skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
FreeBSD won me over about 12 years ago when I was looking for a stable OS for a small dynamic DNS home server. OpenBSD kernel panicked on my AMD K6-2 machine, and I'd just been screwed by a Mandrake Linux upgrade that left my system unusable, so I installed FreeBSD 4.7 and slogged through a month of "help, this isn't Linux".

It's impressive how both the feature set and community have grown since then and hard to imagine the OS now giant-locked or without ULE, ZFS, DTrace, PF, and a host of other things both homegrown and imported. I'm particularly excited to see BHyVe mature so there is a native VM option besides VirtualBox when I need more than a Jail.

FreeBSD still struggles in some scenarios, especially desktop use and availability of BSD VPS hosting that would let people cheaply experiment with the OS like they can with Linux on Linode or DigitalOcean. I have a FreeBSD desktop and a VPS running in prgmr.com's Xen environment, but both took quite a bit of effort to set up:

https://cooltrainer.org/a-freebsd-desktop-howto/

http://wiki.prgmr.com/mediawiki/index.php/FreeBSD_as_a_DomU

Happy birthday, FreeBSD!
A bit off-topic, but a while ago I wrote a crossword clue

Japanese play CDS only? (3)

I'm gratified to find out that the surface was more accurate than I realised :)
yes. If you value your privacy...stop using anything by Microsoft. Outlook.com as well. Windows is backdoored NSAKEY
array of bytes, that can be deleted by some Apple or Amazon from your device, and doing so for nearly the same money as if you buy real book or CD! It's not japanese who are crazy, it's more like western people are totally irrational and insane!

I'm wondering if it wouldn't be possible to have the best of both worlds here? What if there was a service that could act as a depository of your physical media? You could mail them boxes of stuff, which they'd keep someplace like a warehouse in Reno. The service could require that you use special packaging to reduce their costs. You'd also be able to request digitized versions, up to some fixed number of requests per month. Of course, the types of media would be limited. I would start with CDs, DVDs, and books.
I have the new X1, and I find myself continuously hitting the function keys, because they're on some kind of touch screen... it's probably the only complaint I have with the laptop.
>People already fall for all kind of BS "snake oil" remedies and magic pill solutions (not to mention stuff like homeopathy and aromatherapy, etc).

That's fair. But is protecting these people from their own stupidity sufficient justification to possibly promote unnecessary suffering and prevent people from accessing needed/wanted medication?
> that you say "minority rights are growing" means that you accept that minority rights are short of where they should be.

Everything's short of where it should be. That's reality. Tearing down this system and replacing it with another won't change that.

> People don't choose anarchy because they want violence. They choose it because they don't like violence.

Supposedly. Ideally. That's another case of having a nice theory, which may or may not reflect reality.

> Those that choose violence want to obtain the "archy"/power for themselves.

OK, and how do anarchists stop them without choosing violence?

> Sure there are violent power hungry people that claim to be anarchists but that is not the core.

No True Scotsman. Not very persuasive.

> If you are not an anarchist, you don't get to decide who is anarchist and what an anarchist believes.

And anarchists don't get to decide who I consider an anarchist and what I believe. It goes both ways.

> It's much better to take people at their word and observe their actions

I observe their actions. The G8 Summit in Seattle was very enlightening.

> Kind of like telling gays that they are violent rapists and unfit to have families and marriages. As this democracy used to portray them and continues to do so.

Wrong.
Having just spent two days optimising the scrolling performance of my Mac app I understand the reasoning behind this. Fluid scrolling is hard. And while scrolling might be handled in part by the GPU, its still the CPU that renders the text that you're
scrolling. If you're aiming for 60FPS, you probably have less than 10ms to render a screen when the user is scrolling quickly.
Keep in mind the marginal cost of getting a phone-fax instead of a regular phone for home here (Japan) is practically zero.

A fax machine (or a landline for that matter) in the home isn't for me, but they're still moving down the development curve, releasing new features, improving quality and lowering costs.

I have heard on more than one occasion the popularity of the consumer-level fax is tied to the importance placed on skillful handwriting. I have pointed out that there was no way the skillfulness of one's handwriting could be relayed via fax, and noted that there was a certain twisted irony in the fact that a once-new technology remained popular because of something so traditional.

In the last 12 months I have required to use a fax machine about four times here. Twice for a group booking (baseball, riverboat cruise), and twice to send stuff back to my own government in Australia. In all these cases a scanned PDF was confirmed not acceptable.
Certainly more succinct.
Right. I generally just make do with fewer windows (typically Firefox with a gazillion tabs w/vimperator, and a terminal or two, each running screen with a few screens) -- so I rarely need to do much jockying around with windows. A little more shifting around on my laptop (14"), a little more on my desktop (20"@2048x1152).

