skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> No decent office suite

StarOffice met my needs just fine; I could get work done in it, and it supported more Word formats than the latest Word (with occasional breakage - but that was rare).

> lack of support for many soundcards and modems

I think this was the case, yeah. You still had to be picking your HW to be Linux compatible (as opposed to these days where it's just a good idea).

> severe distro / package format fragmentation wars

I think much of that started later; at least, insofar as it impacted me. My experience was RPM pretty much dominating at that time.

> Lack of staples like Flash.

I don't recall what the flash situation was; on the other hand, that probably means it either worked for me[1] or I wasn't noticing the lack of it which would imply it was less of a staple.

[1] admittedly, this would undermine my initial point, as the question was really "a completely free-software desktop" not "a linux desktop", but I honestly can't remember.

> Instant messenger clients didn't support all features that the Windows versions did.

This is true, but it's hardly the difference between "car" and "no car" - more like a car with or without a CD player or something.

> No gaming to speak of.

I've played a lot of great games on Linux which were available then - I still go back to nethack from time to time. Admittedly, first-run commercial games weren't being released under a free license, but given Stallman's comments elsewhere that may be tolerable. There were some near-first-run games (and you weren't buying enough of them! 2001 is when Loki filed for bankruptcy) and Id was in the practice of releasing their games for Linux right away (and GPLing the whole thing years later).

> it was only practical to use on the desktop as part of a dual boot.

I wasn't dual-booting at that time, and it was practical for me.

There were certainly things that might have demanded Windows (there still are a couple, although I think virtualization is slightly more in vogue than dual booting?), but most people didn't need them like they need their car - remember, that's what I was responding to.

If you want to say a free desktop was like an ugly car you had to get up on blocks fairly often and source your own parts for, I'm much more on board.
Extreme determination is a rare and powerful thing.

Combined with some talent, luck, humility and hard work, one can accomplish anything.
You still need a backup plan, I assume that if you fail special forces selection you get to keep your job in the regular military.

If your startup goes bad, make sure it doesn't leave you in an untenable financial situation regardless of how optimistic you are.
Basic BTC 101 question. Are there a fixed number of txns in a block or is it variable?

(And what do you recommend I read to learn this kind of stuff)
AFAIK there are tmux 'windows' which are like tabs and 'panes' which are vertical and horizontal splits in 1 tmux window

but assuming you mean 'panes', it seems you can:

Ctrl-b o

to move around the current window's panes clockwise. Although I prefer inputing a given direction like the other replier suggested with arrow keys.

For me moving between windows and panes is something that I do a lot. So much so that I removed the need to use the 'tmux prefix' to do so. In my ~/.tmux.conf I have for window and pane switching:

# set pane switching with <alt>{U, E, N, I} for up, down, left, right and respectively without needing prefix

bind -n M-N select-pane -L

bind -n M-I select-pane -R

bind -n M-U select-pane -U

bind -n M-E select-pane -D

# set window switching without needing prefix

bind -n M-a select-window -t :1

bind -n M-r select-window -t :2

bind -n M-s select-window -t :3

bind -n M-t select-window -t :4

bind -n M-d select-window -t :5

bind -n M-h select-window -t :6

You can just replace the keybindings I chose like M-a (alt-a) to something that works for you. If you want to keep using a prefix (incase you are worried the keybindings will clash with other program/system bindings), remove the '-n' flag. Hope that helps.

If it doesn't here is a tutorial I found from a google search: http://blog.hawkhost.com/2010/06/28/tmux-the-terminal-multip...

and IMO a really good book on Tmux if you decide to dive in more: http://www.amazon.com/tmux-Productive-Mouse-Free-Development...
Lessons From 361 Start-ups
Reading about ZFS on Wikipedia and here [1] I see that there is a procedure called scrubbing. From [1]: "ZFS provides a mechanism to perform routine checking of all inconsistencies. This functionality, known as scrubbing, is commonly used in memory and other systems as a method of detecting and preventing errors before they result in hardware or software failure."

So I guess "alias fsck='zpool scrub tank'" would quail everyone's concerns.

[1] http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19082-01/817-2271/gbbwa/
What this article doesn't mention is that the cop who was using the Lemmingtrail board to find out about house shows kept posting even after being outed, eventually being somewhat-ironically accepted into the community. I regularly saw him at shows after he'd been exposed and he was always friendly.
It can't even be used as a gauge.
I would probably pay for the one-on-one help part. In particular, anything along the line of professional review of my own designs would be something I would pay for. I wouldn't pay for generic design advice from tutorials etc, as these kind of things are often a lot of work to really use and it's difficult to know if you've learned anything or used them correctly - plus there are very good ones available for free already.

