skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Trying to figure out what a big company is going to do by reading its patents is like trying to figure out what a man is going to do by studying an alphabetized list of all the individual words he's spoken in the last fourteen years.

Which is to say: It's not an entirely useless activity -- if I've never said or written the word Erlang in my life there's a good chance that I won't publish any Erlang code within the next week -- but just because someone thinks or talks about something does not make it so. Nor can you necessarily figure out how the pieces go together by studying them all separately.
Once Labour get kicked out things will return to sanity.

Do bear in mind how the media does like to massively overblow and exaggerate everything though.
I hearby declare anything written in whole or in part by Michael Lewis to be Hacker News. May God have mercy on your soul.
Sure, now there's a real answer. :-)

What I was mostly taking offense to was: "The only tree worth using is a red-black tree." There are a number of special trees that are useful in specific domains. Especially in a comment addressed at folks that weren't familiar with tree structures, this seemed important to note.

Other than that there's nothing in there I'd disagree with. On splay trees -- they're not just simple to implement, they're also lightweight. Often useful for the cases where you only half-way care. Tries and B-trees obviously aren't general purpose.
I thought this paragraph in the guidelines was clear enough, but I've added another sentence to make it more explicit:

"Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or egregiously offtopic, you can flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did."

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The industry is desperate for a good cross-platform GUI framework. If you manage to solve the problem I guarantee you a very comfortable living and a world-wide fame comparable to Guido's.

Do a google search on just about anything software-related and start calling these companies who sell millions of dollars of Windows-only software offering them a quick and painless transition to cross-platform GUI for, let's say $1M.

I can't even begin to describe the desperation I've seen at various companies I worked for. There are trillions of dollars worth of Windows software that is much needed on a Mac or Linux and vice versa. I once worked at a startup that lost a contract with US Navy worth more than all our previous revenue combined just because we were Windows-only. And at my current company our #2 support question is "When's Mac support coming?"
Google's Microsoft-esque landgrab for IE's market share
No matter what the government (or anyone) does, the same process will repeat itself over and over again.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania
No it won't, because the UK govt spends vast sums on high-priced "management consultants" and that's where these people will go. Think about it, if you're an investment banker, what else can you do? It's not like you can become an engineer or a doctor or a teacher overnight. You'll take the shortest path to the money. That's what these people do, why they went into banking in the first place!
I could've sworn I saw this project, or another by the same name and with the same intent, in an Ubuntu repository a year or so ago. If that's not a hallucination, then it looks like maybe the project was imported into Google Code last June 20. In which case, it's good to see the project has come back to life.
Installing Linux on a USB Drive - Cool
In retrospect using "#{my_first_child.gender}" was a pretty big mistake. I should have put "#{one_of_my_children.gender}". For some reason I thought the former would actually be less confusing than the latter.
They're already dealing with the majority of your traffic for free, whats wrong with a few hours between refreshes? Theres a quick fix if you want it instant — host your own feeds!
NaughtySVN appears to be at version 0.0.1, so I wouldn't rely on its stability yet. When I wanted a SVN GUI on Linux a year ago I ended up using RapidSVN, and that seemed fine. I usually do filesystem navigation on the command line or inside vim when I'm programming, so I don't mind launching a separate GUI program for nontrivial version control.
What an incredible year and a great article.

It's hard to imagine a scenario where 12 months ago I would have imagined an editorial in the New York Times with the title, "The End of the Financial World As We Know It."
Laissez-faire capitialism doesn't exist outside of flea markets. Reality is that many industries are monopolies or effective oligarchies: banking, telecommunications, insurance, pharmaceuticals... The idea that these companies working in heir own self interest will counterbalance each other is nonsense. That's why we need regulation. The problem occurs when the regulated do the regulating, whether by infiltrating the government, bribing congress, or actually writing the laws. And I will acknowledge that there is and has been a more than adequate supply of bad regulations.

Also we need vigorous antitrust enforcement so that the failure of no one company can bring down the economy. AIG come to mind, but also the telcos, oil companies, and Rupert Murdoch,
Ask HN: What is your startup's backup policy?
How often do you backup?

Is it automated or manual?

Do you run your own script, or use some opensource/paid solution?

Do you encrypt your backup data?

Which files do you backup? DB? source? images?

How many and which sources do you backup to?
I took a coupla air trips recently, and in all four cases, the boarding took less than 30 minutes. Reducing that to 5 minutes seems essentially impossible, since some families would take more than 5 minutes by themselves.
It's called "yellow journalism." This crap sells right now, and the major news outlets are all over it. Remember all of the "dirty bomb" fearmongering a few years ago?
I've been enjoying the ideas put forth in Branding Only Works On Cattle

http://www.baskinbrand.com/
So, apparently (according to the article), the bond raters are paid by the bond issuers. How in the world is that not a conflict of interest? There must be some "pro" for the financial world being this way?
"it turns out that the best method (one of several more or less equivalent methods) calls for passengers in even-numbered window seats near the back of the plane to board first", followed by even middle, even front, and odd rows int same order.

