skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>The properties inherent to physical media are some of the most consumer friendly aspects of distribution.

I don't think so. What's consumer friendly about plastic garbage that takes up space, is ridden with unskipable ads, DRM to boot, and is a pain to handle?

The true "problem" (for those relying on this business model) still remains the reality that you ultimately cannot force people to pay for virtually cost-free distribution of content. You cannot stop free sharing either. All efforts to do so will eventually result in heavy censorship (actually, copyright and free speech are fundamentally at odds).

Pretty much all problems with digital media you describe are caused by this failure to accept reality on the side of distributors. It's not a problem with digital media, it's a problem created by trying to make digital media like physical media (-> being able to control distribution), when the former is so much more powerful, versatile and plain better than the latter. Distributions as a business model is dead. The future of digital media is one that doesn't rely on it, and embraces cost-free distribution and free sharing.
Awesome work, James!

Your site looks really nice, and now you've got the ability to do design AND program, which is a combo that isn't too common.

Best of luck with your site....
That's a very shallow view of how the non-autarkic part of the world (to which China certainly belongs) works, China's recent history and the influence of the "cocacolonization" effect. Stating it exerts no pressure whatsoever is an extraordinary claim.
Ethiopia Sentences U.S. Blogger to Life in Prison
You can always use the slackware-current packages to run with software that is newer than the last release.
I've been using Arch for about three years now and can't imagine using another distro.

The install phase is a pain if you want to get a full-blown plug-and-play ready-to-go desktop experience that rivals Ubuntu, OS X, or Windows.

It's actually really easy if you just want a bare-bones system that boots into a shell and doesn't install any packages other than what it needs to do just that.

Switch to Arch if you're a minimalist.

My rig only runs Stumpwm on Xorg. I only use xterm, emacs, and the usual GNU toolchain. A couple of interpreters. I have installed GTK so I can use Firefox (and so I can hack on Firefox), but nothing else. I don't have a crap load of applications running in the background waiting to notify me of crap I don't care about or services that I never use. I know exactly what runs on my system and it does no more than that and no less.

I think Arch fills a very nice niche and I'm so happy it exists.
> at some point someone somewhere had to write code at a lower level to support this

Yes that is something i totally agree with. In fact that's why i only supported js and not hate c. Because somewhere it has to be done and c is efficient in dealing with memory allocations whereas js deals with front-end mechanics. But to say that js is 'crazy' is something beyond me. every language has its ways and it depends on what 'level' (high, low, machine) that language works in computer hierarchy.

Comparing high level language like js to lower level language (like c++, java, etc) on their syntax or how it deals with objects/arrays makes no sense.
Humans love to prove that something is impossible, or can't happen.

HUBRIS BABY! HUBRIS!
Maybe.

cpyext is a hack to let PyPy run Python/C API modules. It works for some, but not all, and it's slow. I'm sure it'll keep getting better, but not sure if it'll ever be good enough to run PyGTK or PyQt.

PyPy has good support for ctypes, so ctypes bindings are a good option. There are projects out there like pygir-ctypes and ctypes-gtk. One of them just needs to become complete enough to be a good choice for GTK programming. Compatibility with new PyGObject is more likely than compatibility with legacy PyGTK, though.

PyQt is harder because it's C++.
8. If you put free books outside, someone will walk in every week and ask if they're really free, no matter how many signs you put out .

That's because the book has a physical existence. It's made of paper and ink, has a cover, etc. Adults understand it costs money to make such things, so it's better to put an inexpensive price on it, like $0.50, than to try to give it away.

It's odd that the opposite is true of e-books and e-media. The low cost of frictionless delivery gets confused with the true cost of production.

Kids will always go for free gum btw. That's in chapter 3 of the "being a kid" handbook.
Listen to this man! We're struggling with the same thing at my startup (https://zapier.com/), and having a robust way to hit some of the crazy API's out there is by far the most difficult thing we've come across.
Generally speaking, you don't want to run a server with 840 GB of RAM and the entire universe cached in RAM without ECC.
The build system can't know beforehand which scripts generate which files (unless you're implying it ought to run everything that looks like it might be a script and observe what outputs it writes).

However, once you've compiled a .c file the first time (or run the script the first time), the build system can remember which inputs and outputs were involved (either because gcc tells it which files it used, or by going lower-level and intercepting the file-opens of the program) and reuse that information in subsequent builds.
Show HN: Startup Threads Monthly - Subscription Swag Service
This was a funny and somewhat insightful read; however, it misses some interesting points. Opening a bookshop (much better name than a bookstore, and if you think "what's the big deal about naming" you probably shouldn't even attempt to open one).

Allow me to offer my own list:

1. Opening a bookstore is very much like starting a startup in that a really high percentage of the attempts will fail. The big difference is that if you do succeed, you won't get rich.

