skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Design for any reason other than UX is just vanity. You're confusing aesthetics for design. Design is not color scheme and fonts unless those color schemes and fonts enhance the UX. Good usability is good design. They are one and the same.

As an entrepreneur, code isn't your product. Your product is how that code is packaged in terms of solving a customer's pain point. Finding and convincing users to use your solution is 75% of business -- that means sales and marketing. 10% is fundraising or otherwise finding capital to pay the bills if you're pre revenue. 10% is helping retain existing users (i.e. support) and 5% is the actual code writing.

The code part of the original Facebook was no big accomplishment. Getting millions of users was. Those users didn't come because Zuck and Co. wrote great code; they came because the product was something that did what they wanted and was marketed in a highly effective and viral way that drove users. Coding isn't business, it's just one of the inputs that goes into a business.

To use a watchmaker example, an anonymous watchmaker that has a fantastic watch will never grow his business despite an amazing piece of 'code' -- it takes marketing and sales to make it happen. It also takes distribution, billing and administrative support. Code is a minor part of the business.
Weird. I've been using 12.04 since it was in beta and it's been stable for me. The only problem I've had lately has been with flash videos chewing up too much CPU and causing things to get a little hot.
Fedora Irresponsibly Lowers Minimum Requirements
Any particular examples of joyent doing bad things? Doesn't seem to mention any. I'm curious.
First of all, LTS is no real LTS prior to the .1-release. All LTS-releases had serious issues at first, as far as i remember even dapper drake. Which is not even really harmful for an LTS, since corporations had no need to upgrade as soon as possible from the last LTS.

Furthermore, the story of the declining release-quality was also said about 7.04 (pulseaudio was the issue, if i remember correctly), and edgy prior, end the one after feisty... hoary was nice, but it wasn't that good.
12.04 got - apart from this bug now - really good reviews and felt good on my laptop, so condemning canonical because of one bug seems inappropriate.
Here's the discussion from a few days ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4022508

In short, and quoting from the comments there:

* it was pretty obviously going to be dismissed,

* it exposes the nonsense maths that is being used in these situations.

* this story is old, and the case was settled for substantially less than all the money in the world:

* went on until on May 13, 2011, when Gorton agreed to pay the 13 record companies $105 million in an out-of-court settlement. " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LimeWire

Other stories:

* http://www.geekosystem.com/limewire-sued-75-trillion/

* http://www.law.com/jsp/cc/PubArticleCC.jsp?id=1202486102650&...

This is nothing new, nor does the article add much insight
Backdoor found in a China-made US military chip
As EternalFury says, hardware support is tricky. Ultimately that is why I went back to windows, I couldn't deal with total system crashes in the middle of coding or demo'ing and maintaining a windows VM was just a band aid.
...just like we've built a poor-man's everything else in the browser. I cringe every time I visit a website with YA (broken) reinvention of YA GUI widget that has been polished and clean on desktop GUIs for two decades. (I cringe a lot.)
There seems to be a philosophical difference between the communities.

Hg is about replicating a single repository, while git is about a distributed system of repositories. Git embraces the fact, that every participant has full control about his data and assumes you want to publish cleaned up patch sets instead of all of your honest messy history.
finally following the right path
What is 550 Thread Count?
Many people purchase bedding without even realizing what the thread count means. In technical terms, the thread count equals the number of threads which are sewn together in each square inch. You would count both lengthwise and widthwise.
Not bad. But I prefer WiredDeals:

http://wireddeals.com/

The advantage of WiredDeals over DealsFerret is you can run searches and see the latest activity on the big deals sites without needing to sign up for an account. And, like DealsFerret, you can sign up for an account if you need alerts. I'm not associated with WiredDeals, by the way. Just an avid user for several years and like not having to dig through the big deals sites to see what's happening on a regular basis.
Buying raw megabits-per-second into the internet is very cheap. You should have the option to buy based on speed and have them make a profit even if you saturate the line 24/7.

