skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I know it's a joke, but those graphs are wrong, as is the way we talk about learning curves.

If something has a steep learning curve, it's easy to learn to use. Look at the vi graph: Assuming the x axis is time and the y axis is knowledge, according to its chart you know how to use virtually all of vi as soon as you start using it.

Things that are hard to learn have shallow learning curves: it takes a long time to become proficient.
playgreenhouse.com Another that just occurred to me is startdock.com (the guys behind sins of a solar empire and GalCiv)
More Evidence That Intelligence Is Largely Inherited
Jeff Bezos also practices this at Amazon, http://www.shmula.com/987/jeff-bezos-5-why-exercise-root-cau...
With all the stuff that happens in Aus there are far more important things to sort,

When Peter Garrett sang Bad On Fire there where lots of voices who called to censor him, I guess the wheel turned...
Enterprise Linux variants are the strategic Unix platform in the City of London (world's largest financial services market), and have been at most places for a few years now.

Just finished up working for IBM at a major ex-state-monopoly Telco, working at the worlds largest hedge fund right now.
Everytime I see a Scribd doc I run away like if I saw the devil.

HTML does a better job.
No. Netbook sales have been growing for a couple years and they're like 10% of all portable computer sales.
Reinventing Capitalism: Putting Soul in the Machine
Why the downvote? I think this is a great hack and I'm definitely not disrespecting his work - it's awesome. However, imagine the potential of great ideas like this combined with amazing looking prosthetics as discussed in the other article. If that's not a startup idea I don't know what is!
With the added complexity of making it mulitplayer you would also have to deal with the increased costs of keeping the game running. Right now when they finish a game the only recurring costs they pay is hosting,bandwidth,and support. If the game fails , except for hosting , those costs would go down (less people buying game means less support etc). But if a multiplayer game fails you have to keep the servers running or risk pissing off the people who bought the game
Exactly right. Apple probably thinks that losing out on some sales in the worst market with huge discounts isn't worth destroying that brand. When things recover, and people expect PC notebooks to cost $500 and macs to cost $1500, that might look very smart...
"Arguably their cheapest computer is the iPhone"

Depending on how you account for the 2 year service agreement, maybe not.
I find it painful to be smart enough to come up with ideas like this independently but not enough smart/knowledgeable to implement it without being preempted by a few or several years by another project.

Will I ever reach a level of proficiency where I'm content with my skillset, and would that even be desirable?
Yeah definitely agree that they'll stay in HPC... like you say, anything that is custom and requires design/support.
Doubtful. A real PC for what.. surfing on the net, checking your facebook status and twittering? You need serious CPU for that eh? Anything you want to do, you can basically do in a browser. Serious PC's are still out there, but the trending market of rising sales has not been on serious PC power its been on cheap, affordable luxury and thats come in the form of netbook.
Companies to watch: Cloudkick
Will this alienate all the people that Sun has sold WS/SOAP to?
I would love it too, but why don't you think GPLv3 ZFS would help Linux? It's good technology, the license just isn't GPL compatible.
So folks are buying serious desktops for gaming then? Screw that 360 or ps3 experience? Or maybe they've been buying serious PCs for all those newly unemployed?
Thank you for saying this. I correct folks all the time on this and while they agree steep == easy && shallow == hard is correct, it's 'counter-intuitive' (their words, not mine).

vi is easy, you only need to know ~5 commands to be useful in it.
are you giving them away or selling them?
> It's taken a long time to disable all these irritations and I'm not sure I have them all yet.

I feel like you're missing the point of TextMate. These things might seem like annoyances now, but they're there for a reason. Once you get the muscle memory for TextMate it'll become an extension of your body, like a prefix-keyless emacs or vi.

Your profile says you're not new here, so I have to assume you know what you're talking about -- I don't want to get the viemacstextmate holy war started, but if you're from one of the other editors, give TextMate a chance in terms of adapting to it, and I think you'll be surprised. Don't try and force it into the emacs mold; it's not emacs, it's TextMate, and it's loved widely for a reason.
Funniest bug ever : “apt-get moo doesn't look like a cow”
Sigh...here we go again with the "flying cars"

I don't understand what the market for this thing would be. Do they really think the only thing holding most people back from flying more is that they can't drive their airplane home after flying?

