skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sounds like Interval Research. I hope it doesn't fail after various randomish projects.
How to use py2exe and py2app
Has been for a few hours now. I don't use git (yet) anyway ;)
Drb is nice for very small low traffic things. But it is very network chatty and is not really viable for anything that needs to scale or deliver high throughput.
I sincerely would love to hear of the concrete problems with Solaris Zones, because I am deploying a system based on Solaris Zones very soon.

I don't think security is an issue--it is true that there could be a security bug that would let some malicious code escape from a non-global zone to the global zone. But, AFAICT, that could happen with Xen too. Plus, if there is malicious code executing in a non-global zone then I'm already screwed since that is where my applications and data are.

Xen's live migration requires shared storage (AFAICT), which I don't have. That means that for my systems, Xen migration would work exactly the same as Zones migration (shut down the guest, move it to the new system, and start it up).

I chose Solaris Zones because (1) Zones have extremely low resource consumption, (2) they are extremely simple to manage, (3) they are extremely simple to backup and restore when the zone is on ZFS, and (4) I get to use all the Solaris manageability features.
Requires username and password?
ETags can be arbitrary, the server can put whatever it wants.
Tweeting the terror: How social media reacted to Mumbai - CNN.com
looks to be back up
A very good book is Core Python Programming by Wesley Chun.
: http://www.amazon.com/Core-Python-Programming-2nd/dp/0132269...
But it is not for total beginners.
Well, luckily I have a full clone of my entire repository's history, just sitting here on my hard drive. Good thing it wasn't Beanstalk that went down.
Two things: lots of risk and the O'Reilly book, "Learning Python."

I work for a company and was running a research project in air traffic control worth ~$400K. I was the principal investigator. We were going to create a tool that would redesign the airspace boundaries managed by a controller or controller team. At the time, I programmed in C, Awk, and a little Perl. I'd used Python at the command line, but had never programmed in it. I knew however it was the language we needed. I committed to it, and my partner agreed to it. We both learned Python on our own and the project succeeded. It had to succeed. If it didn't, we were in lots of trouble. We had company VPs watching us.

The Learning Python book is superior to the Programming Python book. While both are written with the same author, the Learning book is far more readable.

My favorite ongoing resource today is the documentation that comes with Python. I have a copy of it installed on the Linux box at work, and on my Macs at home. It is hands-down the best quick reference for the language.
Five Rules of Survival for US Startups in the Global Economic Crisis
A look at what startups should be considering when planning their growth and capital management strategies during our current global economic crisis.
The flipside of that is update-on-attach, which Xen doesn't have.
Worst Google Ad - Ever
Also, CSS in IE can contain JavaScript. I'm not sure how much access it has to the DOM though.
Don't forget adding makeup for "natural beauty".
I think it is pretty obvious; it's just not easy to restrain yourself from the temptation of getting a new toy, and it's too easy to rationalize why it's not necessary to save right now.
Thanksgiving was last month.

But enjoy your American holiday. :-)
Wow, thanks for posting those links! I read the first two chapters of the book and I must say that Chaitin is a brilliantly lucid and entertaining writer.

I am pretty much mathematically illiterate but I am still enjoying his book immensely.
I completely agree with you, and I am feeling frustrated with a number of their current practises. The problem is there aren't many other options for the average user if you want a quality OS. I have no problem picking up a Linux distro, but others (my family members for example) can't handle the under the hood tuning it can sometimes require.
I think your idea is doomed, even if you achieve technical nirvana in email delivery. Here's why:

1. You will not beat MS in the exchange market. "Everyone" uses office, therefore everyone has the outlook client, it's a short hop to installing Exchange, and it can scale right up to enterprise size adequately enough that you'll never be able to touch it. You can see how IBM and Novell have both been destroyed in this market if you're interested in the battle you face.

EDIT: Corporations will not even talk to you, because honestly, email is a problem that is already solved for 99% of them. Additionally, if they're big, it is much easier for them to just go with the flow and use the common system - no one ever got fired for buying IBM, and no one ever got fired for using exchange. Look at Symantec, many people have them beat in the AV game, but they own the mid level market.

2. On the startup end, you're competing with free software and hosted solutions. If startups aren't comfortable with gmail or similar, odds are they just stick with their domain host's offering and use the local client of their choice.

I suppose there could be a very real market for a hosted email service that gives the flexibility of gmail with the comfort of a paid, secure service. I think though that it would be very difficult to firstly find this market, and second present an offering that is tempting enough for them to switch.

Honestly, don't waste your time on this one... the work required just to meet the minimum expectations is so vast it isn't worth it.
There are lots of companies out there using GPL in their code not realising what the implications are.

