skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Does anyone else foresee a move towards news where news is provided (via blogs, commentary, and (I'm sad to say) even tweets) by domain specialists? Programmers talking about the new Windows, investors talking about new mergers, etc.?

Does that not sound like an improvement?

I say let the news dinosaurs do whatever they want, I stopped paying attention to them for my news a long time ago anyway. People always have been and always will be excited to talk about what's important to them, even for free.

(I'll call it now, News 2.0 will be a buzzword soon, and that'll suck)
The White House Revisits Government Cookie Policies
It is quite cool. It's a shame they don't maintain that web site. Those PDF links worked not long ago...

The only way to find out more now might be to email the project at dynapad@hci.ucsd.edu or the author of that paper at dsbauer@cogsci.ucsd.edu.
5 reasons why Obama will hike middle-class taxes
A large number of companies also pay developers to work on Eclipse as well.

In fact, IBM, one of the largest paying contributors to Eclipse, also pays people to work on a boatload of open source stuff. You don't realize until you actually dig into it yourself.
He's pretty clear in his post that the "gist" of the image was valid, which makes it all the more unfortunate that it had to resort to dishonesty.
Being able to notice little details like that is completely orthogonal to an individual's relative initiative and creativity vs. automaton-hood. It's probably often enough that those very details you were "too rushed to notice" are the ones that could kill you in that kind of work.
The (Lost) Art of Software Engineering
The lesson is: some people really like hierarchy and bureaucracy. Probably appropriate for pre-flight checks. Probably not appropriate for children in school.
“Preparing Us For AR”: the value of illustrating of future technologies
So that's what you've been working on? Nice work! 面白い。
Every release of windows ever has doubled the system requirements. Except this one.

So it should (depending on OEM crapware, etc) be a bit snappier.
Actually, mooSwitch has been around since 2008 and has always supported both click and drag, however, I don't believe it actually works on the iPhone (quite a thing to miss):

http://reaktivo.com/mt/mooswitch/index.php
The US states are likely to tolerate much less before throwing a fit...at least I hope.

Recent history would seem to contradict this hope.
It's funny, with enough truth to make it even funnier. (And it's got 66 points now)
Yeah, they shouldn't be saying he's schizophrenic (or even mentally ill). I bet few of them know what that even means or what damage it can cause.

But, if they want to say he's a douchebag and, importantly, they have proof, well.. that's fair game.
Look at how much crap they got and get over the Ribbon, something which almost all of the people who use it regularly love.

Changing things that people are invested in is hard. They don't like change, and don't like it when you force it upon them.

Also, most large changes need to be done slowly. If they make a big (risky) change from Vista->Win7, it will seem much larger (and much riskier) from XP->Win7.
This is the team that went around at CES turning off displays with a universal remote of sorts.... they aren't exactly the pinnacle of online journalism.
Russia working on undetectable spy plane: Air Force chief
While this site is called "Hacker News," there does seem to be a lot of interest in "online media" issues here - which aren't really "hackerish" at all.

This is an interesting debacle on a number of "online media" levels - both that the people involved are all known within that circle, but also that this imbroglio itself is a demonstration of some curious properties of online media and how it relates to both disputes and law.
It still needs a good defrag once in a while.
A canary is also a random value placed on the stack so the program can detect a buffer overflow. If the canary has been overwritten the program can terminate before malicious code is executed. I suspect a significant portion of Hacker News users is familiar with this terminology regardless of where they learned English.
This piece delivers only slightly dangerous bullshit if you read it as a serious article - when it really ain't.

I'm going to say this not because I think everyone is naive, but because I know some people are naive. I certainly have been in the past and pieces like this once made me rationalize stupid behavior..

