skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
UNIX software is not perfectly portable. Portable software is less likely to run on niche systems. The fewer users that a particular platform has, the less likely it is that portability issues particular to that platform have been discovered and fixed.

It has been my experience that one is more likely to find portability bugs in software when one tries to build it on Interix/SFU/SUA than when one attempts to build on Cygwin.

There are only two reasons to use SUA:

- Interix/SFU/SUA has the advantage that much of its system calls are implemented in a kernel driver, just like native system calls. Cygwin hits a userspace emulation layer for many calls, and that incurs a performance cost.

- Cygwin is third party. Interix/SFU/SUA comes from Microsoft.

- Interix/SFU/SUA includes some fairly useful NIS/NFS integration stuff. It's not great, but it's better than nothing.

Whether you choose SFU or Cygwin, UNIX software ported to a compatibility layer is generally more pleasant than native hosted software. ActivePerl and native Apache are just a pain in the ass compared to Cygwin/SFU's implementations.
You can always add them back. Of course in the process you'll have to mention Burger King...

Burger King.

Burger King.

Burger King.
Sleep under my kitchen table at Inauguration
"2gb ram on a PC is probably cheaper than 1gb ram on a Mac."

No such difference if you swap yourself. Actually I got a used 1gb ram from a Mac and installed it on a PC.
Advice to budding programmers: Grow organically
<code style="overflow: scroll; width: 40em;"><font color="#5a5a5a"> * Privatization of large public
**snip**
by a gigantic war-mongering government.
</font></code>
what about acting as gatekeeper for invite-only or beta sites, prioritizing invite distribution by a global karma factor?

or is that too eugenic?
They should just get it over with and give him a MacArthur Genius Award....
Huh? How do initial property rights get started then?
fwiw, perfectlygoodideas.com is available right now. perhaps someone could use the uclassify api to classify & cluster similar ideas & recommend partnerships. no idea how well it would work, but it might be worth a an hour or two on a weekend to find out. im just thinking out loud here :)
That's fine, but I think invite distribution is too unimportant.
Very clever and has already garnered loads of media attention, but I always wonder with ad campaigns like this how much it really adds to the bottom line. Might just be an amusing waste of money.
I maintain this Congress app and others. Contributer data would be nice, but it's not something we're currently planning.

Ideas welcome anytime, though. They all go on the big todo list that makes us feel tiny.
DebGem - Ruby Libraries Packaged for Debian and Ubuntu
I like to run terminals in emacs as well, but every so often I get a segfault when the output is too long on a single line... I have screens doing the terminal handling now.
>Roads, defense, control, vaccines...

Where do you stop? Surely you'd have to include financial companies? A financial company that makes up 10% of the financial market will calculate a phony 90% discount on any systemic risk it creates: after all, if the system fails, only 10% of that failure will be realized as a loss.
A Western thinker, Albert Camus, has written jokingly, in one of his letters, that a time will come when people will start asking their servants to make love for them. If someone falls in love with somebody, he will appoint a servant to go and make love on his behalf!

The second sentence is useful, because some people might not have understood the first one. If a reader is confused by the first sentence, the next sentence will give them a second chance!
I think he says:

"This should embarrass the heck out of any executive who thinks he has to outsource in order to find cheap labor. Or at least call into question his fundamental competence as a leader. If American Apparel can manufacture low margin clothing efficiently enough to beat the sweatshops (in California no less), then anyone should be able to. If they try hard enough."

I think he's misunderstanding why their business model works. Sending your commodity product to China to be make extra-cheaply is one strategy. Building a high quality product that proudly displays it's Made-In-America-ness and tugs at our patriotic heartstrings while charging 2x the price as the Chinese-outsourced competition is another. There is room, in almost every industry, for both a Kia and Lexus.

