skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1. If you upvoted all the Erlang articles yesterday, it has something to do with pg. I like Erlang too, but much of what made it to the front page was bullshit.

2. A day's worth of Erlang madness will do nothing for HN other than squash a day's worth of the usual stories. And when a few hundred users mass-upvote a few dozen stories for no other reason than that pg half-joked about it, I'd say that has more Reddit-nature than HN-nature.
Thanks for the link to that article on osor.eu, on that page was a link to the case study: http://www.osor.eu/case_studies/towards-the-freedom-of-the-o...

"the project is one of several similar migrations of French public bodies. To mention just a some examples: the French National Assembly in 2007 decided to run Ubuntu on their 1145 workstations; the Ministry of Agriculture and Fishery switched their servers to the Mandriva GNU/Linux distribution in 2005; the Paris council will use several open souce applications on their laptops, as decided in June, 2008. These developments thus clearly show how open source software is used increasingly in the French public sector."

Apparently they aren't the first in France to move to OSS so the interoperability is easier to handle.
I can think of a couple of reasons

- Sheer geekery (though that doesnt work with your comment about cost, I admit).

- Multiple PC's (example: at my desk I have a dual screen setup for working on, a 3rd screen connected to a different PC for email, IM [chatterous via Gtalk ftw] & personal stuff and a smaller screen off to one side which is a build machine / test client. Using a KVM to share Kb/M but still being able to see all screens is a great advantage :))
FWIW, my edit had nothing to do with changing the point I was making. The only thing it did was say why I made the point I was trying to make.
I don't follow - Linode supports both 32 bit and 64 bit distributions, while Slicehost only officially supports 64 bit.
1) Why? As others have said, enhanced productivity. I usually keep API docs, examples, and a terminal with autotest on my secondary. Also, in my case, my machine is a laptop (I use that screen as my secondary) and knowing I have a 24" screen waiting for me is incentive to come into the office instead of telecommuting or siting in a coffee shop :).

2a) How? Been awhile since I've had to deal with installing new hardware, but as far as I remember, you can install new video cards and it'll register fine (or get a card that has two DVI ports). As for OS support, I think Windows does it (although I don't know if you have to have a certain edition), Mac supports it on most models out of the box (in the past you had to do a software hack on iMacs, don't know if that's still the case—other than that completely painless), and I know it's possible with Debian (probably most other Linuxes as well).

2b) What's it look like? Most current hardware will support spanning across multiple screens (OS support: see caveats above). In the past, some video adapters didn't have the horsepower to do anything other than mirroring (where the screens show the same thing), but all of the ones I've dealt with recently can (again, YMMV). Mirroring is still useful when hooking up to a projector, but beyond that, spanning is the way to go.
How about an online test to obtain membership?
I've heard and read a lot about people seeing Windows 7 as more of a service pack and one person I know who uses/likes Vista thought it was "ugly".

Myself, I missed Vista entirely and given the chance to easily try 7 for free (legally), I plopped it down alongside Ubuntu 8.10 on my aging ThinkPad T60p. And honestly it impressed me, seeming to be the right fixes in the right places from XP and giving me few problems to speak of. I used it as a development workstation on an in-house programming contract and joined the domain without a hitch. At the same time IE8 did irritate me often with poorly rendered pages, slow performance, and many a crash. I also had problems with suspend not UNsuspending, but then Ubuntu did that too which makes me think it was a hardware thing.

Now recently I got a T400 with Vista Business SP1 and have immediately felt the pain of usage and now I also see the UAC annoyances which I hadn't noticed in 7. It has had problems interacting with the domain, and just feels heavier. Admittedly it's a factory install whereas 7 was fresh, so I know part of my issues are going to be due to that. Still, I've been seriously considering replacing Vista with the beta so I don't have to figure out why this or that isn't doing what I want.

