skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
And we are watching Apple’s iPad dancing around the outskirts of the MacBook Air market. A more old-school market would be working very hard to force the markets to be completely segmented, strongly differentiating OS X from iOS and so on.

Instead, Apple is making OS X behave more like iOS, reducing the differentiation and creating opportunities for the iPad to steal MB Air sales.
How would that help at all?
Looks nice for testing something, but I see no information about support (especially notifications about security patches).

EDIT: looking at their scripts, it's using a client written in Ruby with its own Ruby installation. Things are installed in {/usr/local/,/var/*/}rayburst.
I once read some advice that totally changed the way I think about exceptions: "The ratio of try/finally to try/catch in your programs should be about 10:1." That is, if you're doing a lot of specialized try/catch, you're doing it wrong. (And in C++ you generally use RAII instead of try/finally, but same idea.)

When you do it this way, exceptions make your code cleaner, not uglier, and more readable, not less.

To relate this to the OP, the proposal here implies a naive idea of what it takes to "recover" from an exception. It's very rare to be able to recover at the low level, and even if you can do it, it's hard to be 100% sure you got it right. Low-level code includes details that you're trying to hide from the caller; if the caller has to be able to fix the details, you've ruined your abstraction. If an inner library has a failure, it's kind of unlikely that the caller knows how to recover from that specific detailed failure so you can pick up where you left off. What you actually want is to just let the caller know there was a problem and then retry the whole big operation.

And hence the 10:1 ratio. Lots of try/finally blocks all the way into the deep inner library, and one try/catch block near the top: when your mainloop catches a critical problem, see if it can recover. Mostly this will be by fixing something (possibly asking the user to correct some input, or waiting a bit in case the network server had a problem) and then retrying the whole thing by just calling the function over again.

Someone in another comment suggested that an example of the "recover" technique is when a kernel fixes up an exception (say a page fault) and then resumes the user process. I disagree; in my opinion, you should think of userspace calling the kernel, not the other way around. Even accessing memory is a kernel call (albeit usually a highly optimized one). A page fault is not really an "exception", it's just a slow-path memory access. You wouldn't expect it to change your program flow, so it tries hard not to. It's perfectly okay for an "inner" function (kernel) to recover itself so as not to disturb the abstraction for the "outer" layers (userspace). It would be much weirder for the outer layers to try to fix things up for the inner layers; that abstraction goes the wrong way.
I searched for presidents in hats and I got this:

http://www.snopes.com/history/american/jfkhat.asp

Contrary to myth, JFK wore his hat prominently during his inauguration.
Misleading story. I call it censorship when your comment is more or less removed "because you believe in [insert cause, religion or candidate here]" not because of an imperfect algo trying to remove spam.
Yahoo: Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain
thanks for pointing out its AGPL.. i was going to mention it as an additional alternative in the switch from PHP to one of Java/Node.js/Python/Ruby.

but AGPL for a language is a deal breaker. i accept AGPL for an application, but not for our language (we will make sites for our clients that dont want their stuff open source, and we dont want to be back in license-hell)

on tip for opa: pick a license that is common for languages.

besides the license i think the language looks _very_ useful (more compile time checks, pretty syntax, same user created data types on both client and server).
I would agree with you. The bookstore (or library) method as limiting as well as hit or miss.

"Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought" on Amazon is extremely useful. In one case I saw an author's titles continually pop up for months, looked him, found his blog, realized he was a genius, an then end up buying everything he wrote.

Pretty much everything I read now comes from that process.

There is a networking effect in place here. The first is from Amazon, the second is from the blogosphere/wherever authors are interacting.

One thing is for certain -- authors absolutely need to have good blogs and write frequently. Some of my favorite authors have infrequently updated blogs or Twitter accounts. Unfortunately I forget about them.

"Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought" creates chains if you dig deep enough. You will not be limited to a single pool of books (or music for that matter.) But, I find its also important to hand search the authors (or musicians) that come up for rarer and often just as meaningful work.
Having just finished a general AI course, this was fascinating and a great example of why to be careful with automation.
You may not have been present during XML's ascendency. Naggum's rhetorical voice was a totally appropriate response. Being shouted down by the XML goon squad got real old real fast.
Granted, but once Lee left the editor-in-chief position, things went downhill fast at Marvel and the best people (Marv Wolfman) wound up at DC.
Nice post/concept/analysis. Keep it up :)
> As if, you know, wearing an undershirt as outerwear in public is somehow more dignified than wearing underpants as outerwear in public.

Of course it is. Tee-shirts are now conventional and perfectly acceptable outerwear in most circumstances. Underpants aren't.
I actually have seen build systems that depend on the gcc version (see the 'buildroot' project for example); it's virtually never what you want, because stupid things like installing a tiny bugfix to libc or gcc causes millions of lines of code to rebuild unnecessarily. "Perfect" is not so perfect in that model. For the same reason, a lot of people, myself included, prefer not to include system headers (/usr/include) in their .o file dependencies (and gcc offers a way to decide which you want in your autodeps files).

All that said, I'm not exactly opposed to auto-calculation of dependencies, I just prefer it be optional. Your last paragraph suggests you're okay with such an approach. With that in mind, I think it would be fine to extract out the parts of tup that calculate dependencies, for example, and wrap your .do scripts in that. Then you have the choice.
Hipsters gonna hip.
Dear NPR,

I know this is just one of your employees' blogs, and I know it very likely doesn't represent the official stance of National Public Radio on hat-wearing, globalism or international politics. I also happen to agree with the parent that this theory is a bit of a stretch, but hey...that's life.

That said, I'd like to thank you for writing anything about this subject at all, because without you folks, I'm reasonably sure I wouldn't be thinking about hat-wearing on a sunny Saturday afternoon. So, nutty or not, thanks for providing some mind-expanding reading material. I'll try not to extrapolate this light bit of reading into a narrative about your awareness of the world at large.
Wouldn't layer 7 detection drive CPU usage up for a somewhat different use case? You are not trying to give video traffic a lower priority - you are trying to prevent things like backups clogging your pipes.
Whilst fascinating, It's amazing that stuff like this gets bumped up to number #2 on hackernews
So FB tries to filter out ASCII art.

It sounds to me like FB is trying to win over advertisers who really are not interested in the web, except to the extent they can profit from it. And they may learn FB has led them to believe there is much more potential than the results actually show.

Meanwhile, the "consumers" using the web are generally interested in it. That includes ASCII art and LOL, as a means of communication. And not simply to discuss, purchase products and services.

FB is going to fade away. It's just a matter of time.

Because their motives are becoming more and more clear to even non-technical users, these motives are antithetical to the social (cf. commercial) premise of the internet, and they cannot maintain a monopoly on communication through the web, excluding other avenues by being "the only option". Couple this with advertisers who are still patiently waiting for results, results which will never come.

How can you call this anything other than censorship? There is no profanity, no objectionable content whatsoever in the post.

It's not "isolated", it's "targeted".
Why exactly do you think curated content would magically disappear from the internet? The very website you're using right now was created specifically for content curating.

Content curating is an ubiquitous trend in the internet. Startups are built every day, focusing specifically on this problem. And the fact that you're posting here on Hacker News makes me assume that you think it's working.

Yes, record labels also curate content. But that's so easy to replace. If curating music is the reason why you think record labels are useful. Then that's just one more evidence they're useless.
No idea if it's novel or not but I read it as:

Biochemist makes light[1]. The light is made of CO2 eating algae.

[1] As in lamp, torch, bulb, etc.
Chrome has certain google.com certificates (maybe all of them) pinned.