True, although this case won't change their behavior either.
Major coup both for him and Waterloo. They should just rename the place U of RIM because they've basically paid for a talent pool ready to work for them.
I don't know what these "three ways" are, but the GPL in general will not cross a process boundary. As long as you talk to it cross-process, you're safe from the point of view of combining code. You're even "safer" if you're talking across servers. (Scare quoted because you're basically 100% safe either way.) Other clauses may need to be respected as well but they tend not to be onerous.

Obviously, with sufficient effort, you can do anything across a process boundary, it's just inconvenient, and you have to at least share all the changes you made on the GPL side.
Venture Capitalist Use Pattern Matching - What Pattern Does Your Startup Match?
You mean audit a class? Not sure why you got downmodded, as far as I know you most universities allow people to audit as much as they want.

Edit: Never mind, you go the downmod for saying calc 101 - it's certainly not a 101 class.
I always thought Ebert was too lenient on movies (as he famously says, he goes to movies to enjoy them; I've always liked more critical film reviewers), but I've loved every article he's written for the Sun. It's made me appreciate his attitude a lot more.

In particular, his criticism for how the press handled Twilight. I lost my love for newspapers through 2006-2007 with their handling of the book series. If you haven't read them, the books are disgustingly bad; high schoolers have a better track record in terms of quality. And newspapers and "old media" never once referred to it. They'd focus only on the popularity and on the many people who liked it, which was a really self-serving story.

I really hope people start speaking up against that sort of news reporting. It's killing the news. And I think that old news is going to end up dead as the Internet gains prominent, but god - what an ugly death.
Comprehensive List of Mac / Apple Deals on Black Friday
I was at the Union Square market in September and watched this guy in action a couple times (he takes 2-3 minutes to run through his entire spiel and demonstration-- which is incredibly impressive-- then sells about 20 of them, then repeats)... he sells the peeler for $5 (or 5 for $20, I think) and it's a Swiss-made Star brand peeler that you can find on eBay for around $3-$4, but then you have to pay shipping.

The actual peeler is very sharp and well-designed, but it's not magical-- he just happens to be incredibly good at wielding it on huge amounts of potatoes and carrots. Also, he has something of a reality distortion field...
I think it's like he says in the article - he deals with crowds, not with people. His focus is on the product alone.
Thanks very much to everyone for their input.
Saturn's icy moon shoots supersonic jets of water
Startup Diary - Day 2 - The API & Twitter + I love my alpha users
Yep! We also keep an offsite disaster guide, just in case - http://ozmm.org/posts/when_github_goes_down.html
well he actually implicitly said "vancouver iphone developer" which I misread...

and secondly my "where do you live" question was BEFORE he had explicitly mentioned it.. but either way ..
Actually I used "the" tutorial at python.org. But simultaneously I dived into it by writing web apps (which I was learning as well). In fact I wanted to learn writing webapps (and man there is so much more left aaaaah) and it came down to a choice between ruby and python. I went for python. And no, I am not going into why I chose one over the other!

So I just learnt it by writing several simple apps (thanks to django) and subscribing to a whole bunch of blogs to learn tips and tricks incrementally over time.
If you're new to Python and play games like Counter-Strike: Source and Team Fortress 2, try out EventScripts to customize the game:
http://python.eventscripts.com
Thanks for your comments.

Companies like Zimbra and PostPath have achieved some success in competing with MS Exchange. Why do you think building an email server like Exchange is too much of a technical challenge?

Also, my idea is not to build yet another email delivery solution, you are right that problem is 99% solved. But an office worker receives literally thousands (counting mailing lists) of emails a day. Even with folders and rules, there is a lot of human effort required to sort through all this email. That seems like a real pain point to me.
They priced it wrong by almost $3,000.
Unfortunately, I'm not such a geek that I am checking HN today. But if I were, I would say: Happy Thanksgiving to everyone on HN!
Call me crazy but I abhor black friday. Why would anyone want to deal with that?
I wasn't suggesting that it was a technical issue at all really. It would be a difficult task, but certainly not out of reach for many people I know, so I wouldn't suggest that it would be out of your reach either.

The problem would be selling it.

The issue with your second observation is that while it is true, the work is distributed, thus isn't a source of pain to the company - they entity you're trying to sell to.

There are plenty of GTD tools out there, but this doesn't have anything to do with email.
"In other words, Bartlebooth resolved one day that his whole life would be organised as a single project, an arbitrarily constrained programme with no purpose outside its own completion."

