skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What you say goes against common sense and experience. Pausing randomly in the middle of a train of thought is not on the same level as a carefully considered pause. There was a real-life case study of the difference on the Language Log where the subject was a presidential debate between Bush and Kerry. Kerry spoke at a moderate rate and made careful use of pauses--he had longer pauses before beginning his answers to the moderator's question, and he had shorter, calculated pauses for rhetorical effect. By contrast, Bush launched directly into his answer before hardly taking a breath, spoke hastily, tripping over his own words, pausing frequently and inappropriately during sentences in ways that did not suggest composure but rather confusion and incompetence. Obviously that impression was not helped by his other deficiencies as an speaker, but it was a major flaw in its own right.
>I'm thinking that some forced ventilation of the attic with a small fan might just do wonders.

Radiative barriers should also be on your list. It's essentially just mylar stapled to the rafters.
It is, but the increased price might be because there is an extra day this year.
I have seen installd peg my CPU to 100% and have killed it. What would you suggest I do?

One of the most annoying features of modern OSes is when some system process just decides to start going wild, eating memory and CPU. Often I find reinstalling is the only way to fix such things.
Any criticism or feedback is appreciated. Thanks.
Hide your email, PornHub automatically registered me
I don't think the reality of God has sunk-in.
Virtual memory is actually more subtle than that.

At a mechanical level, virtual memory is permission from the operating system to use addresses in your address space. It is so called because, as you point out, it allows us to separate the concept of "memory for a process" from "physical memory on a chip." The reason I further refine the concept is that allocating virtual memory does not allocate actual memory. Let's look at an example:

void* addr = mmap(NULL, 10 * 1024 * 1024, PROT_READ | PROT_WRITE,
MAP_ANONYMOUS | MAP_PRIVATE, -1, 0);

That call allocates 10 MB of virtual memory. But there is no physical memory backing any of it. All that has happened is that the operating system has now said "Okay, starting at the address I return to you, you can now access 10 MB of memory. I will do all of the work of making sure physical memory backs the virtual memory when you access it." That is, once I try to access the memory, it will trigger a page fault, and the OS will find a page in physical memory to back my virtual memory. But until that happens, no memory - not in RAM, not on disk - backs the virtual memory.
For a more technical treatise ( and additional information ) on what was done, check out this press release:
http://calit2.net/newsroom/release.php?id=1967
I consider my time with Genera to be more akin to archeology and code reading. I look through it for ideas and for examples. How did a group of really smart programmers build an environment that they really liked using? What ideas and techniques did they use? Those are the questions I am looking for answers to. When I actually do any Lisp programming for its own sake I use RMCL or something like that.
The real reason health insurers won’t cover people with pre-existing conditions
The prerequisites could be handled in the same way that WP7 handles them already, by warning the user at install time in the store.

For example, some apps require a gyroscope, which I think handsets only came out with in the second generation. If you try to install one of these apps in the store, you'll be warned that some functionality won't work (or perhaps won't work at all - I haven't seen this). Similarly, I've seen reports that in the upcoming update aimed at lower end handsets, there'll be warnings in the store for the few apps that don't work with limited ram requirements.

I would predict Windows 8 will keep a similar list of the device's capabilities and warn the user in the store if they try to buy something that won't work.
Nupur Mehta is not happy on allegations
I suspect you don't know what virtual memory is: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3699481
If you can,until your "musthave' threshold is beyond 40% on at least one feature. Have a look at musthavescore.com.
On a related note, AppEngine has horrible, horrible, support for paying users. I learned the hard way not to use products without phone support.
this is mostly for msp430 I feel, msp430 is 16-bit and kind of strange to deal with, I'm happy to see this M0+ coming along to replace that.
From the mail bag… EL wire Lupe Fiasco art
That "special power" is commonly referred to as theft.
Ask HN: policy for favoring primary sources over linkbaity content farms?
I am sick of following links on HN that are poorly written, ad-filled, linkbaity rehashes of primary sources that are already freely available elsewhere on the Internet. I think it would improve the quality of content on HN and disincentivize the content farms if HN had a policy of favoring novel content or primary sources over the rehashes, and encouraging editors to redirect submissions to their primary sources.
Instruments from the inside
Microgravity-induced intracranial hypertension may prevent human space travel.
No. It can't.

And pretending it can is a problem.

Solar is nice. It'd be FAN-GODDAMN-TASTIC if we could use solar power as the backbone of our power generation. But we can't, it's just not feasible.

Solar today is half of a power plant. Much like wind Solar generates power when its convenient to its own schedule, not ours, and sometimes that means it generates zero power.

This. Is. A. Problem.

