skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Easy there, tiger. I just upgraded a Dell Latitude E6500 with 4Gb of RAM and an Athlon 5050e desktop also with 4 Gb from XP to Windows 8 Pro. Anecdotally, both boot faster and run Office 2010 faster than when they were running XP. This major upgrade has required no new hardware, except for a Logitech QuickCam Pro for which there is no 64-bit driver. I can probably run the desktop for another 5 years now.
> the police & the entire drug fighting establishment are also an interest group set on keeping their budgets & their privileges

In a way, there's this angle, sure. However, nobody wants the drug war to get so violent policemen drop dead all the time, like they do in Mexico. Nobody actually wants an all out war, despite the name "War on Drugs."
Wow, a politician who gets economics 101! Can we get some more of those?
A publicity stunt for sure. If genuine, strikes me as a bit classist considering much of the hubbub around BF this year has to do with Walmart and Target expanding their store hours.

I hate Black Friday, but I hate iPhone launch day too, and any other form of extreme consumerism. I don't hear any mumbles about consumerism on here and in the tech sphere when people camp out to swap their iPad 3 for an iPad 4 or for the new iPhone, etc.
is there something good for pdf conversion to epub?
direct copy from http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4746566

According to the link in dmgrow's comment, it's

Score = (P-1) / (T+2)^G

where P is the number of votes, T is the time in hours since submission, and G is a power that controls the steepness/rate of decline in ranking, so popularity is decreases exponentially over time. I'm sure that YC-affiliated posts have a different ranking algorithm, considering you can't vote on them.

Some other cool algorithms are:

del.icio.us / delicious.com 's: ranked by upvotes in the last hour. I like the elegance of this solution a lot :)

reddit's "best" feature: compares the rates at which comments are upvoted to generate the probability that a comment is a good one, which is how posts with fewer votes can be ranked better than posts with more votes. It works well, in my opinion.
+1 Pretty cool. I wanted to work on something similar using synonyms.
Also liking the Google Ventures-esque pillow background. And the load on scroll. Care to share your behind-the-scenes with the HN community? Doesn't seem to be using a thesaurus, but rather truncates and elongates words, coupled with jQuery goodness. Am I right?
Not really. The problem is that PDF is basically a destination format. Converting to PDF strips all of the semantics out of it, leaving you with plain text, fonts, and boxes. The latest versions of the official Adobe Acrobat Reader are able to convert PDF to Doc but I have no idea what the quality is like.
This is wrong on so many levels:

* Why is the DHS tracking down copyright infringers?!

* The FBI shuts down a site with hundred of thousands of user because of 36(!) infringing files

* These files were ordered by the DHS not to be deleted

* (From other articles) megaupload's users still do not have access to their data

* (From other articles) the ISP running megaupload's servers is not allowed to shut them down (or repurpose them) and has to foot the bill.

There's probably some other stuff going on that we do not know about, but this looks like a big clusterf*ck.
+1. Thanks for sharing the links. The one I stumbled on a couple of months ago that seemed to cover all the bases was this one: http://jonpolygon.com/2011/07/guide-to-naming-your-startup/

Might want to add that one to the list (I'm not affiliated with the guy, btw, just enjoyed the post).
What if we fill the whole tube with carriages, without any space between them and very little space between the carriage wall and the tunnel wall? That would leave much less room for turbulence and perhaps reduce friction.

If that works, you could then have "station" sections where you could place/remove "inner" carriages to/from the carriages running inside the loop and thus you'd never have to disconnect the main carriage loop.
It's probably possible to do, but nobody's needed one badly enough to do it.
Is there some kind of place where useful PHP tools, frameworks, and best practices are documented?

The majority of people I see trying to learn PHP have no idea these things even exist and are still building applications in the atrocious 1990s style promoted by such poisonously bad resources as w3schools.

