skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Gaudily syntax-highlighted code listings in (archer) gdb
Sell service instead. Like, if you develop a game, sell online access to maps which cannot be downloaded, but can be used once connected. Maintaining accounts is much easier than maintaining keys which can be cracked.
Google Server and Data Center Details
Thanks for posting this cogleethorpe. Big thanks to Jesse & gang at Rails Machine for making Moonshine and answering all my questions while I wrote up this guide.
Yeah, the "They laughed at Galileo, they laughed at Newton, they laughed at Bozo the Clown" effect. Just because people were slow to take to the web doesn't mean that anything people are slow to take to will be the next web.

First, I didn't like the tone of the article. My kneejerk reaction was "Don't tell me what I have to do". Secondly, I'd like to see some real analysis behind the statements. For example I keep hearing about Zappos, and twitter and what not, but I have been buying from Zappos for years because they have a large selection, fair prices, good photos and free fedex shipping both ways. I couldn't care less what they twitter about.

As to customer reviews, that is appropriate at the retail end. I am not going to go to Sennheiser's web site and look for headphone reviews. I am going to go to Amazon (did I mention how much I like free shipping both ways?) and read the reviews there. So browbeating Sennheiser into a blog, customer reviews and a twitter feed isn't going to make me more likely to buy their headphones. Reviews on Amazon saying "most confortable headphones I have ever bought; no sound leak; great audio quality; sturdier than the Other Brand" is what will make me buy.

As for blogs, god help me from another boring ill-conceived company blog. Over the course of a year, I consume products from hundreds of manufacturers and brands. You think I am going to add them all on my RSS feed? The blogs I read are by real human beings on deeply human topics. Not about which pair of shoes has sexy heels.

The reality is that in most cases, a consumer has a very brief relationship with a manufacturer eg, "My headphones broke. I need new headphones. I will research headphones. I will buy headphones. Done with headphones". A social network is based on building long term relationships. I do not want a long-term relationship with an entity I am only going to deal with once every three years.

Things like Nike are exceptions because it is a kind of brand that has fans, just like a sports team. It then becomes a special interest group, not just a commercial communication.

The comparison to Second Life is very apt, I find.
In America, you are poor if you only have one TV.

(The statistic you point out has bothered me for a long time, but it's hard to control people's spending priorities, and it's not like these people are buying new flatscreens with welfare checks. You can drive around any college town during May or August and pick up a working TV for free off the curb.)
How did the launch cost of Portfolio compare to the acquisition cost of Reddit?
Why not build a knowledge base whose content comes from phone conversations?
For example, consider all those phone conversations to company/government help lines.

Are you allowed to make those conversations public?
The fact that you don't have to provide a social security number doesn't say anything about the privacy guaranteed by flickr; if they keep logs of IPs, uploaders can be traced by location, which can often be mapped to a specific person.
I would actually disagree that these rules are not "taught" - I believe they are taught and learned, just as language is taught and learned, and the order in which you place adjectives, and in fact the entire language "structure" will in large degree depend on your primary language, and how your parents talked to you as an infant/toddler/child.
The Great CS Brain Teaser of 2009
"What ultimately matters most in life is how much money you make..."

Interesting value judgment there.
+1. Memcached is generally intended to be used as a writethrough cache, not a writeback cache - it's allowed to drop entries whenever it wants.
>it's not like these people are buying new flatscreens with welfare checks

this is a very good point. I wonder if there is data around that examines how welfare checks are spent.
Oddly enough on the lekking[1] front; I've gotten more comments in the last few months when I pull my smallish (8.9in.) netbook out and use it, than I've seen anyone get for using a Mac in the past couple of years.

1. Lekking - A gathering of males engaged in competitive mating displays http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lekking
I posted this article because I was interested to see what HN thinks on the issue of having broadband as a public utility.

Sure, you get faster internet because you're handing over control and subsidization to government, but then you're taking something that really should be in the hands of every private individual and allowing the government to get its hands into something that has traditionally been defined by open access and freedom.

Personally I'm very happy with my private fiber service and would much rather have a private company with consumer interests (supposedly) at stake instead of simply plugging into Big-Brother Net.

It would be naive to think the government isn't already monitoring, scraping, and sniffing every corner of the net that they can. However, it has to be a much easier pathway to abuse once Internet service leaves the hands of private enterprise.
Tried it before and found it completely useless. The only place I cared about using parallel compression / decompression was on large files, and since it does everything in memory it dragged my system into a swapping hell every time that I used it.
Tweetname Lets You Find And Purchase Domain Names Via Twitter
I'm really confused how people got along before A/C. If the A/C is broken or otherwise off, your windows are down and fans are running everywhere, and you are completely naked, it still feels like you are sitting inside a very hot wet oven.

