skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"I cannot control idiots in cars, so I cannot control if someone runs me over on my way to university, killing or crippling me..."

You can improve your dodging skills. Maybe play more Frogger. :)
Some of his books are not bad actually. At least I did like „Survival is not Enough“ and did agree with many things he says in „Permission Marketing“.

His recent activity however is not interesting at all, I quit reading his blog long time ago: http://rimantas.com/en/archives/2008/04/29/bye-seth/ :)
Understood, it's probably just the knowledge divide that makes certain things more valuable than others. I'm not a sysadmin, I know enough to get around and get things done and learn to do them properly, but the guides certainly help at times when I get stuck.

IRC I'm not really a regular on, but I've been on Linodes a few times and the people are extremely nice and helpful, I feel if someone can relate directly to my situation (same host, same features) it's a lot easier to solve certain issues.

You sound like you don't really have these needs for the most part, which probably makes the value of these services a lot less for you than for me. Although, this is the first time I've heard of prgrm(?), I'm going to need to look into it now, peaked my curiosity.
FAKEAV now spreading through search engine sponsored links
Great post, thanks for writing it. Anyone reading this, don't be intimidated by the wall of text, it is well worth reading.
It works to drive the point home, a perfect ending.
The argument ingnores a fact that if netscape did not take off and be popular, microsoft might not ever consider buying spyglass browser and expanded it into IE (Eric Sink led the spyglass team, with his memoir http://www.ericsink.com/Browser_Wars.html) and waged browser war in late 90s.

What all software architects forget is, most of time, the piece of code that we wrote is to solve problems in life. Those problems have their life cycles; some are long, some are short. While we seems like to imagine the piece that we wrote will be a masterpiece as a Cathedral/Pyramid and last for 1000 years. Unfortunately that is not the case. Most of time, our programs are just solutions among solutions to a series of bootstrapping problems. So unless we have a lousy but popular solution to a problem, our potential competitors might just ignored a market and no progress happened for the field. And this is a lost to human progress.

It is the same as maintaining old buildings, if condition is right, you may just tear it down and rebuild what you deem is fit by today's standard. But don't forget the original building has served its purpose.

Edit:

I personally have affection for Netscape 1.0. I still remembered how people in my lab in Taipei ftped to netscape's download server and waited for the moment when they uploaded the tgz file and started to download it and installed it on Sun workstations. And by using it I felt making stuffs on internet is better than studying physics and the decision changed my life.
Archaic Perl
What one community decides to define itself as isn't really a concern of mine.

Ehh, then I won't be able to convince you that it's not true that what you called crazy view on TCS is in fact common view. Not that I was able to do that anyways; I'm not that eloquent.

Amichail said SPJ is not member of that community and that's perfectly true. You opted to that on ontological grounds. Fine. I've shown that leaders of CS theory in US doesn't give a flip about that ontology and just mind their own business. TCS community is fragmented in two disjoint ways.

Why T in TCS then at all? Maybe because most of people are not linguists and doesn't care. Mathematicians for example doesn't care at all about naming. Most common path of least action is just call the thing by the surname of whomever was loudest shouting about it. They rightly assume it's just irrelevant anyways even if troublesome at times. By the Arnol'd principle name almost never reflects of who actually made the discovery anyways and the rest of msthematics' ontology and semantics is horrendous, http://cornellmath.wordpress.com/2007/07/12/unfortunate-math.... I can perfectly imagine category theory being more relevant to programming than resolving PvsNP. Conversely TCS is about computation and computability and rest are further abstractions, so this can be argued any way one wants.
To add to this, at the time the trial started, Thailand was one of areas with the highest infection rate. It's common practice to do a trial where the disease is the worst.
Interesting, that "Manager/Owner" is the most stable occupation. And all the other (larger) occupations are coming and going.
To _mobile_ Linux. For normal Linux there is Moonlight.
How to Attract More People to Your Open Source Project
Even if I can ride a regular unicycle (which I can) I still want one of these ...
I'm over 50. I've been to the zoo to see the animals.
Started with Fortran, seen different technolgies come and go, until recently I liked what I did.

Speaking with about 1 year of java, now I know how 9 women can produce a baby in one month. Now I know how a herd of turtles (galapagos tortoise variety) can cross the desert.

The first Fortran compiler was released around 1954. I started 20 years later. Java is proof positive that we have accomplished very little in the way of compiler development in 55 years. Sure, lots of clever languages have been created, but none have made it to the mainstream. Must be the clever marketing. Java has the least semantic density (lines of code to accomplish a given task) of any of the mainstream langauges - more time is spent navigating with some of the incredibly good tools.

If Java is the only language you know, do yourself a favour and learn something else. Not C#, but Perl, Haskell, J, anything. Have a basis for comparison.

