skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1. As someone else noted, literally years since you ever had to touch config file by hand. Use Ubuntu, you'll love it.

2. I do believe your view of Unity is a bit odd. Canonical recognized that the state of Linux UI/DE was NOT going to make the leap from programmer. They saw this VIA user studies. That is when they decided to create Unity. And user study after user study Unity keeps coming out ahead of all the other DE in Linux and is on par with usability of current OSX. Point being, Ubuntu is going after users the right way. Unity in 12.04 shows this and the reviews speak to it.

3. Sometimes you simply have to rewrite. This is a fact (sorry Joel) in software. The challenge is to recognize when it is necessary and avoid it when not 100% necessary to achieve your business objectives.
Also let's not forget that the best, cutting-edge games utilizing the latest technology are pretty much out of console gamers' reach. Consoles have a hard time keeping up with the system requirements of newer games simply because its impossible to replace a video chip (or other piece of hardware) in a console. Case in point: Crytek's new engine with soft body physics simulation will be coming to PCs soon. How long until we see something similar on consoles?
They had to put engineering effort into it. With Mongo, you don't.
Eh, "terrible" is relative. ;-) As long as you enjoy SC2, come and have fun!
Mars One
Human settlement of Mars in 2023.

"The astronauts leave Earth for an indefinite time to settle on Mars for good"
[ ... ]
"Every two years after 2023 an additional crew will arrive, such that there is a real living, growing community on Mars."
Until realize that even though the filters in this post have been applied to videos. It will be just as easy to apply the filters to audio, surely again resulting in a revealed heartbeat :)
Where have you seen that it is costing them more to secure new business than they make off their customers? I'm fairly confident that isn't true.
What do you mean by "serious"? That's broadly stated as well.
"Merrill and Capgemini define millionaires as individuals with $1 million or more in investible assets, not including primary home, collectibles, consumables and consumer durables."

So not including your home, or things you can sell like your car, or collectible ginsu knife set. I guess they do include your self managed IRA though, since that is 'investible.'
Can't wait to do a

steam install halflife2episode2

that is, if they provide a command line interface :-)
Realized people may not know what I'm talking about when I mention wires: http://web.mat.bham.ac.uk/R.W.Kaye/minesw/minesw.pdf

Paper on minesweeper configurations being NP-complete. Wires in the paper are wires when approached from all directions, but I'm abusing the term a bit when I also include entangled squares around the perimeter of a minesweeper opening - which have only been approached from one direction.

I think of minesweeper as a bunch of soap bubbles that are popped until you reach wires, which if they connect board boundary to board boundary, or connect to another wire that does that, or connect to themselves, end the skill game and create a probability game. Been meaning to play around with 2D areas that are surrounded by wire rings, but too lazy.

The idea of randomness carved by rules creating stable shapes intrigues me. I play minesweeper too much. Expert: 78, 95 non-flagging, lawl.
He said "serious site". He did not say "large site". For example, techcrunch is most certainly a serious site. It is NOT large scale and in need of sharding.
Facebook Will Disappear in 5 to 8 Years: Analyst
This only moves the logic you need to do in CDN DNS server to somewhere in your web serving stack.

You could still implement crude geographical load-balancing by simply looking at client IP address for example at your load balancer/reverse proxy or the HTML serving server itself.

Nothing forces you to serve same IP address to each client. For media streaming, you can do some IP round robining to balance load. For serving CSS, images, scripts, etc. you'd want to hash some relatively static client derived attribute to pick a server to avoid defeating client side caching.

At its simplest, map first octet of client IP to optimal geographical load-balancing IP(s). I'm sure there'd be some sub-optimal choices, but it'd still be a reasonably good approximation. This works, because first octet determines at least whether a given IP is assigned to RIPE, ARIN, APNIC, specific organization, etc. You get about country level accuracy, at worst about continent.

Or use a full fledged geo IP database to find an optimal server IP for each client IP.

Of course this isn't very practical, because requires more maintenance and is not effortless like using traditional CDN DNS resolution based methods. Maybe some CDN vendor could offer this in a more managed, easily integrable fashion.

I'm sure it could be made work, if the potential latency win is worth the effort for you...
There does not need to be a problem, it can be a good idea for a person or a project to express their ideals and values anyway.

That said, Debian has very few female developers (1-2%?), and is generally skewed towards white, ethnically European males who are sysadmins or programmers and who mainly work on packaging software. See for example the group photos from the yearly Debian conference (debconf.org).

There's room for a lot more diversity: various genders; ethnic backgrounds; technical interests and skills; lingistic, social and cultural backgrounds; personalities; etc. There is fairly little overt rejection of those who are different from the majority of Debian developers, but there is definitely some inadvertent systemic preference to recruit more of the same.

