skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
'Nix allows mounts at any arbitrary point in the filesystem hierarchy. While you could symlink /var/tmp to /tmp, you could also dedicate a filesystem to it. Given that the strict definitions differ (/var/tmp does persist across reboots, /tmp may persist), you risk annoying/disapointing someone at some point if you do otherwise.
Haha, that made me smile! :)

I think the main reason for the misconception is that lots of people compete in marathon races and some of them are fat. So people see someone who can still run a marathon but is still fat and think, "ha they can run for hours but they're still chubby!"

But nobody really competes in a 100-400m race after school age unless they're elite or semi-elite... and obviously those guys are lean sprinting machines. That's the only kind of person we ever see sprinting. Compared to that zany uncle who decided to start marathoning upon reaching midlife, elite sprinters on TV are manimals!

If we reversed it though, and compared everyone fit enough to complete a 400m race, at any level with elite marathoners, the results would be the opposite. We'd be saying wow... those skinny marathoners can run 400m faster than most racers, and then do it again 104 more times without rest! Woah!!!
Advice For Startup Executives: This Year, Take A Vacation
Everybody learns natrual language, yet large number of people cannot learn programming language. It sounds like learning programming language is harder than learning natrual language. This is not intuitive to me. A lot of concept in natrual language are much more abstract and difficult to understand than the assignment concept. Even the leap from one apple, two apple to one, two is a much bigger conceptual leap. I see the story as a failure in education.
I think he's talking about writing data in the SSD's DRAM cache into the actual flash.
GOG.com: numbers, controversy, outlooks and great classics
Send them over to bobby [at] impressar.io. Response has been good so far, I'm hoping people can make good use of it when the monthly "Who's hiring" thread comes out next week.
"All Nintendo needs to do to catch up in the online space is sell a bunch of consoles."

Selling consoles is not synonymous with people using their online service. Moreover, there is no guarantee that even Nintendo will be able to sell a significant number of consoles.

There are several huge competitors in online gaming currently, with more competition arriving and maturing every day. XBox Live, Steam, and Battle.net all have tens of millions of users and offer a robust set of features: social networking (friends lists), online game purchasing and digital distribution, online multiplayer and grouping with friends, text and voice based chat, achievements systems, etc.

Digital distribution and selling of non-physical items have enormous profit margins and low per-item operating costs. They are clearly the wave of the future for all software, especially gaming, yet Nintendo is only just now barely even flirting with the idea. "Catching up" to Steam and XBL doesn't just mean achieving the same number of online users, it means achieving the same level of revenue and the same level of brand credibility from the rest of the industry.
How Apple Bought Saab's Mapping Software
This could be even better than the Nokia 3d web-gl maps.
NYU-Poly Incubators Application
Get ready to super charge your startup!

Polytechnic Institute of New York University (NYU-Poly) is proud to announce that we're now accepting applications for our new DUMBO incubator in Brooklyn. Apply online now at http://www.poly.edu/business/incubators/apply

With sponsorship from Two Trees Management, and the NYC Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC), the incubator is at the heart of a virtuous circle linking the University with the people at the forefront of New York’s tech community, New York City government and institutions, tech market needs and early-stage capital.

Our mission for this new University and City-sponsored incubator is to support the development of technology startup businesses in Brooklyn that are focused on digital media, educational tech, gaming, mobile tech, and advertising tech. We’re looking for high-growth, high-potential entrepreneurs who are solving real problems for real customers.

Apply if you think your startup is a good match with what we’re looking for.
o We love successful serial entrepreneurs
o Technical co-founders of incubator applicant companies must be on board
o We look for a large and sustained impact and an ability to deliver venture scale returns
o We require a clear go to market strategy and an understanding and implementation of the customer development process

Startups generally have five key needs: talent, services, expertise, customers, and capital. We seek to address these needs through a robust offering that benefits from the legacy of success we’ve built at the Varick Street Incubator and the community we’ve fostered. The DUMBO Incubator is more than an exciting co-working location; it will offer programs and seminars geared to accelerating your venture, discounted professional services, investor exposure, and access to the entrepreneurial university culture, students and faculty at NYU-Poly. Through exposure to mentors, incubator staff, and a world-class community of entrepreneurs, we'll help your startup take flight.

Submit your application now by completing the questions online at http://www.poly.edu/business/incubators/apply

We plan to accept our first companies at DUMBO this month so be sure to get your application in ASAP!
For more info or questions reach us at incubator@poly.edu
No. It's almost certainly a mistake to leave school to start a startup at 17, and particularly so if you don't have a cofounder.

