skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"... Is there any harm in installing the 64bit version (ubuntu)? ..."

Are you upgrading or re-installing from another OS or is this a new system? Each of those have slight problems (bloat when upgrading, backup your data before you install). Aside from that the only problems I've had are existing commercial software like flash (32 bit probably never to be 64).
Bush is No True Scotsman, apparently.
I've watched Solaris boxes slowly being replaced by Linux when they reach their end of life over the last decade. And Linux is starting to become the default for new projects at a lot of places. But there's a few industries you still expect Solaris to be popular: London banks and funds.

The other day I applied for a job at a London hedge fund - a household name to a lot of folks in the UK. 20% Solaris, 80% Linux. Unusual right now, but I think it's a sign of things to come.

Sun is too big to become just another x64 vendor. They're not making money from Java, and Solaris revenue is going to go down, because a great tracing framework and a filesystem aren't enough to tempt people from a platform which uses generic hardware (a 32 core x64 is more than enough for most people, a 256 core SPARC is very, very niche) and runs both OSS apps and the proprietary crapware they used to run on Solaris SPARC.
I understand this cruel look at productivity, but I see my projects as labour of love and make an emotional investment in them. I enjoy making them work just right and spending that little extra time to be attentive to detail. I am not sure if such an approach would work for my personality.
Increasing the level of abstraction for what? It's important to outline your goals here: audience, desired end result, level of abstraction, etc.
We'll have to agree to disagree on that.
Why would you want stereo bluetooth headphones? Apple didn't offer that for a long time, I don't even know if they do currently.

A replaceable battery? A slide out keyboard? A normal headphone jack?

No, you're right. Choice is REALLY BAD. Let's all buy Apple stuff and be happy that the Gods have even thought of us.
Official Google Blog: A picture of a thousand words?
I was searching for Axe and edopter, and this was the second result. Totally weird find...
Netbooks with >=1GB RAM and an Atom proc run fine. I run Vista on my Acer Aspire One with Aero enabled, and its quite speedy and comfortable.

The only performance complaints I've heard about are in relation to the write performance of certain SSD drives that some netbooks use.

This article is FUD.
FreeBSD is bad for your throat?
I agree. I think it's great that these guys want to make sure that they get good talent, but yeah, I'd have to really want to work at a place before I'd put in the time to complete a 10 hour project and provide 10 - 15 referees plus whatever else is also involved. Maybe these guys are awesome to work for and stuff, I'm not really meaning to comment on this.

But from personal experience, I very much agree that it is also the interviewers responsibility to sell their company. I've been in the fortunate position for some years now that I haven't needed a job. When I move, it's from the position of already being employed. Near the end of a job interview there will usually be the point where the interviewers will ask if I have any questions for them. My stock questions always include:

a) What do you like about working here?

b) What do you not like about working here?

I love observing their reaction/response to question b) particularly. :) And I feel asking these kinds of questions sends a clear message to the interviewers that I am not desperate for the job, which puts me in a better bargaining position when it comes time to talk salary etc. Of course, this tactic only works when you really aren't desperate.
Yep, the small scale, low budget, homebrew work is more aligned with what I thought you meant by 'personal crackpottery'.
Google Code Blog: Moving another step closer to single-sign on
It's fairly well known that Apple has a very small developer base and that they treat developers poorly in a number of ways. For one, they've been known to break backwards compat. like it's nobody's business.

Sure, a lot of nix people use Macs now, but ask them if they're developing software for the Mac OS. Most likely, the answer is no. They're doing nix stuff.

Compare the Apple developer "ecosystem" to that of the Windows and Linux world. Can you see any big differences?
"Company Win: We get a chunk of code that we need"

Wow that's bullshit - interviewers aren't developers working on spec.
Of course, if you actually use this you can smash the stack -- Python doesn't currently have any kind of tail call optimization. (That factorial function isn't tail-recursive anyway, though.)

