skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is why I prefer forums most of the time, but even on forums it's a huge nuisance to have to comb through a thread with thousands of posts to get to some real information.
Most of the power of the BCM2835 is in the GPU. A headless rPi is a waste of perfectly good silicon.
Trying To Woo Animators, Disney Accidentally Invents “The Paperman Method”
TeX Frequently Asked Questions -- question label "tutorials*"
The White House shares their web API standards on GitHub
I always ponder the number of great musicians who had messed up childhoods, like having the person who they thought was there other turn out to be any aunt or grandmother. The stability my parents provided has always held me back...
Does anyone know how Prior Knowledge's Veritable actually works?
I did a little video on this a couple of weeks a go with a mini how to for Fedora users https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4766611
Bill Gates Will Give You $100,000 to Build a Better Condom
Mohawk Valley formula
You could probably use a bookmarklet to inject the css via javascript.
How far can memory leaks go?
I think the "typing by hand" is irrelevant as it is just a means of copying without any or significant creative part from the copier (and even if it did involve creativity, it might still be copyright infringement. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macmillan_Co._v._King)

Clipping services that photocopied and snail mailed articles from newspapers have existed for ages and, certainly in the EU, they pay copyright holders.

From cursory looks at EU cases, it seems to me that the primary distinction the EU makes is that of deep linking search results (permitted) vs providing a portal where users do not click through to original content (copyright infringement)

Of course, there are gray areas here, but at least, IMO the intent is what 'the people' find reasonable.
What large number of sit-down jobs do you expect to be available to dubiously-educated people that can't also be outsourced to poorer/cheaper countries? It's a problem if you believe the less educated should still have nice rich-country middle-class lives.
>The third-person action-adventure game from Flying Carpet Games is “set in a fairy tale about a little girl trying to escape from an ancient castle ruled by an evil queen. The castle is filled with hordes of steam powered antique robots trying to capture her. While trying to find a way out, she meets a defective robot that helps her in her adventure,” according to the developer’s website.

Does this seem like a Diamond Age reference to anyone? Specifically Princess Nell trying to escape from the evil Queen / her encounter at Castle Turing.
Cypress solution: 20% tax on deposits over 100k at Bank of Cyprus
Anyone else think this sounds like the designer lifted various bits from Diamond Age and melded them into a game?
Help fund research into why hackathons engage students in tech
This is shit, to say the least. Oh wait, you might have meant second class citizen in terms of money? May be, I don't care in that case.
"Looks Amazing"... Amazingly incomplete, that is. Appears to have just surpassed the 'We've got barely functional models!' phase. Report back when there's something decent looking :)
Heterosexual males can develop some sense of what objectification is like from the woman's perspective by figuratively walking a mile in analogous shoes.
Search is an easy problem once the hardware/bandwidth is cheap--they'll have more competition soon. The "cars" thing they have to fight everybody--insurance companies, car manufacturers, big oil, the govt. Pipe dream. I don't see Glass going anywhere either, nobody wants to wear a camera on their face--creepy. Adwords is funding the whole circus over there and publishers I talk to aren't happy with how they're treated. Content is king.
Imprisoned by Innovation
I wish someone would write an alternative to Stylish for Firefox (I would try if I knew where to even start...).

Looks good though. I don't use Chrome, so can't test it, but judging from the screenshot, perhaps some syntax highlighting?

Nice and simple though. Guess a sharing feature would be the next step?
Nifty.

I postulated a while back that the virtual machine would eventually be the target of web application design[1]. I wrote an honours project proposal for a blog engine based on reckoning that if you can control a (virtual) machine from the bottom up, why stay trapped in the architectural constraints of shared hosting?

At the time I referred to the Mirage project, which was an OCaml runtime ported to sit directly on Xen [2]; later HalVM came along and did the same for Haskell [3].

This one is particularly neat because they've built more packaging and framework around it to support fast creation and destruction of instances.

I think this is an exciting time. The sooner people stop targeting shared servers as their architectural baseline, the sooner we can start to see genuine architectural innovation again. Right now all the architectural innovation is hidden in one-shot apps and inside companies. It needs to trickle down.

[1] http://clubtroppo.com.au/2008/07/10/shared-hosting-is-doomed...

