skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Unfortunately I'm not. I tried learning C as my second language after VB and the syntax seemed unnecessarily complicated to me (like '->').

As a newb, you get bogged down in the details and knowing the cases for when to use &,* seems like an added complication.
Luckily, "The AP are idiots" is only four words.
they're actually probably a company that makes no sense at all and whose short-lived moment of (apparent) grace has just come (and will vanish soon)
The iPhone was a success before the app store. It succeeded because it looks sexy, it leveraged off the iPod, it's got an awesome UI, and the best mobile browser by far. The app store doesn't even come into the equation.

>> "because they want their apps to access the 'net everywhere, not just wi-fi spots."

This may be true more in the US, if you don't have many wifi spots. Here in the UK, you get free data (3G and wifi spots). The wifi spots cover most towns and cities, restaurants etc.

In 5 years we'll probably have wifi everywhere, so the whole thing will be a little redundant.
Awesome additions, shame the bandwidth doesn't go up proportionally but tops out at 2GB, but we can't always have everything :)

Linode still rule.

edit: Oops, meant 2TB
Eh, all I got was a big Flash error button. :\ I would have liked a table compared to having nothing.
Hackers expose weakness in trusted sites
You can see the differences really clearly when switching between groups - so I think the graphic is doing its job.

A table would end up being 24 x ~15 - tough to notice anything in particular as every number is going to change somewhat.
TV isn't engaging, but very passive. In fact going for engaging might not be a good thing.
An aspect of this I feel hasn't been addressed is that in this case, the product of the commercial activity is information (in the form of a map), which has a reproduction cost tending to zero. This will of course make it difficult to sell profitably (the fact that in most cases the information costs energy to produce, is beside the point).

To those who would argure that this is unfair competition, I would ask whether they would feel the same about an encyclopaedia company suing wikipedia, or the publisher of "Blurb for dummies" suing the guy who put a Blurb tutorial on his website.

I would contend that there is no viable market here in the first place. The example of Google maps proves my point, Google having to make money selling ads, instead of the information itself.
Nowadays, you can build apps/services as a one person company. You don't need to make that much money as your expenses are minimal.
If we have the technology to live that long, the quality of life will probably be higher. There might not be a difference between a 150 year old and a 50 year old. The need for special treatment for older people may not be an issue at all.
>> "No. You are wrong."

How successful was the iPhone before the app store existed? I'd say very.

>> "Apple's iPhone is important because for the first time ever there is an incredibly simple, usable interface to a full-powered computer."

OR

Apples iPhone is important, because it's the first usable portable interface to the web.
Horrible title for actually quite an interesting discussion.
I don't care about advancement of a field. I care about working on novel ideas that are of interest to me.
According to the wikipedia page, the Neptune 30 can carry 30 KG. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interorbital_Systems

Their website is terrible. It looks like something from Geocities. I went to Wikipedia to see if they were real or not.
As I once thunk
For all you start up founders who are working on Sunday...
Zellr.com - Maximize Your Twitter Profile
Many people could say that there is no need for you to have many windows opened at the same time to find the information you want, and they might be right. You might consider this solution as a new way to get the benefits of the most interesting and popular social sites and applications all together in one place. How? By having a precise profile.
Also, when you right click it in FF3.5 the whole page goes white.

The unspoken flash rule: its good for video players, games, luxury product sites (cars/fashion) and banner ads. Besides that, it's a usability nightmare.
Presenting the Linode Library
Nice site, Having a niche isn't a bad thing though. You can customize your site optimally for your target, something that ebay can't do.
I would agree that low-level programming should be taught at some point. But one course is sufficient and it could be one that is taken in second or third year.

Low-level memory issues should be avoided whenever possible by using a higher level language. There's a reason why garbage collection was invented.
A postcard?
Factor compiler improvements
There are official designations for material classed as "Top Secret" - These are "merely" confidential minutes from the Board of Directors meeting.
They really need to put the specs online and work on their presentation - I love everything I see at their website, but the site itself looks extremely amateurish...which is a pity, because their idea of fractional ownership of rockets has some merit. Also: http://www.interorbital.com/CubeSat%20BOOST-UP%20Program%20R... for a more detailed outline of their business model.

Meantime, the engineering challenge is: what would you like to do, given a power source, transceiver, ~200 gram payload (although apparently they're stackable in groups of 2, 3, 4), and a few weeks' worth of low-earth orbit?
Linux package management review
How Apple can mess with your life
Why is it absurd. Many of our grandparents have seen all of these things change in their lives and they have accepted them.
We need one for Palo Alto, too!
One of the four things that can (safely) make something fair use is if it's transformative, which news aggregation is.
Hmm. I'd pay that.