I'm going back to fixing bicycles.
some letters + (In eclipse) Ctrl+Space, (in Vim) <C-p> or <C-n> in insert mode beat CTS with long names.
The problem here isn't the "brandjacking", it's the "curate this page" option. As a customer, this sort of site is only useful if it's uncensored and focused - I want to read about the Kindle DRM problems along side the fawning reviews.

Basically, "curated" pages become useless. Non-curated pages might be useful, but I'm not going to trust a site whose business model depends on "pay us to take down negative reviews."

This isn't an ethical issue, it's just a big gaping hole in the business model.
Ah and here I thought online piracy was relegated to backwater communities and such. At least he's open about how he's trying to extort money from you. I have only two things I'd like to wave his way and they're both fingers.
Barski's website is also worth a visit: http://www.lisperati.com/
"Brands in Public is nothing more than a 5k a year public Google Alert" - so true.
The most interesting thing might be the fraction of workers that are male. There is a large jump in female employment around 1960, which isn't surprising. But apparently, there was also a big jump in 1860!?
SO: Interesting thread on which language to use for data summarization
In theory, I agree with this. In practice...

"High quality recording equipment is within anyone's grasp."

Therefore anyone can make a record that sounds like an 8. If you want to stand out, you either make it sound like a 4 or raise money somehow to put out a 9-10 sounding record.

"Marketing and distribution cost nothing but savvy and persistence."

This will get you featured on blogs and get you gigs in low-key venues. Anything bigger than that is corporate and requires relationships, ins, and access, which is what the record companies still have.
Funding
Does ycombinator.com fund ideas in Africa?
I would just say this for folks who don't like unit tests because it takes longer. Push yourself away from the keyboard and think about it. When one writes codes one writes unit tests in ones head or the code doesn't work. I submit that we always write unit tests. The difference is in one case we keep it so we can run it over and over, in the other case we do it anyway in our heads then throw it away. I am not convinced that writing unit tests now takes any longer. We all know it saves our bacon later.

I have personally thrown out entire chunks of code except the unit tests and started from scratch to get things working again. I don't think the value of this can be understated.
I may respond to more aspects of your comment later, but I wanted to make a few quick points.

> They've always been fast.

Yes, and now, I'd argue, they are even faster. Unfortunately, I am not aware of any good studies about meme transmission rate-- it's the sort of thing that is difficult to measure without affecting the meme in the process of measuring. Data from a botnet would be ideal.

> The thing is, memes reflect a community's insider aspect. If you
> see a meme and allow it, you're allowing that self-congratulatory
> "We're on the Internet and know what the Internet thinks"

This is of course true. But don't forget that much social behavior is about fitting-in better with ones peers. It's a signal that says "I belong here" or "We are a part of the same tribe". Again, not unique to the internet at all. It's just much faster lately.

> usually aren't funny or clever beyond being repetitive, so don't
> get upvotes by non-kneejerkers.

I don't claim to have a complete theory of humor, but a big part of what makes something funny is repetition coupled with subtle changes in the pattern. Many memes, especially of the ytmnd or 4chan variety, tap into this to great effect. I can think of more than a couple which I thought were uninteresting in their original presentation that became outstanding after several iterations.

Also, note how many memes use self-reference and absurdity. This is the essence of post-modernism. Again, this is nothing new, but memes certainly allow exposure of these themes to a very broad audience.

Finally, with respect to your assertion that "very rarely is a meme used alongside relevant information," I note that your own post contradicts this.
Two-man start up can't afford chi-chi branding, could use your advice.
We're about to launch our first product, and we got attached to a name we had picked for it early on. Turns out there's another company who goes by that very name, and they also work in the same field that we do. So we scrambled to pick something new.

Our product is a video-based hosted application that organizations can use to train and educate their members. It's more virtual learning than an LMS. Our customers can upload their own training videos, and if they want they can subscribe to packaged content made by professional trainers. Reporting is an important part of our application, and we can accommodate organizations large and small.

Since we're two guys, and neither one of us are experts in the field of naming products, the past 48 hours of creative thinking has left us exhausted. We're left with three potential names, and if we're lucky you'll let us know which one you prefer.

Idea 1: Leaderboard

Leaderboard urges you to reach for the top. A leaderboard inspires competition, aggressiveness, and acknowledges performance. A Leaderboard is physical, concrete and highly visual.

Idea 2: GoldStar

GoldStar is reminiscent of your childhood, when performance was rewarded with gold stars on your homework. GoldStar is also concrete and visual, and symbolizes a reward more than an acknowledgement.

Idea 3: Canopy

A Canopy sits atop of tall trees, and invites you to stand on the shoulders of giants. A Canopy is a place in a forest where life thrives, where collaboration and coexistence is most evident, a safe home for an entire ecosystem. A Canopy is literally where the Sun meets the earth, and a Canopy urges you to reach for the sky.