Please don't use "well so-and-so does it" as an excuse for engaging in any bad behavior that you know is bad. There are more than enough vice-free tee-totallers who reach the peaks of every field - it's just that these "highly creative people" stand out because of how fucking annoying and self-centered they are - don't be one unless you truly want to be and it feels right to you.
I don't think anyone took the original graphic too seriously, it obviously omitted a lot of things, but was always in jest. All that aside, Coca-Cola has the most synergy throughout their logos. That's 100 or so years of roughly the same logo.
I'm not sure I agree with the criticism of Pepsi over their changing brand. I think changing their brand to be distinct and more modern to contrast against Coca-Cola's is a reasonable decision, and through the early years Pepsi looked like the cheap Coke knock-off they essentially were, which presumably was the image they were trying to shed through their more modern branding.
I realize that somewhere somebody has to be doing the initial reporting, and that person needs to be paid, but with the amount of blogs and social networking that spreads news, I think it'll take a long time before a news aggregator can't supply a steady stream of decent news.

All I'm saying is that if that ever does become unreliable, then I would gladly pay for a service. But right now, the services that are considering charging aren't offering anything unique (with the exception of say, Wall Street Journal, that kind of thing (niche markets, a need for super reliability, etc...)
Coffee Shops Pull the Plug on Laptop Users
good write up. I'm not a fan of analogies between software and physical construction, mostly because they are often used by people who understand neither and consequently think all physical structures are perfect and software should be too. The author seems to have the right perspective though (or at least one I share).

Some interesting reading -- if a little dry -- on bridges that fall down and other engineering failures
http://www.amazon.com/Engineer-Human-Failure-Successful-Desi...
A kinder, gentler philosophy of success
Did Sun Tzu say anything about child labor and leeching contaminants into the local water supply?
You don't need to ask for Italian sonnets. I have found that just asking for a cover letter and asking them to address one simple relevant question is enough to screen out most people that don't read the ad. I do it mostly because I want to see a little writing sample along with the resume.
The only reason I'd want these is for a web page to be used on an iPhone. They kill usability for keyboard-focused users.
Co-workers use term in Emacs to run sqlplus with libreadline-like functionality (as opposed to none). I'm sure it could add that functionality for other apps too. I just use rlwrap (a readline wrapper app) to add the functionality.
New service that hosts threaded conversations for twitter users
You can resize it with a bookmarklet like: http://www.themaninblue.com/experiment/FormTextResizer/
> For people not in the US (or perhaps Newcastle in the UK), there's no way they'd know the "canary in a coal mine" idiom.

Movies, books, general interest... Sure, I'm not even a native English speaker, but I'm pretty sure I was aware of that expression as a teenager. Also, most serious C programmers know about placing a "canary" at the end of a buffer to check for overflows. Even if anyone was confused, wikipedia offers "Canaries were formerly used by miners to warn of dangerous gases." - which a typical person reading HN should be able to find without any problems.

I'd risk a guess that people reading these pages are quite familiar with most US/UK idioms... Sorry - your comment just struck me as a bit weird, especially when you put 4 acronyms (mostly US-specific) in the last sentence while defending the "canary" explanation.

Ok, can we all get along now and go back to the main thread now? :)
There are handheld / hand-driven screwdrivers that have replacable... bits, I guess one would call them. I have one that switched between large and small blade and Phillips heads. Now that I check, I also have an inexpensive Husky screwdriver/bit set that was a Secret Santa gift; it has hex bits, though I haven't used them.

I'd think before using it for IKEA assembly, though. For the trestles, the screws required significant torque to penetrate. Applying that repeatedly for these not too short screw, by using one's wrists and a screwdriver grip, I imagine would quickly become tiring. A nice thing about the IKEA "throw-away" wrench is that its S shape allows one to create significant torque with a finger grip, lessening strain on / torsion of the wrist.
Even bad writing isn't really very easy. And bad documentation can make the situation worse. Why would anyone want to do that?
But companies routinely do this in job interviews and then get decried for asking frivolous, irrelevant questions.