It would be nice if people actually used tools like this rather than tried to bang their own together with mysql_query.
110 .PK domains managed by MarkMonitor got hacked by turkish hackers
There is actually an Apache project that can extract the text from a PDF. It does a passable job, but like I said all of the formatting is gone.

http://pdfbox.apache.org/userguide/text_extraction.html
Gorgeous, many thanks!
LaunchRock vs KickoffLabs | WebAppLog
An remarkably odd bit of timing: I saw your initial announcement 6 weeks ago, bookmarked your site for a project I've been working on, and just tonight finally got to the stage where I'm ready to use Docverter. I went to the site and was puzzled, because I'd remembered that this was a paid service, and I couldn't figure out whether I'd bookmarked the wrong link or had gone crazy. Then I checked the github repo and say everything committed ~10 hours ago, and lastly, checked HN only to see the #1 story is your announcement. It usually goes in reverse order! :)

So anyway, a slightly longwinded way of saying sorry that it didn't work out as a business (though I was about to sign up!) and many many thanks for open-sourcing it. I'll be installing in the AM and am deeply grateful.
Speaking as a Linux user/developer who hasn't touched any BSD in a long, long time, I can perfectly understand why many people would prefer FreeBSD. Not dissing on Linux (it's still my personal favorite, and Debian is my goto for everything), but it's always good to have choices; to each their own. From what I understand, whilst Linux has the drivers and software, most server setups could be easily swapped out for FreeBSD (drivers are usually not problems on servers, and most server software you'd want to run is open source and already ported and packaged), plus FreeBSD has some things still not in Linux that a smart admin could use to give their startup an edge.
I find Facebook ads to be the few that actually show me something I might be interested in.

-- "Targeted online ads" are basically a myth.
Problem is nobody <wants> to be a target.
For me, hard to read is the point. Comments are something I want to be able to focus on and consume, but disappear if I'm not focussed on them.
I'll gladly accept your money if you'd still like to pay :)
thanks for the feedback.

I am using thesaurus + more stuff and basically covering most of the tips suggested here - http://mashable.com/2012/10/04/startup-naming/

things like - synonyms, antonyms, related words, portmanteau, misspellings, phonetic variations, short url, acronyms, suffixes, prefixes

truncating and elongating is also one part.

the idea is to cover all the ways of creating a good brandable name.
Upvoted and good luck. I'm sure you'll find someone looking for help. :)
Google.

1. Facebook's motto is "move fast and break things". I would prefer if it was "move fast because you have the systems in place to prevent broken things from reaching production".

2. Facebook's new HQ is going to be a single room.

A single. Room.

This is a company run by people who apparently didn't read Peopleware ... if they've even heard of it.

Basically, it's a personality thing. I am mortified by screwing up. That's not a perfect character for business success, I realise. Foolish optimism is the oil of capitalism.

But it's who I am. I suspect I would be deeply uncomfortable with Facebook's culture.
>Update: Contrary to the U.S. and elsewhere, a previous ruling in Germany already makes wireless network operators liable for copyright infringements of others.

Germany has an interesting history of computer misuse. I'm surprised that CCC hasn't hacked wifi of German politicians (at their homes and offices) and transferred a variety of files.
I think we'd all be better off if energy, rather than space or water, were the limiting factor.
The idea of micro-payments for online content and services has been around since Softbank Services Group failed at it in 1995 with $10 million tossed at the problem.

And it's a suggestion that shows limited awareness of the enterprise costs of attempting to create and deliver compelling content at scale.

If you (rhetorical you) desire free content, then a value exchange is implied. For now, no better value exchange has been created than a moment of your time for ads. It sucks. It can be irritating. But it's the only solution that works right now.

That being said, I like flattr -- it's altruistic and well conceived. But it won't work because you (again, rhetorical) are both lazy and entitled... and won't micro-pay for content you consume, but then doesn't please you.