I can see the need for more windows on a 27" (or 30") though. Maybe xmonad with "Spiral" or "Spiral Golden Ratio" does something similar (although probably not quite the same)?

https://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Xmonad/Screenshots

Generally I just use a standard tiled layout, with 2/3 of the screen for the "main" window (vertical split, works best on a 16:9/16:10 display), and bring witch ever window I want there with alt+enter.

But then, I find that things that change "automatically" end up being distracting (eg: relative line numbers in vim) -- so odds are we just have different preferences.
Because someone hid my last comment by mistake:

The last Civil War veteran died in 1956; the last to have seen combat died in 1953.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Woolson

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Hard

And the last Revolutionary War veteran died in 1866. (The year after our Civil War ended, in case you don't know much American history.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemuel_Cook
Wouldn't the parcel need to be bigger than letterbox size to justify a delivery to a parcel motel without creating suspicions on that basis alone?

And wouldn't you then be into amounts exceeding recreational amounts?
I still don't understand where slack differentiates from hipchat.
How to log everything with SecureCRT
587 SAAS Users, Tech Partner Just Got a Job at Amazon. Help
Hey Everyone,
I started clientbiller.com a couple years ago because its something I wanted/needed for my other business.

Now, after seeing the growth in payments and having 587 users, I want to continue growing it and re-launch in the US & China. I need the assistance of a tech co-founder (php/mysql) as my previous tech partner just landed a job at Amazon. I have a front-end dev & marketing background.

I've had multiple previous successes (started and sold 3 companies in the past).

Feel free to look at my linkedin on those details: https://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=7007692

If your interested, feel free to reach out: chris@clientbiller.com
My father has a Thinkpad and the touchpad is horrible. Really seriously horrible. I dislike my Asus full-touch (no buttons) touchpad but I've learned to work with it -- I've learned to work with any touchpad, except a Thinkpad's.

So I get where you're coming from, but to write off all non-Apple laptops all at the same time?
And so far as I am aware, Sony didn't gave any code back.
I think so, I can use a smartphone app / web page to order a taxi now. There's no surge pricing, the cost is predictable as well as the drivers income, they are not expensive and they are reliable, at least in cities, in Australia.

Maybe I've hit middle age, but it sure looks like evangelising uber is a desire to carve some bohemian fashion for ones self by simply making a materialistic change to a brand of taxi, it's only skin deep really, fashion.

Either that or there was a genuine gap in the market.. again any sort of taxi company with OK service would have succeeded.
Yes, so? Anyone else can take the code and add their own proprietary features too.

If they don't give back to the project it makes their life much harder.
TLDR; there are two problems with tip4commit:

1. The obvious, that they are collecting funds on behalf of other people's work and then keeping them when the funds go 'unclaimed'

2. Even if you do want to claim it, they don't make it easy, and for someone in a complicated tax country (like the author, Austria) there is almost no way he could accept the money without incurring some kind of risk. So basically when they are keeping money that goes unclaimed it's very problematic because they don't make the money easy to claim in the first place. Obvious incentives issues.

Point 2 is what this article is about.
Still stuck with a 1200 baud modem in '92? That stinks. I think I was complaining about having to use my dad's hand-me-down 2400 at that point.
> The BSD ecosystem is much friendlier to businesses.

That keep their changes private.
Awesome post! I think the geometric pattern is my favorite.

(And a tiny nit-pick: Banksy didn't make the panda!)
I don't know about the general community here, but i think you should look up niche websites (perhaps a subreddit or something and xda) where you can find more responses (or just people with a smartwatch).

Best of luck though, but i think the chance is rare that you'll get any attention here. Because it's a niche solely for them who own a smartwatch.
Are you sure they're being flagged? I think HN has been experimenting with showing recent submissions more on the main page in order to remedy the problem of /newest being a ghetto no one votes in.
Pretty much this. I really like what you made, but it should be left-aligned.
Show HN: Docbag – an open-source document generation library written in Java
I think the FCC is responding to industry pressure that the Internet, in its p2p form, is a dead experiment. Cable worked better. Never had to worry about Napster before, just descramblers (but switched networks eliminate that). Read-only, receive-only, don't produce anything, just consume. Put the content distribution servers next to the backbones, but squeeze the small players & independent creators. (Netflix, Twitch..) Charge them more for slower access to the same fiber. Throttle any peer-to-peer protocols, encourage server->client protocols and traffic. Merge content creation & distribution into large conglomerates. Crush the companies who won't be acquired.

The question is: is the open nature of the Internet worth preserving at all? We're already forbidden to run 'servers' on domestic IPs. Can they now destroy the notion that the Internet was ever a peer-to-peer thing?
Most people on HN who know me also know I've been running my own startup and we've been a Linux shop. They'd rightly be quizzical that I was suddenly getting a new Mac. The story of how that ended didn't make a ripple on HN (probably bad timing on my part, it was an Apple launch day), https://medium.com/@buro9/the-journey-of-a-london-startup-wh... , and those same people might like a clue that a change has happened. I mostly mention the company in two-part to say "I'm OK, there's a light beyond startups" and also because I'm fairly proud to be moving on to something I believe in (security and a better internet).