And you do have to outsource to find cheap labor. $12-$15/hr with full benefits is not cheap for a factory. I'm guessing he just misphrased what he meant on that one.
Ha. We were required to use Poseidon for UML, but it was such a pain and crashed so often that we ended up making all our UML Diagrams in Dia (which is a nice enough and lightweight program, if slightly clunky; you might want to check it out). Yet instead of being pleased or even just ambivalent about the entire enterprise, our teacher got mad that we used a tool other than the prescribed one. I never really understood why people would get pissy about what tools you used instead of focusing on the actual output.
One comment can kill a submission's entire discussion
That is Trevor's long-term plan, actually. Instead of exporting goods, countries will export labor.
www.graphviz.org
Screen's default command prefix C-a is not usable with emacs, which sounds like the problem you are having. I run screen with C-] prefix precisely for this reason.

screen -e^}]
The person who submits quotations that way (as I did once) can fix the problem with a quick edit to remove the leading spaces. The leading spaces indicate (by HN formatting default) a block of quoted code, which will be displayed without word wrapping. Any time you edit a post or comment, you'll see the link to the formatting defaults here (the link text says "help" and appears at the lower right corner of the form for submitting the edit).
Email prioritizing based on karma?

High karma could move your mail towards top of the pile for people that don't know you (VIP).

Or posts/mails could be filtered based on karma thresholds.
Exactly. I was thinking the same thing when I read this. Good comment.
Funny, Peter Schiff was totally wrong about the Euro. Dean Baker also predicted the housing meltdown, you're falling into the trap of anecdotalism.
The Gaffe of Growing Organically
In that case, people must not always copy URLs the same way, or else sources that add database I.D. codes at the end of URLs are messing things up. Oh, well, I thought I had seen some counterexamples very recently (that is, submissions multiple times from the same source), so it looked like a new feature to me.
A steep increase in the price of gold would carry horrific consequences in human suffering and environmental damage. http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2009/01/gold/larmer-text
Even if our current fiat currency system is untenable we have to find a better solution than a gold standard.
Website Traffic
Ihitz offers website traffic a complete marketing solution for websites which assists to generate new sales, brand awareness and boost rankings with search engines.
You can live 15 minutes outside manhattan on $25k/year, and do just fine. I did this my last year of grad school. Does having a roommate count as "Dickensian" living conditions?
Or, with all the "SEO" URLs lately, two links to the same story on Wired.com can have slightly different URLs going to the exact same content.

Yeah, it looks like various technological reasons like that on the source sites are often defeating the duplicate filter. So I'll try only to submit from sites that have unchanging URLs. :)
Wow, looks slick and nice
Just curious, how many people have been working on this?

One small thing is that you should maybe allow people to view a sample trip from your main page (maybe also a link to something like http://zipalong.com/zip/TripAnimation.page?tripId=42887183)
When I arrived on the main page, I tried clicking on the map and it didn't work and I would have closed the page if I wasn't coming from here to give feedback. I almost didn't click on the What is Zipalong? link.
Your tour is slick, well made and made me want to sign up though but I usually prefer seeing a real use case rather than a tour usually.
Ask YC: What kind of corporate structure would never fire people?
The company I work for fired some people today:

http://andreyf.tumblr.com/post/69289027/shitty-day

Everyone was bummed out (especially those who had to make the decision). I've never really been fired from a job, but I imagine it must be soul-crushing, maybe because it feels like such a "judgment from above". From a management perspective, it puts a spotlight on the shittiest part of companies, also - it destroys the "we're in this together" spirit, and draws a strong distinction between "management" and "workers".

What kind of corporate structure would let people decide to leave on their own, not have someone force them out?
IMO, if screen had...

(1) more sensible defaults: key bindings that didn't clash with emacs/bash and an always-visible status line

(2) a more distinctive, search-friendly name

...interest, discussion, and usage would be many multiples higher.

Anyone want to collaborate on a fork called 'zcreen'? :)
I'm suspicious that the measure of "innovation" is the number of patents filed, but I can't confirm that from the article. In academia, good ideas rarely materialize into patents; they become papers, and the relevance/influence/prestige is quantified in the number of other papers that cite them.