I don't know about recent intentional pressure to exclude those who divert from the traditional mainstream: I am a privileged white European male, I would not even notice if someone else does not feel welcome for whatever reason. I would like to notice, and I would like everyone to be welcome.

The diversity statement is one step in making sure Debian is welcoming, and becomes more welcoming in the future. It doesn't make any active changes, but it changes the mindset of the members of Debian.

These issues are not, of course, in any way restricted to Debian. Free software development in general suffers from them.

(Disclaimer: I am a Debian developer since 1996. I am a supporter of the Debian-Women project. I am biased.)
Sure. They had way too much investment, way too many employees, and didn't seem to have much of a handle on making money by the looks of things.

It'll be spun as a success "Acquired by Google yay!", but seems a pretty resounding failure to me.
> if Zuck was operating Facebook under the same legal entity as the candy store in which his partner had equity, said partner might have a claim, though it would be hard to establish if the partner produced no work for the new idea

Now, IANAL, but to my knowledge this is just patently false and represents a complete mischaracterization of the purpose and legal implications of a corporation.

In this case, Facebook would be owned by the flower shop entity, not Zuck. Regardless of what work his partner put in, Facebook is still owned by the flower shop entity, and each has ownership stakes as contractually or legally established. Neither Zuckerberg nor his partner would have any personal claim to Facebook, only to their equity in the owning entity. Zuck would not suddenly get more equity in the entity because of the work he did.

This is one of the most basic functions of equity and the reason for investing time or dollars in exchange for equity - so that your wealth increases disproportionately from the work of others. If ownership was determined by judges proportioning by sweat equity, those who left Facebook after 2 years and now have $10M+ would be in trouble.

There are numerous legal complications if Zuckerberg claimed that Facebook was NOT under the flower shop entity, however given your statement that he explicitly placed it under the flower shop, the case is quite simple. Zuck would not have been able to extract Facebook without buying out his partner.

I am way over my head in trying to get into this part, but depending on state law, I understand there are de facto partnership agreements in the absence of a written one (generally an equal split) and sometimes ways of getting rid of "dead weight" partnerships. These are not things you want to happen.

This sort of situation occurs all the time in small businesses and often leads to their demise. You are doing a great disservice to anyone who takes your advice.
> Fictitious? Did you read the rules in the original post?

Yes. The grand parent post isn't talking about these rules per se, just a fictitious example of HR and bad password practices.
How similar are your ideas? Is there a chance that you could be an early employee at those companies? In order for it to be worth your time, you have to have a chance of success, and you know that the other team already has an advantage of money. If you don't think you can make it, get in touch with them and see how you can help.

You know how the saying goes: "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em."
That was fairly ridiculous, but where on earth did that clip of rotating the video come from?
Oracle Sues Lodsys
Kicksend nabs Wells Riley as Product Designer
That's actually fascinating. And it makes sense from my perspective of a) having been involved years ago in selling coupons to small businesses and b) dealing with small businesses for other things.

You need to give them a turnkey experience, hold their hand and make it easy for them. You show up with the "form" prefilled (I mean like a paper form) and say "sign here and I'll do the rest." And if you drop the paperwork off (say they are out to lunch) you put those little post-it arrows so they have nothing to think about. This is really big with that market. I'm not a fan of groupon but it impresses me that they are operating this way (and that Mason said that).
It may not be a revolution but anything that replaces QR codes is a step in the right direction. It's much more intuitive to tap, swipe, or just be near something than to interact with a QR code.
Am I the only one who was expecting an article about the likelihood of congenital disorders and/or genetics here?

It's still a good article, mind you, I guess I was just hoping it wouldn't just be about "success" and "money", but rather about the most fundamental worry, i.e. "What if my kid gets or has X...?"

Then again, this seems more in line with the usual HN topics... ;)
And did you miss the protests NYC and America at large threw when an Islamic mosque was proposed near WTC? Not exactly the bastion on openness and religious equality either :/
How is skipping ads on Tivo any different? The implicit contract of broadcast television is that the ads pay for the content.
That would not be a welcome change for me.

I use some hosts file overrides for two reasons:

1) testing at $dayjob

2) to block some spammy things, and if their in-browser resolver did not take those into consideration

If either of those were impacted, it would be bye-bye chrome.
They did an AMA on reddit and the consensus was that it's just a publicity stunt.
And Synapse before that...
I am not sure why this line is buried deep in information on their site:

"We also offer a Free Forever plan which includes one dashboard and access to Leftronic's custom data API."

This should be the pickup line.
U.S Census Plans to Release API Next Month, New Mobile Apps Also Coming Soon
My understanding is that drones are preferred for long term/constant monitoring. Spy satellites are not placed in geostationary orbit, so they only have a few minutes of exposure per day to a place of interest as they fly over.

The Global Hawk [1] drone is optimized for high altitude loitering. Operating multiple drones in the area is one way to overcome the problem of running out of fuel.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_Grumman_RQ-4_Global_Ha...
> "Why do you care if they include you in their user count? Why does it bother you?"

