skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Remember: Google was a search engine, and Amazon was a book store. Facebook doesn't have to stay a social network, and there are plenty of things they can do with their resources. There's a lot you can do once you have a global network of users assembled.
There's an interesting piece of advice at the bottom of this post - the author symlinks /bin, /sbin, and /lib to /usr/whatever. Anybody else have an opinion on that practice? It's kind of unnecessary, but it also doesn't break anything.
It's a separate process for security reasons, and so crashes wont crash the browser. However the whole damn thing is more or less mutexed to hell.

The long timeout is there so freaken' farmvile works. But the whole browser freezes.
There is no such thing as independent design. We've been copying and remixing since before we were painting on cave walls.
Yeah, I agree. We came to a similar conclusion and that's definitely one of our long term goals.
How LinkedIn generates the "viewers of this profile also viewed" list of users
This case is funny.

Pirates demanding the return of intellectual property.
It may be interesting to compare growth VS gold.. but is it standard to compare against the price of gold?

I know nothing of valuation, but by that logic the price of gold would never be worth more.. than.. the price of gold?

I thought you'd value the gain in the market currency, aka dollars. No?
> it's perfectly appropriate to apply Wi-Fi to any wireless TCP/IP networking device

Until you try to explain to your Uncle Ed why his laptop can't access the eBay even though they just rolled out the Super-WiFi in his region.
Now, this is stupid.
Also completely irrelevant, but made me think of http://www.savewalterwhite.com/ (from Breaking Bad) and the donation dinger.
Ask HN: Will you buy Facebook stock?
This Atlantic article has a lot on what makes good teachers and why it's so important to find them: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/01/what-mak... .

In the vast majority of schools in the U.S., however, it's almost impossible to fire teachers after two to three years of employment; in many schools, it's virtually impossible to fire them even before.
great sig:

GPLv3: as worthy a successor as The Phantom Menace, as timely as Duke Nukem
Forever, and as welcome as New Coke.
you make excellent points, but that still doesn't answer pnathan's problem. He just wants to get his work done, and he's getting just that with a Mac. Maybe he would not like to invest time in configuring his OS, that's a personal decision. Yes, OS customization may be an interesting/exhilarating experience for you, but maybe not for him; that's how its "getting in the way", for him
The Facebook Phone actually is planned.

http://allthingsd.com/20111121/the-facebook-phone-its-finall...
It's not physically impossible to change the hardware, software, or batteries of any Apple product, it's just not designed to accomodate that. By selling a separate OS to multiple different PC vendors, Microsoft actually employed the exact opposite tactic, and that hasn't exactly been an unvarnished success.

It's counterfactual to speculate on what Apple might have done if they won the PC war. The fact remains that Microsoft abused their monopoly to undermine Netscape and Java and stole the source code to Quicktime.
Welcome to HN. I see you've been here for a couple of months. Please review the guidelines. http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I think this statement sums up the perspective I'm talking about:

"NumPy is just the beginning (SciPy, matplotlib, scikits, and 100s of other packages and legacy C/C++ and Fortran code are all very important)"

I'm not that familiar with matplotlib and not familiar at all with scikits. But, the point is that there is a lot of other C/Fortran code that users of NumPy rely on. How much do you gain by porting NumPy to PyPy? (Not a rhetorical question... I'm genuinely curious why the PyPy folks have chosen this as a goal?)

PyPy team, if you're out there, please don't take my question as criticism -- it's not. I'm just genuinely curious. Congrats on getting the funding and keep doing what you love!
You may want to re-read the article. It never said that having a correct mental model of assignment meant anything at all. It said having a _consistent_ mental model of assignment was what was important. Correctness can be taught, but people who cannot maintain a consistent model will always fail, because even if they're taught the correct way, they won't apply it consistently.
I already am one, kind of.. I work for these guys: www.mitre.org

My day job is broad enough that I get to sate most of my professional desires in one way or another. Now I have grad school to explore some topics in depth and expand my education. It's working out very well so far.
So do the pirates, though, it seems to me. They usually aren't big proponents on being able to control your data.

