skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
http://www.orricktotalaccess.vidcaster.com/FRq/ma-acqui-hire...
What is going on with Stumbleupon?
HTML5 (plugin free) web-based terminal emulator and SSH client
I can't agree more about prior experiences of working at a tech startup. He was not a co-founder, but I happened to work for a single non-technical founder at his startup. He spoke all the right language - about building engineer-focused, hacker culture, but he really didn't understand and couldn't lead awesome engineers effectively.
See for example: http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/fp/reduceron/
Interesting answers there. I remember doing the capacitor experiment in a first-year physics course in university. Though we were measuring mu sub 0, the permeability of free space. The formula is just reversed though.

It should be an interesting and cheap way to measure the speed of light.
5 Siri alternatives for Android users
> for the record, it is included when you copy from the URL bar

Yes, but this is part of what makes the "feature" so annoying for usability obsessives such as myself. It makes copy & paste work differently in the URL bar than they do everywhere else and in every other application. Normally copy only copies the text you select. Now when you paste you not only paste the text you selected, but some extra, previously unseen text as well.

I know that once you hide the "http:// you pretty much have to do copy & paste this way, to avoid people pasting incomplete URLs, but it still feels weird, at least to me...
For 1 Year Old, A Magazine is an iPad That Doesn't Work
A) I disagree, non-wackos can have extremely strong opinions B) The post I was responding to pigeon-holed the OP not just as a liberal but several Fox-worthy aspersions.
I have a different problem. Firefox now aggressively trims memory usage - over-aggressively trims it, to the point that switching tabs incurs a 0.5 second pause as it reallocates memory it had thrown away. This is Firefox 7, and is most noticeable in image-heavy websites.
You can address up to 64 GiB of RAM with a PAE kernel. Happens that a single process can't access more than 4 GiB of RAM. But in the end, how many people actually run a process that large on a notebook?
I wrote my thesis on an immutable data store as a means to beat CAP. I didn't get quite as far as your other observations though, as mine was in the context of continuation web frameworks.

Very nice write-up however.
Moving your mouse would move the orientation of the light that was travelling across the landscape.
From the landing page:

"Click to interact with the environment, keep the button pressed to fly faster."

Try clicking at different speeds and on different elements and you'll see the interactivity (works better with an external mouse). Contrast it to sitting back and watching it go.
I'm typing this on a T510 - it definitely has an optimus chipset. Linux support for Optimus is extremely poor, so fortunately you can set in the BIOS whether to use the integrated intel graphics chipset or the discrete nVidia chipset.

The laptop works very well in Ubuntu, which is my primary OS. There definitely were some setup hassles when I got the laptop a year ago, but I believe the support is more streamlined today.
You don't have to wait: http://www.trekdesk.com/
That's what the "+" before a search term is for: this is exactly the word I'm looking for, and every result must have this. Otherwise it tries to find the most relavant page that's closest to what you typed. It makes sense to have that by default: do you really want to miss the exact page you were searching for because you used the term "graduate" instead of "graduating"?
Sixty Dollars to Whoever Adds Syntax Highlighting to Etherpad-Lite
Thank you. Got a link to your thesis anywhere? Would love to read it.
I've been involved with around 1,500 Ubuntu installs over the last four years at http://www.freeitathens.org. It's rare for us to image a computer and not have everything just work. We're usually working on three to ten year old computers. If we saw more new computers, perhaps I'd be more pessimistic about linux support.
My point exactly. You'll use a digital one for accuracy/effectiveness but an analog one for style. Why can't there be watch that combines both advantages? Just because the stuff we use works doesn't mean we should stop thinking about improving things.