Much higher resale value.
But this would produce a generation of students that know how to do things that we already know how to do really well already. Maybe it would be better if we skipped page faults and taught things that would advance CS. CS has moved on to more interesting areas that simple page faults. Think about how massively parallel systems run, or how distributed databases handle consistency, or high volume scaling, or NLP or any of the other areas of CS that are far more interesting that page faults.

Language details are all academic, pointless debates to be had by people who like one over another where the differences are often trivial (C++/Java). If you have a great mind and can understand what languages are doing then either will do you just fine.

I'd rather not teach the next generation of CS under-graduates the same old stuff that I did (and yes that included how the VAX-11/750 - one of the first to do so if I recall correctly - didn't have to have all a programs data or code in memory...)

Teach them things that will take CS forward...
Python Wrapper Tools: A Performance Study
I did for grad school until about a year ago.
Because a company is a client of iCopyright doesn't necessarily mean they're using the same product/service as AP or employing the same pricing model. iCopyright, like most companies, likely provides more than one product/service.
I am male but I felt like this should have stated that the average entreprenuer was male (and by what ratio) rather than just leaving this as an unstated assumption and using "he" everywhere. Strangely they tried to use the gender-neutral "they" and "their" here and there, after already using "he".
Then you will have to make up a new headline/title for the story that wasn't taken out of the article.
What keeps me coming back to Linode is the administration interface / console.

The Plesk, cPanel and Virtuozzo consoles provided to customers by other VPS hosting companies are horrible in comparison.

Slicehost's RubyOnRails based interface is too simple and doesn't provide anywhere near the functionality that Linode provides.
This is a pet peeve of mine. A fun pastime is to tell a book aficionado, or maybe a librarian how in 20 years all their favorite medium will be obliterated completely and how the likes of them will be dismissed as luddites. Just sit back and relax for the next hour while you listen to an ad-lib essay on why books are so great and how they have "life" and how computers are "mechanical and lifeless", and how staring at a computer screen will surely cause asociality (while of course staring at a book is not likely to). I've even heard people tout that the book experience, from the feeling of the covers to the smell of it, is inexchangeable to that "degenerate computer crap". Overly melodramatic.

Do I really believe that books will come to an end that soon? No way. Much later, maybe. Do I hate books? Not at all, I love them. I own many of them and regularly buy, borrow and read more.

Honestly, I'm sad that these people can't identify with all the change they're being subjected to, but I'm tired of the behavior. If you don't like where everything is heading, that's fine, you're free to keep your old ways but if you're going to grumble on about it, then you better stop swimming upstream and start learning the other way too. Maybe the reason I'm so receptive to change is because I was born into an era of it.
Red Hat is actually downstream from Fedora. Red Hat takes a Fedora release once every two years and makes it into a RHEL.
Ask HN: What do you hate using but are forced to use?
I'd like to discover niches where people are stuck using software or services that they hate, but where there aren't viable alternatives.

What are you forced to use but absolutely hate using? If there are viable alternatives, what barriers are there to switching?

I'm less interested in hearing generic "I hate Microsoft, but have to use it for work" statements.

I'm more interested in hearing "I work in [industry] and have to use [bad software]. It sucks because [reasons]. We haven't switched to [alternative] because of [more reasons]."
Firefox 3 on Ubuntu 9
I think there are a lot more people nowadays that are open to new and changing possibilities than there were in 'bygone eras.'

{edit} Just to add, I think this is because newer generations are growing up in a world where things are increasingly in flux; whereas older generations grew up in much more stagnant times (with respect to social and technological progress). {/edit}
This is spot-on.

That whole "omit needless words" exercise? This is an excellent place where it could be applied. The form is straightforward. Just have people play with it.
The blog post or signup form should really mention that the trailing number is the amount of RAM, in MiB, for the node, and that larger nodes get proportionately more CPU as well (assuming that's true).

Unless you back up to the home page, the charts on the blog post and signup form make it look like the only advantage from (say) 5760 to 14400 is plus-384GB of HD space for $480/month. You can't even click from the node-selector on the signup form to mode details about the nodes.
Same here, but for Italian. Firefox 3, OS X.
"we’ve discovered...when you even try to say “Hello” or “Thank you” in their language."

I'll attest to that, even though I live in the states. While this article I was proud of both the author and my own Indian heritage. Learning languages is a great thing to do, it's just a shame not all of us have the time to do it. Makes me sad that my high school was forced to cut Latin from the curriculum — it's a very interesting language to learn.
Executive summary of Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: The languages we speak and think in have certain inherent cultural understandings that affect our perception of things. Reading the whole thing is recommended though.
Civic pride required me to do Mountain View!
That's because you don't have Flash installed. Simply install it and you'll be fine. The visualization's whole purpose is to be able to see (visualize) the change as you change the demographic. You can't do that as a table. If you don't want to have Flash, then this, and many other visualizations just wont be something you'll be able to see.
Dr. TweetLove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the @Ev Bomb
Yes, but showing that de Gray's ideas are not "so wrong that it was unworthy of learned debate" sets a pretty low bar. I would disagree with that statement even though I fully expect to be in a grave along with de Gray in several decades.
Really interesting way to see the data. Tufte would indeed be pleased with this.

