skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The apache server at my office is set up to not serve files or directories starting with a .

We use svn export anyway, but wouldn't ignoring (.) directories be the most foolproof step?
What Life Asks of Us
Probably not that crazy... maybe carders converting stolen cards to cash?
Free shipping with the gift card, can't you read?
Maybe people from outside of the US buy them in order to be able to shop at the Amazon MP3 store?
In high school I used to sell this kind of stuff on eBay. Some of the reasons people buy cards/certs online:

1. Foreigners. People in Europe want to buy products off US Amazon but don't want to deal with credit card or banking currency conversion fees or the address verification.

2. Lack of credit cards. Kids or something can use checking-backed PayPal but not credit cards.

3. Leveraging promotions. Microsoft cashback for buyers (10-30% discount on Buy It Now prices) was pretty popular and it completely fucked up eBay economy for awhile so thank god they stopped it. People also often get PayPal or eBay or credit card promotional coupons.

4. People are just stupid. This tends to apply to eBayers.

5. Fencing credit cards. Somewhat rare nowadays.

People also buy physical Staples and OfficeMax because they're percentage-based.

This is actually really shitty business for the seller since eBay/PayPal takes about 25% with their fees.
Was my first thought as well, though it would probably be a red flag in these days.
The last season of 24 had really good hacking scenes. Also, Anitrust is a decent one.
Just guessing but maybe because it's a way of buying things on Amazon dot com without having a CC with a US address?
No - the buyers got the 30% off. But the eBay/Cashback experiment was reported to have ended after the holiday.

Anyway, I'm sure auction psychology and the Winners Curse still has a lot to do with this.
From a developer perspertive, I am really scared everytime there is going to be a new browser in the market.

Anyone has the same experience as mine?
I also enjoyed Mike Judge's other film "Idiocracy". It's not explicitly a hacker film, but it's a sci-fi story about an average guy in a world of idiots, so it verges on hacker territory. It also has some examples of hilariously bad human/computer interface design.

(And if you're into cry-yourself-to-sleep-reality movies, there's also Outsourced, a recent comedy about a call center manager who must train his replacements in India. I found it surprisingly enjoyable. Its primary themes are culture clash and figuring out what's important in life, so it shares similarities with Office Space and Gung Ho.)
Some of the birds around here eat berries that ferment in their stomach and they basically DUI and smack into windows. It's disturbing.
Irrational Intelligence; Get Smarter
I must be missing something here. Your review lists what is covered in the lecture (you can see that on the MIT website) and provides some notes (there are much better ones on the MIT website). Why not just watch the lecture or read the slides?
Maybe when you buy an Amazon gift card there is a fee. During Christmas I noticed that a bunch of cards for $X cost you $X+5 to actually purchase. Or maybe sipping is $2 from Amazon.com in which case you are still saving right now by getting free shipping.
Address space is not much bigger than physical memory now for 32 bits. I've read that my laptop could in fact have 4GB instead of the nominal 3GB. So even if the memory is not "consumed", the default must be changed at run time, unless the kernel space literally consumes 2/3 of available memory.
Erm. My strong suspicion is the reason people are selling is because the price is higher than the face value.
I mentioned this to our sys admin. He made a good point... Export will copy every file in the repository over, every time. Our repo is quite large and we push often. We use rsync so it only copies the most recent changes. They also go out to a number of servers.
Correct me if I am wrong but $25,000 for what looks like a failed business with no current traffic seems a little hopeful.

I could be jumping to conclusions but it does not look as though the app was able to pay it's own hosting fees back in 2007 and it has been dead since then. Plus - who subscribes to emailed newsletters in this day and age?
"Flying Under the Influence"?
Does anyone want a PowerPoint with complex shapes and background images?

http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0...

http://norvig.com/Gettysburg/
Gmail is relatively new compared to those other services you mention, which have been operating for years before Gmail started in 2004. As the article mentions, Gmail use is on the rise, and expected to overtake Hotmail's lead.
I've purchased a ton of books off Amazon without having an address in the USA. I know I cannot purchase electronics, but this is more of an import/ taxation issue... I don't see how a voucher would overcome this.
A Perfect Example of How Steve Jobs’ Health Issues Are Exploited
Have various things that are (1) essential, and (2) can only be done on the wiki.

