skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I disagree. I specifically purchased a machine that would run well under Linux, with no proprietary modules, and that suspended, displayed, and generally ran flawlessly.

I did that because running Linux was worth having poorer performance hardware.

Nevertheless, I still had problems - even the Intel drivers can't composite properly when plugged into a monitor. Oh well, these were acceptable limits.

Then Ubuntu 9.04 came out, and me, like everyone else, got stung by Intel drivers changes that broke many machines and had been identified in the betas but not fixed.

That's it. After 10 years of the Linu desktop, including running rawhide and sid, I gave up and brought a Mac, struggling with OS X for about two weeks then getting into the feel of it.
XML flaws threaten 'enormous' array of apps
http://xkcd.com/312/ (see also the alt-text).
I would bet that any popular open-source project became popular before it had any decent documentation (assuming it has any now). The biggest block, for me, when writing documentation, is that I'm writing for a mystery audience, I don't know what their problems will be, or what questions they will ask. But once your project is used widely, documentation is just a matter of refactoring the mailing lists. And that's an itch some developers are willing to scratch - nobody wants to answer the same questions over and over.
If a story gets flagged by enough users it gets removed altogether, which seems to work pretty good, if only a little slow sometimes.

An alternative would be a setting in your profile at which number of 'flags' a story should disappear from the new page.

EDIT: Another possibility would be to make it harder for the spammers to post links, one way to do that would be to introduce a karma cost to the posting of a link (a la linkfilter), another would be to allow people to only post one link from a given domain.

That way there would be many less 'flagged' articles, and the amount of blogspam would reduce significantly as well.

HN submissions are definitely a factor in the marketing strategy of certain sites.
Or, it could just be that the Apple Tablet thing, if it exists (10% probability) will read e-books (100% dependent probability), and therefore introduce a Book Store to complement the App and Music Stores (80% dependent probability, I'd say), and the iPhone and iPod Touch will inherit it (100% d.p.), and they'll want to shut out third-party Book Stores the same way they'd shut out a third-party music store (97% d.p.) and are willing to lie on rejection notices so as not to reveal their plan (20% d.p.).
Maybe the title should read: Microsoft Worker finds ASP.net is faster than PHP. Likely true but means nothing to me as it is far from an independent survey.
I hadn't thought of putting the QR code on the site, neat idea :)
So do it; there are plenty of good alternatives. The only thing I'd keep PHP for is for adding just a dash of "dynamicity" (dynamicness?) to mostly static pages.
That's exactly what I thought about. Nobody cares anymore if you speak english. Instead, it's just almost weird when you don't.
So, you presume doing all this does not take any time for millions of objects?
I tried to switch to emacs around a year ago. I even posted a thread here labeled Ask YC: Why is emacs a great editor? (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=313025) Even though I got some great feedback and lots of tips and tricks I never got friendly with the editor. The learning curve was simply too steep, the way of doing things too arcane and the usability too bad.

I'm not denouncing emacs, a lot of people I hold in very high regard would commit suicide if they couldn't use it, I'm just saying that emacs is like Richard Stallman: An indisputable genius, but to work with him you have to do things his way, and share his beliefs about the world. Which I don't.
It's a network effect, and not the good kind. The new products/existing products relationship doesn't have to be inverse -- but the organization size required for these unit volumes creates staggering complexity and inertia.

So if it ever turns out there's something about the organization itself or its structure (hypothetically speaking, of course) that's impairing your ability to put out new, different or more competitive products, you might have a very, very hard time changing it.

It's like rebuilding a car while you're driving down the road. The faster you're driving, the riskier and/or more expensive the proposition gets.

