skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Had he chosen football instead of art he might be looking back thankfully that the decision lead him down the path to becoming an NFL star, or sports announcer, or whatever.

The likelihood of football leading directly to a career path (rather than through connections obtained while playing) is far lower than the similar probability for art, though - there are hundreds of thousands of jobs that directly use art skills, whereas the number of football jobs is far lower (even if we include high school coaching in the equation).

In that sense, doing art is really the "safe" option, at least compared to playing football. It only feels less safe because in high school playing football is a lot more respected than doing art.
This seems pretty useful from a VC-esque point of view. At an earlier stage (say, pitching your startup in 3-5 minutes at some event or other) the biggest thing I see missing is some kind of story beyond the product itself. Why are these guys standing there? What's their deal? Why do they believe in this crazy idea? What makes them able to execute it? What are they up to right now (development, beta, it's launched)? What do they need?
Both the above linked post and this discussion here are very much the definition of missing the point.
> Not only are you wrong

I might well be wrong about whether it's worth it to show disk space or not. I have no problem admitting this, because I haven't done any studies about it.

> but "You fail at UI" is a particularly abrasive way to be wrong.

>The additional cognitive load of reading a disk space requirement is negligible

Apparently I was too abrasive, or not abrasive enough.

NO amount of cognitive load is negligible. Ever. When you design a dialog with two buttons that both have to be there, both of those buttons are creating a significant amount of cognitive load. Understanding this is largely why apple makes good UI's. You should never try to justify removing something from the UI -- you must instead always have very good reasons why NOT to remove something, and remove it by default if you can't find enough (not any).

As I said, I have not made any studies of how users install ubuntu or what they expect, but as it's supposed to be installed as the os on the computer, in place of whatever that was before, and as there is no commonly available commodity hardware that it won't install on, I can easily see how there is no longer enough justification to show disk space requirements.
Thanks - I'll check that out when I get home.
I just browsed their competition, just look a little closer. It's actually 400/month per competition. So significantly cheaper than what you indicate. Frankly even if it was higher, it would just mean that the small agencies and one men show just get weeded out - often times they really do not have the capacity to compete with the big guns anyways.

I can conclude one of three things:

1. You are not part of it, therefore you are not happy.
2. You can't afford it, so why not point a finger at it instead.
3. Cost of any competition, or even the free competitions, does not indicate any impartiality. Keep in mind all entrants pay or don't pay.
It's called "tumblr.com" and it's fairly popular.
Actually the graphics card support is better than Windows for me. My graphics card driver keeps crash under Windows 7 but for 9.10 Ubuntu, there is no problem (Rademon HD 5770)
I've been using Safari on and off for about 5 years now. Their book collection is awesome. Along with programing books, they have a bunch of great stuff on photography, business, and other subjects of interest to hackers and entrepreneurs.

Like a lot of the comments on oreilly.com, I'm not a fan of the UI overhaul, but I'm also happy to see Tim O'Reilly saying that the team is scrambling to improve the situation. When a company listens to its users, paying money for their services is much easier to justify.
I wonder if we'll ever know, factually, who wrote to whom first?

I don't mean to slight wired; but I'm sure that many technology companies would like to be covered by wired, and if they have any sense, they'd prepare an article in the most convenient form for wired, and send it to them - and the guy running Demand definitely knows how to make things happen at this point. They wouldn't have any control over what Wired did with it, of course.

I wouldn't worry about it too much - it's just a drop in the ocean, and there are lots of other sources of information on the web. Probably, it's fair to say that having a crappy $20 video is quite a bit better than nothing. And if there's a few results to a google search, most people will look at more than one.

Example: I had a blocked toilet yesterday, google came up with a several excellent hits on it. I tried the suggestions in order, and problem solved. The internet is pretty cool.