{accounts, mail, docs}.google.com (at least) have HSTS forced and preloaded in Chrome, but www.google.com does not.
My guess was IMF or IRS haha.
I think the idea behind this visualization is to show how thin (in terms of total volume) the troposphere plus upper crust really is.
Using return values to pass back error codes is a disaster waiting to happen that can triple your line count.
Yeah, this is spot on. A label is simply what we call it when a group of people involved in music get together and combine their resources. Labels provide marketing, contacts (with other musicians, with recording studios and other services musicians need), and by curating content, they help bands find their audiences and help fans provide new bands.

In fact, it's a very common thing for musicians, once they achieve some kind of success (whether financial, or in terms of their following) to start a label so that they have an organization they can use to promote acts they like.
I think it goes back even further than the Victorian era, whose fashions were in many ways simpler than the height of 17th/18th-century aristocratic fashions. For example, the wig fell out of fashion, and elaborate embroidered suits, gowns, and capes were replaced with a more standardized range of coats made out of plainer fabric (often just plain black). By the Victorian era, nobody was dressing like this dashing fellow anymore: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Georg_Friedrich_H%C3%...
I think that's an overwhelmingly negative perspective. Facebook was (for me, at least) a draw initially because it wasn't drowning in crap like MySpace was. It was a locked down experience, and everyone benefitted from it. In all honesty, I don't see this as a dramatic move away from that idea.
I'm an eBook author with several books that pretty much live on the first page of results for their genres, so I have experience in this arena.

The recent growth in the eBook market is, in my opinion, excellent for most aspiring authors, but might be bad for some already successful authors.

eBooks lower the barrier to market entry. Aspiring authors don't need expensive equipment or software anymore (my ebooks are written in Microsoft Word), nor do they need to spend time socializing and mingling with industry types that they should be spending on writing.

However, eBooks are hastening the end of the days of an author being able to write one book and live off of it for years. The lowering of costs, as well as the increase in competition, will force eBook authors, myself included, to focus on both increasing quality and on churning out more books more quickly. The economy of scale applies here in ways that used to only apply to publishers, not authors.

Of course, this makes sense because in the eBook era the author is, quite often, the publisher.
Ask HN: Does your team use an internal wiki?
Hello HN,

I was wondering if any of you had experience with setting up and running an internal wiki as a team knowledge repository.

My team right now uses OneNote to store all of our tribal knowledge in, It's however recently become quite inconvenient, as many of us are moving to either Linux or Macs. Bonus points if it uses a popular syntax such as Markdown. Even more extra points if you can edit the content through a good text editor like vim.

Thanks!
Article seemed to have some amount of credibility until the part about Mac OSX making shell code "hip" around 2009 that until then would have scared Windows users... (wtf)
This gets at my reaction as well. It might be useful to have spheres of some of the precious metals (silver, gold, etc.) next to the water sphere to help set the frame of reference. I'm guessing they'll be much, much smaller than the water sphere.

At the least, this depiction jars against the common idea that water covers ~66% of the earth's _surface_. The mapping to this presentation is, presumably, the fact that surface of the earth is exceedingly thin with respect to its radius. Thus _delirium's point, that the absolute volume isn't as important as the manner of distribution in relation to other materials on the earth. The common adage that a human is 70% water doesn't, by itself, give a useful description of what it means to _be_ human.
AT&T seems to have forgotten how many customers they gained by being the only network to offer iPhone for a long time. Now that they've got those users, it's easy to take them for granted, and wish they'd done things differently. Had they not offered an unlimited data plan in the beginning, Apple may have went with another provider. Apple benefits from commoditizing industries adjacent to their main: hardware.

Mobile internet access is a commodity, just as wired internet access is a commodity. Most ISPs today advertise UNLIMITED LIGHTNING FAST DOWNLOAD SPEEDS, knowing that their network can't support everyone downloading at that speed at once.

It's like gym memberships. Gyms can't support all of their members showing up at the same time. In fact, they profit on the fact that most people underutilize their membership. What gyms don't do, is harass, limit, and double charge members who show up every day, to work out and get their money's worth.
Well I happen to disagree with that.