[2] http://openmirage.org/

[3] http://corp.galois.com/halvm
2012 Free Software Award winners announced
Well, Richard Garriot's father was an astronaut, so that may have had something to do with his decision to fiddle with space companies.
Somehow it offends one's dignity less to be ousted by a robot.
Decentralized mesh network Commotion ready for testing
I would amend that list and add conscience and the ability to question what is moral or not. Animals in some cases may have limited capabilities, but other animals, such as cats and their sadistic behaviors, I would question.
"
0.6 sec

ago is when we received your request. Within this time we managed to create a new Xen instance, boot it, and run the application that rendered the page you are viewing. By the time you are done reading this, the instance will be gone.
"

for a basic page like that is a bit slow...
I am not suggesting the the law is black and white. Nor am I saying that there is anything codified as law that would require Google to do anything so specific as moth ball reader. The decision to mothball reader (rightly or wrongly) was clearly a business decision: Google obviously felt it could better serve its user-base as a whole (and by extension its shareholders) by distributing its time and LOCs in other ways. The reason I brought up the law was in support of the general point that Google has every right to distribute its finite time and resources with this tenet in mind.

If they chose to keep Reader going it would be purely on the basis that its niche user base is somewhat influential, and might have some success on the future success of their products. That is not in service of it's wider user bases' interest.
Three main types of user behaviour found in ubuntu.com testing
"Over capacity"

"The demo is limited to 16 concurrent instances and 2 libvirt connections. Due to these limitations we were unable to spawn a new instance to service your request. Please try again later."

Um.
Nokia refuses licence to VP8 patents (even FRAND refused)
Am I the only one around here who doesn't consider this a problem at all?
The Evolution Of Google Reader Started With A Crash
Haha - fair enough. Thanks for the correction's correction.
Also a follow up article with comment from Nokia: http://www.fosspatents.com/2013/03/nokia-comments-on-vp8-pat...
"The entire Wikipedia system, including the database" is slightly overblown: it's just MediaWiki and MySQL.
Yes, I'm sure this has been thought about before, but what would happen if we threw the idea of everybody seeing the same order out the window? The comments upvoted by people whose comments you have upvoted would have added weight for example, even to the 2nd, 3rd, nth degree. There's a whole bunch of questions that spring from this, I think, and you wouldn't have to go all-in on it, but I think it could be an interesting exercise.
Interesting, I thought that you played with the document and window height
When I was bored as a child I was miserable. Jumping from one idea of what to do to another, one by one verifying that they will not bring me joy I seek. The only way out of boredom was just wait till I get physically tired of sobbing and feeling horibble, and then having a nap.
Yup; lots of variables to play with. As long as we're actively aware of the tradeoffs (and adjust approach as needed) it's all good.

I don't personally find pair programming very useful most of the time, though I've done it now & then... though I do benefit from the half-way version, which is to occasionally talk through problems I'm working on with other developers (in detail, with code).
Actually its more likely that they're both unavailable than one is I.e our pipe goes down. Another reason to do it in house.
then why do they teach it?? bs
On the second point:

So where does it stop? If Google continued to support Reader as a niche product with no scale, no monetisation and a dropping user base should it not continue to support other applications as well ? Should Buzz and Wave et al not still be alive and well ? Little pebbles ... and all that.

The reason I say you cannot have your cake and eat it to is that NO company, NO matter its size or success, can perpetually continue to experiment at the rate Google does if they intended to support every product they made forever.
Yep, but before they were acquired...
Aliases on that scale are like hosts files. An utter shit to manage. Its why they invented dns which is a centralized delegated service.

The "single source of truth" is hard to avoid.
It is in svn as well (200mb wc switch = 4 seconds).
Presumably the idea is that you run a pool of them, so you're not spawning a new instance each time?
It sounds like they exchanged one container, an OS managed process, for another one.
Well, I personally like to see the most interesting comments at the top. But that creates the inherit problem - the first interesting comment gets stuck at the top and prevents all the newer ones from being seen.
Well it doesn't. We package every rev that's made as part of our integration process. Then we choose one and deploy it (using our auto deployment software which farts out packages across 100-odd machines, per instance..).
I've got an application in the pipeline that is meant to go live in 1-2 months. Does this mean that I can build it now and when the time comes I can pre-share the keys and activate CurveZMQ so I can safely traverse the hostile waters of the internet? That would be absolutely awesome. And it would be the difference between CurveZMQ and the Salt stack model (which I also looked at and quite liked actually, because it sounds simple). I realize that I'm not a cryptographer and should not be making these decisions, so the premise of CurveCP sounds awesome, I'd rather place my trust in DJB than myself.

On another note, the comments about the flaws of the Salt model on http://www.zeromq.org/topics:pubsub-security do worry me, although they seem fixable. Have you or the Salt guys thought about that?
This is a problem well-known in Web search as 'position bias': top results get more clicks and therefore get 'upvoted' by machine learning algorithms.

There are theoretically sound solutions. Typically, I recommend [1]. Very briefly the solution is to yield an unbiased click estimate (or for what matters here, an unbiased number of upvotes). Look at the position and cascade models as well as the solution in [1]. An approximation of this solution at the end of the article is very easy to implement while theoretically sound.

