skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why are they going deeper with it? The more I deal with unix, the more I feel that permissions are a mistake.

That wasn't always true. In the past, it was common to have having multiple untrusted users in one system. Outside of universities that is now uncommon.

It's much more typical to have one operator own (or a small team share) a large number of unix hosts. The common models here for dealing with privileges are more an exercise in getting aroung it than leveraging it.

One model is to have an app user that everyone logs in as. This reduces the change of people making a mistake when they're root, but it's hard to know who did what.

Another model has each person have a unique user. They log in as themselves and then sudo to application users. It's a fair bit of work to set up, and once you have you still don't get to see who ran what command.

In theory you can set things up so that everyone is in the same group, but there's fiddly problems when you do this. Like you can't copy over someone else's file (even if you're in the group and it's 775), you have to first delete it and then copy in its place.

A model I'd prefer would be to have a gateway OS housing multiple VMs. A vm would have full rwx access to a mount point on a filesystem. Any user within the vm would have full permissions. The system would log into the gateway system. If you had particular security needs, you'd implement them at an application level.

Privileges make the unix code and user experience significantly more complicated. I don't see a payoff that justifies the cost.
Economist on Linux Desktop: Free is too expensive
1) Get ahold of a zone file listing all the registered .com domain names

2) Pick five common words

3) Scan the zone file, noting which registered domain names start and end with one of those common words.

4) Now parse those results and pick the words that are joined with them to form domain names (ie, the prefixes and suffixes)

5) Scan the zone file, noting how many domain names start or end with those prefixes/suffixes

6) Filter that list for the ones that occur > n times

7) Randomize the resulting list of prefixes and suffixes so it's not sorted by popularity

8) Add 100 per week
http://webtoolkit.eu is for me the future of web development: let the framework handle all the plumbing.
Mojito claims to blur the client/server boundary. With Wt, you don't see it anymore. If you're a web developer, really worth a try!
I was the featured "Creative Commoner" (or whatever they called it) for a while about a decade ago.

I release a few book length PDFs under a CC license and always liked the simplicity of generating an appropriate license and how understandable the licenses are.

The linked site is not at all clear to me, but when version 4 is done, then I'll run their custom license generator and decide whether to upgrade my licenses.
I was at IBM in the mid-90s and OS/2 was my first prolonged exposure to GNU tools. I got in deep with TCP/IP as part of practicing to become a "Certified Engineer." We ran NCSA httpd and cgi scripts on it. Mucking with OS/2 and its configurability on a PS/2 tower (that you could about crawl inside of) lead directly to mucking with Slackware and working our S. American teams who'd created an MCA patch for the earlier Linux kernels. (Getting DOOM to run on that PS/2 386 was a banner evening.)

Marketing was always an uphill battle. Fans didn't like the Betamax analogy, but it was apt (w/r/t stronger specs and weaker sales). MSFT already knew how to market a dung pile.

I didn't realize NYC Transit used it. I still see it in ATMs and know UPS had a huge install, enmeshed base.
HackThisSite Basic Missions 03 Solution
I was never allowed to test out of classes. I always asked when I felt it was reasonable, and always met with the same response. Though I did have a couple of great professors who would stay with me after class occasionally to talk about whatever I was working on at the time.
OS/2 was nowhere close to being as stable as Linux. There were all kinds of normal usage scenarios which cause the system to lock or crash. (OS/2 had the same "49.7 day bug" as Windows and nobody noticed for years.)
Best comment of the thread. Alas, an infinitely thin razor isn't much use...
He should have disabled the "Turbo" setting on the processor otherwise results will be somewhat randomized. It can take a while for the processor to switch into turbo mode, and the decision to do so can be based on other work being done. Additionally prior thermal load can result in turbo being disabled until temperatures reduce to normal levels.
I really want to agree with you, but I think he found a profitable little niche. The type of apps (actually concepts) he's building for $99 will end up being very cookie cutter and should take a good developer less than an hour (and sometimes 15 minutes).

