skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
RedHat doesn't really sell support. They sell licenses, enforced by their trademark. They provide support for each license sold, that's true.

People buy RedHat licenses because it's a defacto standard in the industry. Some people or companies use CentOS, which is a re-branded RedHat. But if you want the original, you have to buy the product.
But he didn't really mean it. He was just mocking the doc, right? That's how I remember it at least. He just wanted to do construction work like the rest of his friends.
Fix Your Terrible, Insecure Passwords in Five Minutes
Fortunately, there is an update in the article that clarifies the 600 billion number.
So why do they buy the license? CentOS is 100% compatible with RedHat. There is no reason to buy a license other than if you want the support they offer. RHN is part of that support.
Warren Buffet's Kid Show [video]
When to stop reading a Web page. When there's a next button at the bottom.
statistically, after 100 flips, you'd be up 2 dollars. so it would take 500 flips.
"So, I’m one of those people where I don’t like running things “too far” from what a production setup might look like."

Me neither. That's why I use a VMWare image of a linux server that closely resembles my production server for development.
The reddit of books? Start reading one article, but if it doesn't suit, or has too many pages, skip right on to the next article.

The fun bit is that she has paid for said 100 books. Amazon, on a financial level, could be quite happy for her to not read them - it saves time before she buys another.
Why U.S. specifically?
statistically, after 100 flips, you'd be up $2. so it would take 500 flips.
I find that my attention span is way less after quitting TV and going only online...now, I can barely watch a 30 minute tv show without grabbing my computer to check stats, and an hour tv show (or a movie, god forbid) are basically totally out of the question.
I would be a computer scientist.
You can hack around it (but like I said, it isn't very clean). I can't speak for AppEngine or the others but on Windows Azure, you're really committing to Windows but not Windows Azure. So in theory, anything that works on Windows should work on us (we don't run things in a sandbox as some people like to say though we do run you currently in a normal user account without admin privs).

One way to implement this would be wrap a Windows Azure service around whatever you want to do on a node/server and then deploy that service. For example, if you have a Windows server where you install a ASP.NET app or a PHP site by xcopying binaries, you could do the same thing by wrapping that into a web role and put that in a Windows Azure service.

By doing this, you do miss out on some of the advantages of the platform but it should make it fit into your model.
I too am curious to see the downmod/upmode ratio (anonymously of course). I think mine is probably 10-20 upmods to 1 downmods, and I mod sparsely (maybe 1 comment in 20? depends on the thread). I downmod "noise", not signal I disagree with.

While we're geeking out, I'd be more interested in some kind of karma/comment metric than absolute karma.
Mmm.. Tekken 6..
I'm working on http://www.mosambe.com a place where people and companies network to find better opertunities.

Feedback is highly appriciated.

Thanks :)
even copper?
System rollout nightmares
Good point. I'd also note, however, that as hackers, we should attempt to be as precise as possible in our discussions.
It was meant to be tongue in cheek. I actually don't write code for a living (anymore). My computer usage is probably about 4 hrs a day and I'm actively engaged in trying to get that number lower. So I agree there is much to be said for jobs outside of tech.
Quick plug for zuora.com, started by ex-salesforce people (I'm not connected w/them). They make cloud billing models easier for purchasing to swallow. And yes, they're a SaaS provider themselves.
What On Earth Is Wrong With Gravity? [video]
Top Geeky Things You Don’t Know About Romance Writers
Read this, you might find it interesting.

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/3/19/133129/548
Bill Gates Faults U.S. Policy on Data Privacy and Immigration
Figuring tips, baseball statistics, extrapolating energy consumption with population growth, arithmetic competitions, currency conversions for price comparison, price comparisons given a unit price, the price of 2400 grams of apples...

Most of these you can do with division instead, and some of them you have to, but it's harder. The competitions are probably the most effective way to motivate some students to be really excellent; I don't know how effective they are at raising the average competence level.
All tutorials in one place
I agree, not serious-and-business-like enough! We should all ensure that our comments are not humorous, but may sometimes contain a little bit of Snark.
Travel like a human (Airbnb, YC W09)
It's one thing to cook well for your family, and a completely different thing to routinely cook 30 orders in 60 minutes during a lunch rush. It gets very unglamorous very quickly.
I liked the CD bin analogy. Another good one is the clearance rack at clothing stores. Even though it's the same stuff that, a few months prior, was given lots of floor space and displayed nicely on models--it just seems crappier. And even though I know what's going on, I still totally fall for it. Them's some powerful forces, apparently.
Totally agree... If MS has contributed a lot to bring computer to the household...
Pfeh. This reads as a story written purely to arrive at the "and that's why 90% of computers sold over $1000 are apples" conclusion.
FTA:

"Several space missions have already used ion engines, including NASA's Dawn spacecraft, which is en route to the asteroids Vesta and CeresMovie Camera, and Japan's spacecraft Hayabusa, which rendezvoused with the asteroid Itokawa in 2005.

