skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have twitter's new UI open in a tab all day long. I click the "X new tweets" button abou 20 times a day. I read tweets, checkout other twitterer's feeds, and it never ever slows down for me.

When I read about this guy seeing over a minute page loads, all I could think was, something is wrong with your computer or network dude.
Hi all, Peldi here. Thanks for the feedback. I don't know how much vacation everyone here is taking (I could look in the shared vacation calendar we have), but I'd say everyone is taking 3-4 weeks a year, plus some more time when they take their laptop to the beach and work half-days from there.

This is one of the policies that I fear might not work if we ever reach a certain size, but so far we're all happy with it...it's just not something we keep track of for other people, just ourselves.

Thanks again for the feedback, it's a big reason why I'm sharing our current policies.
These meetups are great for DC hackers and entrepreneurs! If you classify yourself thus, you must attend!
God Emperor is difficult to get into, but worth sticking with. Actually love the opening sequence of that book more than any other, which describes some thieves being chased through a forest by a pack of guard wolves, as Herbert moves expertly from the thoughts of one thief to another as they are gradually caught by the wolves, starting from the slowest runner at the back. Fantastic writing.
Get money on social networking just for discussion
Agree, though the only non English science fiction book I've read (translated to English of-course) is Roadside Picnic, which probably would be in my list of the best Sci-Fi books of all time.
What is this thing you call a "type"?
Apple's Four-Year Product Rollout
Oh please: we don't play along blissfully ignoring that. Arguably the biggest contribution to information theory is Shannon's source coding theorem, and we haven't forgotten it.

For day-to-day work, the redundancy & reliability of something Google Docs is much greater than a client computer. RAID is expensive. Backplanes fail. Laptops fall. But now instead of waiting 2-4 hours for a reimage & file transfer, I can take a base image, go to docs.google.com, and be up and running in the time it takes to walk a laptop to my office. Or, if more pressing: in the time it takes to log in at my coworker's machine.

So I'm curious: what's with the pseudo-FUD?
I would add Permutation City. It's about: what's it like to be a digital person in a virtual world? What are the psychological effects of knowing that you're virtual; how do you experience time passing; what are the social implications of changing your appearance at whim, etc.

And, how do different interpretations of data compete to become "real"? For example, if you look at it one way it's a city, another way it's a collection of data cells to be colonized, etc.
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I read some of these as a teenager and some more recently.

Some really have staying power and some really don't hold up.
I found Foundation and Mote in God's Eye rather disappointing.
Why UK startups should stop trying to be US startups
Does Jorge Luis Borges count?
I've been looking as well. I have a hunch we have the same goal... Would love to chat. (my email is in my profile)
Always have a great time and meet interesting folks at the DC Hacker meetups
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Gewinnspiel-Pirat
This kind of list makes me sad, because I've read every book on it (except the classic military SF one).
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Worth noting: cib == ci), and ciB == ci}.

Also, "a" instead of "i" includes the enclosing markers. Not really that useful for braces and parens, but for strings da" is great. da[ is pretty great for Obj-C, too.
both to you and jobu:

That's probably it. I remember watching Deer Hunter...maybe in '99 and I just couldn't believe how bad a movie it was. Obviously, to people still in touch with Vietnam (in 78), the impact was...greater.
I've had conversations of some sort with each of these. They will give you a starting point at least; I'm sure there are many, many more.

http://www.radian6.com/

http://www.allegiance.com/

http://www.attensity.com/
And when the employee sues for wrongful termination, because all s/he did was follow the company policy of taking as much vacation as s/he wanted, what do you do? Maybe not in the US, somewhere where you're not likely working at-will?
The article contained some numbers. Approximately 4 hours of down time in a year and a half.
The submitted article honestly identifies Mashable as the original source

http://mashable.com/2011/09/08/facebook-news-feed-changes/#v...

and seems to add very little new content. There was a rumor flying around Facebook status messages about a feature change like this, but apparently the change has yet to roll out to the user base.
Because the reality is that a computer without an Internet connection has no significant value for 99% of people.