I can hardly do anything but think of ways to get away from the heat (cold shower, going into the shade outside, going someplace with A/C) and falling asleep usually takes about four more hours than it should as I wallow around like a pig. Every 6-month 100-degree summer reminds me why I need to move out of the South.
Howard Anderson: The Management Gospel According To The Godfather
not trying to be picky, but...

2. you can scroll in windows without clicking, afaik

7. isn't that actually 'pixel saving'?

8. last time I checked, iMac's mouse had 3 buttons (and a squishable)...

9. pathfinder

10. hackintosh
A Programmer's Work-day
I have not watched TV for about 10 years. At home, I have a TV set, but the only connection it has is my home theatre.
What matters in life is different for everyone. For example, some might believe what really matters is what you've done to make the world a better place.

On another note, academic achievement != academic credentials, or IQ. Academic achievement == learning, ability, effort. Schools aren't a perfect vehicle for this, but I'd much rather improve what we have than throw it all out to focus our students on how to make money.

Thought experiment: Would it be more or less difficult for a student to become wealthy if everyone was taught how? How does this compare to mathematics?
Stackless is the opposite of what he wants, which is to take advantage of multi-core or multi-processor resources.
How would one teach an "entrepreneurship class?"

I do agree that there needs to be much more training on financial matters, including the matters that make a business run in the K-12 level.

On the other hand, a basic level of education is needed to succeed financially. Remember, 80% of billionaires went to college: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=551121 A large number of millionaires went to college: http://www.smartmoney.com/spending/rip-offs/10-things-millio...
This is very useful info-- a weekend or so ago I made an app in this area. With a little marketing I think there are some industries where you could get more sales.

You might actually look into making this into a web service where you store the images on your site with timelines, etc, to help the users sort through it. You may make more with a monthly free for the backend piece than you make on the front-end, but it does require more sysadmin work.

Thanks for sharing.
Have you ever hidden someone from your timeline? You already have an asymmetric Facebook, with too few hooks.
Ask HN: Has HN had a facelift or is it just me?
Just logged onto HN after install the new Kubuntu and I was confronted with this: http://imgur.com/28d4.png

Is this a new look (large bold fonts) or is this a KDE/ubuntu thing?
you say tomato i say tomato. the things you've listed aren't deal breakers for me. i've developed for a number of years now on all three systems and so far mac laptops take the cake easy. that's just me situation, though.

also, -1 for use preformatted text that ruins this whole discussion for everyone (without a wide browser window).
4: Would you care to back this up?

10: This has been shown time and again to be FUD. I won't even bother linking the appropriate articles.
Although I haven't read any of the 56 responses here, I'm probably safe in assuming:

1) No new insight into this earth-shattering issue will arise, even from the mighty minds on HN.
2) Even if 1) were wrong, it wouldn't change anyone's mind anyways.
it's just you :)
How to move a boat - or what you have to go through to do a startup
You tried it, although it was just released today?

since it does everything in memory it dragged my system into a swapping hell

Well, it just keeps pending blocks in memory. It should be quite easy to bound the worst-case memory consumption (at some cost to parallelism), as they note in the article.
i'm curious why public streams and search are so cool.
I think powerful ideas should speak for themselves, and not rely on the "edginess" (read: trendiness) of the presenter to come across crystal-clear.

If the Rails community were full of powerful ideas they wouldn't have problems attracting and maintaining an audience of like-minded folk (including women). I think, rather, for the most part they are trendoids with MacBooks, seeking ego gratification by demonstrating "projector code" (i.e., code that looks great on a projector and works great when you demo it to your prezo audience but which may have serious issues (maintainability, scalability, composability with other people's code, etc.) in the real world). The result is the current situation: de-evolution into MTV presentation, where the goal is to be as shocking as possible in order to keep the audience's attention.
Tickets Printing
Absolutely. I'm trying to wrap my head around it but I can't.
It turns out you are absolutely correct. Thanks for pointing that out.

"Stackless python does not make use of any kind of multi-core environment it runs on."

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/377254/stackless-python-a...
This axiom could serve as a great launch-pad for introducing set theory.
digg==reddit?
Politically there is a difference, numerically there is not.

While handing out money for people to research whatever they want would be a non starter, people are happy to have the tax code do the same thing. Granted, procedurally when handing out money the government likes to say what you do with it, but manipulating the tax code is seen as more reasonable even thought the costs are identical.

My point is if we are going to be handing out money through targeted tax breaks we should still treat it as spending tax payers money, because that's the net effect is.
There are lots of daily uses where it would be ideal to have a decent-sized screen and no keyboard. Web surfing in bed (or lying on the couch,) playing simple games in bed, using recipes in the kitchen, videos and news on the road (like an iPhone without the iStrain.) Put a notch in the back so you can hang it on a wall, and it's even more versatile (and even better in the kitchen.) Plus it would be a nice compromise for traveling when the iPhone isn't enough -- have a bluetooth keyboard in your hotel room for blogging and email, carry a nice thin tablet during the day.