Human nature... it's not altruistic.
HangPic, story of a lean startup
It seems like jacquesm's situation was a random encounter, and not as much of a pre-meditated action.
A one-line drive-by snipe. HN has indeed fallen low of late.
Scientists See Promise in Deep-Learning Programs
I agree with you, for the most part (though I actually do like the Ribbon when I need to use Office). I just find slinging around claims of astroturfing to be counterproductive, especially when your points are solid. :)
Sebastian has a whole team and much more than a year!

But an average Googler gets their 20% time, plus a real chance to pitch for more resources. The (relatively flat) management chain is very open to great ideas regardless of where they come from, and willing to invest in them if they're sufficiently good. Mind you that bar isn't met all that often, but it does happen with some regularity.

I wouldn't go to Google for the sole purpose of pursuing your own idea there, but you should feel confident that if you have a great one, you'll be given a chance to make a case for it.

This is from the perspective of a Seattle Google employee, so I don't think location is an issue.
> their copyright

Nitpick: This is trademark at issue here, not copyright. Though the USOC and the IOC protect basically everything they can fiercely.
Behold, Some of the First Apple Computer Photos Ever
The function trick suffices to handle objects with stack-shaped lifetime (certainly a very common case), but it does not suffice when resources are associated with parts of a data structure. The strength of RAII is that it handles both of these cases with the same machinery.
2 men spend 12 days in jail, lose jobs for Facebook comments against Indian govt
Yeah I think this is an issue for many people at Google in that everyone that I know that has worked for them recently (5 past co-workers... not exactly a fair survey) has overall been positive but negative on feeling overqualified for the work they end up doing. Its probably a symptom of Google being able to load up on so many highly qualified people with a limited amount of high-end, brainy work.
It's no excuse as I didn't build the page. I have no idea why it's 30 mb and it would have been very easy for me to share the file otherwise, but the only thing the creator asked for is a link to his (bloated) site which is only fair.
That's a great point. I would love some sort of effect where if I've clicked on the comment block it is a lighter colour, otherwise it goes back to the default colour.
Features vs. Benefits: Features are what your app does; Benefits are what your customers value.
Because engineers always want to make something "better", and they consider that in terms of the product in isolation (not in terms of the customer), they often keep improving features beyond what customers value, and so "overshoot" customer needs.

This is so predictable that it fits into Christensen's "disruption" thesis: e.g. minicomputer manufacturers kept improving their product after PC's appeared. They were always better than PC's (feature), but PC's were soon good enough for their customers (benefit). And so DEC got killed. Today, x86 PC's are better than ARM netbooks/tablets/phones...

If you squint your eyes, you can also see this as a case of premature optimisation ("root of all evil" and "don't; not yet").

now with coffeetime™ technology!
Most politicians get economics 101. The problem is most do whatever it takes to get votes/popularity.
It's impossible to end any trade for which there is a market. Drugs, sex, nuclear weapons, state secrets, etc. all seem to create markets to satisfy demand. It might be that the best way to protect innocent lives is to actually encourage the development of the markets to keep them above board and in the public eye.
Roman Numerals in Racket Sources
Most of office is pretty replaceable, but the two bits that aren't are Outlook and OneNote. OneNote is semi-niche so it's not as pressing, but I would strongly disagree with the notion that Thunderbird is a replacement good for Outlook.

Seeing what practiced Outlook users can do is really eye-opening; it's a tool a lot of nerds (including me) hate, but it is a really powerful information management tool and I don't think Thunderbird (or anything else, including Evolution). I don't think I've found anything that is, though the full Google Apps suite does a decent enough job for my personal, non-work purposes.
Another outgoing politician.
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. I'd rather have some more politicians who get economics 585.
The culprit almost certainly is hitting a slow server over a remote (ie high latency) network link in a poorly designed pattern (ie for each client, run these fifteen queries - worked fine for the dev with a fast server on the LAN and three test clients in the DB)
Eradicating 'Reply All'
Google. I can never get over Facebook's "ick" factor. My opinion of Facebook is that it's rotten at the top; I feel it's run by morally-flexible people who will do anything for money. Technically, I don't think they're working in sufficiently diverse problem areas. Delivering status updates and plumbing ads, that's it.