Electricity, water, gas cost a lot more to produce.
Since?

10.04 systems hang after 200+ days due to a kernel bug. If you install the latest kernel, which addresses the issue, after 200+ days processes still no longer report any CPU usage.

10.04 itself was a joke.
Ubuntu is just a distribution. They don't directly hack on everything they ship. This is why they try to keep up with the upstream which releases the new versions. They do it in fact less than Fedora, which may or may not be a good thing. Maybe if they get really big they can afford to slow down.

To add my little Linux rant (as a stupid user):

I installed Ubuntu 12.04 and I had almost everything I needed after a 15 minute installation. I prepared mentally for a battle with Skype. It actually worked really well.

I toyed with gnome-language-selector and somehow my language got switched to Chinese. And then the 2 hour battle began. No matter what I did, my GNOME or Unity sessions stayed in Chinese. Ubuntu devs decided that I don't need to select the language at login, so I couldn't do it there, and the various locales didn't convince anyone except the shell that I don't want Chinese. Finally I opened again gnome-language-selector in which I couldn't previously select the language. Turns out I had drag and drop and not click the languages. So I had to pick up English and drop it above Chinese for it to work.

I should have reinstalled Ubuntu - it would cost me less time. And I still have no idea why I had Chinese in the first place.
Thanks again! I'll do that if I form a coherent question.
Usually I dismiss posts like this. And I have to admit -- I browsed the frontpage several times without clicking on it.

But I think this is very cogent, and one I had totally forgotten about in the whole FB media circus. But this is a rare opportunity for FB to reject precisely the parts of public company SOP that doom them to lack of understanding with their customers, etc.

FB has a hacker / break things culture. Public companies can't admit these things to the public.

Public companies often stagnate by not being able to relate to customers via the full feedback loop that admitting mistakes includes. Some companies get lucky because they insist on getting in touch with what the customer wants in other ways (e.g., through data at Google or through Lean Startup and two-pizza-size teams at other companies, etc.)

But it is an opportunity for FB to buck the norm and continue to take open risks and admit when they make mistakes. It is an opportunity to transform the culture of public companies.
Excellent mention of the coffee shop fallacy. I think you nailed the point perfectly. Coffee making is only 5% of running a coffee shop. Dealing with customers (i.e. sales and marketing) is the majority of the work. People can get coffee anywhere; they go to your shop because of the perceived value of your product. Coffee (and code) becomes a commodity. While there is some really brilliant artisanal coffee (and code,) the general public doesn't usually know enough to tell the difference.
It should be titled "Facebook tries to obtain a platform that it controls so that it isn't reliant on others".
Maybe this is me not paying attention much lately...

How can a bug like this end up being specific to a distro? Aren't the distros effectively just different package managers, different init conventions, and maybe some system management sauce?

The overwhelming majority of the operating system is just: kernel + modules, GNU, X, and a window manager, isn't it? So how can a bug like this be specific to Ubuntu?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4030370
Does this generate some sort of "standard" mbox file? something one can open with Thunderbird or similar?

Probably more convenient than periodically running a POP3 client.
Redefine Web Searching with Yahoo Axis
Reminds me of Stewart Lee's standup bit on "the values of the Carphone Warehouse" (a British mobile phone retailer):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwH1fLEMDkY
Google has never announced how they count views. They have announced that recommended videos are suggested based on the % of videos watched. I would think some of that same technology is being used in the view count.

http://youtubecreator.blogspot.com/2012/05/note-about-recent...
God and White Men at Yale
Read the Lean Startup and learn what an MVP really is. And MVP can be built without writing any code. Your first few months should be figuring out what your customers want.
Not only that, accelerated 3D video hardware is as tricky as it gets. Hats off to the open source developers who attempt it, often having to reverse engineer some of the most complex hardware known to man.