Aside from all the complexities and engineering challenges that trying to do something like this requires, do you really want your $200k aircraft driving around on the street and sitting in your garage? On top of all that, it's incredibly ugly.

Their entire selling point seems to be that now you don't have to worry about ground transportation on either end of your flight, but $200k buys you a lot of cessna + cab fare :)
BusinessInsider.com recycling news is no reason to recycle here as well.

Additionally, it is unclear if the reason the article presents is actually valid (see http://www.sdtimes.com/blog/post/2009/03/12/Microsofts-vanis...).
The mechanics are important, and calc 1 is the course in which they are taught. If the mechanics of algebra and calculus are not second nature to you, everything that follows will be almost impossible. Similarly, when learning programming, you need to learn to write syntactically correct code, and when learning a foreign language you need to memorize vocabulary. It isn't fun, but it is necessary.

Later courses are more focused on mathematical reasoning, and tests reflect this as well. For example:

http://www.math.rutgers.edu/grad/phd_requirements/written_qu...

These exams are also pretty tough to game (even though they are standardized); the easiest way to teach to the qual is to teach how to reason about real/complex analysis and algebra.

You don't seem to agree with the curriculum. Lockhart's article claims that courses like Calc are not well suited for elementary school math (and I agree). That's an orthogonal issue.

The calc tests do a decent job of measuring what they are trying to measure: how well students understand the mechanics and concepts of differentiation and integration.
Does this make anyone else think of that old Are You Afraid of the Dark episode with the midget playing the computer virus, and how the kid gets a serial port in his palm?
I think the x axis should be rather interpreted as "learning progress" instead of absolute time - then it makes more sense.

But ofcourse when read like that it lacks the absolute time reference (notepad can be learned in a day whereas vi takes months) and generally yes, this is just a tongue-in-cheek sketch. - Still, not too far from reality, imo.
Why wouldn't you just set user limits to limit Oracle memory use? You don't need zones for that.
How to Write a Chrome Extension in Three Easy Steps
It's hard for us to guess, but the Vogel has several other titles that have been available online for a number of years so I bet he can make a reasonably strong prediction.

I would be very surprised if Geneforge 1 (which I don't think is his earliest title, but is several years old) hasn't sold more than 5 copies this year. The tail for his products is very long. Pretty flat I'd guess, but very long and since they're distributed digitally there's no reason not to keep them available, gradually dropping prices or making bundles available. Once 5 is released he could sell a "box set of the entire series" and spike sales of the old titles again.
In general iPaper does a good job for smaller documents (press releases, etc.) that you just want to skim. It sucks for very complex documents, or for reading longer books online. It was never designed to be a replacement for Adobe Reader -- that would take years considering the pdf spec has the same magnitude of complexity as HTML/CSS.

Also I'm not sure what metric of 'quick' you use. The iPaper swf is around 150 kb, and the Adobe Reader binary is around 30 MB. Take a look at http://www.dearadobe.com/top_rated.php - most of the top five are related to Reader bloat.
I'm coming from jedit, and before that any other basic terminal text editor. I've never been one for help/bundles/snippets/macros/etc

My gripes come for instance when I go back to do something, and TextMate adds in extra idiocy eg

a = 9+6
// Oops, need to double all that - (9+6)*2, lets bracket it up...
a = ()9+6
// WTF TextMate added a close bracket that is clearly useless

My remaining gripe with TextMate is that I have soft tabs enabled, so pressing tab inserts 4 spaces. But when I press left arrow, it skips over 4 spaces at a time, or sometimes just 1 space if it's not at a tab boundary! I want it to only ever move by one space... (Any ideas welcome on this one).
Can you please elaborate on two things:

1 - "Hank Greenberg was the squeaky-cleanest guy you could find"

2 - "He ruined Hank Greenberg, one of the greatest businessmen in this country, and put AIG in the very position it is in today"
My guess is he wants to push androidster.com (android app consulting)
Cisco to twitter users: ve ah listening
an applicant unexcited about an offer from cisco is confronted on twitter.
I see your point but I'd argue you can't call the iPhone a computer until you can write native apps for it and install them without a license from apple.

