skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The rest of this article discusses why dynamic linking does not deliver on any of its promises and why, just as communism, it might be an idea that only works in an ideal world.

He depends on that comparison because the rest of his argument is lacking.

His first example, the one about the broken C++ ABI, isn't really an argument against dynamic linking. C++ binary compatibility has always been a nightmare because different groups refuse to agree on a standard. It's a ding against C++, but not dynamic linking per se. For any solution to the problem he's trying to solve, there are going to be pathological cases that perform poorly. Poor C++ ABI standardization seems to be one of those cases for dynamic linking.

He also doesn't really consider the world before DSOs. Consider maintaining a machine (or lots of machines) where every package was statically linked against different versions of the same core libraries. What happens when a vulnerability is discovered in one of those libraries? How do you know which packages are vulnerable? Do really want to upgrade every single package on every machine if there is a libc vulnerability?
Fungus pushing frogs towards extinction
10 Tips For Fat Loss
I saw that they used apt to install it, so I would imagine that it doesn't have it installed by default. Also not all livecds would have it so you would have to depend on the ubuntu livecd
Shared processor, multiple memory sequential computation....
It's 'lite'! Perhaps they can whittle it down to the same ~100MB that some of their iTunes+Safari+QuickTime updates approach.

And Apple has used their updater to push software people never consciously chose to install. See most recently:

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=1349
Dude, for real? You sold a weblogs company to AOL -- who everyone in tech knows are morons. No one gives props to Powerset either. They found a bigger fool too.

I mean, you founded MAHALO, the pets.com of the 00's. Zero tech, zero innovation, just slaves. "Mahalo everyone!" You have invented and created nothing in your life.

Seriously, you are an ant running up an elephant's leg with rape on its mind. Zeldman is FAR beyond you technically. Zeldman is to web standards what Picasso is to modernism and what you are to tabloid journalism.
Yes the analogy is dumb. Also unregulated capitalism is just as bad as pure communism. Just as that one eastern country with a communist government had to loosen it's economy, that one western country (which is doing better than that one eastern country) had to restrict some of it's capitalism.
What the Barnes and Noble Nook gets right and what it gets wrong
Just had git-svn acting wonky on me, found your post via Google and now my problem is resolved. :)
Maybe a way for third-parties to make a Recommended Install List as a base to start from and promote it. e.g., A List for Web Developers, a Default List, an Essentials List, etc. Including comments from the list creator (a la Amazon's wishlists) explaining what the app is and why they use it or chose it for the list.

e.g., I could create an install list for my family, or for clients.

It's a good idea though.
Sure.

Passenger can do this in a nearly-painfree fashion, and thin/mongrel/unicorn/webrick(heh) can do this by simply not having your webserver use them for that directory.
Isn't that the whole concept behind caching+sweepers in Rails?
I often up vote before reading since up vote is also flag for latter.
Is there some reason why Amazon SimpleDB not included these type lists? It always seems to be excluded from NoSQL discussions
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I believe that the paper argues that this is one of those cases where approximations are not good enough. You cannot read RSA encrypted email with approximate factorization algorithms. You can't forge a document and fool anyone with an approximate SHA collision. I'm not entirely convinced by this analogy but it was made by Appell, and others pointed out in an earlier HN thread that the authors are experts in approximation algorithms.
I played an identical game a few years ago. Someone went ahead and bid $100 for the $20. Models work fine as long as "rational" behavior is a worthwhile assumption.
What's so great about Windows 7? For starters, it offers everything you want in an OS: Programs load and run quickly, your computer pretty much never crashes, and the system mostly stays out of your way.

It's striking to me that a computer that works is striking to PC users.
K300i Keypad Ways Problem
Much like e-mail, if you let things fester they will get forgotten. Sometimes, I think projects need to be willing to declare bug bankruptcy and close all non top-priority bugs to start fresh.
OmniGraphSketcher is a great little app. It approaches the graphing problem from the opposite direction that traditional graphings apps take.
This is a great report. I intent to try and start doing something similar to this on our projects in the future. Thanks!
Not to take away from HN, but HN seems to be programming + startup related.

Maybe there would be significant value add if there were something along the lines of startup + design.

Maybe someone should start one and post the link here.

I am not a designer, but I am curious about those types of stuff. I wonder if pg would be interested in 'white-labelling' HN like Stack Overflow has done for other sites. But with a more customizable UI, rather than have the design whored out to every idea.

Even if pg doesn't want to do it, someone else should plug that gap.

Opportunities are everywhere!
Likewise, we should outlaw tide-charts since we haven't solved the n-bodies problem.
No financial incentive other than, you know, a need to compete in order to sell their product?