It is, in fact, the problem of solar and wind power. Today we can use solar and wind serendipitously. They run on top of base power and when they provide power they allow us to keep gas powered generators offline. That's nice, but it's an edge solution, and we're already nearing the limits of that strategy. In order to replace base load power we need something that provides power reliably when it's convenient for humans. For solar or wind that means we need to invest in vast power storage plants. Things that do not currently exist even in designs. Things that are likely to be about as expensive to build and maintain as solar plants themselves will be.

We do not have the technology to move to solar or wind power as a base load power source. And it seems likely that if we did have that technology it would put the full cost of those power sources at higher than even fission power plants.

We can no more move to solar or wind power for the majority of our power needs than we could move to Thorium reactors, or fusion power.
There's at least as many Java developers in the Play community. The devs would certainly hear about it if any feature were supported only in Scala and I imagine you'd see community members submitting patches, etc. to remedy the situation.
But surely the social responsibility to help people isn't just limited to pharmaceutical companies? I mean, if you tell rich people that they don't have any responsibility to help sick people in India until they invest in a medicine company, and then suddenly they have to spend huge amounts of their investment helping those people then I think that's a bit unfair, and more importantly saying that will cause a lot of people to avoid investing in medicine.

Ultimately, matters of social responsibility ought to be governed by the government, using taxation to spread the burden equally among everyone who can pay.
AWS not so bad
It just warns you and says that "same application featurews may not be supported" or something like that. TouchDevelop and some of the Compass apps do this.
In some respects wind is like hydro, in that there are a limited number of good places to site a wind farm. As the number of turbines grows there will be diminishing returns as the new sites are less good because they have less wind, longer distances to existing power infrastructure, more damaging weather incidents, etc.
>Of course this would require very peaceful nations on each continent, so even if we had the cost-effective technology now, it would take hundreds if not thousands of years to happen politically.

I don't see politics as being the primary challenge; the US has allies in almost every time zone that could fairly easily facilitate this. I imagine the greater challenge would come from trying to get all that electricity across oceans. Copper wires thick enough to carry a substantial amount of electricity seem like they would be too think to actually lay, and then you have parasitic losses to contend with should they manage to find a way to do it.
The Power of Pinterest [Infographic]
What if users want rich text in their filenames? Why shouldn't they have the ability to do that? And certainly they want slashes in their filenames! But Unix doesn't give them that either. Horrors!

What people want most of all is reliable, robust software. Features that don't work right are worse than no feature at all. What you fail to consider is that every feature has a cost. In this case, the cost was WAY too high. If this cost is to be paid, then it should have been paid in a lower-cost manner.

Contra to what you say, I'm perfectly sure that users would have dealt file with having more limited filenames. In fact that did quite fine with 8.3 filenames for many years. I must concur, however, that those were more limiting than humans should be forced to adapt to.

This being said, I have nothing against giving people the ability to have all of these things in the display name for a file, if it is deemed that the extra flexibility is worth the trouble. This extra flexibility just shouldn't be in the unique identifier for a file. There are perfectly good ways to provide this capability in a manner that has far fewer costs.

Alternatively, I'm not opposed to adopting the attitude of the kernel hackers and shifting the burden onto the shells to generate such meta-character-free identifies from richer display names, but if that was the way it was to be, it would then have been essential that a standard library for generating such unique identifiers from display names have been created, and that the shells uniformly use this library.
Not nearly good enough as an answer. I've watched dozens of investors pressure founders about patents. Usually it's in the guise of the valuation of a company - what intellectual property am I investing in? - and the idea of defending himself later is used as a rationalization.

It doesn't matter at all whether Fred's firm does this. Union Square Ventures isn't suing Facebook either, that's another behavior they're not engaging in. They're also not actually coding software.

What matters is that Fred wrote a seething post about the patent system without mentioning how many if not most bogus patents get created in the first place - at the urging of the other guys on his side of the table.
Google's lack of support can be really scary. I've had situations in at least three different areas where something went wrong with their automated tools and I lost access to a service[1], and every time it was completely impossible to get a person to look at the problem. I still use their stuff for small projects because a lot of the tools are hard to replace for free. But that icicle feeling when you realize that something you're relying on is broken, you can't easily switch away and people want to know what's wrong and the answer is there's nothing you can do to fix it ... it's stuck with me.

[1] Google Group disappeared entirely for a couple of days; AdSense upgrade failed partway through; attempt to switch primary and secondary domains on Google Apps resulted in a month of downtime ...
To make your company blog succeed, be bold
Good write up. It's always nice when people share that kind of information / data. If I learn one thing from the time spent reading it, it was well worth it.

