skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Either that, or only use co-operative (not pre-emptive) multitasking via coroutines. Specifying the points at which control is allowed to switch from one to another is far easier than trying to reliably specify where it cannot and using locks.

Message-passing works quite well, but coroutines are also a viable option. The problems come from using pre-emptive threads AND shared state, because reasoning about who is modifying what (and at what stage of completion) becomes difficult. Co-routines avoid the former, message passing the latter. Which is simpler overall depends on the problem.
Organic and Inorganic Mulches and there biodiversity
Mulch biodiversity requires more maintenance, but they make your plants healthy and your garden too, consider your options and examine the soil for the determination of organic mulches, which is best for you.
How to buy a good keyboard: 5 things to check
The keyboard is often one of the most overlooked components in a computer. For a desktop most people tend to buy the cheapest model and be done with it, for a laptop the keyboard is usually not an important factor in buying decisions. I think that this is a grave mistake however as he keyboard is a very important interface to the computer and plays a critical part in ensuring a comfortable and safe computing experience. If possible, purchase your keyboard or laptop from...
If you have kids, be responsible and raise them well.

If you don't want to have kids, be responsible about that.

I don't read a moral judgment about the necessity of having children in the quoted sentence, although many people seem to.
Wordpress should do that by itself...

Also, I think he mentioned apache rather than nginx...
Actually, I think HN serves as a TC filter. TC articles that show up on HN are typically (though not always) the better ones.
Me too. I'm also able to readily distinguish humor that is clever from simply things that make you laugh because they are publicly embarrassing. Seems like a lot of comedians made a lot of money coming up with the most shocking and socially embarrassing material possible and then watching the audience nervously laugh in response. Richard Pryor was really good at this.

As social mores change, this kind of shock humor wears off, only to be outdone by the next generation.

But the classics, the Carlins and Pythons and such, they'll be funny a hundred years from now.
First hit on google: http://www.wisegeek.com/do-animals-laugh.htm
Tessellated hexagons might be interesting - they have the advantage of being closer to a circular target.

Apparently I'm not the first one to think of that - a quick check threw up http://www.freepatentsonline.com/5805157.html
Yeah, it's more bandwidth than the current "just ask for /robots.txt" method, but only epsilon more. Certainly orders of magnitude less than having the robots link in the html itself (since most index pages are multiple orders of magnitude more than the HTTP headers). The extra HEAD would be lost in the noise its bandwidth is so minimal.

And you're right, the current scheme is easy. But it doesn't cover all the cases and makes certain types of sites impossible to do correctly (see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=639396 for an example). Putting a link to the correct robots.txt for a URL in the HTTP headers would be way more flexible and only slightly raise the bandwidth cost.

You could make it backwards compatible by assuming the current /robots.txt path if there is no header--So it would cost nothing to current site operators. Spider writers would have to do one extra HEAD but I refuse to believe that's terribly difficult.
They recognize that. It is in their pipeline, watch their 1h20m demo.
The Secret of the Security Safety Dance
My guess is that it applies to telephone conferences and emails with more than one recipient.
The unix 'talk' utility did that sometime back in the 80ies (and still does).
Web based tool to generate sequence diagrams (uml)
It seems to me that ambiguity in iStockPhoto's license could mean Twitter would owe many thousands of dollars for this.. hear me out :)

The iStockPhoto standard license has an easily ignored, and rather confusing, clause:

[You may not] either individually or in combination with others, reproduce the Content, or an element of the Content, in excess of 500,000 times without obtaining an Extended License, in which event you shall be required to pay an additional royalty fee equal to US $0.01 for each reproduction which is in excess of 500,000 reproductions. This additional royalty does not apply to advertisements in magazines, newspapers or websites or to broadcast by television, web-cast or theatrical production.

"advertisements in magazines, newspapers or websites" is ambiguous. I first read it as meaning "(advertisements) in (magazines, newspapers or websites)" and the error page on Twitter is not an advertisement. But if this were so, then wouldn't pretty much any graphic purchased from iStockPhoto end up being used over 500,000 times eventually on the Web? Twitter would probably owe hundreds of thousands of dollars in royalties.

