skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
that's what i keep telling people. tech will feel the ripple from the collapse of other systems, and will fall a bit, but tech is robust today and we're at the cusp of BIG advances (cloud, high efficiency solar, fuel-cell, nano, gene therapy, etc).

when industry and financial stabilizes we'll be poised to re-form the economy with tech breakthroughs.

i just hope gas prices don't go back up. i am loving 2 buck gas.
Because all problems in math and engineering have already been solved, and are programmed as calculator functions.
That's always been true before, but I think if you look closely you'll realize that this time it's all different.
Linux can be made to be far more lightweight than Windows or OSX, but who uses those distros? Most people use Ubuntu or something similar and those distros are fairly heavy, not as heavy as Vista, but still much heavier than they could be. Things like Compiz and KDE/Gnome really weigh a system down.
while not religious in any sort of way myself, i WOULD actually subscribe to any sort of up to date instant publication by the pope, or dali lama, or philosopher like dawkins.

you don't have to agree with the messenger, but the message can provoke great new lines of thought and understanding.
Japanese Plate?
Codeweavers offer their software free today
The Xbox division is now actually turning a profit. Not enough to offset the massive losses it's had in the past, but it is actually generating revenue now.

The Xbox itself is a good product. They overlooked the market the Wii pursued, but then again everyone but Nintendo did. If I recall Nintendo has never had an unprofitable quarter, even during the GameCube days when they were doing much less volume than the competitors.
He not only brought the bad news, he also looked at files he wasn't allowed to look at (if I read the article correctly).

I fail to see the newsworthiness of this. Surely by now it is common knowledge that hacking is illegal?
"I'm trying to move on, involved in a great project again"
What's next?
That's still not making any money on the free software itself or from the users; that's just another "added cost service", and the persons paying for it, instead of being the user, is the one wanting to advertise to the user.

I could just as easily use any search provider in Firefox that I want (and I regularly use search plugins for Wikipedia, IMDB, Python/PHP references, Thottbot, etc) in place of Google, and then Mozilla no longer makes money from me.

However, that's not to say that your idea isn't an excellent one. I'm just pointing out that even if that idea had been implemented, Mark is still right. ;)
very nice. this was something i had planned on working on in the future. google is getting there.

i planned on creating a Hulu type service for reading books free online (or subscription if you hate ads) and directing 100% of the revenue to the authors. the infrastructure/maintenance/growth would be paid for by donation or charitable sponsorship.

basically a non-profit type organization, so i have to keep it on the shelf until i make some money elsewhere :D
Uncontacted Tribe Identified in Brazil
Stocks carve out rebound after sharp selloff
> Things like Compiz and KDE/Gnome really weigh a system down.

If you're looking for a modern desktop operating system, then yes, it is tuned for a modern(-ish) desktop.

But if you're talking about using "a different OS" (as the OP was), then you're already further from the mainstream than using a linux distro tuned for your needs.

I'm just checking on the substance of the "Linux is bloated" claim, and trying to find out what alternatives there might be.
It is a little funny though to write a post praising Obama, and then ban all political comments.
Liveblog coverage of Windows 7 launch at PDC
Gmail does mention that it's free. From the sign-in page:

Lots of space

Over 7256.934852 megabytes (and counting) of free storage so you'll never need to delete another message.
SoAndSo's dog is so dead.
I signed up for both in 2005. I haven't used FB since. I still use LinkedIn.

FB is a liability to your career, LinkedIn is not. LinkedIn captures the social network that matters to business. FB captures the social network that matters to pyramid schemes.
Main site has melted down due to traffic. Here's an article talking about what's going on:

http://www.tuaw.com/2008/10/27/codeweavers-says-cheap-gas-fr...
Why tech will survive: Tech actually makes things. Finance, no.
This is why middle-aged guys are such horrible public servants. They have their families and future careers in mind and can't do anything to upset their billionaire patrons. Reckless young people or rich old farts who know they'll be dead soon enough are better.
There is a direct link between processing speed and intellect. The faster you think the more things you can think about at the same time which is probably why reading faster increases comprehension. One of the ideas is that when you bring up a memory you keep it "alive" for a consistent fraction of a second, but if you can bring more things into focus you have more time to work out relationships before your first memory / idea times out.