Am I missing some context here? Why is a nouveau driver crash front page news?
That is Adobe's problem. Canonical can't do much about it. Flash has always been sloppy on Linux for me.
THE MONEY SPIDERS
Like the US only Kindle Fire ? Even if you manage to get your hands on one you can't even buy apps from outside the US without a CC with a US address
They do. You generally see popular videos stuck around 300 for a while though and if it is showing 800 it probably is accurate within a few hundred views.
Death, by Ungabunga.

Seriously, that really can sum it up. Linux has made a lot of inroads, but its nowhere near the stability of operating systems that spend their time "doing work" as their first priority.
Then you just have a bunch of other worries; are your servers up and secure; not an open relay; has an anti-spam measure kicked in against your server so your emails aren't being read .... not saying you shouldn't do it, just that there are pluses and minuses to both.
no worries, i'd never follow you on twitter
Lots of reports from lots of sources, and no details ...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4029676 <- Lots of comments, no substance, now dead.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4028756 <- Observing there are no details anywhere

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4029599 <- Ditto.
I've really come to hate the phrase "you should follow me on Twitter". It might have been effective when Dustin started using it in 2009, but I see it everywhere now. I wrote about my feelings on it yesterday for my personal blog:

http://kylecronin.me/blog/2012/5/26/i-hate-you-should-follow...

My post is a bit less diplomatic and a bit more of a rant than the post from visualwebsiteoptimizer.com, but I attribute that to how much the increased proliferation of the phrase grated on me since that article was published in 2010.
Time errors between ten minutes and an hour are probably the most dangerous, so most devices being less than half an hour off is barely a comfort.
Some thing similar to what I was working on: http://thearea42.com/deals
Can somebody explain exactly what they got access to? What is encrypted?
> we do our remembering in November

The US celebrates 'Veteran's Day' on November 11th, which coincides with Remembrance Day (or Armistice Day), though it's one of those holidays that are more of a footnote than anything else. Memorial Day apparently holds a much older heritage. According to Wikipedia:

[...] it originated after the American Civil War to commemorate
the fallen Union soldiers of the Civil War [...] By the 20th
century Memorial Day had been extended to honor all Americans
who have died in all wars.
Your product: describe vs. discover
Cell towers need synchronized clocks? For what?
Absolutely Free Vector Icon Packs for your Designs
Vector icons have a major role to play in the entire appearance of an application. You can explore the whole range of vector shapes available in a package deal.
how he increased his twitter followers by 173%

He increased the clickthrough rate by 173%, not his number of followers.
"This backdoor has a key, which we were able to extract. If you use this key you can disable the chip or reprogram it at will, even if locked by the user with their own key."

From this, I'd say that anyone who used the backdoor would basically be able to take over the chip completely. Which is somewhat scary, considering the author says it's used in weapons systems—hopefully the author's informed an intelligence agency with the specifics.
"You should follow me on twitter" send the same message about the author's tech-savvy as "Email me at Rabbit47@aol.com"
One-click-deployment with Hubot
Actually it uses html5 localstorage, but if you delete that too, the list gets reset...
I think you are using the wrong calculation to determine "engagement levels" (whatever the heck that is). You keep saying "look he has 1.5 million followers yet he only got 50 comments on this one particular post" then you proceed to extrapolate some minuscule "engagement rating" out of that.

There are a few things which I think are better indicators of engagement than comments-on-a-post / followers.

1) I would instead look at how many people he engaged with over the lifetime of his G+ activity. Or if you insist on analysing individual posts, then try to determine what percentage of the segment that the post was intended for responded to the post in some way. I bet not all of his 1.5 million followers are American, or iPhone users, or Android developers, or photographers... or any number of factors you could use to segment your audience.