I guess I forget the audience on HN is much larger than it used to be.
lol

"Not pirating like foreigners" is actually a source of pride for some groups. Japanese anime otaku and Japanese adult video enthusiasts have respectively criticised their (self-styled) western counterparts who tend to pirate the anime and adult movies instead of supporting the creators.
The author seems to get carried away, emphasizing that microbiomes (measured by host health) do not form a totally ordered set. I think that's a caricature of what microbiome hackers are claiming. A totally ordered set would mean there's one "best" microbiome. But there might be one or only a few "best" microbiomes for a particular person with a particular diet.

In one section, the author criticizes microbiome hacking based on the fact that the experimenter does't have c. difficile. Does the author really believe that c. difficile, or other acute health problems, are the only possible results of an unhealthy microbiome?

It seems most plausible that dietary health is going to be a function health(microbiome, diet/environment, genetics). I doubt anyone thinks it will be a simple function, but along with acutely unhealthy microbiomes, there will be some obvious (given enough long-term data) problematic microbiomes across wide genetic and dietary variations, that don't quickly cause acute disease. And I don't think there will be as much variation as the author believes in healthy microbiomes once you start controlling for genetics and diets.
Apologies if I wasn't clear, but I meant 1-2 people per private office. The company may still have a thousand engineers, but they'd have 500-1000 offices for those engineers to work in.

The only company I know that has them is Fog Creek, but I assume there must be more.
Experience shapes ideas. Ideas are tested through experience. If you refuse to examine the things that shape your experience, some of your ideas will inevitably be poor.

Any racist will, of course, tell me exactly the same thing.
Invite HN: Bay Area Hacker/Founder? Get Your Wine On! (private Limo Wine Tour)
Hi everyone,

I recently launched this Meetup group for Bay Area founders and hackers who like meeting others in a fun way:

http://www.meetup.com/Startup-Wine-On

The first meetup is next Sunday (Nov 9th). The limo is picking us up (eight of us) at 9am and bringing us to wine country for a full day of tastings (4 wineries with lunch at a deli in between).

The cost is $90 which covers the limo and a tip for the driver. There are also wine tasting fees which range from $10 to $25. Also plan on buying lunch (at a deli). There'll be an optional dinner in the city afterwards.

To sign up, either follow the link on the meetup page or go to http://founderwineon.com.

This will be a recurring meetup, so if you're interested but can't make the first one, please sign up to receive updates.

Looking forward to meeting you!

-Bevan
> scrolling with one finger

even on a regular touch pad you can't scroll with one finger.

on a text editor is pretty much rather move the cursor/select with one finger
Nice writeup, looks really cool. A further step might be to 3D scan the installation location you're placing it in to generate a completely custom mesh that takes into account the unique geometry of the room - you could even include the furniture if you wanted to!
SleepyTime mentions, "The average adult human takes fourteen minutes to fall asleep..." so I compensate with 15 minutes in the calculation. There shouldn't be any major variance. Perhaps an odd calculation with Daylight Savings?
Most people don't seem to be aware that there is a well supported FreeBSD image supported for EC2 these days:

https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/B00KSS55FY?sr=0-5&qid=...

GCE can also run FreeBSD fine if you don't mind messing with KVM images yourself (a quick search should show some threads on how to get started). Many other providers would probably maintain support for this as well if more people spoke about their interests. It's not hard to support on KVM based systems so it's a matter of winning new customers not technical limitations.

Of course, it's worth pointing out that it's also easy (and cheap!) to rent hardware at places like Softlayer and Rackspace. Both of these provide support for FreeBSD on the metal. You could then run Jails (very mature and easy to use) or Bhyve (less mature but the guest support is growing at a reasonable pace) on top of this if you need to partition resources.

EDIT:

I should also note that I saw this company recently. It's a nice and cheap way to get a FreeBSD setup: https://www.vultr.com
thanks. your comment about keyboard showing up even when you have a physical one will save me time. won't even bother to see the device now.
Have had my SP3 for more than a month now and I'm so happy I bought one. I've seen the previous models and read Penny Arcade reviews previously and was never quite sold on it. I went to MS's TechEd conference and had a play with one.. Everything just worked. It's better than any laptop I've owned and more convenient to boot. I wasn't even sold on Windows 8 prior to this, but now - bring on the change!

The drawbacks: It runs hot. If you're watching a movie, it'll be fanning full speed. Having screen brightness to max will drain your battery in <4 hours. The kick stand is great but after a month of use it's no longer got that perfect rigid movement it once had, it moves slightly (< 2cm on the end) from what position I put it in. Paying separately for the keyboard which in my opinion is essential, and too pricey was annoying - but it's good quality and very nice to use. The end of the pen nib wears easily, however you can contact MS Support for free replacements.