And if, for example, you build up a corporate culture which is focused around protecting those earnings and margins at all costs (again, completely hypothetical) and put in place financial incentives which reward people for doing so, you're making it even more difficult to enact large-scale change.
When I was an undergrad, one of the sharper students wrote a paper for a teacher who was famous for not reading the homework. In the middle of the paper he wrote a page or two extolling the virtues of the "come from" statement, and why it was superior to the "goto" statement. She gave him an 'A' on the paper.
Dude, that quote is totally worn-out and cliché. Next time, use this one by Aaron Levenstein:

"Statistics are like a bikini. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital."
Should Murdoch win any lawsuit against Google?
I got an excellent introduction to Statistics in my Computer Engineering degree[1][2]. It is for the practical day-to-day use of stats.

Applied Statistics for Engineers and Scientists , 2nd Edition, J. Devore and N. Farnum,
Duxbury Press, Thomson Publishers[3]

Hope this helps.

-----------

[1] http://www.maths.unsw.edu.au/students/current/homepages/math...

[2] Set text and course overview :: http://www.maths.unsw.edu.au/students/current/homepages/outl...

[3] http://www.amazon.com/Applied-Statistics-Engineers-Scientist...
So what do you want to use to keep in touch? The telephone? I don't think people would appreciate it if you kept calling them every few days asking, "What are you doing now?".
I can't recommend Cartoon Guide to Statistics by Larry Gonick and Woollcott Smith enough. It's a great resource for developing an intuitive understanding and can often answer questions by explaining the concepts in a different way that traditional texts.
http://www.amazon.com/Cartoon-Guide-Statistics-Larry-Gonick/...
I wonder how performant this will be?

From the benchmarks I've seen of Python / PHP / Ruby, etc. Ruby isn't blisteringly fast anyway, and if run in an interpreted Java VM in a relatively new in-house Java runtime then it might not be a great solution for web apps that need speed or scalability.

Not bashing Ruby here, nor the app engine. I guess it'd be a neat environment to write small / demo apps in without shelling out for hosting.
One of the very legitimate uses of bittorrent is to solve this problem elegantly.

Sending out a gig of data even on EC2 (which is pretty expensive) costs about $0.10.

They can have my credit card details online via a secure http connection for the $1 they'll have to charge me to make up on the fees. Even beter, now they have that data instead of best buy.

After all, I highly doubt the privacy watchdogs would agree to bestbuy passing that information (especially the cc data) up the chain to the supplier.
Well said. As a college student, I'd be less than willing to whip out my credit card and purchase something off the web.

EDIT: Where "less than willing" means "OMG I HAZ NO CREDIT CARD!!1!"
That's really not an argument. It's obvious that the marines are trusted not to do that, because there are a million other methods of communicating on the net (it was made for that, right?) and if a marine wanted to, they could leak information quite easily. The only effective way to bar them would be to just not give internet access.
Those stats don't show that 15- to 24-year-olds are moving away from facebook. Just that 25- to 34-year-olds are signing up at a faster rate.
The text label beside the radio button is clickable too, if the page author has used the <label> tag correctly.
I'm reminded of the testing scene in Men in Black. When another candidate spouts a meaningless repeat of how they want "the best of the best of the best", Will Smith's character pokes fun at the idea that he doesn't even really know why they are there yet he is all jazzed. Will Smith's character is the only one who pulls the table up to his awkward, round chair to help him fill out paperwork. While everyone is going nuts killing aliens at the shooting range, Will Smith's character shoots the 8 year old girl carrying quantum physics books (or some such). And has to answer for it and explain himself. But he gets the job and everyone else gets their memory erased.
The economics of young people is dead simple. If they can get something for free, they'll do it. No point in trying to convince them otherwise.
Timetric Makes Web Data Useful with Time Series Analysis
Emacs is for people who want to have a versatile do-it-all environment.

Vim is for people who want to process text efficiently.

Typically, software with such a high level of integration sucks. It's a collection of mediocre tools rather than one excellent tool.

My combination of Vim + irssi + mutt + ddd is greater than any emacs tools as they are cherry picked to be the best at their job rather than the most integrated. I know. I binned emacs for them.

