skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Disk images are awesome. If you only think you're going to need an application once, you can run most straight from the image and be assured that nothing will end up on your system.

I think you have a bad understanding of how installation on a Mac should work. There are only two cases:

1. Dragging an application bundle to a folder. This method is for applications that can run without installing or modifying anything important.

2. An installation app. This method is for apps that require a script or executable to run to be able to function.

If you ask me, this is better than the .exe installers that come with every Windows program, inevitably littering files all over your system. .dmg's are mostly just convention in the Mac world, as far as I know. You can package an app in a .zip file, but you can mount a .dmg and then it just appears as a disk on your Mac.

I used to use a Windows machine, and when I moved to Mac this was one of the things that confused me -- but most everyone I've talked to about it agrees that after a little while you get used to it and it makes a lot more sense than the other system.
I don't think it is fair to compare loc on an application that needs to support the needs of many thousands of individuals with an application that needs to support 1.

The more users of something like wordpress that you have the more edge cases you find. I can write a blog in 1200 lines of PHP but I don't think I could convince myself it has anywhere near the features, considerations or polish that something like wordpress will have.

As for the cloud plugin I haven't looked at it but it appears as though the boilerplate is just a way to add an easy method for customization something his lacks.

So we end up with less code but less features and more difficult to get up, keep up or customize. I fail to see how this is a point for Clojure.
Warning: This will follow tipjoy account and DM you for no reason (other than to give you a password that I don't ever see using). Nether of which are explained on ether side of this implementation.

Now somebody has to tip me 15 cents to get my SMS message cost back because TipJoy DMed me.
Ask HN: If HN is trust-based, why not remove the passwords?
I'm referring to PG's claim of this being a "... a community based on trust..." in thread about faking votes.

This is more of a witty and a bit assholish remark than anything else but how much trust exactly there is, and why trust with one thing (like hacking into the site) but not trust each other enough to not use passwords?
Against this bug at least, yes.
Just testing something. -- HN Maintainers.
Bits Rot: Silent Data Corruption
Kiva Han is my favorite and it's at the corner of Forbes and Craig. I like it for the friendly leftist atmosphere more so than the coffee, which is only ok. And sometimes the Wifi cuts out and you have to ask them to reset the router. Coffee Tree Roasters probably has the best coffee but the one on Walnut St. is almost always packed, don't plan on getting a plug. The wifi is limited to two hours per drink. Also consider Crazy Mocha but it's about the edge of what is a comfortable walk.

Your Inner Vagabond in Lawrenceville is absolutely sublime but it's a little too far to walk. It's worth the short drive/bus though. I have never seen a better drink menu in a coffeeshop. http://www.yourinnervagabond.com/

If you are a l337 hacker you can probably get yourself on the CMU wifi.

And if you'd like to meet for coffee or food one evening, maybe we could throw together a mini HN meetup. We have one tentatively planned for the 28th.
Simply awe inspiring. Bookmarked for sure.

I've recently started assembling an SR-71 kit (with an f-117 to go) because I've always wanted the models sitting on my bookshelf.
It's kind of an unfortunate fact of life that high rewards require high risk, and high risk requires frequent failure. There's basically a continuum between doing what you're told, never taking on any risk, and collecting a steady paycheck, or shooting for the moon at every chance and falling on your face each time.

FWIW, I had the same sort of existential crisis when I was about 13, and it was so depressing I almost wanted to kill myself. However, the real working world is not (always) that bad. I found it helpful to think of every job as a learning experience. When you've milked it for everything it's worth, move on and find a new job. If you don't have any possible new jobs, quit and found a company, take it as far as you can possibly go, and if that's not far enough, go and get another job that'll let you work on the reasons you failed as an entrepreneur.

This, BTW, is false:

"It's eight hours a day, almost completely absolutely and rigidly, five days a week, for forty-sixty years until one saves sufficiently amidst it all to retire."

Think about it this way: there are grad students that live reasonably comfortably on $25k/year. A decent computer programmer can easily pull in $75k/year. So for every year you work, you are "buying" two years of freedom, if you're willing to live like a grad student. Work for a couple years, build up skills, then quit and do what you want with your savings.

I know a bunch of people who've put this to really great use. I funded my first startup - which I spent about 15 months full-time on - entirely with savings from a couple years I spent at a financial software startup. A friend of mine is a grad student in physics, and managed to save $20K on a grad student salary (think about that for a second: making $25k/year and saving $10k/year of it), then worked as a baker's apprentice for 6 months. An innkeeper I once met worked in Silicon Valley for about 15-20 years, lived like grad students with his wife and son, and then bought a sailboat, sailed around the world, finally settled in Seward, Alaska, and bought an inn with their savings.

