skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This happened in my home town and when I saw what the followup story was going to be (it made the TV news), Linux users flaming this woman, I just winced.

This felt sort of like a "teachable moment" for the media that was wasted. I wish it was like that hacker giving away Linux in Neal Stephenson's "In the Beginning Was the Command Line":

> Hacker with bullhorn: "Save your money! Accept one of our free tanks! It is invulnerable, and can drive across rocks and swamps at ninety miles an hour while getting a hundred miles to the gallon!"
Make sure your software does not fuck the user's machine up.
How about free food for everyone?
Well, there's also the subproblem approach: (Note, I'm completely speaking out of my ass)

- Launch a string of relays between orbit & the moon. They may only work once a month, but that just means you have to have the judges there that day :-) Each one can be a control board, radio, and solar panel. Swarm satellites, I think they were called, only in a straightish-line.

- Make the actual lander dead, dead, dead simple. Like forward & turn-in-reverse RC car simple. Make it small & rugged, but put little/no control electronics onboard. Power (unless you can beam it in from a near-moon satellite into a battery pack -- it's fine to let the rover sit around 29 days, 23 hr, 45 min of the month, to let it charge), and receiver(s) to control the motor(s).

- Data transmission could be a controllable mirror, and a relay with a good camera!

But I guess this all really depends on another question: what's the cost to weight function? Purely linear? Is it cheaper to do two launches of weight W instead of one launch of weight 2W, over a minimal value for W?

If a launcher for a standard size object can be the primary cost of the system, we could launch relays and landers in swarms and leave the big money for the launcher. 10% success rate? Launch 15 to be sure.

Also, one situated between three high-altitude balloons would look pretty sweet.
Web too busy for business during Obama inauguration?
The Impossible Project
I'm a long ways from that.
Eliminate Illiteracy completely!
I think you could design something that could communicate that weighed less than a pound.

You have line-of-sight, and at the earth end you can build (or just rent) a huge antennea and use huge amounts of energy to send the signal. Think about how they talked to pioneer and so on -- those are much further away, and we detect billionth of watt signals, and blast huge signals back out.

I think the optical communication is interesting, because earth bound telescopes might be able to pick up several super LEDs. The bandwidth doesn't have to be huge -- you can morse code that light very slowly, 2 seconds on is a 1 and 1 second on is a 0, or even slower. It can take a week to transmit, and only transmit when the moon is in shadow, to be sure to give good contrast.

If commands must be sent to it, radio will be the best I suspect. So much work in the history of radio has gone into learning how to make big, power transmitters and tiny, cheap receivers. You will have to have a key embedded in your rover so that some joker doesn't send it the wrong commands for you.

I thought about this google challange thing, and I figured a tiny rover with motors from cell phone vibrators, an atmel chip wrapped in foil, a capacitor storage and tiny photocell, would be best. It would be less than the size of a pack of cigarettes, you would aim for a smooth part of the moon to the extent that you could aim, and hope that it move in spurts over the course of a few months. You might be able to drag a thin hair-like copper wire in order to get a longer antennea for receiving.

It might cost 10k per pound to launch to low earth orbit, but I don't think you can buy 1 pound for 10k dollars. In anycase, if you were in low earth orbit, how would you get to the moon ? You could try to do the solar sail thing, maybe agmented by a tiny occasionally firing ion thruster powered by photovoltaics, but in low earth orbit the sails will have some drag that might pull you in before you ever get started.

So I still think you need a million or more dollars, and the orbit to moon part is not solved.

If a company were formed to do this, and shares were sold to raise money; if the share holders could vote on officers and major decisions the way the Debian community does, or via a system such as www.DeliberativeAssembly.com; I might invest never expecting to see my money back, but hoping the effort would lead to something interesting.

