skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
dmenu - launcher

dzen2 - simple (but very configurable) statusbar

screen and surfraw

w3m - excellent text-based web-browser

mpd and ncmpc - for music

mutt - for email (if you don't use emacs)

bitlbee - an irc proxy that handles most other instant messaging protocols

irssi - irc (or e.g. rcirc in emacs)

cowsay and figlet :)

xwrits - typing timer

rsync - for backups (set it up with cron)

git or mercurial (whatever, pick one)

good windowmanagers: xmonad, dwm, wmii, blackbox

Common theme: non-flashy, shell/keyboard-oriented stuff. If you like several of those, you will probably like most the rest.
This WordPress plugin was technically a client project, but it's for a non-profit so I did it for free as long as I could release it as open source. It being the first OSS I've started (rather than just contributed to), I got very attached to it. It is still short a few features, but I'm very happy with it and it seems to fill a much-needed niche in the WP community.

http://nerdlife.net/custom-taxonomies/
Try subscribing to the computer gigs and jobs section on craigslist for your city and surrounding areas. I watch it for contract jobs in my specialty. I see a lot of web stuff float that way as well.
I'm not sure if they're a 100% Windows shop.

In any case, if you think of it as a sort of modified version of the "Python paradox" for sysadmin, then it makes sense. You can probably get better Windows admins if you look for people who can do both Windows and OpenBSD (though I suspect not many OpenBSD gurus would be eager to work with Windows).
seems like a candidate for inline assembly.
I think at least part of the reason they push it is because in most of North America in the summer there's a gazillion fat male slobs with giant breasts walking around (and their pictures are easily found on facebook).
The Fraud Czar - My morning routine on Free-Singles.com
AuthSMTP was mentioned at Y!Hack a few weeks ago and I'm using it now in a webapp with great success.
I had very little time since my wife just had a baby, she wanted something to do besides blogging while she is home, and I wanted to learn a bit about drupal so...

http://papersubmit.com

It's not finished but it's close. My wife will edit the content and post it. I figure it'll be a way to get some original content pretty easily. Maybe a few flyers at the local colleges. Anyone have any suggestions for getting some inbound links?

I'm an asp.net developer by day...I gotta say drupal is very nice. You can do a lot quickly with CCK + Views.
It's good to hear people talking about creating value. Hopefully the days of useless social networking, sheep throwing, farting phone vc fueled exit strategy bullshit will be over for a while (until the next bubble).
"I'm skeptical of this approach...how many people living in the US know how to make gunpowder from scratch?"

What did this guy do for fun in high school? Saltpeter, charcoal, sulfur in a 75-15-10 ratio.

Saltpeter + sugar in a 6-4 mix and then caramelized is more fun though. It would also aid your getaway when the angry knights came to hunt the heretic who just invented gunpowder.
I like the idea of legally imposing some responsibility on data storage/hosting services. Not just minimum eviction notice but mandatory export functionality would not be unreasonable.

A site like Facebook should allow me to retrieve all of my data in a single action, in some reasonably convenient format, and should be required to give me notice if my data will become inaccessible to me.

The details of this legislation would need to be carefully thought out to avoid imposing absurd requirements on well intentioned sites.
I always just bought the saltpeter from the drugstore. I guess CVS isn't an option 1,000 years ago though.
Contemplating the Consumerist sale and the adpocalypse
Becoming A Power Twitter User With New Firefox Addon Power Twitter
"Government officials had the power to scrape up dried urine from beneath the boarded floors of Stuart stables because it contained saltpetre, a vital ingredient of gunpowder."

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0PAL/is_/ai_n15630934
There are a million different things that a million different people "don't care to see" but that doesn't mean we should censor all of them.

I certainly don't think Facebook's policies should be more restrictive than the FCC, which AFAIK doesn't ban breast feeding (I think their criteria is no nipple/areola... ahem, Janet Jackson).
The PyPy folks are working on a JIT, apparently with great speedups. They've been detailing their work on their blog: http://morepypy.blogspot.com/

Also, are JavaScript and Python really that dissimilar? Everyone's working on tracing JITs for JavaScript now, with great results.
"... was wondering how long you plan to stay a one-man company for. If you are in an accident, who will support us?“ .."