I think I would be very annoyed if I arrived first and was the last to board, but the article says that its method is 6x faster than the current method.
Where can I find reviews of how tech pundits fared with their 2008 predictions?
I first read it as "whining" and was intrigued/dismayed to consider such a flowchart dedicated to it.
It looks pretty awesome but I can't imagine it being legal.
I'll try digging up his shopping list.
The pro is, if you are an insider, your ass is subsidized by everyone else.

So, it is cost effective to lobby, bribe, and generally deal underhandedly to get that subsidy. Times like the recent bailout is when your investment in underhandedness pays back handsomely.
The issue is that breastfeeding has become highly politicized. For me it's very simple: could a man bottlefeed a baby in any particular situation? I think we'd all agree that a man bottlefeeding a baby in the middle of a business meeting would be highly inappropriate, yet the same man bottlefeeding the same baby sitting on a park bench would be perfectly OK. Yet to its advocates it's ALWAYS appropriate for a woman to breastfeed in ANY situation, and that of course is where the problems arise.
No, I don't think the label "picked up from a police station" affects the problem the way you are thinking. What I believe you are not accounting for is that there are twice as many mixed families in the population as there are pure girl families.

Take 1000 two-child families (so as to intuitively ignore fluctuations). Families 1-250 are girl-girl, 251-500 had a girl then a boy, and 501-750 had a boy then a girl. Any of those 750 families could have made the quote in my post, yet there are 500 families with boy-girl, and 250 with girl-girl.

Or another example that I think speaks more directly to your post: you see a woman with a T-shirt reading "Proud Mother of Two" next to a girl who is obviously her daughter. What is the probability of her other child being a boy? Again, since there are twice as many mixed families as pure girl families, the odds are 2/3.
I do daily backups, automatically, using my own script which is a paid solution; my data is encrypted (and signed), and I back up complete filesystems minus easily re-downloadable stuff (e.g., the FreeBSD ports tree), to one location (unless you mean geographic location, in which case tarsnap counts as 2 locations).
Slysoft vs. Blu-Ray: Round 3 --- New BD+ Break
In theory I guess it sounds good, but I don't see it working at all. This would create 18 seperate groups of passengers, and unless they're already in line in the right order, there's no way this would be faster. When they call your zone to board, it usually takes a few minutes for every person in taht zone just to get in line. Multiply that by 18 and there's no fucking way this saves any time.
A month early! Way to go Slysoft.

But note: they've moved from 5 years of free updates to a subscription model. It's getting more expensive for them to keep up with Blu-Ray.

Let's see when the next batch of uncrackable discs gets deployed, and how long it takes Slysoft to break them.
This Bruce Schneier story about someone successfully bringing the components of gunpowder past the TSA is relevant here, AND to the recent thread about how to make it in medieval Europe:
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/12/gunpowder_is_o...
I like the theme, but "miniscule percentage" is not an accurate description of reality, not is the assertion that Google merely repackages and sells open source software.

(It does make me wonder about what percentage of a Leopard DVD is written by Apple. The FreeBSD system is mostly written by others, the OS underneath FreeBSD is Apple, the GUI and Apps are mostly Apple. Print drivers tend to be freakishly huge on OS X and are written by the printer vendors, so that might distort things.)
I'm guessing in the sentence, "Google now regularly hawks its own Chrome browser on its search page, the same page that 63.5 percent of the world uses," "regularly" means "occasionally" since I've never seen it.
Honestly, Google really bungled-up the acquisition :(

Nick was a great guy and FB was awesome, it's a damn shame Google did it the way they did (I "lost" 200k subscribers overnight for one month until they got their MyBrand going again, they dropped half their services, logins to their site didn't work for over 2 weeks off and on.......)
Why is this a web app? For many companies even letting your service see the database metadata is not going to be viable. i.e. you're excluding the potential customers with the most money.
I often read Charles Stross's blog (good SF writer, http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/index.html) and he comments about the big brother tactics of the British police. In addition the British don't have the same guarantees of privacy and freedom of speech that we do in the US. You can be successfully sued for libel even if what you say is true. A British citizen can be sued for a posting even if the server is in another country. Scary.
Same problem here -- just signed up, and none of my media files (css/png/jpg/gif) get transferred. HTML works fine.

I sent a support request, but this is not a very good first impression.
I use to have a dreamhost account, but then switched to bluehost (http://www.bluehost.com) based on the recommendation of a friend, and found them to be more reliable and supportive while keeping much of the dreamhost feel.

