skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In the same way they question DEMO's advertising giveaway you could probably question the TechCrunch one. It's just going to be advertising on there site? Unless your aiming your startup purely at the tech community doesn't sound great.
Apple, Acer, and...Arrington?
The Hunt For Gollum
A Bunch Of Interesting Nerdy Interviews
This fanfilm makes the Starwars fanfilms run crying home to momma.

It really is exciting that dedicated fans can produce such a thing. Perhaps the movies aren't quite as doomed as Hollywood would have us believe in the internet age.
[image]chicago fireworks july 3
I've only seen the term, "meatspace", in the last few weeks. Is this some new nerd trend?

It's at least 15 years old and faded out with the rest of the "cyberpunk" genre.
i know email isn't the cool thing to do anymore as far as connecting online, but in business, i think it's still king.

i'd have serious doubts about someone wanting to correspond about business matters via twitter, facebook, etc.

so i'd say that, no, mail is not something outdated and should die - just another form of communication that has it's place.
I am convinced that this is the right path for OS evolution. Perhaps not necessarily .NET based, but the future OSes simply have to borrow heavily from the best of the current VM implementations: garbage collection, JIT compilation and rich standard library should all be provided by the OS (as opposed to in-process VM) and shared between all processes written in higher level languages.

The separation of kernel/userland must also go away and process isolation should be done via code verification, another trick a modern (yet non existent) OS must borrow from sandboxing VMs.
Systems Software Research is Irrelevant by Rob Pike (2000)
Ask HN: Installing Linux on my router -- OpenWrt, X-Wrt, or Gargoyle?
My SMC WBR14T-G wireless 4-port router has been hanging a lot recently. If I unplug the power and plug it back in, it works again, but it's now happening multiple times per day. I've got the latest firmware. And I've had this trouble with previous (cheap) routers.

So I'm keen to buy a Linksys WRT54GL (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linksys_WRT54G_series) and install an OpenWrt-based Linux on it. I've read lots of good things about how this setup is very stable and configurable.

Anyway, I'm a programmer and okay at network stuff, but not an expert. I can certainly use config files, but I'd definitely prefer a good web interface.

Any suggestions? So far Gargoyle looks really nice, but a bit new/unproven yet. X-Wrt might be the way to go. Or plain OpenWrt?
Replying to the complainant with an explanation of Tor.
Absolutely. You know who writes code at Accenture? 22-year-old liberal arts and business majors, in their first job out of college, who've had about 6 weeks of training in programming.
Heard of Inferno? http://code.google.com/p/inferno-os/

Bell Labs as usual well over a decade ahead of their time...
I saw a news article today from about a month ago, saying that Microsoft had decided to release the .NET Micro Framework SDK and porting kit for free (it's available for download now, I checked). I've been wondering for a while why people don't use it (or something similar) to write device drivers; it seems to me like that would go a long way towards making a system rock-solid.

Also, one good thing about a properly written, all-managed system is security. Assuming that the underlying OS is bug-free (a huge assumption, I know), would there be any way to exploit such a system remotely?

One other cool feature I thought of would be to implement some base classes for things like images, sounds, and movies, then implement various codecs and file formats using formatters and such in the System.Runtime.Serialization namespace. Thus, it'd be pretty easy to add support for a new codec or file format, since the codec class' assembly could just be copied to a special directory, then loaded via reflection.

A final note...think about how awesome it would be to have a full-featured, well-written managed OS. Since everything on top of it is also managed, it'd be very easy to port it to another platform (all you need to do is port the very fundamentals of the OS, and the CLR takes care of the rest!)
Why does Windows make you type the WEP key twice? That's always annoyed me.
Inferno is very interesting. However, I tend to believe that having the entire kernel written in managed code is the way things need to go. By doing so, you reduce the attack surface to a tiny amount of code and make it easier to develop.

That said, Inferno was way ahead of its time, and quite a few of the ideas in my system are based on ideas from it and Plan 9 itself; for example, the 'everything is an object' paradigm is really a natural extension of Plan 9's 'everything is a file' paradigm.
Managed code ensures things like buffer overflows are a thing of the past, so long as your compiler is secure. It doesn't prevent against the design flaws that often lead to security breaches, but it's a start. I'll take securing a compiler and design over securing hundreds of millions of lines of code, though, any day of the week.

Edit: As for codecs and such, this is why I like my object store idea. Your codec class would encode to a bitstream like now, but the entire class would be there on disk. You could send the whole object across the wire and so long as they are using the same ICodec (or whatever) interface, it Just Works (TM).
You're assuming that you spend prevention costs perfectly when you can't.

