skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's not really that clear cut. According to Linus, as long as they aren't writing a derivative work and they only use the public kernel interfaces then it's all good. That view isn't held by all of the contributors however.

The only people who would have standing to take any legal action however, probably aren't really going to care enough about it. If a Linux distribution decides to include it, I imagine a few high profile people will write angry blog posts, but that's about it.

See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_kernel#Loadable_kernel_mo...
Maybe people can start asking their IT departments why they are still using IE6?
Is Wheeler Auditorium in Zellerbach Hall or in Wheeler Hall? Startup@Berkeley's map says it's in the latter, but this and a couple other sources say it's in Zellerbach.
One might think that simply not having content/functionality for IE6 users would be enough incentive. As another poster said, insulting the user isn't likely to prompt a change in software.
This is a great point, and something we are definitely thinking about. The challenge is you need a few users on the same account to for a real demonstration.
OT: I though OS X was based on BSD and not Linux.
Maybe I'm dense, but what is the $5 wrench attack? Attacking you personally with a wrench until you agree to show me the sensitive data on your machine?
I agree but chances are if you work at a Veteran's Hospital or whatever kind of business still mandates IE6 usage, you are going to this guy's website anyway.
"No company can compete with free."

I'm getting really tired of seeing this.
Comments aren't for you. They're for whomever comes along later and needs to understand what you did. (Well it could be you, just several months in the future).

Sure, someone could read all the code, but it's way faster to just skim and pick out the comments if you don't care about the details. Think of code commenting as a time-saving device.
They're inconsistent with this in Argentina; the Falkand/Malvinas islands disputed by Argentina and the UK are not shown as part of Argentina, and the English names of all the landmarks are used rather than the Spanish ones.

http://maps.google.com.ar/?ie=UTF8&ll=-51.76104,-59.8178...
I tried this with VMWare Fusion on a Mac running XP and couldn't get the MS VirtualPC images to work. Anyone have success running VPC with these test images in a VM (VirtualBox, Parallels, Fusion?) on OS X?
Scala actors for the enterprise: Akka framework
this is inherently skewed. many reader onlys dont have accounts and so wont vote and so will be vastly underrepresented. like asking how many people who voted for president are under the age of 18.
Bitching about IE6 is becoming trendy. I don't even bother optimizing for IE6 cause the sites I work on will be blocked by corporate firewalls as soon as someone accesses it from inside and flagged as frivolous anyhow.
Adding funny and even harsh stuff to your messages will alienate people but on the other hand will also create a following. Sometimes this is how people chose to be "different" or "original". Look at me...even I spent time to comment on this which means that he arose above the anonimity in my world.
I've had a cell phone for a long time, but the average monthly usage between my wife and myself is under 100 minutes (and probably 60 of those are because of phoning into meetings when I'm working from home). Typically the phone is buried in my bag, or the ringer is off and I don't notice it, so I'm part of the shrinking minority, too.

We are, however, considering an iPhone. We're taking an extended road trip soon (4+ weeks), and figure the ability to find a campground or coffee without searching out free wifi could be useful.
The article doesn't imply that hard work trumps smartness at all, and it doesn't imply or state that there is little innate variation in ability. What it says is that if you tell a very smart or talented person how smart they are when they're younger, they're more likely to be afraid to take risks that would jeopardize that label. It's better to emphasize to them that they work hard, according to the author (and, I believe, studies that back him up).
The Ultimate Failure of Moneyball
This is something I've been looking for for a while. Thanks, guys. And, thanks for posting the event that I'm hosting: http://eventgel.com/ev/startup-school-09/hackers---founders/
A side note: two-factor authentication (smartcards, etc) -- which minimizes Evil Maid exposure -- is unsupported on the OSX version of PGP Whole Disk Encryption.

Let's pester their support staff to add it.
Digital Wallpapers
One of the best reasons to write comments is that the comment describes what the author wants the code to do. What he wanted was not necessarily what he coded - bugs do creep in, after all.