Or is it "(advertisements in magazines), (newspapers) or (websites)" in which case, fine. Hurrah for vague legal wording! It's a shame it's so vague because it does open things up for interpretation.
Amazing interface.

Favicon maybe a bit too reminiscent of Alexa.
Music a 'mega-vitamin' for the brain
I dunno, but I have seen George Bush laugh a few times.
Successful projects include telephone switching systems, avionics, most electronics in cars, a lot of process control. Companies generally keep the project details "commercial in confidence".
If that were true, then most of 37signals "getting real" and "do less" style articles wouldn't be relevant here either.
Adobe BrowserLab: Cross-Browser Testing
Visited links strike out with CSS.
Have you visited OurSignal.com it's popular items on social sites news. If you visit any news link after page refresh the title should be strike-out. It's a very basic CSS tips using element a:visited. Just take a look at live demo.
Just checked it out and it works very smooth. You can even overlay different renders or see them side-by-side.
Supported browsers:
Firefox 2.X and 3.X (Windows XP and Mac OS X)
Internet Explorer 6.X and 7.X (Windows XP)
Safari 3.X (Mac OS X)

Only downside is you need an adobe account =)
My old girl doesn't wake me up. She's on roughly the same schedule I am (whatever that happens to be). Though she's astonishingly quick out of the gate when we wake each day. Before I even finish putting on my glasses, she's already jumped out of her bed, stretched and waiting by the bed for me to get up.

I suspect your puppy will grow out of waking you up. Dogs are generally pretty eager to please, and it should only take subtle hints for her to learn that waking you at 6AM isn't generally pleasing.
I have three kids, ages 5, 3, and 1. I focus better now than I did 5 years ago, but I don't know that you could separate the effects of having kids from the affects of being 5 years older and more experienced.

Gotta say that the 5 year old arranging keyboards and a broken DVD player on his desk so he can do work like daddy does is pretty cool, though.
The Book Bank - New & Used College Textbooks and various other books
Specializing in used college textbooks, rare books, out-of-print books, used books, secondhand books, and other hard-to-find books.
TV is actually much more asymmetrical than most online forms communication.
Because if the language uses threads instead of processes the compiler can perform all sorts of neat optimizations on message passing.

As a trivial example (an example I included in the post above yours), consider 'copy-on-write' optimizations. Thread A can pass a message containing Object O (which is 50MB) to Thread B. Naively, this would be pretty expensive - however the compiler can set things up so that a copy of O isn't made until either B or A tries to write to O (in which case in can even try to just copy the part that was mutated). This provides a healthy balance between the raw performance of fork-style threads and the safety of multiple processes. This sort of optimization wouldn't be possible just using processes since, obviously, Process B couldn't (or at least shouldn't ;-)) directly look into Process A's memory space.

I never said don't share state - I just said don't transparently share state. Make it explicit and/or make it safe. As I said, it's never going to be quite as fast as raw fork-style threading but, with a sufficiently smart compiler, it can come close - and be a lot easier.
And, of course, the Muller Formula (or, at least the specific article about it that made the rounds a few days ago) was already somewhat debunked here at HN a few days ago.
How Not to Hummer Your Business
I found a couple a year back when I was looking in to this. But.. they sucked. Things like xjqx.com and so forth.
"two on the way", too.
Is there objective reasoning to claim that doing something else besides raising your children well is the most important thing in life?

For myself, yes, raising my children well is the most important thing in my life. Of course, part of that means doing my job well, since providing material things like food and shelter is critical to the good life. But at the end of the day, my work can't supersede my commitment to my family. Our goal as a family is to foster the sort of "home economics" that Wendell Berry writes about--a home that is economically productive as a unit, not as separate parts.

That said, before I had children, I really had no grasp of what it meant to be a parent. Ten years ago, I could have never imagined having kids, let alone being as committed to them as I am now. I don't say this because I think I'm the greatest parent in the world (far from it, really), but because I think you really can't understand how being a parent changes your outlook on life (if you take your new role as a parent seriously).