The money that you spend on someone to prevent/reduce a problem is completely wasted if that is not suseptable or is struck by something else. (Also, the cost to deal with obesity and diabetes together is less than the sum of dealing with obesity and diabetes separately.) It's also wasted if the person gets the problem anyway.

And, you're still ignoring the benefits of early death.
I'm surprised they didnt close earlier
Pre-natal we can apply selection, changing the initial population. However, the effect of that on survival is complicated.

Post-natal changes aren't inheritable. They can merely be applied to subsequent generations, which is not really evolution. These changes may affect survival, which can have a second order effect on genotype, but that's tricky and subtle. (If a culture cuts off foreskins for thousands of generations, will boys evolve to not have them at birth? By cutting them off, the population gets no benefit from having them, but there's no cost to being born with them.)
Written August 5th, 2000

"Irrelevant: Does not influence industry"

Two years later came Xen, a systems research project that has definitely influenced industry.
> for example, the 'everything is an object' paradigm is really a natural extension of Plan 9's 'everything is a file' paradigm.

I used to think that way long ago, over time I realized that it is the inverse: 'everything is a file' is an extension and very powerful refinement of the 'everything is an object paradigm.

What makes file based interfaces so powerful is that they provide an uniform and almost universal framework for representing any kind of resources. The constrains that this imposes are very useful both technically (eg for uniform caching, remote access, proxying, filtering, namespaces, ...) and as a way to narrowly focus the mind when designing interfaces.
I've recently seen someone run OpenWrt on one. I played around with it for a bit; seemed pretty nice. He had it running Python and had it hooked up to an Arduino with little effort.
I wouldn't say they are taking on Walmart. Here is the CEO on making money:

"We're really not a retailer at all. We make no [profit] selling goods. We make money on the advertising side of doing coupons, sampling and keywords – like if you type "shampoo," what shows up first, second, and third. We have a Google-like click model."
I have used both dd-wrt and Tomato, and found them both totally satisfactory. I guess I'd give the nod to Tomato, whose interface was a little slicker, but dd-wrt was still great too. I never had any problems installing or configuring either one of them.

Having had an Airport for a little while, though, I don't know why neither of those were on your list—whether they were overlooked or whether they're outdated.
Between msn messenger, yahoo instant messenger and aim, my experience is that the connection with AIM is much more stable (meaning less dropped messages).
MSN is the worst of all three since it drops messages without any indication of it...

What is interesting is that it's really segmented by countries... US is AIM and Jabber, Europe MSN, China QQ, Vietnam Yahoo Instant Messenger.... So I have to be on all five plus skype...
A plea to the powers-that-be at Google
Looks like a critic to the job system (by mocking the annual performance reviews) to me.
I wasn't speaking in terms of actual relations (since files are a subclass of objects in my mind), but in terms of what inspired me.

That said, I disagree that files are a more powerful refinement. So much of our code is spent converting to and from files, it's a curse more than a blessing. The only really powerful thing about files is that there are tools on our current systems to manipulate them, but I don't think that has to stay that way. Why can't we grep over a collection object from the command line like we do with a file now? Why can't we have good network-transparent objects (a key feature in Renraku)?

The file paradigm in general is tired, in my opinion. Streams just aren't a good mapping for the way we handle data.
Lean Startup fbFund wrap-up
If Xen is the best you can come up as a result of research impacting industry in the last ten years... IBM had been doing basically the same for decades, so I'm not sure one could consider Xen particularly revolutionary.

Edit: Also note that Xen in no way fulfills the definition of Systems Research, it is simply a new minor twist on a very old idea.
I really appreciate the feedback! I am trying to get together a screencast, but have been working on the code right now. I did overlook the email address issue and really intend to just use a username and not an email address.

To answer some of your other questions, the main page is your "start" page that you can edit and and then add links to new pages in the same way that you do on a wiki; the link will link to a blank page until you edit it.

The concept is that you can store the pages and make them public if you want to share.

I agree there is still more polish that I can and will add, and I'll fix the email address issue!
OK, to play devil's advocate, Xen is nothing new in the same way that Pike claims Linux is nothing new.

Hypervisors and virutalization have been around since the late '60s.
This also reminded my of the Singularity research project from Microsoft: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/singularity/

I've actually used some of the concepts in this research for writing a secure distributed testing platform. So it has many applications outside of the operating system.