I'm using computer in the sense of a PC/Mac like device where the user is free to write and deploy what ever apps they want on it. I'll grant you that the iPhone is computer like from the point of view of a locked down machine.
> Uh, Can you document that?

http://files.ots.treas.gov/87171.pdf

That report comes from the Office of Thrift supervision (OTS). They started regulating AIG in 1999 when AIG applied to become a "Federal Savings Bank". (The application wasn't approved until 2000.) OTS regulates and supervises both FSBs and their holding companies.

The report also documents OTS cooperation with and the existence of AIG regulation by "a multitude of regulators in over 100 countries".

As the report documents, AIG's problem is liquidity. One of the paragraphs that I found interesting says: "AIGFP's CDS provide credit protection to counterparties on designated portfolios of loans or debt securities. AITFP provided such credit protection on a 'second loss' basis, underwhich it repeatedly reported and disclosed that its payment obligations would arise only after credit losses in the designated portfolion exceeded a specified threshold amount or level of 'first losses.' Also known as 'super senior', AITFP provided protection the layer of credit risk superior to the AAA risk layer. The AIGFP CDS were on the safest portion of the security from a credit perspective. In fact, even today, there have not been credit losses on the AAA risk layer."

FWIW, AIG became concerned about this biz in 2005 and stopped selling these instruments in late 2005 and started unwinding then. I'd agree that they did so too slowly.

> My impression is Alan Greenspan specifically nixed regulation of CDOs around 1999.

Greenspan wasn't ever in a position to make that call.

> Everything I've ever read claimed they were entirely unregulated. I would like to hear if that's not the case.

Yes, there are unregulated financial instruments. (Leases and ownership aren't regulated either.) However, the existence of such instruments does not imply that regulated institutions (such as AIG or its customers) can use them to escape supervision.

For banks and insurance companies, regulators define what counts as an asset, how it is valued, and regulate exposure to different kinds of assets. That applies to all assets, whether they're "regulated" or not.

Note that OTS says that the portfolios that AIG insured have not had losses, the asset valuation has held up even as the market cratered, so it's a little unclear why AIG is making payments. I suspect that they're caught in mark-to-market, which is a regulatory creation. (Assets that are throwing off cash are not worthless even if there are no buyers today.)

Did AIG screw up - yes. But there's no evidence to show that more regulation would have done better. More to the point, it is simply wrong to argue for more regulation on the theory that lack of regulation was a factor. It wasn't. If anything, regulation failed.
I guess it depends on what you are talking about paying for. $100 for the front page seems cheap, $100 for my one up vote seems to high. So far as I can tell, me voting a story up or down in no way effects my reputation( I can't tell who voted an article up or down and I don't get points for it.) It is my comments that carry both my recorded reputation and my actual what my peers think about me reputation. However moving what appears on HN to a money basis would effect how I view the site or more likely stop viewing the site. The signal to noise ratio would change for the worse.
Sun Microsystems to offer `public cloud' service
Also, the estimated delivery date and price are 2011 and $194k, so it'll probably be more like 2013-2014 and $250k - 300k.
playgreenhouse seem awesome, thanks a lot!
It's also much easier to use than SystemTap.
I'm a huge fan of the SPARC architecture, and I would LOVE to be able to run 32 threads simultaneously on one machine but unless Sun gets that stuff in the cloud it is dead to me.
The thing that amazes me is that these tiny devices (the netbooks too) come standard with 1GB or 1/2 GB of RAM. 10 years ago or so that was a huge amount of RAM -- you could have a big Sun or AIX box running an industrial-grade Oracle instance on 1/4 GB RAM or so.
Gaming social news sites has been going on for quite some time now, although I don't see why anyonenwould bother gaming HN- the traffic is minimal and too savvy to click on ads.