I don't think anyone should consider starting a startup at 17 unless it's one of those rare situations where you stumble on something that takes off, and not focusing on it full time would mean letting it die. Zuckerberg was in this position, for example. But it is extremely rare.
Except that /usr is where /usr/local lives (all software installed through the FreeBSD ports tree) and I don't want that on my / partition, so now I have to create a partition just for /usr/local? How about the various other files under /usr, they now have to be moved to / as well? On FreeBSD /usr also houses /usr/home. /home/ is a symlink to /usr/home!

/ on a FreeBSD system is generally kept small. It doesn't have softupdates on when using UFS2 since it is also the location where your kernel lives, along with rescue utilities and your main /bin. Nothing else.

The proposal as put forth is misguided (talking about Fedora's in this case) and I don't think that the system should be re-engineered just because that is the default use case these days. I remember when I first started using Linux and I created a separate, /boot, /, /usr, /home, and /tmp. Just because udev and others now fail to work correctly doesn't mean it isn't a good idea to keep those separate...

This is just going to cause more trouble, more fragmentation between unix/unix-like systems and Linux and it's various distributions.
Dave: The EC2 tutorial is nicely done. But the problem of setting up an individual communication island seems that "they" will come for those people "personally". While using an existing platform people can "hide" behind proxies, open wlans and so on the required money trail for bringing a personal system online makes the "rule breaker" much more identifiable.
PPA, MPAA, and RIAA are the modern equivalent of guilds. They were once useful for protecting the little guy, then evolved into a protection racket.
Yeah, I'd think it was cool if getting on that flight had actually mattered much.
What a great post.

"In my view, what’s missing at this point is mostly anger -- a justified response to being asked to donate our time, not to Amnesty International or the Sierra Club, but to the likes of Kluwer and Elsevier."
The S-1 filing will almost certainly contain enough info to allow my bets with jacquesm and il, that Facebook's revenues would reach $2B/yr by 2014, to settle (2 years early!):

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=689993

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1163144

Would still be happy to take $200 in Facebook stock instead. :)
These limits are chiefly imposed by the BIOS (int 10h) calls available to a boot sector program (the 512 bytes of machine code you get inside the master boot record of a disk), and require a lot of cleverness to escape from.
I read about this in WSJ. Excited to apply
Facebook Worth 100 Billion
I don't mean to hijack OPs response, but it reminded me of Robert M. Pirsig's book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values.

From Wikipedia: "In the book, the Narrator describes the "Romantic" approach to life of his friend John Sutherland, who chooses not to learn how to maintain his expensive new motorcycle. John simply hopes for the best with his bike, and when problems do occur he often becomes frustrated, and is forced to rely on professional mechanics to repair it. In contrast, the "classical" Narrator has an older motorcycle which he is usually able to diagnose and repair himself through the use of rational problem solving skills."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_and_the_Art_of_Motorcycle_M...
For those who haven't seen the proposal for the / /usr merge:

"Fedora (and other distributions) have begun work on getting rid of the separation of /bin and /usr/bin, as well as /sbin and /usr/sbin, /lib and /usr/lib, and /lib64 and /usr/lib64. All files from the directories in / will be merged into their respective counterparts in /usr, and symlinks for the old directories will be created instead"

http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/TheCaseForT...
OP here. That 2 hour estimate is for people who have never done an Arch install. I think 1 hour is reasonable for someone who's done it a few times to go from nothing to a fully working system.

That said, I won't argue that it's still a good bit more work than setting up other distros.
Google takes down links under DMCA, too.
All Nintendo has to do is add online play through this network to the next Mario game.
I worked on a Mac Pro once that someone had 64GB of RAM installed in... took the better part of a minute to get the startup gong.

They ended up splitting the memory between a few machines as it became obvious that the applications being used (Adobe CS stuff) wasn't going to use all that RAM in their use case, and other machines needed it more.
DOM Snitch - a passive reconnaissance tool inside the DOM
Why does that QR Code go to justinsomnia.org?
UX Developer is a misleading and potentially damaging job title
Thank you for this. I will have to look into a few off that list and implement them. All the models does have attr_accessible. Using CarrierWave for uploads.
> Also, don't underestimate how large log files can grow in a data-driven business (like AirBNB seems to be). I could easily believe that they have many terabytes of data just from logging actions their customers have taken.

Logs don't have remotely the same access requirements as the databases used to serve a product.
Thanks, that was a poor choice of words.

I guess someone like Dani never came across to me as just an inexperienced kid even if he actually was at the time because I was so impressed when I met him.

The fact that YC doesn't only look for established people is definitely one of its best features.
Who Is The Most Unreasonable Entrepreneur of Them All? You Decide
No
You have plenty of time for YC. Wait!!

Eventually,you will have to get a H1 visa to work in the US and that is really hard to do without a university degree. Stanford has many, many applications.