TV usage seems to be inversely proportional to higher levels of education and increasing number of children.

There was nothing really very surprising though, except maybe the racial differences about which I'd not even be able to begin to guess as.
First off, comparing iPhone users to the overall mobile phone market is misleading at best.
And while I don't doubt that 75% of iPhone users use apps,

"For free applications, only about 20 percent of users return to use the app the first day after they download it, and then it quickly drops off from there. By 30 days out, less than 5 percent are using the app. The chart for paid apps shows a slightly steeper fall-off rate."

The iPhone isn't effectively utilized by the vast majority of its users, who value its cachet more then its applications ecosystem. As sibling points out, all the evidence you need is in the overwhelming success of the device before the app store existed.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/02/19/pinch-media-data-shows-...
Mainstream US media does not usually report on the huge number of people who get detained by Public Security in China; as you say, it's a totalitarian government and these things happen.

However, this man is very important to China, even though the dunderheads who have stitched him up don't seem to realise that. His detention is a blow to China's credibility and a vast embarrasment to those in the government who are genuine about the rule of law. It is also very bad for Chinese business! His group's penetration of the poisoned milk scandal saved lives, and brought callous criminals to justice.

Hardworking, independent public defenders like Xu Zhiyong are going to be an ever more essential part of the Chinese economy in the future, and to imprison him for imagined crimes against the state is not simply unjust, it is self-defeating!
In a world where you can layer truly higher-level UI elements on top of them? Just because some elements map 1:1 doesn't mean all do. You can generate a button from <button /> or <input type="submit" /> but that goesn't mean you can't generate image "buttons". The final generation of a "button" should be left to your rendering module.

This is very similar to addition being a far higher level process than the ADD opcode present in every instruction set. Sure, sometimes addition translates to a single ADD, but not always.
Actually, I have. But I figured if I'm going to have a computer in my pocket then I want to be able to program the thing the way I see fit.

Also, I have noticed that the people that do have Iphones use every opportunity to 'flash' them.

Probably a big part of the appeal of the Ipod touch is that it looks like an Iphone...
I've read that "joke" many times before. MOST people around the world are monolingual, there are just fewer multi-lingual people in the US.
Witch hunting. This breaks confidentiality law. It's a list of Kaupthing's biggest clients with a short risk assessment for each one.
A book aficionado perhaps, but not a [real, graduated in L/IS] librarian. Library and information science is basically the study of all the stuff hackers like arguing about—what information is, what is or is not important/redundant information, what metadata is needed to efficiently find something, the value of information in different contexts, the best ways to guarantee the preservation or distribution of information, and so on. Librarians were the first people to use (and espouse) search engines. I'm sure they'd absolutely love it if instead of having a huge library building that had to survive with little funding, taking up city space with books that have mostly never been touched (and therefore have to be culled sometimes—not a happy pastime for a librarian), they could run a small stall that checked out e-ink tablets with the sum of all human knowledge pre-installed, and never worry about conserving space by removing information again.
We Are All Software Companies Now
Some of my clients use Windows Server 2008 on remote colocated blade servers. It sucks because it's difficult to manage, it constantly raises useless authorization dialogs and it's terribly inefficient at even the simplest operations like copying files. To make things worse many operations have to be done using DRAC controllers and a broken IE interface over a slow network. Linux is a viable alternative and some are moving to it slowly but in many cases historic developers and programs are tied to Windows.
Click on the detail you want to track.
This tells me that Palm might just survive after all, and RIM is up a creek without a paddle. The difference in margins on their respective high end devices is huge.
Could be worse, mate. Could be Thailand!
Most 14 year olds in Europe study 2 sometimes 3 foreign languages.

It's very hard to stay mono-lingual in this environment. And then there are all the children that have parents from more than one country. It's not rare to see them growing up fluently tri-lingual.
College: An Overpriced Monopoly (by Kent Pitman)
which Chad did by learning Kannada, a Dravidian (a non-Indo-european) language.
I read Huff's "How to Lie with Statistics" a couple of decades ago. It's a real eye opener, as well as being a short, easy read.
"It's my business, I can refuse to hire blacks if I want to."
I have a counter example. I've known one guy who aced his EE degree, receiving the highest marks in his graduating class. He also scored the second highest in his graduating class for his economics degree. He earned both degrees simultaneously. I knew him really well, and he usually copied assignments and spent no more than a day studying for exams. I think he was really good at getting the most from the lectures.
It might be worth looking at http://www.khanacademy.org/ for an effort in web learning. At this point it's mostly short youtube videos (quite a few of them) concentrating on one concept spanning math, physics, economics and some others. You can also create an account and get a personal "map" to see how you are progressing (were you go from basic concepts, and then build from them). The guy in charge wants to have videos about every possible subject and have one such knowledge map for them. Eventually, I think he also wants to be able to have online tutors helping individual students in the future.
I realize my explanation probably doesn't do it any justice so I instead refer you to http://www.youtube.com/user/khanacademy (the video in there) which should give a better overview of it all. There is also a longer video somewhere that has even more details.