PS: Think about what it's like once you "load up" a complex problem. You can't think about other things while coding, which is why people hate to be interrupted while coding.
Build Your Own Z80 Computer
Facebook makes money. They seem to have roughly the attitude that Google did around 2000. I.e. they're making some money, could make more if that was their main focus, but their main focus in the short term is to evolve the site.

Not to say that FB is going to be as big as Google. Outliers on that scale may only appear every couple decades. But they have a similar hackerly vibe.
I want to believe that, and 75% of me actually does, but the cynic in me translated your comment to the famous last words "this time it's different."
Good point. I only wish religious people were as open minded as you are... :-)
Seems to be up. Just downloaded both and requested a serial number.
When you want to die, you want to make sure you die 'right'. Or quickly.

Apparently, a knife to the gut, then slicing across is very painful. To end the pain, there's someone else that beheads you after you do that. Imagine if that person didn't make a clean cut, and went into your shoulder instead. Now, not only are you suffering a slow and painful death, you have blades sticking out of you.
Apple: iPhone Could Hit $99, Analyst Says
Why can't you criticise (did I spell that right?) your users now and then, when they do that to you on every single post? It's not like you care about offending them anyway, since they are the kind of users you do not want :)
Ruby 1.9.1 preview released
Since the site is down, can anyone explain the differences between the "Games" and "Pro" editions?
Yes, but in this case; it's funny.
Microsoft Exchange LCR Compliments Archiving
Any halfway intelligent human being can teach themselves a very wide variety of trades.

Sure they can, but are you saying there is no difference between the guy playing guitar at the local subway stop and Eddie Van Halen?

Design is a skill just like programming is a skill. To suggest that everyone can be equally talented in a particular element is to demean the trade and the people in it.
Cyber threats in 2009
Here's something from Aaron Swartz about the same topic

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/productivity

I remember pg saying that if he had uninteresting programming work, he would try to make it interesting by making a language design problem.

My dad's brother told him once that "Everything's interesting when you look hard enough." I've found that to be true so far.

But even if you find your work interesting at large, I think everyone has their cycles. It helps to notice how you got out of the last one, and what you did to get out of it. Even the coolest job and most interesting work has its lame parts that you have to slosh through.
The part when user become users.

When you get right down to it, by the time you've accounted for every little preference you're asking websites to be text files, which kinda defeats the whole purpose of design.
We don’t publish the real names of these people, but I do keep a list of people that seem to be really disturbed in some way. It’s often funny to see them at an event, acting like they really think TechCrunch is great.

Apparently, on the Internet Michael Arrington knows you're a dog.
He may well be a punk, but that doesn't seem like sufficient justification for THREE FELONY CHARGES at age 15.
Server was giving me trouble for a bit. Go here if you can't get to it either:

http://tinypaste.com/pre.php?id=6bd88
my point exactly. weak, superficial attempt at political correctness.
>In any case, we're talking about the exceptional students, so racial averages are irrelevant to the conversation.

Nonsense. Assume intellect is normally distributed, with equal sigma to simplify things (1). Assume a racial difference in mean of 0.5 sigma, then 2.2% of the higher intellect group will be 2sigma beyond the (high intellect) mean, while 0.6% of the lower intellect group will reach this level.

This difference grows exponentially when we consider more exceptional people (2).

(1) Between males and females, sigma is not equal. Men have higher sigma, as Larry Summers famously hypothesized.

(2) To see this, write out the CDF for a normal distribution and use the asymptotic expansion for erf. The rate of growth is (smarter group's mean - dumber group's mean)/sigma^2.
School administrators are assholes. Policies and actions like this are pretty common place at public high schools. I can't blame them though, they've had to shepherd children around their entire lives, and get paid less than many entry level workers at for profit companies.
Also, I believe that the kernel has also grown much larger, especially in recent years (don't have data or links, just from articles I've read).