Um ... so, yeah, write me up as one of those beta users who liked it.
"Release early, release often" is an Extreme Programming mantra which has been around way longer than 37signals. I'm not sure who coined the expression though. Maybe Eric Raymond or Linus Torvalds (http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral...).
no, it doesn't really sound like that if you read the article.

could they be connected? sure. or there could just be criminals employed in the same department.
Except that particular measure was designed to discourage casual visitors from being interested in HN, for the sake of reducing the load on the server. And it was a joke at that.
I helped that flood, and you know what? I actually read some of those articles and got to know Erlang and FP a little better, not to mention the Erlang Distribution.

It may have been a bit juvenile on my part, but I actually learned something from the experience. Not that I'm recommending repeating it daily or anything. :-)
I have a main setup comprised of 3 displays with one desktop and a laptop, it's quite nice to work like this, especially when I run macosx and then have windows in vmware fusion on another display.

The only thing I'm torn on is rotation. I've flipped a display 90 degrees around and I can't decide if I like it or not. It's decidedly odd but quite useful in some ways (i.e. for me, reading long things without using scroll so often).
Can I ask us all to consider how we could possibly think this was "news"? I get that it's "funny", in a "reddit" sort of way. But we all knew what happened already; this is in fact the Nth story about the Erlang debacle --- not about Erlang, but about the meta-story about Erlang on HN --- in the last 18 hours. Can we stop the solipsism now?
The HN Erlang fiasco was the highlight of my day.
You can't justify $4.99 unless you are touchgrind or you have a really awesome game. No one is going to know your game is the shit unless they can try it, and $4.99 is past the compulsive threshold.
I don't like that you have to click for the gesture and that enabling gestures disables clicking on normal links. Other than that, I think it is pretty cool. I have seen things like this before, but never in such an easy-to-copy javascript implementation.
Orange 'compresses' images on 3G in Poland
Thanks, I'll check it out. I was really needing a replacement since my dvd drive currently isn't working.
I think you might be misleading here. Your post about starting with a friend triggered quite a lot of emotions, so its staying not only because of its length.

But you're right that longer posts are more likely to 'catch' the reader
Happy to have you.
I have a good test. It's very exclusive. You have to beat the crafty chess engine at a 60sec game of wild 5 "reversed". With black. Good luck.
On the other hand, many people have their terminals and editors in a light on dark scheme because they got used to it from the legacy days when they had no choice. However, I agree that most people probably aren't used to it.
Real IT Episode 3, The Extended Team - Part 2
Releasing early did not fail for you - it showed you what was wrong with your product. If you had done all those tweaks in silence and expected to come out to a great roar of approval, how do you think you would have felt when faced with a great wall of don't-care?

You released, you saw what the problems were, and now you hopefully have learned from the experience, and can go in a better direction. Just be sure to evolve, do not scratch and try to start afresh.
Rackspace (via Mosso) to Launch Cloud Servers at 1.5 cents/hour ($10.95/month) Monday
NASA's Fermi telescope reveals best-ever view of the gamma-ray sky
I never had a chance to try linode–I've been so pleased with Slicehost since trying them that I never had a reason to try another VPS.

Given that, I'm curious to know if Rackspace considered linode when they acquired slicehost.
Except your standard 10 digit phone number scheme only allows 10 billion numbers... which isn't exactly a big enough space to allow you to generate new phone numbers whenever you want.

The idea is kind of cool though... like generating one-time-use credit card numbers for dodgy e-commerce sites.
When reddit launched sub-reddits, it was a sign to me that reddit was no longer sustainable as a community. It got really boring, really fast. I never read reddit anymore; I'd go to Slashdot first, because at least there, every once in awhile, somebody directly involved in a news story is actually commenting.
I agree strongly with this comment.

There's such a thing as releasing too early. If the idea is not fully developed, and or its architectural ramifications still being explored, releasing early can trap you and make it far more difficult to evolve your concept.

If you're absolutely sure of what you're doing, what you want it to look like, how it will work, and you're just building gradually towards this well-defined final goal - great, release early and get users on board.

