skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Many years ago this facet of Linux was the thing that really made me realize just how astonishingly wonderful the central idea of UNIX (everything is a file) really is. It also puts in stark contrast those systems that haven't grokked this beautifully simple idea.
I don't know. I agree with most of what he says. At one time not too long ago I would have agreed with it all.

But lately I've been experimenting with Flash and Silverlight and I have to say I'd forgotten how easy development could be. For all that's great about Javascript it's still a decade old hack. Being in an enviornment without all the little quirks of Javascript and CSS has really made me long for the days of developing for the Desktop. Where you didn't have to worry about font differences between IE and Firefox or whether you might get an IE6 user.

I guess what I'm saying is that things ARE great now but they could still be much, much better.
Do you work for Digg or do you just like the taste in your mouth? I have been a member for over four years (check it out, same username) and have no problem with them other than it seems the investors have started calling the shots. I think Digg would make an excellent four or five person company, but it makes a terrible 80+ person company with lots of investors to make happy. That's how horrible ideas like the Diggbar get started.

Google Images you say? Well it's blocked from all search engines by robots.txt so there is no chance of search engine tomfoolery (not to mention that frames make sense in image search since you are looking for only a tiny bit of what could be a huge page). Digg said they hired a consultant and checked with Google how to do things right... They lied. If they had done either they would have heard exactly what the mob told them the minute they launched Diggbar. Just say you fucked up, don't try and bullshit that you did your very best to be on the up and up.

Sure, it's a handy feature... For SIGNED IN Digg users who want it. It's a ridiculous "feature" for the internet public. To try and pass it off as a URL shortener was an even more terrible idea. Have your land grab, but don't try and call it a service for John Q Surfer.

Bottom line, Digg pushed out a feature made instantly popular because they opted everyone in, that made many people question the integrity of a company previously given the benefit of the doubt. Because they now let don't opt-in non members is not so great, it unquestionably should have been that way to start. reddit has a similar feature but you have to opt-in. That's great and if they really wanted this to be a feature and not a land grab that's what they would have done.
InnoDB is ACID, though, isn't it? Far be it from me to defend Mysql, but InnoDB has made it more like a real database.
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> When you start filing paperwork with the state, eg: getting a driver's license and renting

Renting doesn't involve filing paperwork with the state, at least not in the US. (FWIW, ownership does not establish residency - you can own property in a state where you're not a resident.)

My point is that states often think that you're a resident even if you haven't filed any paperwork with them. Yes, there are cases (such as driving or bringing a car into the state) where they penalize you for not filing paperwork, but in others, they just tax you.
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Why are folks downvoting someone for quoting Vice President Biden?
Yahoo Shutting Down The Rest Of Jumpcut In June
Those are really good points, especially the one about thirst. Guess I didn't really think this through.
Facebook rejects funding at $4 billion valuation, may not raise more
It sounded like a dial up modem when I did this:

cat /dev/mem > /dev/audio

Also, for some reason, this command makes it "beep" on every eleventh character you type. Probably something to do with buffers.

cat /dev/input/by-path/platform-i8042-serio-0-event-kbd > /dev/audio
I think it's pretty clear that they are aiming for IPO, not acquisition.
A dive into Reia language (part 1)
One more thing, the pirates are nearly all from the Majeerteen tribe. They are Abdulahi Yusuf's tribe, and he was the former transitional Somali president and American Ally Extraordinaire. Yusuf is the guy who made the war on terror happen in Somalia, and Bush Jr flooded him and his tribe with moolah. He invited Ethiopians into Somalia and did his best to catch and kill Islamists ..

Except one thing; Yusuf is a war criminal and made no effort what so ever to separate his for-profit conquests from the American mandated attacks on Jihadis. He dragged the name of the U.S. through the mud and cashed up while he was in power. He was eventually defeated in a fair election by the same Islamists he was fighting on behalf of the U.S.

[Just had to inform the dough-eyed voting American with a little bad news about foreign policy that might just ruin his TiVoed episode of tonight's PBS Frontline ;-]
cat /dev/urandom > /dev/audio

I use it as a white noise generator, to cover ambient noise at night. Anyone know how to make a low pass filter (to make pink/red/brown noise)? I tried repeating the random source, to increase the wavelength, but it gets little R2D2 chirps and clicks in it (because of the step-like waveform):

cat /dev/urandom | sed 's/./&&&&&&/g' > /dev/audio
We Are Hunted - This Generation's Music Chart?
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They took in a lot of that at a much higher valuation -- $15 billion. So even at a $2 billion pre-money valuation, at par they're ahead of where they'd be if they'd sold for $1.6 billion two years ago. And that despite a ~40% haircut to all kinds of assets in the meantime.