Also, let's not forget that for most people, minor downtime is a nuisance, not a real problem. It's annoying when I can't reach a web service I rely on, but it rarely if ever costs me money. With businesses, this can be a different proposition, but even then the savings from going "to the cloud" may more than offset any downtime costs.
We will definitely be there to discuss our new startup in dc.
Something Dune accomplishes really well -- and which very few sci-fi books or movies have ever pulled off quite as effectively -- is weaving a lot of background, and culture, and esoteric terminology, into the story without disrupting the story's flow. There aren't lengthy, disjointed sidebars about what X means, or why Y exists. Instead, X and Y are woven into the narrative via context, allowing the reader to pick up quickly on what they are. (There's also a glossary at the back of the book, of course, which helps).

The book's most glaring weakness, however, is that many of its characters suffer from I'm-going-to-spell-out-precisely-what-I'm-about-to-do syndrome (Harkonnen, in particular, has a James Bond Villain-esque penchant for such speeches.)

Regardless, the book has been absolutely foundational to the genre. Nearly every convention of the modern space opera can be traced back to Dune.

It's a pity that no one's ever been able to crack the book's code on film. Understandable, though, as so much of the action is psychological and the drama internalized.
Considering the leaps and bounds the linux kernel has progressed since the 2.4 series kernel I would seriously avoid it for performance reasons doing something the OP mentioned like web browsing.
What's more, you can press <ctrl-D> to view the whole list of possible completions at one time. For example, enter ':colo ' then press <ctrl-D> and you'll see a list of all the colorscheme names. (The space in ':colo ' is important, since if you press ctl-D with just ':colo' Vim will just show you the 'colorscheme' completion. . . )
I only glanced over that article but 20 Gigabytes? 120000 e-mails? In 6 months? Does that include all the spam?
I think a feed would be too high-volume. But you can get topic updates from @TECHNOSPLODE on Twitter.
If you're already on Linux, you could just chroot everything. But that can be a little b¤%&h to maintain. Any particular reason you need this? I use throw-away VM's that I can revert to a fresh state when I'm done testing XYZ.

Also, with the cost per MB for memory, memory shouldn't really be an issue.
That is a good start, but the original poster appeared to want graphical apps to run in the VM; JeOS is console only (as one would expect for a server/appliance distro). It would be interesting if there was something between "full Ubuntu with lots of widgets" and the console-only JeOS.

Yes, one could add the gui afterwards, but something minimally configured already would be a timesaver...
Neal Stephenson really matures between Snow Crash and Diamond Age. I read snow crash after some of his later stuff and it's almost hard to believe it's the same author.

Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon are great books but each has their own style and you would think it was a different author if you didn't know better.

That's why I like Stephenson so much. He takes a topic and researches it so much that he brings it to life.

Whether he's writing for Wired about expats in South East Asia (which dove tails nicely with Cryptonomicon) or extra dimensional aliens in Anathem, he makes the world come alive and the technology and methodologies clear.

He also makes me laugh out loud. Very few books have done that.
It's nice that Steve and others want to make Ruby on Rails applications better and faster.

But this post should have been the original blog post. You can't get frustrated by your audience "not getting it" if you use terrible examples or if you're lying to simplify.

This was a good explanation on the way to use presenters. The original one was not. I still don't plan to run out and use presenters everywhere because the payoff simply isn't there for most of the apps I write.

My bigger concern is that, like with most things in Ruby, a certain percentage of folks are going to just run wild with an idea, and even the simplest application is going to have a bunch of presenters in it just because someone said it was "the right way".

It's good to explain the real "why" with these concepts. What are the benefits, the drawbacks, and what will I be able to do that I couldn't do before? So I think this followup does a great job of that.
Maybe your day does not line up with times Twitter has had capacity issues. Maybe it's maintenance during non-peak hours. I don't know, except that I've definitely seen Twitter's new UI time out as often as I saw the fail whale in the old UI.
In 24 Hours
Structured Homeschooling Gets an A+
It can be republished only provided no charge is made. They want a book that the author owns the rights to, and is willing to put out under CC-BY.

