skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't care how many windows there are, I just want cut and paste to work in a reasonably intuitive way. In the GIMP it does not.
Ahh, what puzzle games do you play? Any suggestions from the market?
TWC DNS Issues
Weight Loss - Secret Tips to Lose Weight Effectively
I support this initiative to split sites. It seems overcomplex, but we need to try something to evolve the site and ease its growing pains.

Maybe HN has the advantage of being connected to YCombinator, and thus has a reduced risk of this happening, but the risk is still there.

It's already happened. Even in tech discussions, we've got a whole shitload of snark even when it comes to mild topics. Topics with even a little drama, like the 37signals discussion over accepting VC, lead to people acting like high schoolers. I'm 19, and I read some of the comments people're leaving here, and I want to tell them to grow up. That's a really, really, really bad sign for a community, when adults are acting like n00bs.

When it comes to off-topic stuff, I realize each and every time that the majority of people here don't know what the hell they're saying. When people start talking about relationships, or drug use, or politics, whatever, most comments are inane and wrong. Look at the Nobel conversation right now. People are going nuts and dissing the committee at every chance they can get, calling it a disgrace, etc., because apparently they've never looked at the Nobel prize before. They're also assuming that the gut reactions of people hours after an announcement determine how a political game is going to be played. It's frighteningly immature, assuming these people are all allowed to vote based on their shallow opinions.

Every week I grow more and more disgusted with this community. I stick around because the few dozen voices that are smart are really worth having discussions with, and I love still being able to discuss certain topics and learn from people who know more than I do, but I'm starting to agree with the general rest-of-the-Internet consensus that people here have their heads stuck deep up their asses. Every time I defend this place somewhere I realize I don't believe what I'm saying. I'd like to fix that, because there are precious few places left to jump from here.
Here is my take on that, but it is skewed because of location (EU):

Poland and several other countries in the former east block are still extremely anxious about being on Russias doorstep, and the Americans figured that now was the time to get a foothold there in case there would ever be a 'revival'. Playing in to the fear they promised a shield from anything bad that Russia might be able to do, ostensibly because of the so called rogue states.

But I really don't see N. Korea or Iran attacking Europe, if Iran will do something it will more than likely be against Israel, and if North Korea will do something I'd expect it to be against Japan or South Korea, and most likely conventional against SK, Japan I'm not so sure.

So the threat is magnified for political purposes and to get a foot on the ground right where it kicks the Russians in the teeth. And of course the Russians never played along and named it for what it was.

NATO has some serious firepower in Europe already, but hardly any of it near the old Russian borders and using a popular fiction (that Iran and North Korea are a threat to western Europe) they tried to get their way.

Obama figures it is simply going to cost a bunch of money, increase the tension so better to let it go.

Smart move on his part.
Sorry, I probably wasn't very clear there.

Not all pirates are freetards, i'm talking about the two ends of the spectrum here. I am a pirate for example but I also subscribe to EMusic and make a point of buying direct from artists when I can and seeing bands live. Some people however are loathe to do this as well and believe that content should always be free.

As it stands both models are somewhat flawed and neither are the way forward in their present state.
I know that IBM is masterful at bundling software or selling its customer base enterprise software licenses. When I worked there, my division could trace a huge piece of its revenues (and profit) to a mainframe monitoring app that basically had no competitors. All the divisions other stuff got thrown in basically for free. Thus the idea of the "IBM shop" - customers who were big blue all the way. "No one ever got fired for buying IBM."

I don't know about the difficulty of migration - what I always understood (and I later worked at one of the largest financial institutions in the US) was there was tremendous investment by the companies running on mainframes in the software developed to run on mainframes. And that these companies weren't interested in migrating to newer hardware/software combos because it was kind of murky if the cost effectiveness of such a move could be reasoned about.

These are also the types of companies least interested in losing control of their data. They aren't interested in the cloud for even their non-mainframe apps. To be fair, the financial company I was at maintained its own data centers, so it might be too atypical to draw any meaningful conclusions from my experience there.
What Server Side JavaScript Needs
World Econ Forum: U.S. loses ranking as world’s most developed financial center
Any chance of getting 'second opinion' style sensors in there that can provide you with sanity checks ? Such as 'GPS reports movement, but wheel sensors do not, we have a problem ?'

That way you can avoid a paralysis of the control software until the vehicle has really come to a halt.
I didn't understand what the site was about. Seems like a wishlist of all items.
Battle for the soul of Silicon Valley
The former's impossible in the paradigm where the only way to make money off music is to sell songs. That's not true, though.

A few of the models I'm going to be experimenting with: Raising money before you release an album, with certain perks given to people that pay the money for release. Offering special exclusives that people can choose to pay for, that most people interested in just music won't bother pirating. That's why I'm excited for the iTunes LP: It's an idea that's worth money even after you own the music, that appeals to fans and less to casual criminals.