Peldi did you overcome this problem?

"... I am still confident that the plugin versions will grow over time relative to the desktop version, as more and more people “see the light” and start working in the cloud. ..." ~ http://www.balsamiq.com/blog/?p=424

I think the biggest insight this game me was that desktop version had a bigger demand than the web version & that you could ship both using the same code base.

Is shipping the desktop version & web version difficult?
say it loud and say it proud...

http://www.identitee.com

Nice work Anomaly!
Sometimes ya get what ya pay for, though.
Sure, I've been in similar situations too... but if it means buying a USB hard drive on the office supply budget and running manual backups to that, so be it.
Amit Agarwal's Favorite Blogs & Websites of 2008 (HN #2)
How do you configure that?
Have fun paying Engine Yard's hosting bill. Hope you got a VC round.
This doesn't look like a very rigorous analysis to me. All the tests go haywire in the upper regions, which suggests that there might be something else at work. At the very least, it doesn't really show which server does better in which situations.
I'm an EngineYard customer with no VC. We've also had to increase our resources and storage several times since launching.

If your startup actually grows and makes money, you can pay for high-quality hosting and growth ...

funny how that works ...
When you take mundane issues such as maintainability, flexibility, and portability into account there are very few reasons left for building a JIT compiler for Python. Note that all these optimizations are viable (to an extent) with languages such as Haskell, C# and Java.

You seem to imply that they're viable because those languages aren't as dynamic as Python. Yet Smalltalk and Lisp (edit: and Javascript) are at least this dynamic, and have implementations that go far beyond this. In fact Java's (edit: and V8's) JIT technology came from the Smalltalk world.
Thanks so much for the advice lionhearted, I'll remember it!
My impression is that Python's interpreter is pretty good, so it wouldn't benefit as much from JITing.

That being said, it would certainly help, and the same library used in TraceMonkey (nanojit) could probably be used in Python.
My startup has grown and is profitable, and I would never pay that. We pay about the same amount for a 16 core beast from Softlayer as you get there for one slice, which is weaker than a $300 Dell I bought two years ago.

What makes you go that route over any normal hosting solution?
> Survival tips if you find yourself in the Middle Ages?

It's simple. Go to China & learn KungFu!
Marissa Mayer on the future of Google
If you are starting out with linode you should be aware of the backup policy. Basically you have to roll your own. Let me know if you have any linode questions. I've been using them for about a year now. I think backups are the only feature linode is missing (compared to slicehost).
Not available in your country yet
good article. I'm sure if you can master these techniques at home, you are set for just about any disagreement with others.
I've been thinking a lot about this issue recently. Hometown is a relatively small site, but what if for some reason Google decided to shut down Blogger tomorrow? There's huge swathes of the useful internet on that domain, and no legal recourse right now if Google lose all that data -- it's a free service, with no guarantees.

It seems like maybe some very lightweight legislation guaranteeing some level of access to data would be a good idea, for services above a certain size -- maybe 1m+ users or something.
Linode is a good service, but in some ways it's newer than Slicehost. Slicehost was a pioneer in Xen virtualization. Linode, until the end of March 2008, used User Mode Linux. Xen has a lot of advantages as a server virtualization platform and Linode saw that and migrated.

So, Linode can be seen as less mature with their Xen setup than Slicehost. I've had no problems with either and I don't want to imply that Linode isn't reliable or anything of the sort. However, Slicehost implemented a Xen architecture about 2 years before Linode and sometimes businesses like a longer track record.

So, Slicehost became embedded in the mindset of many in the hacker community. For one, it was Xen and Xen is just better than the User Mode Linux that Linode used until recently. For two, Linode didn't always offer such a RAM advantage. When Slicehost was launched in 2006, you got a 256MB slice for $20. According to the Linode blog, they were offering 100MB for that price. It wasn't until March of 2007 that Linode equaled Slicehost with 256MB - and it was still running User Mode Linux. Part of it was right thing at the right time. Slicehost got in with Xen right as virtualization was going to take off and had a superior offering. Now, they cost a little more, but part of that is for the reputation they've built for themselves. I hope Linode starts building up their reputation now that they're Xen backed and offering a superior package per dollar and I hope that pressure from Linode will get Slicehost to offer a little more.