I think this could scale well too if you find decent, dependable developers that want to make a quick buck here and there...
Some of the privilege "jails" on a unix system are for programs. Android jails each app by assigning it a unique user ID. [1]

I actually agree with you - the Posix privilege model is dated. But it's still working fine, with additions like the MAC (SELinux), xattr's and ACLs, and now capabilities.

[1] http://www.slideshare.net/pragatiogal/understanding-android-... slide 5/30
There is definitely room for a Pastebin-like service for plain text (blog posts). When Pastebin had massive traffic from Anonymous posts, I considered building something (I got blogb.in), but couldn't continue due to personal reasons.
For example, why do students lose points for late homework? In what way is homework less valuable the day after it was due, besides a rule that just says so?

The point isn't to demonstrate the value of the homework. As you just stated, the homework itself often has very little intrinsic value. The value is to get you used to dealing with deadlines. Do you really think that your boss is going to let you miss deadline after deadline without a credible reason? Even if you don't have "boss" in the traditional sense (e.g. if you're doing a startup) do you think your investors are going to let you miss multiple ship dates without consequence?

You might not like it, but that's the way the world works. People need to plan ahead, and they need your products, assignments, code, or whatever by a certain date, otherwise it affects their plans. In the case of your teacher, he or she isn't assigning the deadline to be arbitrary or capricious. He or she is making the assignment due by a particular date so that he or she can get it graded and back to you in a timely manner. Submitting assignments whenever might be okay if you're the only one in the class. But if you take your attitude and multiply it out by the twenty, thirty (or sometimes even forty) other students he or she has to teach, it's a recipe for chaos.
Obvious things that I don’t understand why noone has implemented
I just wish people could forget the idea that Math is fun. It is not.

This is anecdotal, but I find at least the math I have learned to be fun. I got a BS in math and took some masters-level classes because I enjoyed it. I still work through recreational mathematics and play with project Euler and fractals when I have time.

You mention higher levels and more abstract forms of math, and I cannot say I would still have found it fun if I pursued a PHD and tried to truly breach new frontiers, but I can say that my professors generally all told me they enjoyed it. They did it because they had fun with it.

Different people find different things fun, but I think its safe to say that some people find even advanced mathematics fun.
50+ years
Via email, I asked PG about this 7 years ago.

me: "I've read in your essays that you (and yahoo) chose to store all your information in files rather than a database. I am curious if you would make the same decision now that excellent oss databases are available (mysql, postgresql, etc)."

PG: "I'd do the same thing. It was a huge win to use alists (a lisp construct) and just write them to files. Then if anything went wrong, or data formats changed, I could just munge the raw files. Nothing was wired in."
Thank you... This seems like one of those basic things we should learn in elementary school -- the healing rates of various parts of our body. We should know what needs the most protection/care. I still do not know that information, and it seems that somebody has to be damaged in order for others to learn about it. Mentally putting "ligaments and knee cartilage" on my list of things to be careful about. I didn't know there was no regeneration there. :(
According to Jason Kottke HFJ has their own webfonts service in private beta. He's using their Whitney font with this new service in his redesigned site:

http://kottke.org/12/03/kottkeorg-redesign-2012-version
A vim plugin that lets you edit PNG and GIF icons
This is a surprisingly difficult game.
I had the Amstrad CPC-464 (with built-in tape drive) and after that an Amiga 500 which I still have somewhere. So many hundreds of hours on those machines!
Good for them, and nice that they are contributing a bit of their profits.

