitable place you care to name, was not colonized and exploited in the distant future. Right now we aren't doing that because we don't need to, but we could.

As for space colonization, there's enough of a romantic interest in it that I wouldn't think that the fact that it doesn't make economic sense would necessarily be a deal killer. There's also the possibility that some group would want to escape Earth at any expense. It didn't make a lot of economic sense for the Puritans to go to America, but they wanted out of the mother country.
Following on from the idea of Google offering account access for different security levels, would also be great if you could label an email as 'bank', 'money' or 'personal' and these emails, photos and calendar items would only be visible with full account access - so effectively you could associate a particular email label to a 'security' or 'access' level.

I would DEFINATELY use a feature like this.
We select each landmark "by hand", and can spend time on the quality of the data while still keeping the data gathering/updating process effective. Quite different compared to how traditional landmark databases, with focus on quantity, are built.

Another one of our strong points is data in areas where there are no digital maps available (but still lots of people with cellphones) -- landmark data is so much easier to gather than traditional map data.

Sources of the data depend on the country:
1. For example in the US or Europe, we can work mainly by combining information from a number of online sources with only some checkups from people actually "on the scene".
2. For a lot of developing countries (Nigeria is one of our strong areas for differentiation from other datasources), we will have some local guy physically go around the city and gather the raw data that we then process for accuracy and quality.

I'll dig up some examples where the usual digital maps fail and we succeed.

I am the head tech guy of the company, and am not so accustomed to preaching about the power of landmarks. So thanks for the opportunity to work on my arguments!

Re the app: Try it! It's much faster with the built-in landmarks compared to writing it yourself, and will change your texting behavior. Once you get used to it, texting without a location feels just so... last season. :)
The citizen takes personal responsibility for the security of the body politic, defending it with his life. The civilian does not.
Yeah exactly, haha. Just one of the more entertaining points
3 Members of Anonymous arrested in Spain
> "Sofa’s products, Kaleidoscope and Versions, are not a part of this acquisition. Both apps will remain available and we’re committed to securing a great future for them outside Sofa."

There haven't been any significant updates for Versions since I purchased my license for it two years ago, so I don't see how the situation for Versions could get worse at this point.
How I doubled the price of my software product and sold ten times as many copies
Somehow I've a feeling that we're going to soon lose a lot of freedoms that we've previously had online.

You've already lost them :| apathy is a bigger enemy than anything. As long as people have access to their netflix or amazon or whatever, they'll be ok with internet crackdowns.

Big business and government have been winning for a long time and the hackers aren't really doing enough.
With equipment prices dropping, and tax incentives to subsidize capital investments, these trends seem likely to continue.

Sounds like skewed incentives.
I sold my iPad 1 because I didn't enjoy holding it up for long periods of time. I wouldn't call it heavy so much as awkward to use in many of the standard tablet use-cases (in bed, holding it up like a book).

I'm in good shape, thanks.
Yeah it is. Everyone's Anonymous :|
A Lulzy Take on Media Literacy
In the 20th century we went from thinking that heavier-than-air flight was impossible to it being a major economic activity and the dominant form of medium-distance travel. We went from conventional explosives to nuclear explosives. We landed people on the Moon. We went from dying of dental caries to antibiotics and (very limited) genetic therapies.

In one short century we published more books and amassed more knowledge than all centuries past. Together. And we built the tools to search it and process it into meaning.

Traveling to another star is a formidable problem and doing it Newton style is not impractical. But if the past century teaches us something, we are a species prone to invent magic wands.

Besides that, we all know how futile is to try to predict the future. We can only see and express it in our own terms. The future is as alien to us as Twitter would be to my grandmother (who would be turning a century if she were alive).
Would it? Part of the joke is that it may never get there ;)
Partly: if you look, you see.

Mental illness may have been formerly under-diagnosed.
Facebook testing Real time- "Happening Now" Feed
The problem with this analysis is that it assumes people will only do things that make economic sense, and only if it will benefit themselves or their descendants in a short time frame. In fact, we've done all sorts of useless, expensive things "because it's there," and we spend money on things like radiation shielding for nuclear waste that will last thousands of years.

Granted, space colonization would be much more expensive than any very long-term or symbolic project we do now, but it's not out of the question that future societies would be more inclined to do stuff like that than 21st century anglophones. If so, none of Stross's barriers are necessarily deal-breakers.