I'm not sure how you'd be able to charge for this - if you charge consulting rates for one-on-one then only expect a few large companies/startups to sign up - and these guys would probably just hire a design consultant directly. If you went for a cheap offering, you'd need to keep the advice very short and shallow so as to cover enough people to make a living wage - and shallow design advice is not that helpful.
Both Netty and Play use Jackson though one the Netty version uses a single ObjectMapper and the Play version uses a new ObjectNode per request (created through Play's Json library).
Until the next country needs to be bailed out again at the expense of deposit holders.

greece in 2010, portugal in 2011, spain and greece in 2012, and cyprus so far in 2013.

2 more for 2013 before it starts to look like a Fibonacci sequence :D
Our boss bought us a MakerBot, and we geeked out
I learned C as first language. I haven't used it for any real-world work, but it was fun way to get into programming. K&R told me not just C but how to program, then I read TUPE which told me how to effectively use the best development environment, Unix.
This reminds me of a time when I emailed rms about the entire GNU/Linux naming controversy. I had said that perhaps Linux could officially be the name of the OS, and also that to solve the problem of GNU and the FSF not receiving credit, that people could be educated on who actually wrote Linux.

Needless to say, he disagreed. Stallman is as stubborn as a boulder, and a complete extremist.

But he's also right.
Totally agree. When I first started designing I went through hundreds of tutorials which made it very overwhelming.

I want to create a program that is organized and will help people actually learn how to create attractive and usable websites.

My main goal however is to not only help those learn design (and give them feedback), but to also help them put their skills to practice and either build a business or find contract work (if that is desired).
Hey espeed, how well would the SybilGuard[0] algorithm run on Titan? Right now, we're evaluating Twitter's in-memory graph library (Cassovary[1]), but that obviously requires a big machine..., and we already use Cassandra elsewhere, so would prefer to stay with that.

Up to, say, 5 second response times on large graphs would be acceptable.

[0] http://www.math.cmu.edu/~adf/research/SybilGuard.pdf

[1] https://github.com/twitter/cassovary
Ignoring the odds only helps if you are flying the Millenium Falcon through a statistically overly-dense asteroid field, and that's arguably only because you have the sister of a Jedi (and daughter of a Sith) on board.

In every other case, you are better off using your resources on something with a more reliable return on resource investment.
While I agree with most of what has been written, I think it's necessary to point out one of my key tenets with software development: code (good or bad) must earn the right to be improved (i.e., optimized, de-suckified, etc.).

For an entrepreneur this means that 99.9% of the sucky code written should stay that way...because no one will ever use it. Write something that "works" and then see how and how much it is used before going on to optimize.

It's not a binary question of sucks vs. doesn't suck. It is a question of how much of an issue the suckiness is creating. I'll spend 100X the time trying to improve beautifully written code that is taking up the largest chunk of CPU time rather than focus on a function that is rarely used but makes me throw up in my mouth when I see it.
I think the problem with a newsletter of design lessons is that there is too much game in town already, so it becomes harder and harder to pick and choose (except for people who know who you are, if you think there's a good market for that then by all means go for it.) Lessons tailored to feedback on the customer's already designed product, however, is something I'm yet to see. And it ensures you get people who WANT to learn, since they even built something already and tried their best. You could start doing it yourself, but if you think from the get go of a domain and brand, you can easily scale by creating a marketplace for this kind of instruction down the road. And really, I think personal lessons coupled with design critique is a sorely needed service, and would set you apart.

As the GP said, I also already subscribe to Hack Design but I've had the first lesson, the Objectified documentary, open here for weeks now. I'm yet to take the time to go past that. I'm busy designing and building my app. Sneak into the MVP builders' workflow and help them, and I think you're gonna find the best customers in as much as you're looking for people who are self-motivated and wanting to learn. There's just not enough time for everything we want to do. Take the time to filter the chaff out of the enormous amount of material for learning design out there, and pick the best stuff that I need right now, as per the horrendous mistakes I made on my app, and I'll pay you premium for it.
I disagree. I am reading a lot of good feedback here. Maybe these people won't buy but they are offering up a great deal of advice, ideas and more that are helpful in starting the process.
Yes, you definitely should, just make sure to plop this into your .tmux.conf

unbind C-b
set -g prefix C-a
What we lost was a competitive disadvantage for Linux distros and countless software and hardware products never released by independent developers. Failure lacks a marketing budget.
Single page.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/crime/2013/0...

It wouldn't be fun if the cops approved, would it?
Note that the sentence you quoted is rather quite vague (it almost seems deliberately phrased that way) as it says nothing other than "the money spent on alcohol and cigarettes is upper-bounded by the proportion of other total expense".
Well, it could certainly be worse, yes, but that doesn't make it great.

It's kind of like saying "up to 90% off" in a store... a 10% price cut would certainly qualify under that description, so the description is pretty useless.

Also, note that alcohol and cigarettes are only 2 of many such examples.

