skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Twitter - How to use the latest social networking 
More and more brands are realising the benefits of Twitter and are jumping on the band wagon. Some brands are simply listening to Twitter, finding out what users are saying about their products; some are snapping up their brand names and making sure the twitter-squatters don't get them; and some are being really brave and actively taking part in the conversation.
Gaytes: Fax Server,IVRS and Voice & Unified Messaging Solutions
Gaytes Information Systems Private Ltd have been providing Voice & Unified messaging (UM). It is a concept of bringing together all messaging media such as voice messaging, email, and facsimile into a combined communications experience. Gaytes offers a complete Solution for voice & unified messaging, voice, data and managed services, as well as systems integration and application development.
Yeah, I have click to flash installed, so my first reaction was "what, flash?". It would be so nice to see it done with http://www.rgraph.net/ or something similar.
According to the Oxford English Dictonary:

noun a branch of science which deals with the physical world, e.g. physics, chemistry, geology, biology
I don't mean to be impolite, but your response to the article seems a little defensive to me. The illustrative story he uses is contrived, but if you read his other writings at that URL, it seems to be that his general style leans towards hyperbole. That doesn't mean the point is invalid.

I think it is certainly valid to question the merit of using known techniques of influence to convince others to buy things that may not be of value to them. Where is the line between this and the promotion of things of value that people might not think they want currently?

We have seen a decade or more of intense innovation in which many new things were created that people had to be convinced to buy, but that did ultimately provide them with great value. At the same time, we still have MacDonalds marketing junk-food to kids. Was it "Supersize Me" that showed an interview with a fast food sales/advertising type brazenly describing how they can convince kids/parents to buy just about anything, whether they need it or not, whether they previously wanted it or not? [1]

I have an experiment to suggest to you and anyone else on HN who might be interested: sell your TV, cancel your cable, and don't watch anything that you didn't specifically choose, for one year. (i.e., DVD's, etc. that you make a conscious choice to buy/rent are ok). When the year is up, start watching TV ads again. My guess is that a lot of the advertisements will look ridiculous and cynically manipulative [2], and you'll wonder how they could convince anyone to buy the product they promote. But you know they work, because people pay for them.

[1] If you recall the scene I'm referring to please feel free to correct me if I got the details wrong.

[2] If they don't already seem that way to you.
My tip: pushd without an arg pushes the current directory onto the stack, and then switches to what popd would have. Hence, repeated invocations of pushd let you cycle between two directories without thinking.

$CDPATH is also amusing:

$ mkdir /foo/bar/baz
$ cd baz
bash: cd: baz: no such file or directory
$ export CDPATH="/foo/bar"
$ cd baz
$ pwd
/foo/bar/baz
cd - (Go back to previous working directory)

sudo !! (Run the last command as root)

:w !sudo tee % (Save a readonly file in VIM)

> tmp.file (Empty a file)

cmd !$ (Run cmd with previous commands arguments)

They are just some of my favorites.
I find when I wake up at the same time each day I do a lot better. Weekends completely throw me off cause I can usually sleep in until 7, sometimes at the latest 8.

I have a few methods of waking up.

1. Cell phone alarm set to 5 a.m, this is hit or miss. Sometimes I actually wake up a minute before the alarm even goes off.
2. A 2.5 year old who wakes me up with a plastic golf club or other blunt instrument on the weekends (this is the whole sleeping in part)
3. Instances like this morning, where I was up at 3:15 because I stopped breathing...

The last one is not recommended but it always wakes me up. Thankfully it does not happen too often, just now and again.

Routine is get out of bed, roll the arms around to get the blood circulating, make a nice breakfast and prepare a lunch to take into the office. Drink a bottle of water, turn the coffee pot on, knock out a set of push ups, hit the shower, get dressed, get in car, get 2 blocks down the road and realize I forgot the lunch or my pants, turn around, get item, head to office.

Weekend is fairly void of a routine with the exception of my son waking me up, and taking him to Starbucks in the morning to flirt with chicks.