Actually, that last scenario pretty much sums it up. It's a small laptop with no hinge, with the keyboard reduced to an optional accessory that you can leave in your briefcase, or in your hotel room, or on your bedside table, or wherever, except when you actually want to bother with it.

Of course, most tablets fail by integrating the keyboard, keeping the hinge, and not providing a decent touch-screen interface. Really decent tablet interfaces have been limited to special-purpose applications for medical entry, warehouse inventory, GPS, or what-not.
I asked my dad the same thing and here was his trick to fall asleep at night:

He had a ceiling fan but no AC. So he would wrap himself in a blanket until he was soaked with sweat. Then he took the blanket off and laid on his sheet and let the fan blow on him thereby evaporating the sweat. This would cool him down and allow him to sleep.
Oddly enough, my landlord is one of the organizers of this event.
Two serial entrepreneurs become MySpace executives
The kitchen is the only use case I can see working. A netbook/laptop is far more usable in bed than a tablet would be.

>> "have a bluetooth keyboard in your hotel room for blogging and email"

The bottom bit of a laptop isn't just there for the keyboard, it's there to hold the display at a nice viewing angle. So you'd need some extra device for that as well.

Maybe it'd take off, who knows...
I would not assume that home schoolers lock their kids up. Rather that the other kids are locked up in school.

So homeschooled kids may have less opportunity to socializing with "school-aged" peers --- unless there are other homeschoolers around.
As usual Linux firefox is the sux. I don't see how it manages to render HN news so differently to the windows version.
What do you mean by "welfare". Food stamps are accepted at certain locations for certain items. Unemployment insurance is a general check - but that isn't exactly welfare.
I assumed it was the same as this:

http://compression.ca/pbzip2/

Though looking again, it seems like it's a separate implementation.
They're not using it for its purpose. See: http://www.w3schools.com/tags/att_meta_name.asp

Description: Defines a description of the document

The "document" in this case is a specific tweet which can best be described with its content since it is a self-imposed summary as-is. In short, you're wrong.
In your case internet connection is not household item but office equipment.
What it's like to work for a SaaS Startup
So you are saying unless we can empirically determine otherwise, we should always assume the worse?
Gerald Weinberg's book The Secrets Of Consulting IMO is a much better view of the give and take of giving business advice. Grad school has become far more popular than it used to be and a lot of people seem to promote it as worthwhile to students (paying large tuition, and spending extra years in school) and business (paying high initial salaries and rapidly promoting the grad school graduates). The book "The Big Test" talks about a new class of "Mandarins" - people who have high test scores, get advanced degrees and get high end jobs in business or government as a result. Bill and Hillary Clinton are two of his examples.
>All three systems

What does this mean?
Well, actually if you follow the comment thread - it's not really likely. Most folk are clamoring about how poor an idea this is.
Switching to Story Focused Daily Standups
ReadWriteStart Has Started
What is cool about the abysmal window manager? The looks? Nope. The functionality. It is complete and it is usually supported by the average Mac app.
What are the successes of renewable energy?

On earth Wind, and Hydro power. In space solar.

It might not look like a major breakthrough, but cost per watt dropped in the 90's in large part due to DOD funding. The sterling solar dish design also comes from that area but it's not really in large scale use at this point in time.

PS: Today Wind in the right area is cheaper than coal which is a major win IMO. And while solar is still pricey it's vary modular so it's useful vary useful for a lot of non grid connected applications. Like solar lighting outdoors and remote weather stations.
When I was laid off a little over a month ago, I was looking for things to get rid of. Even though I have a cellphone, I kept the landline: I knew I was going to be doing a lot of interviews over the phone, and I knew that my cellphone drops a lot of calls and generally sounds crappy inside the house.
There is a difference between "home air conditioning", i.e. central air, and independent A/C units. I live in Boston and would be insane to go the summer without A/C, but a few portable units strategically placed work fine.

Even still, there are countries far hotter than the United States which do not generally (or never) have A/C and they seem to survive just fine. Perhaps the definition of "necessity" is the argument here, but in a strict-leaning sense, A/C is hardly a necessity. None of the things on that list are, really.
I think it's pretty much SF author Ken Macleod who's labeled it that.
> You tried it, although it was just released today?

The version from clik was released today. Parallel bzip2 has been around for at least a couple of years. In fact, just doing a search for parallel bzip2 will lead you right to both an SMP/threaded version as well as one that uses MPI. I am guessing this is what was being referred to regarding the memory-consumption issues.
MySQL and Sphinx at Craigslist (presentation by Jeremy Zawodny)
Apparently, Startup is the new black. Maybe it's the economy and looking like "the only option" to a lot of folks that have been laid off.