As for Digg and reddit- many of you have startups and blogs that are floundering with minimal traffic and revenue.

Instead of complaining and being all up in arms, perhaps you should accept that Digg and reddit have been gamed by numerous entities for years, and learn how to game them for your own benefit. That doesn't mean spamming, it means giving your own quality content an extra push. Back when I did that sort of thing, I got dozens of stories to the Digg and reddit front pages. After receiving, synthetically, with many accounts and proxies, the first hundred or so votes needed to get to the front page, these stories went on to receive thousands of natural, real upvotes. So much for your "algorithms". If you can't beat them, join them.
I just setup my CK account this morning and added all my slicehost instances (about 10). So far, it looks like a pretty sweet service.

Would love to see an iPhone app or mobile-friendly version of the site in the future ... then I could spend full days snowboarding instead of 1/2
Entrepreneurs vs. VCs
Can you say "Websphere Glassfish Edition"? IBM already has two different app servers called Websphere; what's one more?
Simply amazing. Do similar plugins for any of the more modern, popular IDEs currently exist that can do this? Just curious but I highly doubt it.

Not to make generalizations, but it does demonstrate the difference between the user base of Emacs versus the users for most other popular IDEs in that they have both the determination and the skills to make this possible.
No, and it isn't worth much inside graduate school either. Some schools especially towards the high end have stopped using the gre and sat as qualifiers.
Flash 10, Massive amounts of 3D particles with Alchemy (source included)
Ask HN: Please explain what happens in this execl() problem.
We were studying for the Unix System programming module. And a friend came up with this problem. I got the code, simplified and did several changes to it. Following is the code.

#include<stdio.h>
main()
{
printf("Here comes the date");
printf("Line number 3 before execl\n");
printf("Line number 2 before execl");
printf("Line number 1 before execl");
execl("/bin/date", "date", 0);
printf("Line number 1 after execl");
printf("Line number 2 after execl\n");

exit (0);
}

Friend complained that execl() overlaps not only the code after it but the code before it. But found that execl() overlaps the code before it until it finds a line feed. Why this happen?. Please explain. (Yes, code looks lame & I get two warnings for execl() & exit() when compile)
Expression Web SuperPreview makes cross-browser testing like moist delicious cake
MySQL insert performance with iiBench Python client
The Truth About J.D. Power’s IQS
Yeah, but it's the (admittedly extreme) end of the netbook spectrum - people that want to do light surfing and check their email on the couch.

Probably why the tablet rumours makes some kind sense to me. It's a good niche and slots into their range, and they're not competing with the cheap-as-possible netbook market.
It'd be absolutely brilliant if it were him who submitted this news item ! :)

The cake is a lie.
Chrome Gets Plugins: How to Write a Chrome Extension in Three Easy Steps
Building fast client-side searches
I don't follow... it may be legal, but why should it be legal? The Australian government are presumably following their laws.
i agree. its why i don't read digg/reddit.
HALO - High Altitude Object (balloon photography) - $500
Adam Savage talks about obsessively making things
It's basically a Geode machine. I downloaded a recent ubuntu desktop distribution, booted it under VMWare and installed it to a disk. Popped the disk in the machine, it starts up.

Using Ubuntu's server variant was a bit more painful, as the kernel build assumes PAE or something; I needed to switch to a generic 32bit kernel. Not too bad.

The wifi driver that ships with Ubuntu didn't work very well with it, so I had to compile and install a new one. There was some oddness with the ifup scripts and I had to have it start up, shut down, and start up again to intialize properly.

I am largely happy with the device; it's just a small, slightly strange PC.

I am also using it with one of those $80 32gb Transcend SSDs. They are not blazing, but neither is the machine.
"There's a spirit of entrepreneurship that many Americans associate with Windows and Microsoft. The recession is bringing it out."

