skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The dichotomy is really quite striking. When it comes to individuals, I don't know a single person who prefers it to Facebook—and nearly everyone else I know really just thinks of it as the home of 16 year-old camgirls with pink hair.

But when it comes to bands, it's absolutely de rigeur. So much so that my band has one out of necessity, and even though we, five curmudgeons with our own site, with a full music spread from bandcamp.com, and everything else you could want, who do everything we can to ignore our Myspace and keep it quarantined—still more people google 'Flaming Tusk Myspace' than anything else.
I've personally found that having the display on has been far and away the biggest battery drain on my phone. At least with the 3G. I haven't had enough time with the 3GS to know one way or the other.

My test was to have the iPod playing and periodically touching the screen to prevent it from going dark.
The AI Report
Computers Make Great Students
That's a misleading title for the listing here. The article says that he "wants to shut down the internet for a day." The title seems to suggest way, way longer.
The last part looks like a thinly disguised advertisement of DB2.
Yeah, that'd probably be a one-liner JavaScript. Something like:

onclick="getElementById('pwd').type='text';"

But you'd want a bit more to toggle it. Still, maybe a slightly better way -- and a way to address the security issue at the same time -- would be to show the password when you hover over the field with your mouse. Is there a way to do this easily with JS?
That is the beauty of free software: Oracle cannot kill MySQL. Never.

As long as there is an interested user, MySQL can be mantained and extended.

BTW, the whole site seems to be little more than a FUDfest.
Great work ! Well if you do get time to tutorial it up - please do !

Well I hear that people claim CSS + GWT can do most of what people want, but I never quite believe it, but glad you found it easy (even learning a little of GWT1.6).
> ...what became the world’s top social network, only to see it lose its edge under News Corp.

I think it's fair to blame acquirers in many cases, but based on MySpace's history they may have done better under News Corp than they would have done independently.
Explanation here: http://blog.ted.com/2009/06/a_note_on_today.php
right? And wow, you seriously just joined and commented for that?
Uberessay.com Launched by Two Students
Fake Steve has been on a leave of absence too, of course.
Even if and when Oracle kills MySQL, there's already a fork of it as of version 6.0 called Drizzle. More background information of this can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drizzle_%28database_server%29.

Official homepage: http://drizzle.org
Blog: http://blog.drizzle.org
Source code: https://launchpad.net/drizzle
I think SMS is used heavily by the consumer market, meaning folks who likely got an IPhone as their first smartphone.

The businness crowd on blackberries probably send quick emails more often than they use SMS or IM (particularly AIM)
Also, they have overlayed credits to the open source projects.
I didn't own YHOO in 2000. But you're quoting a stock price from the apex of the tech bubble.

Either way.. none of that matters. Where the dow was or is doesn't matter.

What matters is shareholder equity. The ONLY job of Yahoo is to make value for its shareholders. They rejected a very fair offer from Microsoft. I don't care one way or the other of Yahoo sells to Microsoft as long as Yahoo management can lay out a clear plan for creating more value for shareholders than the Microsoft deal would've.

It looked to me, and loads of other YHOO investors (including Icahn) that they made a decision based on some silly anti-Redmond attitude.

More importantly... your post seems to betray a sense of how this world works... Shareholders don't "ask" to sell a company. In some cases a board will shop for a buyer (essentially putting a for-sale sign out) but most often that's done only if the board feels they can't protect shareholder value without finding a suitor.

It's not about some burning desire to cash-out Yahoo stock. It's about the idea of turning away a made-offer, turning away cash, a premium on what the market currently values the company. If you're going to turn away cash in hand, you better have a reason. You better have a plan. NOTHING that has happened since Yang turned-down Microsoft has suggested that they have a plan.
Everyone still can fork it.
AT&T Navigator turn-by-turn GPS solution hits the App Store
They're still on the top of the list of most trafficked websites...
Can I ask a question?

Does anyone know how to signal to the Operating System NOT TO CACHE these filesystems? This would be ram caching a ram cache which wouldn't make performance sense.