For IT-related startups, though, I'll still be likely to go first to HN to find the stories that really matter.
Whatever the case, it would be significantly easier to correct GCC's shortcomings instead of starting afresh (and facing all those shortcomings, and others, again).
Mastering the art of indexing
Well, GE is certainly interested in the copyright enforcement ideas behind this media, but there are still commercial uses.

I suspect that a fairly common use for commercial users would be medical imaging storage -- huge amounts of data, but rarely accessed. A few other pluses for medical applications: hospitals care about volumetric density so that they don't have to store giant piles of USB keys; they don't want to have to maintain electronics on a per-disc basis so harddrives aren't the best solution.

Just a thought, but GE usually markets towards industries with technological applications rather than computer technologies themselves.
How social media will change hiring
I'm making a living with Brushes, a painting app for the iPhone (http://brushesapp.com). I started developing it about a year ago, and it's been on sale since August 2008. Sales didn't really take off until January, when the work of one of my artists got picked up by a lot of blogs (and eventually Gizmodo). It was subsequently featured on the front page of the iTunes App Store and that was certainly helpful.

At this point, I'm somewhat reluctant to work on new iPhone apps. There are so many apps on the store that it's far too easy to get lost in the noise. An iPhone game that some friends and I released back in December was DOA. I will admit that I haven't fully cracked the marketing nut yet though.

I'm actually looking for an exceptional graphic designer in the SF Bay area with whom to collaborate on some iPhone/Mac OS X projects if anyone is interested.
In China, Knockoff Cellphones Are a Hit
Have you ever looked at the source of GCC? :-)
I typically move my 15" ThinkPad around by grabbing about (checking...) four inches of the corner with one hand. I admit it's a strain to hold it up and type with the other hand, but a tablet would be lighter and more compact. The ThinkPad is heavy and has a long lever arm.
I used to think of commas as verbal pacing cues as well, but they have more in common with parentheses or semicolons in code. The rule I remember now is "Commas are for parsing, not rendering."
A single computer cannot be the internet either.

Essentially the internet is a much more accessible version of the postal system, which has dated back for centuries. I send you a piece of paper requesting such and such information, you being the server sends me back a piece of paper with all the information I requested. Just instead of taking several weeks to send a request from one side of the world to the other, it may only take a few seconds.

Incidentally the version of the internet protocol being tested for use in space behaves even more like a postal system as they want to be able to store information in relay stations. So rather ironically, in the far future the internet will likely operate more like the postal service than ever before.

The mere fact of the matter is that until computers begin creating things exclusively of their own, all things computers run are made of the human mind and built of human systems and experience.

You refer to data miners, however have you ever seen the server farms they use for such tasks? There's thousands of computers in them, and incidentally tens or hundreds of thousands of individual processors.

I'd argue that when comparing a human to a computer, you should be comparing a human to a single core processor. Your data mining example is complete bunk when you consider the sheer amount of processors they use. Can 100,000 people do a data mining task? I'd guess yes.

Ed: If you doubt my claim that a large group of people cannot be the equivalent of a server farm for data mining, then you should read up on the history of how the Enigma Machine was cracked. The British invented the Colossus computer system specifically to speed up the work already done by humans in Bletchley Park.

Cryptanalysis is much more complicated than mere data mining, especially considering the enigma machine was actually designed to change to make it even more difficult to decipher. If people can do mass cryptanalysis, people can do data mining.
It's a very important book, but I don't know about "required reading for all hackers"
They have added an asymmetric relationship: "fans" rather than "friends". It's a matter of better surfacing it and making it available for individuals, not just "Pages"

EDIT: I was right, there is a new "Subscribe to John" link on profiles today.
I would argue that such a "degree" already exists. Simply start a small business. If it's successful and you decide to move on to something else, having created and run a successful small business will look great on your resumé. If it's unsuccessful, then I guess you flunked out.
for better or worse in many cases fb still acts like a young startup, they try new things, change stuff and are constantly shipping new features. I love that they are an independent company. These traits more than anything else is why they are crushing myspace in the main stream crowd, and staying current with the early adopters.
Confusing constants and variables in computer programming
I'm not saying he's not right, I'm saying I couldn't stomach the post long enough to get to his long, drawn out conclusion. I refuse to read 1000 words when 25 would do. Every blog post by this guy is bitter shit. If he could control his rage long enough to compose his thoughts, he might not suck so much.

As it is he rants and raves and complains and it sucks. Just my two cents though, I could be wrong.
I meant welfare to mean cash payments to the poor as provided for in the Welfare Reform act of 1996. [1]

You brought up a good point to differentiate this from food stamps and unemployment.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_Reform_Act_of_1996
try this:

sudo apt-get install msttcorefonts
sudo fc-cache -fv