2. If you think (1) is a sad consequence of today's soulless dominance of Amazon, people not reading, etc., then read Stuart Trent's The Seven Stairs where he chronicles his adventures in opening a bookshop in Chicago after WWII, where he details pretty much the same difficulties as today's bookshops face.

3. In order to succeed, you have to have a specialty, e.g. maps and map making, the classics, books on New York, etc. Stock a very good collection on the topic (or two) of your choosing and strive to be the best source of information and books in your state, than in the US for that topic.

4. Of course, in addition to (3) you have to have generalities, throw-away popular fiction, cookbooks, travel books, etc. But that it let dilute your niche.

5. Your store should have a unique atmosphere. Additional points if this correlates with your chosen topic niche.

6. Know and love your customers, even when they're weird (you'll encounter these much more frequently than would be expected from a normal distribution) and their flies are open. You have to earn their respect with your knowledge and collection. Again, refer to The Seven Stairs for a wonderful example of how this is done.

7. In case you skipped 1: remember that the wonderful Stuart Brent also failed (I had a chance to see his store on Michigan Ave in 1996, ran by his son, I believe; it was reduced to a standard B&N type of store and was closed in the late 90s).

8. Reread 6! If someone with a classical bent asks for historical fiction and you take them to the romance section they will never come back. If you don't have even a small collection of timeless classics, say Aurelius' Meditations, Khayyam's poetry, Ulysses (and, of course, Odysseus) yours is not a bookshop.

9. Learn how to use the Internet! Understand that probably a good percentage (if not the majority) of your sales will come through the Web, so have Web presence as good as your store. Put useful information on your web page.

10. Lastly, you just have to love books, this is no endeavour that a truly sane or financially dependent person should attempt. If reading Parnassus on Wheels doesn't truly move you (to tears), you are in the wrong business.
I'm fine with that if it stops vendors customising windows too much. There's nothing worse than removing Acer or Dell branding from a new laptop.
I don't think business should be amoral but I think it is. Businesses can do great things, help charities, help their employees, reduce carbon footprints - but anytime they do any of these things they squeeze all the good press they can out of it i.e. turn it into free positive advertising.

When times are tight those are the things that businesses cut first because they are concerned solely with money. I agree with you the toxic mortgages were an appalling thing to offer people who don't understand about, say, the effects of potential raised interest rates and how that might affect them. But that's why I say businesses (all businesses) are amoral - they don't care. So if we spot a bad business practice, like the toxic mortgages, we have to understand that we're going to have to rely on either the government or ourselves as consumers to fix it because business won't stop themselves from trying to make that buck.

I'm not saying I like this being the case but that how I see it.
Distributions like this can't be taken seriously. They're for the outcasts of the neckbeard crowd.

Cynically I suppose that the people involved in making this software aren't encouraged to improve ease of use because then they couldn't be "helpful" in the IRC channel used for support.

Is something like this the reason so many open-source projects so vehemently opposed to usability?
> The install phase is a pain if you want to get a full-blown plug-and-play ready-to-go desktop experience that rivals Ubuntu, OS X, or Windows.

Just about every Linux distribution offers this, because the distro-makers create none of the window managers, etc. Which other distributions have you tried?
So what happens when I copy my SocialFolder into my Dropbox folder? Does the universe implode? :D
And when you factor out just the ITA acquisition, as it was pointed out in the article, it drops to just over 15 million per acquisition.
One the thing that is missing in the discussion of whether banks are evil or not is a better dichotomy: what he describes in this entry is primarily about transaction banking (and more particularly cash management), which one can argue is not evil as it allows for the free flow of capital through the financial system.

On the other hand, when banks start trading against their own book (ie. creating financial transactions that are used to leverage the bank's own money), then things can go wrong.

Ultimately, what failed in this crisis is that
1. The risk around mortgage distribution got to be so removed from the actual mortgages that it increased carelessness.
2. Confidence in the system was shaken, leading to a "run on the bank" for broker-dealer banks, creating a substantial crisis of confidence in the banking system as a whole.

Anyone interested in how the crisis came about should read "The Big Short", by Michael Lewis, and "Too Big to Fail" by Andrew Ross Sorkin. Those two books provide a lot of perspective on what happened in the months leading up to and the days during the crisis.
A Year of WOW (20% time) at PatientsLikeMe
The formula I found was quartic, from [1]

Nref = Nx (Wx / Wref)^4
Nref = number of trips of reference vehicle
Nx = number of trips of other vehicle
Wref = weight of reference vehicle
Wx = weight of other vehicle

The quartic formula really works in our favor for bicycle commuting: if a bicycle (with rider) is 1/20th the weight of a car, the bicycle will produce 0.000625% the wear of the car. So if commuting were the only purpose of the road, you would essentially never need to replace a road again.