It bothers me if they're being dishonest. Tell me how many people actively shared things on Google+ yesterday. Telling me how many people have ever used Google+ in the past isn't useful, and is going to vastly distort peoples perception.

> "I guess I reject the notion that since you don't like/use it, no one does."

Sure, valid point. I'd reply that out of all my facebook friends, a few tried google+, and none actively use it that I know of. So it's not just me.

It's also telling that you got a huge amount of value out of Wave as well as plus. Perhaps Google+ isn't that much different to Wave... in which case it's doomed.

Release Wave -> Failing -> Buy Etherpad -> Wave fails

Release Google+ -> Failing -> Buy Meebo -> Google+ fails

Don't get me wrong, I love Google. But I can see history repeating itself here...
Thanks for the tip. Zencoder looks great, but if I understand correctly, they only handle the video encoding, leaving it to you to find a place to store the videos and figure out how to stream them. I'd prefer something that is simpler, like something that handles storage and streaming automagically.
Pretty sure google published a paper on disk failures that can begin to refute that assumption: http://research.google.com/archive/disk_failures.pdf
Meebo was useful, back then. Sometimes. But right now I am tempted to just respond with 'A/S/L?'.
I don't even have an xorg.conf. Things "just work", and if they don't, I use xrandr at the command line to fix things live. It's really gotten a lot better than the bad old days of hacking around with XF86Config.
Here’s the source I used: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/05/chart-of...

Thinking more deeply about this, I’ve adjusted the number to 1 in 15, since almost all kids (~25% of the population) are part of someone else’s household, and so would be counted as “millionaires” even though they had no control over the assets.
How To Automagically Classify Webpages By Topic
I did the same thing when I was young and poor. From my Pioneer Square loft, I got great reception from a cafe a block away.
I think people want to know conditional probabilities. eg. P(My child graduates college|I have engineering degree from Stanford). I assume most children of HN readers have a greater than 33% chance of graduating college.
Good comment - I'm actually planning another article on the topic you suggest. I'll call it "A Guide to Risks", should be out in a week or so.
Just because it's useful for some and some people use it doesn't mean it's not a failure as a Facebook competitor (which is what we're measuring here, not whether anyone is using it). It's disingenuous to count me as a user when they compare themselves to FB because I and probably most of their other users haven't used it in months. In contrast, a large percentage of FB's user count uses Facebook all the time.
Anyone had experience with cantennas and HSDPA?
There was lots of discussion about this last year, particularly that as they exist in a market longer, they have to spend more to find new customers (because they start exhausting the pool of businesses willing to "test" their service.)

http://betabeat.com/2011/06/groupons-business-is-decaying-in...

Is it true? I don't know (hence my use of the word "may"), but it's certainly a concern for Groupon and other local business services that have to spend a lot of sales people to target relatively small business customers.
Or you could just "virtual host" by initial URL path, like "hxxp://10.0.0.1/host.sample.com/picture.jpg" or "hxxp://10.0.0.1/p2ezQ/picture.jpg".
The site itself (joosy.ws) is hosted on a company server. The repo is on github but it's private. However, Guides are in public repo (hosted at Github Pages).

Here they are: https://github.com/roundlake/joosy-guides

If you want to modify something at welcome page, I can share the repo. But it doesn't contain a lot actually. Just one page :).
>It is the latter group that you are failing to acknowledge, which is perhaps why you are seeing so many down-votes. I wouldn't simply attribute it to "anti-intellectualism."

That group, if it really even exists, is completely irrelevant to my point and thus there is no reason I should need to acknowledge it, other than political correctness. Remember, my comments were about my experience and to a lesser extent, Lewises.

Downvoting my comment-- which was on topic and well written-- because I failed to endorse a politically correct point of view (e.g.: the existence of that group, or its significance) is the very essence of the anti-intellectualism I was describing.

So, I agree with you that this is likely a probable cause of the votes, but we disagree as to their meaning.

You know what the sad thing is? I actually crafted this post carefully to only talk about myself, and Mr. Lewis, specifically to avoid being down voted for being politically incorrect. But the intolerance on Hacker News for anything that isn't ideologically leftist is very strong. Obviously my self-censorship instinct was not strong enough.

Meanwhile, of course, people can make snotty comments about other political ideologies and they get way up voted, even when their comment adds nothing to the discussion. (not to mention the thinly veiled name calling, and disingenuous attacks that are also common here.)

This is nothing you can change, and I'm not really attempting to pursuade you of something here. I'm just lamenting that anti-intellectualism is so prevalent in society and so common on this site. I know it was not always that way. But the reddit.com/r/politics crowd has invaded and like there they are eager to silence anyone who thinks different.
Congrats on nabbing Wells, he's an awesome Product Designer and all around standup guy.
Facebook releases internal C++ libraries as open source
Gaming on the desktop might be one of the only means of survival for the desktop.