By "invest", I mean one stock should be between $100 and $1000 dollars, and I would by one.
If I read TFA correctly, Biden was sworn in privately earlier and thus was president. Rice wasn't though.
Whitehouse.gov Website Code
Tiwi is an insurance company? Is Inthinc an insurance company?
I don't understand why you got downmodded. Although I don't agree with you on equal wages/prices, I do +1 to you just for the freedom of speech sake.
This is an interesting question, because it seems so basic, but actually takes some thought.

I think enabling cheap, sustainable energy would a good problem to solve.
It can be complicated for a non-techie to even set up an apache server on their computer. We'd probably have a couple more good programmers in this world just by breaking down that barrier.
I didn't down or upvote simply because I think it's an honest suggestion. But it's impractical because the diversity is too vast to warrant an equal playing field such as you're suggesting. There are those that try really hard and succeed magnificently, while there are those that sit back and are too lazy to get anything done and would rather collect welfare. There are polar opposites too, those that try really hard but fail, and those that are lazy and somehow succeed.... you're telling me that no matter where these groups fall, they should all receive equal wages? Reiterating that I didn't downvote you, I can certainly see why someone would. So the explanation I just noted is simply my view and what I've seen and ultimately your concept is not practical nor fair.
VendorSeek Launches Voice Over IP Channel on TMCnet
Technology Marketing Corporation (TMC (News - Alert)) today announced that the Voice Over IP channel, sponsored by VendorSeek, has been launched as the newest addition to the TMCnet channel program. The Voice Over IP channel promotes Internet telephony solutions and includes an overview of VendorSeek's products.
20 Websites that Use Yahoo User Interface (YUI) Javascript Libraries
Equal wages just kills this, that's why. I will simply say that I'm smarter and harder working than the vast majority. I deserve to be rewarded. More importantly, it's an incentive to be harder working.
You'd better hope someone benevolent is in charge of minting that global currency.
And that, my friends, is a winning attitude with the press. You never know when that random writer's going to catch a break and land their piece in the FT.
In the original story she did call Dell but apparently they convinced her that Ubuntu could do all the things she needed.

Story: http://www.wkowtv.com/Global/story.asp?S=9667184&nav=men...
Indeed let me add:

One click web development IDE.
Just remember that DNS change time isn't a big problem if you can put out a HTTP redirect.
I understand the part where you said a wiki is a database. I guess it could fit some loose definition of a database. But what does that have to do with anything? The whole point of the article was the simplicity of the SQL schema. The link structure of a wiki has nothing to do with it.
See http://jalopnik.com/photogallery/flyingbridge/ for more & more informative, pictures.
I'd like to see citizens issued with official public/private cryptographic key pairs. I think this would have the potential to hamper identity theft, enable legally meaningful electronic signatures, and bring encrypted/authenticated communication to the public.
The rising cost of education.

I've yet to receive a response from my institution or others that I've considered, of why it is they keep raising their fees, tuitions, etc.., especially in a recessed economy. It seems to me to be counterproductive - folks are losing their jobs, therefore losing their finances, and now possibly finding out that they need more training or they need to enter a new field, thus requiring education. Yet considering these financial difficulties, institutions continue to raise their fees with hopeless abandon.

I asked multiple departments in my university about this and essentially they diverted my call or in-person conversation to some other department, or they said it was a political matter and basically being a lowly student, there's no way I could get a meeting with those that approve these raises, without my belonging to some student body committee protesting these rates... and then we're only supposed to be there for four years anyways as undergrads so it could take more than that to see any preferred and immediate result.

