skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hm I always thought it's a bad name - now I know why!
I don't understand this one:

"Beware the stale game. People often don't realize that scratch games aren't finished when someone wins the biggest prize; the tickets are left out until they're all sold. That means you might be buying a ticket to a game in which there's no chance for a juicy payday, says Chris Gudgeon, co-author of "Luck of the Draw: True-Life Tales of Lottery Winners and Losers." Gudgeon's advice: Avoid scratch games that have been lingering near the Slurpee machine for ages. "If you're buying the scratch-and-wins, particularly the seasonal ones, don't buy a Christmas one at the following Halloween," he says. "There's a very good chance that all of the prizes are gone.""

Surely, unless you have an information channel that tells you when the big prizes are claimed, the odds of the jackpots going early or late are just the same? And if you do have such an information channel then, in the cases where the jackpots haven't been claimed it would make the odds better for the last remaining tickets.
Sweet jumping jesus YES.

And don't start withi git - start with subversion, and move on to git or mercurial later. Subversion is much easier to start out with.
Zoltan was operating in central Serbia (not even in its southern part Kosovo).

NATO bombers (USA bombers in this instance, really) were attacking Serbia, and Zoltan was a soldier operating in his own country, defending it against enemy aggression. How can you raise morality questions against that?

And as I already said, the truth about Kosovo is far from what your media told you. Kosovo is now brought down to two functions only:

1. American army base (Bondsteel)
2. Haven for drug lords, and traffickers of people and weapons. Now they've got their own state in the heart of Europe, thanks to USA lobbying practice which is where all of it originated from.
> $5.20 (plus shipping) for 4 pens that "write amazingly well" is too much money?

It's not about the money by any means. 1) I use a pen pretty rarely. 2) I'm not spending time or energy on the "problem."
Twitter Needs Better Advice Than This
Yep, I once casually introduced my graphic designer housemate to it. And he swears by it now! In his own words, "Dropbox has completely changed my life".
How Gus Mueller does Beta Testing for his Mac software
Ugh, lots to dislike in this article. For instance:

1. "a backlog of patent applications internationally was needed to tackle the 3.5 million pending patent applications around the world": er, no, obviously that isn't what he said.

2. Look how they pair the FSF up with the Pirate Party. Is that because c|net thinks the UK Pirate Party is a vital force to be reckoned with in international politics? Or is it because they hope to make anti-software-patent positions look silly by associating them with marginal-sounding groups? Hmmm, tough one.

3. Wanting a globally unified and more efficient patent system is not, in fact, at all the same thing as wanting patents to cover more things. No one benefits from having patents take years between application and grant, for instance. No one benefits -- at least, not in ways any reasonable person could approve of -- from having lots of crappy patents pass examination. (Note: this latter is one of the things Gutierrez complained of. Being from Microsoft does not imply never getting anything right.)

I've no idea whether the particular changes Gutierrez wants make any sense, either for Microsoft or for the rest of the world. His blog posting (linked from the c|net article) is a bit too much oh-and-everyone-should-get-a-pony for my liking. But the c|net article seems to me to consist mostly of digressions.
Shift of viewpoint, what we currently think of "landfill" has the potential to be the "mine" of the future. Valuable minerals and materials will be extracted from rotted down landfill, "refurbished" or refined, then re-used as raw materials. Effectively recycling, but having gone through an extra phase.

It will happen when current sources of raw materials are less economical than raiding the landfill.
Well 10.0 was called Cheetah -the fastest cat- yet paradoxically it was well and truly the slowest OS X ever (early adopters will cringe as they recall). So there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to the naming scheme besides that they're all cats, or German tanks depending on who you ask.
I remember when they didn't have any products, and were just a consultancy. They had a following even back then.
I don't see how version control has an impact on speed...
Yes, 3km swim sets 4 or 5 times a week. Doesn't seem to help mesleep at all. It does make me knackered, but sleep is still elusive!
Feel free to tell me "yes, we heard it ¡Ya basta!", but Hal Varian's (chief economist of Google) book is a fantastic look at a lot of the economics in high tech and is well worth buying (my summary doesn't do it justice, I'm afraid - meaning it's not just fluff:-)

http://www.squeezedbooks.com/book/show/7/information-rules-a...
Probably good techniques for consumer web app betas.

Although I don't like the idea of a preference to turn on features for one customer. Having code which is only run by one user cannot be a good plan: you've doubled the number of permutations to test, and there's a code path only taken by that one user.
Thanks @lsc!
I love you approach -how are you getting word out about your hosting business? What % are you getting actual sales from word of mouth versus SEO/online marketing versus direct face to face selling?
Amen to that. Stop giving the nutjobs too much airtime.