The whole point of money is that you have a choice of what you want to spend it on. You can buy time as easily as you can buy things.
This has been posted regularly to Digg, Reddit, etc for years. Guess it's HN's turn - though I'm surprised it hasn't come up already.
Here's what I want you to do: 1. find the person you trust most, then 2. send them a document containing all of your sensitive personal data, i.e. your social security number, bank statements, bills, receipts, etc. Then call them and tell them how many people you've slept with last month. Do this because you trust this person.

Oh wait, I think my comment may have been a little witty and assholish. Oops.

Maybe it's because your post entails that we should have to publicly disclose our passwords to members that aren't even part of HN, who may or may not be trustworthy. Maybe people have passwords they use universally. Maybe if you would have thought your Ask HN post through a little more, you would have realized how utterly inane it was.

I don't like to be mean, especially here. But what was the purpose of posting this? It would have been just fine as a comment. And furthermore, if you understood that your remark was "assholish" (your words), why did you bother to post it in the first place?
Actually on closer examination the bug was subtler than that. I did check whether the incoming request was allowed to modify each field it was trying to modify. But the code that decided whether a field was modifiable was using a four variable list to destructure on a five value description of the field. This caused the variable determining whether a field was modifiable to be bound instead to the value saying whether or not it should be displayed. Which meant every field that was displayed was modifiable.
If by 'brute force' you mean 'iterate through all legal usernames', I hadn't even thought of that!

I would expect someone instead to pick the leaderboard, or some other extant set of names (eg: Google [site:news.ycombinator.com inurl:user]), and just iterate over those.

(Sad aside: try that query at Google or Yahoo, and review the top 100 results. An awful lot of the usernames ranking highest are drug names.)
shrug, just because.
I was born and brought up in America but my parents wanted to moved back when I was 15. So I did my undergrad in India and just continued living there. Didn't find any compelling reason to go back to America after that.
(Not that I don't like the place - I do. But I'm comfortable living in India too)
Actually, we had an SBA loan for a web software company in the web 1.0 days. We were doing web-based products and some custom dev for the higher-education sector.

From what I recall, they were less worried about what you did and more concerned about crossing your Ts and dotting your Is. They wanted detailed biz plan (not your 37signals 1 pager), 3-5 years of projected P/L statements, balance sheets, etc.

We got the loan (roughly $100k) through a local bank and, while there were mountains of paperwork, they were great to work with. After the .com bust, a lot of Calif. schools (our main market) got their budgets and grants slashed and our business slowed. The bank was really cool about letting us make interest only payments for a while.

Eventually, we were able to sell the business for enough to pay off the loan and have a little extra dough.
The F-22 is pretty cool. Total overkill actually.
Duh? They're both.
That's actually pretty interesting to me. I didn't notice that when I was looking at the Hacker News code. Perhaps Arc shouldn't allow a list to be destructured except with a list of the same length? Allowing differing lengths seems likely to cause subtle bugs like this.
Ok, this was a joke, really :)

>Here's what I want you to do: 1. find the person you trust most, then 2. send them a document containing all of your sensitive personal data, i.e. your social security number, bank statements, bills, receipts, etc. Then call them and tell them how many people you've slept with last month. Do this because you trust this person.

My mother knows my SSN, has many of my bank statements, bills, receipts, she probably even knows pin to my credit cards.

I just told her (in person) that I slept with 0 women and 0 men last month. What next?
An even better implementation of this, on the Google Maps API site:

http://code.google.com/apis/maps/signup.html
Hit up a good pub, there'll be plenty of women and men there.

Your post may have been a joke, but I don't feel like you were justified creating a new thread. Just comment/reply next time.
Re-engineered battery material could lead to rapid recharging of many devices
Specs listed at http://www.engadget.com/2009/03/17/dell-adamo-announced-1-2g...

A fair bit slower than the MacBook Air, quite a bit heavier, integrated graphics, and $200 more, but with an SSD...
For a language of my own design I'd agree, but I think that would be rather severely contrary to the spirit of Arc.
This is a little off topic, but I want to re-iterate an age old plea: Please link to your product/service from your blog page!

I missed the original soft-launch, but happened across this article. I had to type in the top level domain to see what the service was about. If the blog had a header explaining what the service was and providing a link to the home page it would make things so much easier.
Yeah, I meant brute force over all registered usernames. I wrote a page that used the vulnerability you mentioned to check to see if a user has visited any of the top 100,000 websites: http://tlrobinson.net/misc/history.html (it seems to be broken now though) and it can churn through 100,000 tests in a few seconds.
Very cool ... I'm looking to add the panda video platform into some apps and this looks like it might really help.
I always thought it would be safer to stick the pilot in the center of the plane, using periscopes or (now) video to fly. But I guess you're more likely to be thrown free of a disintegrating plane if you're in the usual pilot position.
Clojure is definitely better than PHP, but this article does not show that. The two code snippets compare two different things -- the Lisp calculates the tag cloud, while the PHP declares some configuration options for the UI. How could comparing those two completely different problems tell you anything?
Wordpress doesn't have polish. It has some HTML that looks nice, but doesn't perform well and is completely unmaintainable.