Google products and projects run across the spectrum from technical to social to political. Google has research labs, it has offices in many of the developing parts of the world, it's very much involved in education.

There is absolutely no comparison: I would be proud to call myself a Googler. I run much of my private life online on Google services, and have spearheaded my company's move to Google apps & standardization on Android. Facebook? Facebook is the reason I installed the RequestPolicy plugin to block their cookies.
Duh!!!

Where there is demand, there is supply.

This is as inviolable as the law of gravity.
I'd argue the opposite, native controls on most mobile platforms have a very low delay and almost always respond faster than web interfaces. The delay perpetuates the stereotype of unresponsive web apps on mobile devices.
I could see that; geeks/engineers can be prone to over-analysis. That being said, I liked this article and comments too; clear, concise and refreshingly transparent. Some of the worst post-game analyses I've seen seem to be where details are few (bad on the OP), then speculation occurs (bad on the commenters), and worst is when the OP comes and throws a tantrum (or similar) dragging the speculation down to a flamewar (although usually a moderate one by my standards).
At which point the retort should have been, to follow that logic, and you starve millions to death! [1]

The thing is while an opposite viewpoint is desirable, their viewpoints tends not to be balanced but rather lean far 'the other way'. Let's say the 'truth' is 5, we claim 7, they claim it's -1. So, on balance, you're not getting the 5 by adding their viewpoint.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
Seconded. 20% time is still real, if you ask/push for it. If your idea fits somewhere under the broad umbrella of your group's mandate, so much the better.

I have to disagree a little with one of the earlier points, though. Through start-up acquisitions, Google is getting a lot more groups with the developer/hacker mindset. Those groups tend to keep to themselves and rail against Google's slow pace, and often eventually quit. Google could learn from that mentality, but equally those developers could learn from Google's methodical approach. In my (limited) experience Google could do much better at integrating newly acquired start-up teams into the overall corporate culture and development philosophy.
The "unprivileged package management" is the important feature here from the GNU point of view. One of the philosophical underpinnings of the GNU project is empowering non-superusers as far as possible - that's why they've stuck with the microkernel design, too. The idea there is that non-superusers would be able to easily run their own filesystem or TCP stack, for example, since it's just a matter of running their own daemon.

Once you understand this, a lot of GNU's technical decisions make more sense.
It's impossible to end the illegal drug trade != No organization with the means is willing to do what it takes.

The Mexican drug cartel supposedly has close to 150,000 "soldiers." I use the term soldier loosely because its really just a bunch of degenerate shitbags that have been given firearms. They are allegedly larger, more organized, and better funded than Al Qaeda has ever dreamed of being. Still, there are bullets enough in this world to solve such a problem. It would be long, ugly, and bloody for all parties involved, but if we were serious enough to actually go about it the right way, the entire planet would be far better having seen it to completion.

When an ultraconservative thinks about the war on drugs, they are generally thinking of the elimination of mind-altering substances from the face of the earth. When I think of the war on drugs, I think first of finding ways to prevent children from becoming addicted to hard drugs before they are old enough to know what decision they are making, and secondly, the annihilation of the violent, terrorist organizations that currently control the industry. I understand that nothing will ever completely eliminate the recreational use of drugs, but by my definition the war on drugs is absolutely winnable. Unfortunately, just because something can be accomplished, doesn't mean that it's going to happen.
Isn't Windows 7 in a large way a refinement of Vista where they did get the "details" right? It's probably overkill to say that Microsoft never gets the details right, but I do agree that their first version product which introduces their inovations is generally rough and unpolished to say the least.

I loved metro when I first saw the build videos in 2011, but that's because I looked at the demo apps as early and unfinished examples of the direction they were taking. Now over a year later I see almost nothing has changed and the same level of quality I saw back then is what is being released now. A lot of things are unintuitive, apps have awkward layouts, the icons are downright awful, etc.