Side note: another 'solution' would be to randomly generate a slightly different order for every reader (e.g. sampling based on the current number of upvotes for every comment). The readers would then spread their upvotes across more comments overall.

[1] O. Chapelle and Y. Zhang. A dynamic bayesian network click model for web search ranking. In Proceedings of the 18th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW), 2009.
http://olivier.chapelle.cc/pub/DBN_www2009.pdf
Yep and that's like managing dns with host files...
There's an extension called stylish, and a corresponding website [0].

[0]: http://userstyles.org/
Branches cost nothing in svn. I doubt you've used it. svn copy only appends a pointer back to the source rev, much as git does.
What are the alternatives? Are there no other share buttons gems?
The issue tracker uptime is higher than the VCS in a corporate environment. Its more an ALM tool for us as it has use cases, defects, project planning running off it. That means the front line support, dev team, project management team, business analysts and management all use it 24/7 (in our case from 5 different countries).

github enterprise is a crappy solution for the above as well and is hard to support and expensive too.
If they are not successful then yes. That is exactly what I am saying. However by choosing Google's most popular products your point is both self defeating and an exercise in "reductio ad absurdum".

Maps is an area of core competency for Google, has huge commercial implications and is a dependency of many other products. Maps is as safe as anything bar Search.

Drive (and by extension Docs and Keep because they all form part of the same umbrella product) is an attempt by Google to compete for the traditional Corporate business stamping Grounds of MS. It also has an API. It would be reasonable to assume that Google will continue to support Drive for at least a long as it has relevance in this area.

As For Glasses and Self Driving Cars - the only products on your list to which your point could sensibly apply - YES. If they do not work. If nobody (and by nobody I mean insufficient volume. A few thousand early adopters is nobody in the numbers of Google) uses them then they would be deemed a failure. In this case it would be clear that that product was not quite what the market wanted at that time - Google should absolutely shut it down in order to continue to innovate and experiment.

Heres the thing: Its still a good thing that these experiments happen at all! One of the great adages of science is that negative results are still results.
That's a poor solution as there is no way to know how much of the product is actually on that repo...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_culture gives a, IMO, decent overview but misses the famous example of the tit and the milk bottle: http://www.brefigroup.co.uk/resources/view_product.do?produc...
You and many other still isn't enough to justify the continuation of a free product. THATS the point. Gmail has something like 150 million active users so it wont close. If it's user base ever dropped to 10s of thousands then I would expect Google to close it. I wouldn't mind because I could get my data - and would already be in the other 149+ million USING SOMETHING ELSE.
Actually most of our developers can't be trusted with this. We have certain regulatory requirements.

We have active directory and its all managed there. If someone needs access, their role defines it. If someone wants access they have to ask.
>The root of both bugs was a design flaw: the decision that >git.kde.org was always to be considered the trusted, >canonical source.

It seems that an even bigger design flaw is that they (still) aren't doing regular backups. The mirroring of course provides some redundancy, similar to what raid does, but as they say: "raid is not a backup solution".
The Real Reason Why Non-Programmers Are Paid More
MediaWiki (+ a finely tuned PHP system, because mediawiki is unusably slow without it), MySQL, and plenty of time / resources for doing the large import of enwiki (since that is what most people are interested in).
It wouldn't surprise me if Microsoft is behind this.

After all Google/Motorola did demand a ridiculous royalty rate of 2.25% of the entire cost of a PC just to license their H.264 patents.
but php bashing is an habit here.
The idea seems good though. By occupying land you are hoarding scarce resource. Tax should incentivise you to occupy less. I think the tax should be progressive so if you have small house and lot you don't owe state that much but if you have McMansion you should pay handsomely or sell it tho someone who can actually afford it or to someone who splits the lot between multiple buyers.
This ushers in a new era of annoying and pointless "This website prevents right clicks" popups.

Just the other day I said to my coworker everybody, by now, knew how to use firebug/inspector (he disagreed and, being in support, he does see more suffering than I do) - we were looking at a client site that had a javascript obfuscation of the html source.

It's like this grand battle stage of the worlds tiniest violins.
I don't think YC ever asks for no-dilution. A founder can not cheat because of various reasons:
0. Founders will have to dilute themselves to dilute YC
1. Investment is done based on a contract, which defines and controls the power that founders have. They can't issue any number of shares to themselves without putting in more money.
2. If somehow, founders are able to cheat YC that would destroy their credibility and their market valuation, resulting in huge financial loss.

EDIT: read this: http://www.paulgraham.com/angelinvesting.html
I thought this meant they do have some sort of backup:

However, while we planned for the case of the server losing a disk or entirely biting the dust, or the total loss of the VM’s filesystem...
And then you get six different package managers on a single system for Ruby, Python, Node, Perl, X and Y?