You may consider going to community college (first two years of university) in Silicon Valley. Cheap and much easier to be accepted with many of the same students that are in Stanford or Berkeley.

Good luck!
In the interest of brevity I left out the post-humanist angle. You're right: we can work on the problem from the other angle of making our form more survivable. Various post-humanist ideas, from genetic engineering to uploading mind state into a (presumably more survivable) computational substrate are options. There is a reasonable argument to be made that our time would be better spent achieving these forms before attempting serious colonization. However, I suspect that "meat puppet" colonization is easier than we think, especially if we accept the OP's argument that we need to stop shooting ourselves in the foot with unreasonable safety requirements.
Harder than percentages?

Sorry, couldn't resist. :)
New Developer Tools in Firefox 10
I think the canonical example (but not necessarily the first) is the "PayPal Mafia" [1]. Many early PayPal employees went on to found successful companies in the wake of the dot-com bust at the end of the nineties.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PayPal_Mafia
We don't compete directly.

We are more focused on the enterprise market, so from a partnership perspective, it actually works out quite well.
You know where there are lots of resources? Space. Recently ran an economic projection for a venture that was being proposed out of Russia - tugging an asteroid of copper into orbit around Earth and mining it would alleviate the environmental impact of surface mining while cutting the price of these materials to a fraction of what they are today.

Speaking about energy, check out space-based solar power. I will be the first to admit that present conceptions are as pre-mature as the solar industry in general, but, it is theoretically a vastly more efficient way to generate power than other options, barring nuclear.
I met a bunch of them last night at Digital Dumbo
One of mind good friends applied. This is a great opportunity.
60%, presumably.
If you're looking to cultivate this into a long term project, I'll offer some tips:

1. Notifications are going to make or break you. I had signed up for OhLife.com 2 years back and it emails me every single day with a gentle reminder to write about my life. It also chooses a random entry that I've written in the past so that I actually look forward to reading what banal things I had written about. Prioritize this over all else.

2. Support email entries. I have visited the OhLife website about 3 times in the last 2 years. My main interaction is through email. It also lowers the barrier to actually composing an entry. Your users can create and refine drafts throughout the day and only send it across when the reminder email comes in.

3. Create a mobile app (lower priority than the above two). I've found that my most profound thoughts and exciting experiences are when I'm traveling. A mobile app is exactly what one needs during those times (Note: I use the word "app" loosely. It could just be a mobile-friendly UI for your website)

4. With apps/websites like these which solve one specific problem, it's always best to keep the feature set very minimal (even though as a developer your likely motivation will be to keep working on new features).

Good luck!
There's also a local installable mirror of the arch wiki. I don't know how often it's updated but if I didn't have multiple machines laying around I'd put this on my arch laptop:

http://www.archlinux.org/packages/community/any/arch-wiki-do...
This is basically customer testing, except treating yourself like the customer. This can be a good starting point, but is also dangerous for a multitude of reasons you already know and I won't reiterate. It's a good way to get started thinking about your solution, but does not replace talking to real customers whose problems you're trying to solve.
Yes, it's "only" philosophy, but that doesn't mean it's utter BS.

Look we either talk about the exact pi, or not pi at all. In my computer there's no pi.

As for the alternative, at least he tried something:

"Fuller also claimed that the natural analytic geometry of the universe was based on arrays of tetrahedra. He developed this in several ways, from the close-packing of spheres and the number of compressive or tensile members required to stabilize an object in space. One confirming result was that the strongest possible homogeneous truss is cyclically tetrahedral."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckminster_Fuller#Philosophy_a...
Revenue is (estimated at) already over $4b a year:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-09-20/facebook-revenue-wi...
I am sure I have used systems with tmpfs /var/tmp.
GoboLinux does it too.

And for that matter, another "unixy" OS uses "bundles" to keep all of an apps files together instead of splattering them all over the OS: Mac OS X.
I'd be more interested in a writeup of what data you actually store. I've used Basecamp at a customer's before, and it certainly didn't justify the requirement of 1TB RAM, let alone 100kb RAM to serve quickly.

This sounds more like Reddit's problem where some architectural simplifications might net a giant win versus piling yet more gunk on top (Reddit is still perceptibly doing random IO for every comment in a thread during page load, or perhaps some insanely slow sorting, I have NFC how they haven't fixed this yet).
What you need to know about Twitter's new filters
What's the point? It's not going to occur in a reasonable amount of time, and if you say, "Well, eventually it will..." then eventually everything that exists will cease to exist anyway.

Why not focus on things that are problems now?
hey danneu,
Unfortunately no. The logic for the cucumber tests are written out, so if another coder took a look at the .features, they'd be able to figure out what the app needs to do. But as far as the tests working if I cmd 'cucumber'; they would all fail as they aren't defined yet.