This does make adding (larger) delivery vehicles quite bad. If the average delivery vehicle is twice as heavy as the average passenger car which was formerly used, each trip will produce 16 times as much wear. Looking up the curb weights for a Chevy cargo van (5000 lb) and a Toyota Corolla (2800 lb), the actual wear factor is 10x.

[1] http://www.nvfnorden.org/lisalib/getfile.aspx?itemid=601
I can't imagine a single situation where you expect variables used in a sum operation to be arrays/objects. That would be highly confusing.

You always have the option to use

Number(x) + Number(y)
(+x) + (+y)
String(x) + String(y)
Not really. Arch takes about 10 seconds less to boot up than Mint on my machine. Then there would be the question of having to wait for both the host OS and guest (virtual) OS to boot up.

It's a one-time expense, too, in terms of time. And there's the added benefit that you learn how to partition, how to mount, link, etc.
I wonder what kind of stuff can be done with 1Tb of SSDs, much cheaper than RAM, but also somewhat slower...
Cool. Here's another take on this, which doesn't produce quite as nice output, but produces some different stats and is Ruby based and a bit more objecty (if that matters). It doesn't like being fed the kernel but was fine on some very large software projects.

https://github.com/mpdehaan/lookatgit
Standalone lexers with lex: synopsis, examples, and pitfalls
Learning isn’t fun. It was never fun. And it will never be fun.
This article ended up being more interesting than I expected. Particularly noteworthy is the point that if a program sets an unusually high value on human life, it diverts resources from other programs also intended to protect human life, and thus brings about LESSENED protection of human life through that drain on resources. This provides thoughtful perspective on policy trade-offs. As Thomas Sowell has written, "The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics."
I find the writer's explanation of the main cause of the financial crisis too simplistic and dangerously naive: "interest rates were historically low which made lending cheap, [so] banks had more money to lend than there were responsible borrowers. This created a credit bubble that once over, resulted in banks suffering large monetary losses and an atmosphere of being scared to lend to each other."

IMHO, the structure and behavior of financial firms was a major destabilizing force leading to the crisis.

In the years preceding the crisis, financial firms created a vast network of complex financial claims and obligations of their own that greatly exceeded the real economy’s needs. These financial claims and obligations were at the center of the financial crisis.

A recent working paper at the Bank of International Settlements shows that financial flows exceeded the real economy's needs by a factor of at least 60 (!): http://www.bis.org/publ/work346.pdf -- an irreverent translation of the paper in easy-to-understand lay language is available here: http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/09/the-very-important-an... .

Instead of just providing a mundane but critical service to the real economy (interconnecting the real economy's savers with its borrowers), the financial system was driving the real economy – for instance, by pushing up the prices of many assets, particularly residential properties, simultaneously feeding on and magnifying a housing bubble of historic proportions.

IMHO, these nonlinear feedback loops and network-amplification effects -- typical of complex, tightly interconnected, dynamic systems -- were important root causes.
A corollary: http://images.cryhavok.org/d/2471-1/WTFs+per+Minute.jpg
No, the prospect of uninteresting ads is not my concern.

AFAIK, Github does not build a dossier on me, using syntax hilighting to build a behavioural model of me and connect it with other people I may know. They don't integrate my syntax hilighting with my search term history.

If they did, I would have the same concerns. This isn't about ad relevance, it's about my expectation that the things explicitly marked private (fence 1) in services that do not belong to Google (fence 2) stay out of the dossier Google has on me.

Quite frankly, casting this as being about the relvance of ads means capitulating 100% to Google's proposition that if it makes me more likely to click an ad, it's worth giving them my privacy.

To me, this is like arguing that if the police can make the streets safer, it's worth giving them the power to arrest and detain people without trial. It all comes down to the old, old argument about trading a little liberty for security.

Privacy is a kind of liberty. If I won't trade it for security, I sure as hell won't trade it for figuring out that when I say "Ibis," I mean the bike and not the bird.
I disagree with that, certainly there's space for a slackware-like distro with a decent package manager. Debian, RHEL, etc. are excellent, but there's no denying that they do some things in their own special ways, for better or worse. But with most sysadmins used to some combination of FreeBSD, Debian, and RHEL, I doubt very many would spring at the idea of something new with no discernible benefits.

Like you said, most people using Arch are those who want a great deal of control over their desktop machine, but without the compilation and general cruft of Gentoo. And those will be the ones putting Arch on servers, I believe.
We allow and expect corporations to be amoral because of Adam Smith's guiding hand: if you make a profit it's because somebody thought that your product was worth at least as much as they paid for the product, probably even more. In other words, win-win.

When a transaction isn't win-win, it's time for regulation to step in. That's why there are limitations (but not bans) on monopolies.

The most common case of a transaction not being win-win is when the information is asymmetrical. That's why selling a "pig in a poke" is illegal.