So yeah, the script is very small. But why is it? Because aliases are used everywhere. Over simplifying things. When you read it, you don't know what it does. When you read the 3 pages of explanations, you get the idea, but you still don't know exactly what it does.

At least with iptables you do. And you can match virtually anything (like a bit in a packet if you like)

The real interface issue is TC.
The choice of Stellenbosch in South Africa as an example is perhaps not ideal. While SA may be a third world country in parts, it is very "first-world" in others and has a GDP greater than Denmark, Finland, Singapore and Ireland. Stellenbosch is also one of the countries premier Universities. I am not sure we'd be as surprised if Universities from those countries were chosen as an example.

I'm sure it's more of a case of Elsevier charging whatever it could to each university.
So I guess that the interior ceiling of cars in the 40-late 50s were just about as high as they are today right? That's somehow a immutable standard or just something they researched for this article?
Pandorabots CallMom Mobile Virtual Assistant
> It might be useful to have spheres of some of the precious metals (silver, gold, etc.) next to the water sphere to help set the frame of reference.

I'm not sure how it compares to the total gold potentially available, but from what I can find, only about 8500 m^3 of gold has been mined in all of human history, which would make a completely invisible sphere on the scale of this image--- radius a bit over 50 m.
This is interesting, and I hadn't heard about it until now. Would you care to elaborate, or point to further information?
Yeah, sorry - that part was a bit brief, and is only a hunch. I genuinely think though that the command line is more popular now than, say, 10 years ago.
The client gets installed in /usr/local/rayburst and data for your install goes under /var/lib/rayburst. It's done so that it doesn't get in the way of any of your actual installs (had enough conflicts with system ruby when testing). And you can clear out those directories once everything is installed.

All in all the current design is to get things installed on a new server and then get out of your way.
I'd say it's not a simulation but a crappy, cheap emulation. Lack of FTL, 'nuf said.
I find a hat better for dealing with the rain, but that could be because I'm in the Puget Sound area. We get a lot of rainy days, but it is usually not heavy rain. The annoyance if getting my clothes a little wet is less than the annoyance of having to hold an umbrella.

The only part of a light rain that is really annoying is wet glasses, and a hat deals with that nicely.
People are still using Facebook?
Can we finally close the book and depart from old and untrue stereotypes that have done such a disservice for the industry? Intelligence comes in all shapes and sizes, races, genders, types of people, etc.
thanks! I will pass it on to my friends.
But cars did also become widely used in those other countries during that time. I don't think that blaming presidents makes sense (and that part was a joke, anyway), but cars as an explanation for the decline of hats seems intriguing. As you noted, in some places in the west, commuting by public transport remained widely used (though I would argue that even many of those people frequently had to use cars), but here I would simply add fashion to the cars and turn it in a two-step process: cars made the use of hats decline, that decline became visible (either through interpersonal relationships or the media) and through that became fashion.

It's an intriguing idea, certainly, but obviously without any empirical validation (that's just how it is, that doesn't mean it's not allowed or fun to speculate about).
Ahh.. so now I became curious and went on to try it myself. I learned some stuff, so it's ok I guess.

Here you go: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/18817679/flags1.png (Just ignore if you don't want, I was just playing around. It seems the flags' colours have to be that way - they're from wikipedia and people on there have been changing the colours all over the place to fit the government specifications. Interesting.)
content. original content.
Will do! Actually looking to help a few people to atart hackerspaces in russia.
Wii u gossip
nice! will add it to my post
I like the concept; I think simple server configuration is still an unsolved problem and it's good to see someone taking a stab at something new. I'll hopefully have a chance to try it out soon.