When Google asks prospective PMs what a binary search or hashtable is, it's not because they actually expect product managers to ever write one. It's because those are a proxy for general CS knowledge; it shows that either they've come out of an academic CS department or they hang around engineers enough to know the basic terminology. This in turn is a proxy for "Won't demand unreasonable features from engineering and can communicate reasonably well with them." This is rather important for a tech company, as anyone who's ever worked under someone with no clue about technology could tell you.

Similarly, when companies ask how many gas stations there are in the U.S, they don't actually care what the answer is. Rather, they want to see how you respond when put in a situation where you obviously don't have enough information to come up with a precise answer. They want to see what sort of background information you draw on to make an estimate; this is often a proxy for how open and aware you are to new experiences. They want to see you combine whatever background information you have to solve a problem. They want to see you self-check and see if your answer seems reasonable.

Yet for some reason, it's clever when Van Halen does it and pedantic when it happens in a job interview...
possibly emerging freedoms

I hope so. Things looked that way in 1989.
Not All Metrics Are Evil
With security updates for Tiger ... PPC even! impressive.
Use iptables to limit access to it from only certain static IPs.

Or just disable password logins entirely.
Code WTF: Check Ethernet Address
Edit: it has keyboard support indeed. I've just tried and works perfect. Pressing space switches the checkbox state and tab switches between checkboxes.

It's a pretty damn good job.


I bet it's not too dificult to add keyboard support to them
As a non-programmer, I had no idea that this usage was so widespread. That's actually rather cool, and I'm going to ping my editor to add it to the reference books.
Drastic way to work, yeah.
Here's how this read to me: "I've put a huge amount of effort into trying to mediate this dispute and get to the point where people could apologise and get on with their lives. I almost got there but let a couple of retarded drunken ranting emails made me lose my temper so badly I now feel the need to throw away any chance of achieving anything positive in the situation by publishing a retarded sober ranting blog post. Also, I am high as a kite."
In my dreamworld the changing economics of the news industry, and newspapers in particular, would cause media outlets to spend less space covering extremely low-bar "entertainment" stories, less time regurgitating stories without adding anything of value, and basically stop the unquestioning reporting of what some spokesperson, official or otherwise, wishes to appear in print.

The outlets that will survive, and probably even thrive, are those that provide indepth, insightful and investigative coverage into the events of the world. (As a bonus - these are the types of articles that ARE copyrightable!).

I mean why would I pay to read about celebrity reactions to Paula leaving American Idol* when I can go to one of a zillion other sites and read basically the same story for free?

(* This is currently on the front page of washingtonpost.com, I kid you not)
I'm sorry, what? The guy lost me at the supposedly lost art of gathering and packaging software requirements. When was this golden age of the not almost-instantly-outdated packaged requirements? Maybe only when the success of software was judged by the speed of shipping out versions as opposed to whether users need/like/use it. Of course, if you ignore the latter, you can have perfect requirements and code alignment, but... Really?
>Shortly after I declared Magic-1 "hardware complete", I casually mentioned to my wife that I was starting to think about Magic-2. Her response was swift, and final:

> "No, there will be no Magic-2!"

...omitted...

> She's the love of my life, the woman I plan on growing old with, mother of my children, my partner and best friend. I have to respect her wishes on this.

> So, there will be no Magic-2.

> Instead, we'll call the follow-on project "Magic-16".
Example of hg convert on Ubuntu
Paula Abdul quits american idol
Jim Coudal of Coudal Partners
If you only have a short period of time, even better to skim through the test: to look for the easy questions to start with.
IPhone Alternate Reality Game Built Using Twilio
Am I the only person in the world who doesn't like the idea of my stuff sitting out there 'somewhere',where I can have no idea whether someone's gotten to it? I.E ... who could you trust that much?
Tell HN: It might be a good time to change your twitter password.
Something odd seems to be going on with twitter. Accounts are posting a message that says "Today was so exciting! Made $124 in 20 minutes! if ur interested, go read: [spam link]"

http://twitter.com/#search?q=%22today%20was%20so%22

The posts started a few hours ago, stopped for a while, and just recently started again. It may be that a 3rd party service was compromised, so if you've given your twitter credentials to another web site, it's worth the time to change your password. The volume (many thousands of accounts, including people I know who would not be inclined to sell posts) and nature of the posts seems to rule out the possibility of a paid posting service.
I'm curious, is your user name supposed to be Robo-Trout or Robot-Rout?
Hardly... not allowing child labor is mainly an idea from the last century. Please consider history before reacting.

