skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Microsoft makes money from the desktop. The cloud threatens this, the current incarnation of the internet.

Over 10 years ago, the internet was supposed to undermine Microsoft, lead by Java. There was even a set-top box, that downloaded everything from the network (sound familiar?)

There was a joke about Java's ideal "write once, run everywhere", as "write once, debug everywhere". A similar joke about network-based computing's ideal of "access anywhere" is "no access anywhere". It's interesting that Apple's approach is not network centric.

1. The network is reliable.
2. Latency is zero.
3. Bandwidth is infinite.
4. The network is secure.
5. Topology doesn't change.
6. There is one administrator.
7. Transport cost is zero.
8. The network is homogeneous.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacies_of_Distributed_Comput...

Of course, Java has basically achieved its aim. And, one day, the network will be good enough - when it's as reliable as the bus in your PC (or, more accurately, as reliably as it needs to be for specific tasks).
I'd like to see one that's not a first-shot prototype :-)
Franchise agreements aren't exclusionary. They just lay out what a company will pay to the city for the right to use the public right of way. They also cover things like in-kind contributions for schools and libraries and minimum service levels (which set out that they can't cherry pick neighborhoods and must offer service to everyone in a geographic area). A second provider would have to agree to conditions at least equal to the first one.

I worked for a city-owned electric utility that would regularly negotiate with outside entities to do pole-attachments. We did fiber loops around the city and started to offer Internet service. When it looked like we might actually make some meaningful progress, Bellsouth and Cox went to the state government and got a law passed that forbade ANY governmental organization or political subdivision from getting into the telecomm business.

If we had the national political will to insist on a competitive telecommunications infrastructure, we'd have one. I'm happy to see that some ISPs are giving it a go. Unfortunately, the capital costs are so high that it's hard for an upstart to really gain traction.

Our best bet for a truly competitive marketplace is for the CableCos to finally get into the business of doing SMB (small/medium biz) customer service that gives the ATT/Verizons a run for their money.
Another direction you might want to explore is to learn VHDL or Verilog and implement the CPU on an FPGA board.

You can get a prototype board for around $100 and should be able to build something to cover most of, say, the MIPS instruction set.

This would be a more engineering oriented project; I would follow along an 'introduction to computer organization' style course from a university (just google and you can determine the required textbook, exercises etc).

It's exciting to write some C code, compile it to mips instruction set with gcc (I had to do some fudging here because my cpu didn't implement the entire instruction set) -- and then run it on the fpga and get the right numbers.
New technological advances allow an internet connection to be split between multiple devices and indeed multiple rooms within your home.

Sure, it doesn't help you download faster on your phone when not within wifi range... but if you use that argument against needing fast speeds at home, why not go back to dialup?

That's why all the downvotes.
I can understand your concern, but the only time we tweet anything is when you click a button asking us to do so; it's very hard to imagine how we might introduce a bug which would accidentally tweet the contents of your emails.
2. In the iCloud settings there is an indicator for storage plan and under "storage and backup" there is a "buy more storage" button. I think also Steve mentioned this in the keynote. No prices released though.
That is because I am using it those days, nothing more...

Gnome3 and Unity, I leave them the benefit of the doubt, because they are new, but GNOME people are usually the ones who are pushing those technologies.
They have a strong ethic and they stick to it, and it very much comes through in setting the tone of their sites. It's so sad to see so many other companies compromise when you get such a great RoI on little investments. Most sites have shopping carts that expire after a couple of minutes. Amazon's shopping cart lasts effectively forever though. The result is a better user experience at a modest cost of engineering and database resources. It's the polite and correct thing to do, and for amazon it probably results in a just slightly higher rate of sales, not to mention better customer retention, etc.

Ultimately the best companies are those who are passionate about their users and willing to go to considerable efforts to do things which have no other goal but making users happy.
I just posted this on avc.com, but might as well add to the discussion here:

Songkick (http://songkick.com) nails this for first time users.