Just because something has a liberal licence, doesn't mean it's compatible with other liberal licences. This ebook, for example, would not be considered FOSS (it couldn't be put in Debian, for example).
Jules Verne. I'm currently reading Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and it is fantastic. Originally written in French.
Limos in Waterbury CT
Curious that Roert Silverberg's "Up The Line" did not make this cut. It was the inspiration for Back to the Future and is an entertaining time travel story.
Obvious one is Stanislaw Lem -- The Cyberiad would be my recommendation.
Ask HN:  Take the job? Or Pursue the startup?
I run a smallish analytics web service, we're doing okay. Actually grew 190% last month. Before you say damn 190% keep doing it, that's a revenue increase from $1,700 to $4,300 - with a profit of $205. Now, that's not enough to buy diapers for either of my kids. I have 2 other businesses I do consulting for that are willing to pay me 2.5K and 1.5K and in return I would be obligated to do about a week a month of work between the 2 of them. I also have a few other web consulting gigs that come in at around 3-5 every so often like every other month.

My question for hacker news is.. I also have a great job offer to make about 10K after taxes and work in an environment where I get to work with my peers. Also remember it's just me running this business and there's a lot of shit that I'd need to do right to grow my profit from $200 a month to $10K.

Do I take the job? Or do I slug it out putting my kids futures on the line?
At some point we have to wonder what it is that this trading actually is for.

Investing in companies, fine. The risk that you take with your invested money evolves over time, true.
But at some point it just becomes ridiculous that people are making money from 0.0001 fluctuations in prices.
Being the cofounder of a reasonably successful bootstrapped company, I mostly agree with you, and I believe that in bubble environments such as the current one, funding has become an end unto itself.

However, sometimes there are circumstances in which the business is better served by accelerating growth or product development, and sometimes the best way to accomplish that is to bring in capital, advisers, and networks that you normally don't have access to.

There's also the case, commonly seen outside the web/mobile/social space, in which the capital requirements to produce a working demo are far in excess of what you have in your etrade account. Think nanotech, biotech, solar, telecom.
Ubuntu's update manager did this for my desktop yesterday ... and for my server VM.
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That's true for all practical purposes, but technically it's incorrect. For a start, statically linked modules can be packed more tightly into sections by the linker, whereas dynamically loaded modules will always have as much as 4kb of slack at the end of theirs.

There are a bunch more differences like this. If it's like userspace, in many cases the dynamically loaded symbols also involve a level of indirection in order to access them since they have no fixed address at link time, which results in a small performance hit.

Modules also include metadata which remains for as long as it is loaded, but I think this is negligible.
There is a tool called buildroot that builds a kernel and a root file system with uClibc and Busybox. The result size for x86_64 using default settings is a few megabytes. You can trim this down a lot by leaving out features. Using uClibc instead of glibc may affect using virtual machines (like JVM), tho.

Gentoo is still alive and kicking. It's not that difficult to use and the documentation might be the best docs I've seen in any distribution. It's also worth mentioning that with a modern CPU, the time it takes to build software is not that long.

In fact, installing a "medium sized" application (e.g. not libreoffice) is faster with Gentoo's emerge than installing a standard Windows app. It takes about as long to download the source, compile and install with automation it as it does to navigate a web browser to a software's home page, locate download link and click "Next ->" 15 times in the installer manually.
Corruption in investing doesn't just hurt founders. It hurts everyone in the end.

Every time one of these articles about "how investors screw founders" or "how employee stock option are never going to pay out", the pool of employable staff are a little more likely to say "These stock options are worth nothing to me but a lottery ticket, so I'm not going to work hard at this job beyond my salary, and maybe I'll get my win for getting some sliver of equity if the company goes big on someone else's effort or sheer luck." In the end, in a den of thieves no one puts in an honest day's work, and nobody wins.