It doesn't look like Ruby has tail-call optimization, either. Lua does...what other primarily-scripting (i.e., not Scheme or Haskell) languages do?
I constantly saw kids fumbling with the random crap that came with the KDE installation: KWrite, Kate, pico, nano. Not just the young ‘uns. Juniors and seniors, also. It made me sick to my stomach.

Far from "random crap" kate turned out to be the silver lining surprise that finally propelled my switch from gnome to KDE.
interviewers aren't developers working on spec.

...till they are. If it's a consensual relationship, who cares?
I agree. This is total FAIL.
The key is that file dialogs now only appear in response to a direct user action, not a mouseclick. The old utilities will need to change to reflect this.

More info on the reasons for the change:
http://theflashblog.com/?p=463

Info on how we at Adobe fell down in identifying non-customers who would be affected:
http://blogs.adobe.com/jd/2008/10/alerting_customers_of_cust...

jd/adobe
I'm not sure what you're getting at. Bush is a national socialist, and an imperialist. He fooled some conservatives in 2000 when he talked quite a bit of the talk, but that fell apart quickly.

In modern American history warmongering has overwhelmingly been the business of the left. Guns and butter and all that. Go count up military actions and pair them to presidents.
Here's a little brain teaser that anybody can try (I think I can do this without taking a side. I'll give it a shot anyway)

Pick a candidate. Imagine that they win. Based on past performance, will the other candidate who lost help them enact bipartisan legislation?

Now do that with the other candidate. Does the first guy help out for the greater good, or pull back to join in with the rest of his party in the regular old political games. Is there substance there or just smoke?

So which choice is going to help the maximum amount of voters?

Interestingly enough, you can use this exercise to support either candidate no matter what the results. But I think it does enlighten things a bit.
Just a screenscape of all the user profiles, wouldn't of taken long to write up.
A Press Release for an upcoming article != Conclusive Proof
I can't tell if you were being serious or not.
This marketing video from NeXT back in 90 or 91 is informative: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9dmcRbuTMY

They were pretty right about where the workstation market was going.

Linus started Linux at about the same time.

In the 17 years since NeXT evolved, NT was born, and Linux begat RedHat, Ubuntu, and Google. Meanwhile Sun just hasn't adapted enough to stay competitive.
Openness: good. Extremely high quality: good.

Either makes a fine product as far as I'm concerned. Both is gravy.

Don't forget to vote!
Fear of looking like a copycat
Yes, I'm serious. Now can you answer the question?
This form reminds me of http://www.wolfslittlestore.be/fear-of-looking-like-a-copyca...

This signup form is playful, but awkward to use as a result. Conventions exist for a reason.
It's absolutely amazing how much thought, detail, and reference to national heritage and geography goes into the design of coins. The only sad part is that (at least here in the US) 95% of citizens couldn't care less, even if they could comprehend what they were actually seeing on the coin's faces.
Kind of sucks they bought MySQL.
Entrepreneurs and Capitalists are Enemies
Because he has a clear vision of what America should do to save itself, because he inspires Americans, and because he has proven himself incredibly competent when placed under incredible stress.
Your point was very clearly shown in the first part of the movie "Idiocracy". Very well expressed!
Do you live in some strange country where you're not allowed to buy phones with slide-out keyboards, or has Apple fronted a California ballot initiative I'm not aware of?
Which means that I might buy an Android phone if I want a small handheld wireless computer, but I won't be using it as my actual phone.
Hmm... so what happens if I accidentally type my password wrong?
The Y combinator is just like python decorators, or generators, you just HAVE to blog about them, or you're not C001!
Ask YC: How to Build an RSS Aggregator?
What do you recommend for reading and parsing 100s of RSS/Atom feeds on an hourly basis?

I'm able to write a custom script in PHP or preferably Rails, but wondering if there is a sweet app or tutorial that others have used and liked.
Fly Stick Van de Graaff Levitation Wand
I use Google Reader with great success, but there are tons of options out there; desktop and web.
198 days to be exact.
Joined column - created (in profiles) = 198
Roughly 198 days ago, and almost surely scraped.