For example: well them they can't go on holiday unless they book their holiday days into the wiki.

Also, overtime. Do people at your work get paid overtime? If so, make the system so that they don't get paid it unless they put their overtime hours on the wiki.
From what I've seen, most people really dislike the formatting the most. Plenty of people get the 'track changes' feature in Word, but when you edit a wiki you have to use a markup language. Simple or not, any kind of symbolic representation for text is patently foreign to most non-techies.
With some account-a-magic it might be used as some sort of tax evasion, too.
IMHO there's some code that deserves more than 1 rewrite.

For example the library Powerplant (Metrowerks' mac equivalent to MFC) was rewritten a dozen times before it was released, as its design patterns needed a lot of fishing out to get them right.
sarcasm_detector.recalibrate()
Rumour: Google to buy Skype
People from a certain generation (or people in your generation who studied certain subjects in school) were told that working collaboratively in school is "cheating," and so in the workplace they don't distinguish situations where working collaboratively is supporting the team. I suspect the main problem is cultural and would show up however you try to get your colleagues to collaborate.
Games? Flash provides a flexible, fast format that makes game design very easy.

The best-of-the-best Flash games really thrive because they're so compatible with things. Kottke mentioned an excellent one yesterday: http://www.playauditorium.com/

That said: Flash is not meant for text. It's overkill. It's like using a tank to scare kids off your lawn.
"A wiki is an electronic whiteboard. Anyone can erase, add information, or redraw stuff. But try to be nice and respect the stuff that's come before; only add stuff that needs to be added."
Technology: You Knew Earnings Would Be Bad, but This Bad?
I actually refused to show the third to friends because it was so bad it actually ruined the first a little bit.
This is very insightful.

Wikis are for text that people want to read and change, regardless of its source. This makes them ideal for Wikipedia but inherently out of tune with the big-corporate environment, a large crowd in which people prioritize based on who is talking to them. A boilerplate memo from the generic HR-department address can be skimmed very quickly; an email from HR addressed solely to you might need to be read; an email from the HR rep who has been assigned to your team might need a more careful reading and perhaps an acknowledgement; even a boilerplate email from HR might need careful attention if the author is someone you befriended at the company Christmas party.

You don't want an automated alert every time your boss's assistant reorders the columns on the weekly report. Ideally, your boss will only call your attention to the report when it is important for you to read it. That's part of the boss's job -- to protect your attention so that you can spend your time being useful instead of rooting through irrelevant wiki documents! And how is the boss going to direct your attention? Email. And while she's sending email, what's wrong with just pasting the information itself right into the message and saving the recipient some additional clicking?

Put all that stuff on the wiki and file off the TOs and FROMs and datestamps and you might as well just label it BOILERPLATE, because nobody's going to have the time to sort through it all. Even a genius super-librarian can only help so much, because the social context of email (its timing; the number and identity of the CCs, the history embedded in all the quoted emails that extend far down the page, etc.) is hard for a librarian to capture, let alone convey in wiki form. And, no, the version history does not help much. (Deriving people's motivations by reading their diffs is a techie art, not a liberal art. And emails carry a semi-reliable record of who has read the message as well as who has helped to write it.)