Bootstrap your business with your own money and your own customers' money, and leave the sharks behind.
exactly right. I'm always surprised more people don't land here when this debate comes up.
MongoDB is Web Scale: myNoSQL
That's too bad.

My employer has "normal" vacation policies (though we accrue faster than most other employers), but most managers (including mine) won't blink if you ask for four weeks at a time. The CEO typically leaves the country for at least four weeks a year (as well as taking other holidays throughout the year), and my direct manager was gone for five weeks, with no contact, this year. I was out of the office for six weeks as well, though I did work remotely for about six days and spent four days at our west coast dev office (where my manager is stationed).

Another person mentioned golden handcuffs--I agree. There are some things that bug me about the way the company works, but when I look at what the company offers me, I'm more likely to either look past those things, or work to fix them.
Exactly. From the get-go the whole Open Handset Alliance was about coaxing the manufacturers/providers into a using a somewhat more-open product by creating a set of most favored nations. Its always been seen as a necessary evil from a consumer perspective to get widespread adoption of a real phone os.
This is an example of a first world problem.

http://twitter.com/#!/frstworldprobs
The labia minora in soft porn and its social impact on Australia's women [NSFW]
MySQL is Not ACID Compliant: myNoSQL
(Neither RAM nor disk is that cheap for laptop users)
Have you seeing this one[1]?

[1] http://www.turnkeylinux.org/bootstrap
"Back to the Future" Stars Return to Promote Nike's "Marty McFly" Shoe
Maybe this also helps, I found it quite useful: http://495west.com/post/9885249988/the-wrong-question-i-want...
I just finished the Commonwealth Saga + The Void Trilogy by Peter F. Hamilton, loved it. Both set in the same universe, the first two in the relatively near future (about 300 years from now), the trilogy in the far future (about 1500 years from now).

The trilogy can get a bit abstract, verging on the fantasy genre at times, but in the end the author manages to give an explanation that "makes sense" for everything, which is the thing I really like about his stories. Highly entertaining.
This is a really interesting list! You've got the predictable ones, e.g. Snow Crash (man, did the conclusion of that one suck!) and juvenile SF, like Startship Troopers (an example of Heinlein's early phase), but really niche ones toward the end (not many would think Atwood as a SF writer).

Two gaping holes: Any SF list that doesn't include Stanislaw Lem (e.g. Cyberiad) is incomplete. Also missing is James Tiptree Jr. (Alice Sheldon), who was Le Guin's mentor (read her Love Is The Plan The Plan Is Death, it'll stay with you for weeks.)

Also a series I really enjoyed is Chalker's Four Lords of the Diamond Series, very creative.
SMTP is not quite as close to the goal as NNTP.
AFAIK, all the investment banks (in the US atleast) have a mandatory annual two-week vacation policy for all front-office (traders/sales etc.) employees. Furthermore, you are supposed to be totally switched off during those two weeks (no working via email etc.), the idea being that your colleagues get to see all your work to reduce the chances of you hiding something like the rogue trader at SocGen or Barings.
PKD has written so many great books its not surprising everyone has their own favourites. I personally prefer Man in the High Castle, Ubik, Time out of joint and Martian time-slip to Electric Sheep and Scanner. I'm surprised none of these managed it onto the list :(
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Actually, come to think of it, Djikstra [sic] wouldn’t even write any code, because it’s beneath him, but you get the idea.

This is ridiculous. Of course Dijkstra wrote code. He authored the first implementation of an ALGOL 60 compiler, if I'm not mistaken.

Though, technically for Dijkstra writing code was a bit beneath him, as he preferred deriving it using his Guarded Command Language. But the point stands. Dijkstra may have been a bit of a dick, but there's no need to libel a dead man.
How is Atwood not SF? Have you read Oryx and Crake?
Sharding the Neo4j Graph DB (2010)
It takes a while for the spammers to get up to speed on new domains. Six months should see relatively little spam.

I'd bet on reply-all and auto-complete as means of perpetuating small mistakes in addresses. There's no cleanup mechanism for it.
Kiva's Intercontinental Ballistic Microfinance: Best data-viz ever
256 now. I don't know how if that is a lot or a few.