If you confine yourself to reading code, but no other comments or documentation, you may think the code's behavior is correct, even though it's buggy.
Thank you. You can post a discussion and do most stuff without having to login/signup.
New rocket on launch pad (NASA)
Honestly, the startup I work for got into the Managing Subscriptions business with their product and it has its own bag of hassles. If I add a seat in the middle of the month, do you bill immediately and prorate it, or wait until the next billing cycle? And if you do bill immediately, what if I delete a user and then add two more, do you bill me (prorated) for the two users, or only the one extra "seat"?

I'm not saying that you shouldn't go that route, just that sometimes more straightforward is better, sometimes knowing that I have the Deluxe account and if I want to add the Downtown office I'll have to upgrade to the Premium account makes it easier to understand. shrug.
How about just leaving it alone? I like the numbers.
The only real future for the publish industry that I see, with regard to course literature, is if they either create an outstanding service themselves or work together with the universities. I don't really see any drawback with electronic books that won't solve itself by time.

The publishing industry faces some of the same challenges that the music industry did when the mp3 players started to become available. And similar to then people will start to think of books as data, and not psychical things. They need to realize this and make the most of it themselves, and not make litigation and DRM part of their business plan.
No, actually attacking you personally with a wrench until you show me the password.

See: http://xkcd.com/538/
Meh.

Wait a few years: all that stuff'll be available on Google.
Tiny utilities for XP
Use objects in memory. I'm just saying the relational <-> object mapping is a necessary evil because in the long run with complex data you'll suffer for your sin of skipping normalization.
There are a lot of options on here - I think you might run into trouble with people not feeling like scrolling all the way down to the bottom of the list.
Mark Cuban keeping T-Mo Sidekick despite data crash, trying Android
On the pricing plan, why does it say "Evaluation" for the 3 for free plan? Does that mean that the plan will expire or some functionality is limited?
Amazon shares break record... 10 years after coming public
> However, IE6/IE7 treat text-indent as moving the background image as well

Great post - any chance you could also post the css that caused the problem? I use negative text indent all the time to do exactly this and haven't noticed any IE problems - it'd be handy to know what combination of styles causes this for future reference!
These are the folks who got us into this financial problem. They should not be rewarded with bonuses for this fiasco, and if they do leave wall street, good riddance.
No, Amazon is.
For what it's worth, Bissinger also wrote Friday Night Lights, which is one of the more famous investigative journalism pieces ever written about sports.

It's one thing to point out that, having identified and (famously) exploited market inefficiencies in the MLB Draft, Billy Beane helped eliminate his claimed edge. That's how markets work. It's another thing to take Michael Lewis' book, look at the career of one of the central characters (Jeremy Brown), and find that he wound up only getting 10 at-bats before retiring. Ouch.
>>It's disputed territory; but it's not Google's dispute.
reply

No, Google is taking sides when it redraws the current political and administrative borders and draws a China map that includes Arunachal Pradesh.

China also disputes the whole country of Taiwan and says that Taiwan belongs to China.

Does Google show its Chinese a users a map of China that includes Taiwan ?
You should join Heyzap (YC09/USV)
I've updated the home page to hopefully better describe the game play, which isn't much.
I've also fixed the broken link issue, though I haven't fixed the old ones.
One thing to note is I only require twitter sign on as a basic access control mechanism and so my bot will know who to follow. Once you are in with twitter you can create/delete and join/leave games.
Presenting: The New Dialtone (a Documentary Series)
I think you've won half the battle by having a product whose story matches a big need. I'd do two things:

- Read everything patio11 has ever written about Adwords and A/B testing. Contact him with specific questions if necessary. He has the clearest, most detailed info out there for marketing a part time software project into a business
- Consider changing your home page to show, rather than describe, how the use case for your product matches people's lives. Something like Step 1: Upload photos -> Step 2: Mix a drink while your photos are automatically categorized -> Step 3: Go play with your kids while we automatically email your pics to your loved ones.

