skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The FHS (Filesystem Hierarchy Standard) [1] is the go-to reference for this sort of thing. It explains that `/bin` is for binaries that are essential before other file systems are mounted (e.g. in single user mode), and `/usr/bin` is for "most user commands" (all others). This allows you to keep a minimal local filesystem containing only the binaries needed for init to get the system running, and then `/usr` can be mounted, say, from a network share. This is useful because then network admins can install software to the common `/usr` share and make it immediately available to all machines which mount that share.

The `/sbin` and `/usr/sbin` directories are for commands needed only by administrators, which will not normally be used by regular users.

Most systems don't really require this separation, but it does make sense. Perhaps the historical reason for doing it is no longer a factor, but that doesn't mean it's perpetuated merely because of tradition.

[1] http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.html
What you really said though was that the value of gold has changed compared to the dollar. Gold is a usual "safe haven" in times of economic troubles - and you could say that we have had those in the last few years.

Since 2009 gold has tripled in dollar value [1]. That does not mean that the dollar has lost a third of its value.

What your figures show:

---
August 2004:
Gold $405
Google $85/share

Now:
Gold $1735
Google $576/share
---
Is this:
Gold: 1735/405 ~= 4.28
GOOG: 576/85 =~ 6.77

GOOG/Gold: 6.77/4.3 = 1.57

Google have given their shareholders a value worth 57% more than gold.

If you instead had kept your $85 in your pocket since 2004, how many dollars would have today?

[1] http://goldprice.org/NewCharts/gold/images/gold_5_year_o_s_u...
I've worked with freshman CS students.

The aggregate breaks down like this, loosely:

20% succeed, always. Hackers/nerds, basically.

80% might succeed. They don't have the talent. They succeed or fail on teacher's competence and their own hard work and background.

20% fail, always. Cheaters, people who are constitutionally incapable of getting it, misplaced students, people with health issues, etc.

The 80% is what a teacher can affect. If they don't have the thinking (math/logic) background or the curiosity, they probably won't do well.

Teaching is hard. It's probably the hardest task I've ever done.
We're limiting to GMail (including google app accounts) so we can focus on nailing the interface and auto-categorization of email. We plan to add support for other providers and possibly self-hosted in the future.
Women entrepreneurs, example not exception
For some reason traceroute is in /sbin, but it works for normal users. Probably another historical accident (did it used to require root?).
Or the even easier:

#> vim /etc/pacman.conf
[archlinuxfr]
Server = http://repo.archlinux.fr/$arch
#> pacman -Sy yaourt
Typically takes about 10-12 weeks.

http://www.quora.com/How-long-does-it-take-between-a-company...
Windows user here. I gladly abandoned Adobe Acrobat Reader as soon as I discovered Foxit Reader. But a few years ago I became unhappy with it (it was trending the same direction as Acrobat Reader: slow, bloated, intrusive) and found SumatraPDF[1], a better (for my simple needs) lean open-source alternative (its Firefox/Mozilla plugin works fine)!

[1] http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf/free-pdf-read...
What you were saying was wrong, and more importantly invalid. Gold rising in price does not equate to the USD being less valuable, because there are more than 2 things in the world. Bring the Euro and the Yuan into it if you're going to make currency-valuation based arguments.

But even more than that, compare it to stock market indices. We're talking about how the market valued it, not about currency valuations. The whole argument about currency valuations is a silly sideshow.

In conclusion, if nobody understands the brilliance of your argument, it's probably stupid.
Can you get rid of the window.alert() calls please. Annoying enough to make me stop reading.
Whereas my brain boggles at how big a pain it must have been to do a literature review pre-JSTOR/Web of Science/pdfs in general.

I am a voracious reader (generally 2-5 novels/equivalent per week, depending) and love ebooks. Carry 5 long novels, 3 YA series, 4 non-fiction books, my work literature, and an assortment of my favorite comfort/pickmeup novels/short stories/essays with me constantly and instantly searchable? Yes please.
Disclaimer: I work for Telerik (who makes Kendo UI).

