skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I'm a bit sick of hearing this meme perpetuated. Give Unity a chance ... in fact, the author's main gripe about Debian is resolved in a really fluid way by Ubuntu + Unity. I think Unity's multi-monitor support is one reason why it's worth sticking with.

I've used Unity on my desktop for a six months or so, but I just wasn't compatible with it.

The display issue is more of an issue of drivers or something similiar: The issue I'm having with my DP-connected 30" Dell is that I can't make it being sole display without first disabling laptop's internal screen with xrandr. If I keep my laptop display on, the screen works as a mirror or secondary screen just fine.

Now this might work in Unity, but unfortunately I've got no way of testing it.
Text as a Database - Linux tool for performing SQL-like statements on text data
Little Blog Marketing Metrics: Insights & Recommendations
What kind of desktop software have you bought? It's kind of hard fighting in that arena when you are just starting, you don't have enough visibility and there is lots of competition with alternative (but not as good fit) products.
With WWI or WWII era technology, it would take a great power months, even years to destroy the population of another. Now? Less than an hour.
I would definitely NOT put any level of SQL Server of my resume, but I'm actually pretty comfortable with writing/optimising queries, stored procs and cursors, and some very simple administrative tasks (as a PM, day to day tasks don't necessarily involve dealing with SQL Server all the time - if they did, then something's badly wrong somewhere...)

I hope this doesn't sound like tooting my own horn, but the lead-up is to this: there's a link in there that should be a submission by itself: http://www.midnightdba.com/DBARant/?p=443

That interview experience is horrifying.

I've done only a couple of interviews, and they've been on the business side of things, so could someone shed some light on the following:

1) Are there really people who claim SQL Server 'expertise' and then not know things like the difference between DELETE and TRUNCATE?

2) If above is true, then am I short-selling myself by not putting SQL Server in my resume?!
Content Marketing: What Makes An Article Popular On Twitter?
Some progress on Create, the new web editing interface
My experience has been different. If a person is in maniacal love with an idea (not not the business), then of course my entire post is irrelevant. It is only applicable if the person him/herself wants an honest introspection of whether what they are doing is right or not.

A founder puts in a lot of effort into an idea and the gets disappointed when entire world ignores that idea. Instead of getting generally frustrated or feeling disoriented, asking these simple questions can at least provide a direction to the founder.
What's so special about Unity's multi-monitor support? I didn't realize there was such a thing. As far as I can tell, Unity sits well above the layer that causes most multi-display issues.

Once you've got multiple displays, Unity/Compiz can do stuff to make working with them nicer; e.g. switch windows from one to the other and various other stuff. But if one of the connected displays flat out does not work or displays the wrong resolution, rotation, or whatever, Unity/Compiz usually are not to blame and can't really do anything to help you.
Perls before Swine (Perl script to F# translation)
Well Hacker News is probably also at least 50% cold reading (I made that number up, but still). It's a constant repetition of what we want to hear. Similar to the Men's Health Magazines that tell us we can get a sixpack stomach within a week.

I mean it is only a matter of time until somebody (maybe a psychic, or a venture capitalists) figures out what we want to hear and feeds it to us. Of course the psychics also had to adapt to modern times.
Hey guys, this was a side project myself and @wernah whipped up a while ago. While it isn't quite finished in terms of the basic functionality that we were hoping for, it's certainly almost there.

I appreciate the feedback. Couple of things that are most definitely need to be added.

- Hints/clickable buttons on either side of the logo that let the user know they can click either way for new logos.
- Preloading a few logos so you don't need to wait for them.
- Bigger array of fonts.
I don't even know where to start with the author's complaints about the memory model. Inactive memory is not "memory from a recently used app". Inactive is just like active memory. It is not unused memory. Inactive memory is memory that has not been accessed recently and will therefore be swapped to disk first. Just like active memory, it can be be freed immediately if it has not been modified (eg. a memory mapped file, or a local copy of some shared memory), but if it has been modified, it must be paged to disk because otherwise data would be lost.

All the purge command and "Repair permissions" do is swap out lot's of memory. But this is not unused memory. This memory will likely be paged in again sooner or later. It does not help much if you simply have too little memory. That's why the author claims he has to run the commands again and again. But the problem is not the broken memory management system. The author simply has too little RAM.

Which leaves the question: Why does Mac OS need more RAM than Linux?

Well, there's the simple fact that there is much more stuff running in the background on Mac OS. You have automatic indexing of every file on your hard drive and file system monitoring. Try downloading an app that opens some file type. The moment it is unzipped, the Finder automatically uses it to open supported files.