(And environmental/farmer/etc protection has a spotty history in non-democratic societies. That is, everywhere up until recently.)
(.....) <- you can have some of my extra periods.
This is exactly the kind of innovation multiple app stores could foster.

The author's example could be served with an HTML5 app. Launch the page from your home screen, tap the location button and a custom database mapping web apps to locations presents results. That would work just dandy for a free app. Safari will even let you store pointers to these apps in a local database.

If folks want to get paid though, it's clearly handy to have the 'burden' of the pervasive transaction.
This is why I hate software patents. Anyone can come up with some idea. Not anyone can implement that idea and make it worth something to other people.

The hard part of software is implementation, not ideas. So we don't need legal protection for vague ideas.
How hard is it to provide attribution for the photos used? e.g.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/thomashawk/287666827/
Reading this made me wonder about the eventual fate of Thinking Machines. Wikipedia says most of it was bought by Sun, the rest by... Oracle!

Now we know why Oracle is really buying Sun.
I suspect your university library will have more than enough subject matter about the theory.

http://www.timefracture.org/D16docs/wire_wrap.html describes the practice of wire-wrapping, the technique used here.
True as all that may be, Nokia has had time to understand and adapt to Linux, resulting in Maemo. If they're only smart enough to realize it, they may be able to make up much of the ground they'll have missed by leveraging what's going on in there, because with or without Nokia's encouragement, or likely even cognizance, my bet is that some of the Maemo folks are learning from the iPhone.

Will it be enough? I don't know. If only for sake of the number of players in the market, I do hope so, though.
Effective Online Marketing
So, to become creative .. I should light up a Cohiba, pour some rum, and have kinky oyster-eating tuxedo sex with a bevy of Amex-charging escorts?

This sounds curiously like something the Most Interesting Man In The World might do (his blood smells like cologne..)
It does when posted on the 5,220th largest site.
Yeah, that's really much more secure ;-)

http://www.debian.org/security/2008/dsa-1571
What happens when everyone has an 8 hour netbook battery and a 5G hookup?
1) I must admit, I pogo stick both the articles and the comments page into new tabs. This allows me to read the article and go straight to the comments (or vice versa) if I want to, as the two are side to side.

2) I also skip through the list of articles for the ones that seem interesting / relevant to me. So any sort of 'next link' button wouldn't deliver me value.

3) I also don't know if it's a simple solution - given the dynamic nature of what is "the next link" (and is this only 'front page', or 'new', or 'best'?).

As for "Comments are also a good way to filter out the noise a bit. If the comments are intelligent, then the content of the article will probably be more intelligent." - I couldn't agree with you more.
" I hear undertones of racism and classism in most of the chatter."

You probably hear it because it's mostly in your head. A common problem with "intellectuals" who expect southerners and "rednecks" to be racists.
Affirmative action is a race-based form of welfare.
Just as Social Security is an age-based form.
I want to second this. I know people who are new to the ribbon seem to hate it, but I love it. And just today I installed a new scanner at work and was pleased to see that it also has a new ribbon interface. Replacing the old windows menus the company had two product generations ago.

