skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Uh, what? We are in the same tribe. That's what being a citizen of a country is supposed to be about. We're all paying into the same government, through sales or income taxes they tend to take a similar bite whatever the income level. Even if you regard local solidarity as mere sentimentalism, there are very pragmatic reasons for me to be concerned about the welfare of my neighbors -- crime, public health, and so on.

I live in San Francisco. When the big earthquake hits and someone has to pull me out of the rubble, they won't be outsourcing that job to the Philippines. It'll be some guy who lives near me, probably the kind of guy with a broad back and an unironic mustache, who has to make do with underemployment since all the local jobs seem to be for douchebags with iPhones.
I usually ignore "help request" email or "feature request" one because basically, to reply these emails occupies a lot of time. But "bug fix" email are pretty useful. I do write test cases for code, but a lot bugs are about platform specification, compiler differences which is hard to be found by your own.
Typed 'computer science' -- hmmm, results don't look right.
Whew 14 points in the hole on the snake link. Note to self, commenting is dangerous!, just submit, submit, submit...
Bah, I knew there was a reason I always hated recursion (except for parsing). The negative pointage just goes to prove it.
I swear, Brian Cox is the next Carl Sagan. He is the most charismatic science educator I have seen in a long time.
To me an "Open Source Developer" is someone who is paid by an interested big-corp to work full time on a project that's open source: there's lots of them at Red Hat, Novell, Canonical, IBM (ASF crap especially), Intel, Sun, Apple, etc.

It's distinct from "scratch your own itch" stuff, especially when it's a project or a feature you wouldn't otherwise work on.
Ants More Rational Than Humans
Indeed. I think the internet is worth a std deviation. Before I was 25 or so, I spent the vast majority of my time bored, and the dozens-to-hundreds of questions I idly wondered about each day were largely unanswered and unanswerable, in aggregate. The world has changed, and while I can handle a few days or a week offline, I don't want to, if I can help it; the internet is where the answers are.
Schneier on Security: SHA-3 Second Round Candidates Announced
Hey man, I could probably spend some time "owning" Slicehost. After all, I know what the API is like ;)
Here is a FriendFeed discussion about it: http://friendfeed.com/science-online/cbbe2531/news-releases-..., which boils down to the answer of 'no'.

This is typical of those with the power in science: they are too slow to embrace new technologies and to adapt to what researchers need. But, hey, why do they need to when they have researchers bent over a barrel whilst they rake in the money.

Scientific publishing is ripe for disruption, which includes getting rid of pdf.
and very difficult to enforce.
Not to say that the ad campaign is a winner, but this conclusion is dubious logic at best. A bad ad campaign is responsible for the revenue drop you say? Nothing to do the with the deep global recession and plummeting consumer spending? This type of stuff makes me hate pageview driven publishing.
Actually just using that sentence is good enough. And simpler.
Hmm,

While some parts of Microsoft may have become "less evil", other parts have become more so, or at least more capable of evil. Vista was the first windows incarnation that had DRM attached to its vitals. One can expect this situation to only get worse. Kindle's 1984 flap was a prequel to what can be expected in the future as this stuff multiplies.
This is dead/low/no tech, but I really want someone to design a way to carry drycleaning - either a reuseable strap (which I have created and used, but which can be forgotten at home or in the car etc.) or, and better to my mind, something that costs essentially nothing and can attach to every hanger without interfering with its use in the drycleaning process, or perhaps an entirely new hanger.
Kindle now offers sample chapters from (some/most?) books. I find that really useful
I would consider being a host, but I'm always concerned possessions may get stolen having stranger in my apt. I'm surprised this doesn't turn away a lot of potential hosts.

Still a fantastic idea, and would definitely look to be a guest when traveling on a budget.
I saw some code posted on a security mailing list and compiled and ran it in a virtual machine to see what it did. Except I didn't and ran it on the host. It rm -rf'd my home.
FWIW, the blog ZeroHedge (www.zerohedge.com) has been following this topic in much more detail for months.

The fact that some banks like GS are allowed to have their servers and other equipment co-located at the exchange while most others are prohibited is suspicious albeit not damning.

I think the bigger issue here are the dark pools that continue to grow largely due to HFT on the exchanges. When 75%+ of the volume is coming from HFT, a lot of transaction end up occurring off the map reducing transparency and brining along its consequences.
Dear person who read a blog post and whined about it - everything mentioned in this blog post about free software, except about free text instead.
I attended your talk at Oscon, and am really excited about this project, thanks for releasing it.
You'll see me on the mailing list soon.
I see one legitimate point in here: There's a lot of faux portability going on these days. The software uses autoconf/automake and it's full of ifdefs so it should just configure/make on any platform, but actually it only runs on Linux/x86. IMO the solution is for such software to stop pretending to be portable (as a bonus, removing all those ifdefs should make the code more readable), but that won't help the grumpy old Solaris users.
Seeing Our Culture with Fresh Eyes
I don't think that we can really site security issues on this, as the pre cannot access any DRM data at this point. So there cannot be any aggreements with vendors.

