skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I still have various partitions: /, /var, /usr, and /tmp (on a single slice). When I am in single user mode the only binaries I have available are in /bin. Unless I mount /usr that is all I have access to, so the split still makes perfect sense.

A lot of Linux distributions by default suggest using the entire disk and creating a single partition named /. In that case it doesn't make sense to have the various different locations since mounting / means you have /usr/bin as well.

I don't want a user being able to fill up the hard drive stopping me from writing my logs, stopping me from logging in or various other things (yes, i've filled up my / partition at one point and was unable to log in because SSH was failing to log something or other). There are also security reasons and being able to set various security flags on mount makes it easier to secure a machine as well (such as noexec on /tmp and or /var).
We're working on a non-standard search implementation that takes into account not only the terms you're searching for, but the type of emails your expecting your query to return (without adding additional operators or search complexity).

Our interface and the way we present emails on the page (contrary to traditional inboxes) decreases the importance of having phenomenal search algorithms.
The watercone is great for non-potable water that isn't contaminated with compounds that also boil below or near 100 °C and are either in A) high proportion or B) that bio-accumulate.

If the preliminary findings with the graphene oxide are hold true, you could stick a cap made of the stuff on a watercone evaporating a bunch of zombie blood and end up with ASTM Type I water to keep you hydrated after the zombie apocalypse.
Which is precisely the sort of thing that leads me to say that!
I'm curious, what is your opposition to `/usr/share`? It seems quite logical to me as a place to store non-executable, read-only, shareable data like man pages and other documentation, fonts, keymaps, color profiles, game data, etc. Where else would you propose to store this sort of thing? I can't really think of a different location in the hierarchy that would make sense.
You'd change your mind after wearing a Twilio shirt. They're paper thin and the giant circle logo that wraps around the side of your abdomen is stiff and scratchy. I have a lot of startup shirts from the old Startup Schwag, Twilio's is the only one I can't wear.
Every field engineer is trained on the proper use of a static mat and wrist strap. It takes only 30 seconds to put one on. Just because the field engineers are lazy and are ignoring their training doesn't make the risk of ESD any lower than it is. In cold winter climates with forced air heating and humidity less than 10%, how likely is it to cause an ESD?

Inexplicable component failures; random errors weeks or even months down the road. These are all caused by ESD. Just because you want to ignore the laws of physics doesn't mean they don't apply to you.
Citogenesis in science and the importance of real problems
> Before I start writing a single line of code, I write the README and fill it with usage examples. I pretend that the module I want to build is already written and available, and I write some code with it.

I write the same way. It forces you to think of how intuitive and natural your code should be. I've run into so much code that makes me wonder, "did they even consider how someone will want to use this?" Software should resonate with how people expect to use it, coming in with little-to-no understanding of the actual implementation.
Cargo cult driven development
I don't know - you don't necessarily have to compete with the hundreds of billions of dollars of wealth; you just need to be able to compete with the expectations of their wealth after you roll in your tanks and attempt to crush them. This is presumably a lower value, iff you have a credible threat to actually go in there and crush them with your tanks (which takes military expertise, expenditure, and the political will to pull it off).

In the current state of the US, however, the political will for new military action is fairly minimal, for better or for worse.
First of all Twitter is not a "vastly richer internet giant". Secondly, the whole point of regulation is that twitter has to comply. What you pointed out they can ALSO do is sensor all the other tweets as a form of a boycott.

What the article points out is that for people opposed to sensorship, it's more productive to stop governments from sensoring, rather than pressure Twitter. If Twitter goes away, there is no guarantee other companies won't sensor things as well.
In 1995, I used to tutor my classmates in a first year computer science course. I noticed that the people I tutored always had a bad attitude towards programming. I used to hear (and have to deal with) objections like, "this is stupid" or "this is boring"...

In retrospect, I don't know why I put up with all of that. I think it was 18 year old Greg's way of meeting girls...:)

I wonder if attitude towards programming is responsible for the distribution? Seems to me that people either love programming or loathe it - there isn't a whole lot of middle ground.
Facebook to file for $75-100B IPO Wednesday
It's just determination :D
so sad...
Programmers also don't have to worry about things like e.g. choosing colors. Which is something I, for one, feel pretty hopeless at.
exp(i tau) = 1
WSJ won't even show the title of the article at that link.

http://i.imgur.com/xhQrV.png
Your sentiment comes up a lot, and I tend to point to this essay when it does: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2639456
You're trying to say Arch doesn't take more work to get up and running? Even OP says otherwise, so please...
It would break FreeBSD's single user mode when using the defaults during installation for partitioning.

FreeBSD's default install creates: /, /usr, /tmp, /var and swap space.