Your home page doesn't convey just how ideal your product is. Adjectives and testimonials are ignorable because people can lie about them. Take a look at the home pages for Dropbox or the 37s projects - brief statements, demo video, tour pages. You want people to know how to use OurDoings in less than 30 seconds.

I know about OurDoings b/c I've followed you on HN and the OurDoings, and I think the above-the-fold part of your homepage doesn't tell the right story convincingly. But like I said, you're halfway there because your product is perfectly amenable to this kind of demo/tour/story treatment.

Email me at peter at pchristensen dot com if you want to discuss it more.
Feeling a bit overwhelmed by the response. Thank you for posting and sharing the film. - msw
Ah, I've found the cause of confusion.

http://startupschool.org/, "Wheeler Auditorium" links to http://facilities.calperfs.berkeley.edu/wheeler/.

Which lists:

>MAILING ADDRESS

>Cal Performances

>101 Zellerbach Hall #4800

>University of California, Berkeley

>Berkeley, CA 94720-4800

However, this is just the mailing address for Cal Performances. It just happens that Zellerbach is another large auditorium/performance center.

Wheeler Auditorium is in Wheeler Hall. If you get confused where it is, it's near the Campanile (big clock tower).

Not sure who to be ashamed of more; my alma mater or the internets for reading comprehension and fact checking.

Edit: Now that I think about it, #101 is likely the box office at Zellerbach. We really should get a sign there that says: 'Startup School is at Wheeler Auditorium.' Map: You are here, Wheeler over there.
While I agree that it unnecessarily belittles any specific IE6 user that visits the site, I don't think his message itself is unnecessary.

We need the whole range of messages before IT departments get a clue. We need the very small, one time top banners with a small message, we need the sites that just plain break horribly, we need the sites that have a polite nagging message on every page and we need the sites that are just plain rude.

Until we have them all, until it's clear that every type of web site is sick of IE6, until these messages are very common, the inertia will not be overcome.
Ask HN: Review my Code - My_Favorite_HN_Submitters
The Python script is available at:

http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/1395097/MyFavoriteSubmitters.py

This script will:

1. Ask you for your credentials
2. Login to HN
3. Download your list of saved links
4. Use that list to generate a sorted list of your favorite submitters
5. Output that list as a simple HTML file with appropriate links. You can now easily browse the saved links of each of your favorite submitters.

Please use this responsibly! The idea is not to bring down the HN server with a flood of automated traffic. You'll notice that there is a delay built into the script that slows down the HTTP requests. Don't comment that out! :-)

While writing this script, I noticed a few interesting things:

The first is that HN doesn't keep a permanent record of your saved links. After 210, it starts discarding the oldest ones. Perhaps this could be changed?

The second is that the top-ranked submitters tend to be people who submit more links. Makes sense. One way to improve this script would be to design a formula for submitter quality. For example, take the number of submissions that you voted up and divide it by the user's total number of submissions in that period of time. This involves even more scraping of the site, though, which I'm hesitant to do before pg gives this a thumbs up or thumbs down.

The third thing is the extent to which the "new" page can be a no man's land where good links go to die. Many of my favorite submitters have excellent submissions with only one karma point, which is a result of the "now or never" voting phenomenon. If a new link isn't given one or two upvotes within a few minutes of being submitted (so that it appears on the front page), it has forever lost any hope of getting the votes it deserves. Perhaps this could be fixed? One idea might be to give links a "second chance" at the new page if they receive an upvote after being completely dormant for more than a week.

I hope you enjoy the script! I've been teaching myself programming over the past year (mostly by reading SICP and Hacker News), and I would love to receive feedback. Is there anything I could have done better? Could I have written something in a more elegant way? Is there something I did really well?

Thank you to everyone for making this site so amazing. I owe this community a debt of gratitude.
That's extremely surprising. I'm sure the maintainers would be eager to hear about your experiences. Care to provide example code which triggers a crash with a little detail about version and platform?