Kendo UI is a relatively new entry in the HTML/JS UI space, but the engineering is based on over a decade of building professional UI for the web. We are working hard to build a complete framework that has everything you need to build sites and mobile apps with HTML5 and JavaScript.

Some of our advantages:
- Based on jQuery (familiar & less overhead for jQuery fans)
- Built for performance (JSPerf us against anyone. We're fast.)
- Clean, simple, easy to learn API
- Lightweight and modular (use what you need)
- Aggressive roadmap (3 major releases each year)
- Affordably priced ($399 with a year of updates/support!)

We just shipped a beta of Kendo UI Mobile, and our next major release will happen in March. The best way to compare Kendo UI, though, is to download it and give it a try. It's fun to use and I think you'll enjoy the developer experience.

http://www.kendoui.com/get-kendo-ui

Hope that helps.

-Todd Anglin
@toddanglin
That's what professional blogging is - rewrite someone's article, hope you hit the news aggregators first.
Razorfish raises the bar for Microsoft-based connected retail experience
Thanks for the CS Unplugged link. The program looks very cool!
Uncle Ed's laptop may not get 802.11 n or 802.11 ac (maybe not even g) either even those are all official "Wi-Fi" protocols.
Aside: I think it would be better were the animals the other way around: sheep aren't very smart (they have a tendency to start following one another for no real reason and this can quickly build up into a stampede) but goats are intelligent, curious creatures, much like programmers.
Let's not forget the whole partition split situation due to the 1024 cylinder limitation. Once upon a time, you couldn't get to certain parts of the disk from your bootloader (using BIOS calls), so you had to make something like a tiny /boot which would hide < 1024.

This situation has only improved a little. There are still lingering bits of it here and there, depending on how deeply you poke and which distribution you have installed.
What Dubai's Skyscrapers & Sewage System can Teach Big Data
Those are awesome pointers - there should be a tool that you could upload all your applications files to, the tool would scan all the files for these errors and return a report on vulnerabilities found and instructions on correcting. Maybe this already exists? I am a beginner programmer as well, making my way through Rails Tutorial (chapter 10) and Learn Ruby the Hard Way (exercise 35) and Codecademy Code year.
Announcing Bitly Enterprise 2.0
Glider will pull in your contacts and address book, and other similar data to make the transition viable. Definitely let us know if there are other features you rely on so we can work on implementing them.
Sqlite has good documentation. It starts with intro code, follows with a few good tutorials, then finishes with an Ok reference. It even has documentation to help you decide when it is the right tool for the job.

Rake has some pretty bad documentation. It was obviously written by someone who is familiar with the project and is a bit blind to the newbie perspective. The tutorial contains obvious mistakes(look at tutorial one build.sh for an example.)
And you can set separate passwords for various applications if you enable two-factor authorization.
Teaching good security practices was one goal of the Ruby on Rails Tutorial (a resource mentioned in the OP). It uses attr_accessible for every model and uses find-through-association (emphasizing the security implications of both), and it most assuredly does not use the /:controller/:action/:id pattern or backticks. It punts image upload over to Gravatar, and recommends Paperclip for those who need custom uploads.

Having a PreauthController definitely sounds like a good idea, but it might be a bit obscure for beginning developers. I'll consider it for inclusion as an exercise in one of the chapters covering authorization, or maybe I'll include it in more advanced Rails Tutorial material down the road. Thanks for the tip.
This all depends on how lucky/smart you are with the job you select. At many large companies, and at a few (not yet baked) startups you will probably feel as though you aren't having much impact.

I am mostly on the startup/entrepreneurial/side project route because my day jobs were weird and completely devoid of meaning.
The Fedora changes are bikeshedding. They start with wanting to change something, and then find a justification. Why not just put all the executables files in /Program Files/?

All this to save a few bytes in $PATH, to avoid problems with systemd, and to avoid fixing udev.
No, it's not. Sorry to be blunt, but it seems colleges want more and more of their students.

Already know how to program and have several jobs under your belt to prove it? Step right in, of course we'll accept you over the schmuck who wasted his high school drawing or playing music.