If you don't have kids, good for you. I say, if you don't really want them, then don't have them. My life has certainly changed for the better because of them, but I don't expect that to be true for everyone. Do what you wish, just be sure you do it well.
For companies where the code is the primary product they sell, hosting it on a remote server seems like a hard thing to ask for from upper managment no matter how secure it is. I can see the case for a lot of small software companies that really would want to use github, but someone on the team refuses to let the code be placed outside their network.
On the flip side, the .com version has a far better design. Usually "ripoffs" look worse or the same, but they've actually improved upon it. Not saying that's right - just an observation.
Very cool! Thanks for the link.

I downloaded and built 2.2.5 sources in Fedora 10. After installation and a bit of lazy fiddling, created the 'yc' elvi.

cd ~/foo/lib/surfraw
diff yubnub yc

-------------------------<snip>------------------------
2,3c2,3
< # elvis: yubnub	-- Use the social command-line for the web (yubnub.org)
< # initial implementation by Iain D Broadfoot, ripped from the freshmeat elvi
---
> # elvis: yc	-- Search ycombinator (news.ycombinator.com)
> # initial implementation by Shailesh S. Khandekar, by simply patching the yubnub script by Iain D Broadfoot
10c10
< Run a yubnub command
---
> Run a yc command
16,17c16,17
< # disable requoting, yubnub commands often need protecting from
< # the shell with quotes but without those quotes passed on to yubnub
---
> # disable requoting, yc commands often need protecting from
> # the shell with quotes but without those quotes passed on to yc
22c22
< w3_browse_url "http://www.yubnub.org/"
---
> w3_browse_url "http://searchyc.com/"
25c25
< w3_browse_url "http://yubnub.org/parser/parse?command=${escaped_args}"
---
> w3_browse_url "http://searchyc.com/${escaped_args}"
------------------------</snip>-------------------------------------------------

Edit: corrected formatting.
I think Guy Kawasaki accounts for about 45% of twitter activity.
Midphase Coupon Code for June and July
Standards support in Opera 10 beta (just released)
Seems stabler than the alpha (for example, works with Facebook now) and has some new UI functionality, in addition to what's in the article.

Download here: http://www.opera.com/browser/next/
Completely off topic: I just want to say I've never seen anyone other than Tocqueville use 'mores.' Bravo, sir ;-)
Not sure why my text summary isn't showing up, but anyway, here's a download link: http://www.opera.com/browser/next/. I figured linking to the article about the standards support would be more appropriate for HN.
On traditional hard disks, seek time is the major problem and most requests will be quite small so the throughput increase would be minimal.

For example 4k page read @ 50MB/sec = 0.08ms + seek time 8ms = 8.08ms and with compression maybe 8.04ms.
Speaking of music as a tool for finding new pathways in the brain, I had a professor in college who had a serious stuttering problem. So, rather than talk (and stutter), he sang. All the time. Actually, it was more of a sing-song speech pattern, but he didn't stutter when doing it, and it took me quite a while to figure out why he talked that way (and having occasion to see him stutter a couple of times when not doing the sing-song voice).

This led to an interesting side effect, that I always enjoyed. Because he had a sort of steady sing-song tone, his voice was somewhat static...it wasn't obvious when he was emphasizing something. This had the most profound effect when he told jokes, which he did quite a bit. Unless you were really paying close attention, you'd completely miss that he'd told a joke. All but the most obvious of his jokes went unnoticed by all but me and the girl who sat next to me at the back of the class. So, we would occasionally get odd looks for laughing out loud for no apparent reason. I always wanted to make him a flag with the word "Joke!" on it, that he could wave when making jokes. But I wasn't sure if he'd find it funny or offensive.
Microsoft technet for free, surely this is a mistake
Deliver something of value every week
Google Wave: Why it's so good and enterprise software is so bad
Just make sure the ratio of people to cake isn't too high.
It's dragging for me, I'm guessing b/c of the load, but worked surprisingly well when it did.