Concurrency isn't really a solved problem. If someone did solve it, and formed an OS around it, that would be what I mean by intrinsically multi-core. It might also involve an entirely different CPU architecture, and view of the hardware, which the fundamental concepts of linux just didn't map to efficiently (e.g. no filesystem). Hypothetically speaking. But if you could make it look the same to webapps, it wouldn't matter.

My point isn't that linux is bad in any way, but that if your platform is the web, then the OS doesn't matter. BTW: I also don't believe that linux is the ultimate OS - it's just an OS, and it's possible to have something better. In practice, the alternative might be based on linux (or at least compatible). Not because linux is perfect, but it's there already and because of the ecosystem of software that relies on it (borrowed from unix). Linux is a market success - by which I mean many people use it.

The only alternatives I can think off the top of my head are: BSD, solaris, minix, QNX, Plan 9, AmigaOS and there are also some really "weird" OS's in academia, many no longer used.

I believe Plan 9 was written by the creators of unix... as an improvement. But it lacked market success.

EDIT BTW I'm not claiming that linux is as bloated as Windows - just that it has increased significantly in size, and due to the same cause: there is no real need not to.
I am partial to BSD as a basis for hosting a browser, which is all I want my OS to do. My ideal would be BSD + Chrome mated to be one small, light kick-ass web top. I gave up on Linux a long while ago on the client side. It is chasing Windows, which I think is backward looking.

Keep in mind that BSD underpins Mac OS X.
Hands on preview of Windows 7: Hey, it looks surprisingly good
Remember when Longhorn had a whole new kernel, and WinFS, and was going to breathe new life into Windows?
First look at Windows 7
AdaptiveBlue launches glue - new plugin plus html injected widget
This is a topic near and dear to me. I believe cognitive abilities are falling, but not for the reasons this article talks about. I believe vaccination may have a strong role to play, and the number of vaccine shots kids get (let's say by the age of 4) has gone up 5-10 fold in the last 25 years.

I have talked to a couple of immunology professors and they aren't really very comfortable with this mad rush to have a vaccine fix for everything.

This is a huge topic, but if any of you are planning to have kids, research this topic of vaccines. Do not blindly accept what your pediatrician says - they are not all that well-informed.
Zimbra Heads Into the Cloud
IMO, the majority of people in the world are interested more in their "social" social network than in their "business" social network.
Perhaps an increase in writing quality would lead to an increase in comment quality.
Authors, Publishers Settle With Google Over $125 Million Lawsuit
You can also setup a script to load up a million fake users onto a spare box and then mimic some typical activity. This'll catch a lot of the unforseen problems that'll show up: it'd catch that 32k directory limit, it caught the >1000 files/directory slowdown when I tried it, and it'll catch most database indexing or join problems. And if your test computer is much slower than the computer driving the requests, you can catch CPU or I/O bottlenecks in the webserver stack. I use P2/200 Mhz that's 10 years old for this and ping it from my parent's desktop that they bought last year.

There're still unforseen problems - there always are - but you can flush out some of the more obvious issues. And the testing can run concurrently with some of the last minute design tweaks, so it doesn't cost all that much in development time. Or do it after you launch when you've got a spare moment; very few websites get big immediately.
To suggest that everyone can be equally talented in a particular element is to demean the trade and the people in it.

Maybe. But I would argue that most people's talent is the result of persistent hard work in that discipline. And that is a compliment.

Sometimes people use "I'm not a designer" as an excuse for why they aren't good at design, as if it's something you need to be born with. It could be that they've just never cared enough to try, but to make themselves feel better they dismiss it as an impossibility.