Fortunately, many schools do support startups (financially, even) coming out of their grad schools. I haven't noticed any discussion on the success of this kind of support versus traditional VC, but it makes lots of sense for a grad student to turn a thesis project into a startup immediately after graduation.
>Another core tenet is that you're free to do as you please until your actions infringe upon the rights of others.

That's totally vacuous without defining those rights. A major one for most libertarians is property, but the distribution of property is based on historic things like taking lands from native populations. Who decides who owns what? How far back do we have to unwind things? Why should heredity determine what property you "start out" with? How does a Lockean ideal of "mixing your labor with the soil" to create "property" somehow mean that because some bean farmer on plot of land X farmed beans for 10 years there, him and his descendants now own all the oil under that land that was only discovered later, and not by them?
My Spanish is good. To live there though, you'll do okay with just basic Spanish. There are lots of tourists and lots of porteños speak some English. In my experience, they really appreciate any effort to speak their language and will work with you to communicate.
Telepresence Robot has no arms to harass people with
A family?
How many Reddit points will a Hacker News point be worth?
Google is running the version printing presses around the clock; expect further inflation.

I suspect they'll want to reach vague parity with FF '3' and Safari '3'. (IE users don't care so much about version numbers; to them the browser is just 'the internet'.)
Students Turn Their Cellphones On for Classroom Lessons
It seems that Palm wants to charge a lot more than the iPhone price point. It had better be better than the iPhone to justify a higher price.
...which is immoral by a utilitarian view.

I think your argument is sound, but I was thinking about a more intuitive form of morality.

When I have to pay an extra $x for Windows or OSX, that comes out of some books I'll buy, or some extra private saxophone/french lessons for my daughter, or maybe a new Wii. When a third-world country pays extra, that's money which could be spent on building infrastructure for millions of people who will die without it.
Trusty’s: Yelp Meets LinkedIn For Blue-Collar Workers
Not my family...
Or pre-grow a patient's own replacement marrow from their own samples, taken before chemo begins and carefully verified as cancer-free before reimplantation?
How we use IRC at Last.fm
S3 isn't special; it's just another part of the Web. If you are crawling, obey robots.txt.
"Java is close"?! Are you kidding?

I think at the end of the day, what is noise for one application domain is signal for another.

Have you heard of Concept programming? http://mozart-dev.sourceforge.net/cp.html I think the basic idea is that it somehow separates the domain-specific code from the code that pleases the compiler.
I noticed in one of the screenshots that quarterly releases are considered stable. That and the ridiculously fast incrementing of version numbers seems to indicate that

(1) they're continually tracking another project a la Gnome/Ubuntu -- presumably WebKit,

(2) everyone in the company is spending their 20% time on Chrome,

(3) they're planning to surpass Firefox's version number this summer and eventually catch up to IE and Opera in a couple of years, and

(4) the original code was very Windows-specific and porting to Mac and Gtk+ is really a lot of work.
Manage Amazon EC2 With New Web-Based AWS Management Console
Seriously, who doesn't have 10 friends to lose? Or you can add 10 random people if you don't feel like alienating your "real" friends.
Every Audience Counts
video tour: http://media.amazonwebservices.com/console/AwsConsole.html
rapleaf.com is vaguely in this space.
One major highlight: "The console provides access via your Amazon username and password. No more certificates or public/secret keys to manage"
http://www.dabbleboard.com :)
I'll give you a hint, I am not the sophisticated one ;)

I'm looking forward to giving your site a whirl!
Wait, I'm an idiot; of course you run a market to solve this.
Thank you very very much for this link. I've sort of been waiting, but it's good to have a final word. "High profit margin" indeed - I can't believe they didn't drop the price in three years.

The question now is what do I buy. I want something the size of a Palm V, and has WiFi. I would very much prefer that it runs Palm Apps, and a GPS would be great, music would be nice too. I don't need a phone. Battery should last at least a week with the device off, I don't want something I have to recharge every day. (I understand that if I use WiFi a lot I'd need to, that's fine.)