I still remember the days of BrowserCam being state-of-the-art -- and people being willing to cough up $75 for an account b/c no one had Macs.
Ask HN copyright implications of publishing book summaries
http://www.philosophersnotes.com

The site sells "condensed ideas" from self help books - in the form of PDF and MP3. It is a neat idea, I'm sure busy people would appreciate it.

Legal (copyright) implications of this? Only a couple of the titles are in public domain. Does this mean, he has obtained permission from the publishers/authors? Or is it allowed to "derive" works from copyrighted work, for commercial purposes?
I play Peggles on my iPod touch.
It says "Pilot". Could it be a trial of some sort?
If you liked that, you might also enjoy Squeezed Books, here: http://www.squeezedbooks.com - which is similar except for the fact that it's open and free. Also, there are a number of other pay summary sites like getAbstract.
From the article:

With a swap partition located on a 10000 RPM disk, average time required for swap read and write requests was found to be 168ms and 355ms, respectively.

I find this rather interesting, as it's orders of magnitude above the theoretical time. Presumably this comes from I/O scheduling?

I'm aware that seek time is a serious problem, but I wonder if you could reduce the number of seek operations by reducing the number of disk I/O operations, full stop. Instead of each page corresponding to one 4kB disk block, you could stuff 2-3 in there and only need to seek and write once instead of 3 times.
Related, random idea that's just popped into my head: what about using compression on the disk cache in memory? This is sort of the opposite, when you've got more than enough RAM. (I have 8GB in my desktop, I rarely use more than 6GB for apps) The rest of the memory gets used as a cache for files, this could be much more efficient if compressed.
Didn't you just say the same thing as the guy you replied to?

From your first line I was expecting a rebuttal.
This is free only for a limited time. http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10255042-56.html
Uh... time to look up 'hummer' in the Urban Dictionary.
Before I was reading PG ...
I've rarely heard "in the doghouse" to mean literally sleeping in the doghouse, or even sleeping on the couch. IME, it just means "in trouble", i.e., she was upset with him for a while.

I agree that "making" a man sleep on the couch is not acceptable in the sorts of cases that folklore usually reports for it, but (and maybe I just know more reasonable couples?) I don't often see it happen in real life.
Cool, now we are talking. Couple of thoughts.

1 - we are using the 335i engine. And it is one of 3 engine systems we have fitted for the rally fighter. So I agree.

2 - Our entire business is a revolutionary auto business model, so we are structured to do niche production and make that our winning strategy. Each micro-factory serves only a regional area. 2000cars max production. Kinda like IKEA or Cabella's for cars. So call it a minority and you would be right. As for desert racing. It is a big deal in the American Southwest, so we believe it will be successful. The whole point is that since people like you (and me) don't off-road race and don't really know about it, that big companies like Honda, Chevy, and BMW will never make a car that works for this minority since the market isn't big enough to support their massive tooling costs...voila a market opportunity is created for a startup company. Since the Rally Fighter is on and off road legal and seats 2 adults in front and 2 in back (or 3 car seats), it is not my definition of a toy. But I certainly want people to think of it as the most fun car and experience that they have ever bought.

I love your thoughts, and I so wish you were making these critiques on our forum so our community could hear your thoughts. We are about to launch a general forum and perhaps we can entice you to post there.

We will soon be choosing our next LM model to make with the help of our community, and we would love to have you involved in that choice.

Thought you might want to checkout this post last night by Jeff Jarvis on his BuzzMachine Blog. The comment stream there shows the breadth of opinion. http://bit.ly/9CRkv
Thanks Steve for blog post. I answered about CBMS above.
The largest study I know of found no increase in oral and lung cancers for snus consumers as compared to nonsmokers who did not use any tobacco.

However, the risk for pancreatic cancer is double that of people who do not use snus.