The main reason for this was, me and Josh were actually going to only do Freelancify for a week or two without testing, then scrap it and re-do it again BDD test driven.

I ended up putting so much work into it in the weeks, that starting over from scratch would be a huge time-killer. One of the next things on the to-do is to go back and make these cucumber tests work.

Josh and I are probably also going to start on another small app so I can do BDD first, then code.
Linode has been offering it as a server image for a while now. I use it for a personal webserver, etc. Never had a critical upgrade problem, fwiw.
The situations are very much comparable. Nintendo may have a lot more buffer than Sega did but it is still fighting an uphill battle now.

The time to pivot is not when you've hit rock bottom, it's not even when you have peaked, it's when you've past the inflection point, well before you've peaked. And Nintendo is already well past that point. They are seeing incredibly robust competition for every aspect of their business: casual and party games, motion based games, mobile gaming, etc. The core strength of Nintendo, which has aided them in past attempts at pivoting, is their 1st party IP: Zelda, Mario, Pokemon, Metroid, etc. But that will only get them so far, and won't save them if they make serious strategic blunders or fail to keep up with the competition. Nintendo still has options now, but will they still have those options in 5 or 10 years?
Twitter is a tool.
I visited awesome place
That's the super old design. Email me your size and address and I'll send you the new nice one with the tasteful design. You'll love it, I promise. jsheehan@twilio.com
why not put all .txt files in /txt? we have .../man for man pages, .../lib for libs, .../src or source and .../include for C includes after all.
thank you for the suggestion, will look into that. The popularity of the posts def caught me off-guard..
The central thing about all these conventions is they developed in the absence of good union mounts. In Plan 9 there is no $PATH: all such things are bound into /bin. This works both because Plan 9 has very good union mounts, but also because those union mounts can be localized to a specific process and as a result are user accessible. I seem to recall some work was done to make this possible on Linux but It didn't get accepted into the main kernel because it is at odds with how we see how a Unix system should behave.

It would be interesting to see a Linux distro that embraced this.
They start like that, like /proc did, and then get other stuff.
True, but I'd say this is something of the Pygmalion effect en masse. We have coddled the public into expecting risk-free space ventures and so they react accordingly when risk-free turns out to be risk-fraught.

Few government leaders will take on that much risk themselves

This is why I support NASA's initiatives to privatise the risk (and responsibility) of certain missions.

That being said, we accept risk in the military. The solution is to create an institution that is protected from political whims so it can take the long-run risks it needs to.
Ahhh. I've never lived very far from the ocean, so it's always pretty humid. Plus, I've always had wood or concrete floors which limits static build up and wood or metal tables.

I suppose if you're in Arizona, static build up is a much bigger problem.
I really really really hope Khan Academy doesn't sell to anyone, especially to FB
Great stuff Michael!
Fun with Flags as a start-up story
Hah, I remember seeing that quote from Bezos and wanting to do the same thing. At the moment, I make do with Jabber and a cron job, but a bit of semi-realtime feedback on positive activity is fun.
No, not the best idea-Play around with startups, try different possible co-founders, build some small products. Then reach out to local mentors and people in your startup scene to get a better understanding of the space.
At no point did I ever say they were part of the FHS.
Indeed, but it's worth pointing out that in this case "different" doesn't necessarily imply "easier". Instead of having to access the data across many concurrent connections, you have to be able to store the data efficiently so that it doesn't take up too much space and you can do jobs on them that don't take 3 weeks to complete. And let's not get into how you collect and merge them together. There are open source tools to do these things, but you're still looking at a decent amount of infrastructure to make it work.
We're undecided. Possibly a free account, with a paid version to remove ads? What are your thoughts?
There's killall but no pkill on Mac OS X by default.
How does FreeBSD handle this?
Upvoted for admitting you were wrong about the gold comparison, it's hard to do that on the internet and we could all do it more often.
Actually, it's you who is doing the over interpreting. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle is a physical constraint that wave functions obey. If you define a state with an infinitely precise location, then the range of momentums is infinite. This result is fairly easy to reproduce, so it would probably be instructive to try it.

The measurement interpretation of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle is both a useful way to understand it, and historically, a way to ease experimentalists into accepting and believing it.
California businesses seek state's new 'benefit corporation' status
Presumably if FreeBSD went down the same path as Fedora, they could also change the default partition layout.
Would you hire me with this resume?
Hi,

I am moving to SF soon and would really appreciate any feedback on my resume before sending it to startups.

Downloadable here: https://github.com/gregorym/gregorym.github.com/blob/master/gregory_marcilhacy_resume.pdf?raw=true

thanks