It angers me that what is primarily an educational institution insists on having their students pre-educated. You'd ideally want your students to have solid fundamentals, yes. But the reality is that most of them don't, and casting away those kids is the easy way out. I listened to a talk by a dean of one of the best technical schools in Turkey, and he said, "we spend your first year erasing all the junk put into your brain in highschool, and re-teach you the fundamentals". I think this is the better way.
Those also require your password, as far as I'm aware.
Take a cue from the car wraps business: If you could quantify the value of a torso (that person rides the train every day, or walks 2 miles in SOMA, or works at Google, or is the 4sq mayor of 20 hip joints), then the owner of that torso can get your monthly shirt for free... and the startups will pay for that. In fact, any brand would pay for that, so you may want to expand the positioning to take any company's schwag.
It eventually clicks.

I started actively teaching myself Rails in Dec 2010 after dabbling with it off and on for years. Went in blindly like most of us do. The uneasiness of the aloofness was eased by the fact that I was learning every day and dangerously productive with what I did know.

Didn't finally grok what REST actually was until last month. It also took me months to finally understand what exactly "mass assignment" meant and what `attr_accessible` is actually protecting against. http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveModel/MassAssignmen...

I feel like every little thing I learn just makes it easier to predict how other things work and gives me more wherewithal to dig in and learn how they work. I also finally started just reading the dang API for once which is incredibly documented compared to what it was many years ago when I first encountered Rails.

Stick with it and actively pursue the things you don't understand. reddit.com/r/ruby, r/rails, stackoverflow, HN comments, and irc.freenode.net's #rubyonrails have been huge helps. In fact, I just started hanging out on #rubyonrails while I'm getting work done. If I don't have a question of my own, I learn even more trying to answer other questions. And I found that #rubyonrails is the best place to ask "why is it this way" because it's too meta for stackoverflow and sometimes all you need is a succinct explanation for something to click.
How To Get Even More Free Books For Your Kindle Fire
Ask HN: Domains for sale should be striped from the owner
The numbers of domains registered purely to be sold on seem very high compared to those actually in use. Could / should ICANN do anything about it?
Google Music Now Lets You Download All Your Saved Music
What's the pricing or a business model in general?
Frontpage re-imagining: Ridejoy
A funny exchange? What is this, Reddit?

Get serious, all of you.
Hmm, I had some alert() calls in there a few hours ago for testing, but I thought I took them all out (just double checked). What does the alert say?
Way, way too long. Go read the FHS:

- If it's needed to boot the system, it belongs in /

- Binaries for normal users are in bin, system (i.e., root user only) binaries are in sbin

That's all.
Curebit (YC W11) Raises $1.2 Million For Online Referral System
Exactly.

Way back in the 1980s, when I was an undergrad, just switched majors from Journalism to Computer Science, I had a professor that tossed this very exercise out during class, my 1st class (which we quickly learned Fortran, then Pascal at a slower pace, titled "Intro to Programming and Algorithms I"). Except he named the variables BARF and BEER. And led everyone to believe that if BARF = 3 and BEER = 47 and then BARF = BEER, that their storage contents would be reversed. Nodding his head and asking if this was correct -- to which the entire class raised its hand except for the very few (this was 1983 mind you) who had some experience who sat smugly by, knowing the punchline already.

I instinctively also raised my hand, but had an inkling that something was askew, and in a snap, I got it, before he "played CPU" and scribbled an line-by-line execute process on the chalkboard. It might sound trite, but it was a thrilling note, to realize something logical that your brain short-circuits. Today, in languages, you can write something like "a, b = b, a", giving you that sugar sparing temporary variable and confirmed my choice to pursue a computer science degree.