There are many ways to compete and sell products. Investing as much money as Apple does into R&D is only financially reasonable with government guaranteed monopolies in place. Do you seriously have any doubt that Apple would spend less money on R&D if they weren't able to patent their discoveries? Would any of their products be possible without such extensive R&D spending?
I'm bothered that the tagline is "Windows 7 is the best operating system on the market" then goes on to say "Now the two operating systems are roughly equal." So, which is it, then? Is Win7 the best, or is it now simply on par with OS X?
The author makes the mistake of assuming that STM is the only/primary concurrency control mechanism in Clojure. Agents and atoms provide additional control mechanisms that are appropriate for different situations.
The relational model has a formal definition given by E.F. Codd that is founded in mathematical theory, more information about which can as always be found on Wikipedia.

"a relation is a data structure which consists of a heading and an unordered set of tuples which share the same type."

So consider something that does not meet that definition: data which you place under one heading, but do not share the same type. This certainly sounds like a document database, or a key-value store - where "value" is implicitly of an undefined type.

Interestingly but perhaps less relevant, an ordered set should not be considered relational, which is why for example you should not consider that adding a clustered index on a table will guarantee the order in which rows are returned by a query even though this may occur as a side effect of the underlying implementation.

Note also, that you can see most RDBMSs are - perhaps fortunately - fairly lax about limiting themselves to theory; see ORDER BY in your SQL implementation of choice.
They pick some pretty bizarre metrics to measure 'best'.

The fact that Windows 7 still doesn't have a useful command line makes it pretty irritating to use. (And I have been using it since the RC was released.)
If you took out the references to communism, his argument would still be there, it has no actual dependence on the analogy he's using rhetorically. Your critique in this follow-up comment is a lot more useful than dismissing his claim as a simple logical fallacy when it isn't.

What happens when a vulnerability is discovered in one of those libraries?

Actually, he directly addressed that issue, by pointing out that updating a shared library when you find an issue with it may break some of the applications that link to it. You might (and I do) disagree with him that this means dynamic linking is bad (imo, downstream projects that choose to take on an upstream dependency have the obligation to know how that dep is intended to be used), but it's not really helpful to the discussion to pretend like he didn't consider it.
An armchair analysis may also suggest that the more risk-taking, energetic individuals may have been selected for in the British population. These are the folks that made the jump across the channel seeking opportunity and probably brought with them that individualistic/entreprenuerial ethos.
Whether Windows works depends on how well the device drivers are written for your hardware.
Anybody remember City Desk?
I loved it
http://www.fogcreek.com/CityDesk/
Sanjeev Arora, paper's coauthor, but also leading expert on approximations to NP-hard problems, has posted a FAQ detailing why he thinks no approximation would help,

http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~rongge/derivativeFAQ.html

And also his response to RJ Lipton who believes approximation ought to work (but then again Lipton believes P=NP, so for him nothing is impossible):

http://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2009/10/22/helping-wall-street...

These are mostly practical reservations, carefully stated as to convince of intractability in the real-world case (which they do) but not prove in theory. Excerpt:

current pricing and rating algorithms use monte carlo methods
and would not solve densest subgraphs even for moderate parameters.
So at the very least those should be changed.

Turns out problem they reduced their model to is open in terms of finding good approximation to it. Excerpt from the FAQ:

The paper relies upon a stronger form of "P not equals NP", namely,
that the planted dense subgraph problem does not have an efficient
algorithm. (In fact it is conjectured that there is no algorithm
to even compute any approximate solutions to this problem).
It's about time this happened. Totally opens the doors for virtual currency.
The best for what?
A lot of people are complaining that NP-hard doesn't mean you can't get good approximations.

I would like to remind you people that we are not talking about abstract problem spaces where you can count on the problems being essentially "randomly selected" for some suitable definition of random. We are talking human-created financial instruments, being created by agents with every incentive to game the system. Complexity analysis is a whole different kettle of fish when you have to assume a malicious agent generating the problems! Everything you think you know about approximation may or may not apply, and probably doesn't apply, because approximation algorithms never (or virtually never) start out with "Assume a hostile malicious agent has constructed your problem instance..."