(A minor note: You left out Powerpoint in your description of the "enterprise wiki". It's pretty important, and for more than just stupid effects-laden bullet points. I worked in an engineering firm. All of us were capable of understanding wikis. I never tried to set up a wiki, though, because people communicated in charts and graphs, and at the time I couldn't find a wiki whose chart-and-graph workflow was anything short of "excruciating". The state of the art was to mail out arguments that consisted of stacks of graphs with commentary, rendered as Powerpoint docs.)
But can the AIR HTML component run Flash?
According to MS it:

"Microsoft Performance Management allows customers to monitor, analyze, and plan their business as well as drive alignment, accountability, and actionable insight across the entire organization."

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/performancepoint/HA1016395...

I don't understand either.
Software providers need to move off of core-based licensing both due to how CPU evolution is going wider (multi-core) faster than it's going deep (GHz), and due to the cloud computing aspect.

A small post I made on the topic:

http://www.digitalsanctuary.com/tech-blog/java/atg/rant-abou...
A quick shout-out to the US Patent Examiners - these individuals have technical degrees just like us, and do their best to weed out the crap patents they can. In fact, they are judged (for better or worse) by the number of patents they successfully reject.

They are also now some very overworked individuals. They have only hours to review patents in a diverse set of topics. There is only so much research they can do - a patent written by a master claims writer, no matter how frivolous, is very difficult to reject outright.

If you want to improve patents in the US, you can start by asking your congressperson to increase funding to the USPTO.
A friend last week described some study which he said showed some evidence that as you consume calories, your body winds forward in age, and that very simply calorie restriction may wind your clock forward more slowly. I believe he said something about mitochondria was involved, but I might have just been having flashbacks to Parasite Eve. I just did a little googling and there are a few abstracts out there.
Nobody is stopping you from using latex,beamer,and emacs and taking a weekend to finish your slides. But if you want something done in fifteen minutes that looks good, use powerpoint.
I don't know for amazon card, but I sold japanese itunes card to people who wanted to have access to japanese music on itunes.
I guess that for foreigners who want to buy a kindle it could be interesting to get a us amazon gift card. (not that I understand why one would buy a kindle instead of the sony reader....)
It seems like there's too much paper work required to actually get to the point where you're doing a mockup.

Maybe they're solving a type of problem different from 'just design a prototype ui'?
I wouldn't think anyone but Microsoft would be scared. The more browsers the better. As a developer you can't expect everyone to stay with FireFox2 There will always be something new and so having more choice creates competition and improves things for the user.
Hey, I've got a dangling footnote that I can't fix! Ah, the mistakes you make at 2am.

Let's tie it up:

[1] This is the famous recursive footnote. [1]
I haven't watched it yet but I'm told that the directors cut is much better and should be watched first.
I agree here. A Wiki does not seem to be a good base for a 'holiday booking' tool. Of course, personally, I've always been a fan of Lotus Notes for being able to adapt applications like this to the normal workflow of an office.
Ask HN: The best PHP book for Ruby programmer?
I need to learn some PHP after several years of serious hacking in Ruby. Of all Ruby books I've read "The Ruby Way" by Hal Fulton was the most practical and fun to follow. For example, while telling you about basic data structures it would also give you a recipe for implementing a sparse matrix or how to use arrays as mathematical sets.

What is the best book that focuses on PHP as a programming language, rather than on building websites?
I'm surprised they have just now noticed this. Redner's and Maslov's papers have been making the rounds in academia for at least two or three years.

http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0612122

http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0604130
It was their attempt at a more consolidated Business Intelligence app to compete with Hyperion, Business Objects, Cognos, etc. It had analytics, scorecards, budgeting & planning, and static reports all in a (SharePoint) portal. It wasn't so good.
Make money from online at home
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I've friends who've done your point 1 for ITunes in the UK - register a US ITunes account with a relative's address but never set-up a credit card.

