skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
SugarSync IMHO takes a backwards approach to syncing. Their original model didn't even include historical versions - wrong way syncs destroyed data! The system works by observing and then replaying the events (file creation, moves, etc.) observed on one device to others.

SpiderOak implements a different approach, having initially built a comprehensive journaling backup. Sync happens as a result of logically combining the journal entries from all available end points. There's no "event replay." The final state for a folder is calculated based based on the user's likely intent from the totality of all actions taken in each folder over time. The set of actions to perform locally on any device is the diff between the calculated end state and the local state.

There are still some good points here. The cross platfrom issues mentioned are subtle. (and SugarSync doesn't even support Linux.) For instance, ":" is a valid character in Mac/Linux filenames but not Windows. And the case sensitivity/insensitivity can create conflicts where they wouldn't otherwise exist.

For character encoding, Windows is actually the easiest with Unicode natively stored. Mac and most Linux distros use UTF_8 but there's nothing stopping users from dumping a bunch of filenames with arbitrary heterogeneous encodings all in the same folder.
It's an overly simplistic interpretation. The more poignant way to frame this would be a specialist-vs-generalist view; if you're overly specialized and never crawl out of your hole you miss opportunities for synergy.

Programming is a good "glue" for generalist approaches because it acts as a stepping stone to automatizing a specialized process.
What is a Crackpot?
Sure, this PDF should give you all the info you need:
http://www.apc.univ-paris7.fr/~beau/IMG/pdf/cppmath_ug2b.pdf

Scribd: http://www.scribd.com/doc/15194614/MATLAB-C-Libraries
There are multitudes of under-served fans in the region. Yes they go to Sabres and Leafs games. But the Leafs have the longest waiting list and the highest prices of any team (all while serving up a very sub-par on ice product). Tickets are largely locked up by corporate season ticket holders and the "regular fan" has enormous difficulty obtaining an over-priced ticket. Hockey is, by far, the number one sport. There would be no need whatsoever to create new fans. The existing market would buy anything and everything a new team would be selling.
Stip unused fields from HTML form submissions
Actually, this is a demo reel of former 3D Realms artist Bryan Brewer.

http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/58562
I completely agree but know nothing about the space. What is the current thinking on the best way to tackle this? Who is poised to dominate this field?
Pretty much every major ISP in the country has told the government that they have their heads up their proverbial asses if they think this is going to work.

There is plenty of talk on whirlpool about this and throughout various local news sites.

Unfortunately, as someone mentioned above - this is a political move to pander to some more conservative independent seats, so that the current government can get more of their own agenda's pushed through.
they need support from outside their own party if they really want to get anything done.

I thought Rudd had already broken the record for most time spent overseas for any PM in Australia's history.... Seems like he's getting plenty done[1].

Oh wait, you mean getting stuff done in the country? Nevermind.

[1] - for those who don't know, our current PM was elected after it was brought to light he used a tax payer funded overseas trip to visit a strip club in New York. Since becoming PM, he has spent more time overseas than any other Australian PM in history...
Well, here in the US I believe we spend more (as a function of GDP) than the French do, but the results are less good overall. India spends relatively little but they have a different philosophy about medicine (I don't mean 'alternative' medicine, but health administration, scheduling etc).

I think our heavily private system is failing in the US for two reasons:
1. health consumers can never be fully informed without getting a medical degree, and indeed they can't get access to facilities or tools without one; and 2. healthcare isn't an asset that you can choose to buy at a given time. You can't decide to have your heart attack at 30 when your recovery prospects are very high, or to postpone developing a chronic condition while you make more money to buy better health insurance. Ill health is, to a large extent, something that happens to you rather than something you can plan for, notwithstanding the benefits of maintaining a healthy lifestyle.

With limited knowledge, limited ability to make decisions, and limited ability to schedule your healthcare spending, it's very hard for normal market conditions to prevail. Though one can buy insurance, there is a massive gulf between the information available to the supplier and the consumer, and suppliers leverage this to give consumers a poor deal.
I'd trade Sun-evil for Microsoft-evil any day.
Refresh Alerts Come to Facebook Home Page ‘Stream’
Trying to disprove things is the best way to get in touch with reality
I seriously doubt that immigration is driving Americans out of engineering/programming. Let's take a look at some basic numbers.