FWIW, I am also writing a real replacement for Wordpress: http://blog.jrock.us/articles/Ernst,%20Angerwhale,%20the%20F... (that article also rambles on and on and on about unrelated things).
Just the other day I had to walk my mom through installing Firefox on a Mac. Trying to explain what to do was very enlightening.

As a power user I very much like the standard way of "installing" apps on OS X by dragging them from DMGs, but for the average user a basic installer would be easier.
My advice to young entrepreneurs
There is a rumor going around in the South African Air Force that the South Africans with the help of the Israeli Air Force (who had big ties in the bad old days) figured out a way to shoot the SR71s down. It had to do with a technique called storm-climbing (which was novelized by Wilbur Smith in 'Eagle in the Sky') where a normal fighter aircraft would go full-tilt with maximum weight in a downward trajectory, flatten out the dive, dump excess weight, and start climbing vertically. This way the pilots would get to an altitude where the missiles could get a successful lock, which in this case was far higher than the 'normal' ceiling for these aircraft. From this height they could then fire off the missiles. I'm not at all sure if they ever attempted it, but I'm pretty sure they didn't succeed. Still in interesting thing to hear :)
I generally tried to err on the side of flexibility, and it seemed more flexible not to require the lengths to match. I could imagine cases where you might want to use patterns both longer and shorter than the lists they were matched against. On the other hand, I'm not sure I've ever ended up taking advantage of this.
The first time Trevor restarted it a few seconds before the fixed code actually arrived on the server.
The Uptick Rule (video)
Assuming you have a "profitable model" wouldn't you want to leverage as much capital and you can muster?
Does Your Online Business Need More Than One Domain?
I decided to learn Paint.NET "over a weekend" to do some mock ups, ended up spending weeks and actually getting fairly good at it.

My advice to you, if you're creating any type of logo, start downloading fonts like crazy. I recommend a site like www.dafont.com (unaffiliated.) The reason? you can find very interesting graphic elements in wingding-type fonts and you can scale them to any size.
Premier Transmission Repair
Cell Phone Auction site, every cell phone, pda, and accessory. Manufacturers LG, Motorola, iPhone, Google, Android, Nokia. Carriers: T-Mobile, Sprint, Verizon, Metro PCS, Cingular, Virgin Mobile.
Are Cloud Based Memory Architectures the Next Big Thing?
Super last minute advice for startups applying for Y Combinator
Eliminate Credit Card Debt | Help With Credit Card Debt | Debt Settlement
Get help with credit card debt now at ccdebtadvisors.com; your advisor will help you eliminate credit card debt, find you the right debt settlement solution, and get you back in the black.
Apple fanboys, repent
Maybe you could use something along the lines of &rest to optionally support a pattern shorter than the matched list?
I wish the ModWsgi module for Nginx was maintained. The last commit was 12 months ago.
http://wiki.nginx.org//NginxNgxWSGIModule
In the interest of full disclosure: I sell domain name ideas.

I still think having multiple domains is good for traffic and sales, though.
The country is bigger than the valley and tech isn't the only industry. Tech startups also don't make up the vast majority of small businesses in America.
You could do that with a dot now. The trouble is, you end up creating a junk variable:

arc> (let (x . y) '(a b c) y)
(b c)
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=518250
This article itself is a good example why obsessing with SEO is bad. The article is written for search engines to index, not for humans to understand. It obviously compiles information from various sources, but little effort is made to make the content actually understandable - apparently the important thing for the author is to mention a variety of terms in proper context.
Indeed. I never noticed how ambiguous it is until I took a class where I tried to teach a computer to understand it.

Yet somehow, we still communicate. I guess that says something interesting about our evolution.

On a related note, how many linguists does it take to change a broken light bulb? Two. One to decide what it should change into, and one to find out what kind of bulb emits broken light.
Because teens do not have the right amount of self-importance required for Twitter until college.

That's how I started.
Prime p (e.g. 5) occurs exactly k times in factors of n! .

k being a sum from 1 to m of a sequence whose term is [n / p^m] ([] meaning taking inteer part) where m is such that p^m =< n that is m being the integer part of logarithm base p of n.

In this example

[log5(35)] = 2

so

k = [35/5^1] + [35/5^2]

Sory for bump-posting, but I had perfectly nothing better to do.
ahem

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=133282
Computer Science Programs Make a Comeback in Enrollment
The complex simplicity of the new iPod shuffle
This useful article comes from Garry Tan, cofounder @ Posterous.
Thanks to garry for posting this, always nice to hear a bit of advice distilled down.