That's probably way more of an explanation than you wanted of why Slicehost holds the position it does in the hacker community.
For the specific Rails app we run at EngineYard, the fully-managed aspect is very attractive. I've got multiple apps and even multiple business ventures–so I can't be hands-on at the server level for everything.

Their staff is very pro-active and always available. I could go on, but my point was simply that EngineYard isn't just for vc-backed companies who need to burn some cash.

And, for the record, I also am a Slicehost and Joyent customer.
Facebook recommends OpenDNS to its users
95% Dreamhost Hosting Discount: Last Day Today
New Year hosting sale at Dreamhost offers $214.80 package for $10.74 only.
95%. Which is also, incidentally, their uptime! :)

Actually, I have them and I'm pretty happy.
here's a post I wrote last month on what I do every time I install a new linux system. The same steps apply to any recent gnome distro. http://mapleoin.bluepink.ro/perma/after-install-work
Advertise your services on HN :)

Seriously, send me an email to silent.watcher[-at-]gmail.com. I need some web development done, and if it works out I'll probably have several other leads for you.
Yes, I did actually.

I conceived and (almost) finished building a rails app. I'm gonna post it on HN shortly for review.
It is fascinating that someone as sharp as Goedel could argue this. But then again, this might be exactly why he never published the "proof" - he could see there were holes in it big enough to drive a truck through.
Just a bit second thumbs up for Softlayer here. Used them for a few years and they've been persistently excellent. I also use Linode too now though for smaller stuff.
I don't miss it; I avoid it.

//me likes to know what application is doing. Not guess.
Growing Up is Hard
Facebook v. Power Ventures
So essentially you're buying consulting? I guess that makes sense.
I've heard this claim several times, but there seems to be very little evidence to support it.

The fast native code Lisp compilers such as SBCL and Lispworks sacrifice correctness for speed. You can fully expect the VM to crash when you give incorrect hints to the compiler. This is obviously unacceptable for languages such as Ruby and Python. I don't know of any serious Lisp JIT compilers.

Smalltalk has never had decent performance as far as I know - not even with a JIT backend. Not compared to Java/C# with JIT compilation at least.

So yes, my claim is that languages such as Python and Ruby are inherently slower than languages such as C# and Java. The less information the compiler has to work with, the fewer optimizations can be made.
Are you sure you want to stand by that? Do you think the government could get involved in this issue and manage to do more good than harm? More than likely we'd end up having to get permission from some bureaucracy before being allowed to delete spam.
We had the same experience when setting our SPF records to FAIL ("-all"). It turned out many more people than we expected forwarded our messages and had spam-flagging problems as a result.

I'm curious if anyone who uses SOFTFAIL ("~all") can comment on how well it works? I see it in wide use now despite warnings that it's not appropriate for production use. Curiously, Microsoft's SenderID wizard calls the SOFTFAIL level "Discouraged" (meaning, mail from non-matching domains is discouraged) with no mention of its intended use for debugging.
Exactly. That's why this is interesting. It's all arbitrary.

We can't just eyeball obscenity. Not if it's to be a law or a policy.

Obscenity needs to be prevented. Nudity is obscene. Bare breasts are nudity. Exposed areola are bare breasts.

To make breastfeeding OK we could make an exception to the rule. So we'd need to add in an 'unless' at the end of the above statements. Seems hopelessly complex. We obviously can't live without all of the above statements.
What FriendFeed Needs to Do To Grow and Keep New Users
I can't. What is it?
Google's T.V. Raman: For the Blind, Technology Does What a Guide Dog Can’t
Take a look at the PyPy FAQ. They're using annotations, type inference assumptions, and so on. PyPy seems to be focused on a Jit-able subset of Python. It's not a project that can one day be transparently included in the new Python release.

