skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Putting aside the hyperbole of the article's title and the PR-release tone of its content, one may ask why IBM would feel the need to add to DB2 the ability to run Oracle apps. Well, to steal customers from Oracle, of course. To me that's more or less an admission that Oracle are the gorilla in enterprise RDBMSes and DB2 is the monkey.

The fact that Oracle disdain compatibility with other databases and their tools are generally horrible is a reflection of their hubris, borne of their market position.

Disclaimer: I am an Oracle DBA. I'm not in love with Oracle as a company or anything, they've just enabled a lazy person to be paid far better than he deserves for a long time.
How To Use Help Elements To Improve Your Designs
Isn't this a bit too US centric?
Yeah, PSD is still at the top. I could swear that a fresh install of Photoshop 7.0 defaulted to TIFF -- I remember it because it was also the first OS X compatible version, so all changes felt intriguing... But I don't know if they changed that later due to feedback, or if I hallucinated the whole thing due to spending so much time staring at the rainbow spin cursor (Photoshop on Mac OS X 10.1 and a G4 was not particularly snappy).

Anyway, Photoshop guru Jeff Schewe recommends TIFF over PSD:
http://www.luminous-landscape.com/forum/lofiversion/index.ph...

"Everything that can be saved in a PSD can also be save in a layered Tiff-6.0 file format...everything, paths, channels, layers, transparency, layer effects...there is nothing that PSD has "special" any longer and when that happened, Bruce and several engineers and I realized that the end of the Photoshop native file format had arrived.

"Tiff has better compression (zipped tifs), can save everything that a PSD can save and be as large as 4 gigs in size (I think PSD is still limited to 2 gigs). Tiff is publicly documented where PSD requires a special NDA to access the internals. As a result, tiff is a more "archival" format while losing nothing by being used."
[- - ]
"So, since Photoshop CS, only PSB is a format unique to Photoshop which does not fall under the heading of having to work with the Suite...and when once looks at all the pluses and minus, I think layered TIFF's offer the best file format for pixels today-unless you are talking raw and then it's DNG-which is essentially, a TIFF-EP file, a variant of Tiff-6.

"Which was one reason that Mark Hamburg, when Lightroom was first released in beta fought really, really hard AGAINST allowing PSD files into Lightroom. He lost that battle.

"So, at best figure that PSD and TIFF are equal but since TIFF is a documented file format and PSD isn't, I lean towards using tiffs whenever possible...because PSD files, suck-and have since Photoshop CS."
The only time this site's name was really a problem for me was when I made the mistake of mentioning my business in a google-meaningful way on here (e.g. "business-name is targeted at the construction industry"), and google picked up my comment here as being higher rated than our website itself!

This was back in the days when we didn't have that much google-juice, and so the result was that hapless architects would search for "business-name" and find that the first result was a site called "Hacker News" which said that "business-name is targeted at the construction industry".

Needless to say, that was not exactly the best impression to make. Fortunately, pg was extremely gracious and altered the comment to remove the name of my business when I asked him.
Where I live (not Sweden), the Judges' Code of Ethics forbids any personal contacts or economic associations that could cast any doubt on judge's impartiality while carrying out their duties. I'd say that membership in a lobbying organisation is uncomfortably close to the above.
First look: Amazon brings MapReduce to the Elastic Cloud
I am not an anti-Microsoft person, but after having used Linux now without even Windows installed for two years straight, it is actually mentally painful to use Windows.

Yeah, use whatever works best for you -- but using Windows these days feels like I'm on my Big Wheel when I was three years old. In a rubber room.
"Chief Executive Tom Costello is an ex-IBMer and was on the research faculty at Stanford University, where he got his PhD. His wife, President Anna Patterson, another brainiac with a PhD, was the architect of Google's large search index, TeraGoogle, still in use today. She also worked with the Internet Archive, the non-profit digital library of Web sites."

But but ... they had PhD's and came from Stanford and Google, they can't fail they're too smart!

