skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Soon, netbook performance will become comparable with laptops"

I have been using a netbook as my main desktop and the only complain I had was with it being really tiny (something quickly offset by me having to carry it). When I am at home, I use an extra screen/keyboard/mouse.

Sure it's no screamer, but it is a more than adequate development (Emacs/Python/Django/Plone) machine.
Now imagine if an email service/client actually got a large number of people to start using encryption. That would be an impressive feat.
I think Vista got that covered.
This does get posted a lot, but I still like it.
I am not sure what you would call "normal software", but i have an old machine that is a PIII with a 550Mhz processor and 128MB of RAM(i use it as a file server). I run on it a version of xubuntu(forgot which version, but it is about a year or so old). XFCE runs beautifully on it. Along with all of its software. And with an even lower end machine, you can use even lighter desktop systems.

Of course, you'd need to substitute a few of your regular applications, for example firefox still has a few problems with memory, and so you might want to look at an alternative.
It's also purely content addressed, doesn't attempt to make fake incremental revision numbers, and doesn't enforce any workflow.
"Apple should be in even worse shape than Microsoft"

Bean-counters usually don't buy, usually. You should compare a recession effects on PCs and Macs with the effects on Hondas and Porsches.
I agree. His books are a good read and very inspirational. When he started his business, all hippy-like with long hair you can imagine what the (at the time) stuffy establishment thought of him. If anyone on here wants an inspirational read, I'd recommend Losing My Virginity. Read some of the other books on him too to realise that whilst he is 'cool' he's also quite ruthless, which you probably need to be to get where he has
I had no idea that "_" stores the last printed expression in the interactive interpreter. That little tip, and the wonderful visual description of Python's "names," were worth more than enough to cover the cost of reading the whole article.
Yes, it's the way of the cool-cycle.

10 years ago everyone thought Bang & Olufsen (http://www.bang-olufsen.com/) was the coolest stereo around. Everybody wanted to have one, and eventually the not-so-cool people got one too. Now the cool people would never be seen alive with a Bang & Olufsen stereo, because everyone has got it. Even their dad, by definition the most uncool person on the face of the earth, has one standing around in his un-cool living room.

The reason something is cool is that trendsetters and opinion leaders endorse it. The reason they endorse it is that nobody else has it yet. (And of course that it has some merit of it's own, which Apple certainly has) Once it goes mainstream they will start looking for something the new thing.

I see this happening to Apple right now, the opinion leaders are starting to move on because apple products are becoming mainstream. This is a major issue that Apple will have to address: if they continue their growth cycle they will become main-stream and cannot keep playing the cool-card in their marketing.

If I knew what would replace them though, I wouldn't comment on HN, but sipping champagne on a tropical island with a russian supermodel and a good book.
Interesting - got a recommendation for a book that deals more with his tactics or the ruthless side? I admire people who are ruthless without hurting others, breaking the law, or otherwise being bad people. You can even learn from people who might go too far - I just ordered "Titan" about John Rockefeller from Amazon, along with "Taiko" about 1600's Sengoku Japan. Some ruthless men in those books - I try to understand and internalize the drive while spotting potential Tony Montana style pitfalls in advance.
Feedburner: Switching to Google account with MyBrand enabled
e.g. just a few a month would pay for a dedicated DSL line for that.
that's really weird. was it written at a time when most programming was for scientific purposes? i don't know my comp history

if i parsed it correctly, he is saying that things should be 0-indexed because a particular mathematical notation corresponding to it is more sensical, but i don't see what mathematical notation has to do with programming notation, both of which are man-made, arbitrary, and for different purposes, such that reasoning about either with respect to the other is imo fallacious

he compares subscript ranges in a notation where 0-indexing appears to be better, but choosing a different notation (such as b in his examples) makes it look better for 1-indexing ( 0 < i <= N versus -1 < i <= N-1 )
Climate change enhances grassland productivity
pg == Paul Graham

http://ycombinator.com/people.html
In essence, they're telling their employees they're too stubborn or stupid to follow guidelines and use their judgment when it comes to responding to email.
I understand, I am more responding to the preciousness and non-replaceability of it, the actual application for this I have in mind is not for bookmarks :-)
Palm has a very recognizable brand, indeed. Besides there're not that many Palm phones around and it can help building 'uniqueness' of the products. Of course Nokia make great products, too. But their market share is just too bug to be an 'elite' product. Other manufacturers like HTC do not have such a strong brand like Palm.