When you're looking far up the ladder it's tempting to call it a gift at birth--when you're only a notch below, it's easier to see it as the result of hard work. What drives those people is another question.
Ask HN: Quiz for Mobile Startups
All questions optional. feel free to answer in private nallen05--at--gmail--com

1. What country are you based in?
2. What country is your target market in? what is that target market and why did you choose it?
3. Can you describe your product in its final form? in its current form?
4. What mobile platform are you currently developing on? what is your back-end currently implemented in?
5. Does your app require a smartphone?
6. Does your app rely on USSD? SMS?
7. Would your app benefit from a custom handset especially made for users of your app? if so how?
8. Do you have/need location awareness? If LB awareness saturation was much higher (say 90% of all handsets) would your product be any different? is base-station triangulation accurate enough?
9. Do you have/need an agreement with N-many MNOs? If you already had one how would your app be different now?
10. If you had an agreement with a significant retail infrastructure in your target country what would be different?
11. Do you expect anyone to ever use your product while being in close physical proximity (f2f) with another user?
12. How do you expect users to get your app onto their phones.
games is 2 megabytes larger. it must be better!

just get both, their fault for bad UI.
I disagree

As computers get better I think there could be a market for a really slick compviz style linux desktop with a ton a tools packaged and integrated with it, including virtualbox so you can run your windows xp partition in parallel.

I think there surely is a market for mac osx, even seperated from mac hardware ( if apple would allow that to happen ), likewise there is a market for a linux desktop, we just haven't seen one good enough yet. But we are close.
Big Three Agree on Guidelines for Countries Who Restrict Human Rights
After the Credit Crunch, the Rainforest Crunch
Ask HN: What is the easiest way to host a Rails app?
Maybe I'm typing the wrong things into Google, but the easy way to host a Rails app is eluding me. I know how to set up capistrano, thin, nginx, Ubuntu, mysql, etc, but where can I find this set up out of the box? It's gotta be out there.

Suggestions? Thanks!
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=218597
But they have a similar hackerly vibe.

Couldn't the same apply to Linkedin?

In a way all the attention is on facebook, linkedin is getting as much attention as google did in 2000.
Minefield Shows the (Really) Fast Future of Firefox
Am I to understand that this article's point is that Barack Obama is dumber than Sarah Palin because she's self taught and he went to an Ivy League school?

This is still HN right?
You could make a shrinkwrap desktop app out of it, with a lot of additional features, and sell it for $799.
Equally accurate headline: "Google's Green Agenda Might Not Pay Off"
School officials are highly political creatures, and can be very dangerous when cornered. As a 15 yo, even (or especially) the intelligent hacker type, its tempting to think you can handle them or predict their reactions.

You can't.

Its best just to keep your head down, and your yap shut until you've got a little more experience with this kind of person and a little more ability to defend yourself. Hang tight, wait for your release date (I think they call it "graduation") and don't antagonize the guards.
Detroit makes things, but that doesn't mean the American auto industry is going to survive.
Microsoft Office Comes to the Browser (Finally)
How to structure your JavaScript code
The article says nothing about Palin or Obama, why bring that up? In any case, Sarah Palin graduated from the University of Idaho (after transferring around a few different schools).

All of which proves... well, nothing.
Q&A with Charlie Miller on hacking the T-Mobile G1 phone with Google Android software
Entrepreneurs, take note: here's how to promote a product. I'd never heard of Codeweavers before this. Imagine all the Digg & newsmedia coverage they're getting.
From the article's conclusion:

The preceding rant is to be taken merely as a preface to something shorter and more aphoristic I wanted to say about commentary on the U.S. election. It has to do with the comparison that is made, usually by insinuation but often overtly -- throughout the mass media, and especially in the elitist mass media -- between the educational backgrounds of Barack Obama and Sarah Palin.
This article gives a decent overview: http://www.aidanf.net/deploying-rails-on-a-clean-ubuntu-slic...

Aside from that, you can search for tutorials related to blank slate hosts like Slicehost and Linode - they tend to cover rails well.
kids may do worse on some measures, but on average, in the age of Google, everyone is a great deal smarter than 30 years ago.

Statistics?