When you boot in single-user mode all you get is / and nothing else. If everything was in /usr you wouldn't be able to mount /usr ... :P
Provding free wifi? Hardware help?
I'm planning on helping a friend provide free Wifi to his customers in a large public house.

What would be the best hardware solution for a fast, secure and reliable network with around 100 simultaneous users.
Thanks for the heads up. I'll definitely take care of that CSS issue in the next iteration.

What web client do you use?
Because everyone's idea of what "makes sense" is different. Thus:

/bin

/usr/bin

/usr/share/bin

/usr/share/local/bin

/usr/local/bin

/usr/local/share/bin

/opt/bin

/opt/some/clever/path/system/bin

Followed by hacky symlinks so that programs can find what they're looking for in /usr/local/share/lib/x, which really resides in /usr/share/lib/x or maybe /var/lib or maybe /var/local/lib or maybe just /lib because it's considered "essential" on some systems but not others.

It reminds me of this: http://xkcd.com/927/
My cofounders and I met at FounderDating 2 years ago. All 3 of us are hackers, so the first time we got together after that we wrote & launched our first project together in 12 hours. Super impressed with the high caliber hackers & designers at this event! Definitely not your typical networking schmooze.
Slowly but surely, the internet will receive the same censorship apparent in public broadcasting.

The fun's over. We've been discovered.
This.

IMHO, humanity's goal for the next hundred years is to enhance our energy and medical technologies as quickly as possible. (space takes a distant third).

We are essentially in a race against time: if we are too slow, we will deplete our resources and wipe ourselves out.

There are lots and lots of things that are worth a single human's life (or tens, hundreds of lives). Research is one of them. For instance, if we could magically trade a random 100 lives for knowing if there is extraterrestrial life, I believe that it's a worthy trade. That's just one example.
Feynman said in his talk on quantum computing (IIRC) that this bugged him -- how according to our best understanding of physics it takes an infinite amount of computation to predict what happens in an arbitrarily small volume. And that was part of what set him to thinking about quantum-mechanical computers. (I should look up the actual quote, though.)
The plan is not to "host" arguments, but rather a place where people can point out others logical mistakes - hoping they will learn from them and improve. Makes sense?
All I can say is, I looked under the hood at the application we're talking about and thought these might be useful suggestions. Particularly attr_accessible.

I've found a lot of Rails apps over the last couple years that were diligent about having an attr_accessible in every model, but not diligent about what went in the attr_accessible. Following the Rails idiom, they were doing all their attribute assignment through update-style params[:model] model[foo] model[bar] stuff, and attr_accessible "breaks" that.

The Rails tutorial is good (and ambitious) --- just know, this stuff trips up solid, experienced Rails developers all the time.
Did the tilted screenshot on the homepage show up? We had some JS issues earlier.

Here's a full screenshot of our current iteration just in case: http://i39.tinypic.com/xfug5d.png
He's not talking about building things, at least I don't think.

One of the most effective things that has been done to slow down America's middle-eastern conflicts is paying people not to fight. When I say that, I don't mean building schools and hospitals. I mean giving people cash money in exchange for them not shooting our men and women.
I agree with #1 the most. I really love hanging out in a bookstore, but I can't say that I often buy anything more expensive than a magazine. These days I only seem to have time to read programming books, and if I didn't buy them from amazon I wouldn't be able to afford them for very long.

Bookstores also have to deal with the fact that millions of people are switching over to ereaders. I myself prefer physical books, but there are plenty of situations where I find it more convenient to use my kindle.
I'd rather type 2\pi than \frac{\tau}{2}.
Professional Photographer's Association as out of touch as MPAA and RIAA
No, that has no effect.
Here's a thought though.
Information spreads faster today than at any other period in Human history. Pandora's box is already open. Other ways to release this censored information will appear.
Citation needed, sounds a bit tinfoily.

Not that I agree with the idea of paying off people, but Syria's total GDP is only about US$60 billion, hard to imagine that it would take "trillions".
Four words: water recycling in spacecraft.
I write the tests first which is kind of the same thing except that I can actually execute that API and see if what I wrote actually works.

Writing good tests first also helps me constrain my implementations to be as simple as possible as well. Otherwise my tests get hard to write and that's a sign things are probably going in the wrong direction.

Often though you can't have your cake and eat it too. There are two schools of thought: worse is better and the right way. The former way eschews simple APIs for simple implementations. The latter is pretty much the opposite.

I'm currently working on a project where I'm trying to maintain a simple API across three different, related services. One of those services has such a simplistic interface that maintaining the simple API that the other two have has made the implementation comparatively complex.