JavaScript and Python are not that dissimilar. So we see similar results with JavaScript. People want performance, so a lot of projects are started where people attempt to JIT JavaScript - but in the 14 or so years of JS's existence JavaScript is still several orders of magnitude slower than less dynamic languages. Java and C# have never been as slow as JavaScript is today. Will JIT-ing JavaScript help? Sure. But -great- results? I wouldn't go that far.
Transistor Tutorial 2/2
Pretty awesome guy, good article.

'The screen reader is calibrated to speak at roughly triple the speed of a normal voice. To the untrained ear, the output is incomprehensible, but it allows Mr. Raman to “read” at roughly the same speed as a sighted person.

...

Since he cannot precisely hit a button on a touch screen, Mr. Raman created a dialer that works based on relative positions. It interprets any place where he first touches the screen as a 5, the center of a regular telephone dial pad. To dial any other number, he simply slides his finger in its direction — up and to the left for 1, down and to the right for 9, and so on. If he makes a mistake, he can erase a digit simply by shaking the phone, which can detect motion.'
World of Goo clone from Real Networks not as good as the original
most analysis of the period fails to take into account the huge increase in standard of living that the average worker saw between the end of the civil war and the beginning of WW1.
I am not advocating anything, I only relay the content of the article. That's why I put "summary:" in front.
TechCrunch gets a new design.. again
[pic] Ergonomics victory
For some reason I'm intrigued by the different TechCrunch redesigns. For a site as big as TC, I'm sure their design decisions are based primarily on ways to increase revenue and attract users, yet I always end up feeling like their designs are still lacking. Maybe it's the fact that ads take up at least 1/3 of the layout..
Oh, sorry. I parsed the precedence of "summary:" as binding only to the first sentence :-)
> If you don't specify which child is a girl, only that one is, then it's 1/3

You mean, if you only specify that at least one child is a girl, then it's 1/3.

Actually you're still underspecified, because you haven't said what you do if the parent has no girls.
1.Could not find any docs.

2. Why? Why not wxpython, tkinter etc?
What will change everything? PZ Meyers' answer.
Sorry, but a new UI toolkit should look pretty. Maybe some of those controls looked okay, but if so the screenshots didn't do them justice. I wasn't particularly impressed. No reason to use these over the other toolkits, far as I can tell.
The world email system is broken...
Makes me wonder about proposed "solutions" such as the mini-charge per email sent.
I'm not sure I see the fix in this post, but at least it's forewarning us about some temporary workaraounds - and some helpful education.
Just one more issue for providers of web services to get up to speed on :(
Interesting to see the author siding with Facebook on this one.

What if someone wrote a grease monkey script that let me scrape my data from Facebook's servers? In other words, what if I automated a process I could do manually without accessing any information I had no rights to in the first place or affecting the service in any way whatsoever.

Facebook would still be sending take-down notices: http://www.chrisfinke.com/addons/facebook-scavenger/

In the UK the data protection act states that individuals have a right of access to the information held about them. If a user is blind and can only access their information using this script, wouldn't Facebook be violating their rights by preventing them from using it?
Interesting Facts About China
Do you know the interesting facts about China?
Its a shame that blocking foreign countries works so well.
Vapid and pointless article...
Help desk trials and tribulations ...
I use Yakuake, the KDE equivalent. I'm addicted too.
That's as rigorous and detailed a flowchart for winning a domestic dispute that I've ever seen.
oh no - I am nobody of consequence !

But I think you are welcome here. HN started out as startup news, so someone with you interests would fit in.
Ask HN : Speculations for Phenom II?
I know most of you dont follow hardware but thought it might still be fun. What do you guys expect from the upcoming Phenom II? Do you think AMD will finally beat Intel Penryn? Beating Core i7 remains out of question.
The app review at Apple is already under stress and criticism. But contrary to your facebook example, Apple recently started even being more lenient with app acceptance policy.

It seems they really want to scale the platform to the PC level as more apps on App Store means more iPhone sale as well. And the future is also towards the small form-factor, wire-free, intelligent UI based companion device for all one's information, communication and entertainment needs.
"Smalltalk has never had decent performance as far as I know - not even with a JIT backend. Not compared to Java/C# with JIT compilation at least."