Are there any PalmOS based devices? (Or maybe linux ones?) I really don't want the Windows based ones, even though I see some that would otherwise be good.

The G1 looks cool - but pricey. And every single device I look at has a phone. Am I the only person on the planet who doesn't need a cell phone?
Anybots is probably not a traditional company in terms of the desire to make money ("maximize shareholder value").
I guess someone will have to build the karma derivatives trading platform...
Zed's political commentary is a ghetto.
Remember it works both ways. If you can't be fired, why should you be allowed to quit? So the answer is probably "the Mafia".
N-party barter settling platform.
The tour assumes you've never heard of EC2 before. It is astonishingly painful to watch.
A University with tenured professors is the closest real-life example I can think of. It would seem to me that if nobody was ever fired, just allowed to leave when they were ready that there would be such high barriers to entry into any company that on the whole we would be worse off. I do think we could do without all the corporate rah rah crap that companies put down their employees throats. As you say, it make the sting of firings that much worse when they are so obviously two-faced.
This is news? I figured most people on HN would have been doing this for years when booking anything online...
Yeah, I mostly scrubbed through to see the look and feel and did not listen.
OK the points system has now officially lost all meaning to me. So come on - pile it on you morons. Don't be shy.
Their interface is YUI + jQuery: https://aws-portal.amazon.com/gp/aws/css/all.js
Speaking of painful, most of the video is about using PuTTY. Egads.
"I think it's a little patronizing to say that it's ok for others"

Ok? What does that mean? If the market value of someone's work is less than or equal to $15/hour, then $15/hour is a fair price for it.

Surely there is nothing more patronizing than to suggest that people should be paid some arbitrary amount that seems appropriate to you, rather than the actual value of the work they do.
> ... the patently bizarre "half-window" feature.

I'm convinced this one comes from watching actual users do their thing. It's a huge waste of screen real estate to maximize on a large monitor, especially a widescreen one - do you really want to read a PDF 3 lines at a time? Much better to emulate having two monitors. I've used GridMove to do this for a while now.
Please, for the love of all that is holy, do not give this thing arms. I've looked into Monty's eyes, and I tell you it's evil.

Even without arms, you better watch your back around steps with this thing in the house.
I've always thought these kinds of sites are interesting. I would be afraid of getting hacked into a thousand pieces and thrown in a dumpster...
love dabbleboard.
(Not that I use it much - but have always been impressed)
An app that tracks your forum activity and displays all your private messages, thread subscriptions, etc. all in one app.
Seriously... Although I feel for her personally (I've been in that financing situation), her startup is in a bad place, getting worse, in an even worse industry.

From her startup's "about" page.

---
We’re a community of top Gen Y thought leaders, forward-thinking organizations and everyone else who realizes that the way we define ourselves in both work and in life needs to change.
---

Professional Blogging and Weird Niche Social Networks are no longer valid business models.
The government is great at not letting folks go!
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Kansas City SEO
Kansas City SEO manipulates your website for prominence on Google search results. Killerflow offers fully dedicated SEO services in Kansas City, internet marketing and web promotion services to enhance your business online.
Attend Berliner Philharmoniker concerts virtually
I think hating bad/incorrect is key to being good/correct: hating bad spelling is key to being motivated enough to learn to spell correctly.

Learning to be indifferent to failure and mediocrity is not the right goal IMO.
I was thinking the exact same opposite. I'd delete my very best friends. The ones that know that wouldn't feel hurt by what is supposed to be a joke.
You've said elsewhere you earned $1000 USD your first year. At that rate of income I doubt your expenses are factoring in your time.

Not being critical or aggressive here. I'm in the online content business myself, but we have costs associated with content production and would be out of business fast if we only earned 1k a year. I don't think your experience generalizes to a lot of other cases, that's all
A warning: I switched immediately to a Kinesis keyboard after first getting wrist pains. But Kinesis keyboard uses the thumbs (much stronger digit, right?) to press the modifier keys usually pressed by the little fingers.