(Since the rumored YHOO $1.6B offer: GOOG -21%, MSFT -35%, YHOO -45% -- while Facebook is +15% or more, even with the dilution.)

Sure, they'd prefer $4B or $6B, but anyone who portrays a $2B term sheet now as creating regret they didn't combine with Yahoo (ha!) is missing the larger context.
You're acting like censoring GLBT literature is equivalent to not legalizing gay marriage.

That's the rough equivalent of saying that, just because we have a president who hasn't pushed for slavery reparations, "progressive" states like California have disproportionate numbers of minority convicts, and the Supreme Court has saddled us with imperfect affirmative action laws, we shouldn't be surprised about rumors of Amazon censoring black literature.
You should read Blink (specifically the section on priming) and then tell me again that advertising doesn't change your behavior. Advertising isn't just about "see the ad, go buy the product" - it's meant to shape your thinking.

Two example priming studies:

Gladwell mentions the study of two Dutch researchers who had several groups of students each answer forty-two Trivial Pursuit questions. Half were asked to take five minutes to think about what it would mean to be a professor and write it down, while the other half were asked to do the same with soccer hooligan in place of professor. The students who thought about professors ended up getting 55.6 percent of the questions correct, while the soccer group got 42.6 percent correct.

and

In a separate study, when African-American students were asked to identify their race on a pre-test questioner, the simple act of checking the box next to African American was enough to prime them with negative cultural stereotypes associated with African Americans and academic achievement. The number of items they got right was cut in HALF. Malcolm Gladwell makes a strong point that priming is a powerful thing. Personally I think this has incredible implications in our society. If ‘smart’ is really just a frame of mind, these social cues (such as African American=less intelligent) are shaping not only the results of standardized tests, but the way we interact with each other in business and other professional fields.

How do you think priming effects your buying decisions? How about your research decisions when pondering a purchase? How do you think it effects jury trials?

Of course, you like to think you're above such manipulation-- so does everyone else.
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The irony is that the only reason Linus Torvalds spent so much time on Linux in the early days is because he accidentally made his dialer program use his minix partition to dial up his university. The dialer was fine with it... it even 'talked' back, destroying the data. He couldn't re-install Minix because he didn't have a copy of it. So he was stuck with Linux, and he was forced to improve it if he wanted to use his expensive computer.
Following a hashtag in realtime is only useful if it's something with somewhat low volume and on a topic that spammers wouldn't bother with. For example the #pycon hashtag was quite useful during the PyCon conference. Most of the time however hashtags are useful to easily identify what a tweet from someone you already follow is about, and can be handy I think when you need to skim through a decent number of tweets.
I'm going to take the unpopular position of somewhat defending this attitude.

As I understand it, as the Somali state failed, foreign fishing vessels took advantage of the missing government and misdirected leftover Somali coastguard to slip in and illegally fish out the local waters. This decimated the local economy. A bunch of out of work, starving fishermen sat around and looked at their boats, empty nets and left over coast guard gear and asked themselves "now what?" Justified anger led them to simply attack the offending fishing boats wantonly, but they soon realized that there was cash in them-thar ships.

From there, it quickly spiraled out of control. That much money available, combined with the local anger and desperation, quickly made all ships targets. Calls for "the end of piracy" sound to the locals like "please sit there and starve quietly by the coast we fished out like good world citizens."

This is why even magic comic book rifles that can bend bullets won't end piracy. Sitting and starving is not an option.

Personally, I've been impressed so far by the restraint the international community has shown in dealing with the pirates. The temptation to just load cargo ships with old WWII guns and blaze away must be no small thing.

I just really really hope we don't get a "war on piracy" out of this whole deal. I'm pretty much "war on X'ed" out.
The problem with the firmware is that it won't work on a Mac with Nvidia graphics chipset. You have to boot the cd and SSD drive on a different system.
SQL is a standard with approximately zero fully-compliant implementations. What's more, every database has a variety of features that aren't covered by the SQL spec, or use different syntax for some feature for historical reasons.

I've got a lot of respect for the PostgreSQL devs for occasionally breaking backwards-compatibility in the name of ANSI-SQL compliance, and for clearly marking deviations from ANSI-SQL in their reference documentation.
The big distinction that a google social network has is that its internal messaging system is real e-mail. Facebook relies on e-mail to keep users updated if they don't log in. This means that social networking can be tied directly into your usual workflow, rather than being a separate site that you visit.

This change alone is a huge competitive advantage.
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Is it just me, or do real entrepreneurs need to be less excited about this YC interview thingy.