For example, I don't think Hitler would have spared any expense to seed another world with Aryans, regardless of whether it made any economic sense (since when do humans only do things that make sense?), and the 420 year time frame wouldn't seem like much to a man who thought he founded a 1000 year Reich.
Facebook's New Feature
Wow. Astronomy has always been my dream job so this view is surprising to me. What areas do feel are most exaggerated? Is dark energy a bunch of crap for instance?

EDIT: My last sentences sounds snarky in retrospect...I meant do you feel that something like dark energy is played up.
I liked this as a quick rundown of of the Java scene -- exactly what I went looking for after seeing the 13-1 JCP vote.
A theoretical and probably ridiculous question here, but... does not the probe thus reduce the planetary orbital speed by the same amount (relative to mass, I guess), that it gains?
Exactly. Just think of all the robots and probes we could've created with the money spent on the shuttle program.
How would you define that exact location, with coordinates?

What if we have gathered just the right amount of landmarks from the area, so it's pretty likely that all the well known places to meet at are there already?

Naturally if you are in a rural area far away from any kinds of "real" landmarks, this will not help you. But by definition, such areas will have low number of potential users as well. We think this works well for a lot of people a lot of the time.
10 Super Powers I believe developers, designers and DBAs should have
Nice starting point for newbs to prevent the worst questions, but there's a lot more that needs to be said...
Acquiring Normals: Shifting a User Base from Early Adopters to Mainstream Users
Anonymous India strikes again against corruption
Is there such a thing as a library that abstracts away the differences between the JavaScript APIs of common embedded video players (YouTube, Vimeo, etc)?

This could be useful if I've embedded a player with embed.ly and then want to control it from elsewhere on the page (say, have a big "play" button somewhere).
Apparently not photoshop:

http://gizmodo.com/5181921/people-skydiving-to-see-space-shu...
I still dislike the way Android forces you to pull down a very small strip of the screen on the top, so I was slightly disgusted when I saw iOS5 does the same now, hopefully the gesture picks up a much larger area for Apples implementation
As opposed to being metaphorically the opposite of every negative point above?
Watching that video, I couldn't help but wonder what Sheldon Cooper would say. It's unfortunate that NASA needs to work towards this level of public appeal just to try and secure funding.
It's not hard, but it is very slow: create MtGox account; create Dwolla account; add your traditional checking account to Dwolla; initiate a xfer from checking -> Dwolla; wait (days) for xfer to complete; initiate Dwolla -> MtGox xfer (wait days); buy bitcoins with USD funds on MtGox.

I started that process purely for the fun of some small-time speculation, but the whole hassle of the process made me realize why Bitcoin is important.
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well, my views are probably at one extreme of the spectrum.

dark matter and dark energy are both real problems. my beef isn't with the facts, but how they are presented. for example, i am very skeptical that understanding those will have any major practical consequences (the argument being that they are only significant on astronomical scales - if they were somehow available / useful / practical at human scales then they would be much easier to study). the "poetic" value of "understanding our universe" is something separate, of course.

most astronomers i know (and i know a lot - my partner is a prof at u chile; chile has a lot of telescopes) love what they do. the thing that they dislike most is the extreme pressure for jobs - there are many more grads and postdocs than there are permanent positions. if you're considering a career in astronomy i would weigh that much more than my (cranky) opinions on funding.

(also, you realise that going observing is not sexy? you're sat in a room somewhere, surrounded by computers, with no windows and a bunch of engineers, so tired that you've got mouth ulcers, eating crap food to stay awake as nothing much happens for hours on end. and the meaning of your data won't be clear until you've done a year more of processing and analysis... :o)

ps the most over-sold field currently is planets: very popular; very sexy ("human inhabitable" etc etc); largely pointless. the "dark" problems are at least physics, rather than stamp collecting.
The real joy of using Linux and open source software is that you realize that you are the only limitation, and that you can hack anything and everything. It's like a huge, enormous box of legos to play with:-)
The significant difference is that we have colonized this planet already. It's in the nature of our species to increase our reach and breadth, and settling in the Gobi Desert simply doesn't pander towards this call. The perspective put forward by Sterling is very naive and narrow-minded, as it entirely disregards this human trait. Remember, we went to the moon, and we want to go to Mars, too, for reasons that we all know can't be fulfilled by a trip to the Gobi Desert.
Apple: The New Headquarters of Computing
Groupon international is a mess