Quick note; set 'cursor: pointer;' in your CSS for the 3 main blocks. I didn't notice they were clickable until I started randomly clicking :)
Show HN: Feedback on my ebook landing page
I've just launched a landing page for an ebook that I hope to have out sometime in June but I feel like that dog in the meme "I have no idea what I'm doing."[1] I am not a designer (or copywriter) but I've been hanging out on HN long enough to have a good idea where to go for help. I used Bootstrap[2] for a template, Colour Lovers[3] for a palette and Weebly's homepage[4] for inspiration.

Weebly's homepage is fantastic but as much as I tried to keep it simple and powerful, like Weebly, I kept getting bogged down in massive amounts copy. I think this is probably where I need to most help. After visiting the site, do you know what the ebook is about? Are the problems its trying to address apparent?

Of course any feedback on copy, design, etc. would be greatly appreciated.

URL: http://startupprivacy.com

[1]http://ihavenoideawhatiamdoing.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/dog_science.jpg

[2]http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap

[3]http://www.colourlovers.com/palette/292482/Terra

[4]http://weebly.com
Clickable: http://startupprivacy.com
Walmart cuts down the prices of iPhone 4 and 4S
I've used Gollum (https://github.com/github/gollum) which is a pretty straight-forward little wiki and works well in a small company.
The "Keep me posted" button shouldn't be red! It looks dangerous, no way I'm clicking that.
Thanks. I'm more backend and ops than design and UI. So things like figuring out obscure compile flags comes easier than CSS.
The Seven Most Interesting Tech Startups Around Today
If it was an opt-in thing it would be great.
You are quite right, in that prices are set to whatever the market will bear. You're viewing things from the perspective of an individual price setter though.

I was talking more in terms of a bigger picture view: In a competitive market with high net profit margins more competitors should enter the market & undercut the existing prices. Mean that in the long run, the sales price of an item should approach the cost price. Now producing & delivering an additional ebook costs perhaps 1 cent, while producing an additional paper book costs perhaps a dollar. So ebooks should be sold at 1 cent + minor contribution to fixed cost + near zero profit, while paper books should be sold at 1 dollar + minor contribution to fixed cost + near zero profit. i.e. ebooks should be dirty cheap compared to paper books.

Yet in practice ebooks are somehow maintaining their prices way beyond what one would expect per economic theory. Little surprise then that various publishers are currently in trouble for price-fixing of ebooks.

Courts work slowly though & in the mean time I'm still pissed about the price I'm paying for those (badly OCR'd) bits & bytes.
Goto statements are not as horrific as comp sci 101 lectures suggest. This is especially true when compilers do it, pretty sure JMP statements are used for function calls.
It's nice seeing how US visitors are 10x greater than Canadian, nicely mirroring the actual population scale.
I would add coursera and udacity.
Response to a patent troll's request for help
Ironically I'm not getting any HTTP code from this link... because the site is timing out.
emotionalprofile.com is form Romania
I find it interesting that your comment and the one above it, both of which express mild, but polite disagreement, were downvoted into grey.
A beautiful site, this could actually be something amazing. It's missing a few key elements off the top of my head, of course (being a demo), but its crisp nonetheless.

Great job, and I hope it goes somewhere. I have a few ideas for it if you are interested!
No I definitely think it is.

But I would attribute that more to the rise of cloud computing. A lot more people have access to remote UNIX servers than they normally would in the past.
No, spam gets killed. Voting is the standard way to deal with bad comments, but egregious abuses only show up if you have showdead on.
By my count, you have made five substantially different claims there: in C++, exceptions should be exceptional; you rarely need more than one try/catch per thread; return values give better performance; return values make the flow less bug prone; and an exception is essentially a goto statement.

I challenge every one of those five claims. Can you provide a reasoned argument and/or empirical data to support them?
Great work, always wanted something like this.

Good for "dev ops" people like me who would rather focus on the app than server configuration (but still need to do it).
I like the HN way of doing things, where every user can choose their own showdead setting.
Adding artificial monetary barriers to the web is probably the antithesis of it's purpose in the eyes of the nerds and geeks who made it.
Interviews Can Be a Terrible Way to Identify Good Programmers