You can go to the site and start tracking favorite bands without providing any sign up info. Only after you have tracked a reasonably large number of bands and you're invested in your list does it ask you to sign up.

(I'm not affiliated with them, I was just impressed by the workflow)
The New C++: Lay down your guns, knives, and clubs
Probably, but most halfway decent private tracker sites already solve that internally.
I think wireless is still being developed but home wireless is easily replaced (just buy a new router) and of course LTE is being rolled out to get even higher speeds on mobile phones.

The important part though is to have a connection that can actually utilize the full wireless speeds. Wireless has been 100mbps for a while now, but nobody can utilize that much on their lines (at least in the US)
I think it would lead to more spam on Wikipedia. So no, it would be a bad idea.

Note that Wikipedia already discourage search engines from interpreting their links as endorsements (rel=nofollow) for precisely this reason.
امتحان اللغة العربية للثانوية العامة 2011 
امتحان اللغة العربية للثانوية العامة 2011 امتحان اللغة العربية للثانوية العامة 2011 امتحان اللغة العربية للثانوية العامة 2011 امتحان اللغة العربية للثانوية العامة 2011
I don't think making these types of cross-country comparisons is all tha helpful. Do people know, for example, that in Germany it is illegal for most stores to be open on Sunday? Things work differently in different countries. We get it.
For most people I'd say the answer if to find a machine with Linux pre-installed.
Watch Bad Teacher Movie Online Megavideo
Watch Bad Teacher Movie Online Megavideo
With the support of a variety of adequate facilities including the presence of a star that is no doubt about the ability of the world s role I am sure this film will make you enjoy and are ready to laugh
In Silicon Valley, Great Power but No Responsibility
Comcast Business Class. Not the consumer stuff, the good stuff. 20 mbps sustained download and 14ms ping to google.com. There's a different (and much better) tech support tree for businesses too. Pricey but easily the best internet I've ever had. Beats the pants of my old AT&T DSL.
It's been a while since I used it in anger, but I would have imagined that the latest release of Slackware is in relatively good shape.

Patrick's emphasis on pragmatism & performance means that he simply wouldn't have incorporated stuff that didn't work if he could avoid it.
Truth is on the cloud.
They added the Apple logo when they introduced ADB - both Macintosh and the //gs used the same keyboards.
What gives you the idea that the network isn't reliable now? It's been around for what, 3 or 4 decades? Maybe 10 years ago you'd have been correct, but nowadays the internet's been pretty well broken in.

And cloud computing, while new (at least in name), has built billion dollar businesses like Amazon and Google.
Why I Want Google Offers And The Entire Daily Deals Business To Die
Less than. The troll would prefer to not litigate, but that you just hand over the money.
Well, the idea of conventions is that people agree to use them. I see a lot of variation in the degree to which people know about or are attached to this one.

While there may be a set of textbooks and papers for which the editors would have flagged "worst cast O(..)" as redundant, I think it's relevant to point out that the use of big-oh notation in mathematics predates computer science. So to the extent algorithm analysis is a branch of mathematics, those who use big-oh in this more general way are in fact consistent with the larger body of work.
How Google Finds New Recruits
I hear you regarding Shuttleworth & Ubuntu. Unfortunately, the GNOME developers don't seem to want to play ball & have seen Unity as a rival to GNOME Shell rather than as complementary or something to build on.
That's unfortunately true :-(
You hit the nail on the head. JavaScript is just not built for shared-data concurrency, but passing data back and forth to web workers provides a way to speed up computation-intensive tasks, decouple long processing times from the UI event loop, without changing the language itself.
Agreed with your point (although I wasn't aware of wp's nofollow rule).
What most people probably don't realize is that Apple is a laptop company.

Quickly transitioning to a computing appliance company.

But, to catch up to OS X? I don't think so. Especially now since it's being influenced by iOS.

