skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Especially since MySQL would never have sold out to Oracle directly.
And if she likes the service (read: helps her career (nothing wrong with that)), she'll keep talking about, and bring more users.
Interesting and wrong-headed: the idea was both to optimize the architecture for C functional calls and to allow the processor to "scale" (hence the name) by adding to the register file without breaking the ABI (which you'd have to do to, say, add an %EFX register to x86).

But: call stack depth on modern programs pushed register performance up against L1 cache performance for the C stack, and SPARC's convolution register spill/fill seems to have been a liability. More importantly, adding registers has not over the last decade been the primary mechanism by which processor speed is "scaled".

There are hardware people here that could articulate this more accurately and correctly than me; I've got some SPARC assembly game, but I'm not a hardware design guy. But when I say the ISA has been discredited, I'm talking about things like register windows.
You'll have to spot the Hype Cycle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_Cycle

<br />
I have often tweeted a picture by emailing posterous and making the subject what i'd like to tweet. It works really well, and the picture also goes to Flickr & Tumblr, which is hot.
well the point is, and i think this is the original poster's point...questions like this are not relevant to what facebook is doing, and even if it is, its the kind of thing you look up.
It would have been interesting to see the study done in an Indian city. Most are multilingual and have near-native fluency in those languages.
The best hope for merging might be that BtrFS adopts ZFS's on-disk format as an alternate to it's existing ext-based one.
Significant Events In The Life Of Objects
What if Smalltalk were invented today?
Check your PHP UTF-8 Checklist
Yes. My wife's from Namibia and her mother tongue is Afrikaans (but she speaks English as well as we do). We try to speak mostly Afrikaans to our daughter Marica, who's now two. Our theory is that "she'll learn English anyway", and that's definitely what's happening (we speak mostly English to each other).

I've been learning Afrikaans as Marica does -- which is actually a great way to learn, because you start at "kid level" and get tons of practice conversing. Still, I have to resort to English quite a bit.

You'd almost think she'd learn half as fast, because she's learning two languages at the same time. But it's pretty much the opposite -- she's significantly ahead of most kids her age in both languages.

I'm biased, of course, but what I read in that article really matches up to our experience with Marica. So I rate the bilingual thing. But you really have to use that second language -- plan to speak it 100% of the time, and you'll end up with at least 50%. :-)
Startup Founders: Should You Divide Equity Equally?
it doesn't matter. employees only become rich if the stock goes crazy. lots of profitable companies have craptastic stocks.
The only thing I can think of is http://joyent.com/

Initially they were a FreeBSD shop, I think Sun gave them heavy subsidies to switch to OpenSolaris on Sun hardware. I'm not sure how much the sweetheart deal was relaxed as Joyent grew.
Does this kind of sentiment really belong in a thread about Stephen Hawking's illness?

Besides which, you're way off-base. Most of the guys at the range where I shoot are suburban dads. Many of them are irreligious (if not outright atheist/agnostic), most of the rest are religious in only the vaguest sense of the word. There are a few people with a lot of Jesus bumper stickers, but they've never been anything but polite to me.

You are right that there's more than the usual support for the Republicans, but that's to be expected. Why would gun owners favor the party that favors gun control?
Kyro, I agree-- twitter and posterous is like peanut butter and jelly -- they're complementary and are better together!
I agree 100%. I still count not being able to answer that question as a deficit in my own knowledge and have done work post-that to be able to answer those types of questions in the future. It doesn't change my opinion about the experience, unfortunately.
I believe there have been several court cases that have established that caching is OK.
Hackers: Intern for the Summer, Get Paid for a Year
How about Giropay? Is it taking of?
Now that it has aqcuired Sun, it can make those Exadata appliances itself, without HP. That's basically what Oracle said they were going to do today.
To be fair, that's not quite the same as perl/shell-style interpolation.

In perl, "$x" pulls the value of $x from the variable namespace. In your Py2.6 example, the "{x}" format in the string has nothing to do with a variable named x; rather it references the keyword args supplied to format.

To simulate perl's

print "x: $x";

you would

print "x: {x}".format(x=x)
Imagine a merger [between countries], by Scott Adams
I would really be interested in his first experience after death...

Will he be able to find a way to communicate to us?

That would be really ingenious, because all of the rest is only opinion, and opinions are all and always questionable...
Follow quality of Java code throughout time
Interesting point. But, I would guess the resulting wage deflation of opening up our markets completely (increasing labor supply) would outpace the deflation of medical expenses, and I doubt the latter would ever catch up completely. Therefore, those expensive government programs would have to be funded with much less tax revenue due to lower wages. I don't think that would fix the problem at all.
Why voice-acting in games is bad
They'd spend quite a bit of their social capital with the Linux community if they tried to be private that way.