Oh wait, PhD's mean nothing in the startup world besides buying you a whole lot of PR.
The problem is that the whole system is corrupt, not just one individual. Corruption is how you get buy-in, in our current arrangement.
What Aaron doesn't give due attention to here is that improving existing government transparency is part of a larger information ecosystem. Digitizing previously paper-bound and siloed databases makes possible a new kind of "connect-the-dots" work that used to take investigative journalists months to do--or they simply didn't even try. His own project, Watchdog.net, has pioneered a new way of finding links, or "handshakes" as he called it, between campaign contributors and congressional earmarks, and the demographic data he's cataloged is going to help power new tools for investigative types to answer such questions as "How many members of Congress who represent districts where X percent of their households have experienced a foreclosure last year voted for the banking bailout?"

We're just at the beginning of a new wave of data- and citizen-empowered watchdogging of government, and it would be a huge mistake to discount how valuable these government transparency projects are in opening up the process in fundamentally new ways. Yes, it's true that government still wants to hide its dirt and the data it discloses is often only part of the picture. But the more we open access to the existing data and involve people in connecting the dots, the greater the appetite and demand for even more transparency, of the sort even Aaron might find useful.

(My collegue Micah Sifry wrote this with me)
Uh, actually the driver's license causation seems to make sense (in an environment where drivers have to have a driver's license). If yu took away all driver's licenses, accidents might go down. If you took away the rats, the garbage would stay.
I was hoping to see something about OpenCL/CUDA/etc., especially in the "Is there anything in the pipe from hardware designers..." section.
OK... As a huge cycling fan I love the idea of this site. I could follow these guys on Twitter but I like the idea of taking a 2 minute break and just skimming this site instead.

Some suggestions:

1 - Spend time on making a more cycling oriented design
2 - Add thumbnails of the cyclists pictures next to their comments and maybe link to a bio page
The Majority of IT People Got Some Closet Issues Going On…
Yeah, it sounds hard so we probably shouldn't even try.
That would never work. To start with, you can't stop members of Congress from associating with each other. If you said "you get one week every 2 years to pass everything", the entire congress would spend 1 year and 51 weeks in secret meetings trying to figuring out what to vote for in their 1 week of voting time.

All that would happen as a result is there would be a 2 year back log of legislation, and it would take FOREVER for anything to get done.

The only real way to deal with corruption in government is to limit it's power. As long as there are people in power, some of them are going to become corrupt. That's just human nature. The best you can do is limit power, so that the damage they can do is minimized.
The best reason for not using the Acrobat Reader from Adobe is that it is slow, slow, slow.

The Foxit Reader is an excellent choice on the Windows platform - fast and free.

Download link here: http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/reader/
Only a short time ago, planning a trip without a travel agent would be crazy. Travel agents allow the vacationer(s) to focus solely on the vacation, rather than on tasks which they're not particularly suited to, like organizing international, multi-leg flights, getting deals on hotels, and finding fun things to do once they get there.

In... The Age of the Internet... the networking ability of a music industry studio is less useful. The equipment is much cheaper, and the techniques are more accessible, so you can have cross country collaborations that produce music that sounds better than the Beyonce sound debacle.

The musician doesn't need to perform all of the roles himself, but it would help if he could choose the roles he needs without signing a 6 CD 3 pence a tour date contract.
Minimal design website gallery
My bad.

Suppose I want to define a function that squares integers. Well, I can either define it as a formula:

Square i => i * i

or I can list all of the integers in a table

1 1

2 4

3 9

4 16

etc...

Both of those are perfectly valid definitions for the Square function. The signature of the function is Int -> Int. If a row is listed more than once (e.g. the row 3 9) it still doesn't affect the definition of my function. 3 still maps to 9.

Now suppose I want to define a relation (remember, a relation is a function) of employees that work in my company. In a typical RDMS I might create an Employee "table" with the following schema:

emp_id, first_name, last_name.

The signature of this function is Int -> String -> String -> Bool

It just so happens that people (tuples) explicitly listed in the table map to true and anyone else maps to false.