Information wants to be free? Well, part of freeing something is that you can lose it forever.
Link NASA's GitHub page: https://github.com/nasa
> I'm still waiting for /opt/local to show up...

Wait no longer: http://guide.macports.org/
Biology? Because billions of years of evolution have made us all think: "We should have kids and hang around long enough to make sure they have kids too. That way we can keep this caravan rolling."

That's a pretty big motivator.
> My Arch system doesn't inundate me with pop-ups to update my system with out-of-date libraries. It doesn't integrate "the social web" into my "desktop." In fact it doesn't do anything unless I specifically want it to.

All these things are also true with Ubuntu.
your landing page looks very promissing, just what I wish I could use right now. signed up for beta, good luck with launching soon!
Sorry about that. I put the sound onload because I thought it was kinda funny -- and also as a demonstration in case some potential users were unaware that a website can make noises (thank you HTML5. no thank you to Chrome/Safari supporting only mp3 and Firefox for only supporting WAV).

Perhaps I should get rid of the onload sound. Or have a link that says "click here to hear a sound" or something.

Update: I just commented out the onload sound. In retrospect it was annoying. Thank you.
Luckily we bought single threaded RAM ;)
Well it's half true. But if you read till the end, you'll see I was pretty open about this. And next week I'll post on HN to explain how this strategy yielded quite a lot of downloads in a short period of time ;)
Google was underpriced at the IPO; there's no indication that stocks should be systematically underpriced to the same extent.

Since Google went public, investors have learned a lot more about how these business models work, and how quickly they can build durable competitive advantages.

If "Can it go up 5X" were the threshold for going public, investors would price this in, so the actual threshold would drop.

The bull case for Facebook is basically that it's by far the cheapest platform for spreading memes--whether those memes are shared infographics, political slogans, or, say, the existence of Gap's latest sale. Plus, FB owns identity in a way few other sites can match--even Google only owns identity around the ages (they know what you want but don't yet have; Facebook knows more about who you are). Through credits, FB essentially owns a piece of any successful business built on its platform; if it were a country, $100bn would not be an excessive valuation to put on the net present value of its future taxes collected, less collection costs.
You just can't compare to one currency and say it costs 5 times more. What I tried to say was that USD's value changed over the years. Apparently no one understood and everyone is trying to be funny. Sad.
It's also possible that gold is not a good indicator of value. (Go to the store and try buying something with gold.)
I don't like to use buzzwords, but this looks to be disruptive.

Let's take a trip back to 1996 in the Wayback Machine:

"Later this summer, Netscape will roll out a comprehensive Internet strategy that will position its servers and browser as a next-generation Internet-based operating system.

...The only difference technically between Netscape's Navigator browser and a traditional operating system is that Navigator will not include device drivers, [Marc] Andreessen said."

http://web.archive.org/web/19990428173124/http://www8.zdnet....
> it seems like a pretty fair deal to me.

To heavily paraphrase Benjamin Franklin: those who would give up privacy to obtain moderately more relevant search results, deserve neither privacy nor relevant search results.

Privacy is freedom, knowledge is power, convenience is safety.

> Maybe where we differ is that I sort of see the end of privacy as a foregone conclusion

It might well be, but that doesn't mean it's not worth fighting for in the meantime. I don't believe human society is evolved enough to handle a complete loss of privacy quite yet.

> Credit card companies [...] [sell our] data with absolutely no compunctions

You've just reinforced my earlier point. This is precisely why we don't want Google to profit from our personal data. I want Google to stay on my side.

> I don't think it's fair to call Google "evil" until they actually do something evil

I didn't. But as I said earlier, if they allow themselves to enter into a situation where they're either forced to do "evil" or can't tell if what they're doing is "evil" or not, they are not adhering to the spirit of their motto.

However I think at this point we should call it a day and agree to disagree as we're starting to go around in circles. I did very much enjoy the discussion though and it gave me much food for thought.