I've also heard rumblings that a primary motivator behind the CDDL (and GPL incompatibility) was a core group of old Solaris devs at Sun that would have been royally pissed off if their work was GPLed. I wonder if Oracle would care if they quit en masse.
What if the link is to an older story that was submitted a while back?

I ask because there's plenty of new readers everyday on HN who most probably have never seen the link the first time it was submitted.
Economists today are in a way the scientists of the renaissance. Back then it was the church that couldn't accept the world view of Copernicus and Galilei. Today it is the politicians that won't accept free trade and long-term fiscal responsibility. I wonder if the day will come when politicians accept economics the way they accept gravity?

Disclaimer: I don't really mean to compare economics with the hard sciences, just the way they are treated.
Long hours put workers at risk of dementia
Exhibit A: Why the Digg bar was a bad idea, you tick off your creators
Writing Block Methods with automatic Resource Cleanup
Why Oracle Won't Kill MySQL
This works well a lot of the time, but there are cases where raising a child to be bi or tri-lingual can cause all sorts of problems due to difficulty in acquiring fluency in at least one language. The problems can eventually manifest themselves as behavioral issues.

Working in my field linguistics course, we had to do quite a bit of work with these children. Often times, switching to one primary language at home caused the issue to go away within a few months (for children under a certain age).
I don't have a netbook so I never test it in low specification computer. But someone complains about that's before too. With this kind of effect, it's inevitable. I wouldn't suggest you use it in a heavy site.
History suggests that it was. My guess, based on the amount of prevarication by the banks, is that the market won't return to its former highs for 10-15 years.
I dunno, you don't have to be Wozniak to use a blue box...
By what standard is that astonishing? Or here's another question: If that's such an astonishing number why did the Techcrunch article feel the need to exaggerate it?

For God sakes it's a free service. 1 in 20 takers when there is 0 barriers to entry isn't astonishing. Maybe, MAYBE if 1 in 20 became active users that would be impressive but I doubt even that will happen.
The sad reality is that his family's image had to be carefully managed order for Obama's presidency to become a reality. It would have been very difficult for anything less than Huxtable-like perfection to keep the Obamas palatable to middle America. Even with the Obama family's nearly sterling image, Obama smears still got some traction in the sticks amongst those who think he's some sort of sinister, un-American, terrorist fist-jabbing secret Muslim who's not even an American citizen.

I guarantee you that if the Obamas looked like a black version of the Palin family (with questionable intellectual pedigree, teenage pregnancy, an uneducated spouse in a radical secessionist party, and close in-laws with predicate felonies and drug problems), the electorate would not have let Barack Obama anywhere near a major party nomination, let alone the presidency.
Apple's Mac Business To Shrink For First Time Since 2003
Last time I wrote a very rudimentary sign so that anyone could identify us. I don't have access to a printer now but if someone wants to print a sign it would be great.

Last time we just introduced ourselves, I'm with @blackguardx, it's more fun to just introduce yourself, you might even meet someone new that's not from the meetup hehe
In the slides from that talk he actually anchored the start of Silicon Valley with Hewlett Packard. I blogged last year that Federal Radio was a much better starting point, See http://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2008/11/05/steve-blank-on-secre... based on Timothy J. Sturgeon’s "How Silicon Valley Came to Be" where he notes:

The fact that the San Francisco Bay Area’s electronics industry began close to the turn of the Twentieth Century should lay to rest the notion that industrialization and urbanization on the scale of Silicon Valley can be quickly induced in other areas. Silicon Valley is nearly 100 years old. It grew out of a historically and geographically specific context that cannot be recreated. The lesson for planners and economic developers is to focus on long-term, not short-term developmental trajectories. Silicon Valley was the fastest growing region in the United States during the late 1970s and early 1980s; but that growth came out of a place, not a technology. Silicon Valley’s development is intimately entwined with the long history of industrialization and innovation in the larger San Francisco Bay Area.

See http://web.mit.edu/ipc/publications/pdf/00-014.pdf
That's part of why... I think he also wants to let people know there is a lot to running a small company that people don't write publicly about. And the ones that survived their early days and have profit + momentum often write about high level things that don't _really_ matter when you don't have enough money for tomorrow's payroll.
KDE3.x being brought back with Kubuntu 9.04
It's definitely useful in moderation. I think most of us would agree that we find a lot of the comments to be valuable and insightful, as with some of the articles.

Of course, "in moderation" is key here. Spending all day on the site probably isn't a good use one ones time. Popping in for a few minutes throughout the day is probably pretty safe to do.
I got asked the same SQRT question from FB (this was over the phone mind you). Not sure if I should give the the name of the interviewer. I bet it was the same guy. Anyway, the interviewer asked me to go to a FB site where we can collaborate and he can see what I am coding. He asked me this question and did not budge away from it. It was just ridiculous. For the life of me, I tried various different methods, even going to wikipedia but it was extremely complicated to code that up in a short period of time. We spent half the interview on this question. I decided to go work for Google, a much better company, instead.
I like the ending.