We'd love to hear your thoughts, suggestions, and other names that come to mind.

Thanks in advance,

Max and Cam from Big Bang Technology in Toronto.
(this is Cameron the other half of Big Bang Technology)

We really appreciate any feedback or questions anyone has on this.
It's jump on Seth day.
I figured Death Valley.
Yeah, but as of right now you could basically call it PPC/Intel, and most users are probably running Intel. Binaries (universal or not) are good enough for every single application distributed for the Mac platform. Why would command-line tools or libraries need to be any different?
This is however a major problem I have with comments:
If it is obvious to me, my mind never ever spends a conscious second thinking about this. For me, the problem does not exist at all. So, tell me, how am I supposed to comment something which might be not obvious to someone else if I don't know it is there?
I don't see the need to make that distinction here. It should be trivial to port from Moblin to desktop. And I'd assume that Intel's Silverlight would be better than Moonlight, as it should be more lightweight and it is based on offical Microsoft Silverlight, so it should support wider range of Silverlights features. Only reason imho to choose Moonlight over Intels Silverlight would be licensing issues, as I don't think it will be FOSS.
I don't get it.

Are Intel saying Moonlight sucks? Too big or bloaty? The wrong licence? Too Not-Invented-Here-ish?

Why wouldn't it be in the best interests of Microsoft, Intel and Novell to work together on this?
Articles like this is as good as it gets from Wired. To be fair, that's not worse then you'd get from almost any other publication. But crap is still crap. And Wired is kinda crappy even when it comes to their alleged core competency - tech. And it is total crap on any other subject.

Yet we keep seeing Wired articles ever higher on HN, ever more often. At least for now the comments rebuking them are good.
Why don't we see mobile gas stations?
Absolutely agree. I work with a "duct tape" programmer and you couldn't pay me enough to touch his code. I'm so sick of someone asking me what's going on with RelayHandler's mda function and what do the variables "a", "sb", and "c" stand for? I kid you not... I don't always agree with Joel and this is one of those times where I absolutely do not agree. Duct tape programmers can stay the hell away from me.
Ah, that kind of stinks about the unlocking function not being there.

Only thing I can think of is that if your business is growing so you need upgrades, at least your business is growing? haha. I can definitely see why this could be a potential bottle neck, but for freelancers and side-businesses it probably won't be as much of an issue.
Next Wheel of Time book: Listen to Chapter 2 for free
Anecdote != data, however, I will say that my decision to stay in my job is quite tied to the health insurance my family (w 1 child) receives through that job. It is simply too risky and expensive to take a lower paying job that might provide worse health insurance or part time work in order to attempt a startup.
Wait until she hears about radio!
Navel gazers? or egomaniacs? pretentious arseholes? or gormless twats?

Or all of the above?

For god's sake, what is this site and why the hell does it get articles posted to HN so often? Technology isn't interesting unless you're interested in technology - trying to stir up interest in the industry by constantly waffling on about the peripheral bullshit that is part of any business as if it's some kind of unique experience for the 'tech sphere' is just utter bullshit.

It's embarassing to our industry that development is turning into a geek verion of E! or some bullshit.
Off the top of my head: blue links beat the stuffing out of "designer friendly" links back on my old site.

That's an interesting statement. That's what I would expect, on the basis of consistency with the behavior of other sites. What is the experience of other HN readers? Have you ever done a test of link colors?
Chrysler Phases Out Paper Owner’s Manual
Chopraji, You are right. Almost all space missions today, even those of USA are made of international teams. Science has no boundary, nor should it.

However, the title appropriately said "..helped discover.." and not "..discovered..".

This is India's first lunar mission. I know that it was not a complete success (we lost contact with the mission couple of weeks ago..), but it wasn't a failure either.

This mission, which costed a paltry $76M was able to be part of a historical discovery. So, it is appropriate to acknowledge the "Third World Country" which built it.
Facebook - The Movie
Great. Now we can have bottled water from the moon. Of course we will just tap it here, but nobody will know!
> Amichail said SPJ is not member of that community and that's perfectly true.

My argument was that it is impossible to exclude SPJ from any sensible definition of "theoretical computer science", unless you are taking those words and re-defining them to mean something other than what they actually mean as a collection of words.

I accept that there may be a group of people who call what they do "theoretical computer science", and who believe that nothing else is "theoretical computer science", but in that case, the onus is on those people to remember to translate "theoretical computer science" as a term into "complexity theory" when they talk to people outside the complexity theory community, because the rest of us have a much stronger claim to the general meaning of the term, which encompasses both this idiosyncratic use of "TCS" as well as all of the other things that it can correctly be taken to mean.