I cannot work out if that is part of the tmpfs/ramdisk driver itself, or if people who write these sort of articles don't know about normal read/write caching that occurs in all operating systems.
I suppose you forgot what happened to tank-man in 1989? Oh wait, no one knows
Don't Be Stupid - Typographic Poster for Free Download
They've retracted and updated with due credit: http://blog.ted.com/2009/06/a_note_on_today.php?utm_campaign...
I know this isn't the majority use case for people here, but if you ship MySQL alongside a closed-source product, you're required to buy a license. If Oracle stops selling licenses, that would screw over a fair number of people, open source notwithstanding.
Ubiquity 0.5 Preview Release
This seems like bad PR considering all the people they have fired.
I would venture to guess the average MySpace user has no idea about the people they have fired. They'd certainly notice if something happened to Tom though.
It's been years and I still can't even filter/search using regexps or using my own custom headers.
I don't agree with this AT ALL.

It's not the role of government to decide when to "fund" or "not fund" certain types of industries. Let the private sectors decide if that's a good idea or not. Do you agree with farm subsidies?

Are you glad your tax dollar get spent on projects that may have no practical purpose because there's no market or products ready to use them?
didn't you get banned for this before?
"In the Corona SDK, you’ll write code in Lua, an intuitive and powerful scripting language."

In case you were wondering (like I was) if it was ECMAScript based.
A thing you can do with these is use an "at boot time, prime the ramfs" technique on file/web servers to pin important static files in memory if your normal serving patterns will push certain things in and out of the page cache more than you like.
MySpace to shed 300 jobs worldwide
(Annoyance, the feeling of being annoyed and other nearby emotions are patented by Monsanto. $0.002c annoyance fee has been charged).

(More seriously, why doesn't you having your DNA count as 'prior art'?)
nope, that wasn't the reason. It was because we had apparently submitted unoriginal content - and it wasn't me personally either. Who are you anyway? I've been transparent enough, why are you hiding?
That is the hilarity of it. Monty and his core team have set up their own company and are forking the code into MariaDB. So Sun basically paid $1Bn for the domain name mysql.com, that is the one asset that they can be said to actually own in this deal. And then Oracle bought Sun...
I'm not sure this is true anymore. The mysql client library (which your closed source product needs to talk to mysql) is GPL. Now you want your closed-source program to stay that way, so you have to either dig up the old public domain client library, or write your own. Now there is another option, the new libdrizzle library is BSD licensed and is MySQL compatible.
One of the odd things about the social graphs for me is that I have multiple distinct social graphs that overlap little if at all. I expect there are many people that want to really be sure they are keeping their work, personal, and family lives separate.

For example, my high school friends probably hate my updates about programming and computer topics. And honestly I don't care much about their trip to the river.

On the other hand, my more professional friends (who I don't interact with on twitter) could care less that I'm walking the dog but are happy to chat about programming.

For that reason I have multiple communities: Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, HN. They each have different social graphs and I discuss different things with each of them. Facebook's is trying to connect to these other sites to connect usernames to Facebook profiles, but I'm not sure I want all that going back to the same place.
thanks for the warning....actual article link: http://careers360.in/first-person/a-clear-aim-knowledge-hard...
Does that work better, just edited it to be less misleading
I would switch, but Google.com is more than just a search engine for me now, it's also a portal to tools like Gmail, Adwords, Analytics and Webmaster Tools, all of which I use extensively.

Perhaps someone could write a greasemonkey script to give me easy links to those tools from Bing.com instead? :o)

Before anyone says it, yes, I'm fully aware I could just add them to my bookmarks bar, but I'm used to the way things work now and it would confuse me for weeks to come changing my daily routine.
I'm pretty happy with namecheap.com. The only problem I've ever had was a domain transfer that didn't go through. One quick email and they fixed it within minutes.