Edit: some users have a 198 day gap from today, and some have a 189 day gap ... this might've been scraped over time
Right now, politics is hacker news
As I write, the #1 story on Hacker News is The Economist endorsement of Barack Obama for president; it is currently dead. Another fast-rising story is a Financial Times endorsement to the same effect; it is alive, but its days (or minutes) are certainly numbered.

Ordinarily, I am a strong supporter of a clear separation between Hacker News and state; politics, if allowed to infiltrate, would soon dominate. But these are not ordinary times. There is an election on Tuesday, with historic implications.

Until the election and its aftermath are over, politics is hacker news. Stories relevant to the upcoming election should, for now, be allowed to live.
Weird, but definitely old. Not very complete, I'm on the list but not my job and I've mentioned it on here several times.
The data was not especially useful without a baseline distribution across income levels. While the headline was accurate, the author's assertion that this confirms that the iphone is not just for the wealthy sounds like a leap in logic.
What if the only reason it forbids it is to prevent Opera, Flash, et. al. from coming to the iPhone? Then Gruber has his cause and effect wrong. Even if he doesn't, this is still sick in sort of the same way that Alumni preferences keeping blacks out of state funded schools is--sure there is technically another reason than there blackness, but the end effect is still bad.
Sorry, I'm looking to build an app that aggregates feeds, not a normal "consumer app"
> A normal headphone jack?

Are you talking about the recessed one in the first generation iPhones? Because at least the iPhones had a standard 3.5mm headphone jack to begin with (albeit one that wouldn't work with some third party headphones because of their size), unlike the tmobile G1 (you know, android and all) that has no standard headphone jack at all.
6 for 6? Do you mean 6 for 7?

And congratulations - when one door closes another one opens.
Sure there was, and there still is. It's called jailbreaking, but Apple doesn't like it (will refuse to support your iPhone should there be problems, so you'll have to revert). There were multiple apps one can still use to get jailbroken apps on one's iPhone.

It also happens to be the only way one can pirate existing app store iPhone applications, sooo...
> "Gmail is twice as reliable ... and higher reliability translates to higher employee productivity."

Actually, I bet the email outages are some of the most productive time in a company :)
PackLog - My iPhone application released under MIT license.
Love the creative uses people are bringing to the phone.
>"[...] same way they needed a while to figure out building a good sdk distribution platform"

More likely the reason for the delay in doing the above was because they needed to figure out building a good lock-down and kill-switch mechanism.
Looks like they've decided to make a 10 Euro "gold" version of the coin as well. http://en.knm.nl/domains/knm/content/arch10_2008s.jpg
You're talking about making a conventional device in an unconventional way. I'm talking about making something completely new.

Historically, groundbreaking scientific work has been done by one or a few extraordinary individuals (Einstein, Watson and Crick), and groundbreaking engineering work has been done by carefully selected groups led by an extraordinary individual (Oppenheimer, von Braun). I don't see how the Internet changes that.
"... Stumbled upon this XLS of all the hacker news user names and what they do...WTF ..."

Nothing you can't already get by reading the site. Just username + about box.
Here's hoping the Republicans get the message, abandon the illiberal religious BS, and we can have proper debates about what sort of role the government should have in the economy. Yeah, right:-/
I'm going to hold off a bit before upgrading. What I run on my laptop, while having Ubuntu as a base, ends it's similarity to the Ubuntu defaults there. There's not much in this release that helps me out a bunch, may as well let some bugs / deficiencies work themselves up before upgrading the system.
Who did Google acquire for the image recognition software (Optical Character Recognition) behind this?
Reality Check Checklist + the Best Foreword in the History of Man
Bypass the book promo and scroll for Fake Steve's superb foreword.
"... if you are growing that quickly you should have no problem raising capital. Charging people is one way to drastically halt your growth, though - if that is what you are after ..."

Good point.