Now I have to take extra care to make it as simple as I can... but it's still complicated. Which means my poor future developer who has to maintain this thing will need lots of documentation in order to understand it (fortunately I maintain TODO lists and notes as I go to accompany my stories... forming a sort of journal of my development process for each project; it makes it easy to pull out useable "how and why" documentation).
Im hitting ESC in vim all the time. Is that a bad thing?
I wonder if they would run into fragmentation problems with this much of memory, and if so how they are going to deal with that?
Of course! Just changed it! Thanks.
Startup Of You, Reid Hoffman's upcoming book
I'm definitely not your client base as the few things I do put on social profiles all come from my hard drive anyway, so I have no need to back up or export them.

That said, this service looks very slick and kmfrk makes a great point about using it to liberate your photos and such and make them available to people that don't have accounts. For example, links to facebook photos are useless for me since I don't have an account there, but if the people uploading their photos there could also have them mirrored to SocialFolders or even another network where I either have an account or don't need an account to view them, that would be sweet. If they could have that happen without doing anything extra on their own (after installing the software, of course), that would be pretty amazing!
I'm somewhat curious- why were you trying to train yourself to stop using ESC, and why couldn't you just unmap that key?
Ruediger.ws
Eh. Libertarians can be dreamers too. There's a vein of transhumanism and immortality-seeking in certain parts of the movement (which I don't particularly respect, but that's another matter).

But say you're a Libertarian and have some ideas about how society ought to be structured. Meanwhile, society is clearly structured a certain way which (according to your worldview) is not consistent with that (e.g. the US government, undue tax burdens on the private sector, and bureaucracies like NASA) and it's not particularly likely that you're going to see massive restructuring of it in the near future.

Why would that stop you from taking issue with specific irrational policies of those bureaucracies? If space travel (or carbon-reduction or whatever-you-want) is clearly a goal of society, then you might as well try to cope with reality and at least try to make sure they go after that goal as effectively as possible, and limit the damage it's going to do.
Baudehlo is correct. Gmail provides a SASL extension called XOAuth that allows you to authenticate IMAP/SMTP with OAuth tokens.
I did this a while ago, and it's great for and initial version development. Now I find that customer journey mapping (putting yourself in your user shoes thru interactions, interviews) is highly complimentary process to the README outlining.
Use it to make more graphene oxide, obviously.
Commonly called use cases. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_case

I don't have a particularly favorite ideology or process myself but the important think is THINKING about the software you are going to write BEFORE you write it. To that end use whatever works.

If you need a formal process involving use cases with a specified and standard format great. If writing the README does it for you then more power to you. The important aspect is the thinking.
> In physics, it does not make sense to discuss position (nor boundaries) of object with infinite or absolute precision.

No, no, no, you are over interpreting. The fact that you cannot measure with infinite precision doesn't mean it doesn't even makes sense to talk infinitely precisely about positions. You can for instance make thoughts experiments, by imagining an initial state infinitely precisely, then conclude that subsequent measures will give such and such results, this time with finite precision.

According to current models, nature runs on infinitely precise mathematics. (And according to most sensible current models, that math is also deterministic.) The fact that your access to those maths lack infinite precision doesn't mean the math itself is imprecise.
yes, the tilted screenshot showed up, but a link to a proper screenshot would still probably help your sign-ups.
> if nobody understands the brilliance of your argument

What they didn't understand (what I said they didn't understand) was that I tried to determine value of the USD, not compare price of the gold to price to the shares.

Almost everyone pulled out some stupid comparison, trying to be funny. The Ron Paul, Apple and Juice comments looked like they came here from reddit. Only few comments were actually valuable and tried to correct me in a non-condescending way.

Anyway, after some more reading around I came to conclusion that valuing USD by gold is indeed not the right idea. I was somehow convinced that gold is something stable. From what I found, the difference between 2004 and 2012 dollars is inly something above 25%.
I think this site could use some of that memory and caching love. Loading articles or even /newest is sooo slow sometimes.
How about students who reason like this:

I don't know what the notation means and there is no way for me to know what it means. Therefore I'm going to use a different interpretation in each question to minimize the variance in my grade.
I'm long Facebook over the next 20 years or so.

So I'm going to buy shares.
Thanks for the feedback! We think that'd be an awesome feature as well. We've been looking into parsing automated emails from common senders (ie. amazon, twitter, etc) to display them in a more appropriate and useful manner, similar to what you've described.
I was thinking the same thing. Now he can make different sounds based on type of customer...
I'm not sure if this principle is a good one for starting a business. Many of us aren't exposed to meaningful problems outside of coding, using the internet, etc.
How To Learn Who Has You In Their Google+ Circles
I really like LinkedIn, I've used on both sides of the hiring table, and from a social aspect it's stuff I'm interested in about my social connections.