I'm currently thinking of launching an ARG with a future music project. I think that launching a video game through an album distribution would be really fun and potentially really profitable.
Does that include embedded videos?
Try googling 'interactive fiction', which seems to be the modern term for old-school text-games. I used to play a few text games as a teenager (I'm 20 now, so this was only a few years ago) and there seemed to be a small but thriving community about IF. A lot of intelligent discussion about narrative, game design, and so on.

When you talk about the 'text-based games where you rob a bank, etc', it sounds like you are referring to Torn, the browser game that was posted on HN a few days ago for making its creator a millionaire. There's quite a fundamental difference IMO between clicking buttons on a webpage and entering pseudo-english sentences at a CLI.

I feel I can speak with a bit more authority on the first kind as over the last few months I've been working on my own browser game, which currently has around 600 active users (active = logged on in the last 5 days). It's not purely text-based, as the main screen includes a 2d map showing the area around a player. Still, a few people have said it reminds them of the old Infocom games, which I think is pretty cool.

If you want to take a look, the game is called Shintolin (http://www.shintolin.co.uk) and is set in the stone age; players craft spears, build huts, hunt animals and so on. One of the features is that every item and building in the game is player constructed - there are no NPCs apart from animals, and the game's history arises naturally from the interactions between the different villages.

Sadly it hasn't made me a millionaire, but I have learned a lot about programming from it, especially how to organise large projects (I had to scrap the original version of the site, after it became an unmaintainable mess of PHP scripts). There's no Javascript or Flash involved, just plain HTML/CSS, with a Ruby and MySQL backend.

Anyway, I mention that just to show you that the space of possible text-based games is quite large and diverse, so you might want to look around to see what tickles your fancy. Focusing purely on the gameplay and content without worrying about graphics gives you a lot of freedom (though HTML makes it fairly trivial to create a basic GUI).

One thing I've been getting into recently is roguelikes such as NetHack, which do have graphics, but very minimal ones (usually entities are represented by ASCII characters). As they often feature procedurally generated content and AI, I think they could be an interesting project to work on from a CS perspective.
I didn't realise Chad Hurley (YouTube CEO) still worked for Google. Also amazing (from Wikipedia) is how much stock he managed to keep onto (after acquisition) when the early expenses were presumably so high.
Not sure this has the "replace the OS aim" to it. From the lively site, "... Rather, it is an experimental system for turning the web as we know it into a universe of objects that are active, accessible, changeable; in short, lively."

OTOH, I've been using Seaside + Squeak/Pharo for a webapp at work and its been awesome to work with. SqueakNOS is pretty exciting too: http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/1762

But my first reaction to Lively (and still is) is, "what for?" I guess I can't get over having an application in the browser that doesn't need a server. In that case a native desktop app. would be much better. I guess its just experimental :)
For being the driving force behind ending a war that killed almost 200,000 people (just felt someone should make that point)
It's funny--they profile Ramp Champ and Skee Ball. Apparently these are two games modeling the same real-world game, and Ramp Champ doesn't use the Skee-Ball name or iconic game representation anywhere so it doesn't do as well.

At least for me, they're entirely correct. I must have seen that game in some list or another (new releases, etc.) at least 20 times, and I until now assumed it was a skateboarding game. Really hammers home how important the icon and name are.
SEC goes back after Mark Cuban…
>And isn’t “strident” the very adjective most commonly used to write off the arguments of those with whom we disagree?

Erm, no, it isn't.
Defining The “Threat Level” Of A VC Fund Posted on: October 8th, 2009
I am inviting everyone to imagine that he is running a company, would he use such an Armageddon weapon, hmm...
What I find astonishing is if this were an enemy of the US then where would they be? Either they have neglected to secure their hosts or this guy is good.

If I were to leave the door of my house open, and came home to find a nut-case in my front room, wouldn't that make me the fool?
How Do Bubbles Create and Kill Jobs?
there is little/no offtopic here, so isn't it a bit of overreacting to claim this is a problem? Also it is truly interesting from time to time to check the HN users feeling about political/.../... issues.
Alternatively, "The now over-appreciated art of duct tape programming".

Seriously, if I see one more article which features "duct tape" in the title, I'm going to start extolling the virtues of the wood-glue programmer. I have no idea what this characteristics of this programmer would be, but you can bet that the label would be repeated frequently!
WTF - Free Custom Printed Photobook With International Shipping For Everyone
Now, this is too good to miss - a professional looking high-quality custom printed photobook with your pictures for free including international shipping, and guess what you can get them free month after month as you are allowed one free printed photobook each month.

