skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Fedora updates much quicker to newer versions of packages, specifically in our case PHP. So our webserver is running Fedora, and or database server, MySQL, is running CentOS 5.2.

The nitty gritty is that the CentOS base installs PHP 5.1.6, but we use features only in PHP 5.2 and greater.
OpenOffice.org Update Sets Downloads Record
It makes no difference whatsoever. Some of the largest and most successful open source projects have done fine with CVS, or with nothing at all.
There was a recent comment on here that was something like "I can see why you were downmodded, liking Quickbooks and all, but..."

WTF is up with all of this brand-clanning? As long I use an OS, have a SCM system, use some sort of accounting package, etc -- do we really want to gang up and make some kind of decision as a herd? Most products on the marketplace do most of the things we want them to do.

I've been using Subversion for a small effort with 4 programmers for the last six months or so. Works fine. I love P2P apps, but the argument made on this site was unpersuasive.
I think it is important t distinguish between 'doesn't mean anything' & 'doesn't mean X'.

It doesn't mean that Apple has a brighter future or that it's a better investment. It may even (as you say) mean bad things. But it does mean some things. Another big tech being cashed up may mean that big consumer tech companies might start paying dividends. It might mean Apple start trying to buy other companies like MS have.

Apple is a big player that has overtaken another big player in cash, a player known for having a lot of it. So this can almost be considered an industry trend now. That's meaningful & newsworthy. I think that is meaningful. Maybe it means (like you say) that the industry that the companies (industry) is having a hard time finding valuable things to invest that cash in.
Ask YC: Have you come across any good interface for a search engine?
I have been pondering about upgrading the interface on my search site and looking for some ideas/pointers here.

So does anyone here have links to a good search site that they have come across or someone here has a mockup of a search site that they would like to share?
In order for Google to predict the future millions of users would have to be accurately able to predict the future, and then use emoticons to reflect their feelings about the prediction.

Emoticons are often used to express feelings about past and present events. If they express feelings about future events, it is speculation. How would you filter out the noise of the past, present, and erroneous predictions of the future?

Cool concept but in practice you would need more information about who uses the emoticon (location, occupation, age, etc). And even then it still might not be feasible (a bunch of people in the financial sector, aged 25-40, NYC sent frowny faces...now what?)

Reminds me of information (prediction) markets where people purchase positions on future events. Turns out it is a more efficient way to tease information out of a group than polling. The ideas is that when there is money at stake people's predictions magically become more accurate.
This article didn't mention that a 25% tariff on importedntrucks, but not cars, was a major factor in getting US automakers to focus on trucks and SUVs, where they could have fatter margins. Paradoxically, the legislation that was meant to protect them may end up killing them instead.
"Git seems good for open source tons of developers tons of patches/branches etc."

If that's all Git seems good for I recommend you spend more time playing with it (or Mercurial if you want). There are many benefits to using something like Git even if you're not going to share the work with anyone.
Why?

Why not just use it for the features you need?

I mean, if you spend a lot of time researching features that you are not currently using, and you are currently maintaining your code enough to reach your goals, aren't you just wasting your time?
I don't think it's safe to measure various health care systems against each other. The prevailing theories these days seem to suggest that most of the problems are due to lifestyle. Diet, pollution, obesity, exercise levels, etc. all play a major part as well, and those have little to do with the health system. So I don't think it's safe to say that publicly funded health systems would work as well here as they do elsewhere.

Also, I always try to resolve arguments on practical grounds first. For instance, I feel that moral stances on drug laws are irrelevant, because the facts show that drug laws don't stop drug use, cause violent crime and many deaths of dealers/distributors, policemen and civilians. So even if you accept that drug use is immoral, just like with alcohol before it the laws still should not be on the books.

A law that has almost entirely negative effects is not a good law no matter what the moral justification.
I would be really worried about an open source project without a source control system. Actually, I would be worried about any project, open source or not, developed without using source control.
Where do you ask business related questions to get answered?
I am wondering what the aggregate amount of money small businesses spend on advertising in America is. Does anybody know the answer, where I could find that information, or where I could find people who would know. Thanks in advance.
I think it's unfortunate you haven't even looked at Clojure. If you did, it's possible both languages could benefit. While I am a fan of the JVM, one downside of the language is that compromises were needed to work nicely on the JVM. Besides that, Clojure has many features that make programming in it great for experimentation (and large-scale), and I don't see those features in Arc. If Arc had immutability, threading, STM concurrency, lazy functions, and literal data structures, but without the JVM compromises and with the 100-year goal, it might be more interesting to me and others. I looked at Arc when it first came out, but the homepage still doesn't spell out what makes it worthwhile other than "brief and malleable".
google.com

(somebody was bound to eventually ;D )
This service for subscription payment processing launched recently. I haven't tried it, but it looks interesting -- especially if one wants to get their subscription app out the door quickly.

http://www.zuora.com/products/zpayments/index.html
IE already supports font embedding and has for years. Their font embedding tech was developed with input from the font making industry and they plan to make the technology available for other browser vendors to freely use. Bill Hill, an MS researcher has been a strong advocate of improving typography on the web.
Cool.