Emacs is effectively a somewhat less harsh form of vendor lock in.
I'd have to convert the production of a team of people over about a decade to something else... If it weren't for the huge installed codebase I have I probably would.

The drawback of having an investment in anything at all is that it gets harder to switch away from it.
Connect to your Hacker News account
I no longer have the link, but a few years ago I read critiques of Chinese government economic statistics based on a comparison of electricity demand versus gov stats. Quite a discrepancy, as the electricity demand was much lower that the growth stats would predict.

My problem with the stats is that, while I can easily believe the cities are growing at 8%, most Chinese still live in the countryside, and it still quite poor, albeit not as poor as it once was. My uncle-in-law supports his family by farming strawberries on 2 mu of land, roughly an acre or so. That acre's not growing at 8% a year, and they're still using the same fertilizer they always have -- human feces.
Can it be that email is the killer app of social media?

This should not surprise anyone. It would seem to me that few people would miss the irony involved when you get a message telling you that you have a message.
I dunno, I've done a lot of work with SVG, and I find the verbosity to be quite useful. It really depends on how you decide to use it - for me, its an excellent container format once you have coded a little controller-view abstraction.

For example for a music-editing software project (internal, not publically released) I once used SVG as the primary User interface description language, with nodes named according to the verbs and objects in the UI paradigm, with the DOM structure being modified from a C++ application as needed depending on realtime input from the user.

It works fabulously for this .. All I had to do was provide a dictionary of key node names to a UI designer, tell them "whatever you call a 'dial' has to have a 'needle', and then it will work for all controls that are using your dial skin", and hey-presto: instant UI appeal! Without any major coding changes it was possible to have very fresh, very appealing user interfaces built up by artists overnight .. and another thing I found interesting was that those artists I worked with that understood that the Node Editor was the primary interface to my program, were able to get really nice stuff done, fast, and with enthusiasm.. whereas those who complained that SVG wasn't Illustrator and that they were /never/ going to learn Inkscape to build the GUI and that I had to learn to use 'the real tools .. like Illustrator' .. well, that was just a waste of time.

So my personal experience with SVG has been superb .. I really think its an excellent data form for design user interfaces and, given the appropriate strategy for how to lay out SVG nodes in a manner that makes sense (hint: group), it can be very fun for artistic/creative hats to participate directly in the skinning of an application ..
Yes, and often there are two levels of user - those who 'get' what a site is about immediately, and others who need more information. Seperating out detailed descriptions into an FAQ section can lead to a cleaner 'main' site.
If you don't nitpick how will I learn? :)

Seriously though I do that on occasion and it always amazes me. It's like the motor part of my brain is completely separate from the creative part and so on occasion I'll type the completely wrong word because my fingers are somehow blindly transcribing what my inner monologue is saying. It's weird.
* List all installed applications and libraries with versions

* Subscribe to all security advisories of those components

* Look for problems that hit your setup

* Take patch/corrective action when necessary

* OS update is good, but is not the final word in what you need to patch. You need to do your own homework
Astronomers Find Hyperactive Galaxies in the Early Universe
The pre-order for Windows 7 Home Premium (where we normal folks could purchase it for 50 bucks) has ended. But it was a very good deal as that price is less than half of retail. http://www.microsoft.com/Windows/buy/offers/pre-order-ended....

I pre-ordered a copy from New Egg. The ultimate edition was available as well for $100.00
I always say "if i has the money I'll buy even if I don't need". That time i don't have even a paypal with null balance; now I have the money and even a CC, I still don't buy anything, unless it will convert to more money!
Online pr, usability, pay per click tips
Basically, the benefits of advertising online are well known and documented, but Online PR remains something like black sheep for many customers.

Online PR, in the narrow sense, is traditional PR which is extended to the online community. This includes targeting online and traditional media that have a significant online presence. Online PR allows for a very wide distribution of news and information.