Oh, and I mentioned why I don't like the multi-dial approach: your eye still has to search for the hand. There simply is more eye movement involved in reading an analog watch, which is exactly the thing I tried to present a solution for.
Launch to learn
Unless you figure that's he's likely at work now probably not.
wrong move. you should have become his best friend, you'd be rich now.
I thought I hadn't seen Firefox hang in a while.
I think "dishonestly" is a little strong (though yes, alchemy was an early branch of chemistry).
The case of the 500 mile email (2002)
Come to Jelly. Noble Tree Coffee and Tea on Wednesdays from 12-4. http://jellychicago.com
The point seems to be that if you move most of your IT onto the public Internet aka cloud (with SSL + passwords) then employees don't need to access any secure network.
Totally agree. I switched to Linux Mint after that last release and have no interest in ever going back, even if they fix all of the many issues with Unity. I lost so much time on that last "upgrade" that I will never trust Canonical's judgment again.
How Vimeo Lost Me as a customer
Using Yahoo BOSS or the Microsoft search feed, anyone can build a fully functional, highly relevant "search engine" in a couple of weeks. "Search engine" is really a metasearch engine. Given enough traffic, you can syndicate a sponsored link feed and generate 3-4 cents per search. In principle, it is a great business. The place where all have failed is in the non-coerced acquisition of users -- everybody has to pay for users somehow, and by the time you've bought a one-time user you are forced to give them a terrible product (all ads, no quality).

What Gabriel has figured out and no one else has is how to build a search brand that people trust and are willing utilize. He seems to have a loyal core of users that come to his site without him paying on a per-search basis. Search quality, as perceived by the user, in as much about brand trust as it is about algorithmic quality. Too many companies focus on tech first and hope that the brand trust will come later (SearchMe, Blekko). Gabriel has actually invented a viable search business model. That's much more novel than his technology.

The interesting question is whether DuckDuckGo's organic user acquisition model can scale with additional resources. They put up one billboard in San Francisco and got a huge ROI -- will that work elsewhere?
Mine3D: 3D Minesweeper in WebGL
For what it's worth, I've seen absolutely no indication that Google takes social data into account when ranking results. They only show it as metadata on items within the original ordering.
Impressive demo video of GateOne: http://vimeo.com/24857127

I could see a number of use cases for this. However, I would like to know that it has been vetted for possible security issues.
It's always interesting to me what makes it up and what never catches on. Apparently more HN people are intrigued by the mere title "lights" than a title with more explanation.
Well that's nice for you that it works, usually works for me at home.

I run about 200 desktop linux machines and sqlite locking is a common problem on firefox. Users are often completely unaware of how to fix even though they are quite technical.
technology has made the world an easier place to communicate, however looking at this map is easy to see the cultural divide that exists in the world.Facebook was built as an American company and therefore appeals to cultures that have embraced a similar cultural standard. Even though Facebook is available around the world for the most part, it goes to show how much a divide we have between different cultures.
Feels static compared to what the arcade fire did with google.

http://thewildernessdowntown.com/

The web is a new medium, and browsers can be more expressive then pretty viz. Push the boundaries with this stuff don't just do your radio show on camera.
Pandora's Box
Bitly Rolls Out Reputation-Monitoring Tool and Social-Search Product
“Price Pulsing”: the Benefits of Dynamic eBook Pricing on Amazon
I don't care much for the track but as the environment pulsated, I found myself smiling. Simply amazing.

Running perfectly on MacBook Pro 5th Gen with Google Chrome Canary (16.0.x.x).
Ah nice! Yeah, I'm a part of PaperG which was part of the beginning of YEI (I think they say we're the first funded startup to come out of it). It's really awesome how things have grown in the last couple of years. I was pretty excited when I heard about HackYale -- something that should have been done long ago.

Feel free to contact me if you have questions about startup/Yale/CS stuff
Jason, we’ve been working on this. There were some big performance improvements in Firefox 6 and 7 and we’ve got a big hang fix that’s just about to hit in Firefox 8.