Your logo looks very similar to the MS Office logo.
I hate to use the cliche of Ford and the faster horse, but sometimes figuring out whether or not you need something involves trying it. It's very easy to dismiss things you're not familiar with as things you don't need. For the longest time for example I thought I didn't need the power of Emacs. I finally tried it for Lisp development and now it's definitely something I need. Similarly back when I used Windows I didn't think I needed Linux for anything.

I've felt similarly about Git. I'm orders of magnitude more productive than when I used svn. To me the time investment has been well worth it.
Cheekily, I would add:

* Structure your argument to fit the topic. There is very little chance that there are exactly 10 reasons for doing anything.
I really would like to search by location that isn't apparent from the main page.
If you're a college student, a great resource is are the librarians at your libraries. Their job includes having a grasp on where to find this kind of information.

For one off questions of this type, I find yahoo answers and ask metafilter to be great. I personally don't know where you would start, but someone on those sites probably does.
I didn't know that. Down here in Australia that's upside down. SUV/Commercials get a lower tariff rate. It's not much now, but it used to be higher.
A phone that photographs printed material and then reads it back.
Appliance building with pfSense - Introducing pfDNS
While reworking the builder system for a commercial client that is
basing their appliance on pfSense we needed a builder target that
could be public and show how to build an appliance from scratch.
If there were a logic nazi for every ten grammar nazis the Internets would be such a better place.

<hides>
Well, actually... that takes me to my iGoogle pages, and you know, with the latest redesign... * starts bitching about minor unimportant things while ignoring the general benefits of the iGoogle homepage redesign :D
Definitely targeting pg and not some random Paul Graham; they're even using the "Y!" favicon on their site!
For me, there's a modest amount of activation energy associated with trying a new SCM. For work, there's an INCREDIBLY large amount of activation energy to move all of the developers, scripts, etc, off svn (although we don't develop open source).

I think "you just need to try it" is the wrong approach. I want to know /why/ I should try it. I want to see my work flows called out and the minutes/hours I will save by switching from svn to git explained clearly. Svn certainly has its pain points, but I haven't seen a concise, easily digestible outline of what git (or its ilk) will get me.
"Nifty, though having used both languages I don't know why you would want to use Java instead of Objective-C."

One big benefit of using Java is for people like me, who don't own a Mac, and can't develop using the Cocoa platform. Once I get my hands on a Mac, it probably will make more sense to use the native platform, but until then...

I couldn't tell from the presentation whether some sort of JVM is required to be installed on the iPhone. It doesn't sound like it if the code is finally converted into Objective-C, but I remember seeing some installation instructions when I visited iphone4java.com...
Or is this an entirely different project?
What large and successful open source projects have done fine with no source control? Did any of them chose consciously not to use source control? I'm really confused as to why a multi-developer project of any kind would ever not use source control.
Donate your bookmarks to Science
If you want a "clever" (read: interesting; read again: intellectual; read once more: poignant) game, play Chess, or Stratego, or Risk. If you want a game that's not fun, well, I'd probably just say "lighten up".
Google Earth comes to the iPhone (it's dazzling there, too)
The context isn't what games hhm wants to play, the context is what games (if any) hhm wants to see at the top of hacker news.
This game is so cool! What a neat spin on a classic game. They should take this game social on iminlikewithyou's new platform.
I liked it. It's simple, to-the-point, and moderately fun. It also probably took a lot more work to put together than one might think just from looking at it.

Also, there is an interesting "hack" to me, but it's sort of a stretch. Notice that the game powered by the Box2D physics engine. It's cool to me how that physics engine has revolutionized 2D games in a small way. Erin Catto, its creator, decided to open source it, and now suddenly we have hundreds of games that have been able to experiment around with physics in gameplay. And new gameplay in small games is just one step away from new gameplay in AAA titles like Half-Life 2 ... Portal was inspired by a small game that a few Digipen students created for their final project, for example. (It's called Narbacular Drop. Check it out -- it's fun! http://tinyurl.com/5m2qtp)

So I think we should encourage people to continue experimenting with new gameplay ideas... hint hint.
I would have liked a comparison of the same problems in Git, which seems to be the version control system that is taking over SVN's reign as king.
Lol, you know you have "geek street cred" when people are using your name to try and con other people. While this kind of sucks, I wish I have your problem someday.
"google.com"
a one url reply. That should crack everyone up.