Do you think it would it deter users if they wanted extra features? Casual users might want to stick with zero cost but I wonder if business users might be willing to be charged for extra features that free users cannot use?
GameJS: A 2d game development framework in JavaScript
this shit is about as cool as a steaming shit coming out of my ass(whilst shitting from a hovering helicopter) and landing inside an active volcano. If you think this is an actual business model, you sir, are fucking delusional. the jig is up, fraud
Was this downvoted for seeming spammy?
So in short you think someone should build a great GUI on top of TeX. Why not?
SimplePie - http://simplepie.org
Researchers develop software that can duplicate physical keys from photographs
MSR has been around for a pretty long time. Sure, these are really cool research projects, but turning research into products hasn't traditionally been one of Microsoft's strengths.

It'd be interesting to see where they take these projects three years from now.
I think TeX doesn't take more than a "reasonable amount of effort" otherwise I, and many others, would use the alternatives.

And I'm interested where you got the "reasonable amount of effort thing" from. The TeXbook says nothing of the sort, for example:
"TeX, a new typesetting system intended for the creation
of beautiful books---and especially for books that contain a lot of mathematics."

Note the emphasis on the "beautiful" and "mathematics" rather than ease of use.
Element b is a member of set X. Element b has property q. Therefore all members of set X have property q? Really?
Ah, target disk mode, I'll miss thee.
U.S. ruling may curb business method patents
Y Combinator’s Snipd Launches To The Public
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesseract_OCR

It's open-source abandonware from HP.
ShareThis Is Sharing More
Disclaimer: I built, ran (for two years), and sold a Web app that processed tens of thousands of feeds each hour and distributed summaries based on those feeds hundreds of millions of times per month.

That out of the way, the difficulty varies with the scale somewhat. With a large scale, you run into all sorts of issues including arbitrary blocks from feed providers, dealing with database locking, etc. If you're really just doing "100s" on an "hourly" basis, hopefully you'll stay well under that level, but if you think it'll need to scale up quickly, the decisions you make now will need to be different than if it's going to stay small.

I can't provide any code here, but just some quick pointers.

Our crawler (which is still running under the new owner) was entirely custom and written in Ruby. It performed very well. Instead of using a specific feed parsing library, it uses Hpricot (the Ruby library) and a set of custom built rules for parsing RSS and Atom. The reason for this is that we wanted speed, reliability (no shifting libraries), and it HAD to work with invalid (and even extremely broken) feeds - many "proper" RSS and Atom parsers have issues with busted feeds. Put it this way, though, Ruby is definitely up to the task, as long as you rely on a parsing library (Hpricot, in this case) and aren't just using regular expressions or something ;-)

One nasty thing you'll need to deal with is knowing whether items in feeds are new or not. You could delete all items associated with a feed before processing that feed each time.. but what if you want to keep an archive of older items? What if you need to maintain database performance? How are you going to track what's new, what was deleted, etc?

I used a hash that was either based on each item's GUID and the feed's ID OR (if no GUID present) the item's link and title. Unfortunately this was not failsafe. If someone changed the description of an item, the change wouldn't get picked up! And.. not all feeds use GUIDs - and some feeds have GUIDs that change when descriptions change.. some don't :)

Feed formats are really, really dirty, despite being specified officially. All sorts of nasty publishing systems are mangling the formats and you need to be able to deal with it. These are issues that go far beyond choosing a feed parsing library - it's about the organization of items. You need to do a lot of sanitizing to be 100% effective. You'll find feeds that use wholly inappropriate date / time formats, and the content provider will not care. You need to be able to deal with that. Oh, and watch out for feeds that have wacky dates way into the future.. which can then end up "stuck" at the top of your list of items if you're ordering by date ;-)

This all just scrapes the surface of how tricky it is. I was doing it fulltime for over two years and even now I feel I've only seen half the picture. You either strive for 100% effectiveness of processing and parsing feeds and drive yourself nuts - or settle for 90% and sleep at night ;-)
Customers are more important then investors.
Thanks Peter! I was looking into FeedTools...
http://sporkmonger.com/2008/2/1/feedtools-0-2-27

