skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Apple has enjoyed the fact less companies target OSX and, assuming the same competent to incompetent developer ratio for both platforms (something risky in itself, because the barriers of entry for Windows are much lower), it would be no surprise if there were less buggy programs for OSX.

You can't say there's less buggy programs because it's hard to break through. You can say there's less buggy programs because there's less programs in general, which is a much more rational assumption considering you assumed that there's the same ratio for competent to incompetent developers thus making about the same ratio of buggy to polished programs.

However I don't see how Apple's Kernel really is "locked down", I interpret that as a forced cull of functionality for safety or in terms of things like DRM. The only thing I'd consider is the lockdown of the hardware because of forced lack of choice.
I extrapolated his statement to include things like software addons. Even an experienced web developer gets annoyed by searching, downloading, uploading, configuring permissions etc... It's very similar to what he's griping about.

Yes, mature apps like WordPress have a built in plugin installer, but have you ever worked with software like MediaWiki or osCommerce? Installing "extensions" or "contributions" (what we just call addons) can make you crazy. Open this file, find this code, replace it with this or past this after it, rinse and repeat dozens of times. uggh
If he was homeless, how was he supposed to get a letter telling him to show up in court at all?

Yeah he got arrested for being homeless.
Those Strang videos demonstrate that there are benefits to lecturing in front of an empty chalkboard (or several, in his case), chalk in hand, vs. displaying slides from a computer. Watching how he steps back and thinks out loud about what he just wrote and what to do next, double checking his work, making and correcting the occasional error, all greatly enhance the pedagogic impact.
An analysis of Benford’s law applied to Twitter
But he was a veteran of a war that they lost.
LATimes - the Lost Art of Reading
Itanium?!

Itanium is not a many-core processor: it is a VLIW processor.

If the Larrabee can remind someone of another processor, it's the Niagara family from Sun.
David, the project's creator, and Daniel, Haystack's creator/maintainer have managed a good dialogue back and forth, ensuring a decent integration. I know that Xapian-Haystack has gone through a couple of refactoring iterations since inception to provide quality code and project stability.

David welcomes constructive feedback, so try it out and contribute your input for improvement... or just say thank you to him. heh

I intend to use it for http://www.snapact.com/ when I get to that point in Snapact's feature list. There need to be more hours in the day.
Wrong book, dude. You're thinking about Of Mice and Men.
Yea, but on a charge of trespassing which was possibly related to his being homeless and looking for food or something.
And how many times do you do that in a lifetime?

I've been a commercial programmer for about 10 years now, and in that time I still don't think I've spent even a fraction of the time I've spent dealing with other, considerably more irritating issues in software. My dealings with MediaWiki and osCommerce (and what you seem to be describing) usually involve following half a page of instructions in the order they are written, without a lot of thought or effort being required.

But hey, I could be wrong. Perhaps there are people out there that really hate following step-by-step instructions.
I wonder if gay porn has experienced a noticable uptick in sales since January from all these out of work Republicans.
Wordpress vulnerability: Remote admin password reset
Yeah good point, however selling to a large organisation is difficult when your a small startup because decisions take a long time and often require you to meet them, submit proposals etc. Even then there is a very good chance they will turn around and say no, and not pay anything and go with a competitor.
Me neither. I can't call OSX core locked down except it doesn't go out of its way to provide hooks for malware.
Uh-oh Disqus, Here comes JS-Kit ECHO | My Philly Network
What? Homeless people can't get served anymore?

What do you suggest the police do? Just forget about expecting homeless people to make their court dates? Or perhaps homeless people can be exempt from certain types of crimes? Maybe we should just immediately throw them in jail, because there not going to be able to come back to court -- they're homeless.

When you're charged, you know there will be a court date, whether you have an address or not. It's your responsibility to show up for it, homeless or not. Simply because you don't get your mail doesn't mean that somehow society is punishing you for being homeless -- lots of people miss court dates and end up in jail for it.

Come on guys, use some critical thinking skills here. [Now I got sucked into this. Geesh]
why not just use geolocate and give people in USA the USA flag for English, and people in Britain the British flag for English etc
Xapian is amazing - it's incredibly fast, and I much prefer it to Lucene and friends. I'm using Xapain with Django right now, but the framework I built to smush them together is hardly elegant.

Can't wait to try this out.
Pretty soon Insurance is going to cover this process... it will be a simple routine doctors visit for this info.
Major labels are introducing their own file format
It's one thing to be poor. It's quite another to be homeless. Also, don't forget that at least for a while we are still free; the homeless are not destined to stay in the gutter if they don't want to. We have no castes in America.
Agreed on small companies, though big companies do spend a ton of money on software, including software that compares poorly to open-source equivalents. Think of commercial source control.