The problem with Palm might be that Pre 'is just a beginning'. I mean currently they have very few models and that eases the choice for consumers. Apple does it very well unlike HP, Asus and others and I personally think that helped them a lot. Today when you say 'HP laptop' I get no idea how it's going to look like. But if you say 'Apple laptop' I get a clear cut image of a shiny high quality product.

Low number of models keep them recognizable among consumers. That's the key for building a strong recognizable brand. I think Palm will keep the 'cool' factor as long as they do not introduce very few new models. One or two WebOS-based phones is Ok but if there are going to be more they will become just another brand.

Anyway the great products (especially the first-gen models) are essential if the company wants to become the Next Brand. Google made a huge mistake with G1. Everyone I talk about it says the phone looks very low-quality and cheap. And it seems like Android is not going to be cool after G1.

I wonder what phone was the first to have a Windows Mobile. I suspect it wasn't a great phone.
How Olympic finals were won and lost
Another point worth mentioning: Math in general is heavily interconnected. The more math you do, the better you become at it. A large amount of math is knowledge. That mess of symbols is something you will have to understand. As soon as you understand what it means, everything is just trivial.

My advice would be to start with some books you can understand and then build up there towards your goal. It may take a couple of years, but the time used are going to be paid back in masses when you hit other math problems: They suddenly got easier too!
FREE is as successful as poverty.
Congrats guys. Just read your backstory with YC - http://ticketstumbler.com/new-stuff/2008/11/03/when-ticketst...

Very exciting stuff. Especially loved the FC reference -

"Starting a company isn’t a seminar; it’s not a goddamn weekend retreat."
I would be cool with allowing high karma users the ability to down vote stories (people on the top 100 list for example).
Use a Video Organizer to Declutter
Rather, he never turned the big ads on for signed-in users. There was originally just a 60x60 in the sidebar on the front pages that's sold specifically for Metafilter. All the ads he added after that were only for visitors.

Almost all the site's revenue comes from ads on http://ask.metafilter.com -- with a shitload of traffic from google searches. It pays the salaries for 4.25 people!
I usually dislike multi-page, but I was surprised that I didn't mind in this case.

I realized that it's the latency of multi-pages that I don't like. This site loaded instantly (for me). A factor in this was that I adblocked all the ads (when I disabled adblock, loading was significantly slower).
I don't like waiting for page-loads. It breaks my train, and maybe also there's the uncertainty of whether I'll be able to finish reading, since pages sometimes don't load - this has happened to me.
Hmmm.. if someone cached their multi-page article in the client (including the ads) and switched dynamically pages with javascript, one could achieve the same effect.

These are also "webapp" issues, and I think why offline webapps (google gears, AIR, silverlight, javaFX) are so important. I guess it will also finally disrupt Microsoft's Windows platform, without needing a new hardware platform (previously, mainframes, minicomputers and workstations were disrupted by new hardware platforms - I don't see that happening to Microsoft).

I think I actually like multi-page in itself - it gives me a natural break, and also enables literal "bookmarking" (yes, like pages in a book) if I don't want to finish it all right now (or if I want to remember part). I actually wrote a little greasemonkey script to add in anchor names to headings on long essays (eg: pg's), so that I can bookmark them (with #).
Dividends, baby.

PG and Co. are already aware of all of this.
Thanks - we're both big fans.
While I was using Windows I found Digsby to be the best of the IM clients that I tested.

It gave the notifications for gmail, but also twitter, facebook and handled a couple of my IM accounts.