But a new engine, called VASIMR (Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket), will have much more "oomph" than previous ones. That's because it uses a radio frequency generator, similar to transmitters used to broadcast radio shows, to heat the charged particles, or plasma."
Dropbox (YC 07) needs a nasty systems engineer
dropbox is a YC startup in SF (we've since been funded by sequoia and accel.) we want to be the way the world stores and shares files, and we're well on our way.

from the blurb: "We're looking for someone great to join our small, hardcore team that manages billions of files and petabytes of data for millions of users; someone who would take pride in the very high standards we set for availability and performance. Serious hacking chops, battle scars and prior end-of-the-line responsibility for large Linux-based deployments are all essential."

we'd love to bring someone in from the HN/YC community -- include your HN username if you're interested. thanks!
Portfolio - Lionite Internet Ventures
You don't need to sign your comments.
Joel Spolsky summed it up pretty well in his last Inc. article:

"...The Web consulting business was great, but it had one problem: limited margins. You could charge only so much for an hour of some consultant's time -- in those days, maybe $200. Some of that went to overhead (say $20) and some to pay the consultant's salary (maybe $70). That leaves you with a mere $110 per hour in gross profit. That's a lot of money, but it paled in comparison with margins in the software industry, in which you can produce additional copies of an application at virtually no cost."

So, if a body-shopping service company is competing against another body-shopping service company, they're facing the same per-employee costs and will have no problems in their market. However, if a body-shopping service company is competing against commercial software for the exact same product and market, commercial software will face lower costs and receive higher revenue for the same work and so will have more resources to bury that competing body-shop every time.

Also, if our company receives a service call, we regard it as a failure of our product to address our customer's needs. If a 'commercial' open source company receives that same call, they regard it as money earned from a support ticket.

Given that difference, which software product would you prefer to run in your business?
I like the name of the service :)
And it have good search results.
what to choose... restore old cars, electronics, instrument maker, musician, build windmills
Seeing the first link, I find this: "Although it may be enticing to spend a few years with a slick point and click IDE such as VisualStudio and pretend you are programming..."

Is that a thoughtful comment? I don't think so. I think that this kind of comment is what groupthink is really made of.

People thinks that the audience of the site is mostly anti-microsoft and happily insults "the others", hoping that this kind of remark will be rewarded.

Heck! If it turns out that enough people dislike that behaviour and downvote, you can still make a story asking for a revision. It seems to have worked, BTW.

OK, it might not be the case for all the comments you meant, but there are many and the general tone of them really didn't invite to more detailed read.

IOW: if you have something interesting to say, try to write respectfully and to the point. It's posible to say you don't like certain IDE without saying their users "pretend" to be programming.
Strange how you got modded down, I think that to be happy instead of working is quite a nice thing to strive for.

It's easy to forget we work to live, we don't live to work.
I thought it was obvious that I'm a U.S. citizen...
How to Create A Simple Web-based Chat Application
If you haven't already picked up a copy, you would probably enjoy the excellent book, "The Art of the Stonemason".

See here: http://www.kk.org/cooltools/archives/001414.php
nice article on a yc company. the part i like best: airbnb is a startup that helps other entrepreneurs starting up by letting them monetize their space, albeit indirectly. nice!
Government 2.0: Crowdfunding Federal Agencies
Professional LEGO builder (that's what I wanted to be as a kid. seriously)
Why Email Marketing is Dead (And How to Bring it Back to Life)
Startup Law 101 - High-level legal tips to consider when about to get acquired
I don't think I follow you, care to explain ?
1,336 MPG Hydrogen Vehicle Built By Students
Yes, great Washington Post coverage.

Every time I hear about airbnb though, I wonder - don't you need a permit to offer paid accommodation? For example in my part of the U.S. you need a "special use" permit to run a B&B. How is advertising your spare room on airbnb different?

I looked in their FAQ but couldn't find an answer.
Are you kidding? It's a perfect rhyme: Pub. Sub. Hub. Bub.

It distinguishes it as a specific standardized implementation of the PubSub architectural pattern.

It's no worse than Aitch. Tee. Tee. Pee.

Or Doubleyou. Doubleyou. Doubleyou.
Goodbye, Apple
Back in the day, AOL and Microsoft went through a similar war their messaging service. It was great from the consumer's perspective, interesting from the hacker's perspective, and petty from a business perspective--like the insistence on trying to kiss the hot girl in the bar last Saturday, drunk.

Now, here's the other thought: Apple has a lot of reasons to block imitation devices from accessing iTunes, the least of which includes perhaps security issues for its users, but also for the fact that being able to access iTunes, iTunes Store, and iTunes content might have very specific clauses drafted in its agreements with Apple's content partners. By not protecting that, Apple in itself might be in legal trouble.