Then you have an automatic version control and backup system running in the background, for every single file on your hard disk (Time Machine). Additionally, many Mac apps aggressively cache data in memory. Take iTunes. You can scroll lag-free through music libraries with tens of thousands of songs and their album artwork, and filter them instantly.

These things use up RAM. Lot's of it. And that's why you can't run 3 VMs on your Mac if you only have 4GB.

If you don't want the extra features / bloat of Mac OS please go ahead and use Linux. But don't write a completely ignorant piece about how you think the memory management model in Mac OS is broken without reading the real docs: https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Perfor...
I was visiting Chicago a while back and rode the North Central from Vernon Hills into the city a few times. One day we stopped, waiting for the tracks to clear, in an industrial area I got to drool over a bunch of BIG decommissioned power hammers. (I believe it was the east side of the train for those who are curious.)

I have a friend who is working on a book of what is basically smith porn. Beautiful photos of big power hammers and presses in action and some stories of the men that have used them. These have been gathered on his "vacations" and at work over 40 years or so.
German military production was stunted during WW2 by the bombing of ball-bearing factories.

I've read that that was a goal of the strategic bombing campaign against Nazi Germany, but I've also read that even with the famous raid on the ball bearing plant in Schweinfurt--repeated with unsustainable losses of air crew and aircraft after the Germans learned how much the Allies valued that target--the strategic bombing campaign was much less effective than the Allies had hoped.

http://www.anesi.com/ussbs02.htm#tbba

Perhaps equally decisive was cessation of trade in ball bearings to Germany by Sweden (a neutral country in the war).

http://home3.swipnet.se/~w-38797/specarbete/sweden03.htm

The moral of the story appears to be that it takes a nearly total trade embargo as well as direct attacks on factories producing critical supplies (as well as stockpiles of those supplies in other places) for "strategic" attacks to have actual strategic effect.

AFTER EDIT: Farther down in this subthread, the prediction is made that future wars might involve the massive destruction of nuclear missile attacks. As the thirtieth anniversary of the Falkland Islands War approaches, I am reminded that contemporary commentary on that war pointed out that nuclear weapons had ceased to be a deterrent in the modern world, in which nuclear weapons have not been used in warfare since 1945 (in the same war as the Schweinfurt ball bearing plant air raids, against a combatant country that had directly attacked a neutral country's main military base in the ocean between both countries by surprise attack). Argentina was not deterred at all from occupying the Falklands by Britain's possession of nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles. And of course the terrorist attacks on the United States in the year 2001 were not deterred by the the United States possessing similar weapons. There seem to be a lot of kinds of warfare that can go on with no resort to nuclear weapons, and thus no deterrence by nuclear weapons.
Thanks a heap for the feedback. The click twice issue is really quite strange and annoying, needs to be fixed.

I've got the functionality for affiliate links in there, but not all fonts are necessarily affiliatable. I'll probably link to the ones that aren't anyway.

Thanks for the comments.
Gotta love cargo cult Hungarian notation.
I don't care about the entertainment industrys profits
Here's to learning: bootstrapping in south europe
Renders fine on Chrome 17.0.963.46 on OS X. Though, I do see an exception being thrown in some javascript on the page.
We've been using Flask recently, and I do like the simple, no-nonsense approach. Our project is modest in its library needs, and it's nice to have a useful toolkit without imposing a heavyweight structure on our code.

There are significant limitations with some of these frameworks today, though. For example, lack of byte range/partial content support is bad news if you're serving large files (think multimedia).

We're still investigating options here, but WSGI doesn't seem ideally suited to working that way, and as far as we can tell quite a few of the "microframeworks" lack any kind of support for returning partial content automatically. The concern seems to be that WSGI would need the application to generate a complete response even if it was going to serve only part of it as a 206, because there's no standardised part of the routing set-up that says "I need these byte ranges from whatever full response you would have given me".

A common philosophy seems to be that such files should be served statically by your front-end web server anyway, but that is not sufficient in all cases. For example, you might need to process the request through your framework to generate the response on demand, implement access controls, or integrate with a custom logging/analytics framework.

[Edits: Trying to clarify key points.]
I wouldn't mind the official end of life of linux software.

I used to be a window maker user (always hated KDE and did not like Gnomes sluggish performance). Window maker is nowadays not even on the DVD distributions. But it still works fine although I think nobody has really touched the code since long.

That is one of the nice things about linux compared to OS X. On linux dead software will still be alive for long and you get it via your favorite package manager. On OS X dead software is really and finally absolutely dead.
HN uses bcrypt: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3099563
1) yes. but not just sql server - mysql as well. probably postgresql, oracle and others too.