They also do bulk transfers and have free WHOISguard. A quick google for the monthly promo code will get you a discount.
Daxko doesn't sound that great to me to be honest, my current employer in the UK gives me 24 days off a year, and have just agreed to a 14 week sabbatical after 8 years of employment. I also get pension contributions, Health care and paid sick leave as standard.

OK, they don't pay for my lunch once a week but I think I can cope with that ;)
Four crowdsourcing lessons from the Guardian’s expenses-scandal experiment
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=542240
This can't really be the first time this had been submitted, can it? I was looking for the discussion of this (months old) article, and searchyc.com didn't find it on the first search, so I thought "well, just re-submitting the URL should take me to it, right?"

Now it's time to find out if you can flag your own submissions...
I've never found networking "events" to be of any use. What has worked is asking people you're working with (say investors) for introductions any chance you get. The conversation starts off much warmer and you tend to get to people who are usually too busy to attend conferences for the sake of it.
Ask HN: Learning to write effectively - for programmers
I'm a programmer with a hacker mentality. I'm mostly self-taught through experience and rolling out small projects to learn new technologies.

But when it comes to writing, I don't what steps to take to improve. The resources available on the topic don't speak to my learning style or answer all my questions.

So Hacker News, how do I start learning to write effectively?

- What is the feedback loop? How do I know if my writing is good or bad?

- If my end goal is to be a business/technology blogger, what changes?

- If my end goal is to be a better HN commenter, what changes?
Yep, Daxko's package would be considered very poor in the UK, and would probably be illegal in most of the EU.
HN doesn't normalize the URL, yours has the "www" this one does not:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=542240
Fair enough. I agree that the website may expose a "global" password as you and another person said.

I guess I'll design my future login boxes with security enabled by default and unmask option for the responsible user who would need it...
That sounds like an awfully naive version of how government works. What about DARPA grants to university research projects? Or NIH grants for medical research? What about speculative defense projects, like (to name a bad case) missile defense, or (a good one) unmanned aerial vehicles?

The government "funds" and "doesn't fun" "certain industries" all the time. In fact, it even does what it's doing with Tesla in a smaller scale routinely, through the SBA process. The Tesla loan is a drop in the ocean compared to the SBA loan budget.
I thought so too initially, but after using Blind Search for two days to get an unbiased view, I still think Google is the best, Bing is about on par with Yahoo, and Yahoo is better than I thought.

Bing and Yahoo fail badly on longer searches (i.e. several keywords rather than one) and (Bing especially) on ambiguous words.
The real problems most companies have can't be solved without pissing a lot of people off, tho'. Unless all the people whose decisions lead you into that situation are no longer there...
Poll: Do you read HN because you want to see what hackers are really like?
When will PostgreSQL hit the tipping point? Sucker has been ripe for the pickin' for years.
PyGo Wave Server is here - play with the Waves now
>> - What is the feedback loop? How do I know if my writing is good or bad?

In my first year of college I was amazed at how helpful it was to just give my writing to a couple of people and get their comments on it. I had never taken the idea very seriously - but it changed the way I wrote. Listen to their comments, even if you don't agree at first. Remember - your writing is usually for an audience, so pay more attention to their opinion than your own.

>> - If my end goal is to be a business/technology blogger, what changes?

Aside from just practicing and reading that kind of material, I would recommend you study rhetoric - the art of making a good argument by taking into account your strengths as an author, the specifics and emotions of your audience, and the logic of your argument (ethos, pathos, and logos)

>> - If my end goal is to be a better HN commenter, what changes?

Any person who has real experience, sincere opinions and good manners will probably make a great HN commenter.
Funny thing is, this loan is most likely an investment in green technology, nothing else. So your comment isn't really off-topic.

But the way you put it made you sound a bit... out of touch with the discussion. Also fanatical, and not even wanting to participate in it, just dismissing it out of hand. And without a starting capital letter, it's pretty much the typical throw-away remark not encouraged here.
MySQL is still selling licenses to someone, so I don't think it's as simple as that.
No. I am a hacker. I know what hackers are like.
His writings for Newsweek have been fairly uninspired. Especially compared to his skewering of the cultures at IBM and Yahoo as FSJ, most of his columns felt far too "safe". Not that I can criticize someone for dumping blogging to move to a well paid magazine gig, but it seemed crazy for Newsweek to hire someone like Lyons and then force him to write from a straitjacket.