The median household income in the US about $50k, men's medial income is 45K and women's is 35K. If you assume a two income family with median earners their income will be approx $80k. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_...)

Salaries in the tech industry (even at very low positions) are much higher than this (i.e., than 50k, 45k, 35k). This is now when salaries are supposedly low due to immigration.

I do see that Americans respond to economic incentives in other professions. During the real estate bubble a HUGE number of people passed the realtor exams and got into the real estate business.

Programming/computer skills are the easiest skills to pick up (no need for expensive equipment). I'm actually very puzzled that there aren't more Americans in engineering/programming.

I'm unconvinced that fear of immigration-induced salary decreases is the reason why Americans don't want to go into engineering.
Severe proof that the animals are not given enough mental stimulation in a zoo.
Well said.

We live in a society where more data than ever is stored systematically and widely available, but we haven't yet developed the tools to cope with the resulting information overload. I suspect this is why we see popular trends like using Facebook and Twitter: even if people did have the time to take part in genuinely deep, creative, insightful interactions, there's so much to talk about that soundbite discussions rule.

It doesn't help that the media is increasingly full of superficial "don't make me think" material. Sometimes, it's the endless echo chamber that is most of the blogosphere and online forums: today, I reckon about 90% of the posts I've seen are just links to other posts that are top 10 lists of other posts that might, if you're lucky, include one or two original bits of writing. Off-line media is just as bad, with banal reality TV shows and sensationalist newspaper headlines boosting audience numbers because so many people just don't want to make any effort any more.

I think in the next couple of years, though, we will start to see a backlash against these trends. People will get bored of one-liner "discussions" with "friends" they haven't talked to more than twice in real life, and start to wonder what happened to, y'know, interesting conversations where they learned something or gained a new insight. This doesn't have to be highbrow or reserved to well educated middle classes: just "I liked this movie I saw the other day, because..." rather than "That movie rocked, because." would be a start.

As this trend takes over, I think we'll see improved ways of separating the wheat from the chaff. Just as search engines try to identify the best material on topics covered on bazillions of web pages but mostly not very well, so I think we'll see tools develop that cut out the middle men and go straight to the source of original, interesting material; I suspect the first social networks that enable this effectively will be the next popular trend.

Which brings us back to where we came in, which is to say that we need to have some original, interesting material to talk about for all of the above to work. That, one way or another, is going to involve either thinking more or sharing data that isn't trivially available to others, either because it's not accessible, or because it is but you still have to work out which parts are important enough to highlight. And how are we going to know that one bit of writing is presenting such content where many others aren't? Whatever the answer to that question, if a picture is worth a thousand words then we can be sure that good visualisations that pick out interesting data to discuss are going to play a big part in it.

Of course, sometimes you can be too verbose. I didn't have time to write a short post here, so I wrote a long one instead, as Mark Twain might have said. Maybe I could have just written "Current trend = banal & uninteresting => doomed; new trend = original & creative => interesting => successful; effective visualisations help identify original & creative content". Then again, that's more than 140 characters.
Unless you have >10 employees that _will_ _participate_ in any group coverage plan, you only have one option: pay the employees a little extra to cover the premiums on their own personal health insurance plans. The other benefit of each employee buying their own plan is that the health insurance is no longer tied to their employment with a specific company.
or we read it 9 years ago when the article was originally published
Each year I end up in a panic state trying to remember if Mother's Day has come yet because someone posts something like this (or worse, a small reminder on a blog post) without saying "in the U.S".
He seems to miss the point that TDD is more critical in a weakly typed/dynamically typed system. Yes, C, C++, and Java didn't have TDD when they started, but there was this thing called a compiler ...
That's great. The email integration is nice and the UI looks slick.
I perused the source on git and at least perl 6 isn't completely Greek to me.

Or should I say - isn't completely Brainfuck to me!
Left handed people are the only ones in their right minds :)
Interesting idea, I think most of them allow at least some versioning - whether it's accessible by the user is another story.

My thought would be to store some meta-data on devices about the current version of the file, and just check the remote server for a newer version before it's opened.
Review my App: Phone Analytics for your BlackBerry
A special HN build of my app: http://mld.dreamhosters.com/bb/Phonalyzr.jad

It should work on everything except a Strom.

A little more info can be found here: http://phonalyzr.com/
Whoever owns the data are best poised to dominate (hi Twitter), but we'll see :)
This is an important point. Sometimes we read about people here being banned from using the net (sometimes for things like soliciting minors, but also just because it's regarded as a 'luxury'.)