"Now, fast forward five years to 1997, when The Trentonian decided to look up William Figueroa to see how he was doing after his hour of fame.

By then, he was a 17-year-old high school dropout who had fathered a child and was working a low-paying job at an auto showroom."

Yeah, don't call anybody an idiot for a small error...
Ask HN: tracking a criminal down electronically
Recently a rogue real estate broker defrauded me of $2000, which to me is a decent sum of money. I reported the matter to the authorities; however, they are having issues tracking the guy down physically because they are using fairly outdated methods (Visiting everyone in the neighborhood to ask if they've seen him lately? Come on, what is this, 1980?)
Anyway - I know the e-mail address that the guy uses. I know the phone number that he uses. All of that stuff leaves an electronic trail that is, in the end, traceable to a physical location. Anyone have experience with how to do this, correctly and legally?
Ask HN: Now that Oracle owns Sun, do you think Postgres will take off
Be it based on fact or fiction, unix geeks are a finicky bunch. Do you think the adoption rate of Postgres will skyrocket due to the paranoia of unix geeks around the world and Oracle's potential to meddle?
Isn't this the site where entrepreneurs go, those people that compete on being better. Not the site where salary-slaves go to whine about having to defend their salaries?
I see, thanks! I don't understand everything you are saying, but I still. I think rather than looking at individual laws and financial constructs, it would be more interesting to study why people accepted investments without transparency. I think more transparency might be the correct answer, rather than regulations as to what kinds of investments should be allowed for whom.

I remember reading about another stock market bubble (I think India Tea Company), where at one point someone sold shares for a "venture whose activity shall only be revealed later", who then disappeared overseas with the investors money. But really, if people are willing to invest in that kind of thing (0 transparency, extreme risk), can laws really help, and would they be the right answer?
I actually thought that was kind of funny. He's pretty dope too.
Many square root methods have been devised, notable among them the Newton method, devised by the guy that invented calculus..

How does front-end design work significantly overlap with this? I would wager that one could quiz the best CSS/Javascript gurus in the world and not a single one would know, nor care.
A foolish article - why the graphic about browser wars, when the real comparison is between Office Enterprise and things like Google Docs (who will surely be competing against Oracle + Sun now)?

Yes, the OS is less relevant now as many users don't need more computing power than a netbook + SAS can provide, but it still matters. High-powered consoles won't kill PC games, I doubt I'll be editing HD video over the net any time soon (although I wouldn't object), and no large corporation or medium is going to outsource its operations to some third-party provider of cloud services.

Just because something is commoditized doesn't make it irrelevant. Cars are functionally identical for 90% of drivers but people still have preferences there.
I dunno if I am stating the obvious, here, but Twitter's inanity is entirely dependent on whose "tweets" you are reading.

More generally, in the community I am involved in, Twitter has stepped into the gap left by the lack of a comfortable mechanism of interaction through Atom/RSS feeds ("blogs", comments and trackbacks are not convenient enough to use for many purposes).
hang in there Stephen!!
I don't care. I'll keep using Postgres whatever happens because it's the best thing out there as far as I'm concerned.
Google News Timeline Offers A New Way To Search The Past
While I wouldn't say that drug makers are marketing stimulants to the healthy, I would say that they are not differentiating enough between medical use and use for cognitive enhancement.

It seems like the drugs are being marketed as a way to improve life, not just a way to treat a pathological illness. The difference may be subtle, but it is there. Advertisements usually show a kid's life changed for the better, whether it is making more friends, or getting better grades. These are probably all accurate. But everyone has had these problems to some extent. And these ads don't really differentiate between symptoms of an illness, and symptoms caused by some other problem, and viewers can't really tell the difference themselves. So these drugs are somewhat being marketed as a brain booster.
maybe not skyrocket, but it will definitely tip some scales into the postgres side. there's going to be some movement.
Google Similar Images First Look
The importance of upgrades has always been overblown by a tech media written by the kind of people who pay attention to new OS releases. For most people, the OS isn't a product separate from the computer.

What's changed is the PC market reached saturation shortly after XP dropped in 2001. Older versions of Windows weren't upgraded voluntarily so much as swept along with the exponential growth of the overall market. If Microsoft didn't drop support and licensing of new copies to force upgrades, plenty of companies would be happy to stick with XP for years to come.
That's why submitting the canonical URL is preferred, because the HN duplicate detector then upvotes the original submission, and takes you (the submitter) to that thread.

But The Economist doesn't make this easy by posting stories with so many different URLs. I've gradually figured out which form of the URL is the main form, and try to submit Economist stories that way. Those tend to be the first-submitted URLs here on HN.
Title seems to imply that it's an official decision, and that's a bit disingenuous.