But if you're not sure, don't! Once you get a few users who trusted you and put their time into your project, no matter if it was free or not, you can't just walk away. Well maybe you can but I can't.

When you release something, you ask users to commit to your project. It's unfair to do that unless you're equally committed.

I'm a big fan of private betas, where you can flesh all this stuff out before asking strangers to put their time into your app. Very private betas, if need be - just you. Release early and often - to yourself. Maintain a runnable state at all times. Use your app intensively, eat your own dog food, evolve it that way. I like this kind of advice, not 37Signal's cookie cutter platitudes.
I'm at hosteurope too. These guys are dirt cheap, and customer service is fairly reliable... if you don't mind copy-pasting into Babelfish every time.
While we'd gain very narrow topics in the "sub-HNs", regular HN would become diluted.
Do Not Crawl in the DUST: Different URLs with Similar Text
I agree, it does come off a little whiney from the outside... but let me ask you, how long have you been publishing to the AppStore?

It's a lot easier to be a contributor to the problems than it is to show restraint and professionalism for your peers given the state of the store. Please make no mistake about it, there's nothing stopping us from playing the same game except our commitment to be a provider of quality. Obnoxious penny-scraping behavior is not something we intend to be apart of out of respect for other developers. We could very easily repackage our apps 10 ways to Sunday, submit faux updates every few days, game the ratings/reviews, etc. and would certainly be a lot better off fiscally.

I'm not trying to sound like an AppStore Hero here either, this is something that a number of developers have all agreed upon to attempt to set an example and respect each other.

My snide remarks aside — I think it's perfectly acceptable for people to have a few novelty apps under their belt for no other reason than to have fun — we have one and I'm sure we'll make another one at some point in the future. But to have 40+ (I've seen some devs with 60+ of useless crap) just because "you can" is a gluttonous, self-serving assumption that deserves no respect. Sorry, call me an whiney ass for all I care. It's no different that email spammers.

I think my preference would be a completely open-market for iPhone applications that's disconnected from the AppStore, whereby the AppStore only contains applications that Apple hand-picks if developers are inclined to give up 30%. It would seemingly solve all the problems, aside from the burden Apple shoulders of dealing w/ customer support for their iPhone/iPod due to 3rd party crapware.
The multicore crises: Scala vs. Erlang

is the real title. It is a reasonable discussion of the differences between the two languages. As far as I can tell, no biases one way or the other.
Well it is free software. If he's throwing in the towel, couldn't someone just put the code on github/bitbucket and run with it?
Sun: We'll put Java on the iPhone
How do we know that the "right" contributors even care about Erlang? Or who the "right" contributors are? There's always going to be a subset of people here that will be naturally interested in things like Erlang or the design of the Lua VM. But there are also hundreds of people who are worth engaging with who couldn't possibly care less.
Subreddits do some things really well. AskReddit became a great community. I was involved in Suicide Watch for a while. and it really was doing some great things.

The problem with Reddit was that it let users make their own reddits. That led to dilution. If PG were to divide Hacker News by his own pattern, we might maintain order.

That said, I'm against it. There's no need yet: the community's fairly intact.
8 ways to get developers on board w/ SOA governance
Real IT Interview - Dan Wright Shows Off F5's Tech Center
Or they were so busy triple-checking on tax issues that they forgot to ask the FBI :-)
I'm going to whine from a user perspective - I no longer browse the app store because of the ridiculous shit out there. I think I gave up after the first couple of weeks. Yes, now there are probably children and my boyfriend who enjoy spending an hour digging through the games to find a 99 cent one that will last them for all of like one hour of entertainment. That's...not the ideal audience for most apps. I find out about apps to buy from review sites that I end up trusting (i.e. toucharcade for games) and from friends on twitter and irc. No other source. Too much of a pain. Not even advertisements.