2) that depends on what you want to do. if you want to get more work doing sql server work, put it on the resume. there's things I've taken off my resume simply because I don't want to do work involving that tech anymore, not because I'm not capable or don't want people to know. In person, I'll tell them if they ask.

re: #1 - people lie on their resumes all the time. people also exaggerate the truth a lot. lastly, some people really do honestly think they "know" a technology if the icon is on their desktop and they've clicked it a few times while working at company X. they may not really even know that they don't know anything substantial about tech X.
Design elements for iPhone developers
MITx Opens Enrollment for First Interactive Online Course
Looks like you live in Calgary, based on the website in your profile. Definitely a lot of blacksmiths up that way, but you might have to get out of town a little bit.

Blacksmiths are always having hammer-ins (hackfest/demo day analog). If you can get to Brooks, AB, CA in June there is a forged knife hammer-in. Email me (in my profile) and I'll get you details. Abana.org is also a great place to find smiths.

The cool thing about hammer-ins is that newbies or people with only a casual interest often get to play with the toys (with careful instruction).
Do they still ship with unusable trackpads (that requires you to carry a mouse everywhere if you ever going to use your ThinkPad) or has that improved in recent years? It's the only pain point against ThinkPad for me.
Okay, I really think you know much more about memory management than the writer of the original post, the question for me is using chrome with a few tabs (8 for example) and Dropbox besides the default applications I face huge slowdowns (the system becomes unresponsible for a few minutes), the same happens with Safari, for a system that was described for me as "it just works" this really sucks. This with 4GB of RAM in my MacBook Pro.

I face no such problem with Linux or FreeBSD in the same hardware.
I wonder how food trucks get there.
http://bplan.lensu.com/?plan=y4dgf
If they've not asked these questions of themselves during the first few weeks, that's fine. If they've not asked themselves these questions in the first 3-6 months of work, there's problems.

Whether or not they've asked these questions can usually be found in some sort of action plan they're working. I don't care if it's 10 words on a whiteboard or a 10 page 'business plan' - it generally shows they've thought about market size, steps to reach the market, potential value, etc.

Someone external to them asking these questions might help reorient their thinking, but if someone's capable of going months long in to something without the capability of doing some of their own introspection, they've got bigger problems than just this particular startup/project.

We may have worked with different people (likely very true), but this has been my own experience. There's 5 startups I've talked to over the last year beyond just a cup of coffee style meetings - multiple meetings, talking financials, markets, plans, code, etc. Only 2 had real plans that they were executing - the other 3 kept digging in their heels insisting I didn't "get it" or similar reactions.
Because Apple don't provide these package management tools, volunteering third-parties do.

Apple are never going to provide Linux-style package management tools because the market for them is minuscule compared to Apple's real market: normal people. For normal people, there's the App Store.
Fake. The hardware shot came from a recent article by Paul Thurrott on the Windows start button: http://www.winsupersite.com/article/windows8/windows-8-secre...
Great post. I'm going to show this to management because this is exactly the idea that they advocate yet they keep hearing they should be more like Steve Jobs. Not many people would want to work for a pseudo-Jobs. Problem is, there seems to be a plethora of them out in the wilds of big corporate America.
We're working with flask at the moment, and I have found it excellent. I really don't want to be bothered by anything to do with the web framework because I am already busy with the other stuff, and I've been able to ignore it all with flask because it is simple and lightweight it works.

We used pylons for the last project, and there are areas I still don't make improvements on because it is too much effort to get into it.
This was kind of the point of the project. I thought that looking at each font in isolation rather than scrolling was a better way of handling it. Also not worrying about tweaking any options means you can ideally get in and get out of the site quicker. Bit of an opinionated look on it I suppose, but interesting to see how people react to it.
Acta Criticized After Thousands Protest in Europe
It's fairly clear that the author was referring to the default configuration that JSLint ships with. Keep in mind that the original recommendation from the author JSLint was:

“There is one reliable, objective metric of JavaScript code quality that can help you in making your choice [… of library …]: JSLint. If JSLint finds problems in a library, then dump it and move on to the next one.”