Linux has an opportunity to get the power users and geeks that Apple is seemingly abandoning with the iOS merger. In 4 or 5 years I don't expect Apple to be selling consumer-level hardware that has an accessible command line or filesystem or the ability to run unapproved apps. That would be unacceptable for me, so I'm hoping that desktop Linux will be a viable alternative. I try Ubuntu every few years, and it's not there yet.
Yes, the last time I bought in Amazon was more than 10 years ago but I use Amazon as a wish list repository for Books and Music.
Well, I remember that when pg et al started YC, there was a general sentiment that the Y Combinator model cannot work in the US either.

Hell, as late as 2010, a friend of mine who is a VC partner said that "YC has lots of nice names in its portfolio, but it is unclear whether it is going to succeed financially". And about 6 months later, his VC started a YC-inspired fund.
Songkick requires logging in to a facebook account. This site is doing exactly what we're discussing NOT doing.
if a user initially sees your url in your rss feed, and then posts it to reddit or hn or bookmarks it on delicious, doesn't it screw up all of your statistics for visitors-from-rss-feeds if it has those url tokens? i mean everyone would be visiting the page telling your statistics engine that they came from an rss feed when they didn't.

it seems like a better way of doing it would be to capture those tokens at an initial url, but then redirect the user to the proper, clean url without them. that way you get accurate stats for visitors-from-rss-feeds, but everyone else that clicks through as that clean url is passed along appears as a different source.
Startups wait while Portland Seed Fund evaluates applicants
I guess this means we actually have three ways to describe a keyboard shortcut: Command + C, Open-Apple + C, Campground + C.
To replace the firewall/router AND host all my private personal data in one box, I'm going to need a ton of convincing about security. This appliance will be a hot target for exploits, and they're going to have to do an incredible amount of ongoing testing and updates. I can't imagine this is feasible for the $100 price tag they are quoting.
I never said that India doesn't face multiple issues, if that was suggested from my comment, it was misleading and I apologize.

That said over here, the risks to failure are higher for startups due to having to overcome the lack of infrastructure - which means more support work is required for each hour of work spent on the actual product. Just getting a good internet connection, or even electricity, can be hugely difficult, adding to the chores which an entrepreneur will get out of his way, before he can focus on his product.
This is one of the reasons, India has far more successful service companies than product companies.

To me this means that a product/service has to have a much higher chance of succeeding (risk reduction) or higher pay off when it takes off, to make seed funding viable in the first place.

If infrastructure is built though, then costs are lowered, and risk/cost of failure goes down. Especially risk brought on by external factors not related to the team, market, service or product.

Please note: I am not saying that failure doesn't hurt in San Francisco or America. I am saying that in comparison, you would rather fail in the states, than you would in India.
It's like Techsavvy in Canada, except I effectively get 3Mbps, not 1Gbps, from them :(.
I'd be interested to know why you consider upstart "seriously broken". I've just used it in anger for the first time, and it seems like a big improvement on the old, arcane system of alphabetically named init scripts.
After reading that last statement, I'm reminded about the days when http://www.osnews.com/ used to be full of stories about Open Source Desktops and more.

EDIT: This is more like what I used to look for back in the day: http://www.osnews.com/topics/1 There's a list of available topics at http://www.osnews.com/topics/
In a world with analytics you have content farms.
BTW, I convinced by co-founder to remove some of the KyMaLabs stuff from the Wormwalls. We still want to keep quite a bit of brand awareness on the pages, but we've removed lots of the unnecessary stuff.
I definitely believe it.

The knowledge and advice that they give is freely available to anybody with access to Google

Definitely not. They're not giving general advice -- that's already been given in the form of PG's essays, etc.

They give detailed, specific information for each company. From what I understand, it includes everything from tactical information on exactly when to launch or what features to cut, to longer term product and UI design to long-term strategic advice for the company. Also, they have expertise in everything from team dynamics to product development to knowledge of the press and funding, etc. With hundreds of companies as YC alums, the YC folks have an unrivaled amount of experience -- whatever your situation, they've probably seen something like it and can give you great advice.