As well as being very hard to enforce, it's not unlike house arrest. Like others here, I have difficulty functioning without net access. And it's pretty much an economic essential if you want any kind of a decent job.
Yes, there are plenty of concepts from git that are useful (like tracking changes to content, rather than files.)

I don't think using git itself directly would solve many of the hairy platform issues, because they are really outside the scope of what git itself tries to do.

There's also the complication that if you want a zero-knowledge approach to privacy (where server admins can't read your data OR your file/folder names) some new data structures need to be invented.
The problem is that not every change can be auto-merged, and a "normal" user does not want to deal with resolving merge conflicts. Binary file formats present another problem - imagine trying to merge two different changes to the same image or Word document.
Six Tips for a Lawn You'll Love
Should be "multi-process", not "multi-processor".
On making fun of Starbucks and being discerning
"Numerical Recipies" is a good book, but you do have to keep in mind that it was mostly written several years ago, and this is a field where a lot of people are actively researching a lot of topics, and not just the obscure/niche ones.

I recently did a fair bit of work with matrix computations, for example, and while "Numerical Recipies" and "Matrix Computations" were both useful for background material, the technical notes that go with LAPACK were often far more up-to-date (and a source of the latest research papers behind the LAPACK implementations as well).
this is a naive viewpoint. government is not necessarily an 'other' which impinges on us; rather, it's an organization to which people can outsource the largest scale tasks, such as infrastructure or military defense. It would be nice if all commercial exchanges were mutually beneficial, but they're not.
Something I just noticed. I much prefer this over Twitter Search's implementation as it doesn't require you to refresh - it can just fetch the new data. Although I'd still prefer a check, load, highlight sequence but done automatically.
Have you ever studied accounting (not bookkeeping)?

Accounting is actually quite a nuanced, creative field. When used for good it can really enhance business decision making.
What makes AS3 so much better than JS? Aren't they both ECMAScript languages?
Dreaming in code is a book about the startup life of the Chandler project.
(It's 3am and I'm running on about 3 hours sleep from the night before, so my ability to argue effectively is diminished, instead I will just provide a specific example as a case FOR free.)

Many of you would probably have visited homestarrunner.com - it's a site that provides animated flash cartoons that is updated regularly. For all intensive purposes, the flash cartoons are just like online video.

Unlike most other online video sites, they haven't succumbed to needing to monetise with ads, nor do I think their model constitutes as freemium. Quite simply, they provide additional value to their fanbase on top of the value they already provide for free.

They monetise their site by selling tshirts and figurines and all sorts of various trinkets and curiousities.

The fact is, that without giving away content for free, they wouldn't have garnered favour with viewers, nor created a fanbase who would purchase their wares to support the sites costs.

Now while I don't know how much the guys are making, the site has been going for nearly 9 years without any external funding, so they probably are turning a profit.
Does anyone have any good resources on creating a county by county map like that?

I've tried to find a good one to use, hopefully to output some data I've played with in python, but I can't seem to find any good resources.

Note to HN: There is so much information out there now. Lets see more people playing with it ;)
"What they fail to realize is that once you start offering a valuable service for free it is very difficult to later charge for that same service."

Of course. That's why you never give away for free those parts of your service that you think you might charge for someday. If you lure people with free services to grow an audience and then start charging for those same services when you have an established userbase, do expect a serious backlash against this bait-and-switch. You can't give things away then claw them out of the hands of your users like that.

"And if that service happens to be the core value of what you have to offer, well, then you’ve just given it away. Yes, you can claim to use a “freemium” model in order to charge for added features or services over and above your core service, but, if you give away the most valuable part of your service, the uptake on the number of people who convert to the for-pay premium services is not going to be very high."

Well, don't do that either, then. It's not because you're using a freemium model that you have to give away the best parts and then charge for some mostly irrelevant gimmicks and hope people will make what amounts to a donation to your business.

The free parts of your service are a loss leader. You aren't merely not making money on the free parts, you're losing some. You have to justify those costs. Don't lose sight of that.
Are social networks a replacement for religion?
Whatever you may think of religion, it is a way for people to associate only with others who share a similar worldview.

In places where religion is lacking (e.g., Silicon Valley), one might expect heavy use of social networks as a replacement.