Ultimately, My routine during the week is the best one for me. It make's me pretty productive, and I really enjoy being the only one in the office for a few hours. It's amazing what you can get accomplished when no one is around to interrupt you.
Or just omit the <<EOF and press Control-D to finish (assuming you have not done anything strange with stty).
This one is good too: http://www.shell-fu.org/lister.php?top
Interview: Meike Reichle, Debian Developer
Heh, I'm beginning to think we need an HN: Politics for people who like HN and the people who debate here and want to talk about politics. Hopefully it would be a forum with minimal name calling (instead replaced by discussion/debate!).
I alias maek to make
Er this is just a verbatim repost of http://steveblank.com/2009/06/18/epitaph-for-an-entrepreneur.... See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=663432
Tracemonkey is a pretty big development. In the longer term it will allow plenty of stuff to migrate to the web in one form or another.

As for why people would even bother with java:

- legacy

- the ability to have shared state between the threads of a web server (such as an in core object cache)

- corporate dictates
These sorts of comments are exactly why we flag economics articles here. There are plenty of people here that take exactly the opposite view (or views, depending on the degree to which they take those views) - that markets should be even more open/free/etc... On the other end, there's even some guy who says he's a "venture communist".

Economics is something that we can all agree to disagree on in order to talk about what we have in common: hacking and startups.
I love the '-exec' flag for find
But that is not inherent to the money, is it? It is the policy of the money issuing entity.

The Freigeld proponents want money that automatically loses value. Like the guy int he article mentioning that "money" in the middle ages would decay (because it was biological stuff). That's why I worried that he might be one of the Freigeld people.
Japan engaged in quantitative easing for a decade and never had inflation.

Just because they print money doesn't mean it goes into circulation. It's currently sitting in bank vaults, and the increase reserve requirements agreed by the G20 will also ensure that much of it will have to stay there due to liquidity requirements.

Also, be wary of anything by Ambrose Evan Pritchard - he is always writing these alarmist, breathless articles saying that the world is going to end. Read some of his other articles to get some context.
Or Rhino, JRuby, Scala
Survey Monkey Growing Like A Weed, Fills Out Exec Team
touch somefile.txt
Also, huge libraries.

For example, POI (Excel) or Lucene (full text search).
I know - I meant that [most of] the bottom 30% or so of that target audience range will simply stare at Mr.President and sit around nostril digging or elbow jabbing or whatever it is these days that kids use to distract themselves when Important Adults Use Big Words On A Stage..
Come on you Twits Get on your Facebook & let's blog our way out of recession
Saddleblanket seat cover
Why do you need a seat cover for the PT Cruiser when it comes out of the factory fitted with the upholstery? The fact is, the factory fitted upholstery is almost sure to get damaged soon – but you cannot let this happen. A seat cover will let you protect the upholstery and prevent any damage from taking place.
GHC is a static compiler; it doesn't belong here unless I've missed something.
Probably because you are not worried about either: I'd think the probability of either of them saying anything really harmful would be quite small, but it would be a lot higher in the case of Bush.

every time I talk about Obama I get downmodded: perhaps that indicates that you're saying dumb things about Obama, then.

(But, actually: I suggest that you do what I just did, and put "ars obama" into searchyc.com and look to see whether it's actually true that you get jumped on every time you talk about Obama. Doesn't look like it to me.)

reflexively downmodding [like you did]: no, I thought about it carefully, applied a general principle that I'd arrived at earlier on the basis of rational reflection, and then downmodded you. And I also read and considered what you'd written, disagreed with much of it, and commented on one bit that seemed worth commenting on. What exactly do you think is wrong with that?