So, this isn't just pettiness that Apple is taking in full delight of. Just a bit.
Agreed.

My father-in-law makes and gives away enough that he's probably violating a few laws about liquor distribution.

He's from Eastern Europe and everyone he knew made wine. It's amazing how interesting his wine tastes compared to the bottled variety. No sulfites, no ingredients other than grapes.

It tastes best about 9 months after it was created and goes south after about a year. The craziest thing, though, is that at about month 12 it starts to sparkle a little. Nothing serious like Champaign, but a bit of tingle on the tongue (and it hits you a little quicker imo).

There's only a few downsides:

1) Fruit flies. Oh man. It's bad. When I assisted him last year the first stage of filtering, we poured the waste out and it looked like half of it was dirt... except the dirt was moving. He does it in his garage so for about three months there's a thin layer of flies over everything in there and enough get into the house to make it sufficiently annoying.

2) Pressing is hard work and the amount that he makes, just about every other step in the process is very tedious. Part of that is because he refuses to use anything resembling modern equipment. It's all hard labour.

3) The temptation to turn the wine into Brandy always looms. Which is a great idea and produces fantastic truly snifter worthy brandy, but also runs the risk of burning your house down.

It's worth it though. Even the labour, since in the end you have natures best pain killer as your reward.
I agree that, of all the radical philosophies, global capitalism is the one that is providing real change in the Third World. And personally, I am more flexible on concepts like child labor and safety standards. Subsistence farming is hazardous to your health too, and people ought to be able to make a choice on what's best for their future.

With one caveat -- as long as there are well-enforced laws that protect the rights of workers to organize or protest, and a strong local government that isn't powerless with respect to foreign companies, that can direct investment to make permanent upgrades in local conditions. Taiwan obviously got it right, somehow -- I don't know the history. Perhaps you can enlighten me, but maybe it's due to their democratic assembly and their strategic relationship with the West.

Other places in the world seem to be getting a worse deal -- often due to the deficits of the local government or culture, I'll admit. But globalization also seems to move a lot faster than it did, with less commitment to the host countries. If it takes literally just weeks to set up light manufacturing somewhere else that's just a little bit more desperate, how does a place like Cambodia hold onto the little gains they've made so far? I'm not an expert in that country either but I hear they've had serious problems with that.

Anyway, I have to bow to your superior understanding of the realities, but I just don't think that my microwave ovens or cans of cola had to be paid for with so much misery. It just doesn't seem like this is truly required.
Maybe I'm privileged then, because I got used to downloading software written for Linux and not necessarily getting it to compile without a few tweaks for my specific setup. It taught me my way around the OS and really helped me learn how to cleanly administer a system.

It really makes me appreciate a good package management system.
This seems to work well only with highly general or extremely popular searches. I tried web.py, django, and jquery and got far fewer results than there should be.
High end watches don't keep very good time because they're not electronic watches -- they have mechanical movements.
Yell at them script kiddies to get off my public interfaces!
Timber framing.

Just took a great course (for the second time in 9 years) from the Heartwood School (heartwoodschool.com), with my
second son (first son the first time).

We built a two-story 24' x 28' craft shop in 4 days and raised on the fifth.

Highly recommended.

We also built a timber-frame small horse barn at our farm back in 2000 with some itinerant framer help (well, they did the bulk of the work, since they had the experience). Great time, with a 200-person barn raising, big get-together, bonfire, etc.
Yeah. Apparently there's often the issue that pipes are too tight for the flow in there.

There's a line running to the faucet, containing hot water. Near the faucet, this line splits and one of them continues to the faucet while the other one goes back to the heater where its contents are pumped into the heater. This keeps the water near the faucet warm. There are other methods for that, but that one is common. And because the pipes are too tight for that flow, there's cavitation at bends inside the pipe, which destroys it over time.
Google's Android To Invade Homes
One of the cruel, unspoken ironies of academic life (particularly for grad students, who usually have little power or autonomy) is that the biggest rewards come from revolutionary change...but nobody wants to support you if you set out to be revolutionary. So you have to be free-thinking, but only incrementally so. Stay within the confines of your pack; throw stones at the other guys.

Working in low-stakes fields like academia really helps you to highlight how little our social structure has evolved from apes. So much of success in human culture depends upon winning the favor of the alpha, while not alienating the other members of the pack. And while we may have come up with much more sophisticated mechanisms for doing it, fundamentally we're still just howling at the trees and competing for a little bit of attention.
My son's a farrier. I think having an egghead/hacker father probably pushed him as far as he could get from technology. ;-)
Work at a Gym.