A friend of mine blogs about his experience with the two here: http://www.danshafer.com/onemind/node/807
I could see this working very well for Southwest, though, for instance, as they already have everyone pre-line up not only by lettered zones, but also in groups of five within those zones (eg "B 15-20") at most every Southwest gate they service.

Instead of milling around the gate in the 15 minutes before boarding, they get everyone where they're supposed to go, and then funnel them through the door single file, in order. As the article references, though, it breaks down into a clogged jam-up of humanity trying to stuff their carry-ons into the compartment the moment you get to the plane.
I couldn't tell whether he was intentionally hiding wisdom behind a front of "winning" and "competitiveness", or whether I am able to take the positive out of any statement and ignore the negative.

He offered some good advice.

A discussion is a process of understanding multiple perspectives and finding a resolution that satisfies all parties.
That depends... which Superman are we talking about? Lois and Clark Superman or get-her-pregnant-then-zoom-off-to-Krypton Superman?
Some might dispute the idea that finance is dead.
Maybe in Canada. Probably not in the US.
That pretty much is the business model of "speed dating", no? If the speed dating event itself counts as a first date.
Consumers regularly counter act companies. Brands are so valuable that companies fight to protect them. The best examples of monopolies are almost exclusively backed by government regulation.

For the examples you site about companies too big to fail: firstly no company is too big to fail. Secondly, those industries would be more competitive without regulation, subsidies, the SEC, and the FCC.

Finally, it makes your whole comment hold less weight when you single out Rupert Murdoch while commenting on an open forum on the internet. Communication and broadcasting tools have never been more competitive and free.
My name is Rod Boothby. I head up the Evangelism team at Joyent.

It's true that some of our user interface stuff needs improving. We are planning on delivering some powerful solutions in the near future.

Over the past year, we have been focusing on helping clients deploy truly massive sites. The largest Ruby on Rails application in the world runs on Joyent.

http://www.joyent.com/a/scale-rails-to-1-billion-pageviews

Joyent has helped clients like ABC, CNN, Disney, Boston.com, and Gilt.com to deploy and scale sites that deliver Billions of page views a month.

For example, we have a Drupal site running on Joyent that can support 2.5 Billion page views a month.

Over the last month, we have delivered to clients solutions that you simply can not get from some of our competitors mentions below..

#1 Joyent VPN Cloud - a secure cloud deployment that is segregated at the switch level. This delivers the PCI compliance required by large sites.

#2 Joyent's Virtual Data Center software - we will be announcing more in the next few weeks, but the first instance of this product was delivered to a client in Japan in December '08. Even with virtualization solutions like XEN or VMWare, most data centers can only achieve 8% to 12% utilization. Joyent's Virtual Data Center software can help large data centers to achieve up to 80% utilization.

#3 Joyent Cloud as a Service API. For an example, check out what Aptana has down with Joyent's API: http://www.aptana.com/cloud

The stuff coming down the pipe is also really interesting.

The first includes a new tool that lets you fully instrument a production application and get true performance analytics designed to help you identify bottle necks and you to true Application Performance Level agreements.

The second is a new web based interface that lets you manage complex cloud deployments.

If you have questions, our would like to learn more, please feel free to ping me directly. ( rod at joyent ).
"Even random boarding would be faster."

That would be pretty fun.

I wonder about families boarding, though. It seems like the proposed solution would fall apart fairly often. Families often sit together and want to board at the same time.

(also, thank you so much for submitting the print version)
It may even be justified, because I was mad at him for things that no longer matter.

If it was just a friend, it may no longer matter, being similar enough to you.

Anything more involved (the $SUBJ of the article) implies that everything else is secondary, and nothing else matters: it could very well be, that causing pain and grudges is the last thing the "friend" would have wanted -- in any shape or form: be it fight or discussion (or rather dispute).

Actually, the article mentions this, when putting off the fight/discussion for a time, when "on the spot" discussions would be too heated. This will bring you right back to "If one feels disadvantaged at the end, both have lost, since the same fight will probably have to be fought again." Or discussed, as you prefer.
The suggested method isn't going to work for families and couples with adjacent seats.

If the primary impediment to rapid boarding is cargo stowage, it seems like it would make sense to focus efforts on developing an alternative carry-on cargo stowage system.
Smalltalk has never had decent performance as far as I know

I don't know what you mean by "decent". Strongtalk was widely regarded as highly performant in its day, certainly far beyond what had been thought possible for a Smalltalk. Its techniques are now being applied to produce impressive gains in contemporary dynamic languages (Maglev, V8). Given that Python and Ruby are in loosely the same class of dynamicness as Smalltalk and JS, I think that's plenty of evidence. Point taken about native Lisp compilation, though.
I suppose it would be like an extended camping trip.