The first few return posts have totally recaptured the voice, so hopefully FSJ finally has an outlet where he can write without tainting the Newsweek "brand".
Technology is certainly necessary. Technology is the only way to increase production. Increasing production is they only way to get wealthier, by definition.
Not only is it necessary, but technology is also sufficient for development. I'll take development to mean progress on indicators such as GDP as well as life expectancy, literacy rate, and freedom of expression. As I said in the first paragraph, technology is THE way to increase production. But increasing wealth also improves things that seem unrelated to the economy, like freedom of speech, the right to vote, and more. When people are starving, they are desperate for money and will do crazy things to get it. Once they pile up enough money to relax and feel like they have an interest in keeping society stable, they demand (and get) more human rights. South Korea, for example, went from a third-world nation of unproductive farms to a super-productive industrial nation, and, at the same time, became a democracy and a civilized place to live. South Korea just adopted new technologies and the rest followed.
Others may be contemplating a career in computing or carrying out research in psychology/sociology. There are all sorts of stereotypes about hackers. Which if any of them are generally true?
Not news, not hacking, not interesting.
You've just described the Boy Scouts, in many respects.
Going Solar: One Year Later
I think one of the cooler things coming out of yahoo was the "Yslow" best practices. But the guy in charge of that left for google around late 2007, early 2008. From what I've read they seem to have "lost" a lot of other people too.
I found the bits about David Pogue begging Steve to take his whole liver, and whatever other organ parts he needs, pretty darn funny.
Using default values in C# 4.0
Enjoyed the interview a great deal, thanks Andrew. His strategy for locking out the press was brilliant.

One thing - I'm unable to skip forward in the video. The Firefox beta crashed on me midway through watching, and being unable to restart the video halfway was maddening. Is this intentionally disabled?
I really like the way he is doing the source code revisions. It's always a pain to be in a book and have broken code and not know why. You can take a sneak peak ahead (hg show HEAD+1), or if you make changes and want to revert them, it's really simple as well.

Plus getting people to use VCS in any form is a major win in my book.
saw it on TC first
Sell an enterprise version for use in intranets. Hire a good salesman to sell it. This is a great replacement for Word documents that are manually versioned (to create a paper trial).
I don't talk about my Gibsons on this wobsite. Sorry.
Both ramfs and tmpfs on Linux cause writes directly to the page cache, just like a normal write but without a backing store (though in tmpfs' case, the backing store is swap). So there is no double RAM usage.

This is confirmed in these docs:

Documentation/filesystems/ramfs-rootfs-initramfs.txt

Documentation/filesystems/tmpfs.txt
The History of Migration and Selection Seen through the Human Genome (vid)
That's a strange issue with blip.tv's player. I think it just needs some time to fully buffer before it'll let you skip forward or backward. Sorry about that.
It's a lengthy lecture, but well worth watching, because it is very up to date and presented by one of the leading researchers on the subject. The use of visual aids is excellent, and the explanation of the underlying science for a nonexpert audience is quite clear.

The Q and A at the end is particularly interesting, with participation by the scientist who first sequenced the Neanderthal genome.
I'm surprised nobody has compared this to google's wave yet.

If you haven't, you should go check out the demo -- I'm not for sure yet how much feature overlap there is, but their demo exhibits a wow factor that is undeniable.