Georges Perec, Life: A User's Manual
He he he, smart one.
How about listening to actual rich people, not those who run websites acting as if they know what made someone rich.
hey brother i will help you out
Okay, that would make sense. Either way, I missed my chance.
Carbon dioxide detected on extrasolar planet
+1... George Carlin's bit about 'all-natural' comes to mind.
If you ever wanted a use for the term "begs the question" here you go: "If we could live for 70,000,000 years, there’d be no theory of evolution, and certainly no creationism: we could watch speciation and adaptation with our eyes,"

He assumes that evolution is true, then therefor if we lived to 70,000,000 there would not be creationism. However if evolution wasn't real, but creationism was, and people lived to 70,000,000 year you could say the same thing: they saw creation happen, and no one would imagine such a thing as evolution.

Which makes his sentence effectively meaningless. And he "begged the question".

It's an interesting article, but it has a number of errors that severely diminish it. Plus he really needs to stop bashing on the bible and stuff (that myth that the bible says Pi is 3 isn't even true).

My biggest gripe with it is this:

"Take Goldbach’s conjecture, that every even number 4 or higher is a sum of two prime numbers: 10=7+3, 18=13+5. The conjecture has resisted proof since 1742. Yet we could design a Turing machine with, oh, let’s say 100 rules, that tests each even number to see whether it’s a sum of two primes, and halts when and if it finds a counterexample to the conjecture. Then knowing BB(100), we could in principle run this machine for BB(100) steps, decide whether it halts, and thereby resolve Goldbach’s conjecture."

That's WRONG! A turing machine that checks every single integer by definition never halts, so the entire exercise is pointless - you'll get no info. Yah, if it halts you know the answer, but if it doesn't you know nothing, so calculating BB(100) doesn't help you at all.

On top of that it's possible that BB's for large number don't exist - I don't mean that they can't be calculated, I mean that for whatever numbers of steps you chose you can make the machine halt in that number of steps, but there is no upper limit at all, and you can always create a machine that halts after more steps.

PS. If you want a really large number that ordinary students would understand try 9!!!!!!!!.... (repeated factorial).
i may do a little hacking on thanksgiving but I can't imagine most programmers working today; it's a decent day to be down (unless you have a shopping or leisure web app)

edit: o yeah I forgot that some users may be international...
I can't believe such an uninformed and dangerous post is sitting in public, implicitly endorsed by 37signals.

From the URL it looks like may be getting pulled out of an svn repo or some other internal resource. Nonetheless, they need to get rid of this, because I certainly would have hestitation in using their software if they do not understand such fundamental aspects of security as this.

Quite apart from the dangerous notion of mixing SSL and non-SSL content, even the part about caching is just plain wrong. Recent browsers will cache SSL resources to disk if you send appropriate cache-control headers (this was one of the huge issues fixed in FF3.0).
I use an iPod touch and I love it. I check mail on it, occasionally browse the web (though my college doesn't have wi-fi). I take lots of notes: not just for class, but my jotting down ideas. I like watching video, and it's got an excellent screen. I use Frotz a lot: it lets me play interactive text games, and it has an excellent library. It indexes music better than the Classic does, I can get around my library faster, and it's got an excellent display for songs. I love the cover flow option. In other words, I use it like I'd use a small computer.

I sync it with my Mac every night: I've never run out of battery over the course of a day, and I only sync the sorts of music I'm into at any moment. It holds 32GB, but I think 8 would be enough for a single day. And it's got more battery life than I need in a day.

I don't need a new phone, and I don't want to pay 70 dollars a month for a new one. I hate texting, and I rarely make phone calls. At the same time, I like playing video and I like a lot of the added features and applications. In college, the iPod touch is huge. I'd say it's the most-used of the various iProducts. So it's got a niche audience, and it's a big enough niche to make it worthwhile.
Did you wind up contacting the EFF and that blog entry is how they chose to respond, or does someone at the EFF read slashdot or HN? ;)
This bothers me with "all natural" foods. Crude oil is "all natural" but it's not fit to drink.
Hotmail's a bad comparison, because they're two products in the same market with similar features. What if Google tried to make a product that was competing with something like MobileMe, which has less features but works much nicer - and at a cost?

I think Blackberry's trying to compete with Apple was inevitable, and I think they've got some good ideas. But they're dealing with a much higher-quality competitor, in a different field. Phone manufacturers are trying to make a competing phone. They need to work on making competing mini-computers. RIM is the top smart-phone maker, but they're competing in a different (albeit overlapping) field now, and their first attempt was a dud. I think if they didn't try, that Apple would (and still very well may) swamp them within a few years. So they're responding. But their first foray has been a dud.
I know we've had this argument before, but you know, it's possible that Pogue just really likes Apple products.