Banks and traders operate in this "asymmetrical information" grey area. Arbitrage is allowed and is useful because it brings prices to their correct level and provides liquidity to a market. But high-frequency trading is clearly not useful to society. Who cares if it takes prices 10ms or 1 second to complete a sale and get prices to the correct level? HFT takes money out of the system and provides no benefit to society or the other party, and therefore is "evil".

HFT should therefore be outlawed. But you have to be very careful. Such a law would be very difficult to write correctly, and due to the law of unintended consequences and the pace of change and the cost of regulatory burden, we're probably better off without such a law.

HFT is evil. But companies that practice HFT are simply being amoral, not immoral. So perhaps the fault lies with the government for improper regulation, not necessarily with the companies for practicing it.

HFT is only one of the 'evil' practices that banks and large investors use. The linked article touches others, some of which are 'evil' and some of which aren't.
Why would you want to be a minimalist? Even a Raspberry Pi system, which costs under $50 kitted out with storage, could handle a moderately full install.

The only "minimalist" Linux install I've ever wanted was one so stripped down it would boot off of a 3.5" floppy. It's amazing what you can do with a kernel, a baked in read-only filesystem and a tiny loopback device for storing configuration files.
Ah, yes, that does make more sense. Thank you both.
This is not really special anymore in 2012?
Where strategic acquisition of distribution would make some sense is as a competitive advantage over Amazon and Netflix (and over any similar competitors who might emerge). But to secure exclusive rights on key pieces of content, Apple would need to pay an exhorbitant amount of cash -- essentially, protection money to Hollywood to keep content out of competitive hands.

This also forces Apple into the game of picking hits, by betting on which pieces of content are going to be worth buying exclusive rights for. Hit-picking is a notoriously tricky business. (Even Hollywood gets it right only about 10% of the time).

Strategic, overall partnerships with key content providers -- HBO, for instance -- might make a great deal of sense. But to do so would be to place Apple's fate in the hands of HBO's development arm, i.e., to bet that HBO will keep turning out hits at the rate it currently is.

Perhaps a hybrid approach here is best: prime the pump with some exclusive, big-studio content, but over time, focus on developing a content ecosystem that is attractive to content developers the way the App Store is to software developers. Hollywood is a very pricey middle-man for content development; the long-term goal should be to build up the independent development system. If nothing else, this forces Hollywood's costs down by introducing legitimate competition.
>An acquisition or exclusivity deal with the increasingly desperate Nintendo would be money well spent.

Please elaborate, in what way is Nintendo "desperate"? I'm not really following the console market anymore, but last I checked was Nintendo being the only of the big three console manufactures pushing innovative new concepts and making a killing with the Wii and DS. I know they are worrying about the mobile market, but is that really true competition for them right now?
Can someone with Google Places ties help me out?
Please god no.

Apple is great and all but there seems to be almost a call from some people that the world would be best run by an international dictatorship with the half eaten fruit as it's flag.
Last I checked, I believe something like 20% of our customers were from the tech/startup scene. The vast majority of our customers are regular businesses.

But yes, we're still tiny compared to behemoths like Sharepoint. All the more reason to be excited about the next 20 years!
You will be missed.

Absolutely correct on the wm comment. However, I am an organized, messy person and prefer stacking wm. Currently in favor of openbox, but it may be something else tomorrow.(Note: not archbang, but I am not entirely opposed to archbang as some are. Archbang turned out to be really great for my old laptop that I use primarily as a browser, but nothing beats the real deal when it comes to my everyday-everything machine)

That nixos looks interesting, possibly something to consider for one of my personal machines.
I believe that C extensions, which have always been and still are very CPython specific, will have to be replaced with ctypes and possibly Cython versions eventually.

I expect to see quite a lot of improvement in that area as a side effect of the work on numpy.
Arch is fun to play with. A couple years ago the fact that everything was i686 optimized was a big deal. These days just about everyone is using 64bit. It's a good choice for embedded linux systems and servers (Beyond Oblivion used arch for their servers).

Speaking from experience, life is just too short to run arch on a laptop. Heck, I have a hp pavilion dv7 with switching graphics and even that was a pita to get stable on ubuntu.
A more proper adjective for the way in which English "rips off" other languages would be aggressively, rather than shamelessly.

"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary." - http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/James_Nicoll
Your opinion differs from mine.

I Live to Learn.
$ 300 3D Printer, the Makible Makibox
مشاهدة مباراة الهلال والاتحاد بث مباشر 
مشاهدة مباراة الهلال والاتحاد بث مباشر
مشاهدة مباراة الهلال والاتحاد بث مباشر
مشاهدة مباراة الهلال والاتحاد بث مباشر
I wouldn't really consider C that much of a statically typed language, with all the pointers and casting and low level stuff. Have a look at Haskell/ML/Ocaml if you really want to see a type system that will blow your mind :)