Can you grab an Aurora or Beta build and see if things are better?
No doubt it is a touching story. That was my reaction to it as well. But when you read hyperbovine's point, and think about it... it is also true. So touching story yes, but normal human behavior - yes.
Every change of medium results in the old being shoe horned into the new until people figure out the new for what it can be.
Yeah, I have to restart it at least once a day. In addition to "Clear Recent History", how about a "Clear Older History", where I can delete everything older than a month or a week? That would clean out probably more than 95% of the cruft possibly speeding things up. I'm sure there's a way to do this, but how about an easy way for the average user?
I wouldn't be surprised if they did exactly what they just did with the iPhone - when the 3rd generation comes out offer the 1st or possibly even 2nd generation much cheaper instead of actually building something cheap and nasty.
I rarely do 3D modelling, so admittedly the applications I'd like supported are probably outside your initial target market, but here's the top three I want to pair Maide with:

- Apple Motion

- Unity

- Google Earth (I realize there's an iPad version and it's awesome, but Google Earth + projector + Maide would be incredible)
The problem is no one wants a change in the status quo. I hate unions. Although I believe they do have their benefits, they have gotten out of hand...
I like Caltech's approach where freshman year is pretty much the same for everyone, except for humanities and social science where the requirement is just a certain number of units rather than specific classes. Everyone takes freshman math, freshman physics, general chemistry and lab, and biology freshman year (except those few who place out of them).

Students don't start taking specialized courses in their major until second year (they don't even have a major first year), when they take those alongside the required sophomore math and sophomore physics.
And the autocomplete relies on the Places system, which is what is hanging (or was, until a few weeks ago).
Stepping Back from the Angel Bubble
Fast python on the iphone
I would say the compositions -- but perhaps it is due to the technical limitations as you mentioned. I can definitely say the compositions because I think they sound even more amazing in the hands of an orchestra, or in piano collections. Maybe I'm just a Nobuo Uematsu fan

I do agree that the Halo music is pretty good and memorable (especially the whole chanting monk deal).
So uh, not to cause a fuss but why was the title edited? I can understand removing the word "impressive" as that is an opinion, but removing the explanation (interactive html5 / webgl presentation built with threejs) seems silly? How are users who casually browse news.yc supposed to look at this and have any clue what they're clicking? Titles that are descriptive should be more important than... well I can't think why it was changed to just "lights"? Surely the title containing some sort of description about the content is a courtesy that users would appreciate.

(For reference the original title was "Lights -- impressive html5 / webgl presentation built with threejs" and is now "Lights")
Kudos to you for making the world a little bit better.
I've also been using firefox since 1.0 and had such problems through 3.6

But 7.0 is the best version yet for me and radically faster on startup and operation (and I use a ton of extensions).

It just took a weekend to get 7.0 to behave like 3.x and then I was happy.
Opera 12 alpha: HTML5 Parser, Radial Gradients and WebGL
As should we all.
it was actually on the front page before it got edited to simply "lights" - the previous title was similar to the earlier submission.
I agree - the only impressive thing about this is the technology.
In the introductory optics class I took in college, one day the professor said "Let's measure the speed of light!" and pulled out a ruler.

The class laughed.

He then set the ruler on the table. The ruler was one of those where the tick marks are raised, not merely printed on. The ruler was metal and reflected light well.

He then shone a laser at the ruler, so that the light bounced off and hit the blackboard. The lines on the ruler acted as a diffraction grating and a diffraction pattern was visible on the blackboard.

He marked the peaks with chalk, then went back to the ruler and used the ruler to measure the distance from where it had been to the blackboard. He then used the ruler to measure the distance between the marks he had made for the diffraction peaks.

From those distances, and the separation between the lines on the ruler, and the frequency of the laser he was using, it was a simple calculation to get the speed of light.

Or course, in a sense this is cheating, as you have to know the frequency of the light source, so he had to use that as a magic constant in his calculation.
Linkbait from interscope?
In both FF and Chrome, copying includes the http:// to the clipboard, so it's all there when you paste. So that's not an issue at all.
IPhone 4S sells out completely across U.S. carriers
but aren't you paying for web hosting?
Replaying Terminal Sessions with Scriptreplay
I don't think you lower a flag, that's already at half-staff, to quarter-staff.
Were these recruiters that your company hired, or were they actual HR employees from your company?