Then you purchase ITunes gift vouchers for a dollar above value from ebay and apparently save 30% off the equivalent UK prices. The 30% being the figure in the heady days of nearly 2$/£1 - soon I guess we'll be selling the gift cards.
Aeron chair is the best. Too bad its so expensive and can't carry it with me so it stays in Texas even when I'm across the country :(
Looks amusing... in the vein of a Christopher Guest classic. Bought the cheap copy on ebay.
I'm surprised they have just noticed this, given that PageRank was originally created to rate scientific papers, not web pages!
The problem is not the license per se, but the bait-and-switch they did.
http://www.jroller.com/sjivan/date/20080425
This article is describing more recent work by Maslov and Redner, announced just in the last week or two:

http://arxiv.org/abs/0901.2640
"Logo is a computer programming language used for functional programming. It is an easier-to-read adaptation and dialect of the Lisp language; some have called it Lisp without the parentheses."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo_programming_language
I agree with the elements on the left or right instead of the top. More real estate there than top
But they did a better job of this when migrating YouTube. It's bizarre.
WYSIWYG

Period.
I think the overall question is what problem is the wiki a solution too, and is it the best solution?

What information is the non-IT user really having to disseminate to others? What value is it truly providing? How have you made adding the information to a wiki not be additional work? Is it improving productivity or reducing it?

And finally, who has ownership of the project? If you do not have a non-IT owner it'll 'gather dust' if the value of the application is not easily perceived.
maybe, I can program. more front end than back, but realistically I can't completely do any of my ideas n my own :(
New Tech Blog
Check my blog out, its not actually new, but its cool :)
"characterized by refusal to compromise or to abandon an extreme position or attitude"

thanks!
Ask HN: Review my project, Factolex - the fact lexicon
This comment genuinely made my day.
21 Cool Twitter Greasemonkey Scripts
I am using twitter form Last 2 months and this one is the best, but it doesn,t have lots of feature. But with Greasemonkey scripts you can do lots of thing in Twitter. Here are over 21 that are sure to vastly improve your Twitter experience
Ask HN: Does anyone here use software RAID on Linux?
We've been struggling with software RAID. First on SuSE 10.3, not on SuSE 11.0. We're finding that we occasionally have a disk failure, and then the entire RAID device becomes unavailable and dismounts itself. Using mdadm tells us the individual disk isn't working, and that the RAID isn't available.

(Note: I'm deliberately not using the technical terms here because I need to find out what other people's experience is of this.)

Does anyone here use software RAID 5 on SuSE? If so, what are your experiences? I've searched around using Google but there doesn't seem to be any problem that crops up repeatedly. In fact, the general impression is that software RAID works on SuSE Linux 10.3 and above.

I would welcome contructive comments and advice.

Thank you.
Factolex.com is a fact lexicon. We split up knowledge into small sentences: facts

You can use the checkboxes to remember the facts that you find relevant and by doing so, we create your personal lexicon (which can be exported using the API or a widget). Also, the more people select a fact as relevant to them, the higher it is ranked within the term.

I'd love to get some feedback from the HN community. Thanks for checking it out.
It displays a grey box. Flash content is loaded on click. (works only with webkit browsers)

It works! CPU load is way lower.
It is all about momentum. From their perspective the email system still works. Sure there is this "wick-ee" thing, but they don't care because it seems like they don't have to use it. Go and checkout the book "Diffusion of innovation". It explains all about this.
JAX-RS as the one Java web framework to rule them all?
This article wasn't about that at all. It wasn't intelligent, it was well-written. There's a big difference.

And it isn't about intolerance, it's about getting your facts straight. There are certainly many valuable services rendered by religion, but he didn't go into them.

Besides, intolerance in this debate doesn't come from the geeks. It's not computer scientists organizing against gay marriage, or insisting their beliefs must be in the Pledge of Allegiance. If I'm intolerant of the fiction that others use to justify their intolerance, is that wrong?
I really hope its international.
See also http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=443746
The myth of width: When wide screens don't work
Talks about reducing the web framework layer to virtually nothing beyond a REST API. Interesting read.
See also http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=452172
"You may have Frontotemporal Dementia. Please see your physician."

http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08%2F12%2F15%2F16...
Patents should be valid for one year only, to give a head start to whom had the idea and invested developing it.