Only if the Pre was accessing DRM protected media would that be a valid point. I think there is more than a dash of pettiness involved here.
There's a bit about "buying at a fair price", which brings to mind the bit about the devil being in the details...
We support 3 million lines of code on every flavour of Linux, 32 and 64 bit architectures, as well as Mac OS X and Solaris (we use the Gnu auto tools).

I think the portability problem is over-stated.
I've often thought the same thing. I've known people in the food business and it just seems like a lot of work.

I think I'd do something like BBQ probably through some kind of catering situation.
(btw great comments above gents, voted them all up)
We crave efficiency, but always end up in local optima based on resource allocation limitations. Great business opportunities are creatively observed by sharp minds and unleashed by relentless entrepreneurship. There are social forces pushing towards lower cost, ease of access, higher functionality and always entertainment!
You Can Reinvent Yourself Online
And I've got the same thing, but I write and test code on OS/X and "deploy" to the VM
Airbnb is a good example of how the best startup ideas tend to seem crazy at first. When we first met the Airbnbs, we loved the founders, but we had a hard time believing this would be popular. In fact it is massively popular. Few startups we've funded have grown so fast.
Ha! Ever try to get Microsoft to provide /real/ support for a problem in an OS you paid them for?
Warning: Auto-starting video.

From http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> If you submit a link to a video or pdf,
> please warn us by appending [video] or
> [pdf] to the title.
Well, yeah. It's not like Sun ever released a completely incompatible OS "upgrade" based on an entirely different codebase and standard set, right? :)

My point wasn't to defend linux, it was that this whole genre of platform flame is boring and useless. This stuff happens. It even happens for some really good reasons, like "improvements" and "features". It's been happening since the dawn of computing (at least), and it's even been happening in precicely this form since the Unix wars began in the mid 80's.

Just deal with it. Or don't. But stop complaining, because you won't fix anything.
I used to use this scheme exclusively. It's pretty good, particularly when you use semi-obscure song lyrics.
The "fuck you, customer" is often a different way to raise esteem. The feeling is that if others read about how badass you are at not caring what others think of your projects, they will think you're badass and ask you to do contract work for them. Presumably they'll realize that only a really really uncaring badass person will write a long screed about how they really don't care.

(gah, the original post is such a long exercise is self-important posturing! Complete with careful recitation of all the opensource work he's done. And then I followed the link to the bio site to learn the guy does "Agile coaching". At that point I even briefly considered doing a facepalm gesture).
50 US cities may have to be bulldozed in order to survive
Microsoft caves to EU pressure, will offer browser ballot
> The 10-inch, 3G-enabled tablet, akin to a jumbo iPod touch,
> is the latest brainchild of chief executive Steve Jobs

As if everyone in the Peanut-, er, Apple-Gallery hasn't been clamouring for something like this for many years.

(Not that I can see why. Wacom's digitiser-tablet built into an LCD is a great solution for pen input. A computer with only a pen input is a crummy solution for general purpose computing ... unless the input is never-before-seen tremendous - like Apple's multitouch iswas).
Now that the Pre is actually masquerading itself, Apple could go after them for trademark infringement!
Either that or you'll be keeping them up at night wondering why anything actually works.
Instead of this pissing match over the horrible iTunes, Pre, Google, and Amazon need to get together and make better media software.
Many systems have (dumb) arbitrary limits on password size and content.
Standard practice? There are an insane amount of bad web designers then. I have NEVER dealt with a designer that knew anything worthwhile SEO-wise - other than simple stuff like adding meta keywords and descriptions. (the design equivalent would be making sure you have a header, navigation and content area - common knowledge)
The whole film and darkroom setup?
Yes, and she can charge a fortune for it. Most people don't understand these concepts (people who hired her, for one).
Incidentally, Apple is rumoured to have no debt and $30Bn in the bank.

What do you reckon the biggest limitation on them making use of their cash reserves is? (Assuming they aren't, that is).

Is it ideas? Ability to scale their corporate culture? Their management culture? Their hardware development teams? Their software development teams? Manufacturing arrangements?
I gave up after a couple of paragraphs. Maybe I have a short attention span, or maybe this is just the same tired old argument.

During the Unix wars nobody gave a crap for standards, and these only came to be when Unix was starting to get some serious competition from non-unix operating systems.

The problem is, relying too much on standards leads to stagnation, and it is Linux that has prevented unix from standardizing itself into irrelevance.