I'll leave you with this:

Privacy has to be viewed in the context of relative power. For example, the government has a lot more power than the people. So privacy for the government increases their power and increases the power imbalance between government and the people; it decreases liberty. [...] Privacy for the people increases their power. It also increases liberty, because it reduces the power imbalance between government and the people. (Bruce Schneier)

...and the last word, if you want it!
LinkedIn's use of member photos
Without attracting too much publicity, LinkedIn has updated their privacy conditions. Without any action from your side, LinkedIn is now permitted to use your name and picture in any of their advertisements.

Some simple actions to be considered:

1. Place the cursor on your name at the top right corner of the screen. From the small
pull down menu that appears, select "settings"
2. Then click "Account" on the left/bottom
3. In the column next to Account, select the option "Manage Social Advertising"
4. Finally un-tick the box "LinkedIn may use my name and photo in social advertising"
5. and Save

Via Inbox>Compose message in Linkedin, you can spread the word to 50 connections at once.
As part of the IPO or after? I just called my broker and they said that I have a slim to zero chance of getting in on the IPO unless I have a bunch more zeroes added on the to amount of money I have to spend.
That's an over simplified version of what the next Fedora is going to be doing. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/UsrMove

The Fedora move is why this link got posted and is getting upvotes.
From the landing page: "One of the programmers set up the computers so that a bell would ring every time an order came in."

Continuation of the quote in the WSJ source:
"A great novelty at first, it quickly got annoying and had to be turned off."
Help Wanted: US CTO
I've loaded up with a few shares via second market and I literally can't buy enough, even my grandmother is in Facebook.

It's going to be an industry leader and there will be strong demand from money managers which one would imagine will only lead for a strong buy sentiment.
I've been using Arch on my little Samsung N150 for a while now. Initial setup was tedious but not altogether difficult thanks to their brilliant wiki. I'm no guru and I'm sure If I looked hard enough I could find excellent documentation on Ubuntu. I don't have to look far for Arch, a simple google nets me their wiki page as a top result and it's almost always able to fix any current problem.
would you believe 4 things? - maxwell
Leonardo did a lot more practical engineering than just making fanciful drawing of flying machines, and his anatomical drawings, for one, were remarkable.
A collection of post-mortem startups posts.
There was a pretty funny scene in Middle Men regarding this very topic. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1251757/
Fair warning: a similar system nearly caused me to destroy my cellphone, the screen over my window, and the windshield of the Honda beneath it.
The title isn't quite correct. He explains /bin vs. /usr/bin, but not /bin vs. /sbin.

My understanding for the latter is that /bin is "normal stuff", while /sbin is system maintenance. But, hey, maybe that split is actually there for obsolete historical reasons, too. Does anyone know?
Reminds me of Middle Men. "We just made $9.99..."
http://www.traileraddict.com/clip/middle-men/we-just-made-99...
Maybe, but its not so rare to see physical things for free that an adult would be in disbelief at the very idea. I think that it's no trouble to me to ask "are these really free?", but it's a lot of troble to me to have you running down the road after me shouting "stop thief!", then shouting at me so I feel like a fool, then making me unwelcome to come bsck in future. Maybe you only mean some books, or a bit of the sign blew away, or I misunderstand the context, maybe someone put the sign there as a joke, maybe all sorts of awkward misunderstandings.
QR Codes Are the Roller-Skating Horses of Advertising
Nevada GOP to release caucus results via Twitter, Google
Former inmate wins $22 million over 'forgotten' solitary confinement
Isn't that the same position as Microsoft is suspected to have?
Feel Good Friday: A Moment from Viva La Vida Live in Tokyo
Why does he assume nature requires decimal representation for her calculations?
"as we involve the U.S. military in more and more missions that look highly political"

"War is the continuation of politics by other means." - Carl von Clausewitz (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_von_Clausewitz)
NeXT soaked up over $1 billion in investment about a decade before selling to Apple. If it's a success now, it's only because if you traded your NeXT stock for equivalent Apple stock in 1997, it would probably represent a significant return on the money invested in NeXT in the 1980's. But you'd have gotten an even better return by having that money in federal bonds between 1985 and 1997 (and then investing it in Apple) rather than having it in NeXT.
Nice work! It would be very helpful if there was a special URL that could be shared with employees that want to receive the notice.