HotPrints allows users to create professional looking custom photobooks online from Facebook and Bebo, usually the service allows you to get the printed book for $2.99 + shipping but they have now teamed up with advertisers allowing them to distribute free photobooks in lieu of advertisements; but don't worry as the ads will NOT be on the same pages as your photos and all advertisements will be easily removable full page inserts from reputed brands.
Okay, that makes sense. :-)

My policy is, I buy from artists who I feel aren't big. I bought Joanna Newsom's album for a friend of mine after I downloaded it, and I just got a song from Pomplamoose, which is a crazy duo I found on Youtube. When I feel like my money's going to a good cause, then I pay.
^^This!

Bittorrent is possibly the best distribution system ever. There is no DRM, there are no checks to see if you're in the right country, there's nothing stopping you from getting exactly what you want.

Movies for example...some people hate the extra/bonus features on DVDs and just want to see the damned movie while others like them. Why don't movie companies distribute two different versions? Also, what about letting people in all sorts of countries download or watch things? This is possibly the worst thing for me because I'm Canadian.
Sure, but to equate vegans with eco terrorists is a bit much isn't it ?

Most of them are far from it, I've yet to meat ;) a single vegan that came across as aggressive in any way. I'm sure they exist but it definitely isn't the norm.
[KartMe is a] free service for easily organizing and sharing favorite books, restaurants, gadgets, recipes and more

Yeah, I would literally stick that text below the logo/search and above the three-steps description.
It works for me now. it says "see you there!" Thanks, whoever fixed that.
I was able to figure out that's for storing things I like, but I don't know what the benefits of that are. Why do I want to use this service? The "Save time & money" section doesn't tell me anything that it seems like it should.
> No, the above doesn't fall under the: "You don't have an option avoiding legal credentialing"

Technically it does, but I do agree that it is more open than many other careers. And yes, there are plenty of options still left. But some careers are completely shut off to you if you do not go through govt.-approved schools. That is the key.
Very informative, I think your take on it, because of your location, leads to a better understanding of the area and the tensions. Helps people like me understand it a little better.

I agree with you that Iran and North Korea definitely don't seem to be a threat against Western Europe, at least not an initial one or immediate one. I was under the impression that the locations for the shields were chosen based on it being able to intercept a multitude of possible strikes against different countries. Obviously the information I've gotten has been minimal and not well researched, which is why I continue to pester you ;).

Given the information you've provided, it seems Obama was indeed making a good decision, that's good news. I am a little curious on what the real threat is already against the US though. It's arrogant to think that we're not being targeted for a large hit, but with the media the way it is it's hard to accurately gauge anything, I tend to err on the side of being overly critical.
Bug with the most spectacular results:

As a (former) hardware engineer, I've worked on many projects where bugs have physical effects. This can range anywhere from amusing to seriously dangerous.

One such bug involved a mistake in the assembly diagram and silkscreen for a circuit board. The result was that a tantalum capacitor was installed backwards on a 12V supply rail.

Tantalum capacitors are polarized, and they fail in a spectacular way when reverse-biased. In this case, the supply rail could source upwards of 20A, so the fireworks were loud and impressive. Luckily the cap was easily replaced and the only permanent damage was cosmetic.

Hardest-to-troubleshoot bug:

In my subsequent return to the world of software, I worked on device drivers for network interfaces (among other things).

NICs frequently operate through a circularly-linked list of packet descriptors, which contain pointers to buffers in RAM where the NIC can DMA packet data. The hardware fills the DMA buffers and marks the descriptor as "used," and the driver chases the NIC around the ring, processing the packet data and marking the descriptors as free.

In testing, we discovered that under long periods (hours, usually) of heavy load, the system would occasionally freak out and stop processing packets. Sometime later, various software modules would crash.

Working backwards through the post-mortem data, I saw that the NIC would get "lost" and dump packet data all over system memory. I dumped the descriptor ring (tens-of-thousands of entries) and wrote some scripts to check it for consistency.

To make a very long story short, when the NIC was stormed with lots of 64b packets with no gaps, it would eventually screw up a DMA transfer and corrupt the "next" pointer in the descriptor ring. On the subsequent trip through the ring, the NIC would chase an errant pointer off into system memory and corrupt other system data structures.