2) How are you comparing your chosen metrics to other platforms? Does Twitter or Facebook have better or worse engagement? I just checked out his Facebook profile and that same Golden Gate National Cemetery that got him a measly 54 comments on G+, earned him only 2 comments on Facebook (one of which was Scoble's reply to the first and really the only comment). So while he seems to be getting even crappier results on Facebook, I don't think anyone could say that Facebook is a ghost-town. Perhaps it would be valid to say that internet just sucks for marketing in general... But here's a hint: In my 9-5 I am both an internet and a traditional marketer (I sell subscriptions). I can assure you that all my cost-per-order analyses heavily favour the adwords/social/SEO/e-mail campaigns to the direct-mail/fax/telemarketing campaigns. (I sell a low value product so maybe this is why my CPO leans this way. If you sell $1K-$10K products you might find that nothing replaces a phone call for value)

3) You cannot look at a single point in time and make a judgement call. You should look at the trend-changes over a longer period of time. Skate where the puck is going to be and all that jazz.

4) Quality of engagement is important too. A response which consists of at least one or two sentences that add something meaningful to the discussion and illicit another response from somebody else is a 100 times more valuable then an endless stream of "Cool! Thanks for posting."
I'd wee myself with delight.

The world would be a better place.
1. Downstream sometimes patches packages to solve problems. Patches can have bugs.

2. A bug may be triggered by the presence of two conflicting libraries or configuration settings that appear in the version sets chosen by a distro.
I never saw it. It must have been blocked by NoScript.
Inquiry Into Counterfeit Electronic Parts in the DoD Supply Chain (PDF).

http://www.armed-services.senate.gov/Publications/Counterfei...
Fast Food – Who Eats Where?
Thanks to you and everyone else that responded. I was more interested in the parent's actual experience, what made them frustrated, etc. I agree that it depends highly on personal use cases and what you are trying to do. Personally, I am using it to support some of my graduate studies and some personal projects, nothing major. If I was doing major software development I would be doing more research on my own, and indeed this line from the wiki page would seal the deal for me:

"At the time of writing (July 4, 2010), the final 2.7 release is out, with a statement of extended support for this end-of-life release. The 2.x branch will see no new major releases after that."

Since what I am working on doesn't involve major libraries (like numpy) I see no reason to stay on 2.x and I think I'm safe to look at 3.x for future stuff.
"You should follow me on Twitter" has bugged me for months now, I didn't realize it started with Dustin Curtis as an "effective" phrase.

It mainly bugged me for sounding incredibly presumptuous - as it usually does when you tell someone they should do something that increases your own ego.
"It could easily scoop up an infirm company like Research in Motion, which is valued at less than $6 billion, and drop a beautifully designed Facebook operating system on top of RIM’s phones."

I find this to be an affront to engineers and designers. It trivializes the amount of time and effort it takes to make a well engineered product.

Can someone elucidate why it might be important for Facebook to have it's own hardware? Why wouldn't apps on an Android or iOS or Windows Phone be good enough (of course with seamless integration like Twitter on iOS)?

P.S. With Facebook's current alliance with MS, doesn't Windows Phone make for a good platform to build upon. Note, I believe that Windows Phone will eventually take off.
Are you grouping operating systems into "linux" and "non-linux" categories, and asserting that the "linux" operating systems are nowhere near as stable?

I'd strongly disagree with that.
OhAmpersand collection of Ampersands
CentOS does not mention Red Hat and Red Hat does not mention CentOS. That's the deal...
Show HN: Made a landing page for an app I made, feedback?
I can think of: chosen versions of programs and libraries and their interaction, default configuration, compilation options etc.
I've been wondering about this for a while. Given the scale of chip architecture today, does anyone in the field have any input as to how hard something like this is to detect?
I like social and other vanity-in-appearance like companies. I think we are quick to discard them as trivial and non-beneficial, and quick to forget that they further accelerate the dissemination of information whether that information is useless (e.g. most memes) or fundamental to human development (e.g. arab springs). What does bug me is that a lot of the "innovation" in social is similar to the "innovation" in finance, where it's a bit of a stretch of the mind to accept that the "innovation" is truly beneficial for society at large, or that the utility derived from it matches the utility that could be derived from employing the technical talent behind it to other ends. We need a balanced world, but we also need to push the "human race forward."
The fact that he's pleading for money as he makes these claims makes me suspicious of them. He needs to provide more specific information and evidence.
So China is doing the same thing to hardware that the U.S. is doing to software (and probably hardware too). Well, not really shocking. Karma is a bitch. :)
The language used in this article seems very much like the author has something to sell and is trying to create the impression that it is advanced and mysterious. The claims about improvements of many orders of magnitude in speed and cost as well as the unavailability of information and services to private individuals suggest to me that someone is trying to get a defense contract for some overhyped technology that won't really deliver what's promised.