Perhaps also a small Win/Lin/Mac resident service, and mobile app?
My understanding is that bin is used for programs that do not require super user privileges, where as sbin programs do.
Why are you only supporting GMail? I mean, basically IMAP should do it, right? Considering the recent drop of "don't be evil", I'm seriously thinking about returning to self-hosted email and it would be a shame if such a hopefully great service wouldn't work with that..
Ship it as soon as you get the wheels on.
That's the point. You can't buy food with gold or stocks, but you can with money (currency). So that is what you measure the value with.
I was told, in 1996, that Amazon's plan was to become Wal-mart on the Internet; selling absolutely everything, and doing so at high volume.

They were a bookstore, but their pitch deck described Acts 2 and 3.
Show HN: "That's what she said" bookmarklet
Hey, GMail doesn't have a public API does it? Could you tell us a bit about how you integrate with gmail, I thought they kept it pretty locked down?
"What speed of internet do you have?"

"Wireless!"

sigh
The education thing is interesting (and didn't they recently restart some old intra-school features they had in the old days?), and there's a lot of opportunity in the Blackboard space.

The Khan Academy in particular, though, is a non-profit. I don't even resemble an expert on the subject, but I think that would make acquisition difficult to (practically) impossible. And even if it were legally easy, Salman Khan's success and ambitions makes it extremely unlikely he would agree to it (eg move from CC to "sign in using your facebook ID?").

A partnership might fall in line with their mission, though.
And the reason for splitting them is so that normal users don't have the super-user programs in their $PATH, since they would be useless there. Of course, this is arguably obsolete now since the advent of sudo, policykit, and so on.
What's the value in Economist Burgernomics?

http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/07/big-mac-in...
Glorious.

More history bits like this please.

At the same time, makes you think about dropping FHS .. yeah I said it.
Why do I do what I do?
This reminded me of the Netscape FTP server rigging. They had an Indy play a cannon shot every time someone successfully finished a download. It's a small part of a much bigger story, and all of it is good as far as I am concerned.

http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nscpdorm.html
I love that. Though I think what the author was trying to say (I read an interview with Bezos somewhere) is that "[amazon orders started pouring in so rapidly that] it got annoying..."

Nevertheless, I think I could find a "softer" sound that would be less jarring. Maybe let users select from different sounds or upload their own. Or something.

I read somewhere about a company that did monitoring by playing white noise that corresponded with certain key metrics (such as the rate of new users). The noise was invisible until it changed slightly in pitch, which meant something unusual was happening.
What's making it difficult for me is that, even with your explanation on the difference between Atlanta proper and greater Atlanta, your article doesn't include much in the way of facts that would undermine Cars Kill Cities. If indeed most "cars are designed for city roads," that's amazing. Where did you hear that?

Edwards lays claim to some persuasive evidence. You're certainly free to call his numbers bogus, but simply saying "Ask the manufacturers; that the truth" isn't enough for me. Which manufacturers? Do they make something like the "average American sedan" cited by Edwards? No lie, you would kill Cars Kill Cities for me if you provided the following two examples: 1). An "average American sedan" that somehow gets better city mpg than highway; and 2) the same "average" sedan that somehow takes up less than a full parking space.

These two points pretty much sum up Edwards' entire article; face these points with examples that contradict them, and maybe the issue will then be that we're all just driving the wrong car.
> This is demonstrably true, at least in the U.S.

Demonstrably true here in India as well.

True that I can't speak for all of India, or you can't speak for all of US; but I believe I have enough data points for the extrapolation to be valid.

I think that's enough to infer we have a problem, and it's largely ignored.

> cletus believes he is a more thoughtful educator than people who spend their careers on it.