It's a bleeding tragedy that the focus of the Chandrayaan images is debunking a conspiracy theory, as opposed to more 'useful' purposes. Ordinarily I would put that down to the Times of India being its usual sensationalist self, but in this case, the damn ISRO scientist is the one giving sound bytes (and even a paper!) about the 'veracity of the Apollo 15 mission'.
I always thought apple was naming their OS releases by the names of German WWII tanks, until now. ;)
So, decide on basis of expectation calculations as opposed to mere probabilities?
T-Mobile introduces first pay-as-you-go Android smartphone, dubbed Pulse
$100 a day!? That's not living simply - that's staying in hotels and eating in restaurants. I'm an active CouchSurfing host and I've met many travellers who get by on $100 per month. And that's in Europe. You can stretch that out for 3 months in lots of parts of Africa or SE Asia.

CouchSurfing and equivalents can drastically cut your accommodation expenses. Hitch-hiking or cycling give you free travel. Even travelling by bus can be remarkably cheap in most countries if you go the slow way (which also lets you see much more of the country that just the capital) - you can often go 50-100km for a couple of euros. Your primary cost is food, and if you've learned to cook even a few basic meals, you can easily get by on a couple of euros a day.
Not only that, but I can predict a whole lot of anti-Apple people calling it "Slow Leopard". Is the reality distortion field that strong, to the point of making people miss such an obvious pun?
If you're doing python development, I'd suggest learning Mercurial (HG). I actually find it simpler to use than SVN. And Python itself is moving to HG for version control.

Also, if you're on Windows and you want to do SVN, feel free to pick up Tortise SVN. It adds SVN extensions to explorer, and the tutorials are really rather good.
Yep.

$ ghc --help | grep -e "-O"
-O An `optimising' package of compiler flags, for faster code
Oracle-Sun deal delayed by EU
I wonder what they're going to do when they run out of recognizable big cat names.
I wonder what 10.7 will be called - we're running out of cats with acceptable names (Andean Mountain Cat won't do).

What's left: Lynx, Cougar, Puma, and of course, Lion.

Apparently, a panther is not a species, but refers to a cougar, a puma or a leopard, depending on the country.
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[sic]So if a snow leopard is less developed - not to mention weaker roaring - than the regular leopard then Mac’s decision to use the name to describe a more developed OS does not make sense.[/sic]

This explains it - everyone who didn't buy it did so because they knew/discovered the true nature of a snow leopard and realised Apple ( or 'Mac') was telling them it is actually an inferior system.
Well thats official, 10.7 will be called 'Panzer'.
Are you on the Seedcamp Week 2009 shortlist?
OS X '14
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The logic is binary, either you have a possibility to win something (at all), or you are a complete loser.

If you're poor, buy one lottery ticket where the draw is as far into the future as possible, or a scratch lottery ticket and don't scratch it until it's about to expire. As long as it is not decided, you are potentially a winner.
backtype looks like a search engine to me - we are focused on what your friends are doing.
No. Twitter is a single website. RSS is a format used by hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of websites.
Travel is basically free if you're doing it for any length of time.

In Africa, Southeast Asia, or Central America, you can live on $5-$20/day depending on where you go. Hitching through Malawi will run you $3/day tops. Assuming you've ditched your rent/car payments/etc. back home, you're going to be living an order of magnitude cheaper than you would if you simply stayed in the USA.

For short trips, your flight will be the dominant cost. For long trips, you're just not going to spend that much.

If you can put away a measly ten grand, you can stay gone for a long time. How much did you make this year? More to the point, why didn't you manage to save at least $10k of it?
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Given the preference for big cats (since Cheetah/Puma as you mention), I guess Lion is the most likely.
It's no worse than Mac OS X 10.6. For a company that gets big props for marketing that's an awkward name.

Having 10 in the name twice would be crazy even if you used the same numeral system for both.
And, of course, Shotput Ventures DID hold a Demo Day, on August 10 in one of my auditoriums, and packed it to standing-room-only.

I didn't check IDs for state of origin, but there were certainly a bunch of angel and VC investors in the room.
I always figured since the last one was "Lepord" this one was called "Snow" + "Lepord" to say it's the same cat, with some minor changes. Thus near-same name.
Well, try an experiment. Find a time of day when you are alert and well-rested, and lay still in your bed with no external entertainment for eight hours

I'm not saying the idea is correct, but your argument is sorely lacking in plausibility - creatures with complex nervous systems get bored staying still unless they lose consciousness (and actually, we spend a lot of sleep with our brains still active in dream-world). If evolution "wanted" to come up with a way to keep animals out of trouble for the part of the day they'd be vulnerable, sleep might be a reasonable and generic way of doing so
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I prefer to live and work for at-least 6 months instead of continuous travel. This way I can empathize with local culture, socio-economical and political conditions.
Not only should they be free, in my opinion they should discount my monthly fee if I handle traffic for phones not on my account. That would give people an incentive to set these things up all over the place.
If it had any truth to it, it might stick. But from what I've read so far (not tried it), it just isn't slow.
I remain amused by the casual bigotry exhibited by so many Silicon Valley denizens that OF COURSE all the smart, motivated, ambitious entrepreneurs will move to the Valley. Most of them would be incensed if a colleague displayed a comparable level of bigotry about race, or sex, or national background, or the rest of the litany. But it's socially acceptable -- at least west of I-5 -- to dismiss 99% of the country as full of failures. "Sure, maybe they did great in AAA ball, but they couldn't make it in the Big Show."