I think there are very few other advisors who could give really good advice on all these fronts.

If you look at the link you referenced, you'll notice that every single one of them is about connecting YC startups with important people

What? Maybe half of it is, but did you miss the whole "office hours" section?
Ask HN: What PG and Arnold Schwarzenegger have in common. 
Is it just me or is it that Arnold Schwarzenegger and pg have very similar writing styles?

Based purely on comparing PG's essays and Arnold's book "The encyclopedia of modern bodybuilding."
they don't treat you like an idiot when you call up

The main reason this happens on most ISPs that that there are so many stupid-about-technology people out there that call up ISPs. There are loads of people who think they know all about technology and computers, and it turns out that they don't really know more than a few buzzwords. Hence the tech support flowchart has to assume (no matter what the customer says) that the customer doesn't know anything and that they should (e.g.) restart their PC.
Bookmarklets are cross platform across practically any browser and work in mobile devices too. Can't say the same for plugins.

Plus it's easier for some developers to knock out a bookmarklet than a plugin, especially when you can do much of the logic server side, and potentially hook into existing code there.
Yes, You Can Run 18 Static Sites on a 64MB VPS
Ryan - A couple things:
- I'm curious why it was so obvious after 2 days that you needed to drop the freemium model? (under pricing video)
- I have no experience with your current offering but think doing a people who liked this video may also like would have pointed me to some premium videos worth checking out. I did find some but only after some searching.
- I've only seen up to the pricing video but it seems like this particular set of videos would have been better served as a podcast so I'm curious why go the video route? I just mean the visuals aren't necessary to understand the material so it seems the savings in bandwidth, production cost etc... would be motive enough to go the podcast route...

Thanks in advance for any response and thanks for taking the time to put the videos out there.
I had this problem until I disabled vertical refresh. Based on posts in the ubuntu forums this appears to solve most people's problems with the AMD drivers.
That's definitely a great way to learn more about CPUs. In school we designed a simple 8-bit CPU and loaded it into an FPGA. This included coming up with a simple assembly language and building a compiler.
Startups have the risk meter pegged so it doesn't enter into their management decisions, instead they are focussed on execution and they flame out or succeed as they will and when they succeed they clarify the risk around their idea (if it flops the managers can pat themselves on the back for avoiding that land mine, if it takes off the managers wring their hands and wonder if they should have been able to forecast that success.

Your profile says you work for Blekko, and in a senior enough position that I'm going to assume you're not naive enough to actually believe this. Startups are every bit as capable as risk aversion as BigCos, albeit for different reasons. At BigCos, it's sheer organizational inertia you have to deal with. At startups, you have the exact opposite problem: "We're so new and unestablished that we just can't afford to take that kind of risk".

Humans are, as a general rule, afraid of risk.
On weird botnet traffic
BitCoin Digital Currency: Financial Revolution or Doomed to Fail?
Er, right, I had a bit of a mental lapse there.
> In 4 or 5 years I don't expect Apple to be selling consumer-level hardware that has an accessible command line or filesystem or the ability to run unapproved apps.

As long as individuals continue to develop apps for iOS, I don't see that happening. Maybe they'll be behind an "Expert Mode" toggle.
First Video: Rooted Nook Touch Running ADW Launcher
Thank you, Anonymous. Somebody has to take on those evil bastards.
You Have No Reason To Trust Me
When you buy software, you expect it to improve over time. Name a mac developer who posts on their site "we're no longer updating this software, but please buy it anyways". It would never get a single sale.

I don't mind paying for upgrades. But I want these upgrades to exist, and for the developers to commit to the product they are selling and improve it over time.
Where in the article did it say anything about anon?
Unlike qsort's n^2 worst case, the conditions that degrade hash tables are very common: all you have to do is specify a crappy hash function for your load, or size the table poorly.