(The reasoning behind the general principle: I'm-going-to-get-downmodded comments, in most venues, consistently seem to do one or more of (1) divert discussion onto meta-noise, (2) procure the sympathy-upvotes they're fishing for, while (3) not actually deserving those sympathy-upvotes. As such, they lower the quality of discourse. I wish to avoid this, because I prefer reading higher-quality stuff. Downmodding such comments when I see them pokes the system in the right direction; saying what I'm doing encourages other people to think about whether my policy is a good or a bad one -- and I expect that people who seriously consider that, whether they end up liking or disliking my policy, will typically come to share my general opinion of the poor-poor-me comments. You are of course welcome to disagree with any of that -- you are welcome to consider it a stinking blend of industrial-grade stupidity with military-spec bullshit -- but what it certainly isn't is "reflexive".)
How about a link to the comments after each article title? I usually read those first and then click on the link (otherwise I'd have to come to HN front page anyway to see the comments on it). Works great though - good job.
> make me a sandwich
what? make it yourself
> sudo !!
okay
I've (just about) finished moving my project to JRuby. The combination of the Ruby language for most of the code, the vast selection of libraries, and the ability to drop down into Java for performance sensitive code is a joyous thing.
Further to filtering the history: I use "script" to record terminal sessions. See "man 1 script".
Why wouldn't you just alias sl to ls? It'd be much less typing.
If it's straightforward to get near-C performance out of those languages, why do they lose out so badly in the language shootout? eg: Tracemonkey vs Java -

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/benchmark.php?test=al...

Java varies between 10 and 100 times as fast as Tracemonkey in all the tests. If you think it is straightforward to write code that equals C performance, you should do so and submit it to the shootout to prove your point. Personally, I don't believe you can :-)
I'm not sure what you are referring to by 'that'?

(Anecdote: My dad ended up buying a set of the World Book encyclopaedias by a pushy salesman - ended up tremendously enriching my life over the next couple of years.)

I realise that anti-consumerism is viewed as a Good Thing, but some of the onus is on the consumer - his 'duty' is to think and buy. The producer will gladly cater to the second half of that, and manipulate the first bit to the fullest extent he can to enable the buying. This hardly makes the producer (and his agents) a 'bandit'.
The six dirtiest tricks vendors use to get their hands in your pocket
The story about the salesman pushing the grand piano and a wall being knocked down into the bedroom to make room for it.

It was clearly meant tongue-in-cheek, or at least that is how I took it.

Of course nobody buys a piano because of a pushy salesman if their house can not accomodate it, but it is a nice analogy to describe some of the process that goes on when people buy stuff they don't need or have the ability to use.

Have a look at this for how far the 'salespeople' are willing to go:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hi63rXnuWbw
Well, the other guy will make sure that he wakes up when he kisses the guy's gf.
My rant including the "little man" was no so much directed at the article in question as it was at the movement in general. But Russels depiction of this hard-working professional as a victim is condescending. He can provide for his family, but can't in the face of a simple salesman say "no, go away, and if you come back next week I won't be this polite"? This is obviously a contrived example, because the real world don't lend itself well to the point he wants to make.

> the goal of (many) salespeople and advertisers is to make their targets sillier and stupider, and that's seldom in their interests or those of the community / nation / world as a whole.

Obviously there are scammers out there, but the average advertisement/sale caters to the average consumer, and by declaring that the actions of these consumers make them "sillier and stupider" (than what?) and that they don't act in their own interest or "those of the community / nation / world as a whole" is "holier-than-thou".

How do you objectively define the best interest of the "community / nation / world as a whole"? To take a very current example, the current financial crisis is caused in (a large) part by the political system (a democratic president and a republican house -- no-one gets away clean) deciding that is was in the best interest of the nation and its citizens is to lend a lot of money to a lot of people who couldn't really afford it to buy their own home.
brushed metal theme ????