Which has led to the Valley being a hothouse of artificially-compressed geniuses building products for each other instead of for the real world.

But not everyone is a brilliant 23-year-old willing to share a flophouse with three other geniuses while coding 20 hours a day. In the real world, people have spouses... kids... mortgages... elderly parents... heck, maybe they just like sweet tea! There are all sorts of reasons that they won't move to the Valley, even if they have plenty of talent to compete at that level.

I submit that looking for the best of the best among that 99% of the country is a heck of a good way to make money. It's harder, because you can't sit on Sand Hill Road and watch the universe rotate around you. But with some hustle and some brains, there's plenty of opportunity for non-Valley entrepreneurs, and non-Valley investors, to do very very well.

I'm not going to try to embed a picture here on HN, but check out the link and let me know if you want a button! (I think Fred Wilson would wear one; I doubt that Paul Graham would.)

http://academicvc.com/2009/07/not-the-valley/
Are we as a society so bad at giving to charity that we have to outsource with the lottery and the christmas card industry to do it for us?
This my friends, is the definition of "pedantic."
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Puma was 10.1 no? Also, Clouded Leopard and Bornean Clouded Leopard ;)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_cat
>Why should lions get 15 hours a night and giraffes just 5 — >when it is the giraffes who will be running for their lives >come hunting time?

Lions also have to run for their lives come hunting time.
This is an interesting exercise for people who think that anything can be measured in dollars and cents. A one dimensional scale does have some trouble coping with the real world.
No, they had to pass some sort of exam in order to be able to practice in Israel (and also learn the language of course).

But a few years hence, the result is that a lot of Israeli doctors are former Soviet citizens.
The biggest problem is actually that it's harder than it should have been to Google stuff related to 10.6 and not 10.5.
To be fair, you definitely don't pronounce it twice. Then you'd just sound crazy.
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Definitely - the thicker fur on the actual snow leopard is what makes the naming decision really, really bad. I told Steve they should go with Shaven Leopard, but he just wouldn't listen.
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Then instead of spending $120 on the lottery over a year, they could invest ~ $119.40 over the same period, at the end of which they will have $120 which they can put into the lottery. Same result, less money spent.

Except that they lack the utility of playing the lottery for an entire year, which is already worth more than $120 to them, as we can see from the fact that they play the lottery in the first place. :)
If you look at it from the perspective of G5 owners, who cannot get this upgrade, it kinda makes sense.

"Dude, what are you running on this? Snow Leopard?"
"Naw, just Leopard."

They don't have to be the fool with the outdated cat.
"Dude, you're still running Panther on this thing?"

And yes, I'm aware this is probably equally retarded logic, but it's the only decent reason I've heard for not hyping this as the best thing since sliced bread, like they usually do.
OSX 10.6: Hairless Hypoallergenic Domestic House Cat. Just doesn't have the same zeal to it.
Mine isn't outdated as the article says.
In basic usage I found hg and git remarkably similar (although I haven't had to do anything further than a clone/co/comit). I'd rather use git just for github (which I find to be the best "social" repository hub) - github has always provided much more than Google Code or Launchpad in that the emphasis is on finding someones repo, forking it and making it better.
It probably ships with Moonlight, or Darklight or whatever it is.
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I vote for Bornean Clouded Leopard for 10.7

If they name one Lion, it'd have to be one hell of an upgrade me thinks.
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> He needs eventmachine. He requires rubygems and loads it. Tell me what he is doing wrong.

He requires rubygems even though what he wants is eventmachine. What's the sense?

> Tell me how he should do it differently.

Don't require rubygems. Rubygems isn't used anywhere in the code, why require it?

> And if that usage is wrong, then what is the point of even having Rubygems.

Managing your own $LOAD_PATH on your own machine(s). That's the point of rubygems in the first place.
It sounds like you're already getting an overwhelming yes, so I'll just add:

1. It's not a bad idea to keep some of your home directory under VC, especially config / preference files and any writing. (This is more useful on Unix, which typically uses text files for nearly everything.) They're also useful for backup.