Recipe to make desktop into console.
1. plug desktop into tv.
2. buy wireless mini-keyboard and mouse, or install menu system that operates by D-pad to select games.
3. There is no step three.
Unfortunately tons of firms put a huge value in this. Try getting a high level rockstar-ninja-badass (lol) engineer job, especially at a bay area startup, without some sort of pedigree from a named institution. Its bullshit, but reality.

Google used to, might still, place a degree from a top-tier institution as the first requirement in upper level job postings.
Negatory, good sir. AirPlay's got that covered too. As of late you can do multiple drawable screens and choose which one to chuck down the AirPlay encoding hole, as long as your CPU/GPU can feed both. Microsoft is just making this feature more explicit.

http://firemint.com/2011/guide-to-setting-up-airplay-and-par...
This author is missing a few big points. First, Yahoo didn't make a move into social until it was too late. Facebook is one of the biggest mobile apps. Sure, they haven't figured out how to monetize it just yet but they are a huge player in the space and have been for awhile.

Secondly, he/she completely ignores the fact that Google is making gobs and gobs of money based on their initial web design. They may not ever make the social transition but people are going to continue to search the web and they'll be the top player. Same goes for Facebook - social media is here to stay and they will be the big dog for a long time to come.

Lastly, portals pretty much just died. I don't see that happening with social media in the next 5-8. So, once again, Facebook is going to remain relevant for a long time.
these numbers are not all comparable.

1/30 chance of being gay means there's a genetic dice being thrown (as far as we understand).

a 1/2500 'chance' of working for google does not have the same degree of randomness. not everyone in the US applied to work for google. on the same rationale, pick a random convenience store with three employees - you have a 1 / 100 million 'chance' of working there.

it's like being surprised at any given bridge hand because the chance you were dealt that particular one is one in a trillion. you have to get -some- bridge hand. people generally work -somewhere-. the numbers are meaningless without prior selection.
"So I ask all of you, why not Java for web development? What's wrong with Play?"

There is nothing wrong with using Java for web development. There are loads of people using Java for web development. Otherwise nobody would have bothered building things like Groovy and Grails, Jruby or Play.

"I read stories every day saying there is a lack of Ruby and Python developers. Yet, there are tons of great developers who are being taught Java and could pick up Play as easy as I have."

Tons of Java developers just sitting around looking for a job? The problem isn't a lack of X developers. It's a lack of AVAILABLE x developers to be picked up.
Should Arq use Rackspace (I'm the author of Arq)? So far it's only been using S3 because that has always seemed to me to be the best option.
ASUS pulls booth babe tweet
Yes, this. Thanks for listening. It's a pet peeve of mine because most people work on serious sites, and a minority of them have large scale data, but people often imply that everyone needs to solve massive scaling problems even if they will never have them.
Did you read the actual article?

It's just the telescope (the mirror) - it doesn't include the cameras.
Tokutek uses Fractal Trees which have several SSD-friendly properties: http://www.tokutek.com/. Unfortunately, I don't have any first hand experience with it.

If you want an interesting challenge, you could also try implementing a MySQL storage engine using LevelDB. Obviously basic implementation shouldn't be too difficult, but getting good performance and reliability would require some effort.
techcrunch is a serious site. They don't need sharding. They have thousands of posts, not millions, and certainly not billions or trillions.
I don't think it's very logical. I think most of the sentiment has to do with raising lots of money, growing very rapidly, making lots of easy money, etc. These are all things that many here are wary of.
"massive advertisement for Steve Blank's books and program?"

To which I say "chicken dinner"!

Disclaimer: I worked with Steve. He obviously has a nose for marketing, pr all that stuff. So of course he will always be angling for anything that will raise his profile. Which is, as you said "not to say that the books and programs aren't necessarily good".
I like the idea, but the pricing is a little bit steep. This seems like something that would be free from a supermarket that had all of the ingredients and wanted to target a new demographic of shoppers. The peripheral model for this makes a ton of sense, because then I don't feel committed to your recipes- I can take them as more of a suggestion than as something I've paid for, and therefore expect to use. I think this is also why several people have mentioned that they want to know more about the meals they would be paying for. Reading the page, though, it definitely seemed like something I would want to use.
Publishing the URL to a (perhaps several days delayed, or even static data snapshot, but interactive demo) of this could be very powerful marketing for Leftronic.

Also, live demo link on the site leads to a page that is completely black on Safari on iPad.
There is Nothing I Can Do - Because I Suck
I'm not sure why you said "a single database server". No one said that. We're talking about sharding across databases, and the vast majority of sites don't need that.

Having a master/slave setup is more than a single server, but it's NOT the same as sharding.
Picplz shutting down