I'm mostly a Linux guy, I admit, but I have worked, and still do, with other unixes (the ones spelled with all caps) every day and I must say that although they are unix (and I like the unix way of doing things), they are also a pain to work with and not "standard" at all (just put AIX, Solaris and IRIX side by side, and try creating users, managing ACLs, and so forth). The only standard thing about them is the lack of the small features that Linux admins take for granted and that make one's job so much easier (the so called GNUisms). Keeping your tools in the 1980's just because they are "standard" doesn't mean they are any good.

Don't get me wrong, once you have an AIX box humming along, it works just great. But so does a Linux one with added flexibility and "niceness".
Psst, downmodders ... that's a quote from the Office.
Some of the best people on oDesk are making 80k USD a year fulltime, or 40k working half-time. That's not bad. Too bad there are only a small handful at that level.

I'm an independent technology consultant myself, and constantly struggle to find leads. I've heard mixed results on guru and oDesk ... at the startup where I'm CTO, we've hired people specializing in niche ecomm packages off of elance _dirt_ cheap ... shamefully cheap. Typically from Malaysia.

It's such a mucky business ...
The bassoon is in kind of an interesting position because it's used in basically every full symphonic score ever, but uncommonly played. Most universities will have two to five bassoon majors at any given time. There are tons of less commonly used instruments but they are usually played as a side project by another instrumentalist. A lot of bassoonists actually double down on the saxophone which is used rarely in the symphonic context. Myself I alternated between Bassoon and Tenor Saxophone, which was my other love.

The instrument itself plays differently from anything else in an orchestra. It really is a bizarre instrument. And it's an absolute riot to play. The double reed, woody sound, and enormous four-octave range make playing the bassoon a really unique endeavor. The instrument is built out of tune with itself. It takes a certain kind of... distinctive individual to really connect with the instrument. Ask any concert musician - they'll nod and grin when you mention those odd bassoonists.

The closest instrument I can think of in terms of rarity and unusualness is the French Horn. It's really the odd duck of the brasswinds. French hornists are a little more common than bassoonists, but then most instrumentations call for a few more horn players.

Man, this has been a trip down memory lane. What might have been....?
I'm a big fan of Apple, but this is ridiculous. Going to such extreme lengths in the name of what boils down to decreasing their customer base seems rather silly. God forbid someone use Linux and pay Apple for iPods.
"Independent technology professional"
I first read that as 'Beer profits fall 92%' and was slightly worried.

(I know you're picky about houmorous comments here, but please don't vote me down to -8)
Until trouble occurs
Synopsis: Apple has never supported or particularly wanted third-party software or hardware to be able to interface with their systems. In the running skirmish that is trying to get said devices to work with said systems, Apple has once again made a change that breaks the jiggered compatibility. This guy doesn't use an Apple system, so he's not gonna buy another iPod.

Well, that, plus a lot more drama and dramatic linebreaks.
Golden Slippers of Zappos
The result of Sega vs Accolade suggests that trademark protection wouldn't be extended to identification for interoperability reasons.
I actually take back my comment about not being appropriate because it made me think about the entrepreneurial possibilities of creating a brand based on humane meat. So I was incorrect in the video not being appropriate because it was able to kindle the entrepreneurial mindset!
Can he explain why Harvard loss 22% or 8 billion dollars in its endowment over the last year?
I'll admit it: I will watch this cartoon.

Warren Buffett is, next to Taleb and a few others, my favorite modern thinker, and the clip seems to do him justice. It's ironic how his ideas are so simple they can be accurately presented in cartoon form. It's like reading the Intelligent Investor: business/investing isn't too complex, the hard part is executing on simple premises while keeping your emotions in check for the long term.
I continue to be amazed at how people are willing to give Apple a pass on cutting off the Pre. Paticularly this guy who says he can "understand" Apple cutting off the Pre but then balks at Apple cutting off his music software.

Monopolistic greed is understandable when it doesn't affect me seems to be the attitude (On that note I'm pretty sure Apple makes way more off iTunes than it does off the hardware at this point)

As a customer who is paying for this music I should be able to sync it with whatever I want. I don't expect Apple to support the Pre but I think it's reprehensible to actively try to cut it off.

(For the record I'm an iPhone 3GS owner who doesn't even like the Pre. I just don't want to be forced to use Apple products for the rest of my life just to keep my music)
I must admit I am a bit shocked by this, too. I just assumed the iPod would continue to work on Linux, as it worked pretty well so far.
Palm should ask themselves whether flaky on-again/off-again integration with iTunes is really better for their users than writing a standalone sync program like Blackberry.