If you care so much for third party approval from PG and folks (not that they are not nice/smart ppl) but then just go to a B-school dude and get that nice degree which will surrogate for your competencies in the real world.

BillG didnt need no YC, neither did Google guys and neither did the ipod god - infact even PG didnt need no YC, so please stop this gushing/blogging over your yc interviews as if they are like the biggest thing to happen to your entrepreneurial careers. Its beginning to sound almost like a b-school interview and I wudnt be surprised if YC starts attracting the entrepreneur wannabes for the 'stamp' that they missed from going to a b-school.
Interesting? Do YC refund/pay for flights? I'm thinking return tickets to SF, plus say 2 nights in a hotel for 2 is probably coming close to $5K(AU$). That's a pretty significant chunk of the seed funding that YC gives you.

On that note though - congrats guys - always great to see some Melbournians doing great stuff on here.
Why Do CEOs (Still) Love Ayn Rand?
If your terminal gets messed up from catting random characters to stdout, type 'reset' and press enter.
Thanks so much. This helps us immensely.
They don't jump out of commercial airliners.

Airliners didn't always have this door mechanism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D._B._Cooper
Actually we did have a prototype of YC: we had an angel investor, Julian Weber, who gave us our first $10k, got all our paperwork done, taught us the rudiments of business, introduced us to one of our two next investors, and let us demo to them in his NYC loft.

We were very lucky to have Julian, and we would have been even better off with YC, which is a superset. In addition to all the above, you get other startups as colleagues, and startup-specific advice.
Facebook made under $300 million last year, was a little shy of breaking even, and at first expected to make towards $400 million in revenue this year. But the company said in late March — incidentally at the time that chief financial officer Gideon Yu left the company — that it was beating projections by 70 percent. I’ve confirmed that this run rate has the company possibly breaking half a billion in revenue by the end of the year.

If that's true, it's remarkable.
So what if you 'unlocked' the door at high altitude, when the plane goes downwards, as soon as pressure is low enough, it will open.
Do you only read articles by famous people?
America's (and mostly W's) short sighted foreign policies are legend, although Obama seems to be turning that tanker around slowly, as he says. Looks like you guys are stuck between a rock and a hard place if the word Islamists carries the same connotations there. But at least you had a fair election.

Also, while the allegation that a majority of Americans are ignorant about the shortcomings of American foreign policy may be true, I think you will find that 1) It is less true on HN 2) When people on HN don't know something, they listen with an open mind, even to criticism of their country 3) (In my experience) Americans are the most open to discussing criticism of their country

So your repeated use of cliches to bash Americans is counterproductive here. FWIW I am not a US citizen.
I know it's probably not what you're asking for, but if you just want a white/pink/brown noise generator this is an excellent little flash app: http://www.simplynoise.com/
Find all the .wav files and play them:
find . -name '*.wav' -exec cat {} > /dev/audio \;

I guess I don't have any at the right frequency, though :(
I'd call it creative destruction but perhaps the alternative then, and probably more likely, is that I will have the option of receiving an electronic version of my w-2's (already available to some extent) and different 1099 this and Schedule A-Z that forms, etc. which can be imported directly into my tax prep program rather than filling in all the 'enter the number from line X of form Y ' lines one by one.
A Web Developer Perspective on iPhone Software Development
At the end, it appears the author doesn't really get it. He thinks there was luck involved:

Ultimately, this hack involved [..] and a little bit of luck. Someone figured out the voting URL protocol. [..] and a member discovered the ’salt’

There is no luck involved in figuring out the 'protocol' and discovering this kind of 'salt'.
Exactly, and for those guys who do not get into YC, they still have the option of getting a 'prototype of YC' - which in your own words is almost the same as YC.

I am not saying YC is bad - far from it - I am myself a big fan.

The only thing I was pointing out was that the YC interview rejection/acceptance should ideally have only as much importance as being rejected/accepted from probably another angel investor - which happens more often than not in the startup world and consequently should not be given a lot of importance.

The entrepreneurs who are in the trenches shouldnt really care as much about a rejection or two - its no big deal and even an acceptance might not be a big deal - but if you build something that people want and have something to show for it then feel free to jump over the moon.
I did this a while ago, and better, and posted the code:

http://www.jperla.com/blog/2008/03/14/learn-100-digits-of-pi...
Facebook made under $300 million last year...

How?!
We're back in Melbourne now, planning to return to the Valley in a couple of months and bracing ourselves for the immigration minefield.
Awesome, acquired instead of sued. Personally I would have expected the later; acquiring the name seems like a rather progressive move.
What are they making money off? I have never heard of anyone clicking an ad on facebook. (conversely I have met few Internet users who have NOT clicked a Google ad)

They could be selling data/information. If so, I hope it's anonymized.
You hate when clients have an idea? I think it depends on the client. Someone having ideas is fine -- I like that a lot in fact. You can get some good collaborative brainstorming out of it, and it often gives me insight into how the client sees his/her business or product.