My data is all the laws that exist (and are still constantly changing) to prevent some poor people from misusing the welfare money they get.

Quite obviously, they wouldn't be there if this wasn't an actual problem.

See, for example, the second page of this article (http://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyphillipserb/2012/07/26/who-...), where it says:

> In Massachusetts – and my own state of Pennsylvania – proposals are being floated to ban [...]

There's a reason those proposals are there, and no, it's not that lawmakers are bored.
Thanks! I'll keep an eye out for these releases. :)
Ah, that looks excellent for more complicated setups. I've been using the slightly simpler tmuxinator.

https://github.com/aziz/tmuxinator
I don't understand how this is better than just writing your email address on the item and have them contact you directly?!
The Force is not a Field of Luck +1. She wasn't piloting.
If you put your mind to it, you can achieve anything.

Except compute an uncomputable function. Or transmit information faster than the speed of light. Or simultaneously measure the speed and momentum of a particle with errors whose product is less than half the planck constant.

But apart from that, anything.
I feel like not being realistic about your odds is a very dangerous game to play. Sure, you can maybe grit your teeth and bear it. But you also might totally burn out doing something unrealistic.

This applies to more than just start ups: It's very rare that you can succeed through sheer stubbornness, many times you'll just end up hurting yourself.
A123 Changes Name to B456 After Sale
Anyone know if it is possible to do single combination keybindings? Currently all of the keybindings are things like 'Ctrl+W L', whereas I'd like to do things like 'Command+L'?
Great! A $1B down, and now only $23B more until it becomes 1% of the total US money that the Federal Reserve has printed!

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/M1/
Tom has finally convinced me that it is less expensive to us to have a handyman fix things than for me to do it myself. Which is a bummer, because I do so love excuses to use power tools.

I've often wondered how many people in tech would probably be mechanics or carpenters (or welders/blacksmiths) if there was no more lucrative occupation. It seems to me there's a great number of people in my network who do these things as hobbies. Scratches an itch.
You don't think Tom Brady broke his task of becoming the current starting QB for the Patriots down into smaller, more manageable tasks? Given enough time and dedication, even something as seemingly ridiculous as wanting to become a starting QB for an NFL team is possible (read "not probable").
John Carmack has done a bit of research on this, he has a good explication on SuperUser http://superuser.com/a/419167

Edit: Also on his blog http://www.altdevblogaday.com/2013/02/22/latency-mitigation-...

tl;dr High speed video camera capturing button input and screen in the same frame to measure the complete cycle. Diagnosing why is harder.
Learning to program is really difficult. Teaching to program is even harder.

The only programming class I ever took was taught by an unmotivated teacher who only taught programming because he needed the money. That was in high school. I started out excited about the amazing power programming gave me to bend the computer to my will and make it do cool things, but the teacher's lack of enthusiasm covered the class like a dismal fog, and his intensely boring lectures and make-work assignments totally dampened my enthusiasm. I finally dropped the class.

I didn't go back to programming until years later when I was taking grad school in an entirely different subject and I rediscovered programming on my own. I taught myself C and ended up spending all night coding and debugging and loving it, to the point where I neglected the actual subject I was supposed to be learning.

While I've never taught programming to others, I spent several years teaching technical classes to engineers in the semiconductor industry. I also taught English as a second language for five years. From these experiences, I've learned the following:

Learning to program is really fun. Because programming is really fun.

Teaching any subject is fun if you enjoy the subject matter, have a passion for teaching, and if you teach people who want to learn and have aptitude in the field.

So if teaching programming is hard (instead challenging, but fun) it could mean you either don't enjoy programming, you don't have passion or aptitude for teaching, or you need to find motivated students with an aptitude for programming.

If the problem is that you don't enjoy programming, you need to find a different subject to teach.

If you don't have passion or aptitude for teaching, you need to get out of teaching as soon as possible, because you are likely ruining your students' first experiences with the subject matter.

And if your students appear unmotivated or lack aptitude, you should consider deeply the possibility that this could be because you have one of the two issues above, and repeat until the problem is resolved, or until you are really, really, really sure the problem isn't you.

If you are absolutely sure the problem isn't you, then you need to consider finding a teaching situation where students are motivated, and you need to discover methods to gently encourage those who genuinely lack programming aptitude to focus their learning in areas where they do have aptitude.

But before doing that, maybe it would be good to take one more round of considering if maybe the problem isn't you.
A number of Python and PHP extensions either aren't up to date or don't work at all. Memcached comes to mind.
Wow this brings back some memories! My first computer was also a TI 99/4A. I got mine brand new in 1982 through a friend that worked at TI. For a while I suffered through the slowness of using a tape recorder for storage but eventually I bought the expansion box for it which added memory and a 160K, single-sided, 5.25" floppy disk. Compared to the tape drive it was a speed demon!