So, review a web site; review a dating profile (buyer). Why not a 'review anything' service?
Those aren't excuses, those are reasons: copying large files are the pathological case for just about all caching techniques. You've now kicked out everything useful from your cache with something that you will never use again. It has little to do with virtual memory itself.
The hydrogen layer accumulates below the current surface of the silicon. When you put it in a furnace, it causes a very thin layer of silicon to shear off from the 3mm wafer.
If that is so then I guess there are a lot of people writing crappy 80s code.
That's because the interactive web inherently locks away software more than binary-only releases ever did. It certainly enables some new capabilities - google search is probably impossible to do in a distributed fashion. But things like facebook and twitter are just capturing the critical mass from what could be a decentralized platform and selling user-undesirable modifications. A company using technology doesn't necessarily imply a tech company.
Publicly funded projects are such an inefficient mess, in part, because of all the shit that is done to make sure that tax dollars aren't "wasted."
Why People Should Chill Out About Targeted Advertising
New Objective-C literal syntax for NSNumber, NSArray, NSDictionary
WebM Experimental Codec Branch Snapshot
> We can also use software to make people behave better, to make people's lives better.

Progressive (US car insurance company) gave my girlfriend this device that she plugs into her car's diagnostic port. The incentive is that if an insured driver agrees to use the thing and wants to "prove" they are a good driver. In return the user gets an insurance discount if their driving stats are good.

The little object does something very basic: It counts the number of "hard stops" in every trip and uses cellphone networks to report the data. People can then go look up the stats online. 2 hard stops for this trip, 7 for this trip, etc.

Eventually it turns into a sort of game to eliminate the hard stops from your driving routine. You pay more attention to driving because of it and therefore become a more attentive driver.

At the end of 6 months you send the device back and your insurance is adjusted (or not).

This is a huge win-win for software making people behave better:

1. Girlfriend gets a lower insurance rate

2. Progressive has evidence she is not an insane driver

3. Most interestingly, the device has forced her to be (seemingly) permanently more conscious about her driving and has made her a better driver. Not only does the device find bad drivers, but it can convince many to become better drivers, possibly without them even knowing it!

Literally software has consciously and unconsciously made her into a better driver and literally every party involved (her, progressive, people near her on the road) are better off for her having used this device.
Ask HN: CoffeeScript for SQL?
Most of us spend a decent part of our days writing relational database queries in a language that was designed in the 1970s. While the actual clauses of the query are very expressive, I could think of a lot of ways to clean it up.

One of my biggest pain points is that a CTE can't be used for more than one select statement. Basically a temporary view. Why can't I do:

var @users = (
select *
from dbo.Users
where isActive = 1
);

select *
from @users;

select *
from Projects p
where exists (
select *
from @users
where userId = p.userId
);

Or hell, even:

create view #Users as select * from dbo.Users where isActive = 1;

The compilation would be a trivial substition of the initial variable as subqueries:

select *
from (
select *
from dbo.Users
where isActive = 1
) x;

select *
from Projects p
where exists (
select *
from (
select *
from dbo.Users
where isActive = 1
) x
where userId = p.userId
);

I know that there are some very good ORMs that can sometimes be a solution. But sometimes you need SQL.

Why hasn't anyone developed a higher level language that compiles down? We've done it with LESS, SASS, CoffeeScript, haml.
That's true, but does this make the fuel last longer, and anyway what are fuel costs as a percentage of total operational costs? My impression is it doesn't make sense to operate a nuclear reactor at less than full power.
Gorgeous Interface. Not über-intuitive, but really gorgeous.
New Scientist TV: What a trip through a wormhole would look like
only the left-leaning media. You never saw the same sort of outrage when left-wing talk show hosts do the exact same thing.
might be nothing but i found traces of "vipcode" on the javascript of the building game here:

https://developers.google.com/events/io/input-output/

code here:

https://developers.google.com/js/script_foot.js

search for "vipcode"
I dunno, I like the readability of an explicit else.
IPad Squashes Laptops on Way to World Domination
Isn't that atypical of incremental pricing? One would expect the marginal cost of the third day to be lower, if anything.
Well, you could code a script that registers for you, before any human.
There would be huge problems with killing copyright IMHO. Most open source licenses are based on it for example.

http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/07/pirate-party...
I agree in principle with the idea that carbon-based energy has a ton of negative externalities (megatons, in fact...), so there should exist a relative subsidy between it and green.

The issue is that creates even distortion between the energy sector as a whole and the rest of the economy, since fossil fuels are already subsidized (through not pricing in the negative externality) and we're adding a separate subsidy to green energy.