I suppose this is where financial aid comes into play, but even so depending on your application factors, the fees still rise, so that could possibly mean that you'll owe more money when you get out or you need to be approved for more grants that don't need to be paid back which implies more scrutiny in your application.

meh, I'm fed up with this subject.. any thoughts?
In essence, what you're suggesting is communism. Unless i'm misreading your comment, in which case could you please clarify "wages".
I'd toss Vonage and go for Skype-out, save $11/month :P If you're only calling out from it, skype-out is $3/month or $30/yr and allows unlimited calling to the US/Canada.
Selecting Your Wedding Venue
Your wedding venue has a lot to tell about the quality of your wedding day celebrations. However, it does not mean that you should go for expensive wedding venues. Selection of wedding venue takes up a major portion of your wedding planning time. Many factors have to be taken into consideration while selecting your wedding venue. Here are few points for your consideration.One of the major concerns while selecting the wedding venue is the cost. This factor alone can bring in a great difference.
In my experience, Skype hasn't been near as reliable.
Hard to quantify, hard to approach.
Improve Business returns by conducting Competitor Analysis
In any Business, Competitor Analysis would play a major role in improving the Business Returns. Reason, it would allow us to track the competitor marketed areas to generate leads.
Is Metadata?
This was a teacher?!
Agreeing with your general sentiment, what are the specific kinds of technical issues that come up with IE? I've kept all the sites I manage browser-independent (some people call that "primitive"), so what am I missing by not building in features that would make me want my visitors to not use IE?
Wow. So geeks sit around in forums arguing the finer points of eigenclasses, and constitutional lawyers sit around in forums arguing about who is president during a 60-second period. Awesomeness!
Third-party payment is indeed the main reason nominal cost for education (I might say "degree-granting") rises without notable improvements in quality. In most of private industry in which customers pay for their own consumption, quality goes up over time at constant price, or price drops at constant quality, or you even get better quality at lower price over time. But not in education. Few people pay much directly out of their own pockets for the education they consume.

See

http://learninfreedom.org/school_state.html

for some reading matter on this issue.
Currencies are currently horribly manipulated, and individual currency crashes (like Iceland) can completely devastate a population. Maybe centralization could be better? It seems to be working well for the EU.
Building desktop Linux applications with JavaScript:
http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/javascript-gtk-bindin...
What's your recommendation for something to read about economics, a question I asked HN readers

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=415683

with fewer answers than I expected from this erudite group.
Doesn't throw any either.
I'd like to see several huge improvements in Gmail's interface, for example more convenience in building contact groups with emails that have just come in (and thus aren't individually in my contact list at all).
Yes, but maybe there's a guy just as equally smart and hard working in a developing nation and he's getting peanuts even though his government doesn't provide him with health care or education or social security. Voted up.
Really? That's odd, I've never had problems with Skype. Worked amazingly even when I was on vacation in Jamaica (sharing a DSL connection with the whole hotel) calling back home to Canada.
Here's a gem: McKean: Redefining the dictionary
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/erin_mckean_redefines_the...

delightful!
All Souls: The toughest test you’ll ever take
Ask HN: What kind of office do you have?
So... long story short, I'm finally getting my own office. That's kind of sweet, I know, but want some ideas on how I should pimp it before I move in.

What kind of office do you have? Are you facing the door or away from it? Do you stand? Dim lighting or bright? Couch or none? Music? Plants, aquarium? NC or NO doors? What rocks your boat?

Thanks for the advice!

P.S. I've been in a cube, and also doubled up before. Of course, I hope next up is a home office :)
Wifi debugging tool. Something that can tell me why the hell my signal drops 30 seconds every 10 minutes, etc.
I took quite a few economics courses in university - and all of the textbooks were poor.

The best course was on monetary policy, basically the type of modeling and process the Federal Reserve or the Bank of Canada go through.

Check out http://www.stanford.edu/~johntayl/MacroPolicyWorld.htm
For the bay area, this exists. http://transit511.org
"Ok, here's what I want you to do.. Go to mozilla.com/firefox"
After the TED thread and watching a few inspired presentations there, I'm thinking "Kill PowerPoint."
Oh, I gotcha. Yeah, we do a number of things to keep costs low in lieu of saving time. This mostly applies to doing certain grunt work that we could pay to have done.