An ideal search site would have one input box and a submit box. And maybe the logo too :D
After the data is input, the design that comes to my mind again is the linear results displayed by most search engines (except cuil). This is the part where you can make a difference. If you don't mind about the business model (or in specific ads) currently, then use the space on the right side too. Use it to display thumbnails of the page. And along with the common search data shown by other search engines, you could also display data about the media in the page and even the type of page(flash or html etc). Any medi in the page like mpg, wmv, asx etc can be mentioned in the results. Coz if a person is searching for just test then that can be useful.

Also the thumbnails data I mentioned are of much use when doing quick surfing. I wouldnt want to endup on some page that isn't readable.
I had the impression that in the '90s, the Linux kernel was managed just by e-mailing patches around, before adopting Bitkeeper, and then git. Things are much easier now.
Using emoticons can give results with an error percentage of around... 99.99% :) and the result maybe just 0.01% right.

Coz, as kwamenum86 said, these icons are used to express personal feelings about an incident or news. My aunt might be in the ICU and when such a news is heard I give a sad emoticon. And that can't be counted when you want to decide if the world will be happy(not the whole world cares about my aunt). And at the same time I might be happy when a guy in my class scored less than me. He would be sad and I would be happy when we express this in emotes. (I'm not this bad).

So if these emotes are to be really considered to count for the world's future happiness measure, then the text along with the emote also has to be parsed using Natural Language Processing to determine if its just a feeling about an incident or news that matters personally or the other way.

I might be wrong too.
"... effective security interview involves a series of questions and evaluation of performance across the responses ..."

True.

Add demeanor, body language, appearance to these questions. I think there a lot of non-verbal questions being asked by the person looking at visitors. One of the most useful is the ability to read"body language" and fit. Does this person fit the right pattern? Are they hiding something documentation and other procedures missed? Of course this will get a lot of false positives like the parent post.
I've been watching the tech industry for some time, and I've seen a lot of different versions of the same thing. As a user of Groove, I'm an evangelist when it comes to P2P/Non-server file repositories -- we need to see a lot more apps like these.

But looking at it long-term, 99% of these "improvements" are cool, make a few operations easier, but aren't worth the investment in terms of just using the tools as a way to get somewhere. As techies, we're constantly getting sold the bells and whistles and constantly losing track of what the big picture is. Whenever somebody says "you don't know the feature you want until you try the app" that's kind of a red flag for me. If I know the features I want and am happy with what I have, what, aside from "wow!" are new features going to get me? Most likely they will appeal to my technical side, not my business-get-things-done side.
If you've never seen a Contactus, you're missing out. They're really cool. They grow in the badlands of the internet, surviving for weeks without water or human interaction.
The graphics and layout of your site look great :)

I have a suggestion that might be of use: reduce the content on your main page so that the user can tell in 15 seconds or less what your site does, and how to get started.

Some examples:

- removing "Search Employers, Internships, and Reviews"
and the middle search box, while leaving the one on the top

- Removing "My Portfolio", should be shown only when logged in

- Moving "Contact Us" to the bottom of the page

- Removing "recent reviews" and replacing it with "From the Blogs

- Adding some big buttons for "Students" and "Employers" (your main audience)

Keep up the good work!
"The Linux kernel source code used to be maintained without the help of an automated source code management system, mostly because of Linus Torvalds' dislike of centralized SCM systems.

In 2002, Linux kernel development switched to BitKeeper... "

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_kernel#Revision_control

Bizarre(-ng? just kidding!) but true.
Why run any CentOS at all then?
I don't think they've reached the end of their lifetimes yet (not even close), and I'm sure they will pay for themselves.
Branching off of your argument, there's a significant amount of activation energy to start a new svn repo, compared to mercurial or git. I find that when all I need to do upfront is type "hg init", I end up using VC for far more. For example, all the dotfiles in my home directory, my window manager setup (a somewhat-patched dwm), and my bin dir are in an hg repo. It makes "moving in" to a new computer (and syncing with my laptop) much easier.

You can use mercurial as if it were svn, just an svn that isn't a pain in the ass to set up, and that makes free backups for you automatically. Anything past that is just a bonus.
"... There isn't a clean feed, just a more censored one (kid safe) and a less censored one (no illegal material) ..."

All it takes is access input before the filters to get access to the raw feed. Nothing complicated about that.
IE's current support is limited to the EOT format I believe (http://ajaxian.com/archives/the-fight-for-fantastic-fonts-or...), which is almost completely unused in the real world. There would need to be a lot more work done in this area to make it practical I think.
The difference is that by distributing the actual font file with your website, you're creating a copy of the font. The end user can install that file, and then use the font like any other on their system. In the magazine example, you're only distributing the end result of a font -- the user can't take the magazine and generate new documents using that font.