The best place to post would be the mailing list [1] or the bug tracker [2].

[1] https://webmail.iro.umontreal.ca/mailman/listinfo/gambit-lis...

[2]
http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~gambit/bugzilla/
Clickable link:

http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/1395097/MyFavoriteSubmitters.py
Direct link: http://www.americainfra.com/media/media-news/infographics/da...
No XSLT was an attempt to make the UI generic, either you accept that UI are a custom tailored to be optimized for the platform or you accept the dumb terminal philosophy where you try to generalize the UI to adapt to all platforms.

The fact remains that human preference is for tailored UI and not until AJAX took hold was the desktops dominance as a platform threatened. Time and time again, tailored UI's are preferred. It is the reason for Apple's return to stardom as well as the rise of web 2.0.

Developers try to fight this mentality to work in their boxed solution and I understand it, but you have to clearly refute evidence to the contrary to believe that the user prefers application developed in this manner.

So If that is the case why not design an architecture that accounts for this reality and makes peoples jobs whose responsibility it is to assist the user instead of enforcing a developers domain on them.

As well, I do not agree that different UI's require different back end logic they require different work-flow logic and work-flow is not reusable. If they require different back end logic for say getCustomer, addCustomer, validateAddress then there is core architectural flaw in the solution. How a customer is then displayed is a problem for the UI e.g. Do I show all info in one screen do I show pivots to make room for more screen real-state.

It is not Apples fault, that is faulty logic, Apple is giving their users what they want and their last quarter clearly reflects that.

Web sites that rely on web services are not tricky to scale look at my document on amazon I referenced. It is essential to scaling. Google, Amazon et. al. are doing this precisely for that reason scalability and to not be locked into back-end or front end technologies. Not to mention you are distributing all work-flow and dynamic templating to the clients, which in practice has a large impact on resource utilization.
You shouldn't even have to buy the device (Kindle). It should be included when you buy the first years course literature. I do think amazon knows what they are doing, but the publishers needs to wake up.
"Market inefficiences are harder and harder to find, one of the ironies of Beane's brief but successful reliance on on-base percentage from 2000 to 2002 is that it has made players with such skill far too expensive for his pocketbook."

Market inefficiencies don't last when a book is written about them. Not that surprising.
That is a developer mindset and flawed at it's core. You should use what is easiest for the person that relies on your work to use.
This is kind of a red herring.

First a large part of Moneyball isn't about player salaries. Billy Beane was forced to build teams with lower payrolls. But what he really did was change a lot around how players are evaluated. Taking these methods of rating players and adding them to a decent payroll and you're going to see increased success.

Also I personally think that Billy Beane's main focus wasn't really post-season success. It's putting a competitive team on the field - and puts butts in the seats for as long as they can in the regular season.

I know the A's are a bit battered right now but its hard to argue with the success they had for a long period in the late 90s' to early 00's with a really minimal payroll.
Unfortunately the images from the site have activation issues because they see it as being installed on new hardware, someone from MS posted on the VirtualBox forum suggesting an email to see if the demand was high enough and I guess it hasn't reached that point yet. http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=21712&#...

For my own system I used MSDN to get working installs of XP on my Mac in VirtualBox.

You also need to convert the VHD to VDI. I've done this on Mac using Q (http://www.kju-app.org/) and these simple commands.

/Applications/Q.app/Contents/MacOS/qemu-img convert -O raw -f vpc "input.vhd" temp.bin

VBoxManage convertdd temp.bin "output.vdi"
What Bloggers Need To Know About The FTC's New Regulations
From the Psystar site:

"Rebel EFI is free to try and download, though it will have limited hardware functionality and a run-time of two hours."

Huh? Has anyone tried this yet, and do you know what that means? ...have they somehow crippled the OSX install, or do they mean that the installer needs to run within 2 hours?