The normal release will continue with KDE4 and keep pushing it until it's stable. This is just for people "who are not quite ready to take the jump to KDE4.x."
It matters completely, if Facebook can't get a plan together to make tons of money there won't be an IPO to bring in the fuck-you money. Right now they are unprofitable and have no great outlook that would lead to an IPO.
That is a fascinating hack of the real world. I could see this being readily applicable to construction in desert climates; my first question would be about the water budget necessary to support the biological glue.
Is he right? There are places in the world where democracy doesn't work very well. I'd say that this is the sort of question that deserves actual thought instead of the regular "Democracy Uber Alles!" platitudes that we get so often.

(Yes, I know what Churchill said about democracy. However, Churchill would have said the same thing about absolute Monarchy if it were still around. He was that sort of guy.)
Does the NYT really think that xkcd is "wildly popular among techies the world over for its witty use of programming code in its gags"? I literally winced at that. Are newspapers legally obligated to get it subtly wrong when talking about subjects that I, personally, know about?
'Hard work' is a relative term. In the end, it's all about competition. If you're building anything worthwhile, you will have competitors - if not in the beginning, after you launch. In order to be better than the competition, working smart is not enough, because you're not the only smart person around. The only option is to work smarter and harder than the competition. Now you could be in an industry where everyone works 8 hours a day, so working harder wouldn't give you too much incremental advantage. Unfortunately (or fortunately for those who can work 'hard'), tech startups are not that industry.
I'm missing the part where an unpaid intern can support living in SF and working up to 7 days a week, esp in software where pretty much every internship in industry pays quite nicely
Yes, I had that exact same experience. It was a form they use that lets them see as you type. You have to be logged into your FB account, then they look up your name. After it was over, I ended up writing back to the recruiter who setup the manager and told them about this experience and how unprofessional it was. Kudos for getting a job at a company that has a real business.
How did you find the broker? A website or some service?

Anyways post up the info and I'll see if I can find him. There is pretty much 10 or so steps to go through to see if there is info about the guy online
http://www.fool.com/investing/dividends-income/2009/01/09/fo...

Summary:

# John Paulson

# Nouriel Roubini

# Meredith Whitney

# Nassim Nicholas Taleb

# Peter Schiff
From what I've observed, when people say they spend "X hours a day working" (for some outrageously high X) what they're really talking about is how much time they spend at work, which is not the same thing. These quantitative games are a bit silly. It reminds me of when people brag about how many lines of code they churn out, as if that were a good thing.

There is a real issue, though. Most startups demand an intensity of commitment that is difficult to reconcile with part-time engagement or even, it seems, with so-called work-life balance.
There's a huge barrier to entry. First, you need to be paying attention during that particular part of the show. Second, you need a computer and an internet connection. Third, you need to have it nearby when you're watching Oprah - you're not going to remember to do it otherwise. Then you need to figure out what to do. Then you need to go through the signup process. Finally, having signed up you need to find Oprah again (not so easy if you don't understand URLs very well, like most people who use the internet) and click "follow".

1/20 is astonishing.
You're right that it's not the right opportunity for everyone. For people with a little more flexibility (or who are already in the Bay Area) and want a more entrepreneurial summer experience that coding for a big software company, we think this could be pretty sweet.

You'll put SW into people's hands almost immediately, get to work through the business implications of what you're building, and more. We also hope that this becomes seriously lucrative for the intern(s) over the course of the next year.

Also keep in mind that this is an experiment, in many ways. We haven't tried this before, and we don't know anyone else who has, either. It's a relatively risky internship in that sense, but one with pretty significant upside potential, too.
In Defense of the Dark Ages
Please... Leave this ad for late night infomercials.

Use jobberbase.com, build your own, and get 100%
Indeed, 10% sounds pretty low. 10% sounds like what it would be fair for the company to retain.
It's still being brought back, however. KDE3 is not in the Hardy repositories _at all_, and adding it into your system without compiling everything by hand can seriously fuck your system over.
I just used Posterous to successfully document my daughter's arrival into the world.

I give it two thumbs up.

It was painless and straightforward to snap pictures on my iPhone and immediately have my family see them. And given the state of sleep deprivation we're going through, mindless is exactly where I need stuff to be.
This is a hot research topic right now in the social sciences. The general theme is that democratic institutions (transparency, professionalism, corruption-resistance) are probably more important at first than actual democracy.

http://www.amazon.com/Wars-Guns-Votes-Democracy-Dangerous/dp...

The "Asian Tiger" economies -- South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan -- all started ramping up their growth under extremely authoritarian governments which then liberalized once they had reached a certain level of prosperity.
In my experience, Chinese people tend to be more critical in general (and correspondingly less affected by criticism.) Maybe that's a massive overgeneralization, but if you transplant this taxi driver to the United States, he would have the same complaints about Americans.