http://daringfireball.net/2005/09/anthropomorphized

http://daringfireball.net/2007/06/brushed_metal_leopard
Dependency analysis, and a digression onto mock ducks.
And then ^o to execute that command, and put the next command from your history onto the command line ready for another ^o...
The Impact of Load Balancing on SOAPy and RESTful Applications
Very clever. But I'm not convinced: anything that increases the theft rate and thereby requires people to buy more also increases the effective cost of the product. I don't have any numbers on this, so you should be skeptical about what follows, but: introspection strongly suggests to me that when the price of a thing increases by a given factor, my probability of buying it goes down by a larger factor. (At least when we're talking phones, toys, music players, cameras, computers, etc.) Now, suppose you try to increase sales by encouraging theft: if a fraction f of devices are stolen and their owners buy replacements, then (1) the effective cost goes up by a factor of about 1+f and (2) the number of sales per "original" sale is about 1+f. If my introspection happens to describe how typical people behave, then the net result is that the vendor sells fewer devices. (And has less happy customers.)

(Actually it's 1/(1-f), not 1+f, if your second iWidget is just as likely to be stolen as your first. Something in between if you are more careful to avoid theft once you've been bitten once.)
After the industry accepted Java as an enterprise language, lot of development went into optimizing the compiler and these were not academic developments, like your examples (maybe except TraceMonkey).

Add this to the already existing huge amounts of libraries and the fact that Java is a perfect middle ground language in every ways, and you have the answer.

Personally I don't like Java, mainly because of the 'framework culture', but I have to admit that a lot of progress was done in the areas of compiling and running Java code.

Still despite that much effort, I still can feel when I use a non-statically compiled interactive application (e.g. text-editors, games etc.). Generally low latency responses for your actions and fast startup time seems to not to be the property of dynamic languages.
A lot of ideas people have are like wishbones - http://www.nilkanth.com/2009/07/09/selling-fake-wishbones/
More things that don't make sense
I found The Bloop to be particularly interesting.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327246.500-13-more-t...
Fat Burner Pills That Burn Belly Fat Fast
The approach and phrasing might be different, but aren't you and GP making essentially the same point?

The world of B2C marketing (especially FMCG) is generally a murky affair, but then again you can hardly expect the purveyors of such products to say "Here's my toothpaste, see if you feel the need to try it out, then continue to do so, if you like it. K thanks."

Most basic marketing courses in college lay the foundation to "convince kids/parents to buy just about anything, whether they need it or not, whether they previously wanted it or not?". McDonald's does it because they have the pockets to do so - Old Poppa Joe's deli across the street would do so too if they could, and you can be assured they wouldn't warn you of the health hazards.

There's little to no point in bad-mouthing the sellers - that's precisely their business. Caveat emptor, though. That's his duty.
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/4-websites-to-learn-cool-linux-...

http://www.hiraeth.com/alan/tutorials/courses/Unix-Tools.pdf

and Powers / Peek' oreilly book "Unix Power tools" on google books

================================

IBM had a good series:

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-11sysadtip...

https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-10sysadti...

http://www.linuxformat.co.uk/wiki/index.php/58_Cool_Hacks

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/aix/library/au-productivit...
I was looking at doing BLAST searches on genetic data in Erlang and checked out the benchmarks for the algorithms on different languages. I was shocked to see the performance benchmark for FASTA on one of the benchmark sites: Java was only slightly slower than C++, about 20% off the mark. http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/fulldata.php?test=fas...

Found the url:

Java -server: 7.54 seconds

C gnu gcc: 9.33 seconds

C gnu gcc #4: 5.29 seconds

C++ GNU g++ #4 6.21 seconds

I'd always thought of Java as slow, from the early SWING days. Nope. Java is really fast. Not sure how globally applicable this is, but I thought it was neat. Considering what its features buy you... 20% for this algorithm is pretty cheap. Although for C I guess its a bit more.
> This is obviously a contrived example, because the real world don't lend itself well to the point he wants to make.

You don't say... I think it is an excellent analogy of the process that goes on between producers, salespeople and consumers.

> How do you objectively define the best interest of the "community / nation / world as a whole"?

That's a tricky one, but I suspect that the maximum by any definition does not include large amounts of funds spent by people on things that do not benefit them.