Anyway, I'm going to take a shot...
The beauty of IE is that once you've found a bug, there's nothing you can do about it. I gave up trying to bring the bug I stumbled across - http://crashie8.com/ - to Microsoft's attention after I kept hearing "oh, your HTML isn't valid."

grumbles about Netscape letting go of its mantle...
FWIW, color blindness is probably not an issue with that chart, as green is the only saturated color, and it seems to be of a dark enough value that it would not be confused with the other colors in the chart.

You can preview an approximation of what a page looks like to the color blind here: http://www.vischeck.com/vischeck/vischeckURL.php
Future Xilinx FPGAs to include ARM CPUs
Common Mistakes People Make When Investing
I love browsershot.org Don't agree about the poor execution. I think it's great.
Open Source Voting System Code Ready for Public Review
Absolutely a great company, they did everything right.

I think junk bonds got them through the dotcom collapse.

When Half.com let people exchange 2nd-hand books, it was USA only. Then Amazon introduced 3rd-party sellers in about 2003 in the UK, and it was great. Though I still buy some from Abebooks (now owned by Amazon).

They even got the Internet Archive going (Alexia was bought out by Amazon).
Moneyball has been so successful that it is now invisible. Because it is widespread knowledge, the competitive advantage has disappeared, and the teams with the most money come out on top.

Money helps teams compete every year, but a lesser team with a good strategy can sometimes contend. 2008's World Series winner was the Phillies, 13th in payroll. They played against the American League Champions and the Rays, who were second to last in payroll.

The Rays beat the White Sox ($121M payroll) and the Red Sox ($133M payroll) with a payroll of $43M. The Yankees, with their $209M payroll, didn't even make the playoffs.

This article, in typical sports journalism fashion, is written based on current events with no historical perspective and cherry-picked data.
This is a pretty nice visualization. It pegs the CPU of both cores on my MBP though (Webkit). =(
Wheels are quite unpractical. Their only advantage is that they require relatively little energy over long distances. However, why not reduce the need for long distances or not create it in the first place?
Fair point. Nothing I can do about it though. In any case, the interesting bit is the correlation between the other roles.
I just can't wrap my mind around how having a piece of technology obligates me to use it.

It's the same as if you had a landline, bought an answering machine, set it up, and never listened to the messages. Then you blamed your friends when they got upset about that. That would be rude. Not because of the technology per se, but because you're telling your friends that you can be reached via cell phone, but then you disregard the time and effort they put into reaching you. If their time and effort really isn't worth the courtesy of you meeting them half way by looking at your cell phone once a day, then either they're not your friends, or you're a jerk to your friends.

A solution is simply to tell your friends that your cell phone is for business use only, and offer them other ways to reach you. But to give out your phone number and ignore your friends when they follow your own directions is not polite.
FYI: you can edit your comments here (within two hours of the original post).
Let's see...they don't abuse their employees, they compete on quality, they frequently expand through acquisition rather than duplication, they're not known for exploiting third-world countries, and they appear at least mildly interested in being a good citizen in their community.

So I'm going to go with "no".
I guess it would be nicer to have four options and the choice to click all applicable, and then have a combination results view. I guess we have to work with what we have.
Do you see the irony in your poll :-)
Radiology Transcription Washington
I'm not familiar with the arguments for and against a salary-cap in baseball, but in the NHL (my primary sport) it has done a great job of making the teams relatively even. There's no equivalent to the Pittsburgh Pirates in the NHL - the worst teams last year were in the playoffs just a bit before.

I am not sure that buying talent helps the top teams as much as it pushes the worst teams down by making it impossible for them to afford to keep their talent.
People with money to spend on getting their Hackintosh up and running can buy more compatible hardware. Sure it's only $50 but some motherboards aren't much more than that, and if you don't game you can get a fine Hackintosh-friendly video card for that price.
Well, they didn't quite do everything right.

For one, Amazon had a really tough time when the first Internet bubble burst back in 2000. All of a sudden they weren't able to raise capital as quickly as they wanted to.

This would have severely impeded their growth, if not for some brilliant improvements made to their supply chain efficiency.