I see your point, but one must intellectually curious to make use of the vast pool of resources that is available. Google also allows mis-information to be more readily disseminated.
Wow. I've always had an appreciation for good design, and a good "feel" for what would look good, but never knew how to approach the creation of a good one. This is exactly what I needed. Fantastic.
Google strikes book search deal
The article recommends using Wikipedia articles if you're not happy with lorem ipsum. That is actually a great idea to me.
> Granted, but the truth is, no one has any clue what's going on, ever.

Hmmm... that sounds like a pretty absolute statement... is there any way to bet on that ;~)?
Google, Yahoo, Microsoft Agree To Guidelines - Doing Biz With Countries That Restrict  Human Rights
Let's do an interesting exercise. Facebook has 100 million users. Let's suppose 10% of that user base would be willing to pay a $1.99 to have a premium account (like unlimited number of photo albuns, customizable look&feel etc). That would mean almost $20m dollars monthly revenue, much much larger than their burn-rate. College students don't pay for SMS? Why some of them wouldn't then pay this small amount to Facebook?
Sure, this is a very rough estimation based on old subscription-based business model. A product in a free market operates much differently than if you charge US$ $.01. But it only shows that Facebook has many ways to become successfully profitable. They are only being cautious.
Pygments TextMate Bundle (for publishing your code on the web)
I was speaking only of their internet usage. Wii is still playing catch up a bit there.
I have to say, once again I'm unimpressed. Most of these changes can be summed up as copies of Expose, smart folders, and file previews from Mac OS, and toolbar thumbnail previews straight out of Ubuntu. Oh, and moving some desktop apps online, so instead of just communicating with an online service, now the whole app has gone Java Webstart on us. Nice...

And if there's nothing else that's really new under the hood since Vista, as he said, what exactly is so new and bold about Windows 7? Seems like a "me too" grab, and a rather weak one at that.
> Also, I believe that the kernel has also grown much larger, especially in recent years (don't have data or links, just from articles I've read).

OK. The kernel runs happily on a 32Mbyte ARM system I have to hand. dmesg tells me the kernel usage (a 2.6.21) at boot time is ~2Mbytes:

<5>Memory: 30292KB available (1912K code, 153K data, 84K init)

I don't think that justifies being called 'much larger', unless you're comparing with mid-90s kernel versions or something.

The source code for Linux is much larger, but I think that's mostly due to broader support for hardware and other optional components.
Hotmail is still the 2nd largest email provider, and only barely. Would you consider Gmail a failure? They're a distant third.
Teaser Photo of Tesla's 'Model S' Electric Sedan
I have a favorite game which has very poor support under Wine. The CodeWeavers product may very well do a better job with it. If so, I can switch my personal box full-time to Linux. That would make me very happy.
They've always viewed it as an investment. Honestly, it's worked out pretty damn well. I'd never have guessed they'd have gotten to 2nd place so fast.

Moreover, they've just begun to capitalize on it. As I said, they've got an internet connected box tethered to everyone's TV. They've been working on the dream of the living room PC for years, and now they've finally gotten there.
Better yet, since they are free to make modifications to Firefox, they could always change the account to an Ubuntu one rather than leaving the Mozilla one in there for search.

Wouldn't be so nice to Mozilla, but that is the nature of open-source. In fact, if you have a company with lots of employees who use Firefox, it might make sense for you to alter that. Of course, probably isn't worth the effort considering how little you'd make back.
I prefer hotmail to Yahoo mail by far. I use gmail only through forwarding or pop.
Not when your occupation is to get laid, unless I've been using linkedin wrong.
Slicehost.com does have some nice tutorials for just getting started. Is there a turnkey solution out there?
according to TUAW:

"Word from CodeWeavers execs is that the free license will be for a download-only flavor of the Pro version (!), including the Games optimized build and the option to share a Windows 'bottle' among multiple users on the same machine."
Agreed, but you're less likely to find falsified information on a LinkedIn page. The people on LinkedIn in are more likely to be real. That has considerably more tangible value IMO.
> The rest of us want a webpage that is pleasing to look at.

The default font size is pleasing to look at, that's why it's the default size. You kids need to get over the idea that everyone loves squinting at tiny fonts, they don't.