2. Git and Mercurial (AKA "hg") are both really good, and probably simpler to use than svn. (I suspect the people who say svn are simpler probably learned it first, and then had to learn all the ways that git/hg's designs differ - but those differences make them simpler to set up.) They havea few different features, but have probably 90%+ in common, and you're not going to really know which one would be a better fit for you until you pick one and learn the basics. You can change your mind later.
Not to mention the pretentious tone of the article, it's clear the author has both an axe to grind and absolutely no insight to offer. He just has an opinion with little intelligent arguments to back it up.

> First, let's look at the fines in the only two music piracy trials that have taken place to date.

Damages, not fines. Fines are a punishment, damages are to correct damage done to the "victim". There's a difference and it's important.

> I'm going to equate one year of prison with a $50,233 salary which is the median household income as of 2007.

This is ridiculous. Freedom's price is not the opportunity cost associated with it. He mentions it in passing but brushes it off as something to make light of. Hand-waving the central part of your argument is just dumb.

Of course, there's also the ridiculous fallacy of "what they do is wrong toooooooooo". Didn't work with my mother, doesn't work with me. This article is a waste of time.
A) true I think I fell just for premature optimization and made my solution too complicated. I assumed that they would pose the problem in a such a way that the naive approach would be too slow.

C) yeah that was the shortest - my first "naive" algorithm was not fast enough, though. I have now thought of a better one and can't wait to try it out, but it is too late for the competition. Still, that alone was worth participating to me - it is a kind of "revelation feeling". I love it when by improving an algorithm a problem becomes solvable.

B) Was actually the easiest for me - the naive algorithm worked well enough. Took me a while to get the program bug free, though...
Actually, the definition of "pedantic" is "marked by a narrow focus on or display of learning, especially its trivial aspects".
Is that chart on the bottom of the profile his performance improvement over time? That would be pretty cool, like 3 years ago he was just a normal programmer (a 13 year old programmer, though)... Or is it accumulated points?
wow, i got downvoted :) sorry i didn't reply earlier.

for some reason, i thought there was some (un)written rule of not linking to your own stuff, like on metafilter and other sites. I checked the HN guidelines again and didn't see any such rule. That mix-up was the reason for my "and DON'T post it to HN" line. Sorry for the snark, and maybe just post it with a small intro text in the HN post?
Or does TechCrunch report of twitter frequently because they've seen that more traffic is sent to TechCrunch when they do?
Brit inventor wants prison for patent crims
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I think Google Checkout is far and away a bigger screw up...

Incidentally I signed up one of my blogs for FB yesterday. It was a mess of a signup and very confusing once complete how to actually use FB.
> Not that it makes any sense arguing further, but for the record, I was not talking about libraries, I was talking about apps.

An app is a library is an app.

> Top level apps that need to require those libraries somehow.

And Ruby has a built-in method for that. It's called `require`. So if an app, a library, a script or whatever needs another library, it requires it and is done.

> I would have thought it was completely reasonable for top-level app authors to require rubygems

No. Unless the toplevel app is never distributed out of controlled environments (where you do impose rubygems) or expands gems in some way and therefore needs to hook into it (e.g. a GUI gems manager à la synaptic for apt-get) there is no need for rubygems at the app level.

The usage of rubygems (or the lack thereof) is part of the execution environment (the state of the machine the app is run on), not part of the application. Maybe for security reasons all libraries are deployed manually and $LOAD_PATH is handled likewise, maybe the guy uses bundler (http://github.com/wycats/bundler/tree/master) or rip (http://hellorip.com/) and doesn't want or need rubygems, maybe the user goes through his OS's package manager of choice (be it yum, apt-get, ports, …) because he likes having all package handling across his machine in a single place and piece, or maybe the app's user does indeed use rubygems. But as the application/script/library author, that's none of your business.

Requiring rubygems in your distributed code (unless you're in specific wrapper contexts or, once again, you're building on top of rubygems and expanding it in some way) means you're putting your nose where it doesn't belong: you're forcing environmental decisions on your users.

If you want to package your lib/app as a gems, that's fine and way cool of you, but that doesn't imply requiring rubygems at runtime.
I happily concede that if you really enjoy playing the lottery then it can be eminently rational to do it.

The person I was replying to wasn't making that argument, but a completely different one: that the utility from the potential winnings outweigh the costs for some poorer people. I think that's monstrously implausible.
Tcl doesn't.
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The website is in German only, but the individual articles are in HTML, so Google Translate will help.

Interviews & viewpoints from across the German-speaking web-o-sphere :)
The author could've tried to make the one-dimensional scale work by polling people how much they'd pay to get out of a 1 year prison term, or alternatively, for what sum they'd be willing to go to prison for 1 year (most likely the two sums aren't equal). Maybe there are studies to that effect somewhere?
This will not happen. The two things serve a totally different purpose. I zoom through my many RSS feeds every day in Google Reader to catch up on the news (with context!) It will take me day's to do this in Twitter. Plus, Twitter is horrible as a informational source. Breaking news, yes. Catching up on the latest topics, noooo.