I hope the ribbon becomes common.
That seems kind of odd as eating, and thus obtaining food, is usually its own purpose. I'm not sure treating the entire grocery store as an impulse purchase is entirely bankable; additionally, what would the impulse buys at the register be then? Meta-impulse buys?
Writing a STORY in anything less than chapter length segments wouldn't work very well - there has to be enough content and context for the reader to get into the story. And for that matter, the average length of published fiction has been growing for decades, many, maybe most novels now are as long as the extremes, like Dune, from the sixties, and short stories have become increasingly rare from the early 1970s on. Multi-book novels (trilogies, and longer) have often become normal, especially in science fiction - see most of the works of John Ringo and of David Weber, for examples.
I'm running all three. And to be honest, I don't notice that many differences between Vista and Windows 7 beyond the task bar. Maybe the differences are there, but I don't notice them.

There are a lot of little things missing in XP that annoy me.

My feeling is that all the positive stuff about 7 wells up from the Microsoft marketing buzz. Not a bad thing, since all of the negative stuff about Vista was anti-Microsoft marketing buzz. But it's just as content free.
Could the title of items in RSS get updated to have "[dead] title here" whenever a story is killed?
Linux, Open-source and my Macbook
I don't know, did Benjamin Franklin?

http://www.epa.gov/superfund/
Write iPhone apps with Mono
DB2 Express-C 9.7: very, very cool
One more for OS X that's relatively unknown is the 'Go To Folder' shortcut in file dialogues. It's accessed via ~ and supports tab-completion — opening something in ~/Documents something becomes:
cmd+o, ~, ~/D[tab]<enter>, filename<enter>
I block flash ads on my solaris box -- the z ordering is all screwed up with flash, and it gets in the way of content. Also, it makes firefox (by its own fault or by the plugin) crash, often.

On other machines, only those ads with movement get blocked. Look, if you can't get a message that's interesting in text while I'm already reading, then you don't have a product I'd want to buy.
Kim Kardashian's Latest Spicy Photos
I seriously doubt it. I am a southerner and many have called me a redneck. I am very plugged into the folks I have grown up around. Racism is alive and well my friend. Obviously, not all the people I know are racists, but there are more than enough. And its by far not a southern phenomenon.
Why your company should hire open source developers
And Pepsi is sure to have at least another drastic change in the future since I don't know a single person that doesn't think the current logo is terrible.
Headed To College? Design Your Dorm Lets You Build Your Pad In 3D
Humility is generally a virtue; but not in the face of arrogant stupidity, then it is pandering to idiots. There are claims, unfortunately fairly common on some political issues, where you can be sure comment you are responding to is egregiously wrong.
I think they also need to worry about the growing popularity of smaller devices like the iPhone and, like you mentioned, netbooks rather than laptops. Someone could sit in the shop for hours and use the wifi to watch a streaming movie on their iPhone/netbook and take up a seat. It is only one seat, but if they aren't buying anything it could hurt business.

It is reasonable to ban laptops and other devices from a store during lunch time because of the huge wave of customers, but they should be allowed once the big wave dies back down. Late night coffee shop studying is really popular, especially in college towns.
Why Teens Don’t Tweet
And if they pull it off every other site is going to follow suit.
The Complete Guide to Going Paperless
Have tried to hire open source developers. Most of them are very busy and expensive. But I still ask prospective hires to see their GitHub accounts. If they don't provide a link, they are automatically disqualified.
GMC Terrain – Your Well Equipped, Stylish Crossover
What interesting websites do you visit daily ?
Leaving mail/personal sites.
ZendAMF, Flash, and the Twitter API
A simple example that shows how to use the Zend framework with flash to communicate with Twitter.
I explicitly said "there are people that click on those ads". Those people don't have Ad Blockers. I don't click on those ads, so I have an Ad Blocker. All I was saying was that it doesn't present an ethical problem.
"lots of really interesting, amazing, beautiful women in San Francisco"

That was true when I was there. And they tended to like independent rockers with somewhat long hair, day-old beard, who were smart and literate but never let that get in the way of being physically active most of the time.

How many geeks does that describe? (That described many of the people who got Silicon Valley started .... then)
HN, techcrunch.