So we're distorting the market to favor creating green energy over reduced consumption of energy. When what's really needed is simply an effective tax on carbon, and then let people decide the most efficient way to respond.
It got to be pretty stable at RC3. I agree the beta was poor in a number of areas, but I've been consistently using the latest from GitHub for months now and would recommend you give it another go with this final release. They deployment story is the same, though I've filed some feature requests around this and I imagine this will be improved by the community as more people start using v2.
They might be worth the price of admission squared. It simply doesn't matter if the cost of that admission is out of reach. I worry that an ever increasing ticket price will put this event, if it hasn't already, squarely in the realm of corporate-sponsored attendance.
Really glad you found it informative!

I think you could definitely white-label the DomainPolish idea and sell it to people hoping to build a Review X service. The problem is that if you just try to build a site yourself that lets you review anything it's very difficult to target your customers.

People search for "get feedback on my website" not "site to review anything". Picking a specific vertical makes marketing much easier. But it's a cool idea! I can put you in touch with the current owner of the DomainPolish source - he'd probably license it to you :)
Startup Business Ideas That Rocked Launch
Check this first: http://www.pixelmator.com/ - works like a lighter/prettier Fireworks, currently only 30 bucks, and no annoying licensing thingy. Mac-only, but most designers are on mac anyway.
Thank you. I'm on my way to become exceptional DBA.
Oracle is only 2 years younger than me, but unfortunately it has been developing much faster than I am.
It literally takes years just to become familiar with all these layers of Oracle technologies.
So, it's really hard to blame DBAs for not knowing how underlying OS works. :-)
Personally I use Python 2. I'll move to Python 3 when I think it's ready for prime time for my needs. I'm in no rush.

None of this deters me from thinking that Python 3 was the right thing to do.
The Failure of Sales Analytics
> And privately designed/built/owned particle accelerators? It's definitely a new era.

Well, you could build a push-pull Van de Graaff generator, hook it up to a discharge tube, hook the tube to a high vacuum pump, and there ya go, linear accelerator in the 1 MeV range. Totally doable in a garage.

There are people who built a cyclotron at home. You'll need to wind a huge coil, but it's doable.
Pushing code across 20-odd servers using OpDemand only takes 30 seconds, so there's not much time for tunage. Still I'd have to go with the mashup:

Deadmau5 vs. Salt N' Pepa - Ghost N' Push It
Nonfiction Curriculum Enhanced Reading Skills, Study Finds
I was once the tech lead of a 4-person team of programmers. One person quit to go be a middle school math teacher, a second to move to another city, a third to move back to his home state, and then I quit to move into a different area of work (and ended up moving out of state a few months later).

When I gave my notice our manager was baffled, and genuinely wanted to know if it was something he'd done that had driven us all away. There wasn't.

I don't have any idea what happened in this case. Perhaps all those people moved to other groups at Google or got recruited to startups. Or perhaps that group's manager was a jerk and everyone left to get away from them.
No, because then if the original product falls through, there's still going to be a metric ton of chargebacks.
Congratulations. Our stories are a lot alike. I created Feedback Army in 2008 (I continue to operate it though). One thing I liked about reading your story was the lessons learned part. For a novice entrepreneur there's a lot of value in shipping something, marketing it, providing customer service, and dealing with the whole process. You'll find it's a good springboard to what you do next. Best of luck.
Without copyright, for example, movies would have to recoup (most of) their production costs before ever showing the film to the public. Once they do, there is huge incentive for theaters to obtain third-party copies and show them without any remuneration to the moviemakers. There are similar arguments for books, music, and video games. How do you propose that this would work in practice?
Maybe it's not so surprising that an Earth-evolved land mammal wouldn't thrive in microgravity. From the article: "33 percent of [Shuttle/ISS] astronauts had expansion of the cerebral spinal fluid space surrounding the optic nerve, 22 percent had flattening of the rear of the eyeball, 15 percent had bulging of the optic nerve, and 11 percent had changes in the pituitary gland and its connection to the brain."
Backdooring a Linux Web Server that is Vulnerable to Command Injection/Execution
From the literature I've seen, the realistic maximum amount of solar energy that can be produced through photovoltaic cells is about 40-50 watts per square meter. Although solar is exciting, there's just no way it can be used to replace fossil fuels, no matter how cheap it gets to manufacture. It'll have to be a combination of renewables (why not more hydroelectric power) and greater efficiency (like LED's).
there is a bright side to it - the 'sold out in a hour' situation last year was ridiculous. While i would have preferred a coding challenge to eliminate that problem, a price increase is another method of fixing it.
They didn't get rich by giving stuff away.