I would have gone just to see the looks on their faces.
The opening sentence bothers me. “Rob Pike reports that Dennis Ritchie also has passed away.” (Emphasis mine.) As though he’s just some kind of footnote in light of the death of Steve Jobs! Both Jobs and Ritchie were “I don’t care if it’s impossible, I’m doing it” types, but I feel that Ritchie contributed more to computing as a whole, while Jobs’s innovations were mainly in user experience.
Maybe my understanding of pride is flawed but let me put it another way. By holding an opinion or expectation of oneself (or another) you're setting yourself up for disappointment in the case that the opinion or expectation is challenged. If I pride myself as highly knowledgeable in some field and someone comes along and points out all the flaws in my knowledge then it's probably going to hurt. If I don't pride myself on this sort of knowledge then it won't force me to reconsider my self-view in the same way. The flip side being that if I pride myself on this sort of knowledge that very pride may be the impetus that makes me actually go out and learn the things I don't know.
The automatic updates have to ask for admin rights, is that what you are seeing? You can deny admin rights and it will run fine (without updating). And they know it's not optimal, they're fixing that in the next version.
As mentioned in the article's comments, this appears to have been recently resolved.

Here is the full thread:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=686025
I run FF on linux for dev work (not on FF itself, but for JS heavy web apps). Actually, I run a whole bunch of different FF versions with different profiles for testing a huge variety of things.

My main gripe is that some of the extensions (NoScript, Firebug and friends) sometimes break things, hog the CPU in one way or another or just plain eat up the heap.

I am fine with this. These are extensions, after all and it's for dev stuff, which I judge by a slightly different standard than 'normal user' stuff.

The latest FF releases especially make me happy because they're adding modern web features and working on UX and performance. And it shows and feels.

I don't care about bookmarks because I don't bother storing those in the browser anymore. Was the choice for storing 'stuff' in SQLite a good one? Yes of course it was. It's the best cross-platform way to store structured data on disk, which is why everybody and his/her dog has made the same choice. Are there inefficient ways in which it is being used? Maybe. Probably? I haven't looked into this, but this is hardly an insurmountable problem.

Sure it felt like FF was lagging behind once the WebKit browsers started coming out (with better JS engines) but the Mozilla Team is back in the game with its new release cycles and updates.

And this makes me very happy.
Ask HN: Please help me find an old story
I've been looking for it for about 2 hours with no success.

The story linked was about a person dealing with people not able to pay up(Distraint, distress). There where a few comments about unethical jobs that only few people carry out.

Unfortunately this is all that I can remember which made the search fruitless.
Thanks in advance!
The unity and its ilk might work great....on a netbook or convertible tablet. How will it work with many terminal/firefox/vms open? With the dock and bottom bar it looks like the worst of gnome 2 and os x. XFCE/iceWM/LXDE/gnome 2.x imo are much better for getting work done. How is this different then the ipadesque desktop of os x with all applications lined up in rows?
37 Signal's Support Stats
I noticed this problem in Windows along with huge memory leaks.

I've switched to Firefox Nightly and this lag seems to have gone away.

As a bonus, the browser feels as fast as Chrome and it takes several weeks more usage before needing a restart due to slowness.
"Just need someone to build it now" mentality
"... and build it for me now"

Boy, how well I can relate to this!! Web development is not a magic bullet. Why is it hard to understand that fact..
In some ways, both! The music definitely did have to work with the limitations of the SNES, but that audio chip (at the time) blew everything Sega had out of the water. I agree with asianexpress- Nobuo Uematsu is just awesome. But the sound of the trumpets on FFVI sounds so unique to the SNES too!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BPGle3hTWk&feature=relat...
> how many people actually run a process that large on a notebook?

my primary computer is a notebook and I routinely run processes that large (vmware, mathematica, matlab, IDA, binnavi, my own programs, etc).

"why do you run these programs on your laptop instead of sshing to a server somewhere?"

sensitivity, responsiveness, I don't always have internet, the hardware can do it (8-16GB of RAM in a notebook is almost commonplace)
That's just it, though. Any normal person would have done that.

The billionaire CEO of a worldwide, multi-billion-dollar company at the forefront of its industry is not a normal person. A normal one of those would be surrounded by assistants, walking fast, and brusquely brush off such an uninvited interruption by the hoipolloi.