This is a good example of how copyright light hasn't translated well to the digital age. Almost everything you do on a computer involves creating a copy of intellectual property, and the law hasn't really caught up with that fact.
do you have any links to those "well-worn rules of thumb"?

i'm looking at building a "purchase!" button, that's obviously quite important in the whole scheme of my site, so i'd really appreciate anyone pointing me in the right direction...
A lot of us may have passed thru such ideas, but this is a simple idea executed well.

The last time I had such an idea, I was wondering how Google used machines to scan library books for their Google Book Search project. I heard that those machines were HP ones. Machines that scan books page by page and converts those into text(ofcourse since it has to be searchable). Always wondered how the text in images was reconised.

If such technologies that can recognise text are already here, then its not going to be very soon when captchas will be rendered totally useless.
GM has way too many brands and selection for Apple. Apple could just design and build their own "Apple iCar" -- the only car with one button and a touch screen to control everything. They can sell it outside of select Apple retail stores.
In the U.S. (and many European nations?, but not Germany or France), typefaces cannot be copyrighted, but fonts can.

The distinction is that a font is the digital representation of a typeface. Although some fonts have received design patents, that is fairly rare.

So, the actual font file is in fact subject to copyright in the U.S., and distributing it through the browser could be considered a violation.
Inner Goodness
I like the idea of 'Beerware' and 'PostCardWare'. Although 'Beerware' sounds like a cool name, I would change it to 'CoffeeWare', since 'beerware' is a tongue-in-check term.

The PostCardWare idea is too good if you want to know how many people really want to thank you for what you did. I was planning to put up a donate button for my new 3D movie(I'm an amatuer using Blender), I now think its better to have a modified version of PostCardWare - ePostCardWare by clicking a button or just writing in the guestbook. :)
There's a Google Logo Script-fu. It's a pity it's not written by Sergey. But, I'm sure the actual Sergey creation pre-dates the Script-fu.

http://registry.gimp.org/files/google-logo.scm
Ofcourse nobody forgets Mr.Missile Man :)

And Mr.Madhavan Nair as well.
The title is somewhat misleading. OpenOffice did very well, and 3 million copies of the recent update were downloaded in one week. This may be a record for OpenOffice, but it falls far short of a real "record", as firefox 3 had over 8 million downloads in 24 hours.
Emoticons are just words; why confine the analysis to just emoticons?
This Account Has Exceeded Its CPU Quota

ouch
Net startups slow their metabolism
'And along with the common search data shown by other search engines, you could also display data about the media in the page and even the type of page(flash or html etc)'
Can you elaborate? Google does display type of link for a few formats (pdf, doc, ppt, etc..), are you suggesting to recognise more media types or just show the info about the site?
I don't really know how wide spread its use is, but there is already software that can solve captchas. Researchers have been able to get above 30% recognition rate for captchas since january. http://internetcommunications.tmcnet.com/topics/broadband-mo...
Wow, great feedback, thanks for sharing. I largely agree with you on almost all accounts, but my point was not "OSX sucks", I was saying that "Gnome/Linux have a great UI too". For instance in Gnome there is a concept of "horizontally maximized window" or "vertically maximized window" (both have super-flexible hot key assignments), so when I am working with an application that suddenly spits out a lot of information in a window (terminal is a prime example) I can quickly maximize it vertically and quickly go back. Moreover, there is a concept of "window groups" that allow me to "merge" several windows into one and flip it when I need to: great of debugger/code windows or HTML/Browser or whatever. My point is that OSX simply won't let you do that.

When I'm talking about "virtual desktop isolation", I mean that under Linux, applications running in different desktops don't mix: Alt-Tab list (or Command/Tab in OSX) is separate for each desktop, and an application running in desktop A cannot open a prompt on desktop B (something I see happen frequently in OSX: Skype may have a contact list in desktop A, but it opens pop-ups on desktop B, same applies to safari and numerous other apps). Under Linux each "space" or "virtual desktop" feels like another computer altogether: I often run up to 5 desktops on Linux with 10-15 apps running in them, while on OSX it quickly becomes a huge mess: sometimes I hear the sound of someone having sent me a message via Skype but I can't find the goddamn window - it can be anywhere and Command-Tab list is useless.

Back to del.icio.us issue: no, Gnome does not have it "built-in" but Gnome has a very rich system of plug-ins for its desktop search feqture. The community is quite active and del.icio.us plug-in is bundled as an option with Gnome itself, along with a huge list of others. This is a prime example of where a commercial body (Apple Inc) can't compete with the crowd. And no, delimport does not work: I've tried (along with 3 or 4 other apps).

I am not bashing OSX, in fact I'm typing this words in it right now, all I'm saying is that when in comes to UI, Linux is not behind at all, in fact I believe it's ahead of everybody else in some aspects of usability. It's hard to beat Apple because of their "whole banana" philosophy: MBP+OSX is a great combination of hardware/software, something that Windows/Linux simply can't do.