Since hardware can DMA anywhere in RAM, the OS is powerless to stop it. The resulting errors can be ridiculously hard to track down and fix.
Adobe to release critical update tuesday
IPhone App Design Trends
That's not 10BaseT, it's 10Base2 (or thinnet): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10BASE2

And--even though I've strung cables for both kinds, and of course 10Base2 takes far less cable, the maintenance issues and troubleshooting headaches of the bus topology make me so glad we've progressed to more robust network topologies.
Anyone else on Google Wave?
I have a Google Wave account but the only person I know who also has an account is currently on holiday. Are there any other HNers who want to try out 'waving' with me?

jgrahamc

BTW I do not have any invites. I wanted to get one for my SO so that we can wave together, but no response yet from the wave team. I did manage to figure out Stephen Fry's wave handle and have a little chat with him which was fun. But I can't go around just bothering celebrities so that I can beta test it.
We were doing some early testing on this distributed system, and process A kept backing up well under it's nominal load. A had no allowance for shedding excess load (it was broadcasting high frequency safety-critical data), and the network buffer backed up under the shitty messaging layer. It turned out that process B[0..n] couldn't pull the messages off the wire quickly enough because process C was blasting some other data to B at about 1000 times the nominal loading, filling up B's VM and kicking off the (improperly-tuned) garbage collector for 2-second intervals -- it ate the processor time needed to handle the load. Total death spiral.

Needless to say we ended up with more robust load management code and tuned the output of some processes.
Please don't be offended. You did start by saying we were "way out there," and I don't think you meant in a good way. I think that does imply that you are "zoomed in" on a smaller range of policy options and that does make small changes look big.

I'm not sure if you thought I was advocating everything that China does, or that I was somehow taking China's side in a US vs. China debate. That wouldn't be the case at all. If you read my other posts in this thread, I criticize both the US and China.

I'm also not sure if I misunderstood what you said about flexibility of governance. Whether or not you support the changes, I don't see how the Chinese government can be seen to have changed policies less in the entire Deng era than the US in the same time period.
I found the design to be pretty confused, and I suspect that most visitors will leave immediately because of this. You need to communicate what the site is useful for, and how to start using it simply. For example, I wasn't sure whether to start by searching for an item, or clicking the 'Start KartMe' button on the right.

Maybe the design mirrors the fact that the site is trying to do quite a lot of stuff. It's a pretty impressive feat technology/coding-wise, but it might be worth tweaking the homepage (and maybe moving some stuff off it) to help ease the new-user experience.
- The Swedish IRS can claim whatever they want. They don't have access to the bank accounts on these islands, so how should they know if some of them are affilated to that company.
- It is completely irrelevant if the TPB is making money or not.
And I bet it does a hell lot, or otherwise they wouldn't been so keen to go to jail.
That's the first lesson of Startup School. :)
Not so much a bug, but this incident cut my lifespan by about 5 years or so:

I was fixing an account balance on a customer's master database. Any change that happens on the master gets replicated to 30 branches, usually at 10 minute intervals.

I wrote the UPDATE statement, highlighted it, and pressed "Execute". Unfortunately, I didn't select the WHERE clause, so I basically gave all their customers (85000) a 50c credit balance. The IDE I was using also had a bug that caused it to ignore the auto-commit setting (which was turned off), so it basically committed the transaction. First I tried a ROLLBACK, which failed obviously. Realizing I had to act quickly, I disconnected the network cable (I was working on the DBMS server) to stop replication. I extracted the transaction log from the current database into a textfile (a few hundred MB) and restored the database from the most recent backup. Then I basically ran the extracted transaction log as SQL scripts against the database, hoping that it wouldn't fall over. I didn't want to do a normal restore because I was afraid of it showing up in the logs.

Within a very stressful 60 minutes I had everything back to normal. I never told a soul IRL about it.
I'm guessing anyone who has worked with "Enterprise" development teams has far better examples than the one mentioned.

As for five whys, it's a valuable and useful exercise, but the reality is that you often need to fix the symptom first.

In other news:

experience != skill

education != understanding

maximized != improved

responsible != reliable
I don't disagree with any of the above.

What gets my goat a bit is that you see attacks on Guantanamo for breaking the Geneva Convention (or even, as here, that it is as shocking as the Nazi mass murders!) -- and when it is pointed out that is a non-serious argument, there is never an answer.

I never could stomach propaganda written by people that know better. I like to think "the good guys" should be better than that, too.

Idealists lie, where pathos go in -- integrity go out.
while you're optimizing your PHP application anyway, if you have another 5 (or maybe 10) minutes to spare have a look at:

http://xcache.lighttpd.net/
Ah, yes, of course, you're right. If I could vote I would vote you up but my voting seems to be on the blink.
What is your suggestion to replace that? As some careers demand a certain level of competency and skill (Doctors, Nurses, Civil Engineers, et cetera)?

Are you saying the confidence we give doctors based on their years of studying and research just might be too much faith in the Government standard? Interesting question that brings up as well, how do we accurately gauge a persons skill in a profession like this if we were to try to "free" up the institutional thought process? Maybe an apprentice/master system? Seems to work well for skill trades, why not for doctors?
US Justice Dept opens IBM antitrust probe
More fun from adobe. They covered their ass this time and said the work around of turning off JS might now fully protect.
Can we get more people to choose the stairs by making it fun?