This statement is fairly meaningless if it's reduced down to "if there's some set of configuration options to JSLint that allows this code to pass, then it's OK." Crockford clearly meant that people should evaluate library quality by the default configuration of JSLint.
http://xkcd.com/378/
Thanks for the feedback. Will get onto that.
CSS3 ordered list styles
Python web framework roundup
A lot of web frameworks have been built for Python. There are even tutorials around the web for rolling your own web framework in Python. That is because it's really that easy. In the end this has led to a lot of great frameworks and a lot of bad ones also. So lets round them up and separate the wheat from the chaff.
Absolutely. The idea was that it's a great starting place for someone to look at a heap of fonts and get a feel for what they like. It certainly was not meant as the end point for the logo. I wonder if there's some sort of smart kerning algo we could bang on each logo.
5 Things Your Startup Should Take Away From Jeremy Lin’s Underdog Story
http://i2.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/000/248/und...
The reply seems immature from the perspective of project maintenance.
+1,000- 1500 man hours @ say 15$ / hour = a total of around 20,000 - 27,500$ + land costs.

Which, is still great for such a cool house IMO.
As I said below, if you're developing Apple products you run a fine line with humour because a lot of people aren't going to "get it".

Whether it makes you sad or not is irrelevant. What matters is what the users think, and if Reddit's reaction to it is any indication some will think it's funny and some will think the author is a bit of a dick.

I'm willing to bet that those who don't like it aren't Mac users.
What bugs me about projects like this, is that they're being presented as 'sustainable' while they're the antithesis of that. If everybody would want to live like that, there wouldn't be enough room, let alone large, undisturbed areas for forests or agriculture; plus this house may have cost the builder only 5000 pounds (if you don't count the land), but that's only possible when it's a one-of-a-kind project. If you'd have to take into account the supply network needed to build a house like this, and live in it, to a reasonably comfortable standard (meaning, at the very least: warm, dry, no vermin inside, access to sewer and running water), it would become a lot more expensive, if not downright impossible.
North Carolina's model digital school
I think the problem is that you used OS X for a year. I've been using my Mac for 4 years, and Linux for another 4. And I have Python (in fact I have at the same time Python 2.5, 2.6, 2.7, 3 and 3.1 for testing purposes), I have installed so many packages I already lost the count. You only need to be sure the path is correct when doing it. And I have 2 Gigs of RAM. Mac OS can be a bit hungry, but there's an "easy" solution for this. Closing unused applications. That bright dot in the dock means something is using an incredible amount of RAM just to sit there doing nothing. If I only leave open my mail app, Chrome, emacs and twitter client, I can go for days without ever hitting the disk cache. If I start adding more things (or tabs like I'm crazy), I'll hit the cache, of course. But this also happens in my Linux systems, it's not a Mac OS problem. As for the DVI port... I usually leave the DVI adapter linked to the monitor I use. And use bluetooth devices when possible. So far only once I have used a hub to connect 3 things to my Macbook (an SD reader to copy images, my Ben Nanonote to install some packages and my iTouch to sync with iTunes). Happened once, in 4 years (and I also have a drawing tablet, btw).
Repair Permissions -- seldom does anything.

http://daringfireball.net/2006/04/repair_permissions_voodoo
I've interviewed developers with (claimed) years of database experience who couldn't articulate the difference between char and varchar.

Another thing I've noticed more recently - rails developers who know almost nothing about how the database works. Like they might barely be able to write a inner join among 3 tables; left/right joins flummox them entirely. This is by no means universal, but I've encountered it several times in the last year, enough to be a trend in my mind.
> A reply() construct is not present in Erlang, where you are forced to include the sender each time you want to be able to receive replies. This is not a bad thing however: Scala messages always carry the identity of the sender with them to enable this functionality. This causes a tiny bit of extra overhead, which might be too much in performance critical applications.

An other nice result of Erlang's way (which I'm not sure can be replicated in reply-based Scala interactions) is that the message can be bounced around privately between processes until the final reply is sent (just forward a possibly transformed message with the same contained PID to the next guy in the chain)

While this could be done by having the initial receiver act as a middleman, it also means either that middleman has to be blocked until it can craft the final reply or it has to keep a bunch of state around (for each message it received) in order to correctly act on reply information. This lowers its throughput (and may even deadlock it for the former case) and increases its memory requirements. Erlang's way also makes it much easier to spin new processes to handle each message.
Well said. I would add that for perl instead of using homebrew one can use 'perlbrew': http://perlbrew.pl/ which is a lot like RVM.
Open activity monitor, and check which applications use a lot of memory. (Look at the "Real Mem" column).

If your computer frequently freezes, the problem is mostly a specific application (Virtualbox comes to mind), not just Mac OS X itself. 4GB are more than enough for casual browsing.
Ironic that this is on the home page the same time the article about Bootstrap missing semi-colons is.

Crockford made it to keep himself from falling into traps and lets everyone else use (and configure) it too. That doesn't mean you have to use it religiously, I'm just glad for yet another tool in my drawer.