Consequently, while this move concerns me (and I've opted myself out and removed a lot of other "default" settings and "apps") I still find LinkedIn useful enough to keep my account around.
That's not so far off. It has all of the really beautiful system stuff of FreeBSD (rc.conf, predictable file hierarchy, documentation) and matches them or does better. It forces you to learn how things work and does a good job of teaching you good practices. Even if you don't use Arch, the Arch wiki is a gold mine on configuring pretty much anything.

The main thing Arch has over FreeBSD is you get easy access to lots of shiny toys. Pacman repos update much more frequently and the process of updating packages is much faster. If your favorite text editor drops a new version, it will be available in Arch repos in minutes/hours; it may be months before it makes it to FreeBSD ports. And things like audio, video drivers, wireless are pretty painless in Arch compared to FreeBSD.

The biggest downside of Arch is that it sits on the complete opposite side of the security spectrum. FreeBSD makes sure you start with a secure machine and anything you do to cheapen the security is your bag; most of the time it'll try to let you know you when you're doing it wrong. The BSDs in general have a really healthy culture of security paranoia. You don't get that with Arch. Signed packages have only recently made their way into pacman and I'm not sure if they're even required yet. So a lot of the time, it feels like you just have to cross your fingers and trust that the repos you're hitting haven't been compromised. And you're constantly installing software from them.

Also, occasionally you'll need to spend 5 or 10 minutes recovering from a wonky upgrade (upgrading often is better than not).

Arch is an excellent, if not secure, desktop/laptop environment and you'd be crazy to run a production server on it.
Chapter 6 of the Rails Tutorial, 2nd Edition is out ("Modeling users")
It's discussed to death in the comments on that blog and others, but reading it might be very boring, so I'll repeat my stance on it (I'm a guy implementing numpy on pypy):

NumPy that's faster is already very interesting for many people, because you don't have to go to great lenghts to shift code to C or Cython to experiment. Besides it integrates seamlessly with your current stack that might be in python.

Regarding low-level API: Calling C/fortran from PyPy's numpy should be dead easy, over say ctypes. You should be able to call to whatever C libraries you wish.

Matplotlib, SciPy and scikits should be relatively easy to get working to some extend using hacks like this - http://morepypy.blogspot.com/2011/12/plotting-using-matplotl...

As for other stuff - well if it depends too much on CPython C API PORT IT. It's not that hard and once you have a respectable Python runtime, you can do it, it has been done.

Just because we won't support all possible users from day one does not mean we should not try. There are very valid usecases where people shy away from Python because as soon as you try to write a loop in Python, stuff gets to such a crawl that you can't even run experiments. I personally believe Cython is not an answer here and you actually need full python to do most, especially for unexperienced users, so we're primarily targeting the niche that can't be possibly attacked by any solution that's based on CPython.

As for other stuff - numpy even if you vectorize stuff is nowhere near the speed of C. We try to attack that as well and even surpass C eventually.

This is pretty much it, feel free to ask more questions.
Right I agree, this gets into the who fairness and equality debate, where everyone has a definition of fair and equal. The fact is, the people that purchased those domains played by the rules. Sure speculation can seem like a free ride and it is not that sexy but people should not be begrudged for getting lucky especially if they did so via a little foresight.
Amazon Lights the Android World on Fire
Perhaps you have some misbehaving software, but I've never seen /usr/share/bin, or /usr/local/share/bin or a lib directory in either of those locations. I just checked FreeBSD boxes (which, admittedly, follow their own standards closely), and a Redhat box.

var is a directory which may be found under /usr or /usr/local, but won't contain a local directory.

Think of it as 3 roots: / is required for boot, /usr is stuff maintained by an administrator (say, company wide), /usr/local is where files installed by local users go. Within each of these 3 roots, you'll have some subset of bin, etc, lib, libexec, sbin, and var. The root directory has some additional singleton directories which don't make sense in the other directories: dev, root, mnt, boot, proc, rescue.
So, /usr really means "user", and the "Unix System Resources" acronym was put together afterwards. Interesting, thank you !
I would love to hear more about your thoughts - My hope is to teach people how to make stronger arguments for their case.
* http://www.rackspace.com/apps/email_hosting/ (IMAP/webmail)

* http://www.snapengage.com (sales/support chats)

* http://www.zendesk.com (basic KB & support tickets)

* http://www.github.com & http://www.springloops.com (public & private repositories)

* http://www.geckoboard.com (dashboard of financial state of the company)

And I'm a power user of my own SaaS products:

* http://www.w3counter.com (realtime visitor analytics)

* http://www.w3roi.com (ad performance tracking)

* http://www.dialshield.com (automatically calls high fraud risk customers during the checkout process on my ecommerce sites)