Conceptually it's the same as if I had a function called Employees where I could do something like this:

Employees(12, 'bob', 'morton')

which would return true or false depending on whether or not Mr. Morton is an employee in the company. The difference is that in SQL, what is returned is not the result of the function but the definition of the function itself which just happens to look like... a table.
I have been making Alton Brown's Very Basic Bread with fantastic results. http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/very-basic-br...
well yeah appeals is one thing, but it won't automatically clear them, I'm mainly thinking of how the Ted Stevens case was thrown out after a guilty verdict, due to prosecutor misconduct, surely there is the same thing for judges too.
You don't happen to be in a position to hire anyone, do you?
Databases of campaign contributions and legislative data are just tools. Posting the data (which is supposedly already "public," but is often hidden in a basement somewhere) online doesn't sprinkle fairy dust over the capital.

But people can (and do) use these tools to write books like the ones he links, and to pull data from different sources to uncover specific acts of corruption and malfeasance.

Databases are just as useful to reporters and authors as anonymous leaks and insider sources.
There is some truth to this. Socially marginalized people do tend to IT (I know, I am one of them!).
Car publicly available under an open-source licence
The middle age thing was just a reference to the general struggle between the church representation of the world and the emerging scientific approach. I agree with you on the racial prejudices. They are definitely not dead; many people seem to need them somehow. I suspect, though, that genetic profiling will become a more potent issue in the future.
And that linked Sunlight Foundation essay at the bottom seems awfully ad hominem.
Ask HN: Where can a person ask for specific startup advice in confidence?
I have a startup idea, but very little knowledge on how to implement it. What's the best way to get advice without risking someone else stealing it? General discussion forums are pretty public and are no doubt trawled by people looking for ideas to make money from.
World first for strange molecule
All but one of those (the yui one) is available on Oreilly's Safari bookshelf. ~$40/month is nothing to scoff at but if you're in an intense learning period, I find that it is a no brainer (you don't need to agree to more than a month).
Official torrent links here:
http://torrent.ubuntu.com:6969/
From the NYT article..."For one thing, it could be a thin market, on both sides of the trade. The Securities and Exchange Commission allows the trading of unregistered securities, but only for select investors. The new market will be open only to accredited investors and qualified institutional buyers, which the S.E.C. defines as financially sophisticated enough to invest in high-risk securities about which there is little public information. These include individuals whose net worth exceeds $1 million and institutions that manage at least $100 million in securities."

Understandable...but, drats. There are more than a few startups I would be interested in investing in, but I don't qualify as an accredited investor.
Just for the record: a couple of days later, a local newspaper had this story; their short piece said the box would boil 10 liters in 2 hours.

That's about double my optimistic estimate, which did not take into account any losses by conduction or convection. From the pics, the box doesn't seem to be as big as 1 meter square either.
I've never met someone who used any version of windows because they thought it was a reasonable way to interface with your computer, always for application compatibility.
The housing bubble would have crashed regardless of oil prices and availability. The severity of the crash might have been less if oil were abundant.
Indeed, and there are real examples of local reporters uncovering corrupt congressman based on data in these public records. This is a lot harder if they have to travel to DC and sit in a basement reading room to pore over paper ledgers.
Time Warner Cable wants legislation to eliminate competition
I wonder what's an easier engineering task, affordable fuel cells, or affordable high pressure hydrogen tanks?
Twitter-enabled box alerts customers to fresh bread
Worst tech predictions
Best Blogs for the Recession
Every time I go to HN from work I think to myself "is it blocked already ... is it blocked already ... phew!".

The company has a reasonably strict policy on internet usage, stuff like webmail is blocked, for example, but all development-related sites are not. However, they blocked the blogger.com 'dashboard' recently ... without blocking the site itself ... hmm ... so they might block HN one day, I won't be able to prove that it's 'work-related'.
The admins at work blocked HN simply because it had the word "hacker" in its name.
You'd think after the last time, they would have switched to a decent domain host that sends reminders.
Self-made

And if you don't like doing something, you won't invest yourself in getting better.