That willl give them enough time to build a brand (iPhone, Viagra) then it is all open season and everybody can copy and improve on that idea to get an edge, investing their own resources (Zune, Cialis) whether they fail or not is up to the market.

You can't blame people for you being a great researcher and a poor marketer.

People will reward who can be both.
10 Years of programming
A humble article to celebrate and retrace parts of my 10 years experience in web developement.
But how? I agree that my calculation was flawed, but even if you stretch it over 10 years that's still a rate of $12500 per saved hour - without counting the cost of ownership and only to break even.

Are there really deals that turn out so much more profitable only because you arrive 2 hours earlier?
22 years of job creation wiped out in a day
+1 for Confluence

Yes, it's not free (or Free) and is made by a pretty established company, but it's a solid product, Wiki enough that if you want to get into it, there is a lot fo customization and detail that you can do, but at he same time friendly enough that if you don't care, you can just use the WYSIWYG editor to make your point. It also integrates nicely with JIRA, although I doubt that's used by much of the HN crowd.

As for getting people to use it, my team made a rule that if you sent us a question that (in our opinion) belonged in the wiki, we'd answer it there and send you back a link. After a few weeks of doing that, people just stopped asking and went there first.
Amex is Amex, wherever you are. It's dealing with customs that puts people off.
I'd say we're already there, and have never really left it. In my opinion. the noble/serf arrangement has always been in place in America.

I did a bike ride across the country about 10 years ago, and it was eye opening. Much different than what I saw everyday in Orange County, CA. It's easy to keep the blinders on in our everyday lives.
WiFi Epidemiology: Can Your Neighbors' Router Make Yours Sick?
When I was young, I thought mechanical engineering would be my ticket to the space race, but after seeing the movie hackers for the 1st time on the engineering floor in college, I thought hacking was COOOOL.

I know it sounds lame, but I have to think that that movie got me fantasizing about it.

So, later on when I was struggling with Statics and Dynamics my teacher recognized that I was really a hacker and not an engineer. He asked how I did all of that stuff on my calculator, I then showed him my serial cable mod for the TI-82, and the other software i had written to make his class easier, because S&D was so hard. He suggested I change majors.

I AM SO HAPPY I DID, and today I have a job where I get paid to design the OpenWeb, and work on side projects. Maybe one will break out.

I still think I owe the campy fantasy of hacking to the movie 'Hackers,' for letting me think i had a better chance of getting a girl via hacking. I guess today i am still hopeful.
"I just finished building a Drupal system that stores content until a user with a particular email address logs into a site, then shows it to them."

Interesting -- public code?

"like so many Drupal problems, this will require some custom code"

Yep -- that's what I mean, it's an itch to scratch, not a tool I can deploy today. I wish I could deploy such a tool; it would be useful w/ my graduate work, which involves lots of collaboration w/ different groups.

It sounds like you're a heavy Drupal developer, and so your comment gives me some hope that if I were to try to implement this with Drupal, I wouldn't end up in a stinking morass. (At least not one I didn't make myself.)
I think the problem is that you're assuming something is wrong with the non-techies rather than that something is wrong with the wiki.
Maybe, but I was never exposed to it :-)
I named my ubuntu box Jarvis that day, after seeing it twice. ;-)
Wilson Sonsini Cuts 45 Lawyers, 68 Staff
why is it taking so long? Google has thousands of programmers...and they can't port over a single system in 1.5 years? Its not like they are starting from scratch
Well, maybe. I think it depends on the project.

At the moment, I'm working interfacing a handheld device with a networking device. I quickly wrote a prototype to work out implementation details (since connectivity required using a particular protocol). That's not to say I didn't write parts of the prototype to be refactored or pulled out, but given that I had to do a fair amount of exploratory programming to determine the best implementation, much of the prototype code will be thrown away.