This is largely because the team that did a JIT enabled Smalltalk dropped it and started to work on a JIT enabled VM for Java. This team got bought by Sun in the 90's and their Java VM was HotSpot, which is used in Java today. As somebody else notes, a lot of the optimizations used in JVM come from dynamic languages such as Smalltalk and Self...
Mathematicians don't understand people?
Understanding Quake's Fast Inverse Square Root
Out of curiousity, vaccines for what illnesses?
Google Gadgets.
Software as a Service is a matter of trust
never! i shall fight you on the beaches... ah FFS meh.
I'm surprised there's been no post about it. They had a nice write up about the last one (which I really liked).
There is no Agile
Writing about something is a way to understand it better. Why people write about things they fully comprehend is beyond me ;)
I'd get the Windows 7 beta. It's really stable, the dock (ahem 'new taskbar') is nice, and UAC is less annoying.

Anyway:

* Poderosa, or Putty Connection Manager. Tabs beat 8000 terminal windows.

* TortoiseSVN or the beta GIT app.

* PowerShell.

* eTextEditor.

* xMing if you need an X display server.
Oh look, more ads.
the google gmail notifier takes care of that, as well as having a bunch of other features.

http://toolbar.google.com/gmail-helper/
The problem here seems to be, from how I see it, that the author doesn't like the fact that someone can take the data that they can access and port it somewhere else.

All the whole thing with facebook scavenger is just disturbing. What if I didn't use a plugin and just saved things locally? Would that be just as bad? Why?
Phishing Attempts on Facebook Are Getting Lackluster
Hasn't this ALWAYS been the case? It's just that every now and then, heads slowly sink up asses and caution is thrown to the wind.

It's never a bad time if you really DO have a good idea.
Early phase phishing on Facebook used to involve using the names of your friends, people you had connected to your profile. A few minutes ago, I noticed this notification. Not only do I not know who these people are, their names aren't even linked to a profile.

Are phishing attempts getting a bit lackadaisical, or are scammers getting more determined?
Israeli troops clash with Hamas
"I have two children, and the gender of one of them is #{my_first_child.gender}." Are they not the same because of FIRST_child (which would be true), or is the FIRST just an accident here? I for one don't see how the original statement could be interpreted as describing the second algorithm. We clearly get the information that there is a girl among the children, and nothing is said about it being the first child.

Basically we have a situation where we see a person and we know he has two children, at least one of them being a girl. If it is impossible to derive correct probabilities from that information, then probability theory is useless. There is no algorithm, it is just a situation.
I'm not sure what things are like in the US, but in the UK advertisers wouldn't want to associate with a company that's pissing off moms.
That's pretty cool. Do you know if anyone's tried using that for embedded systems? It's been in the wild for a while. I know that Rodney Brooks developed L, a common lisp for embedded systems, but that was a more than a decade ago (http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/712056.html)
1) Carefully pick your suburb - all are not created equal

2) Ditto for location within suburb - an older home near the town center usually offers more convenient stimulation than a larger home 15 minutes out.

3) If you can't do those, try to locate convenient to train station or interstates so commuting is faster and external events aren't so hard to get to.
Will this be the downfall of plenty of fish? Most of his adsense income comes simply from other (paid) dating sites.

So it's kind of ironic that he helped create the very situation which may one day lead to the site's downfall.
The line is simple: Feeding a baby is allowed. Displaying breasts for another reason is not allowed.
Mike Cassidy: Best Strategy Is Speed
Car Seat Savings
Discounts and Child Safety Car Seats from Britax, Eddie Bauer, Combi, Evenflo, Graco, Compass and more. Large selection and great discount prices
In my experience, it's often the interesting, flagrantly off-topic details that are remembered, and help me later on. Human beings are wired to remember the surprising, and I don't seem to be much different in this regard.

The absorption of material isn't really what I get from a lecture. Rather, like the taper in a train's wheels, I use it to gently pull my experimental wandering thought on track.
Profanity is the crutch of inarticulate motherfuckers.
Mac equivalent to gedit would be TextMate, not TextEdit, which isn't a programmer's editor.