Edit: they seem to have submitted a patent application for the process of sending test signals to a chip and monitoring it with an oscilloscope: http://www.sumobrain.com/patents/wipo/Integrated-circuit-inv...
Taken from text:
"This particular chip is prevalent in many systems from weapons, nuclear power plants to public transport. In other words, this backdoor access could be turned into an advanced Stuxnet weapon to attack potentially millions of systems."
FB OS. AKA Root-kit.
How WebSockets work vs polling/long polling/streaming
This particular chip is prevalent in many systems from weapons, nuclear power plants to public transport. In other words, this backdoor access could be turned into an advanced Stuxnet weapon to attack potentially millions of systems.

From the description I'm guessing an interface device that does something in the order of I2C/CAN/M on one end and external comms to the outside world on the other (why else would require "sophisticated encryption standard").
"Currently there is no economical or timely way of ascertaining if a manufacturer's specifications have been altered during the manufacturing process (99% of chips are manufactured in China),"

That claim about 99% of chips being manufactured in China is very easy to verify as being utterly false. I have to wonder about the trustworthiness of the rest.
Since the criteria was having done the task at least once, I am quite impressed with all those who checked yes for died gallantly and were still able to fill out the survey.
My impression is that people are overconfident in their ability to plan an invasion and under-confident in their ability to pitch manure. There are other examples, but in general there seems to be much less variation in results than there should be. Some of the things listed are very easy, some are very hard.
Actually the instructions allowed for being confident you could do it without further training. I agree that far too many people are confident in their ability to die gallantly, however.
I find it incredibly annoying how every talk and article on the web these days seems to be mostly an ad for the author's twitter page.
I'm confused.

> Google has never announced how they count views. They have announced that recommended videos are suggested based on the % of videos watched. I would think some of that same technology is being used in the view count.

What do you mean? Surely there is no magical technology or algorithms behind view count? "If a unique user watches a video increment the counter by 1" why would they need anything more complex than this?

I know there is a lot of abuse protection but I'm not sure how this fits in with my assertion that 1 click = 1 view. There was a bug a few months back with Youtube that didn't apply anti-abuse checking to Mobile views (viewing a video from a mobile device) and a group of blackhat people abused this and sold views: they would view a video 1,000,000 times as if it was being viewed from a mobile device and Youtube would count 1,000,000 views, even if it was all from the same IP.

I'm not sure how it's debatable that if 800 people click on a Youtube video link then 800 views will be counted, what reason would they have for not counting 800 views if 800 people clicked on it?
Last week a report was released that revealed 1800 cases during a 1-year survey. [pdf] This is just one device, he has good reasons to advertise his expertise.

[pdf] http://www.armed-services.senate.gov/Publications/Counterfei...
Exodus from Silicon Valley
>huge problems.. social inequality.. turn up for elections seldom crosses 50%

Sorry to be depressing, but that sounds pretty par-for-the-course democracy to me. Particularly the turn out.
I have no doubt his feed, or whatever Google calls it, is very active. Problem is mine is not. Last time I checked the newest update was almost 3 months old. Which experience is more common? Mine or his? He's stoking social media nearly 24x7 and is a fairly high profile tech something or another.
Will the Google Car make these sorts of low-value home delivery businesses viable?
nice find.
Why do you want object instances?