There are a few negative comments here, and it is cool for everyone to have their say. In response, I would like to say that Red Hat supports some projects like Hibernate, JBoss, etc. that are useful and help me earn my living as a consultant - so thanks to them for that.
This has been happening to me recently as well, last month I blogged about a project that people have generally been finding interesting , posted it on hacker news and it climbed up to the top of the front page then suddenly disappeared

I had seen this before and made sure to not post links to the submission anywhere (apart from on the post itself, as a replacement comments)

http://arandomurl.com/2012/03/27/pouchdb-is-couchdb-in-the-b...
OpenStack, the Free Cloud Software That’s Changing Everything
Totally agree. When you give people only one way to proceed, they will try it, even if they don't know what will happen. (Which doesn't preclude five-finger pinches and other additional gestures -- people just won't realize they're there unless they read some manual.)

I think some of the other hardware buttons could be removed from the iPad though, such as the volume buttons.
Why can't you use cuda / opencl to force updates on specific video memory?

I guess trying to mix directx / opengl and cuda / opencl would be a pain. One is at a completely different abstraction layer than the other.
Jeroen Vader, only you could be so bold.
(Sorry, couldn't help it.)
This could end up as great lead generation for a mobile development shop. Once the customer sees what $99 buys, it's likely that he or she will want changes and probably some design work.

If you can pull together a group of designers and developers and provide the hosting and make the ever-so-painful submission process painless, you are basically creating an app-as-a-service business where the $99 prototype is the loss leader that gets you your customer base.
Thanks for the feedback... added a screenshot. @euroclydon it's an Illustrator template for mocking up design using the default Grid in Bootstrap 2.0
Yes definitely. You could do that now using our course creator tool (http://www.codecademy.com/creator), where different sections could be teaching a different languages.

Also related to that is teaching one language in terms of the other "Introduction to X for Y programmers".
Raphael isn't just SVG; it's a vector library that can use SVG as a backend. It also works on IE back to IE6, using VML.

So if your goal is "SVG" and/or you only need to support modern browsers, then use SVG, it's great. If your goal is "vector graphics" and you need to support every browser made in the past 10 years, use Raphael.
I have seen LDS on HN a few times now.

I know generally the HN effect causes a lot of traffic when the post is active but very little increase in average traffic if you remove the days when a post is on HN frontpage.

What's your traffic look like on weeks without a HN post compared to weeks with a HN post?
I partially agree. The onus is always on the indivdual. An organized class can provide comraderie, a place to ask questions, guidance, and many other benefits. But in the end, it is always up to the individual to get something out of it. A determined person with some basic resources can learn without a class, and a person who puts no effort in will not learn in even the best class.

But as for I refuse to believe that there is a student anywhere that really wants to learn but cannot. That is true, but only to a degree. There remain plenty of places, even in America, where internet access is limited and a young student in particular may not have the resources to get consistent and frequent internet access. Similarly, there are places where the libraries are not accessible in a practical way.

A truly determined person, such as Srīnivāsa Rāmānujan can rise above, but they are the exceptions and even Ramanujan got help from people to reach his peak.
The resolution war is coming
Or the iPad could normally work in bezel-mode, but allow a separate "fullscreen mode" to take advantage of the whole surface area for some uses cases.
That's a Geraldo Rivera look-a-like!
Heh. :) I had a bit more CompSci than most that make the programming jump, from AP CompSci in high school to roughly two years worth of it to complete my CompEng degree (and a few "electives" such as compiler construction and a low-level intro to AI course). But there were still lots of things that I missed (OO and all the related trappings were completely missing from my schoolwork. STL barely existed.), but most of those had no benefit to what I was doing then. (Just as assembly and being able to design a chip from the sand up has little benefit to what I'm doing now.)

"Team Leaders" are fun to lead into blind alleys and ambush with little known facts and tricks, too. ;)
Sounds similar to GWT: https://developers.google.com/web-toolkit/

aside from being in c++, any other differences or reasons why one might choose this over GWT?
http://jottit.com
This is absolutely awesome. I've had it bookmarked since it was first on HN
Send a Brogram
Facebook Linking to “Find More Pages” As Part of Sponsored Like Stories
Not in rural, or even a lot of suburbian America. Telecom monopolies and all that. My mother has 300 kbps dsl, which she has had for a decade, and that is from Verzion, because they have an internet monopoly in her area.