Very useful, pity no client for linux or mac yet :\
We have 4 blogs (which is why we don't have an RSS feed on the front page). Here's our company blog:

http://ticketstumbler.com/new-stuff/
I've made this for my startup. We look at a ton of sources. Delicious, Magnolia (RIP), Technorati + about 5 more. It gives you a very good list of tags.

Would people be interested in me turning this into an API?
how did you get coverage? nice one :)
I am sure its possible. Apple has the right combination of marketing, technology and design to make what they are today. Having said that, its a recent phenomena - several years back, we all thought SGI made the mean machines, where are they now?

But I wish Apple comes up with something more killer product, diversify even more ... like you know, may be a car audio player. That will have the same wow factor of iPod/iTouch - somewhat internet enabled. So you can directly download/buy music into your car audio, and play online media ... and of course, it can double up as a iPhone and map device. Much of its out there already, but still its a scrambled market. Apple need to lead the way in usability. I'm sure Jobs can turn this into a multi-billion dollar franchise.
The "You should study that" remark is from esr not from me.
I spent several years working for a very small commercial printer and was in charge of the billing/inventory system there. Eventually, since I was tracking the raw materials, I was put in charge of ordering paper.

We only three mid-sized printing presses and I was dropping just under six figures every month on paper alone. Of course, we weren't printing on the kind of paper you get with the NYT. This was higher quality stuff but you can get an idea of the costs involved.
Setting your own location is coming soon. In the interim you can search via zip code:

http://ticketstumbler.com/search/?query=20009&x=0&y=...
The article is from 2007, drives were smaller. Around half of all computers in US had less than 50GB:

http://www.comscore.com/press/release.asp?press=1557
Sorry, I've updated the slides. They looked ok (if not pretty on my machine). think slideshare conversation bleaches a little. anyway, now black on white
Tall Popy Syndrome

Tall poppy syndrome. From the article:

Top of the decline list is what is know (sic) as the "tall poppy syndrome," a phrase used to denote the ordinary Australia's lack of respect for wealth, power and assorted pretensions. Tall poppies could once expect to be cut down. This social leveling attitude went hand in hand with belief in concepts such as giving everyone a "a fair go."
The Star Online Newspaper of Malaysia
Well even if the publisher dissolves they probably can ooze over to a new publisher.
no irony. the post was about how our team built /programmes and /music. we're not responsible for the whole of bbc.co.uk and we're not responsible for the bbc's shoddy moveable type install that powers the radiolabs blog. trust me the post was valid xhtml when i wrote it. it just got mangled by MT and the old bbc templating system.
If you manage to find validation errors on /programmes or the beta part of /music i'd award you the irony points. but don't kick us for stuff we didn't build...

Michael
US GDP Shows Biggest Drop in 27 Years
Figures out today revealed that the US economy contracted at its fastest rate in 27 years during the final 3 months of 2008.
Ask HN: Ruby on Rails host?
I'm planning to roll out an application in the next few months. I'm looking for a good, reliable RoR host. I thought of EngineYard but I don't quite need that level of hosting yet until I'm sure the idea will take off.

Does anyone have suggestions for a good RoR host? I'm looking at the < $50/mo range if possible but willing to go as high as $75 a month.
Try using ipython [http://ipython.scipy.org] for much more stuff like _ . e.g. using using _n to get the output of the n'th line you typed in the interpreter.
Slicehost or Amazon Web Services.

I personally use Joyent, but they're rather pricey.
oh, and this is a good resource for hosts for rails : http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=272031
i'd say putting your real name and contact information in your profile suffices.
IBM has a culture of cyclic change. Every 20 years its a different company, and it has been changing constantly through it 100 year history. IBM has seen many great CEOs through history.

Microsoft still relies on essentially the same business model (a software-product company.) essentially the last 30 years. It is trying to diversify, yes, but most of its money still comes from Windows and Office.