In both cases, the author is right on. Focus on installation, documentation, support, and usability. Each of these things can make paid software less expensive than free software, assuming that [paid cost] < ([free setup hours] - [paid setup hours]) * [hourly rate].

And more importantly, maybe, businesses will pay a premium for decreased risk. If they think your paid software with good support/installation/usability/documentation is less risky than another tool, you've got a shot.
Case in point though: spring source had "community" builds + special builds for customers, and the community builds + documentation were crippled somewhat. I know a lot of commercial open source users (who weren't paying) were disappointed by some of their actions.
Maybe more on topic than you suggest, as some Physics books double as pretty good books about math.

http://www.amazon.com/Road-Reality-Complete-Guide-Universe/d...

OK, I haven't actually read it, but it looked like a really good book for learning a lot of interesting math when I thumbed through its contents at the library. :)
...when they take hold of their own destiny. Make something or provide a service at a price people are willing to pay. Really, isn't every would-be founder in the same place? No way to eat unless they can get someone (YC, VC and ultimately customer)to pay them?
If anything has a complete lack of drivers, it's OS X or default rolled Windows. Linux supports more drivers in terms of legacy and current hardware out of the box, unlike Vista and XP which culled legacy hardware support, and don't have as many drivers as linux in terms of out of the box support.

So I must agree it's a horrible argument.

>"Open source software is free if your time is worth nothing."

While I agree with your original point, that it's the freedom in terms of control. This argument is completely invalid because it's like saying "Windows sucks because 4 year olds can't administer it effectively thus it takes longer". If you're going into OSS you need OSS specialized and trained staff, someone who has only worked with Windows Server isn't going to be able to effectively manage OSS, OSes because it's obviously logically different. (Difference is if they've used a commercial UNIX which is quite close to Linux you just have to modify some habits and learn package management for your distro).

In short the problem is the lack of preparation that goes into going Open Source in a company, such as getting the IT staff familiar enough with the tech.

Example of Windows vs. Linux -- Setting up FTP, allowing user logins disabling anon. (Using CentOS as distro)

CentOS:

yum groupinstall "FTP Server"
vi /etc/vsftp/vsftpd.conf

anonymous_enable = no
local_enable = yes

chkconfig vsftpd 345
service vsftpd on

Windows:

Open Server Role Manager
Go Through Server Role Wizard to Select FTP server role
Go into IIS options.
Go through multiple prompts, properties screens and wizards to finally enable local login and disable anonymous.

In short:

I can remember every step of the install on Linux, on Windows I have to be looking at the damn screen. Yet I've spent as many years on Windows Server as on Linux. However because I know exactly what commands on the commandline do and it's an easier interface to remember off the top of my head than a GUI, I can do it faster IF (very big if) I have all the knowledge I need.

Not only that but the "vendor lock in" is so inherent to Windows, people don't realize their core data (how their server is set up) is almost impossible to get at and export without the use of third-party full backup tools. Unlike Linux in Windows I can't clone /etc/ or some parts of /etc and stick it on a different server running the same version of the OS and expect it to be a drop in replacement.
This is actually a built in feature of many phones (picture/video mail), and there have been several scandals about minors using it.
College textbooks available as iPhone download
Looking Back At Earth: LCROSS Spacecraft Detects Life On The Blue Planet
This is a thorough summary of essential principles of user registration and engagement. It's well-organized and includes some excellent examples.

Although it's "only" a slide deck, I came away from this feeling enlightened.
> No software can be 100% bug-free, we all know that.

I didn't know that!
I worked on many multi-lingual websites and always used the name of the language in its native form (Arabic => عربي, Greek => Ελληνική, etc ) to offer language selection. It works very well for me. I agree with others who advise against using flags for this.
I wasn't disagreeing with you that that is what they are doing. My point is that it has been successful.
My own math background is through Calculus II right now, so I'm a beginner, but I can't say the Companion (though it is excellent) is something I could 'get through' in the sense that people usually mean it. By necessity it is terse, despite its massive size. I personally find it useful as a survey on the field, but I wouldn't recommend it as a teaching guide in and of itself for people who happen to be as dumb as me.
already killed once:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=755007

and it needs to be killed again.
Pinboard's hiring, dude! I've got a clever compensation formula I'll email you about...
You've never once, under pressure and time constraints, made a stupid, simple, oh-god-i'm-an-idiot mistake? You're a better man/woman than I.
Platitudes + anecdotes = content! Rinse, lather, repeat!
Depends what you'd call "hooks". In terms of the Windows API there are some really cool really useful dynamic features in the toolkit, but they're obviously borderline virus/malware type functions. (IE read the text of the entire window if you have a WID).

Stuff like that is standard to any toolkit. However what you may be talking about is that bullshit they call the Windows directory and Windows Protective Service where it doesn't let you modify it directly but it's easily modified programmatically.
> We supported US and UK English. The UK people loved this and it was one of the first translations we received.