Also, how would you specify a cross-language dependency, for example from a Python application to a Ruby application to a Ruby library? Should the Python-installer know how to handle "Ruby-dependencies" and what little piece of software to call to install said dependency?
Discovering SQLAlchemy Core: the Relational NoSQL API for Python
not on topic, but how comes any time there's a comparison of education or healthcare or overall "social health" of the northern European countries (Linus's Finland, Norway, Sweden) with any other country in the world, the northeners are always better? How did they manage to get so many "social" problems so right? Does anyone know of a good case-study about how these countries reached their current level?
Actually it would be even worse as we can't risk people pushing our code to their private repo so Mr Firewall goes "no way". Another problem: we dont know which repo we're pushing to at a network level.

Code theft is a major problem. Not because the code is crap and we're embarrassed (unlike VMware and Microsoft code leaks), but because its valuable.
Unfortunately many of us learn this simple truth the hard way: a mirror is not equal to a (daily) backup.
Backups address the problem only to the degree that they give you an older revision to revert back to. The interesting thing that happened here is that corrupted data was propagated through the mirror network, which syncs more often than backups get made, and how to prevent that. Because while having a safety net is nice, avoiding developers being inconvenienced by a failure is the real challenge.

Plus unchecked backups of corrupted data aren't worth a lot, and corruption-proof mirroring acts as further (and timely) backup.
Indeed. We just create patches in such an event :)
Ask HN: What advertising methods worked best for your Android/iPhone app?
I know there are tons of ways one can advertise an app and some methods work better than others depending on the exact app, but I really want to hear from your personal experience.

I also know that this question has been answered a million times, but every time I see an answer to this kind of question, the answer is as abstract as it can be.

I'm more interested in answers like: <appname> - used facebook ads with a CPC/CPM price of $$ and this has gotten me ~x app installs.

What did you try and what did finally work?
Is there any indication that non-Google services are likely to have a longer expected lifetime than Google services? I don't think so... If services going extinct bothers you, the only sane alternative seems to be non-cloud services based on open standards.

Bashing Google seems silly...
It would be interesting to here what someone from GitHub has to say about this, they must have dealt with this issue at some point.

Also I would be interested to know why KDE don't use something like GitHub or BitBucket? It would be cheaper for the organisation, and they could still setup web hooks to get notifications of commits.
I worked in an environment with a significantly larger repository, and svn switches were a constant source of frustration.
Thanks, I've just fixed this bug.
Asynchronous socket and http library for android, based on nio, not threads
" but the killing of Reader looks like a desperate move to help Google+ "

I'd +1 that.
Unless you use svn and svnsync...
True, but if their mirroring system had been more robust in checking corruption, they would've had an every 20 minutes backup.
GitHub and BitBucket don't run open software, and KDE as a community doesn't feel comfortable with putting its name behind organizations that aren't playing by the rules we've set for ourselves and consider valuable for what we're doing. We also don't think it's what our donators expect us to do with their money, and we care about being responsible with their funds. Meanwhile, some parts of our server infrastructure are actually donated as well, so it's not like we're blowing the bank on hosting -- most of KDE's expenses are in putting together and attending developer conferences. Our financial reports are open too, if you're curious: http://ev.kde.org/reports/ :)

That said, we did originally try to work with Gitorious, but that didn't come to pass for a variety of reasons. Here's a small writeup of our journey back then, some of the parts discussed there have since been swapped out or fleshed out further: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2972107
Looks useful, though you may want to look into adding some tests…
KDE has a policy of not relying on non-foss services, as explained more eloquently by the other reply to this comment.
I have always disliked that assumption, it assumes too close of a correlation between "content someone wants to read" and "content someone will upvote". I would add to your list that it biases content towards posts that have popular opinions that the majority thinks are minority opinions.

It fits well with how people act and it fits well with what people complain about in the comments. Hard to measure though. Although if something as rough as scroll logging can still make an improvement I'm sure you could find something rough along these lines that would.

(It's so fun figuring out how to make our filter bubbles more harmful isn't it?)
Ask HN: the northern European Edens (Finland, Norway, Sweden)?
How comes any time there's a comparison of education or healthcare or overall "social health" or development of the northern European countries (Finland, Norway, Sweden) with any other country in the world, the northeners are always better? How did they manage to get so many "social" problems so right? Does anyone know of a good case-study about how these countries reached their current level?

The thing that actually overfilled my "glass of curiosity" was Linus Torvalds's comparison of public education in US and Finland. And I've read so many such opinions lately, not only comparing things with the US but also with other countries that I have to ask: is this northern Eden a myth? or are they really doing something right and they are doing it right for over half a century?
Chickens, cows, and fish aren't very smart.
School gives plenty of time for children to be bored.
Greasemonkey/Tampermonkey also allows this. Been using it for a few years: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tampermonkey/dhdgf...