Really cool stuff is going on in this area between OS and languages.
No. If you want to follow many people you can't follow people who post frequently. I happen to be able to (TweetDeck helps a lot). It's a tooling problem, not a service problem.
Had to double-check my article to make sure I didn't cull out my Singularity reference, as it was a big influence of mine in Renraku's development. If Singularity were released under a non-tainting license, Renraku likely would be a distribution of it rather than an OS unto itself. MSR is doing some amazing things; can't wait to see what else they do with it.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=245227

EDIT: Here's Pike's update: http://interviews.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/18/11532...
Agreed. My research: http://v3vee.org/. I don't even know what to say about this article - it's just so poorly thought out and researched that I can't believe it.
Look up "paravirtualization."
I noticed Singularity hadn't been mentioned directly on HN before so that's why I threw a link in here :)

I also wish the Singularity project had a friendly license. I also had to do a lot of work up front, so congrats on the work you've done! Truly cool.
> I don't even know what to say about this article - it's just so poorly thought out and researched that I can't believe it.

You are clearly missing the point by a few miles...
I used dd-wrt to run my Linksys WRT54G as a wireless bridge. It has been flawless.
Makes sense. This is why Michael Jackson's death practically brought down the Internet, right? Irrespective of how many people actually cared about the man or his music, he was somebody that everybody knew of. Similar with Princess Diana's death - even people who didn't care about her rang around their friends saying "Did you hear... ?"
The UNIX point really resonates with me. I'm writing this post from Haiku (http://haiku-os.org), and it sometimes saddens me to see that a lot of energy is spent on POSIX compatibility (Haiku is not UNIX, but there's a compatibility layer that allows trivial POSIX software to compile with very few changes, and makes porting larger pieces of software possible).

This, of course, has to be done. Otherwise there will be a whole bunch of software future Haiku users will miss out on, and a whole bunch of trivial software the developers would have to rewrite from scratch. Oh, and then it would take way too much effort to port Perl, Python, Ruby, Vim ...

These days, "portable software" pretty much means "targets POSIX".
My first job in the Silicon Valley was on the Himalayas doing QA. They were awesome machines. QA meant pulling drives and cpus in the middle of processing, browning out/cutting power, etc.. it was wonderfully destructive :-)
Yeah, danah points out that even though there isn't an economic reason for the segregation, it's happening anyway.
There is a reason Plan 9 dumped PoSix, there is APE ( http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/ape ) but to properly maintain it would take way more effort than the rest of the OS.

And it is becoming even worse, 'all the world is a vax' has become 'all cpus are x86(-64), all the kernels are linux, all the libcs are glibc, and all the compilers are gcc', portability of most software is awful, and auto*hell only makes things much worse.
Sure, I agree with you, there was no "huge paradigm shift" (that is so extremely rare in CS).

But there was a virtualization efficiency advance that got an impressive number of companies to actively jump into the project (with time and money) which (along with it being free) made it explode, mature, and eventually make things like commodity computing rental via EC2 possible to implement just years later.

I agree with him that there is so much established infrastructure/standardization out there that doing something completely game changing is hard if not impossible. Which is why I think weighing things against such a behemoth industry, Xen's story is impressive.

It did what he wanted: "Make the industry want your work." But it's because it is useful, not just because it is cool. As for grant money's role in all this, it's the same issue. Like arts and humanities vs. energy/science, the lion's share of research funding is always going to go towards what will most likely advance the country's economy/technology.
I don't know it depends on the price point but if it's 300$ I'll probably buy it... Seems like a fun piece of hardware...
>> Maybe they are targeting companies that have already been funded.

This is definitely the case.

I can't imagine an angel would be happy if their money was spent to present at DEMO. A YC company would have to spend their entire 3 month stipend to get a spot. Insanity.
If you want the crotchety, overly pedantic, poorly critical response by PZ, http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/02/futurists_make_me...
Yeah. I see the date now. Ignore that.
> But there was a virtualization efficiency advance

You are just reinforcing Rob's point. Xen doesn't do anything new, it is simply an optimization, that doesn't mean it is not useful (as he also points out), but confirms his point that all 'research' this days is just optimizations and 'phenomenology', and nothing that is and feels truly different and new.

In the end Xen is a textbook illustration of the problems he is pointing at.
The date has nothing to do with it, the kind and nature of the research is the issue.
Two things - one - DB IV had a GREAT report writer - very RPG-2 ish. You could throw in breakpoint sub-totals anywhere, AND it gave you the source code in dbase for the report!

When I worked in Clipper later I wanted to get DB4 just to create the reports in it and paste the source code into Clipper. Couldn't find it then.

Also - I liked Pointcast. I wish it had stuck around.
Xbox 360 bundle
XBox 360 reviews. Buying info, discount vocuhers and cheapest prices for XBox 360s in the UK: Resident Evil 5 Game.
New OS stagnation could be showing the trend away from the OS. A return to the terminal? Cloud computing could be the first new step of many. In many ways we may no longer need the local OS.
> And, of course, the big gaping hole in that argument is that if you can effectively raise money to participate in DEMO, then you don't need DEMO's help with raising money.