That "aha" moment was repeated when learning about pointers, recursion, regular expressions, etc.…

But I wonder, the way my 1st teacher presented it, if the way he stoked and kindled the curiosity fueled and whetted an aptitude for programming. Not that it made me super-rock-star-programmer but it certainly led me on a quest that resulted in semi-successful (I mean I have made a living, but not built things that sold for millions and billions :)) career. Contrast that to advanced math classes I had where the professors were arrogant a-holes, seemingly solely interested in showcasing their intellectual chops.
TN State Senator Complete Ignorance on AIDS and Gays
GOP State Senator Stacey Campfield, the man who spearheaded Tennessee's "Don't Say Gay" bill -- which would ban discussion in schools of "sexual orientation other than heterosexuality"-- lashed out at arguments against his bill by comparing homosexuality to bestiality and making what public health officials would characterize as recklessly false assertions about AIDS
I know about FHS and the rationale FHS uses for the continued existence of /usr, I just do not agree with it (nor with the existence of /usr/share).
It's questionable to base public policy on individual choices when the costs of those choices are socialized and the benefits of those choices are privatized.
It annoys the hell out of me that people are still imposing the 486-era 1024Cyl and 8GB limitations in 2012.

ArchLinux, for example, still really, really wants you to make a /boot.
Wow. As someone who was there (I know dating my self here) reading this is kind of like that scene in Sleeper where the person from the future is trying to understand artifacts from the past.

So during the BSD / System V merge (project Lulu at Sun) the /opt filesystem was introduced as a way to keep 'packages' separate from 'system'. The difference between /bin and /sbin was that sbin was 'static-bin' which is to say everything in it was statically linked and could run without any libraries being available.

The fact that Linux starts up differently is because Linux never was UNIX they are two different OSes, pretty much from the ground up. They use similar concepts, processes, file descriptors, Etc, but they are two different species. FreeBSD on the other hand is a derivative of UNIX and last time I checked it started up in a similar way.

The lack of space on the RK05s was indeed the reason for the addition of /usr/{lib, bin} and the general consensus at Sun and AT&T in the 80's was that the root file system contained the system, and the /usr file system contained stuff that was not-system.

AT&T (the guys that 'owned' UNIX) had some pretty detailed specifications about what lived in what directory and why. It was a "BigDeal" (tm) to add a new directory in the root file system so new directories, when they were proposed, appeared under /usr. And once /opt existed it gave people free reign to create their own trees. Early package managers would build /opt/<package>/{bin/lib/share/man} and the downside was that ones path variable got longer and longer, and there arguments about if there should be more constraints on opt.
Harvard Introduces venture fund with New Enterprise Associates
Damn that 2009 job request of mine. I coulda, woulda, and shoulda. Haha.
Conventional (that is, without capabilities) traceroute and ping were setuid root because it there was no provision for emitting ICMP packets in the network APIs and only root could assemble raw packets.
moreutils: tools that nobody thought to write long ago when unix was young
I can see the Mashable article but I can't see the WSJ article (presumably because I'm not a subscriber).
memcached is standalone, no one server knows about any other server, so at a simple level, no. It also can't go out and fetch data from else where, it's either got the data or it hasn't.

You could write a more complex cacheing layer on top of memcached that looked first in memcached, then fetched from solid state storage if it wasn't there. That's kind of what we will be using it for by wrapping Rails around it.
Agreed, sharding takes "throwing hardware at the problem" to a whole new level.
He doesn't; the entire argument is base independent.
Yes, you OAuth and then you can use IMAP with XOAUTH login.
Hell, no. If you have a car just sitting in your garage, should you have to surrender it to the DMV (department of motor vehicles)? I've purchased many domains that I planned to use; but plans don't always work out. That doesn't mean I should have to surrender my assets. Yes, I'm frustrated when a domain I want is taken and I visit the site only to see a "search page". But that's the owner's option. Maybe all those dormant projects on SourceForge should have to give up their project names, too?
Imgur.com Is Getting 6 Million Views A DAY and growing at a 20% PER MONTH Rate
The stats for this site are amazing. Here's an interview with Alan Schaaf the creator
Not everyone has a WSJ subscripton. I don't see the article when I click on the above link.
The particular way traceroute runs is implementation-defined. Some use ICMP echo request packets (ping), which you have to be root to send on most Unices. Most of them, however, use UDP packets instead.
One nice thing about talking to GMail is you can use OAuth (via IMAP, XOAUTH login), so that you never have to see the end user's password.
Last week I set up a heroku+twilio app to call me and yell whenever I curled its URL.