The difference between the app store and more traditional methods of selling software (i.e. you have a website that you sell your app through, you advertise to your audience, etc.) is that even google and the search engines will help out a "better" app and the absolute shit (i.e. fart apps) will eventually get filtered out...or at the minimum, they won't be crowding other apps out except for their own direct competitors. The app store doesn't do that so well by itself. There's about ten gazillion improvements Apple should be making to improve the whole process...at least they've just NOW started to show reviews by version number.

Now from the developer perspective...the thing that's been pretty much hammered into my head as I've gone through the experience of publishing an app on the store is that the app store itself is virtually useless unless you get into the top 10 for category (even this is questionable if you're not in games) or top 100 overall. Sales spike usually on weekends and from outside sources, although being in the top 100 for the category is probably helping for random sales (although, I must admit, they're generally unwanted sales requiring the most amount of tedious handholding of the user). If the guy in the original article is whining after not releasing a free/lite version of a (comparatively) expensive application, it's his problem for being ignorant to iPhone app marketing best practices.

If someone spent a day to work on an app times a dozen apps and makes enough money to quit his or her day job...good for them. That doesn't have much relevance to the problem overall though. Yes, people will always buy shit apps that give them little amusement for the money, but that shouldn't crowd out the wonderful and polished applications out there that aren't games or fart apps that someone would still want for their iPhone.
I felt like this post kind of wasted my time; it contained so little overt signal that I felt compelled to poke around to find out who this was about and why it would be interesting to me.

The goal isn't "short". It's "concision". You still need to have something to say.
Django useses this Approach:
app/
---- models.py
---- views.py
---- urls.py
---- admin.py
etc.

etc. I think it does indeed make more sense. Though the difference is not that big except for one case: Reusability of the code, that way you can easily just copy the directory to another site.
I just found this paper in my school's library. Its not new and it looks like google + yahoo + msn have maybe given up on trying to find 'DUST' because they now let you do that

( http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-y... ,
http://ysearchblog.com/2009/02/12/fighting-duplication-addin... ,
http://blogs.msdn.com/webmaster/archive/2009/02/12/partnerin... )

Its still interesting that

1. Many sites have a lot of 'DUST'

2. It is not very hard to find the 'DUST'- which obviously reduces crawling time.
Did you really intend to suggest that you think that the vetting team would have squashed the raid if they thought that Mr. Kundra actually was involved in something serious, that is, that you think that the vetting team would do a coverup for a nominee?
Business Consulting and IT Solution Services  – The Revere Group
Expert business consulting and IT consulting for mid and high-level enterprises for over 15 years. The Revere Group covers .NET development, CRM consulting, and other consulting services.
I know it was a joke, my point is that encouraging "Wow!" is good, discouraging "What's this?" is... well... unfortunate.

To me, "Wow!" is an extreme form of "Interesting!" And by "interesting," I don't mean the same thing as "Capturing attention." The HN front page is full of stuff that captures attention, however "FBI raids office of D.C. CTO, Obama appointee Vivek Kundra" isn't interesting in the same sense that Boltzmann’s Universe (http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2008/01/14/...) is interesting. The salient difference is that although the former is entertaining, it doesn't change me in any way. It isn't actionable.

Whereas the latter leaves me wondering, and I will still be thinking about its implications tomorrow.

So overall I would say that de-emphasizing attention-capturing stories is great, provided they are replaced by interesting stories. And when the traffic subsides, by stories that are interesting and attention-capturing.
I liked the 'timmyevolved' page.. the music was good and it built up mystique. However, I'm going to forget all about it in another hour or so..you'd better get some attention when you relaunch, and even put out a couple more announcements along the way hinting at what the new site might do.

(then again, it might not matter since I never knew what the old site did)
I'm the exact opposite -- I bought my linode slice when Slicehost had a waiting list, and haven't had a reason to look at anything else in the two years (or so) since.
Real IT Video Blog - Jason Covers The Deployment Framework
No you suck.