For what it's worth, I've never read a review of his that didn't make good points on both sides. If Pogue's in Apple's pocket, he's doing a very good job of being fair to both sides.
The difference here is one of perception. Apple loads their program IMAGE instantly, so it looks like things are going smoothly even when it's taking time. It was a smart move on their part.

Does rotating really have lag? It's pretty much instantaneous for me on a Touch running 2.1.
In all fairness, while most newspapers may be devolving into gossip columns, some of them still strive to maintain some dignity like WSJ, NYT, etc...
Is it going to rain?
Happy Thanksgiving to you too, and a merry Halloween!
Irritating pattern:
1. A free(mium) hosted service becomes popular
2. It inevitably goes down one day
3. I hear about it from every blog, tweet, and news site.

I have always hosted my own email and webserver so when it goes down, instead of blogging about it and complaining, I just fix it.
> If Solaris on SPARC can be made price/performance superior to Linux on Intel, then that's what they should do.

No - this is where I think the worlds collide. You're basically saying they should commoditize their own hardware to the point where its at parity with Intel. I'm saying they need to do the opposite - they need to increase (or at least maintain) their margins and focus on selling it to the people who really need it - enterprises and top end institutions that value the incredible robustness and scalability you can only get with that kind of hardware. I think trying to do both ends of the spectrum on the same platform is just going to ensure they do neither effectively.
A program that is able to disable network connections for a designated amount of time
"As I write this article, I’m using a program that disables my network connections for a selected amount of time and does not allow me to switch them back on, thereby forcing me to actually write instead of checking my e-mail or reading blogs."<p>That's from a pretty interesting article in The Atlantic( http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200811/multiple-personalities ). Anyone know which programs are able to do that, I guess for all three major OS(Mac, Windows, Linux)?<p>Thanks
I like how simple it is, but it definitely needs an RSS feed. Seeing as they're using some sort of IP geolocation, it would be cool if the forecast 'followed' me in the feed when I switched locations.
well it depends... the cost of cleaning up your car and the legal costs vs the outright satisfaction... choices, choices!!
Ask YC: Is there a way to get the RSS feed for "new" submissions to HN?
Or do I have to use a 3rd party service to monitor changes on the page?
I wish there was a way to use python to program the iPhone...
For Linux, and probably a mac you can do such a thing with a small shell script, possibly even running it from cron if you so desire. Just issue an ifconfig down for the appropriate interface, and possibly swap the sudoers file if you're really weak.
if he is selling it, he does offer a pretty good deal at $5

this site: http://www.simplygoodstuff.com/star_peeler.html
sell it for $6.95 (not including shipping and handling)
Shows the importance of having an exceptional demo of your product.
This is quite interesting.

On one hand, this article really gets it: 'above the line spending vs below the line spending; objective cost-of-sale vs speculative cost of branding.' From an investors' perspective, this will give you the picture. I agree with the conclusions. I think that online advertising largely because of google/adwords/google analytics, their competitors & the complex of supporting technologies & services, mean that the base chunk of online ad spending is much more robust then the average.

But on the other hand, the article seems to be written in the context & jargon of the advertising world that doesn't get it "awareness, consideration, preference and loyalty" is part of the consumer behaviour concepts behind traditional advertising selling 'ordinary products for ordinary people'- washing powder, toilet paper & cars. It's really squeezed in here. Then they mention hulu. That's dumb (IMO). Hulu is part of analog tv advertising. It replicates the analogue environment enough to be able to take their customers with them. I have no beef with this, but there is nothing the about.com, facebook or even (i think) youtube can really learn from them.

The second thing is that the undertone seems to assume that big traditional advertisers are the driving force behind everything. They were in tv-land where there is only room for a few dozen advertisers that needed to reach everyone & above all wanted to become 'your brand.' That has nothing to do with online advertising. The revolution is that advertising is now in chunks of whatever size you want. You can advertise a local auto repair shop on a $1000 a year budget with approximately the same ROI as a as a big name nationwide chain. That's the revolution. I'm sure coca-colas & Fords will eventually take a big piece of this, their big companies. But it's not their pie.
It picked my location perfectly, but then gave me a temperature in Fahrenheit. All you need now is to match locations to measurement standards (ie. US, UK and that one other country imperial, all others metric).
That sounds amazing. On my first day of Calculus, the Professor began by assuming we already knew Calculus because he was retiring after the Semester and had pretty much lost the will to teach. He ended up using the word "obviously" a lot and I dropped the class a couple weeks in.
Or maybe someone will come up with a way to target advertising to consumers in a way that doesn't suck, so you can make a living from a website with reasonable traffic. Adwords doesn't meet this criterion.

http://notesfromearth.com/2008/11/27/worst-google-ad-ever/