It's hard work, but very potentially rewarding. And I've never seen a gym employee stressed before.
I had this problem too. It sounded like he was upset that software written for Linux and assuming Linux tools doesn't run on his pristine server. It sounded like he wanted everything to compile on his old Digital Tru64 Unix Alpha box. I hate to say it, but I'm pretty sure that the world has continued to move on and evolve. Yes, people will start using libraries you don't have. Yes, people will stop writing workaround for old technologies. Yes, people will tend to write for their own environment first. No, it is not necessarily a bad thing.

It sounds like a guy who doesn't want to change, and I have a lot of trouble mustering sympathy for that. Oh, and I think he wants a pony too.
Computer gigs feel more productive... I can make a computer do much more work than I can. If successful I can effect the lives of many more people with software than with manual labor.
Been a distance runner for over eight years and tried out the Nike+ for about a month two years ago. Basically it's not accurate. Mine was off on pace and distance constantly. It's in the garbage now.

The way I calibrated it was I ran on a treadmill at a constant pace for 1 mile. After I'd get pace results that were off by a minute sometimes, and mileage results off by 1/10th of a mile. I calibrated it like 20 times before giving up on it.

That might not seem a lot, but to a serious runner it is. A 6:00/mile pace is far more grueling than a 6:30/mile pace. I ran a 1/2 marathon with it and Lance Armstrong congratulated me for finishing when passing the 11.5 mile marker. Uh, another 1.6 to go dude. If I let it pace me it would have ruined the race for me. Fortunately stop-watches and mile-markers still rule all.

You can look at reviews for it on Amazon. Many had the same experience I did. People still buy them though because people like stats. "You finished a marathon. Achievement unlocked!" etc...

It's more for new/amateur runners to the sport. They don't care so much about accurate pace and distance. Just having something say "You did good!" makes them happy. Running for 30 minutes is difficult enough for many, without worrying about accurate stats. And heck, if that gets you running, by golly go and buy one! The more people taking care of their bodies the better! :)

--------------------

The idea behind the uploading of your workout data online is really cool though. If it was replaced with a GPS unit, and the cost stayed affordable, lots of problems solved for runners like me. Garmin has a nice, albeit bulky, runners GPS wrist-watch unit, for $300...

--------------------

The data saying "5 uploads and you're hooked" probably has a lot of more "serious" athletes like me dropping out before hitting the 5-upload mark.
I worked part time as a volunteer for a used bookstore once that was run by the public library. All profits from the bookstore get put back into the library and all full time workers were library employees who got paid from them.
Free web based Application to Submit Your Websites To Multiple
Anthropologist, literally working in the field / excavating digs. Alternately a geologist doing pretty much the same thing minus the human artifacts.
Airship?
Here are all the results:

http://teamecomarathon.com/iframe/results/result.php?id=1

The article claims this team won third place in the hydrogen fuel category, but I can't find them in the listing, #65 and #86 are Turkish but different teams ?

Also the top performer has a whopping 3771 km/l, or 8870 mpg, which I think is absolutely amazing.
How's it different from delicious.com?
I don't really get the point of this article. Different tools for different jobs. I have both a dell latitude E6500 and a white macbook. They are both really nice machines, but not really "apples" to apples.

Do research on what software you need, what you want to get done, and... Well I guess I'd better stop preaching to the choir.
I think this falls within the wide category of unenforced laws.
This is a very cool service, but the search isn't so good as the idea. I tried to search some composed names and the queries returned a lot of results but none of them were significant at least in the first page :D
Because managers need a line item in the budget to do anything, and it's a lot easier organizationally to pay a yearly subscription (no matter how expensive) than it is to make it an employee's job.

The support basically amounts to access to their RPM repository. You'd have to pay a lot of money to get access to Alan Cox -- normal tickets just get you access to people who've been through the same training that your manager paid you to go to.
Another good one is the clearance rack at clothing stores.

That's pretty interesting, because I buy the majority of my name-brand pants, polos, shoes, and shirts from discount stores like Marshalls, TJ Max, Nordstrom Rack, etc...

Do you pay full price for your clothing from all the designer stores?
I agree with you completely. It has to be one monthly payment to access internet anywhere and everywhere.
Assuming pay wasn't a factor in the decision, I'd be a door man for a hotel that caters to vacationers (and not in a major city like New York).

- My back hurt less and I was generally in better shape when I had a job that involved standing for the majority of the day.

- When the dominating factor of your job is smiling at and being smiled at all day, I think it'd be hard to leave work in a bad mood.
I left a startup for a regular hedgefund first; I think having a lot of outside interest in finance helped. Then the HFT firm hired me because now I had some finance experience, and I knew C++. Another approach would be to look at the career pages of getco, citadel,etc, and diff your resume against what they want.

Edit: but really, why are you dying to get in? I would guess startups are a better bet for most readers of HN, anyway.
This is a good way to come up with memorable, secure passwords, but it still requires either remembering a bunch of different passwords or being insecure and using the same password for multiple sites.