The correct mindset here is probably the security mindset, where no matter how small or trivial the "arbitrary command execution as root" vulnerability is, you damn well better close it, because in the computing world the smallest crack can be easily widened large enough to drive a truck through.
The status bar also says "transferring data from 127.0.0.1" -- and there's no "http:// at the front. They just edited the address bar after the page loaded.
I thought this was a parody after I read the complaint about the activation code.
Chinese Cyberattacks Exploited Adobe And Microsoft Software
The subhead on the home page works a lot better: "Windows 7: The Best Operating System Microsoft Has Ever Made." It strikes me as ill-considered editorial tweaking.
Sometimes a catchy title is just a catchy title. Perhaps you've been so damaged by the misuse of this - actual dreadful, extended, fatuous analogies between one thing and something rather unrelated/inflammatory that you recoil at the mere sight. This is understandable but in this case, the author doesn't actually make any serious analogy with communism - just a passing reference to 'ideas that sounded good but didn't work out in practice' to get his critique of dynamic linking going. It's a harmless (albeit worn-out) device - it's you who might be red-bloodedly over-reacting.
And it happens to not mention Linux...
I am a big reader of Metafilter and stumbling across a couple of greasemonkey scripts has made the experience significantly better. I haven't written my own scripts, but in these "fill in the gaps" situations it can be invaluable.
I will admit that I'm not completely comfortable enough with powershell to authoritatively call it 'useful', but could you elaborate on some specific complaints? How much have you used it? From my personal experience, while the syntax has a bit of a learning curve, it is a marked improvement over 'cmd'.
No, it's just that it seems like HN is the rss feed for techcrunch. It doesn't matter how inane a techcrunch article is it will get 50+ votes anyway.

And since the twitter internal documents stunt they pulled I have little sympathy for them.
Wouldn't that just be a folder?
Have you ever actually read a software patent? I have yet to find one which is educational...

I'm not saying that the spirit of this holds true here, or in every patent case. I'm saying that responding "ugh! patents suuuck!" is too simplistic of a world view.

Patents on software are basically patents on math

How, exactly, is that, in a way that patents on anything else aren't "basically math"? More importantly, do you think Nokia would ever have spent $60B on R&D if they got no patent rights for it?

I'm all for copyright protection on software

How is that even remotely, marginally related?
Join Mozilla as an UX designer.
>It's also impossible for a traveling salesman to find the best route between cities

It is not impossible, merely Hard.
Isn't the reason Apple spent the amount of money they did developing multitouch because they knew they could patent it? If there were no patent protections in place, it would have been very financially foolish to spend most of the R&D money Apple spends.
Hey guys, this looks super great :-)
I'll save amichail from downmod hell:

Crappy kernel mode drivers crash OSX and Linux too. Vista was garbage at launch because of so many breaking driver changes, practically everyone had to re-write their drivers, especially Nvidia, ATI, and Intel. Windows 7 basically uses Vista drivers, which are quite stable at this point.

It's quite like how some huge percentage of Safari crashes are due to Flash. People complain that Safari is crap, but it really is someone else's fault. That said, I'm not defending Microsoft or Apple here: once others make you look bad a bunch of times, it is your fault for not protecting yourself from them.
> They can buy all of Dell's public stock with the money in their bank account. What are you going to do?

Huh? Are you some sort of Apple fanboi or something? What kind of a response is that?

"Microsoft can buy a small country with their money, therefore every action that Microsoft has taken as a company was perfect in every way and above reproach in every sense (morally,busienss-wise,etc)."

"Microsoft released a buggy version of Vista that wasn't really ready for primetime until Service Pack 1, but LOOK AT THEIR BANK ACCOUNT it was obviously the right move.... right?"

The amount of money they have in the bank has nothing to do with anything. Unless you're trying to imply that you believe the golden rule, "Whoever has the gold makes the rules," is right and just.
startup event conferences in india are a joke man! turn into networking and schmoozing sessions eventually.very difficult to meet people working on good product ideas and technologies. we're based out of mumbai and built a group around the IIT campus area. you might wanna try barcamp some rare gud showcases and people.
Windows 7: The psycho girlfriend is back
Dear WSJ: To Avoid Google Disease, Please Put A Condom On Your Content
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I use PowerShell every single day at work. I wrote an article about it here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=571141

My love/hate relationship with object piping is my chief complaint about PowerShell, but the bigger picture complaint is that applications for Windows simply aren't designed to be used on the command line. You inevitably run into some wacky program that won't place nice with stdin/stdout, or won't let you override some setting without hacking the registry, or otherwise slows you down.

Beyond that, the terminal application UI is utter crap.
Christmas sale ugg
Recent studies in behavioural economics (and also the winner of the Nobel in Economics a few years ago) suggest that rational isn't a necessary precondition - you just need some players who are rational/have knowledge. Sure it causes short term fluctuations but in the long run, you get to the same answer/price.
You'll still find a few of the niggling quirks found in Windows versions past. For instance, the OS still requires "activation" by a 25-character code, an anti-piracy measure that annoys legitimate users while doing little to crush actual pirates.

rofl
It has stuff like this, which I remember from my clojure implementation of srv.arc.

(do (prn header*)
(awhen (max-age* op)
(prn "Cache-Control: max-age=" it))
(f str req))))
Yeah, I was mildly confused too by the fact that the articles you've upvoted are called "saved" articles in your profile.