It's long, but skip around and you're sure to hit on at least some of the important bits: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_UyVmITiYQ
Ubiquity belongs to a very large class of software, that which I find deeply interesting and compelling—yet is so disruptive, requiring enough memorization and adjustment of my habits, that I never adopt it, and always set it down or let it lie dormant after a couple minutes of playing. It's not that I come to any verdict and decide not to use it; but there's such a huge gap between, "This will be very useful! Let's stick it in the toolbox!" and "This is a great tool that I'm comfortable and happy using frequently!". Most of that gap is occupied by many individual, "I know! I'll use Ubiquity. Good thing I was aware of what kinds of problems it would be good for, remembered that it would be appropriate to use here, and remembered what in fact to do."s.

Last time I picked it up Ubiquity did nothing to help me traverse that gap. But here I am downloading it again at .5 so we'll see if things will be different.
The note doesn't do it for me. The issue is not just Hughes's lack of proper attribution on stage, but his assumption of credit. The interview doesn't absolve him, it implicates him, when he says ARToolkit is unbelievably awesome and then, "Folks ported it from C, which is what it's written on, onto Java. And then we took the Java port and made it work in Flash." Isn't he saying that he was integral to the port from Java?

Later in the interview, he says that making AR easy was "all we were looking to do." He calls himself a researcher and says, "It's open source. Everything I do is about being very open." On the stage he says he "wrote a bunch of code". I can't come to any other conclusion than that he misrepresented his contribution throughout. But neither he nor TED has acknowledged that fact or apologized for it.

I'm not saying we need to string him up for it, but both he and TED need to stop making excuses and start making a sincere apology.
Core technology patented for mobile social networking
GyPSii Awarded Core Patent in Mobile Social Networking:
”Friend Finding” now secured by patent for
transmission of location-based information between mobile devices

23rd June, 2009 - Salo Finland and Amsterdam, The Netherlands - GeoSentric Oyj (NASDAQ OMX:
GEO1V), developers of the award-winning GyPSii mobile social networking application (www.gypsii.com),
today announced that the European Patent Office (EPO) has granted an EU-wide patent for the
transmission of location-based information between devices and the subsequent publishing of that
information for viewing on a map. This feature represents what the industry has coined “friend finding,”
and as such, is the cornerstone of the combination of mobile social networking and location based
services.
This significant Friend Finding patented technology enables GyPSii users to locate and share information
with friends to view on a map, and further protects intellectual property enabling key features such as
pushing user generated place content or requesting a friend’s location so they can meet-up, on mobile
devices. The company uses the patented technology in the friend finding capability to allow users to
share their location over a mobile device. Users can request or share their location and a favorite place
location with one or many friends, from mobile device to mobile device, and view the location on a map
on the device/s.

“Location adds context to the GyPSii social networking experience. It allows people to create, connect
and share while on the move exploring their world,” explained Dan Harple, Executive Chairman of
GeoSentric and GyPSii. “The granting of this Patent to our technology portfolio rewards our continous
pursuit of innovation and adds enormous value to our Intellectual Property assets.”
The patent is the first of 6 patent technologies developed by GyPSii to be granted by the Patent Office.
The capability can also be applied in other uses such as Fleet Management, Field Operations and
Emergency Services. The patented technology is additionally embedded in the company’s line of TWIG
products.
The GyPSii application is available across a wide range of devices, including Samsung, Nokia, LG, Apple iPhone and BlackBerry handsets.
Quiz: What Do Facebook Quizzes Know About You?
I'd love to believe that, but ultimately I can't. The most naive writer who seeks to apologize simply says "I'm sorry."
They have several other "core" patents pending.

I hate this BS...companies patenting obvious things, often with blatant prior art. I'm waiting to get a "cease-and-desist" letter for breathing from some industrious patent troll.
I was thinking of the boy scouts on steroids, so to say. The boy scouts are too well-behaved. A little bit of boot-camp atmosphere would be interesting.
Then you just have to hope Apple won't care / notice that you're using a scripting language. So far, Apple has been reasonably lenient (there are apps running on smalltalk for instance), as long as you don't allow users to run custom code, but who knows when they'll go and be more strict?
It would not take much for a distributed, node based plugin system to house personal sites and friends lists etc.

Do you know, I think Opera might agree with you here. Except now they've started it, everyone's laughing at them.