First I'd go to the local book store and buy as many survival guides as I can get my hands on.

Then I'd buy some high quality tools - knives, leathermans, nail clippers, matches, first aid kits, etc..... Many of these would be priceless for that era.

I'd try to buy a small waterproof tent. Maybe a sleeping bag if it's not too large to carry. If not a sleeping bag, at least pack some warm water-resistant clothes.

If there's time I'd print out some Wikipedia articles about agriculture techniques, subsistence farming, natural medicines and fertilizers. Maybe find some information about edible insects and plants. Basically anything that helps you survive in the beginning.
The problem with boarding planes is that people completely ignore when they're supposed to board and immediately line up as soon as boarding starts.

I fly all the time and as soon as boarding starts for the last N rows more than half of the passengers line up, in a completely random fashion. It's as if people are unnerved by waiting while other people are boarding, even though everyone has a specific seat.

People would have to be trained into some form of orderly boarding before improving on the theory has a hope of helping.
Awesome idea. Typically entrepreneurs in Canada have had a hard time finding money to fund their ideas. Hopefully this solves the problem for some of them.
EU Police learning hacking tricks. They are about to “Remote search” your PCs.
it's a matter of negotiating with the right authorities and regulators. Of course, you can't just open up shop and take investment money.

in this case, colektivo is separated from colektivo capital, which funds entrepreneurs and businesses (2 different corporations)
For customer data, we do daily automated encrypted backups to S3.

We also do more frequent backups to an internal server during the day.

Our code is in SVN, which is also backed up to S3.

We have scripts that take a vanilla etch build and prepare it for production. That way we don't have to worry about backing up the OS.
I rely partially on backups and partially on wide distribution of key data.

There are at least 5 accessible copies of my source code at any moment, for example: my laptop, my server (source control), my server's backup from yesterday, my server's backup from a week ago, and my per-release In Case Shit Happens tarball chilling on a Google server farm somewhere.

Which means if my apartment burned down on the same day that Slicehost's colo facility got hit by a meteor, I would still have a copy left.

Customer records? Important but not as important as source code. I have five redundant copies of every transaction: one at the payment processor, one at e-junkie.com, and 3 in my database and its backups.

Email? Much less important to me. I pay Google to worry about it and assume they will be competent.

Analytics data? Nice to have, wouldn't cry too much if I lost it all tomorrow. Mine gets backed up as a side effect of backing up the other stuff. Google Analytics and Clicky also keep historical data for me, and I rely on them to make sure it doesn't vanish.

None of this is encrypted (except to the extent my service providers do it -- Paypal certainly does, for example). I don't store customer billing information, so the most sensitive data I have is a list of names. (Source code? Pfft. Very little of my business value is in the source code.)
My experience has shown the opposite -- the worst programmers to work with on a project are the ones using Tortoise*. I've noticed more missed files in commits and poor branch management with Tortoise users than with command-line users. Of course, this is mere correlation rather than causality.
Funny, possibly true, but note that this essay dates from his "happiest" (or at least longest-lived, most productive) marriage.
> Consumers regularly counter act companies.

So why can't consumers get e.g. cheaper text message rates?
I'll be the first person to upvote it.
The problem with these proposals is that the passengers' incentives aren't aligned with the airline's. I sit and read a magazine or surf the internet until everyone else has boarded, which minimizes time spent queueing, and that spent in the plane itself. (Of course, this isn't a sustainable strategy for everyone to adopt.)
Leopard DVD contains not just the OS, but numerous essential programs and system libraries that come with it: GCC, Python, Ruby, vim, Apache plus myriad of userspace UNIX utilities and libraries.

Think of it as a free vs proprietary ratio of x86 instructions loaded in a machine's RAM. Building anything on top of Linux/GCC/MySQL/Python/Apache will guarantee that the best you could hope for will be nothing but a miniscule percentage of it. Google would find life much more difficult without OSS: Windows/Solaris licenses alone will make it significatnly more expensive to operate thousands of cheap x86 servers, not to mention increased development and management costs.

I find OSS fascinating. People keep underestimating its importance all the time, mistakenly calling operating systems and compilers a "commodity" without realizing this enormous dependence of our industry on this movement.
Server-Side Style Sheet rewriting
It's debt, not equity.
There was no fallacy, just an assertion that the article was fluff.
yes, there are much less investment funds and also less banks in Canada, compared to the US. This is going to be introduced as an viable and trusted source of capital for new & growing businesses.
People like to stay in groups, splitting a group of friends or a family who are in the same aisle into seperate boarding parties is unlikely to work.

Trying to find another article on the subject which showed not allocating seats and allowing a free for all was almost as effective as this tactic.
Southwest has the lowest turnaround times in the industry, and they have essentially no load order (the A-B-C groups just determine who gets to pick seats first).