But why wouldn't it work? Scanning your google groups topics shouldn't not take longer than scanning the list of tweets...
http://qubes-os.org/Home.html might be interesting
'Good Souls Corruption' in the Enthusiast Press
Stanislaw Lem (Solaris, The Cyberiad) is amazing, and some of the English translations are so full of puns and clever turns of phrase it's hard to believe it was originally written in Polish.
jreposa, you should be fine on Lion - it's what I used to initially develop the script. What issues are you seeing?
Probably the most surprising thing about this list is that whoever made it didn't insert Amazon affiliate links into it.

Anyway, these lists always raise the question of what does "good" mean exactly? Inevitably they're dominated by books that were, in their time, incredibly significant.

You see the same things in computing books. Someone will always recommend "Design Patterns" but (IMHO) it is the dullest, driest book you could ever read. The ideas were important. As a book it's terrible.

Science fiction falls into a number of categories.

The first is space opera. This is basically a tale of adventure in a science fiction environment. Sometimes these books have some kind of message but most of the time they don't. They're typically the "Terminator 2" of books: they can be hugely entertaining, sometimes even really significant, but often don't have much substance.

Don't take that as a criticism. Stephen Donaldson's "Gap" series was, for me, a fantastic series but it really is simply space opera style entertainment.

The second is what I call "hard science fiction". It's the sort of sci-fi where the story is a backdrop for some physics. Ringworld is an example of this (as are most of Niven's works).

This is a genre I thought largely dead (with its height in the 60s and 70s) until I read Alastair Reynolds. His books have more of a story than, say, Niven's but they're still largely rooted in our current understanding of physics.

The third is what I call "literary science fiction". Literature, traditionally, was used as a means of talking about something that normally couldn't be talked about. Plays in the Shakespeare's time filled this role. Nowadays it's not so much that talking about these things is verboten, it's that the story can be an accessible way of discussing a topic that an essay never could.

Stranger in a Strange Land is very much in this category. It's almost only sci-fi by association. It does have the hallmarks of its age, most notably mental powers (a common zeitgeist in 60s sci-fi). This book probably had the same effect on society that, say, Pacific cultures did on Victorian English society.

In the 80s cyberpunk was born. Cyberpunk is largely an expression of fears about an Asian (Japanese more often than not) "takeover" of Western society. It's actually very xenophobic but it does reflect the dystopian fears of the time. Cyberpunk has waned in recent years as the xenophobia has and the realization that this isn't the future.

Does this make pioneering books in this field like Neuromancer "good"? Personally I thought that if you ignore the pioneering part, it was a fairly average book. Here again is the power of nostalgia I think (as I read it some years after it came out).

So I find many books on this list that are (IMHO) overrated, largely for nostalgic reasons.

I also find some authors missing that really should be represented, most notably the prolific CJ Cheeryh whose books Downbelow Station and Cyteen are both noteworthy and stand the test of time.

Some books on this list stand the test of time very well. Ender's Game, any of the Iain M. Banks' Culture novels, Hyperion to name a few.
Here's what I think isn't being said:

If you take risks, the risk isn't just that you'll piss people off... its that you'll create something that is worse or no better than what you already have.
Agreed, I spent the entirety of the list going "Yes, this is a good book, but where's Gene Wolfe?" Anyone who loves literature is doing themselves a disservice by not reading it.
There are images of VMs floating of base installs of various linux distros. If this is too big, just configure JeOS with your basics and clone that image as needed.

If the original poster is looking for a VM to distribute an application, JeOS is a reasonable place to start.

On the other hand if the original poster wants to run a VM for every application he will (likely) want to look for a VM platform that dedups memory, a la ESX (though that's a bare metal server hypervisor)

If the original poster just wants a secure enivornment to run apps, something like VMware ACE may work better which allows you to lock down/filter access to USB storage, network, etc.

Disclaimer: Former VMware employee.
Should be done. Let me know if it helps. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.