> caused in (a large) part by the political system (a democratic president and a republican house -- no-one gets away clean) deciding that is was in the best interest of the nation and its citizens is to lend a lot of money to a lot of people who couldn't really afford it to buy their own home.

There were many more 'actors' than just a few government officials in the US that together brought about the crisis, equally culpable are the people operating the banks, the people that took on mortgages that they knew up front they would not be able to pay for ('ninja' applicants), foreign banks buying up the debt packages etc.

Indeed, no-one gets away clean.
SCIENCE ANIMATION: Biology, Chemistry, Technology, Engineering, Optics, Math
Because of my background I found most of these things pretty obvious, or lacking in useful detail, but not everyone has my background, so I thought I'd submit it anyway.

Hope it's interesting to at least some of you.
The author of this critique seems to think that this amounts to "Colonialism", and would be another example of powerful Western nations taking advantage of weaker third world countries.

No, you've read it all wrong. Actually the critique argues that cononialism worked well and was a good arrangement for all involved. It also argues that the plan can't work today because it would constitute a threat to both the host regime (unflattering comparison, brain drain, etc.) and to current Western ideology (because colonies would demonstrably work better than native-run democracy) - not because the plan is morally bad and thus somehow unworkable. I pretty much agree with this analysis.
you know, it's funny. most people would put the start of economic thought ~1776 when Adam Smith wrote the Wealth of Nations. That means it's been around less than 250 years. Sure it may not describe physical processes, but economics does try to model the real world. SCIENCE wasn't too far along 250 years after inception. I mean, we still believed that the world was flat not too long ago. give it time, the data will come. mistakes will be made.
I was wondering what this posting did on HN anyway, but after your enlightened observation I will invest some time in searching for this forum.
It is defensive. I'm sick and tired of this movement. As I replied to gjm11, I believe that this story is a hyperbole because the real world don't lend it self well to the point he wants to make.

> I think it is certainly valid to question the merit of using known techniques of influence to convince others to buy things that may not be of value to them. Where is the line between this and the promotion of things of value that people might not think they want currently?

There are two parties to this, the sender and the receiver. The receiver needs to process and act on this information for the sale to take place. I see this movement as extremely condescending because it all too readily assumes that because consumers make "wrong" choices, they don't have free will. The line goes where people chooses to make a purchase. McDonalds: it's not healthy, and everyone, including kids, know this, still consumers want the product, because they like it. I like it, and no-one else provides the convenient package of fat, protein and sugar I need at 3 am returning from a night on the town, and no-one else can give me that small energy kick as fast as a cheeseburger can to get me through the last hour of a long drive. (I haven't seen Supersize Me, but I'm familiar with it's conclusions)

Regarding your experiment, I've all but stopped watching programmed TV, but yeah, I find ads obnoxious. Manipulative? It's not like they lie about their purpose.
Or, of course, a "dirty" deed. I am given to understand that one may engage someone to perform such deeds at highly discounted prices.
Java is fast if a) you have lots of memory and b) you can write off the VM startup time. Now memory is cheap and you can buy boxes off the shelf these days with 128G in, but at the point you run out and need to swap, your performance is destroyed. Of course this is true for all languages, but C (et al) won't hit that problem 'til much much later. That's clearly shown in the statistics.

As for point b, no-one is using Java to write command-line tools for that very reason.
mpd + cron + some hard rock... i'm a heavy sleeper :D
Yeah... the table shows that memory usage is another story entirely :)
> I think it is an excellent analogy of the process that goes on between producers, salespeople and consumers.

Well, I don't. Care to elaborate?

> ...does not include large amounts of funds spent by people on things that do not benefit them.

That's circular. How do you define what objectively benefits someone?

> There were many more 'actors' than just a few government officials

Of course. I singled out the government, because that's an entity we often look to in search for a definition of the common best interest.
Personas - how the Internet sees you
Make Pictures Perfect with PicTreat | Tricks Machine
screen is infinitely useful.