See how much value I added to the discussion there?
Interesting, reminds me of the HMVC pattern (Hiearchical MVC) or the Presentation abstraction control

PAC : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presentation-abstraction-contro...
HMVC : http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-07-2000/jw-0721-hmvc.h...
Not surprised, but very disappointed that this is still US-only (once it launches beyond existing Grand Central users).
Can't putting a facade on HN to discourage people have a negative result, in that it will ENcourage some set of people who like that facade?

And if so, won't that dilute the real identity of HN, actually making it more like that facade?
The High Priests of IT -- And the Heretics
Besides the article, I found the take on Google logo interesting. Cool!
Ehm, no. Releasing early did fail for us. The idea was not mature enough, the "puzzle" wasn't completed but we started developement and released too early.
Social Web Blog: Introducing the Google Friend Connect API
iPhone OS 3.0 is coming, preview on March 17th
> The Erlang flood was not a favor to Erlang, from my perspective.

Actually it was the massive barrage of Erlang articles yesterday that convinced me to start learning Erlang.
There is no way you can take it as often as pot. It's not a daily drug, of course. For me, I use it about several times a year. A couple of months is usually enough for clutter and stress to gather down so I can clear it all up with a disassociative.

Also, on permanent brain damage, see DXM FAQ (http://www.erowid.org/chemicals/dxm/faq/dxm_side_effects.sht...).

So far (about a year of usage) I find that the positive outweighs the negative.

PS. I'm also learning how to "astral project" (I put this in quotes because I just think it's a natural disassociative, not a spiritual experience). So far, I found AP to be much more powerful (albeit much shorter too) than the second plateau of DXM and I intend to stop drinking disguisting syrup completely as soon as I gain enough practice with AP.
Sigh, you first need to define consciousness before you can answer any questions about it.
What is consciousness?
My dream is to develop artificial intelligence, so I've thought about this a lot. Generally people have it very wrong.

I would define it in two parts:

1. Consciousness of facts:
What you "know" is what you are conscious of. Machines are already conscious because they have memory.

2. Meta-consciousness:
You know that you know, or you know what you know. This is a feedback loop on knowledge, unlimited in recursion. Sort of like the check if a pointer is null (and a check if the check is null, etc.).

I know hardly anybody agrees with this, but I'm pretty serious about it.
People tend to confuse what they see as the world with what any entity should see.
To make computer more human, is to create human senses, simulate human techniques of interpretation and memory and add a comparable experience of time.

But in my eyes there is no reason not to claim that computers are already conscious. Consciousness just isn't the goal.
Google introduces telephone services
Yeah, real .NET programmers use heroin. Everyone knows that
Thank you so much for the link to the video.

It's very easy to setup and really amazing... I just tested it out on my laptop with my computer's monitor(I plugged my computer's monitor in the laptop instead)... and it's really cool.
We implemented gestures in an early version of ipaper. Unfortunately it wasn't very usable. The physical analog -- swiping pages -- is far more comfortable than the same motion with a mouse.

Incidentally we chose to watch cursor acceleration (removing the mouse-down step), which simplifies the gesture.
Glad you liked the trailer and thanks for your insights.
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Zuora - subscription billing and recurring payments
Does anyone here have any experience with this company?
Get the goal of pixel perfection out of your mind. It can't be done, because you don't have a clue how each person's browser/system is configured. And it shouldn't be done, because then it's too easy to forget about graceful degradation.

For example, on account of my accessibility issues, Facebook looks like crap and its horizontal scroll bar is even defective. And, no, I'm not changing my configuration just to suit Facebook, or Google, or whatever.

Sorry I'm so testy, but pixel perfection really hits my buttons.
I'm pretty sure that Hulu's problem is the fraking CRTC's CanCon laws.
if only the different agencies had shown as much diligence when checking the background of people appointed by the previous administration.

sigh
Did you ever consider that the idea was wrong? And that the 'fail' was just telling you that the idea was wrong?