If you think of it like "TicketStumbler is for frugal people" and "TicketStumbler is a frugal company" it makes it less ironic, maybe? ;)
My 10 year old self would have had no objections at all about working for arcade token wages. I think the author is onto something.
I'm facing the door (normally open), and not facing the window (which overlooks the Rockies). When I faced the window, I found I didn't look at the monitor, so facing away at least lets me get work done. I have 2 bookcases, one full, the other one getting there. I leave the shades open until about 1pm when I close them because the direct sunlight makes everything unreadable. There are 3 chairs, a whiteboard and another desk (which is unoccupied, and with a hiring freeze is very unlikely to ever get occupied).

Because of a bad experience getting laid off at a previous job (if I hadn't tailgated someone else in, I never would have been able to get my personal books and stuff), I normally don't keep more posessions at the office than I can carry out by myself (meaning no aquarium, or other bulky stuffs), and just books.
How to do Research (a student guide)
what am I missing by not building in features that would make me want my visitors to not use IE?

I'm guessing the answer is: Clients. I haven't had one yet whose site was so simple that it avoided issues with IE6. Of course, you might have clients who are less demanding or have more austere tastes, in which case they're really smart because working around IE bugs costs money.

The easiest way to answer your question is to point you at this catalog of IE's deficiencies:

http://www.positioniseverything.net/explorer.html

But if you want a document that really captures the essence of IE-induced terror, you can skim the invaluable "On Having Layout":

http://www.satzansatz.de/cssd/onhavinglayout.html

Don't read it all at once. It's exhausting.

IE, particularly IE6, is a great illustration of PG's observation:

The distinguishing feature of nasty little problems is that you don't learn anything from them... writing an interface to a buggy piece of software doesn't teach you anything, because the bugs are random.
Sorry. Stupid.
My workflow involves a master branch for the dot-com site and two others for some content-specific subdomains. Because of this, I find cherry-pick absolutely wonderful.

Some good info in the article, though I think these comments have some better stuff.
I've got an idea for a better article: "Here are a few suggestions for your prototype CrunchPad"
Hence MAMP
Ira Glass on creativity's dark stage
Definitely.

Ideas?
This title is wonderful. If only there were acyonymical prepositions...
Because people aren't satisfied enough with their day jobs, and they want to keep making more and more money so they can spend on frivolous bullshit.

In this up and down economy I’m outsourcing my wardrobe (namely shirts) to corporate america and you!

I had a chance of talking with the guy, he talked about huge, extravagant vacations with the money which I think is awesome. "The economy is bad, so I'm going to whore myself out, then go overseas and spend the money instead of pumping it back into the economy".

But, I'm being an ass about it, so I'll leave it alone.
Let the experts manage it all.
You're already doing it wrong. Camel caps? Eww.

uglyAsFuckAndAlmostUnreadable -> fail.
acceptable_using_underscores -> better.
using-hyphens-as-lisp-does -> great.
Move to France or Germany. They hacked Education to the point where it is free, and in some cases you will get money for books,etc...
A web based programming IDE.
Chiropractor Ryan Miller | Weight loss Middleton | 
Back pain is the most common chronic pain, with nine out of ten adults suffering from back pain at some point during their lives. Half of all adults have some back pain every year. In the Maximized Living approach, you will use wellness care, biostructural correction, improve your diet, and get regular exercise.
Worked for Jules Verne anyway.

Wait, it didn't. They missed the Moon.
This is another of those things that amuse me: People who think of tiny self-replicating nanomachines as a vision of the future, rather than as a reflection upon our mutual family history.