And if you love doing something, you won't really mind the drudgery of getting better.
Not so much over here. Half the guys in my department read it daily, or throughout the day :)
Yes, I get smirks and jabs from people who think I am trying to relive my misspent youth. 'Hacker New?!!? Bwahaa! Greetings Dr. Falken, do you want to play a game?'
Uhoh. Looks like someone forgot to renew the domains.
And yet, we still put up the techcrunch articles.
Thanks, I appreciate the link to Thrift. ... and I agree on the responsivity comment. I guess I'll look into setting up a daemon to my math in the background.
But from the side of the company, how do you determine if an applicant is unmotivated or incapable as opposed to just unchallenged and stuck in unproductive environments?
I'm excited for the next iteration when they revamp the default theme.

Ubuntu owns but it needs to look prettier out of the box to really grab prospective switchers.
these help:

http://www.winmatrix.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=13708

http://www.blackviper.com/WinVista/servicecfg.htm
This reads like a drunken rant from an Achewood character.
Researchers show how to take control of Windows 7
This particular rant is pretty Perl-specific. This may be more general: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/11/081120073130.ht...
Magic Boxes, Canned Chaos and Creative Totems
That no one thought of it is certainly the simplest explanation.
I think it's refreshing that Ubuntu doesn't go for the "shiny and blue" feel that Vista 7 and OS X are going for.

Also, 9.04 ships with 3 community themes that are very attractive.
People often do that here, with a new username and/or being vague about what their idea actually is.

If I, tdoggette, was working on something like Twitter, the "Ask HN:" thread would be "somehandle" asking HN about a startup that takes input from many users simultaneously and shares it with other users that I'm thinking of writing in Ruby and have no idea how to monetize.

I'm not advocating it, but it's certainly done.
Again, not an anti-MS person here, I support a large number of Windows clients, but it is not my OS of choice.

Maybe there are user interface tweaks that one can perform on Windows (do tell) but I can never seem to get it as minimal as running something like fluxbox on Linux (to say nothing of ratpoison, stumpwm, or xmonad). My very unscientific poll of the computer support staff at my office shows that there is fluxbox, openbox, and twm. My Windows usage is cursory, so maybe I'm totally wrong on this.
I do. On my work computer the OS is Ubuntu, and on my home computer it is windows 7. Personally, I like the Windows interface.
I used to care but now I've developed a healthy fuck you attitude. It is all about balance.

I once borrowed a stranger's (UW student) laptop in a cafe to quickly check HN and he was nervous. He said "Hey man, I'll kick your ass if you hack my computer". I was laughing too hard to think of a come back.
It's a slideshow. Here's the list, click through to TFA to see the descriptions and who made the predictions:

'iPod will die by next year'

'YouTube will not go far'

'No need for a computer at home'

Who needs more than 640 KB

TV won't last

'There will never be a bigger plane built'

'Spam will be solved'

eBay will be huge in China

'Telephone is inherently of no value'

Photocopiers are niche
I want to get some .lu domain names...ac.lu!
oh my - this could have been awesome
That article was written in english right? I read the whole thing and I'm not entirely sure...
Thoughts on hacking finance
STP, like so many things, is best expressed in rhyming verse:

Algorhyme

I think that I shall never see
a graph more lovely than a tree.
A tree whose crucial property
is loop-free connectivity.
A tree that must be sure to span
so packet can reach every LAN.
First, the root must be selected.
By ID, it is elected.
Least-cost paths from root are traced.
In the tree, these paths are placed.
A mesh is made by folks like me,
then bridges find a spanning tree.

Radia Perlman
> it makes no difference since every self-recursive call made has no further effect on the computation.

Yes, that's what I was trying to say. It's the same for non-self-recursive calls.

> If you meant that it doesn't record every function called in the history of the execution of the application

Yes I do mean that. Here's an example: http://www.lambdacs.com/debugger/

This records not only function calls but literally everything.
Because when I think "list," I think "clicking next and waiting ten times."