Is this generally the case?
Unless you did remember 2 months ago, but forgot that you did, and you feel like a dick because thought you forgot to do it today (and it's 8pm, when your mum is likely asleep already…)
It's actually even worse than that. Even plain text files can cause problems. You make a change to a file over here, then you delete the file over there. What should be the result of the merge? There are an infinite number of such screw cases because the "right answer" depends on the semantics of the data. For example: you add a line to a file over here, then you add the same line to the same file in the same location over there. What should be the result of the merge? Should you end up with one extra line or two? What if one line has an extra trailing space? What if it was an extra leading space and the file contains Python code?
A compiler doesn't protect from segfaults.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY Integrated Circuit (IC)
Ok, I found the article (issue 3) but I'm slightly off in my recollection: it's for an Apple 1.
http://www.brielcomputers.com/wik/index.php?title=Replica_1
So does this mean that Firefox will now consume 100% of my available CPU cores now, as well as 100% of my memory?
I have this odd feeling that we're being taken for a ride here, like it's some big marketing stunt, and next week they'll release the game to much fanfare.

Has anyone actually checked for their bankruptcy filings? Is it illegal for (private?) companies to make claims of bankruptcies, if its purely for marketing purposes?
happy birthday from me.. :) because.. today it powers everything from the pocket-size iPhone to Google’s giant server farms
woh.. I thought that IC is not much older... Happy to hear it is 50 year old...
Only when running Flash.
Religion is a lot more than a social group. You have a social following and gathering around a central idea with very little differences in points of view all to embellish values and ideas that one who belongs to that group feels are true.

You find something very very different with social networks even ones that are gathered around central ideas.
Yes, religion is more than a social group, but aren't both used to make people whom you associate with more in line with your worldview?

For example, you might use either to increase the probability that you associate with honest people.
Heh. I'm facing a similar conundrum. I dropped out of community college to move out of my home town, and have since worked at some amazing companies. I really should go back to school to get my bachelor's, but not only am I too busy, but I'm afraid I'll be bored out of my mind... at least by the <300 level stuff. Eventually I'll get back... when I'm not working at two startups.
I am like this guy with most things. I like good tools. Though one thing that the author does not mention is that expensive is not necessarily better.

As a student I used a cross pencil because they provided the most comfortable pencil(The cushion tip is a mandatory feature in my mechanical pencils). Now I switched to a cheaper draft/matic mechanical pencil that provides a superior writing experience at a more reasonable price point.
Cool, I wrote these notes up for a conference tutorial I gave a few years ago, glad to see they've taken on a useful life of their own.
I'm skeptical about there actually being a decrease in attention. I hear this kind of stuff about "the good old days" in quality X all the time and I suspect people are just forgetting that they were also distracted back then.
Story of another iPhone app rejection
A single (classic) process can use a single processor; multiple processes can use multiple processors.
The Power of Poop
I lost my Dad two months ago. He was my best friend.

You are 100% right...Make time for your family and the other people who are really important to you in life. They won't be around forever.
It's an interesting idea, though I'm not sure how often I would want to see an 'analysis' of my call history.
However, I suspect their are other things that you can do for users with that same data.
For instance, you recognize the 'most called' numbers, so rather than the phone book being just alphabetical, maybe it would be functional to have it first display 'most called', that sort of thing.

Or maybe it has value for businesses when you combine the data from many of their devices. Just a few thoughts.
Clearly you've built the technology, i'm just wondering what is the best application of it.
Hi callmeed and any other eventual reader, please accept my apologies for my bad writing in English, I hope you will understand it's not my native language and that I do my best, anyway, going forward I will try to get my articles reviewed from some native speaker guy before publishing them. Thanks for your comment!!!
Listen - Do You Want To Know A Selling Secret?
Ask HN: What startup news stories should I talk about on Calacanis's show?
On Monday, I'm doing the news on Jason Calacanis's This Week in Startups.

There hasn't been much news since his last episode (on Friday) so I'm trying to be more creative.

Could you recommend startup business news that...
...people would talk about after the show?
...didn't get the coverage it deserved last week?
...points to an important trend?
Hi swombat, thanks for your comment, I actually completely agree on what you say: "Over-engineered code is as much in need of a refactoring as under-engineered code" I should have also mention that on the original article. Good observation, thanks!!!!