Unless we get either reform on who can lay fiber or get some national fiber channel program in the states, only big cities stand a chance of seeing meaningful increases in bandwidth this decade.
Indeed. I've used http://rthauby.github.com/Paige/ for a few projects; it's a simple npm project that generates documentation from your readme file.
Very neat service. Do you plan on adding other commission links , ie: not GoDaddy ?
This is a great service. I've already registered a domain using it, and will do some more today. Congrats! I hope you make $1 million!
> Because I am not stupid to pay monthly fees instead of single upfront licenses.

You just insulted everyone here who pays monthly fees for software, including Github & Dropbox customers.

In addition, the overwhelming success of SaaS vs native apps leads me to think that your personal tastes and concerns are not representative of the average consumer.
Ask HN: Is Paypal approving crowdfunding applications?
It took less than 2 weeks in January for Paypal to do the "technical review" part of our application to use Adaptive Payments for a our crowd-funding site. But now we're in our 10th week of waiting for their "business review process" to complete. We've been told that some policies are being changed. So my question is, has anyone had recent success getting Paypal to aprove a crowdfunding application?
I just turned 20 and I've been programming for 8 years. The biggest thing I learned is that Gates was wrong -- skill continues to increase well after your first 3 years.

Outside of that, programming has proven to be one of the most rewarding skills I've ever learned.

12 - "Learned" Java. Didn't understand any of the concepts;

13 - Learned C, Understood a lot more. Read 'Hacking, Art of Exploitation';

14 - "Learned" x86, Wrote first WEP cracking utility for Win32 (distributed as binary at least :) when FMS was new;

15 - Got down to brass tacks and learned deep x86. Wrote first non-trivial exploit for use-after-free condition in Adobe Reader;

16 - Learned Ruby. Wrote first utility to repack the SSDT in Windows rootkits and hook accesses to the first memory page of the service descriptor. (Lots of people do this now);

17 - Learned a lot of Math. Wrote transfer control protocol on top of IP and wrote a lot of Cisco IOS utilities;

18 - "Learned" networking (A wildly complex and massively underestimated field, I'm not sure anyone really knows networking anymore) Reimplemented all of dsniff w/ STP & 802.1q utilities;

19 - Learned Erlang. Wrote my own NoSQL database (zv.github.com/artifact);

20 - Now :)
I get a large number of false-positives and, interestingly enough, even more false positives for the same search term when searching from my iPhone.

As I click on them all, they stop appearing again, but this is quite an annoying experience. Do you default-to-available if your query to WHOIS times out and nobody has clicked to check that link before?
This is a duplicate of: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3788021
Google, Oracle going to trial as settlement talks collapse
>A model I'd prefer would be to have a gateway OS housing multiple VMs. A vm would have full rwx access to a mount point on a filesystem. Any user within the vm would have full permissions. The system would log into the gateway system. If you had particular security needs, you'd implement them at an application level.

This sounds...sort of familiar...

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs)

Sadly; *nix was just good enough.
"Politics" is not "political correctness". Don't let the similarity in words confuse. Sexism in technology has nothing to do with politics (or only in the most broad sense of the word, in which case everything is "political")
I've used this tool but not yet purchased any of the favorites I saved. I knew a few domains I wanted to buy so went to LDS and opened up the link to the registrar from there so hopefully credit was given (can't freeload).