As a brit I can back that up. There's no malice in the feeling but a common consensus here is that our English is very different from the US version (coff the first coff :D) so it's nice to see it recognised and supported.
Whoah, S3stat looks great! The kind of thing I'd love to have but have more important things to work on myself. I'll happily pay you $5 for that.
I always wondered what sort of tortured mental gymnastics were required to rationalize a sense of entitlement for flash runtimes. And all this time I thought I was picking up a faint whiff of Marx, and the muffled whimpers of baby-proletariat hungry for mother government to expose her teat.

Thank you, but I'll just vote with my consumer dollar for platform B if I don't like platform A.
Music to Hack to: Nintendo Mixtape
As far as I know, this is the very first album release on Hacker News. :-)
The very fact that he had a "criminal tresspassing" charge in the first place — for sleeping on a public sidewalk, as you neglect to mention — reinforces the thesis of this piece.
"Perhaps there are people out there that really hate following step-by-step instructions."

Yep, they're called "users". They aren't programmers and don't want to be. They just want something to work. I'm surprised a programmer would rather waste time on trivial tasks than to just click a few buttons.

"And how many times do you do that in a lifetime?"

If you are someone who is trying to build a real website and trying different things, you do it a lot.

"...I still don't think I've spent even a fraction of the time I've spent dealing with other, considerably more irritating issues in software."

It really depends on exactly what you're doing, but since programming is your profession, of course you will deal with a lot of other issues. We're just trying to save people time and money.
The flags don't help and simply based on the number of questions you have about the subject it's obvious that it's not clear cut how to handle the issue. Drop them.
DreamIt Ventures Demo Day
Dr. Quake and his Heliscope Single Molecule Sequencer. Sounds like a bad movie villain!
There is something sleazy/brazen about quoting people off online discussions as on-the-record 'news'. Only serves to increase paranoia and self-censorship. Not to mention that it's lazy.
Wrong. They do say. It was, in fact, for sleeping on a sidewalk. Did you even read the article?
Review of Shotput Ventures Demo Day
The Cancer Stem Cell Theory Continues to Look Promising
Simply because you don't get your mail doesn't mean that somehow society is punishing you for being homeless -- lots of people miss court dates and end up in jail for it.

Anatole France: "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread."

There is no natural law passed down from the heavens that decrees that you can later be arrested and jailed for not responding to a court summons in a timely fashion, regardless of circumstance, and regardless of the severity of the original charge. Just because it's the way it is doesn't mean that it is necessarily fair, just, or reasonable.
Apart from all the very wise arguments already mentioned in the thread, flags also tend to turn your UI into angry fruit salad.
They author could have just posted a link to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerating_change and be done with it. This isn't exactly news.
Ask HN: Are you a founder?
Hi everyone. I'd like to know....are you a founder of startup? if so, which one? what's your role?
dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=754725
Apple is the New Microsoft
Come on guys, use some critical thinking skills here.

Not commenting on the rest of your post, using my critical thinking, it would seem odd at best to expect people without a home, without an address, to be able to read or respond to mail. And court-dates are rarely if ever decided at the time of apprehension.

If your primary goal is merely to stay alive, I think you will find your priorities somewhat different from the ones had by the rest of society.

But I can see this going on and on. You have your point of view, I have mine. We're obviously not going to agree, so let's leave it at that.
"However, any time someone does that, that's a part of the process that isn't taking place on JobSpice."

This is the real reason not to offer Word export. They can try to convince HR departments to use JobSpice for their resume filtering and searching needs, instead of just a place to download resumes into their internal systems and never returning to use other services.
Much the same way that texting was a built in feature of cell phones before twitter came along?

What would you call a service that sent short porn messages between random people? God knows there's some pun potential in there. But the fact is that cell phone integration with porn is still in it's infancy stage (from what I can surmise). If the trends are heading towards free and amateur stuff, then providing a platform to easily facilitate that would be the place to go.

I think it's the usage model that's still uncertain. Could you do streaming 2-way video from some kind of common chat room? Or would it be more of a twitter model? Or perhaps something more along the lines of RSS feeds?

I still think there's lots of money in porn, it's just that the old business models aren't going to work so much any more.
The problem with basic auth has nothing to do with how it's encoded. All authentication is insecure in flight if you're not using SSL. The problem with basic auth is that you can't log out.

You may work on a computer that only your cat can access, but a lot of people --- maybe most --- don't have that luxury.
Punnography...
I just found myself wanting this morning when I was reading through the comment threads of a friend of mine. I really wished that I had seen them at the time they were posted instead of 3 months after the fact.

I don't think this would be a particularly hard thing to build as a weekend hack...
I was mainly addressing your point on fraud and expropriation of public funds. Compare that to violent crimes, which are committed primarily by the poor.