Re predictions, I'm slowly coming around to the view held by some economists that if you want accurate predictions, go to prediction markets where they're recorded, associated with people, and the incentives lead to making good predictions, not loud ones.
CakeFest #3: July 9-12, 2009
Adding The Label Tag
Anyone attending?
Oh dear, we've been rumbled!
Good stuff. WSGR continues to shine in helping entrepreneurs!

WSGR is literally a 'textbook' example of what a good law firm is. In my graduate entrepreneurial finance class, we studied a case where an entrepreneur had to choose between giving Rosati a non-trivial amount of equity in return for legal services or going to another law firm. Not knowing how important good lawyers are, when the professor suggested going with Rosati was the best course of action, I strongly argued against it. Since then, every time I have encountered a story about WSGR (often about Yokum and often on HN), I have been reminded of how wrong I was.
Click fraud fell to 13.8 percent, claims Click Forensics
Adding Hidden Fields
I can only suggest to try using the Dust Theme. It can be found in the package gnome-themes-ubuntu.
Virtual worlds server Opensim just got voice support
Those aren't minimal.

This is minimal:

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It's called a theory. Then you try and prove it using the scientific method. Then we move on to other problems.
In a sense, cheap oil (in the US and other countries) allowed the creation of far-flung suburbs that enabled the rocketship of suburban debt to launch.

Without those suburbs enabled by cheap oil, the housing crisis never would've been so severe, as no one would've thought of driving 50 miles each way to a McMansion every day in the middle of nowhere.
But when a large site like Facebook stops supporting IE6, lots of people will upgrade. Facebook is an "important" site, in that people want to use it, no matter what.

I'd say the majority of us web people aren't working for sites as large and important as Facebook -- thus, we can't dictate anything to our users. We can, however, benefit from the anti-IE6 momentum they create.

Killing IE6 has to start from the top.
The main difference is how closely linked the world economies are now than they were in the 70s. Additionally, CDOs made it nearly impossible to separate the subprime mortgages from the prime ones or even performing mortgates from non performing ones. Because of the incredibly complex nature of CDOs and the close linkage between financial instruments and world economies, the subprime crisis is (was) not so much a magnifier as the first domino.
I take a screenshot of my camera's small LCD while focusing on the subject.
I've been using it for about 10 years. Application compatibility is only a small part of why I stick with it.

(I have tried multiple Linux distributions and OS X)
With today's computers and the simplicity of most websites so could be said about flat text files or even XML-files queried realtime trough Xpath or Xquery

That does however not mean I would tout those technologies as good general databases.
Godaddy has had automatic renewal (as long as your credit card is still valid, of course!) for at least 4-5 years, I believe.
This piece is more fluffy than a cat in a dryer.
I've taken some introductions to law, but this is not something I'm competent in, but I would assume that the defendants could get the verdict invalidated if they could prove that the judge's affiliation with affiliation with that association was of the nature that he should be unfit for duty.

In all likelyhood, I think the outcome will have a lot to do with how media reacts to this. If they label the judge corrupt and fights for a retrial, the courts of appeal will have a hard time resisting.
I'm a fan of the CPAN Search design.
One option is LiteStep (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiteStep), which can make the Windows UI like AfterStep. A friend of mine uses it and claims it works very well.

Some other shell replacements exist, but I've never tried any of them.
People have been saying that for 2 years. "The next version" is always when they'll dump the sordid brown.
> the village ... now directly or indirectly employs a fifth of all working islanders. Most of the rest are engaged in fishing, also government-subsidized.

Dollars to donuts, we're looking at a case of massive subsidy from the national government.

Jobs may sound good, but if there's a ton of labor going into not-very-productive folks going through the motions (being paid to catch fish that are worth less than the cost of the labor that produces them!??!), then the whole thing is just an elaborate kabuki (pardon me) show masking the fact that it's fundamentally just a case of welfare transfers.