Even nicer when you're able to check off most of the points :D
Making users create junk variables seems to me like better behavior than the current implicit behavior. It's your decision, though, of course.

Anyway, is it safe to assume that you're not going to try to get me arrested or anything?
Haha, this actually sums up nicely what I was wanting to say. I'll add - Communities that have trust also have privacy, my friends don't need to know who I vote for or how much I make but thats no reason not to trust them.
The points were editable through similar means. Pages like http://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=519433 contained a form that allowed all of a story's details -- including title, url, and score -- to be edited. Just like with profiles, the story editing forms didn't have fields for non-admins, but just like with profiles, it was possible to submit a request with the fnid from the form regardless of admin status.
It would be very hard to guess, because it all depends on accidents of liquidity.
I absolutely was around for the previous redesign, saw all the backlash of people complaining about being unable to find stuff, but after a day or two, most people seemed to prefer it. That is expected behaviour with most radical site redesigns and something I've seen many times for other sites. As I said, this reaction is quite different, and it's because the new design is objectively pretty awful.

By the way, it really is quite irritating trying to have a conversation with you, and having you state "obvious opinions" as fact ("Then you weren't around for the last redesign, which people hated.").

I don't recall any such reactions to Facebook Video, although perhaps it was localized. The only two previous widely reported upsets for users have been the addition of newsfeeds and the terms of service debacle (and yes, I was around for both). The last redesign seemed to upset application developers and advertisers more than users.
Wordpress has a lot of features that most people overlook when implementing their own blog platforms. I'm not saying it is a great system to develop with but it handles a lot more use cases than most systems I see people comparing it with. People regularly compare things like the Rails demo blog with wordpress as an example of why PHP/wordpress is bad.

It could certainly be better but it's understandable as to why it's not pretty under the hood. Trying to be everything for everyone usually results in ugly systems.
I start off by saying "I work in IT for an investment bank", which usually ends up with bewildered looks.

Then I say "I fix keyboards and mice for an investment bank", which usually ends up with some nervous laughs (some get it, some don't).

Then I say "I write software that run electronic trading systems, like stock exchanges". That's when most people get it. The others tend to think the finance world ends at their ATM.

Recently, the last sentence has ended up with dirty looks from those who probably think that people like me caused the current global recession. At this point I usually say something like "I don't work in credit derivatives".
I test against the RC releases and have found some bugs that way.

This time, it was testing mod_rails that led me to testing my apps against Rails edge. I wanted to make sure I could run mod_rails on open solaris in this next release cycle, so I was running things on edge earlier than I typically do.

Also, there was (is) an issue with Rails 2.3 and paperclip due to changes in how Rake handles empty file fields. There's been back and forth between the three projects on who needs to fix what. At the moment, the latest paperclip should work against Rails 2.3.
Maybe I am missing the point here - why Cambridge specifically ? What about London, or even Oxford ?
Like plutonium. Managed safely, they can generate results that are impossible any other way. Managed poorly, on the other hand...
I use scalr at the moment(paid service) we have just under 20 instances spread among 6 farms. Been using them for about 3 months now with very few problems. The only major issue I've had is that their DB roles aren't great for large db's(>100gig) though I think they are working on an SBS one.

As it is I use a modified role to allow SBS but have to muck around too much for comfort on start ups since the SBS partitions don't always mount at startup(sometimes up to 10 minutes later) and when they do that the DB init scripts fail which causes scalr to cycle the instance and start the whole process over again. That said I've only had to do that twice since I've used them.
Beginning Engineers Checklist
Sounds fair enough. I've emailed garry at posterous to see if there's anything we can do about that.
I don't want to get overly philosophical here on breakthrouh happening or not but I too think language structure may not be tied to or convey any particular meaning. Quine explored this much on philosophical grounds and then there is poetry, a craft of aligning text to our inner brain cache buffers so that it gives a pleasant read e.g. by the means of rythm.

What I mean is not that semantic analysis is futile, but that it may simply not be intristically fundamental to the language. For example in this comment on basics of statistical machine translation http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/?p=577 Gil Kalai expresses his astonishment at the results despite himself being a noted statistician.

On the other hand I recently bought a book of poems, side work of a translator, who showcased therein his skills at morphing his language with the goal set at scrambling it badly - striping out of any flow and rythm and obeying grammar only in most pathological ways, still the poems are beautiful and meaningful.
unalone: That said: there's some terminology you need to know.

unalone: Amichail, I don't know you, so forgive me if this is impertinent, but you don't seem to have a clue about how Macs work. You don't seem to have put any research into the ideas behind OS X.

amichail: Expecting people to research how the Mac works just to install software is asking a bit too much.

unalone: I don't expect you to. I expect you to intuitively understand it, like pretty much everybody I've seen using a Mac does.