Ahhhh .. the "good old days" of buying a computer magazine with programs listed in Basic and typing them all in. Sometimes having to figure out how to convert them because the version of Basic wasn't the same one. I don't have the 99/4A anymore but I do still have a book that I bought back then to experiment with called, "Projects in Machine Intelligence for Your Home Computer".
Thanks so much for your reply. I really appreciate your feedback.

I have been learning things that can add to my current programming practices, and I know that Node.js can be another one of those things. I'm going to implement a little Node.js here and there in my clients projects to start to get the hang of it. I started to learn Ruby through Treehouse, but I just didn't really care for the style all too well. I think if I were to learn another language it would probably be Python.

I keep hearing a lot about MongoDB. I should look into it some more. Especially since I won a startup pack that had a $1000 credit to MongoHQ. I also got a $1000 credit to EngineYard and $500 to to Code Climate, but since I don't develop in Ruby I haven't found a use for them.

Thanks again for taking the time to respond and give me some things to think about. I know if I want to be apart of a startup I am going to need to have a base knowledge of a lot of different technologies. Right now, sticking with what I do best is working, but I think it will only work for so long before I get bored and sick of it.
I remember being at a basement show in Allston when I was 18 that was broken up by the cops and thinking "This is so fucking cool". I mean, it's a pain in the ass and sucks for the bands. It can totally ruin your night, but for me it totally fanned the flames and made me love it even more.
I'm sure most people in his selection group felt the same way, and most of them failed. We only write blog articles about the exceptional ones.
Assuming that you're sincere in asking... neither my wife nor I care about the product recommendations and I don't see how "a confused data set" hurts me other than that (the data set's going to be confused by the fact that we frequently buy gifts for other people over Amazon anyway). Gifts are easy; you just tell the other person not to look at the orders because you bought him or her a gift.

The incremental cost is in keeping shipping addresses and credit card info up to date in two accounts vs. one and in having to remember which account was used to order something if we need to look up order info.

The only advantage in having separate accounts is when it comes to commenting and reviewing; I'm picky about only having reviews that I've written listed under my name, so we got separate accounts when she wanted to review some purchases. Many people (and probably most nontechnical people) do not care at all about the "benefits" you mentioned. Plenty of couples share email accounts too. I've even seen shared Facebook accounts.
All I do is learn. I love learning.

This is a field that I've found hard to learn about without someone who is passionate about it around.

As long as it was clear that the person providing the service was really rather passionate about their field and considered competent by their peers, I would pay a premium for in-person ... tutoring. Mentoring. Whatever. One-on-one or with a small group (max of around 7 people).

If I had the money, I'd say fuck scale and buy and staff a Socratic sort of Hogwarts for the neckbeard, and live the rest of my life happy.
This might help the OP come up with a hybrid approach. Create tutorial videos, blog posts, whatever that have lessons with exercises. Publish them for free. People pay for you to take time reviewing their work and then meeting with them over Skype for feedback and personal instruction. Hmmm. I guess that doesn't scale too well either. You would have to charge $100+ an hour to make any money. Maybe you charge a small monthly amount for access to all content. I dunno. Actually speaking to the person with experience is key, but their time is so valuable that it stops being affordable enough for people that need it.
So, in a sentence: Bitcoin is being used by people as a highly liquid, defensive store of value from within Cyprus, where capital controls are preventing people from moving their money out through traditional means.

This is what gold used to be used for. But gold is not liquid, and Bitcoin is. It appears that hackers have made something better than gold, the longest standing store of value in human history. What an incredible achievement! For the first time in history, I can somewhat safely make the argument that we now live in a post-gold economy. Gold is still there, but we now have something even better for storing value.

This is getting deep into the economics of mediums of exchange, which are important for understanding what is going on here.

I did a talk on Bitcoin a while ago where I went into describing Bitcoin from a medium of exchange perspective rather than a technology one. It may help you to understand what is going on here, and why I think that this will continue into the future: http://www.slideshare.net/KyleDrake/bitcoin-the-cyberpunk-cr...
Presumably you could give these folks disinformation and check to see if the cops show up. I am not sure why anyone would think police on social media would be any more suave than police in real life. As far back as high school the attempts by law enforcement to get a jump on where the 'bad thing' of the week was going to happen were pretty transparent. I could never figure out if that was on purpose to put people on notice they cared (like driving around a neighborhood to let people know they are watching, showing the colors as it were) or if they were just that clueless.
Reminds of a serie of experiments in psychology and their conclusions:

- Putting a photo of a child or a baby in one's wallet raises the return rate ;

- putting a brief of paper with the words 'if you find this, bring it back to XXX, money award is in the other pocket' while actually not adding the money award works too.

That's all I remember for now.
VsVim: Visual Studio and Vim with Jared Parsons