Someone said a company is truly great when it has made it to the 3rd great CEO. How many CEO who had the ability and the vision to reinvent the company has Microsoft had?
i've seen pg make polite suggestions to commenters who are out of line. they almost always completely ignore him.

given that he's got other things to do besides just moderate this site, i don't blame him at all for killing the accounts of unruly posters. at that point, the onus is on them to do something to get back in his good graces, or just go somewhere else.
I read that as "BIOS of your twitter flock" and was momentarily confused.
http://www.hping.org/visitors/
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/7mnbi/ask_reddi...

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/251418/who-are-good-web-h...

usual suspects: slicehost, linode, rails Machines, engineyard, rimu,
Netbooks are nice, but they are not taking over the market anytime soon. A certain category of people have always wanted small cheap notebooks, and now that they are available, they are buying them. The old consumers who purchased normal notebooks will continue to do so.

Netbooks sell well because they are cheap and small. They are useful for particular tasks in this configuration, but not for others. The market is changing, but not towards netbooks exclusively. What people want, and don't get yet, and will jump to purchase when they come are:

- Very thin notebooks that are very cheap, but have 15 or 14 inch screens

- Very thin and small notebooks than have 12 inch to 10 inch screens, and are very cheap

If any of the above is above 700mhz in speed, it's fine, as speed is not the main criteria for the bulk of people. The third category of people want

- the same as above, but with lots of ram and speed for video editing, photo editing work

All 3 classes want an automatic connection to flat screen screens at 32 - 30 inch at home, auto connection to external mouse and keyboard.

Current style notebooks as well as all categories of desktop computers are not wanted, they are just taken because they are what is available. Nobody wants a large box sitting underneath his table, it just happens to come in that form factor.

Netbooks fulfill a part of the above, and that's why they are selling. They will not stay low end forever.
This is even easier with a window manager like Xmonad, since you can configure it to "log" state changes. No polling necessary.
Also, one of the biggest sources of antioxidants in the foods Americans commonly eat is coffee. (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9105892/)
I actually got confused by the "names" illustrations, even though I know Python. And the illustration doesn't really explain what is the observable difference between Python and "other languages".

I suppose the point is that Python doesn't support "pass by referece"-semantics, and that assignment never copies mutable values. However, AFAIK this is exactly the same as at least Java and JavaScript, and probably other languages too (I would guess Ruby and Lisp also, although I'm not sure).
I have Ubuntu installed through VMware right now, to try it. Exact same problem I had with previous versions: the audio card doesn't work and I've tried but it won't fix.

In 2005, Ubuntu fried my computer and I had to hard-reset everything. So it's hard feelings.
Here is the important part:

Extensive experience with Mesa has shown that
the use of the other three conventions has been
a constant source of clumsiness and mistakes

0-based indexing is not something you can rigorously prove to be better.
Did you just admit to using Eclipse on this site?

Seriously, though, git-svn is very low on user interface, so you should be able to take the standard git plugin:

http://git.or.cz/gitwiki/EclipsePlugin

and use that for most of your work. When you want to get changes from svn, or commit changes to svn, just open up an xterm and type "git svn rebase" or "git svn dcommit". You may even be able to get Eclipse to run an arbitrary shell command for you, if so, you're set.
I like tying it to karma rather than user date length. That way, long-time users that haven't done anything will still see the guidelines, as a sort of hint.
How is tarsnap considerably more secure?
This post is over two years old. Not to take anything away from this guy, but I think that the parser in dateutil (http://labix.org/python-dateutil) is much more robust and the de facto standard for parsing dates in python as far as I know. I checked and dateutil handles all of the examples he lists.
Someone at work linked me to Brightbox yesterday; haven't used them myself so I don't know how good they are. http://www.brightbox.co.uk/

Of course, there's always Heroku: http://heroku.com/

I have nothing but good things to say about Slicehost, but getting Rails up and running requires more work than a dedicated Rails hosting setup would (the upside, of course, is greater flexibility).
Yes.