Source: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17498797
Lighter reading: http://www.slate.com/id/2170141/fr/flyout
BrowserLab - Cross-Browser Testing
http://www.mydigitallife.info/2009/06/03/free-1-year-microso...
I think the title of inventing the browser would go to Tim Berners-Lee, although Andreesen was responsible for the first mainstream browser. I'm anxious to see whether someone will come along behind Google and do what Andreesen and company did for the web browser.
Online or electronic publications or uses, including web pages to a maximum image size of 800 x 600 pixels... is covered by the Standard License (http://www.istockphoto.com/license_comparison.php)

The impression count is seemingly for offline reproduction.
Thanks for the link davidw. The summaries at squeezedbooks look more generic, more like reviews than summary. Also, I'm not sure wiki style is a good idea for book summaries.
I guess this student is not going to travel to North Korea again, at least with this name.
They are definitely not reviews - they tell you what the book tells you in a condensed way.

I'm not sure that the wiki thing works either, to tell the truth:-) I haven't been able to attract many people to contribute so far. Actually, I do think it's a good idea and could work (wikipedia does, after all), but maybe I'm missing something to give it some critical mass.
Comment #20 is really worth reading. One of the best arguments
against laissez-faire capitalism I have read.
Yay! More breathless praise for yet another random web app.

In plain english google wave is an collaboration tool, much
like many that have come before.
But this is written by google, so it'll probably be pretty good.

Will it make your teeth whiter, improve your chances with women or fill your bank account? Not a chance.
A year's trial, and this is awesome. Verified as costing £0.00 !

edit: keys generate for me just fine (I'm using Opera as it doesnt seem to work in IE7), and the downloads also work.

Make sure you have registered your Subscriber Benefit Access Number (BAN) number on your receipt to activate your account!
On the Benefits of Developer-led Initiatives
You might find an answer in The Symbolic Species by Terrence Deacon.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolic_Species
> But there's nothing more important than reproduction and the endless family trance?

We all have 4 Billion years of ancestors who lived short and brutal lives. They sacrificing everything for their children in the total poverty of nature. Often they would have to watch more than half of their children die in order to raise some that made it to adulthood.

Now, I'm fat and lazy, I don't have to search for food, and none of my children are likely to die. If I said raising children was too much work, or my time was too important, or I had more important things to do, I can almost imagine some old german farm woman from 500 years ago rolling with laughter.

Fortunately for you your ancestors disagreed (if you enjoy existing). Either you will change your mind when you hit the right point in life, or your genes will drop out of the gene pool and be displaced in the next generation with genes which are slightly more likely to produce a person who wants to reproduce.

I agree with you, though, that most people end up not really taking care of their kids, and just letting the TV raise them. That is very annoying. Kids really do require endless attention and time, but I've done both (had kids and previously didn't have kids) and I can tell you that something clicks in your brain, and you wouldn't want to go back.

I suppose I could hit you with the categorical imperative or something :)
I've also subscribed and subscription expiration says: 1/1/1900
"This implies that Twitter's resembles more of a one-way, one-to-many publishing service more than a two-way, peer-to-peer communication network."

Well, there ya go. There's the business plan. It's just a new way to advertise products. Specific cases like Dell solidify this point as well.
Is Microsoft the next GM?
Product keys don't seem to work though...

EDIT: I mean the site won't generate any keys for you.
Wordpress can't do it by itself, it can't configure the webserver, and if you meant loading and serving the file by itself - it still means using a heavy php process instead letting the webserver serve a few bytes of disk (which they are always great at doing).

Yea I saw he was using apache, but I thought I may as well try to lead him to the dark side :)
Most of them aren't that clever.

Like why is it easier to load a truck with dead babies than live babies?

I'm sure there are all kinds of reasons (mostly because live babies are very fragile and you would have to be careful) not just because you can use a pitchfork.
Well, it's obvious that the trends cannot continue to be linear indefinitely. But at the current rate, IE would drop below 50% market share in around 2 years.
Just wait 'till it's integrated into gmail
Maybe you should think of the fun you won't be having when you're 80.

I'm not trying to make you feel bad, but seriously, some day you will regret not having kids.

On the other hand, I guess it is never too late for a dude.
What a non-neutral 'Net looks like, UK-style