It's not the act of having an idea that's bad. What's bad is when the expectation, spoken or (worse) unspoken, is not that the client's ideas are the starting point for a conversation between the two of you, but that you're going to do what this article suggests and just "polish up" the client's idea verbatim. That is, with nearly nonexistent exception, a road straight to horrible design town.

Just like how good programmers aren't just "good at computers," or "good at math," or whatever, good designers aren't just "good at drawing." Like good programmers, good designers are good problem solvers. (The problems they solve are just different.) Most good designers I know relish solving problems and coming up with unexpected or interesting or clean and efficient solutions to challenges as much as (if not more than) they enjoy the actual act of putting pen to paper (or hand to mouse). Obviously a good designer should be someone who produces aesthetically pleasing work, but that's not all they do, at least not if they're good!

If you're not letting your designer help you solve your problems, you might be under utilizing your designer. If your designer isn't helping you solve your problems, you might have a bad designer.
I notice this is the second submission by mattyb from everything2.com tonight.

As cool as everything2.com is, if anyone reading this has remotely any work to do within the next two days, don't start traversing the tree of links from interesting everything2 nodes. I say this because I learned, from experience, that if you have tabbed browsing and open on average >1 new tab per page while traversing a site like everything2, your backload of reading material will grow exponentially and your procrastination problem, if you have one, will similarly grow to epic proportions.

I fear mattyb has been sucked into this trap.

Apologies if this comment is not productive enough.
We actually stayed for 11 days - we weren't going to fly all that way with the possibility of being unsuccessful, only to return immediately without having any fun.

But we did it on the cheap, and you're in the ballpark with the cost. YC reimbursed us USD $700 like everyone else.

Yep it was a big punt, but totally worth it.
Thanks, that's what I'm using at the moment. I'd prefer a local solution rather than a webapp (but perhaps it doesn't make any difference?).

I tried their download brown noise loop, but it doesn't (always) loop seamlessly, even using:

mplayer /home/user/8usb/SimplyNoise.com\ -\ Brown\ Noise.m4a -loop 0

I also tried downloading their flash swf itself, but it doesn't run locally (I expect it needs to phone home for the sound files).
You'd better hope that everyone else feels the same, a social network without all your friends on is a bit pointless.
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i have clicked on facebook ads, when at times they are actually really interesting to me. not often, but a few times. i probably click on google ads about the same amount (rarely) and otherwise never click on other ads across the web.
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Lacking creativity does not make one a hack. As an example, take movie critics. Good critics are good at pointing out the strong and weak points of a movie. If involved early in the process, their advise can be used to improve the movie. However, most of them completely fail at coming up with movies by themselves. That doesn't mean they are incompetent: it just means that their expertise does not cover 'being creative'.

The follow-up question than is: is 'being creative' a required skill for a designer. I venture: no. As the author points out, the sketches and ideas of the client can convey a lot of information about his business: not only factual information, but also the harder-to-express features that distinguish a business from others. It may very well be enough starting material for someone with less creative skill to produce an excellent design, completely covering what the client had in mind, while including all possible designer finesses. Of course, everyone has some creative skill and some may very well be enough.

The very best can come up with original ideas out of thin air. We respect that and strive towards that ability. However, that does not mean that those that cannot do that are immediately demoted to 'hack' status. That would denounce many great artists and thinkers as 'hacks', because they were only capable of executing ideas to perfection, while not being able to come up with those ideas themselves.
You don't need to tell me about Americans ajju, after all, I'm one :-)

I understand what you're saying yar, but deeko, things are not as cut and dry as they seem. The story I'm replying to had a phoney "pirates be ware, we have sophisticated guns" vibe to it. The so called pirates couldn't give a shit what you type of guns you have. To them death is secondary, because they have little to live for.

We have to understand their motives to combat their piracy (not to kill them): The pirates have two sources of income, cattle and fish. They used to export cattle, but their produce is no longer sold in any international market, because Somalia lacks the federal institutions to certify meat quality and oversee health issues. But they can't fish anymore, because foreign fishing boats have pretty much whipped out their coasts.

None of these pirates are committing crime in someone else's backyard. Nearly every ship they took was in Somali waters. I have no sympathy for the pirates, but I understand their cause as much as I understand an Inuit who bombs an oil refiners because, say, the Alaskan oil extraction industry is killing whales and sea lions, which the Inuit needs to hunt for food and fur.
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