Online PR Tools
To limit the number of followers you can have but not to have a limit at the number of sources you can follow seems to me to be the wrong way around!
Also congrats for DirectedEdge for doing the animation without flash on the front page. Nice!
I think Apple is really going backwards with this move.

The platform could have been a great medium to publish (and monetize) any kind of multimedia content (everything that couldn't be considered strictly an application, like interactive fiction, comics, reference books with a customized interface etc).

From an author perspective this could have been a great medium to experiment with. Much more interesting that the kindle or simple e-book reader apps with a fixed user interface.
Hello, phisher!
how about rss feeds on my blog? email?
Interactive laser demo is quite awesome
Helpful for my wrists
I'm curious about the 6% (as of this writing) who voted "No" on the poll.
> Wait, what? 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. This is a very, very, very America-centric idiom.

I know that idiom from junior school. That was in USSR, perhasp as close to un-American as you can get.
Kill your application devs and you kill your device. A point not lost on Microsoft.
Why don't they give the CDs to retailers for free, and let the retailers charge what they want for them?
its interesting/scary? that reddit and 4chan have become the de facto sites for information gathering/organization/action
If your site needs a FAQ, it has users. If your ego needs a stroke, you should tweet pretentious bollocks.
I doubt it, a lot of people's machines that currently run XP would not be able to run Windows 7 without upgrading the hardware. Even if they could they either don't care or think it's too complicated.

Most of the people that are left know how to pirate it anyway or have annual agreements with MS anyway so they are basically competing with that.
"Much like MySpace, it seems, users are learning that having 100,000 “friends” you’ve never met is much less valuable than connecting with a select number of people you know well."

That's hardly a new discovery; I remember when I first tried out this "Internet" thing in '95 I subscribed to all mailgroups I've encountered just because I could and it felt cool to receive mail from people in places like South Africa.

Obviously I quickly learned that it wasn't a very good idea but the point is that the concept of reducing spam by not giving out your contact details to anyone (or in the case of social networks, not following / accepting as a friend anyone) is not new at all.
I should also point out that at my work, everyone can update to Vista for free, though as yet I don't think a single person has asked to.
Don't understand the comparison of the Mac upgrade vs. Windows 'upgrade'. The Mac upgrade is not an OS in its own right - it is only an upgrade. Windows 7 is an entirely different OS.

Feel like I missed something, there...

Edit: see below - I did miss something (serves me right for not clicking through Jeff's amazon affiliate links)
Time to clean up your digital closet
Ask HN: where'd my ability to downvote go?
I used to be able to and my karma is 131. For about a week now I've noticed that I'm back to up arrows only again.
Thanks.
I'm wearing my Vi-versus-Emacs tee-shirt right now and am ready to start brawling if anyone else is. I thought all the Vi users were either dead or in old veterans homes.
a uk magazine I write for ends their disclaimer on the back page with a jokey sentence or 2 about their week. It's the first thing I read now that I knoew about it - like a cult thing.
Do You Have the Right aaS?
I don't think it's scary that they gather the information. The information they found is what is disturbing.
What's with the [END] in the title? Is the submitter using Western Union as their ISP?
I found Sheldon Ross, Introductory Statistics very approachable

http://www.amazon.com/Introductory-Statistics-Second-Sheldon...
Because of the nature of the flaw, details have not been published. (Also see the original article at http://www.codenomicon.com/labs/xml/) Not clear what can be done about the issue, and how bad the issue is. Should we just wait for it to be resolved?
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Bash Shell Awesomeness - Mass Killing Processes (On Ubuntu)
I can still downvote, so presumably the threshold has been moved up a bit.

Just write a few more insightful comments or submit some good stories and you'll probably be able to downvote again.
I hope that t-shirt is flame retardant...
did you look at the sublanguage for paths? It's quite compact if you want compact - the other primitives
(like circle, ellipse etc.) are more verbose but IMHO
sometimes better if you want the SVG file to be read
by humans.