But I'll probably just build something custom w/ Ruby. I was hoping someone else had already done the work and open sourced it ;)
I have to say, I love your idea for bring google-maps-like navigation to other, abstract concepts. You aren't thinking of releasing a jQuery plugin for doing that by any chance, are you :~)?
He's talking about apple phones -- with slide-out keyboards

yeah, i know. Keep thinking about it, you'll get it eventually.
Follow Stanford’s iPhone Programming Class For Free
Bush is a national socialist

That's an interesting choice of words.
There are two kinds of people on the issue: those who are certain of their position, and those who say they're not conclusively convinced one way or the other. "Those who are certain" are far louder and more idiotic on both sides. This headline is an example.
Genetic Dead End - 5300 Year-Old Oetzi Has No Modern Relatives
Unfortunately I'm unable to share the code, as I sold the intellectual property.

However, I can share that it used Hpricot, and had a number of XPath rules for each discrete element of both the general feed and "items" that needed to be extracted (title, link, description, time, etc). Each rule was in an array, so rules for Atom and RSS could be mixed.. the first to match dictated the format. This is a pretty quick and dirty (but ever so effective) way of doing it - parsing feeds as XML in the "technically correct" way is an absolute nightmare given the poor validity of XML out there ;-)

All that said, one thing worth looking at is: http://rfeedparser.rubyforge.org/ - it's based on the Python Universal Feed Parser which is generally considered to be the most awesome of feed parsers out there :)
HTTPS only matters for the page you are submitting the log-in information to, not the page you enter it on. Of course, it's difficult to tell if the page you are submitting it to is secure or not without looking at the code.
Well, in a sense you're right...

Checks usually "clear" in a day or two, but most banks have antiquated standards for how long they keep the funds on hold. My current bank keeps checks in my account uncleared for eight (8) business days (except for the first $100), and this policy means I never deposit checks -- instead I go to the bank it was drawn on and cash it. Bank tellers, whom you would think would be used to large stacks of cash, still seem to get flustered when you present a single-digit-thousands check and ask for cash. Dunno why.

Anyway, the biggest problem with the checking system is that banks have six months to bounce a check, which means that checks you've forgotten about for months can suddenly make your bank balance go negative. Fun. The second biggest problem is that there's no real security in the system at all.., people jealously guard their debit card PINs, but will happily write a check which is effectively a license to take money, of any amount, out of the account it's drawn on. All someone has to do is use the routing and account numbers on the bottom of the check for electronic ACH.

Basically, checks are a bad idea today, and you should probably avoid using them when possible.
If you applied this cycle and haven't heard from us, please check your spam folder
We replied to all the applicants last night, but some say they still haven't heard from us. Many if not most of our replies got classified as spam. GMail classified it as spam, for example. So if you think you still haven't heard from us, please check your spam folder.
I don't know anything about these particular models, but the models that have been used to raise the global warming alarm over the last 10 years have consistently failed to predict outcomes. Upper atmosphere temperatures in particular, which are key to the premise of the models.
Rails Performance Testing Tools
also, consider that your mail service for your ISP might just SUCK (as mine does) and perhaps that's the reason you haven't received a reply

i had to get a copy of the response from my co-founder. i think i'll use Gmail from now on :D
Publish FriendFeed updates to Twitter - a snake that eats its own tail?
People who were paying attention during undergrad should know this; I realized early on that a lot of your experience had to do more with the people involved than the material. A good advisor is no exception, and from what I hear, is even more important in grad school.

It's also pretty true outside the ivory tower. Surrounding yourself eight hours a day with people who amaze you with their skills and/or having a de-facto mentor can do wonders. A lack thereof can leave you feeling demotivated, like you are just treading water and not really advancing yourself.
Sun posts $1.67 billion loss on write-off
FriendFeed Blog: Share your FriendFeed activity on Twitter
I know I need to be more efficient on when I give up on something, even if it's just for the night.

Maybe it's due to a shifted schedule and sleep deprivation, but I seem to be having a lot of these this week, where things are a lot clearer the following morning.
What about state quarters? Plus, what about coin collectors in general?