The idea was to use it to train myself to stop hitting ESC in vim, but I'm sure it's portable for other pavlovian needs.

https://github.com/dpritchett/no-calls-please
Amazon Customer Finds Bag of Cocaine Inside of Used Textbook
Ferris Bueller comes back in Honda Super Bowl 2012 Ad
So you're basically claiming that what he added to science, maths and engineering was that he was a revolutionary illustrator? I would probably believe that, if it was accompanied by some evidence. Even this claim you describe in extremely vague terms, as always with da Vinci. What exactly did he do different than his predecessors? What were his great accomplishments exactly, that put him in the same category as Newton and Gauss, or even higher than them?

> So what's the big stink with Newton? I mean, we have much better mathematicians and scientists now? By modern standards Newton is incomplete and imprecise. <-- Note sarcasm.

Even though you mark this as sarcasm, I'd like to address this. Of course modern mathematicians and scientists do better in absolute terms. What Newton did is now common knowledge. What makes Newton so great is not his absolute level, but the things he added to science. The delta between scientific and mathematical knowledge before Newton and after Newton is huge. So what is da Vinci's delta? In concrete terms; not just a logical fallacy like "you don't know what da Vinci's contributions are, so they are so entrenched in society that they must be great!".

> (Note: Don't confuse what I'm talking about with linear perspective, developed in the west by Brunelleschi, a contemporary of Da Vinci. Linear perspective is vitally important to this, and Da Vinci made good use of it. Visually, better than anyone else at the time.)

Interestingly, perspective was already understood by Euclid in 300BC and described in his work on optics. Alas, like the Greeks' knowledge that the earth is a sphere (heck they even measured the diameter), this was largely forgotten and didn't become mainstream artistic knowledge until much later.

> Da Vinci's Lady with an Ermine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_with_an_Ermine) was one project. I still have nightmares about it. I spent six months on it and never got anywhere close. And it's considered a lessor work.

I'm sorry if this comes of as rude, but that's hardly proof that da Vinci was an extraordinarily good painter. Still, I have no problem conceding this point the third time. When I look at da Vinci's paintings I see nothing particularly worthy of deification above all other painters (on the contrary), but then I don't have a degree in Fine Arts so I accept that people who are experts on the matter have it right and my tastes have it wrong.

The problem is that he is in general deified for being an all-round genius, not just a painter.
Your landing page is nice, but I'd really like to see a proper screenshot available.
The impressive part is them understanding and advantage of "opportunity cost".

In business, nobody, cares what you can do with "how little [computing] resources". Running a web services is not a circus act.

What matters is how effectively you do what you do, and that is not just a parameter of "using little computing resources". Efficiency includes saving time of your team, saving engineering pay, not evolving your system into a messy architecture, and having peace of mind. When a bucketload of RAM costs 1/5th of a developer's yearly salary, use RAM and not 2-3 developers for a year.

For that same reason, the fact that "anyone can brute-force it" doesn't mean a thing. It's like saying "anyone can save money". Actually it reminds me of this classic quote:

Gonzo: Well, I want to go to Bombay, India and become a movie star.

Fozzie: You don't go to Bombay to become a movie star! You go where we're going: Hollywood.

Gonzo: Sure, if you want to do it the easy way.
I wonder if the timing has to do with Google's recent "hey let's fuck up our core feature!" (search)
I've started following this rule for all of my personal projects. However, many of us find it difficult to apply this rule to the software we write on the job. Most of the projects we work on aren't for us. They are for customers with vastly different needs. When you are creating that type of product, I don't think this rule really applies.
New Orleans' Tech Scene is Not on Bourbon Street
There are plenty of good reasons to make a /boot. Encrypted laptops for example.
I'm not huge into email clients, but perhaps that's just because I never found one that offered me much that my web client does not. With that in mind, I sincerely wish you the best of luck and hope that you can change mind.

Unrelated, the CSS background on your marketing page is a little borked on larger screens:

http://i.imgur.com/uoYkJ.png

I'm on a standard 27" apple display running at 2560 x 1440 (which was the default resolution).