Not a good move for me: despite eventually going off all keyboards and using voice dictation software, I have permanent damage in both hands and my thumbs are the first to start hurting.

What I've been told by experts is that the best thing to do is to switch among different layout keyboards every couple of days. Each uses slightly different muscles, and if you switch often enough, you may not fatigue any of them--but there are no guarantees on anything!
Your points are valid. However, although I'm not certain HER startup qualifies, there are businesses that cannot be started without at least some cash investment.

Your model really only works in software, consulting, or services. And it doesnt always work in software. Sometimes you need to buy/lease computers. Or cars. Or Steel. Or Whatever. And that takes money.

Plus, a business may be generating revenue, but have cashflow issues. This again depends on the business, model, industry, etc.

Simply saying "Bootstrap" is not always good enough. Granted, from the looks of her company, it should be in this situation, but shes already dug 60 feet into a hole, and its nearly impossible to 'bootstrap' yourself out of a situation like that.
Google seems to be very aggressive with it's browser strategy. Chrome has to be their most active project -- from beta launch to version 1 to version 2 beta - all in four months.
Google also included its own HTTP network code in this new version, which, according to the release notes, was necessary to move ahead with the Mac and Linux versions of Chrome.

HTTP for Windows, Mac, and Linux - http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_releases_first_p...
In the next few days we'll see comparisons from all the external EC2 portal efforts, forced now to highlight only their 'value add'.

It's always interesting to see where AWS is willing to step on the toes of all of the 3rd parties building enabling tools. And who they let in to their private betas (with EBS, some people were publicly feeling dissed).
I would absolutely use this if it was more generalized and usable with other languages. I wonder how hard it would be to make it work with other braced syntax languages?

http://hg.toolness.com/ubiquity-firefox/raw-file/347c22717e8... -- The script for anyone who wants it, the article itself doesn't link to it strangely enough.
What is the windows key used for in bash? Could you just use that to begin screen commands?
Incubator RoundUp 2008 (YC, TechStars, DreamIt, LaunchBox)
Maybe the Web console is aimed at people who have never used EC2.
New TV trends: Internet movies, 3-D, power saving (AP)
Audioscrobbler made sense, but now I look at Last.fm, search for bands that were quite popular there in 2006, but now are in the low single digits of playbacks. I think Last.fm has lost the plot, no matter how many gigabytes its market cap is.
Many of the YC startups listed there have had more than seed funding. They just didn't announce it. Two others haven't bothered to raise money because they were already profitable and didn't want the distraction.
"I just hired someone to take care of my house for $50,000 a year: A house manager. This is in addition to the full-time nanny I have. And the cleaning service. And the assistant I have at work."

Trouble making payroll? Get rid of your full-time nanny, and assistant, and cleaning service and house manager. Sounds like the investors are getting fleeced.
Networking for Cloud Computing- Response to Cisco Blog
Fair enough. The implication though was that the project has been a miserable failure. I don't think that's a reasonable assessment. How many other projects of a few dozen people have had a larger impact over the past 2–3 years?
Two Trillion Reasons Why Kido'z Will Succeed
Done. Note, it's a mailed coupon so you have to wait 2-4 weeks.
Maybe you didn't mean to phrase this as you did, but at-will employment, which is what most corporations adhere to now, allows people to leave on their own at any time. Most people don't though, unless they are forced out, because of fear of the unknown or lack of a motivating factor.

Also, the distinction doesn't always have to be between management and workers. I would worry about the forward-looking health of the company if that dichotomy became a topic of conversation anywhere within. Employees are not stupid, and will realize when something besides the best future prospects of the company are motivating the cuts being made. Odds are there is a comparable amount of potential pruning to be done in the management ranks -- some people I've have read have argued even more potential. Not saying that is what is happening here, but it was just a thought that popped into my head while reading yours.

On the other hand, there is the perspective that, if cuts aren't made, the spirit of "we're in this together" doesn't matter so much anymore, because there is no more "this". It can be soul-crushing, but not as soul-crushing as shutting the whole company down instead.