On wars: wars are started by officials selected by a broad swath of the public. At least 50% (+/- epsilon) of the population, rich and poor alike, share the blame.
Digest is worse than Basic-Auth: it has most of the same underlying problems, and adds the problem that your passwords need to be stored cleartext on the server.

Nobody uses digest.
The problem is the bums themselves. Japanese homeless don't make garbage messes or harass people. They generally manage to peacefully scrape by without imposing themselves. It's much the same in other more homogeneous industrialized countries as best I can tell.

The problem is the American underclass.
I'm willing to let it go, with one caveat: getting, reading, and responding to mail is a different problem from failing to appear in court. We can solve the first one, but conflating the two doesn't help any.

It sounds like there is an opportunity for people to help homeless folks by providing them with post office boxes and voice mail. Seems like I read that a lot of charities are already doing that? Wouldn't that be a cool startup idea? (if you could find a way to monetize it)

To me, this conversation has the same problem that homelessness itself has (and I speak from experience). You can either look at everything like an obstacle or like an opportunity.
I've been involved in the buying end of these types of projects numerous times for both hardware and software in U.K. Universities. For £100k+ projects it typically goes like this:

Companies get a invitation to tender, usually europe wide. Companies submit an overview of what they want to do to solve the problem. Companies that have been in business less than 3 years or don't have a sound financial background are weeded out.

Then it's typically it's narrowed down to 3-6 companies early on. Each submits a 100-150 page tender (on paper or MS word - often with heavy copy+paste from previous bids) with prices (blind - you don't know the competitor's prices), different options etc. Each company gives a talk with a sales person and a technical person at least - are grilled by half a dozen people who all know their stuff from the customer and have different technical requirements and beliefs + management people with their own ideas. This goes on for about 6-12 months where no money changes hands and seller incurs travel/staff etc. costs.

Then it's narrowed down to 2-3 for extra implementation details and more meetings with other key stake holders - many of which have just heard of the project and often don't approve of the direction.

If you win the tender, you start getting paid in a schedule (4 or 5 big payments) depending on implementation of the project, with the final payment often 3-6 months after it's all working and live.

I would suggest if it is your business model to sell expensive products to large companies, that you have someone in sales who has done this all before.
Here, allow me translate this article: "blah, blah, blah"

Anyone with half a brain who has ever had to wade through the "documentation" for certain kinds of proprietary software can probably agree that a lot of it is simply pointless and redundant. Case in point: Great Plains by Microsoft. That is like, ERP hell.

Anyway, the only actual way to compete against open-source competition is to stop thinking your own time is so much more valuable than everybody else's.
Thanks for the encouragement. This is my first open source project, and I mainly wrote it because I was disappointed with Djapian's Xapian interface and was quite impressed with Haystack.

Originally, I was planning on using Whoosh for the backend, but quickly ran into issues with locked files when deploying to a live server.

Anyways, I'd love to hear any comments and feedback you may have after you've given the code a try.
I'm really digging this, nice work!

Just one question/issue: when browsing styles in Chrome, one of the styles seems to be cut off by the column divider, and only shows as "Impossible I...".
VC-backed company valuations continue to fall in Silicon Valley
The author is well known for writing books and articles that describe the U.S. way of life in the worst possible terms. In one book, she pretended to be uneducated and unskilled, then tried to survive on a minimum wage job. She found, to no one's surprise, that it was difficult. Her conclusion was not that you should strive to do better than that--it was that society and the government should make it easier to scrape along with minimal effort. Her other writings take a similar least-common-denominator approach to every issue, and end with demands for ever more money funnelled to those who put forth the least effort. Her heart is in the right place, but she wants the safety net to be impossibly vast.
Google uses cookies so the IP issue is meaningless. They also track what advertizing people click on...

However, I suspect you and I are not really the target market. I use Amazon and don't use Gmail but a large number of people spend a lot of time online looking at content hosted by Google, or including Google advertisements.

PS: Amazon might know which books, and electronics I like, but Google knows which car I have and when I am looking to buy the next one.
Following a Fast Weight Loss Diet
I was just suggesting that "users", even those who aren't particularly technically-inclined, are more than capable of following step-by-step instructions, given that the only requirement is generally knowing how to get things onto a web server, how to copy-and-paste, and how to edit a file.

But I wish you the best of luck if your users are happy. Perhaps I'm just getting cynical :)
The exploit has WordPress change the password and email the new password to the user. You aren't able to get access to someone else's blog through this and they shouldn't lose access as long as they still have access to the email account (and check it regularly to see that the password has been changed), but it's definitely an annoying bug.
Concepts of Modern Mathematics

http://www.amazon.com/Concepts-Modern-Mathematics-Ian-Stewar...