Allow me to make my argument entirely concrete:

Let's say that I do "organic chemistry" and I go to organic chemistry conferences with other organic chemists. Obviously there are other sub-branches of chemistry. If I decided to stop calling what I do "organic chemistry" and start calling it just "chemistry" instead, to the exclusion of any other kind of chemistry, you can understand why people would be very confused (and probably a little annoyed) when I start telling them that Alfred Nobel wasn't a chemist.

I will go even further to say that the test for a sensible definition of "theoretical computer science" is probably which people it includes, and SPJ would probably be on that list, IMHO (along with Hoare and Milner and countless others who are excluded by this supposedly widely-held definition).

And I really don't think it's widely-held outside of the community that calls itself the TCS community, which by definition, doesn't make it a "widely held view", does it?
The article reports that the Thai government (the Thai Ministry of Health) has cooperated willingly with this study. Thailand was an early country in Asia to have a high AIDS infection rate, and has been a leader in that part of the world in working on strategies to find community approaches to preventing the spread of AIDS and to find medical preventives and cures for AIDS.
I thought this comment was well-stated:

> The Danger (with a capital D) is that people use this as a "GOTCHA YOU HYPOCRITE!" moment instead of a teaching moment.

> The way we SHOULD let this play out is to say, "Now, Lily, you see how easy it is to get caught up in this, even if you're a good person. Should we go after the worst and most egregious violators of the law? Sure. But the casual fan or artist may accidentally or innocently violate the law with the best intentions. And they shouldn't be persecuted."

http://www.techdirt.com/article.php?sid=20090923/1409046297#...
Does "persuasion" even work? To me it just comes across as smarmy.
the bizspark program is much better.

Rather than getting just free web software, you get pretty much all microsoft software for free for 3 years.
Ask HN: Is there a map of 'techhubs'?  Any in NC?
Ask HN: Is there a map of 'techhubs'? Any in NC?
Windows 8: More early clues start to emerge
impossible to exclude SPJ from any sensible definition of "theoretical computer science"

Yes, there is. Vide my last sentence above.

Proving that is futile because you want to argue anywas and as I said I'm not that eloquent.

Nobody takes away from SPJ of what he is.

Edit: you expanded your argument after I wrote above. I don't feel like I have anything useful to say. Not that I felt that in the first place, I just gave a counterexaple showing of how world stands. Next time I'll run into someone I'll first ask what school he attends and who is his advisor instead of arguing about what he semantically meant describing his field. Then it would be evident what he works in and if we have anything to learn from eachother insetad of wasting our both time for idle argument.
Canopy, Its a strong sounding name. Not as sketcy as Goldstar, or leaderboard.
I didn't notice at first, but if you start typing in the search box in the upper left, it pulls out individual professions. Pretty cool.
Microsoft: Google Chrome Frame makes IE less secure
Free Beta License Key Loophole Still Exploitable In KAV 2010 And KIS 2010
Anti-virus software need constant updating to protect users against new threats and this provides anti-virus software company's an edge for fighting piracy as they can check and block blacklisted keys whenever a pirated copy of software connects to internet for updating, leading security software vendor Kaspersky also blacklists pirated keys every few days making pirates go hunting for new non-blacklisted keys now and then, however, earlier pirates found a innovative trick to get past this limitation via a beta registry hack which allowed users to get genuine activation keys right from Kaspersky servers without any limitation bypassing the blacklisting completely letting them update Kaspersky Anti-Virus 2009 and Kaspersky Internet Security 2009 without buying, I was pretty sure that this hacktivation trick will get blocked in upcoming versions of Kaspersky products but to my surprise it still works in Kaspersky 2010 products.
I think bloat is the issue but not in a negative way. Silverlight is a subset of the .Net Framework in that Microsoft Jettisoned any unnecessary feature to make the package size smaller. While Moonlight is a port of Silverlight it requires Mono to run and Mono is an attempt to port the entire .Net Framework to Linux.

So if you want Silverlight on a cell phone and you want it to be as small as possible Mono doesn't fit your goal (which is what I have to assume Intel was thinking).
Ya you will
Hi- Just saw this post- this is my book...

I'm finishing the last chapters this week and then there is still tons of editing ahead- The release date will be March next year!

It's going to be a FAT book with lots of games, will cover all the interesting parts of Lisp programming, including full coverage of functional programming, macros, and a lot lot more. Also, it has a zillion cartoons and illustrations.

I wanted to write a Lisp book that puts FUN first- I hope you will enjoy my book!

- Conrad Barski
250-Foot Long Hybrid Airship Will Spy Over Afghanistan Battlefields in 2011
Let’s Fire Our Customers
Best Collection of Useful jQuery Tooltip Plugins and Tutorials
The civil war killed a lot of dudes.