Steve was not a normal billionaire CEO.
The site also works with Safari running 10.6 with WebGL enabled, based on a test with 5.1.1.
See also: Everything by John Williams. Try thinking of Star Wars, Indiana Jones, or Jaws. You're thinking of the music, now, aren't you?
It sounds like you aren't happy after 5 months..and your boss isn't doing you any favors.

Can you imagine being in the same position for 5 years?

I would look for another job.
You seem to be getting down-voted. Maybe it's the harsh tone on what they should not focus on. But I agree with your second point. I've noticed a decline in Google's search result quality. I suppose a large part of that is SEO. Perhaps DDG can find better ways to counteract it.
Hackers to the Rescue: Illegal Government Spyware Swatted By eVigilantes
U.S. Intelligence Unit Aims to Build a ‘Data Eye in the Sky’
FYI, the Bassnectar remix of this song is very good.
Ruby on Rails Cheat Sheet - CEH - Saher Team
Don't know, but good question.
Behold: The iPhone 4S Disassembled
K&R&You - A Tribute to Dennis Ritchie
Does this have IE6 - IE8 support?
The payoff in medicine might be worse from a total possible payoff standpoint, but definitely the best from a stability standpoint.

A mediocre doctor can throw a dart at a map and still make $150K-200K per year. In fact, with the strange renumeration structure of modern medicine, a doctor in the sticks can make more money than a doctor in a desired suburb.

Worst case scenario in medicine is working as a GP in Montana for "only" $150K a year.

Worst case scenario in investment banking is you are out on your ass in 2 years with skills applicable nowhere outside of downtown Manhattan.
Google Crushes Q3 Earnings Estimates
We do not have an exclusion list, but we do run a micro-benchmark on your machine to ensure your GPU will be powerful enough to handle MapsGL. You can try upgrading your drivers as well, which sometimes improves performance (looks like intel put out new device drivers for that chip about a year ago)
Assume you achieve total world domination and they make a movie about you. Visualize the narrative arc. Would you think "This guy deserves to be the hero or co-hero of this movie?" If not, you don't want them to be a cofounder.

There are fairly few movies where someone bestows money, a name or an idea on the interesting characters and ends up being really important to the plot.

You want Aragorn, not Elrond, as your cofounder. (Naturally I think of geeks as hobbits.)

P.S. Your co-founder should say the same about you. If you're a tool rather than a partner, fleeeeeeeee.
I'd kill for multi-row tab support in Chrome (TabMixPlus in Firefox or by default part of the browser in Opera). It's the only thing that keeps me from switching 100% from FF.
Infographic of Top brand communities and (lack) of engagement on Facebook
Dun DUN... Dun DUN... dun dun dun dun DUN DUN DUN DUN
It was certainly the case that NVidia was the best for Linux until recently. But Intel has been working hard on their open source drivers and ATI has been catching up fast, and recently NVidia threw up their hands and said they had no plans to support Optimus under Linux.
Hey guys, this is a project I put together last night. I thought it would be great to gather photos and stories about the impact of K&R on your life as a programmer. So if you have a second, snap a photo with your copy of K&R. Upload via http://kandrandyou.org/submit. If you don't have tumblr (which I'm assuming most of you don't) you can post your image in this thread or send me an email at kyle.j.conroy+kandr@gmail.com
IOS 5 Fonts
IOS 5's "Cleaning" Behavior
I'm not saying that the same desktop OS will run on both devices, but rather that the overall UI and functionality can be shared.

Though, in a couple of years, who's to say that Ubuntu won't be able to run on most devices? Maybe there are challanges, but I doubt that it would be impossible. It's just a matter of time and maturity.

I think people are already asking for one user environment across devices, so I bet it's something they might have in mind.
DDG is a great search engine. I was stoked to see that the Midori[1] browser adopted it as the default search engine. However, if I can't seem to find something there, I try Scroogle with SSL[2]

1 - http://www.twotoasts.de/index.php?/pages/midori_summary.html

2 - https://ssl.scroogle.org/
For my T520 I can get by disabling Optimus, but then I can't use external monitors.