(I'll assume you're talking about the quicksort algorithm rather than the qsort() function because you're comparing it to hash table accesses in general rather than a specific implementation of them.)

But I'm not sure I agree. The worst case for quicksort is an already-sorted list. I run into this scenario all the time, though usually in a slightly different form. When I iterate through the elements of one of the tree-based containers std::set and std::map they emerge in sorted order. If, inside my loop, I then insert them into a similar container I end up with worst-case performance. The other day I replaced std::set with std::unordered_set and saw a dramatic increase in performance, although it may not have been entirely due to this effect.

On the other hand, a non-crappy hash function should be available to everyone at this point. Personally I like FNV-1a, but haven't found an issue with whatever my C++ standard library is supplying. I have spoken with other programmers though who didn't realize hash tables needed some empty space to perform well or had stumbled into a pathological case with their oversimplified hash function.

This is kind of a silly semantics argument... but, if you interview for a job and look like a deer in the headlights when I said hash tables aren't O(1), NO HIRE.

Gee Ptacek, what do you have against deer? I can just imagine some poor interviewee with a bright desk lamp shining into his eyes...
Awesome! The intro computer architecture class at MIT (6.004) actually does this same thing over the course of the term. (http://6004.csail.mit.edu/). Of course it's not just NANDs, but the basic idea is working from the FET level in the first lab, then building up abstractions each subsequent lab until a Beta processor is built by the 6th. You might find some of the resources on that website helpful. Everything is built using a program one of the professors built where you define lists of components and subcircuits. Good luck!
Novus in Vancouver is pretty awesome, 40/10 for $65/mo
Sofa OSS statistics environment, with python
Right. Reducing the influence of one (of many) component will reduce the whole thing. It's not a zero-sum game where influence incontrovertibly remains constant with the various factors increasing in response to others' decrease. Influencers will try to maintain a given level of benefit for their efforts, of course, but that doesn't mean that reducing money's role won't have an overall effect at all. This is what you seem to be arguing.
I definitely get the impression that Jeff is more surprised than upset by users who have used cookie-based accounts for long periods. If I recall correctly, the record for longest "active unregistered account" is around 2 and 1/2 year (Stack Overflow is just shy of 3 years old, for comparison). That's a loooong time to go without clicking a Google/Facebook/Whatever button.

Of course, not having to register is completely by design and almost certainly never going to change, it's such an obvious win from a user experience point of view.

Disclaimer: Stack Exchange employee.
I'm a happy Linux user for years now (GNU/Linux for the most difficult ones), but I went through the same process:

1. Excitement. Compiling the kernel? Cool! Configure an SMTP server just for fun? Cool! Having "fun" for hours fiddling with configuration files to make something work? Cool! Making a sound card, a video card or a modem work after hours of compilations and configurations feels just like "beating the system".
2. Well, there is more to IT besides editing udev rules and iptables profiles. But now my system works quite well, so I can go on with my life.
3. Update time. Or perhaps I need a new computer: maybe it's that I'm becoming old and impatient, but now I have stuff to do and other interests to nurture. I don't have time and patience to waste on making this damn piece of hardware work.

You want to make Linux a viable desktop operating system "for the masses"? Well, then don't tell me "it's free software, if you don't like it then write some code and change it!". Or "works for me". Thanks George.

Don't get me wrong: I like and support hacking, experimenting, FLOSS, open culture, open hardware, open whatever. I use FLOSS and Linux every single day and (for now) it works fine for me. But let's pretend for a minute that not everyone is a programmer. The truth is: even if I'm actually a professional programmer, I want an OS that "Just Works"(c).

PS: It's the same for... Linus Torvalds. He uses (as far as I know) Fedora. Not certainly Slackware, Gentoo or Arch (3 very good and interesting distributions BTW, I've used them all). His motivations? Paraphrasing: "because I'm familiar with it and I want to get things done".