There was a lot of promise for Windows 8 back then, and to some extent I still expect them to refine the UI and make it into a better user experience by the next version of Windows -- but by then the feeling of "innovation" will be gone and they will have missed their chance to make the big impact that they needed and would have otherwise gotten.
Yeah..I'm always worried I'm not thoroughly elucidating how I feel. The words, they just keep coming!
Definitely Google.

Maybe it's because I don't really use Facebook, but I don't know what most of the Facebook employees work on. I never really here of cool projects coming out of Facebook.

On the other hand, Google has a million different projects, and a good portion of them would be interesting to work on.
hmm, never noticed that. Ha.
RIP Larry Hagman -- wiki timeline
>RFID can't either, unless you severely overpower the readers.

Readers can't be made specifically to cover a larger range?

>You'd think the antichrist would be able to come up with something that couldn't be defeated with aluminum foil.

RFID is cheap. And you don't need something that can't be defeated by aluminum foil. Putting aluminum foil around things is a hassle. People avoid hassles. How many people take the battery out of their cell phones to avoid being tracked?
I hope the creator of the icons is not upset by my forwardness, but I've converted these icons to bootstrap style icons for easy use. Visit https://github.com/chrismarlow9/Batch-Bootstrap-Plugin for the project.

It allows you to add the icons with pure CSS style (using rowXcolumn) class name. The CSS file isn't exactly small but I did this for the purposes of people making friendly names for icons and expanding on the project (I tried myself but I hate coming up with semantics for technical things. Anyways, enjoy. I simply used GIMP to Greyscale the image and invert the color to white. Transparent the image on your own (or maybe I will later)...
All this would do is raise the price of drugs. Really, mass murder is not going to solve any of this and lack of resolve is definitely not the first cause of failing to find a solution.
sweet ...but every time I find a new favorite color scheme, it only lasts for a week max ...after this some part of my brain pulls me into changing back to my good ol' Visual Studio-like color scheme ...wonder if this happens to anyone else too
- People are fleeing TV and running towards netflix and bittorent, using DVRs to record their favorite shows and skip through commercials, and changing channels during commercials.

- Email is universally loathed and spam protection is standard, it's gotten so bad that the government had to make a law that forces all email solicitations to have an unsubscribe option and the name and address of the company sending the solicitation.
Free iPad Mini scam spreads via Facebook rogue application
I am constantly walking on a fine line between asking for something completely impossible (can I get your house for free?) and asking something too easy for a yes (can I give you $5?). The whole idea is that there is a 95% chance I get a no, so I can expect it and be genuinely surprised if I get a yes.
I find statements like the following disturbing:

"I think there are multiple theories out there on how the universe was created and I think this is a country where people should have the opportunity to teach them all"

No. Only one of these theories follows the scientific method, is subject to peer review, and will be changed when evidence suggests that it should.

If I had a theory that the universe has been farted out of a pink unicorn, it does not give this theory equal standing among the scientific theories; even a billion people believing it would not change that.
No, a million times no.

This is the kind of thinking that makes the public sector a quagmire of inefficiency. The IT department of the city of Munich has exactly one mission and that is to enable the employees of the city to service the citizens of Munich in the most efficient manner - not playing politics on behalf of the free software movement (or Microsoft, for that matter).

By the same yardstick, the city of Seattle should stick with Microsoft everything to protect local jobs, in spite of evidence of superior alternatives.
I read your original reply to hayksaakian as an enquire as to why hayksaakian would assume the js to be related to node since the js is client side.

In that context, my reply means that since hayksaakian started with the assumption that it was server side, it's only logical that he would conclude the js to be a node module since server-side javascript's most popular implementation is node.
Of course, looking back I see that I may have misread hayksaakian's reply.
Not until they retire, it seems.