Anyway after once having upvoted w/o reading an "advanced data structures" article which turned out to be extremely far from "advanced", I at least try to skim before upvoting.
Somehow I'm not surprised that Slate would write a pro Windows 7 article. Slate was started by Microsoft. But I think they are owned by the Washington Post now.
So, does Microsoft still own Slate? Because that's the only explanation I can think of for this ridiculously hyperbolic piece.
http://www.cadillac.com/cadillacjsp/model/gallery.jsp
If you by structure and incentives you mean do this work or you fail, and by clear lines of authority you mean the teacher is right and if by very tangible goals you mean telling the student that getting an A on this test will mean you have the chance of getting a job after getting about 1000 more As on these tests.

Then yes, but making school into a game where people work together(ie not just alone) you drive accountability, incentives to work, and a very tangible result when the team pulls it together.
Top Referring Sites: Social Media No Threat To Search
Clojure offers three concurrency mechanisms: agents, atoms and refs. Agents are atoms are very easy to use and understand. They are no more complicated than Scala's actors.

Clojure's refs are more complicated than Scala's actors, but Scala has no similar feature. If a Scala programmer needs the functionality in Clojure's refs, then the Scala programmer must use plain old Java concurrency.
Thunderbird is so painful to use that I have trouble imagining the Thunderbird team producing something great. I'd rather they fixed Thunderbird.

I'm tired of:

- Getting prompted for every single message whether I want to send in html or plain text format.

- Search that takes forever.

- Junk in my inbox, messages I wanted in junk.

- A UI that finds any excuse to pop a modal dialog in my way.

Can anyone recommend another FOSS mail client that it is both good, and cross platform?
I'm not saying that the spirit of this holds true here, or in every patent case.

When people say "patents" on Hacker News, you should assume that they mean software patents. Maybe business method patents on rare occasion.

How, exactly, is that, in a way that patents on anything else aren't "basically math"?

A sewing machine is not "basically math". A stapler that doesn't use staples is not "basically math". But more importantly, "a scientific truth, or the mathematical expression of it, is not a patentable invention." (Mackay Radio & Telegraph Co. v. Radio Corp. of America, 306 U.S. 86, 40 U.S.P.Q. (BNA) 199 (1939)).

More importantly, do you think Nokia would ever have spent $60B on R&D if they got no patent rights for it?

Yes, of course they would, thats the business they are in. They made $76.22B revenue in 2008.

How is that even remotely, marginally related?

The tools of our industry are already sufficiently protected to encourage investment, research, and development. Mechanisms are easy to invent are often invented independently, and patents interfere with this.
Was payout enforced? If they don't pay up, then the bidding could easily continue.
Oh yea I knew that. Sorry, it's hard to pass vocal inflections and speech nuances into text and I forgot. When I said "yet somehow ..." I wasn't seriously inquiring how they did it, just the fact that they did do that. :)
There's a simple counterexample to this argument: operating systems. If it were not possible to create shared code, it would not be possible to write operating systems, which are nothing but shared code. Shared code does demand more careful management and versioning, especially of interfaces, and if you don't do that you are indeed hosed. But if you do then you aren't.
Most likely Apple never considered those patents.

Except that the actual complaint states that Nokia offered to license Apple the patents and Apple declined multiple times.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/21458614/Nokia-vs-Apple-Complaint
Sales taxes on anything -- luxury or not -- are regressive taxes on the poor, because the poor spend a higher portion of their income on consumption than the non-poor do.

For example, let's say we have a uniform sales tax of 5%. A poor person with an income of $20k will spend almost all of that $20k during the year, paying 5% of her salary in taxes. (She might even borrow money and spend more than her income, meaning relative to her income the rate increases to more than 5%.)

Say for the sake of argument unpoor me makes $40k and I spend $30k, saving the remaining $10k. I pay $1.5k in taxes, more in absolute terms but less as a percentage of income (3.75%), which is the definition of a regressive tax.

There are other ways sales taxes tend to favor the unpoor. For example, a poor person will typically buy almost all goods locally and thus be subject to tax on all of them. This is not necessarily true of non-poor people -- more than half of my monthly purchases are tax-exempt because of where I make the purchase. (For example, when I buy software from American companies, neither Japan nor my locality nor most US states tax me.)

There are tweaks you can make to sales taxes which make them marginally "fairer" to the poor: exempting food and clothing, for example, which the poor tend to spend more on as a percentage of income than the rich. However, these tweaks get very complicated very fast (a lot of governments actually have a policy which sounds like "Exempting food sales but taxing prepared food sold for immediate consumption unless it is take-out except taxing hot take-out." I wish I was joking. My sympathies in advance to anyone who writes POS software for French bistros.) These exemptions also tend to cost the state a lot of money, because non-poor people spend lots of money on food, clothing, etc.

Anyhow, long story short: sales taxes are, and must always be, a regressive tax on the poor.
If I am forced to take the mental effort to disentangle the actual argument from the irrelevant analogy, I'm probably going to save the effort and skip all of it.