I don't really get Palm's reluctance to write good sync software. They've been avoiding it since the 90s.
I like his point about the phrase "right now". I've often used the expression myself when talking about the progress of a web development project.
Ask HN: The founders' visa? 
Dear HN community,
I am an international student from Myanmar (Burma). Currently i am a rising senior.I am very passionate about making web/mobile applications that other people find useful. I want start a start up after I graduate next year with a friend of mine who is also an international student. If i start a company in US, are there any ways i can stay here? Any advice? Thanks.
Is it? Around here (Hawaii) there are ordinances in many areas restricting the number of B&Bs that operate, and neighbours have been known to complain to the authorities when they see excess traffic to/from a property.
This decision is exactly the same as dozens of decisions they've made in the past, all decried as patently ridiculous and self-destructive. Apple likes to sell self-contained systems, in order to make sure that everything works really well. In the iPod's case, they have an interest in being sure that iPods are only used with iTunes, because then they can ensure that it works well -- and so people won't complain about how lousy iPods are when they use it with other people's potentially lousy software.

That's unfortunate for Linux users, because it's clearly not worth it to Apple to build a version of iTunes for GNU/Linux. But, you know, the iPod also doesn't play ogg files. So what are Linux users doing buying them in the first place?
China Invests $30 Billion in Renewable Energy; Economy Rebounds
You're forgetting a second perk of paying for an item with support: You get to yell at someone when something goes wrong without having an HR report filed against you. Passing blame and responsibility for "opportunities" is standard enterprise behavior.
The Song of the PowerSquid
Whats really missing from this article, and is alluded to quite frequently, is couchsurfing.com
I skimmed the article, seems like a great pitch, but I didn't get why I would want to use airbnb.com over couchsurfing.
couchsurfing.com is pretty mature though not w2.0. It's got the verification system so you can have some peace of mind, and its free.
Take notice: the Onion newspaper is again for sale
Meanwhile, I am amazed that people are giving Palm a pass for the tactics they're using. They way they re-enabled iTunes sync is by changing their USB id to be the same as Apple's.

If they wanted the Pre to sync to iTunes data, they should have written their own app that reads the user's XML file. It wouldn't have been that much work.
>A friend asked me if I knew I was privileged to be able to take such a break.

This is probably the issue for most. Without spending a lot of time online every day, I'm not sure that I'd be valuable enough to earn enough money to do all the pleasant things commenters here have written about (cottages, exotic travel, etc.)
As far as my grandparents know, I run the internet.
That's a rather bad synopsis.

Here's a better one:

In a misguided attempt to lock people in, apple is blocking linux users, (and anyone else) from accessing their data on an iPod.

Don't support 3rd party software? Fine.

Actively block them? Not so fine.
Can't feel too badly for these guys, they've been capitalizing on market inefficiency (the bad kind, anti-competitive actions) for decades. For anyone interested in the diamond industry, this Wired story from 2003 provides some great insight into the cartel: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/diamond.html
Seems like you could cross sell this to some business travelers. Perhaps also up-selling some professional services (legal/design/marketing).

Personally I like having separate spaces for work and home.

Sounds like a good idea to partner with a Kinkos. Maybe hard to make the numbers work out, but worth looking in to.
Our tendency to keep reading even bad books is also (to some degree) a manifestation of the "endowment effect" documented in Dan Ariely's "Predictable Irrational": Once you've forked over money for a book, you value it more simply because it's now yours. Even if it sucks, you'll have an easier time convincing yourself that it is an Important Book.

That said, I think there are cases where you should plow through a book you don't (at first) enjoy. E.g. when a book comes highly recommended by people you trust, or from an author who has delivered in the past. This is especially true for older books that were written for less attention-sapped audiences and have cultural gaps that take getting used to. I'm thinking of Dostoevsky's "The Brothers Karamazov." It was highly reccomended by friends with good taste, and I had enjoyed some of his shorter works. Still, it was incredibly slow getting started. But once I had ingested the multi-layered background and got a grip on Russian peasant culture, was one of the more amazing books I've ever read. And could not have been otherwise if not for the investment required to get into it.
Also: it sounds like you are advocating a sort of internationalism. That would be fine with me, as long as we had similar rules for global labor as we do for global capital.

Free trade agreements are negotiated painstakingly to make the treatment of investments uniform across countries. In the process, they usually accord some special treatment to professional classes. I myself am a beneficiary of such rules -- as a Canadian professional, I can skip across the border to the USA with just a little bit of documentation.

We don't have anything equivalent for labor. This seems to me to be a great omission, if not an outright scam. Even after free trade between the US and Canada and Mexico, we don't allow workers to cross borders. Nor do we have uniform standards for the treatment of labor like we do for capital, either.

It seems to me to be deliberate -- they want the workers to be stuck with the local situation, and they want local governments to compete on lowering benefits and labor standards.
FWIW, both here and below I rewrote a paragraph several times about the analytical mindset overlapping with several other fields. I never found a wording I liked, so I cut it.

Have a nice weekend.
I got a Nokia N810 recently. With a hefty SD card it plays media very adequately for my needs -- and it does a whole lot more too! My iPod is starting to gather dust.