I find this explanation absolutely farcical.
If you select the 9+6 and then insert the opening parenthesis it will wrap everything automatically. This is not really intuitive, but the extra idiocy is there for a reason.
Perl 6 hasn't moved to Pugs. Pugs was an experimental prototype that was already abandoned by the time work started on Rakudo (Perl 6 on Parrot).
IPhone’s ‘In App’ purchases will be a boon to micro-payments
A lot of garage rock; notably, The Detriot Cobras and The White Stripes are from Detriot. A few others, too: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit_music#Rock_and_roll
buffers?

BTW, don't think this is "Hacker News" ;)
Download Your Genomes on BitTorrent
The emacs shell is also cross-platform and provides the basic shell commands. It can be customized easily with pieces of elisp.
Apple's Joswiak: Wundrbar is Very Special
Using Google Earth to steal 200 tons of lead
The way to do it is to select the text you want surrounded (SHIFT + LEFT/RIGHT etc) and then press the opening bracket key. There are other tricks to this as well. If I press " it automatically gives me "" and places the cursor inside. I can then either press CMD+Return to drop me straight to the next line or CMD+left (CTRL-e) to jump to the end.

As for moving around, I just use shortcuts such as ALT+left/right or CMD+left/right (CTRL+a/e).
Yeah built-in TV will never happen on the iPhone because it competes directly with iTunes store purchases.
Getting your friends to vote you up is one thing... getting a network of proxied spam bots to do so is another.

There's a fine line between "giving an extra push" and being downright unethical. I usually try to convince people (on twitter and irc and personally) to upvote my stories when I think they'll be of interest, but I would never actually contrive a script to do that for me.

I'll add that in my experience, the relatively small push of getting a few initial upvotes from friends, even on reddit, is usually enough to propel articles onto wherever they're destined to go. You don't need a 100 fake votes.
Because Linux is (and will be for the foreseeable future) licensed under GPLv2, which is incompatible with software under v3. There are also some issues on driver architecture that make ZFS and the Linux kernel a tough match.
Pittsburgh Hacker News Meetup: Saturday, March 28th at 9PM at Church Brew Works
That's the real secret between human beings.

What is a friend?
That'll do fine.
But Vim already has those features via omnifunc.
"J.D. needs to re-think their methodology and reporting."

I assume they've thought about it quite a bit and know how to get themselves paid.
Send me an email if you're interested in coming to this or future Pittsburgh events and I will add you to our email list.
Scalable Inman Flash Replacement (sIFR): Rich Accessible Typography
btrfs is supposed to one-up ZFS anyway, and that's going into mainline as experimental with the imminent release of 2.6.29. I'm not sure how btrfs and ZFS they compare, just know that btrfs is being developed since Linux has been unable to get ZFS.
Thanks a lot for bringing that up. I suppose it's not the information marketing sector I feel is dirty, but the subset of that sector I've seen that sells courses on how to sell courses, promising to make you rich if you only "follow the 7 easy steps outlined in this course!"

Of course the rest of the sector is essentially ebooks and supplemental material. That's not too far removed from regular books. As long as I don't have to use fake testimonials or spam email lists then I'll be alright.
> I get two warnings for execl() & exit() when compile

man execl
man 3 exit

will tell you which headers you need to #include.
Which is worse:

1. A 'paid' frontpage story that is sufficiently HN related so that a moderator doesn't kill it,

2. A frontpage story showing evidence that somebody wants to game a social news site.
I agree that it's a terrible way to introduce someone to a new language, but I have to admit, when I have to help out on some Win32 C++ project, it sure is handy for helping to shake the rust off and save time. For me, it's not the language syntax as much as the Win32/MFC/ATL apis, and while I'm now a vim guy, Visual Studio is the one exception for me.
Maybe you can't create new physics and math, but is it also true that you can't learn to do many useful things with them? I'm not sure. I'd like to think it isn't.
So I can trade hard-to-find but easy-to-consume for easy-to-find but hard-to-consume? That isn't really my definition of "progress". Oh, and in reality, these documents are actually less accessible once they are indexed and put in Flash, if we're using the definition of Web Accessibility.

I would also like to be given an example of something that you found hard to find via normal means but was easy to find via one of these document repositories. I am still wildly unconvinced of your general claim. Google is pretty good at the whole text indexing thing.