That's it. In the scheme of things that's piss all drawback for a mobile device. I'd put the engineering behind it next to that of my Nexus 5 phone. It just works.
Any claim which relies on the superiority of cassettes over CDs is inherently suspect.
This is one thing that I really dislike about digital music stores - the fact that most of them don't offer a lossless option at all, and in the rare chance that they do, it usually costs extra, even though it really should come by default (because sheesh, it's what we've been getting on CDs for ages). Bandcamp is one of the few exceptions that get at least this thing right by offering a variety of options for a single price with lossless being one of them.

By the way, there's no reason to keep stuff around as WAV/PCM, it'll be just as lossless as FLACs (and thus can be further transcoded with no issue whatsoever) and you can actually tag the stuff like that too.
Right, I was trying to speak only to the possibility of getting data off the phone without physically obtaining the device. Those scenarios don't care if the storage is encrypted, and have nothing to do with scenarios where someone else has your phone.
The time is based on your browser's Date function which should match your system clock. I think you might be experiencing a strange calculation with Daylight Savings.
Very cool. Thanks.
One feature request: The ability to order by things other than rating, like release date.
This is something I've been curious about as well. I would love to be able to wander into such places as a lurker to see exactly what is going on. Are things as horrible as the popular media leads us to believe or are things far more banal.

However now, with the revelations of the past year or so, it seems like the kind of thing that is risky to try and discover until after you learn tradecraft and how to protect your identity while exploring darknets.
What's interesting is that each physical copy of Taylor Swift's latest album, 1989, includes 1 of 5 possible sets of 13 polaroids[0], and it's set to have the biggest sales week (in the US, presumably) of any album since 2002[1]. I wonder if she didn't steal this idea from AKB48.

0: https://twitter.com/taylorswift13/status/526459191826079744

1: http://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/chart-beat/6304336...
Why the hell would you rip it to WAV/PCM and not FLAC? You'll save on the order of 80% space without losing any quality; you can always convert the FLAC right back to WAV without anything being different.

However, there are other ways to get those as well. Bandcamp offers downloads in flac, mp3, ogg, and others. If the album isn't on bandcamp, or some other site that offers flac copies, then you can illegally pirate flac content from some-of-a-few audiophile websites.

I'm quite a fan of bandcamp and I'd highly recommend seeing if you can find good music there.
They want to force other companies use their magical invention by law and then rip them off because they have to use their patent.
Unfortunately, now that Vaios are gone I haven't been able to find a laptop with good specs & a solid chassis other than MBPs.
I don't see how right-click and drag could possibly be natural or easy on anything but a mouse.

Apple introduced multi touch to solve problems just like that.
Let's do a bit of political sleuthing and indulge in a smidgen of sincere speculation, here.

This is not to judge his leadership early but to set realistic expectations in a country where hope in transformational leaders, is all too often, cruelly crushed.

So lets ask this: what clues has Mr. Modi left so far - in the present term and in his previous stints as the Chief Minister of Gujarat - to lead us to believe that he is a stickler for lasting change and not impetuous acts of political theater.

Does his track record show a penchant for thoroughness and completion?

He is known not to trust underlings, delegate little and in general not given to relinquishing control.[1]

Again these are early days, but is anyone prepared to share their hunch on how effective this man will prove to be in transforming India, say four years on?

[1] Defying Expectations in India, Modi Begins Key Trip to U.S.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/26/world/asia/narendra-modi-d...
Linux has had vastly more resources poured into it just for the kernel than all of FreeBSD (and the other BSDs as well).

Yet FreeBSD is still a nice operating system and kernel.

Legitimate question: where have all those resource gone into Linux? What have we gotten out of it that's not in BSD?
You're right! I never knew, I've added a note in the post. To be fair, Banksy has caused a lot of stencil art in this city.
This is already happening. I've known startups from top accelerators paying for visitors from stumbleupon to show as a signal of "growth".
According to The Guardian[1]:

In John Markoff 's 2005 book What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry (even the book's title is from a hoary old Jefferson Airplane track) he reveals that the world's first online transaction was a drug deal:

In 1971 or 1972, Stanford students using Arpanet accounts at Stanford University's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory engaged in a commercial transaction with their counterparts at Massachussetts Institute of Technology. Before Amazon, before eBay, the seminal act of e-commerce was a drug deal. The students used the network to quietly arrange the sale of an undetermined amount of marijuana.

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/apr/19/online-high-n...
I'm familiar with the AWS images but at the time I was looking for hosting Amazon charged more for running HVM than for PV images. I can't find anything about that now on their instance types page, so maybe it's no longer an issue.