I don't think it matters what cletus thinks. Conceited or not, I see his observations mostly hold in the real world.
Reminds me of the days when 1 MB of RAM did cost 500 bucks. Used to run Windows 95 :) after installing from floppy.
much of the original traditional unix file system hierarchy is basically redundant and unnecessary in the modern age. for a good overview (from the author of a linux distribution which departs completely from this tradition), see:

http://www.gobolinux.org/index.php?page=doc/articles/clueles...
Can you explain more? You aren't talking about writing data that is cached in the SSD to a regular hard-drive, are you?
My understanding of Godels is that it only implies that a super system will always be required to explain certain results in a base system.

Which does not refute out ability to model nature.
You mean other than SMTP or POP? Those are both definitely public APIs.
I appreciate the minimalist philosophy, and Arch is on my todo list (it's even got a vm allocated). However, I seemed to have evolved into a more dual-pronged strategy - Full featured Ubuntu desktop, with relatively stripped down Ubuntu/Cent/OpenSUSE servers running in VMs.

For my desktop, I still value 'just works' over minimalism. Things like Spotify just work out of the box. And any software I may want to play with in the future that has to choose which distro to target will most likely target Ubuntu and Fedora first.

Also, the Debian repo is extensive, and the Ubuntu PPA system almost always compensates for when the Debian package is too outdated.

I also like where Ubuntu is going with the UI/UX. At first I hated the idea of the sidebar, but after trying it and realizing it autohides and stays out of your way most of the time, I switched my opinion. And I'm really looking forward to HUD in 12.04. I've been wanting an integrated Gnome-Do/Synapse for a long time now.

Finally, I get my minimalism fix where it's most important - on the servers. I can set up a local dev environment using vm's that mirrors production - database server on one vm, app server on another vm, and Nginx running on the desktop and pointing to the app server vm.

It does annoy me to start up htop on the desktop, and compare the plethora of stuff I see there with what htop on the servers displays. But I just accept it for now.

Compared to that best-of-both-worlds setup, Arch seems like it would require more compromises than is worth the time and effort to deal with it. I still intend to learn it, just because I value things that will help me learn Linux (or any of my primary tools) better. But I don't see fully making the switch to Arch.

Thoughts?
The most galling line in the response from their lawyers is:

"May I also stress that when you are relating this issue to third parties on whatever platform I would consider it unfair if you did not relay the fact that we immediately acknowledged your copyright and sought to bring redress."

The implication being that when discussing being wronged, you must for represent the other party's perspective as well. Is that something we can ask of Sky as well?
I've personally fixed many issues with email sorting myself with Gmail filters and so forth but it would be nice if I didn't have to have these filters and my client did it magically.

I hope it keeps my Google address book and my ability to send from a selection email addresses I own. Losing those would be a deal breaker.
Interactive chart of Tech IPOs, Both Booms and Busts.
There are a variety of tools that live in /bin but are symlinked in /usr/bin, at least on my 10.04 LTS box:

$ for f in /bin/*; do [ -e "/usr$f" ] && echo /usr$f; done;
/usr/bin/dumpkeys
/usr/bin/ksh
/usr/bin/less
/usr/bin/lessecho
/usr/bin/lessfile
/usr/bin/lesskey
/usr/bin/lesspipe
/usr/bin/loadkeys
/usr/bin/mail
/usr/bin/nano
/usr/bin/tcsh
/usr/bin/touch
/usr/bin/which
/usr/bin/zsh

This has the potential to blow something up during the installation procedure if it is not carefully crafted to realize that these files are the same and to ignore link's failure.
Good idea about letting users send out a special (obscure) URL for public consumption.

Also good idea about an app.

As for Win/Lin/Mac resident service -- I just open a browser window, load bellbot, then minimize it.
Why is this a link to Mashable when all the reporting work and original information is from the Wall Street Journal?

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405297020457370457718...
Jan. 27th, 2012 - Steven Tyler Voted off ‘American Idol’, Unanimously