I, for one, am pretty sure that I'm a colony of several trillion self-replicating cells, whose parts are self-replicating nanomachines. And that is an amazing realization. But not especially futuristic.
peace, hunger, education, heath, democracy (in basically that order). Enabling peace and reducing hunger are essential foundations for a more enlightened existence. With enlightenment, one is empowered to improve health, through all the avenues this implies (the environment, eating habits, exercise, lifestyle choices, and not necessarily in that order). With good health and even when of modest means, one can chose and (if sound mind), focus on developing and improving democracy, which helps everyone, even the very elite, because as the poor do better in a sustainable way, everyone else will benefit too.
Longer lifetime...200-300 years. There is just too much to do and time flies way too fast. One minute you are a 20 year old college student, the next minute you are 40 years old, running out the clock.
Jason Scott, article author here.

I must say, I'm impressed; the comments on here don't really descend into the ad hominem, design crazy, check-out-how-hardcore-geek-I-am mess it did over at reddit.

By link bait, I assume you mean for attention instead of money, since I don't do adwords/banners or stuff like that. In that definition, guilty as charged. A lot of it is to just knock people out of the safety zone of thinking of services they don't pay for and just "use", as being their big ol' buddy. And to not fall for "cloud computing" things like software rental, all-actions-on-web and so on.

As for length, well, some people will always want what a weblog posting to say to be three lines, but they're people who don't read weblogs all that much either.
I was so inspired by Joshua Klein's talk that i even sent him a congratulatory mail too. Now whenever i look at crows, i observe them, before i just used to think they were nuisance.
your aunt is wrong. logistical impossibility. that, however, does not preclude the possibility that obama was indeed sworn in earlier in the day or more likely the night before.
I don't think we've ever gotten a piece of "personal attack" criticism that I took seriously. The way I figure it, I know myself way better than anybody else and am more than capable of issuing personal criticism. I'd have felt a lot worse if he would have criticized my code or something.
I have to take issue with the author's claim that Ubuntu will have to work like Windows to be comprehensible to Windows users. I've handed over computers running Ubuntu to several people who were used to Windows and had never used Linux before. None of them were very tech-savvy. Apart from the occasional "what do I use for...?" type question, none of them had any trouble.

Curiously, I never see anybody claiming that Apple needs to make OS X more like Windows to get people to switch. If it was more like Windows, I think the response of the tech press would be "why bother?".
The Hyves Hype
If you really want to see mean, try saving the world. That really offends people. I'm not joking.

I've got a whole collection of choice comments saved up in my quotesfile, but my all-time favorite is this one, from a bona-fide hater who actually meant it:

"I don't see how the US government could be so lax in its responsibility for providing for the national defense as to leave you at large." -- Alan Grimes
browsermob.com
This is quite a big list and a very good one at that. The title should be '50 Useful PHP Tools' to emphasize that it's not just another small list of PHP tools.

The categories covered are as broad as the list is long:

* Debugging Tools
* Testing and Optimization Tools
* Documentation Tools
* Security Tools
* Image Manipulation and Graphs
* PHP Code Beautifier
* Version-Control Systems
* Useful Extensions, Utilities and Classes
* PHP Online Tools and Resources
* In-Browser Tools (Firefox Add-Ons)
* Frameworks for PHP
* PHP IDEs and Editors

A list like this would have saved me so much time when I started using PHP. Then again, most of this stuff didn't even exist when I started using PHP.
Yeah, I didn't do more than just mention cherry-pick, but that's really a great way to show how different git is from SVN. There's no way to do that, or anything close, with SVN.
Interesting comment about not facing the window -- I don't have an office, but I've heard many people say that having their computer in front of a window is good because looking back and forth between their computer and whatever is outside the window helps to prevent eye strain.
From what I've seen people like facing the door...

I remember I once got the choice window desk in a large office (very large - was actually a trading floor of sorts).

Whenever I came in on weekends I'd sit with my back to a massive, empty open space. It didn't feel like an issue when there were people around during the week - but when it was just me it really creeped me out. Eventually I swapped with a location that didn't have it's back to the open space.
Or, for scientists, mathematicians, computer scientists, and engineers, the toughest test you won't ever take -- since the subject matter of the prize examination is limited to Law, History, English, Greats, and PPE.