Besides, XML gives you full DOM-access - that's the thing where I see the true difference as compared to Canvas. The programming model is much more like "usual" client-side Javascript programming - append elements to parents, react to events that happen on elements etc., whereas Canvas has a fairly imperative programming model.

So, to cut a long story short - if you are offended by the XML and verbosity give it another chance and look "through" the XML to discover the declarative nature of SVG and the corresponding programming model...
ORA-00119: invalid specification for system parameter string
Thanks. Was just wondering if it was something I did wrong. If the threshold changed that's fine. :)
Canada Media Fund Virtual Town-Hall: 1pm EDT
I took away from the article something more to the effect that the Marine Corps is protecting their network (and the extremely sensitive information on it) from malicious software which may get on one of the computers after some unsuspecting soldier clicks on an innocent enough looking link. If I was a hacker intent on getting into the military network this is exactly how I would do it.
To be clear- the app rejected here was originally made available on Cydia, and is mainly used for putting your own content onto the device. In other words, the selling point is putting torrents of books onto the device, just like the main selling point of the iPod is storing 32gb of pirated music.

This still scares me, but I think it's overstating things to say that all ebooks are banned. "This category of application" could be taken to mean multiple things given the context- applications formerly available via Cydia and applications that allow you to upload your own book content are both plausible alternatives.

Once we submit Free Audiobooks in a couple weeks I'll have a more definitive data point for everyone :)
Don't take it so seriously :)
Disney finds 'a whole new world' in WiFi-powered rides
It's become a cliche, but I sincerely believe that the lack of a decent micropayment system sabotaged any chance of that for-pay culture existing on the internet and prevented it from becoming the economic engine we once envisioned.

However, such phenomenal social progress has been made, and could only have been made, in that commercial vacuum, and there is more to come. It's not worth giving that up for the quick fix of a consumerized internet.
The reasons are Silverlight, Flash and AIR. As for getting SVG in Internet Explorer, apparently Google is working on something like the ExCanvas project for SVG, otherwise there are libraries like RaphaelJS which abstract away the differences between SVG and VML.
indeed I thikn the practice started here in the UK!
You can actually search in the little bar there for any wikipedia article to show related stuff, and as kind of a little easter egg, you can specify a starting page via the query string, e.g.

http://www.directededge.com/?Y%20Combinator
I'm an Emacs user but I do sometimes commit the heresy of looking at Vi and wondering. Not that I'd ever want to leave the wonderful environment I have in Emacs with my large (and growing) collection of customizations but the modal editing and compossable commands do look like they could be pretty cool once you get used to them ("7 habbits of effective text editing" shows some pretty cool stuff).

So anyway, has anyone used Viper much? I notice it has WIZARD mode which claims to keep all of your Emacs customizations and keys working. So is Viper just for Vi refugees in an Emacs world or might it be useful for a Emacs user wanting to see what it's all about?
I see exactly where they're heading: Apple will create their own reader and Book Store in iTunes, where they'll charge content creators 30%. Perhaps if they're feeling particularly generous, they'll let you share your your DRM'd iBooks between your Tablet and your iPhone. Third-party readers are obviously a massive threat to this potential profit stream.
I know it is not grammatically correct. Was just experimenting for phrases which would not reach equilibrium.

The above mentioned phrase actually reaches an oscillatory state, which is kind of cool.
Rupert Murdoch Reveals Intent To Charge For Content
Unless they can trigger an infinite loop I'm not really worried about Java/Python based web services being affected. Any exception should be caught on a per-request basis.
I think freeing themselves from Flash is worth potentially having to display ads beside a video instead of on it.

In WebKit, you can composite on top no problem. I would be surprised if it doesn't turn out that way in Firefox.
One of the reasons the App Store prices are so low is that there is no “try before you buy”.

If I test a piece of software for a month and find it useful, I will pay a reasonable price to keep using it.

If I read a paragraph written by the author and view a screenshot, no way I am going to put down more than a few bucks to test if this software is actually useful to me.