In short, Lua's philosophy is to keep the core language as small as possible, but to include features that make it easy to add major language features as necessary. Adding an object system to the language is trivial, for example. (It doesn't have hygienic macros, though there are some side projects that attempt to add them. No experience with them, though...I'd just use Scheme.) Lua feels to me like a minimalistic, more internally consistent Python.
Bidet Reviews
Buying a bidet can be difficult which is why ReviewBidets.com was created. Read user reviews of the most popular bidet models before deciding which bidet to buy.
Most parents not quite ready to have 'designer babies' - but demand exists
With the number of equals matching on the opening and closing comments.
Why would long-time users that "haven't done anything" need the hint?
Looking at the average corporate employee they're probably right.
The advantage of the newspaper at work is that we pass it around the break room all day. It gets annotated with interesting notes and drawings by everyone. That one single newspaper gets read by perhaps 50 people.
This is one of the things expected to be fixed in 5.1.4, IIRC.

# works with an array-style table (consecutive integer keys, starting from 1) and not hash-style tables. Once you're familiar with Lua, you rarely confuse them -- they tend to be used very differently. Using the same variable type is mostly an efficiency trick.

I agree that counting from 1 is kind of annoying, but part of their reasoning was that Lua is targeted as a scripting language for niches that can include people who don't really program. They tried to keep "weird" programming stuff from obfuscating the tiny amount necessary for writing config or data files in Lua. It has coroutines, lexical scope, metatables, etc. when you use it for real programming, but they don't get in the way when you don't need them.

For example, from the data file for my laptop's wifi script:

device="ral0"
sudo=true

Network { key="home", nwid="barbelith", wpa="..." }
Network { key="sparrows", nwid="The Sparrows" }
Network { key="schulers", nwid="schuler-alpine" }
> I'm so used to ordering from big sites like Amazon and Ebay that I usually don't even check to see if there's a phone number.

Well, in those cases, neither make their phone number easy to find. Amazon has it hidden very deeply in their "help" site, and eBay requires an account to get at their number. I assume, anyway -- I browsed for a few minutes and didn't find any phone numbers at all.

Big companies prefer email just as much as small ones.
I wonder what phone was the first to have a Windows Mobile. I suspect it wasn't a great phone.

I'm pretty sure it was the Audiovox Theia. I had one, it sucked. The battery life was good for about 2 calls. The radio would randomly shut off if the phone was idle for a few hours. App integration sucked.
Why I'm Twittering From Davos Even Though I Run Reuters
This thread was actually covered one time: http://www.hackerne.ws/item?id=108723
I also need:

* Django admin

* Django ModelForms

* Django Middleware

* Django ContentTypes

* and someday maybe GIS
I think Palm has a valid shot. One thing, IMO, that is crucial is to realize the world does not run on a single OS. The majority of your cool/hip adopter base in on OS X today. If the software to sync data, backup information, transfer photos, etc. does not run on something more than just windows I think a lot of people will never even bother to pick it up.

That is the main reason I switched from a Blackberry to an iPhone. I miss my blackberry for most things, but I DON'T miss not being able to really do much with it with OS X. And yes, I'm aware of the various 3rd party apps that almost work for about 50% of the functionality.
First of all, he said Linux and open source. Open source has definitely disrupted, most notably on the desktop, Internet Explorer's monopoly. Also, LAMP and others have done rather well against MS on the server (although this would have been more retrospective than prediction even 6 years ago).

As far as Linux on the desktop goes, it's too early to call failure. Six years is not exactly an eternity. But in that six years, Linux has become much more user-friendly and easy to install, major vendors like Dell have started selling it pre-installed, MSIE has lost its dominance (which is important because you can now use the internet without running into MSIE-only sites now), webapps have made the OS less important, and the netbook thing is happening, reducing prices to formerly unheard of levels, making the price differential between Windows and Linux that much more important.

Call failure when the marketshare of Linux stops growing at the expense of Windows.

Here are some stats: Linux's numbers are low, but growing.

http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php