Only thing I'd change so far is maybe moving the search bar slightly higher on front page, make it and the button bigger and putting light grey text in the search box. But, you've probably thought of all of that already, just my personal style. Anyways, this has been my go to tool for searching for domains since I found it here a month or so ago. Thanks for building!
UK plan to monitor all email, phone and and web use
Previous submissions on this exact topic:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3760753

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3758984

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3764040

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3760220
Windows, because I just want things to work instead of wrestling with it to work .
I had one class that I wasn't allowed to test out of during my second to last semester. The professor told us that all of the assignments were up on the portal for the class. I asked him if I could turn in all of the assignments the first week of class. He said yes but wasn't sure that I'd know the material. I arranged a deal that I would turn in all of the assignments the first week and as long as I got an A on every assignment, he would give me the final the at the beginning of the third week and I wouldn't have to show up to class again if I got an A. It's not always easy, and sometimes you've got to get dean/provost approval, but if you really want to do something, you can most likely do it.
Google, Oracle head to trial as Java-settlement talks fail
Mike, what type of computer do you own? Does it use Intel hardware? Maybe it was created by Dell or Lenovo or somebody else? When someone asks you what type of computer you own do you say "It's an Intel/Dell" or "It's an Intel/Lenovo"? Or would you just say "It's a Dell"?
The "Hello World" of genetic algorithms
The cheapskate entrepreneurs might indeed want more services, but will they want it for an hourly rate that's 150% of what he paid for the whole initial app? Probably not. That's Patrick's point: This is basically an adverse selection machine. It's disproportionately attractive to people who don't want to pay you money while also putting up a big red flag to people who would like to give you money.

There might be a good business model here, but I'm pretty sure it isn't going to involve these $99 app buyers suddenly turning into worthwhile consulting leads. My guess: In the best case scenario, this process can be entirely automated and take up no time for anyone.
This is not the first time I've heard this argument from a "cloud services provider", and surely it won't be the last.

I've found you can get very far on those four points (minimal configuration, accessible, collaborative, and minimal production-development gap) using shared virtual images, specifically using Vagrant. It's probably not a good solution if you require massive amounts of test data in development, but unless that's the case I just don't see the benefits of using SaaS components for development's sake.
Voted up, because I wish users would submit the link to the content instead of enriching Mashable or TechCrunch. This should be on the front page instead.
I just wish people could forget the idea that Math is fun. It is not.

Maybe it's not for you, but don't generalize that to everybody. It requires more work at higher levels of education, but that doesn't prevent it from still being fun for some people.
It's a lot more expensive to ship and replace a pair of shoes than it is a DVD.
WebGL Inspector
This is perfect for small icon tweaks!

Monochrome icons worked pretty well in regular Vim, but otherwise make sure to open the images with GVim.
I was really excited for Google Wallet, so much so that I bought a Galaxy Nexus.

Guess what? Verizon blocks it. If Google doesn't want to fight for their product, why should their co-founding engineer stick around? Happy he is off to Square.
(I'm not so much grumpy at losing a specific payment option I'm grumpy at one of the few companies with enough force to lean on Verizon capitulating. New tech gets slowed and I get sad.)
"Comments stand on their own merit" ≠ "all opinions are equal".
Get typical traffic for roads, not just highways on Google Maps
It’s been years since I read it, and looking at it now, I see that it wouldn’t stand up to another reading. I do think writing was indeed as socially influential as he claims, and that patriarchal religion could be one of its social effects. But the bit about “rewiring the brain” is obvious crap.
I'd disagree. I may be a little bit of a hypocrite for saying this (I'm about to finish my masters in cs), but while I found undergrad valuable I keep thinking of my grad degree as a complete waste of time and energy. And why? For the same reason stated by the author. So much of my energy goes into producing artifacts and making sure they fit some particular professors view of correct. I've learned so much more outside of school than I had in grad school for exactly the reasons enumerated.
Or you know, some people simply prefer it.
It's a grid template for bootstrap.

If you're not a designer, you probably won't need to use them anyways.
I would suggest to anybody that is considering ditching Linux to give a thought to trying another distribution. I've had very few problems with the following:

Lubuntu - simple, elegant and fast

Fedora 16 - pretty and lots of features out the box (LVM, SELinux).

OpenSUSE - No fancy new desktops, no trouble getting software such as flash to work

I know this may be preaching to the converted here on HN but I've seen several posts today from people who have ditched Linux to go back to Windows.