That sounds a bit like a reflexive argument to my comment.

Conferences aside and all other things being equal-- if you were an investor, would you rather put your money in a team you know can already raise $20,000 if they need it versus someone with unknown skills/means in that area?

Surely it's not a negative. You know the old adage that most investors are happy to invest in companies that don't really need their money.

But of course, just because a company can raise $20k doesn't mean they don't need "real" money-- which is surely why they got the initial funds so they could demo and raise more.
It's still around?

I was annoyed at the way they'd ding you for more $ if you used a better zip.

However, their wordpuntuationmarkword schema for pw is still not bad.
vista doesn't, was probably a weird leftover little used feature from before wireless was widespread and popular on xp.
People across the globe are doing something that is and feels truly different and new: they're thinking and arranging their entire stacks in terms of remote virtual machines.

We could argue about the definition of novelty all day and in the end I think it's simply a judgement call what one deems as exciting or worth talking about. If you're looking for something so profoundly different along the lines of Einstein and Heisenberg in physics, I agree with him through and through, nothing in systems will probably happen like that given the current funding paradigms (I can't actually think of anything like that in the history of computer science -- you can for example be as reductionist as you want if you want to take Pike's side of the argument: "oh, it's all just a collection of logic gates"...).
In that case, you're just wrong. Look at what has come out of systems research: Xen and its ilk created a huge jump in virtualization research. Microsoft and VMWare now have large paravirtualization as parts of their virtual machines, which we are seeing more and more uses for every day.

There are a number of other things that come to mind, mostly in high performance computing. Parallel FORTRAN is one of the most common HPC languages and I believe the primary development was based on work at Rice university.

The problem is that people too often get caught up on implementation: most academic departments do not develop "products," they work to develop ideas. Many of these ideas have been built on recently to produce successful products.
Get Rid from Bad Credit Mortgage Loans Please Vote & Support
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Lots of diggs for someone who doesn't proofread his articles. I'm guessing he relates well to their user base.
High Scores for Patriotism: Happy 4th Of July
If my coworkers wouldn’t look at me weird, I’d probably wear one of those novelty American flag top hats to work this time of year. Maybe it’s something in the water, but the Fourth of July always puts me in an overly patriotic mood.Hats are only the beginning. From napkins for the family barbeque to ambient music, everything pays tribute to the Land of the Free around here. That’s why I can’t get enough of Addicting Games! Are you kidding me?
This is a great article. I haven't had a chance to play some of these yet, and now I'd like to. =)
The following passage from that second piece is fascinating (I had never heard of the "Unix room"... it sounds like an illustration of Conway's Law, and a lot of fun too).

One odd detail that I think was vital to how the group functioned was a result of the first Unix being run on a clunky minicomputer with terminals in the machine room. People working on the system congregated in the room - to use the computer, you pretty much had to be there. (This idea didn't seem odd back then; it was a natural evolution of the old hour-at-a-time way of booking machines like the IBM 7090.) The folks liked working that way, so when the machine was moved to a different room from the terminals, even when it was possible to connect from your private office, there was still a `Unix room' with a bunch of terminals where people would congregate, code, design, and just hang out. (The coffee machine was there too.) The Unix room still exists, and it may be the greatest cultural reason for the success of Unix as a technology. More groups could profit from its lesson, but it's really hard to add a Unix-room-like space to an existing organization. You need the culture to encourage people not to hide in their offices, you need a way of using systems that makes a public machine a viable place to work - typically by storing the data somewhere other than the 'desktop' - and you need people like Ken and Dennis (and Brian Kernighan and Doug McIlroy and Mike Lesk and Stu Feldman and Greg Chesson and ...) hanging out in the room, but if you can make it work, it's magical.
I have a WRT-150N wireless N router, and it works great stock. All Linksys routers from the 54G up have Linux already, and I don't know about the 54G, but mine came stock with a web interface..you just go to 192.168.1.1 in your browser and login and there it is. Linksys recently released the source for the firmware code on their wireless routers, including the 54G, because some Linux GPL guys found out the routers were Linux- based and threatened to sue them if the code wasn't released. The code for a bunch of the routers is on the Linksys site. I've scanned through it, and as far as I can tell it just uses some Broadcom hardware/startup code, some MIPS-specific processor code, a vanilla kernel, and the GNU Zebra routing engine, which has been replaced by Quagga but still works great. Anyways, not saying that the Open-WRT and others aren't cool, was just saying my 150N works great and has a web interface. Do the open-wrt and other custom router distros add many new features that the router wasn't previously capable of? Was wondering bc I haven't looked into them much, but might if there's a substantial increase in performance/features.