I just thought I would share, maybe someone here will like it or find it useful.
If you look at Google Trends, "bingo" is searched for more in Sweden than in the USA. Perhaps localizing to Swedish or some other locales would make sense, since there is probably less adwords competition? Change the strings in the software, get a clued translator (often I see utterly terrible "translations" of foreign landing pages) to also do the landing page and ads.
Admittedly it costs $100/year to get the signing key, but with that, I can program my own iPhone any way I see fit. I just can't count on Apple agreeing to distribute what I write.

That does suck, but it has little overall effect on the usefulness of the phone to me as a portable computer. When I bought my first iPhone, there was no App Store at all, and Apple was actively stating that there was not going to be any such thing. The value proposition was OK then, and it's OK now.

As far as people flashing their iPhones around conspicuously, I really wouldn't know anything about that. I use mine in public all the time, and one of the things I don't like about the experience is the way I completely lose awareness of my surroundings and people nearby.
Amazing that Sony loses $300 per unit on the highest priced Playstation.
It's not just you! http://highscalability.com looks down from here.
Design Community Supporters
Linux. It's arguably one of the best unix clones ever and it is extremely stable. Still, I feel that another clone of macro kernel unix was a missed opportunity. Plan 9 and it's ilk (and QnX) seem much more the direction to go in for many reasons, most of them having to do with modularization, upgrading your operating system (even the kernel) without rebooting and user land device drivers.

Still, to make a living plan 9 and QnX are niches, plan 9 is very much an experimental os, and QnX is mostly relegated to being a real-time embedded systems os. If you've worked with either one of them for any length of time though you really will begin to appreciate that there are other possibilities that are worth researching.

Linus and Andrew Tanenbaum had this out a long time ago, and it seems that Linux 'won' by acclamation but I'm not so sure that wasn't simply pigheadedness instead of sound engineering reasons.
Ordinary people.
Online maps in my area are not good (not enough details, and most detailed map - maps.google.com is something like 5 years old). I saw on the website they can take pictures - but I have no idea how detailed those picture might be? Also what equipment is needed, prices, legal issues etc. Anyone have details on that?
Use AJAX to filter Kayak's employees
Kannada is no harder to learn to learn than any other Dravidian or Indo-european languages.

If kannada is difficult to learn, the same can be said of Telugu, whose script is close to kannada.
And Hindi which also follows the same script rules (forming composites from consonants and vowels using Devanagari script). This is so much true that Sanskrit is often printed in Kannada script in my state without any loss in phonetics and "spelling"

Tamil might be harder to learn as it is not phonetic. there is no unambiguous way to write 'ha' and 'ga' for instance. Mohan (a proper noun) is written mokan and called mogan.

So says a native kannada speaker who can speak 3 other languages, read 4 and comprehend a couple more.
"These Google Voice apps duplicate 'x' functionality. Sorry, but we won't allow it."

That's almost word-for-word what they did say. The problem is inconsistency -- there are tons of apps that could be, but have not been, rejected on the same grounds.
The article is inconsistent. First, it claims that there is something special and important about the quartz mined there. Then, it turns around and claims that there is something important and secret about the processes used there.
Kinda off-topic, but I'm surprised sex wasn't included.
Ad-supported music will not save a troubled industry
http://lesswrong.com/lw/l6/no_evolutions_for_corporations_or...

http://lesswrong.com/lw/ks/the_wonder_of_evolution/
Kind of a blurry line. If you have a button on your screen, an "arbitrary code path" can be run when the user pushes the button. That is apparently fine. So it follows that running similar codepaths based on strings in a text file is also fine. After all, the user isn't writing code, he's just controlling the program (the $foo interpreter) with his input. Clicking a button, controlling a runloop... both seem exactly the same to me.

I am sure there is some arbitrary line drawn between the two, though, which is why I don't even bother. If Apple thinks they can make money like that, great. I don't have to help them though.
Of course it's 2TB (2000GB).
SUSE Studio Launch
I love the "Guest Author" byline. I guess their software doesn't support having a name unless you are employed by TechCrunch.

I also thought this article was going to be complaining to Ev ("@ev: <whine whine whine>", meaning "at ev: <message for ev>"), but apparently people are using "@foo" to just mean "foo". Good thing they don't use IRC...