I guess the depressing part is that higher quality can't be supported by adwords alone - it would seem, anyway. I think quality is often best rewarded in niches audiences and uses, where quality really matters.
"I'm a nobody" in the end was really funny to me, because those other "somebodies" (farmville developers) were really also nobodies no 99.999999% of the people in the world. I bet even the people who play farmville don't give a damn either.

Frankly I think he's more cool than the other guys just for admitting to it. High-fives and thumbs up for him.
Yep, definitely not funny.
Flat files continue to have a simplicity, portability and fungibility that is difficult (if not folly! :) to walk away from.

Instead, there are opportunities to enhance things in ways the are still perfectly useful in emacs/vi.
I think he was just using it as a nice lede. And he had a picture.
We debated this, but we wanted to do it IN the alt text, which turns out to be a bit of a pain to do on tumblr.
Yes. The book Stumbling on Happiness discusses this a lot, and I highly recommend it.
Not really. I hope I'm not being overly critical, but "a weary customer" is pretty purple prose, and "intelligent enough to be aware of its affect" -- "affect?" C'mon. "Effect."

If this were some other kind of writing, like a forum post or a blog entry, no problem, stuff like that wouldn't faze me. But I think you have to clear a high bar in quality if you're writing some sarcastic & condescending criticism of something else... especially when the "something else" is already aiming at a (relatively) highbrow audience. Otherwise it's not credible to me and not funny.
(Correction: Late 17th through early 18th. He died in 1727, Lavoisier was born 1743.)
Yes, I had it backwards; it's SHA1(m || k). Fixed now.

I'm in the unfortunate position of maintaining a real-world system that uses WS-Security, and this is not the only potential problem I've found. For example, the "m" part of the digested string is composed of parts that are concatenated without delimiters (just like the old AWS authentication digest); one implementation was vulnerable to message forgery because it could be convinced to split the same string in more than one way.
Wow, so there are two blogs explaining xkcd and two xkcd hate blogs. That's what I call success.
That attack you described is a canonicalization flaw, and I think it's one of the least talked-about, most prevalent failures in MAC-only security systems. Colin had a good canonicalization flaw in Amazon AWS.
One thing really stood out for me from the book "Programmers at Work".

Many of the programmers repeatedly emphasized the importance of data structures to both understanding programs as well to solving the problem. And after noticing how I work, I find that to be true.

English documentation of the core data structures is more important than verbose description of the steps in the algorithm. This is the key thing that is different among progarms. By and large, we use the same algorithms again and again. And I can trivially find English documentation of those to understand rapidly. I don't need it in the code also.

And by documentation I mean something that explains at a programming language level with the identifiers etc. For git, it would be insufficient to say "trees are collections of blobs". I would need to know the struct names and an explanation of each of the members. And whether the "collection" is a array/list/hash etc.

Having looked into literate programming, it seems to emphasize documenting the algorithms more than it does the data structures. Hence it misses the "big picture" which is what is really needed.

I'm not convinced that LP is useful.
Another interesting site is Sphere online: http://www.spoj.pl/
There's also something about the type of risk taken here. Taking art over football isn't exactly a major risk. It's a choice, and perhaps one that went against the prevailing wind, but it seems to me more like this guy is advocating 'do what you want'/'follow your gut instinct no matter what people say', rather than 'take risks' per se.

I'm totally all for doing what feels right, but you gotta admit, sometimes people are looking at you funny because the decision you're making is a bad one.
The HTML5 doctype is the shortest doctype that triggers standards mode in all browsers.
A Serious Take on Internet Game Play
Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders weekly seminars audio podcasts from Autumn 2009 brought to you by DFJ, STVP, and BASES.
It's about breaking the trends. The classic car is just an example of what most people DON'T do. Most people think the safe choice is to purchase a vehicle with a warranty because they know what they're getting into.
Motif | Yahoo Research
I've touched up the example source a bit to be closer (in style) to the original. I may want to talk about "which tags implicitly close others" but that's not the subject of this chapter, and having unclosed tags in the example source is distracting from the main point.
This should now be fixed. Sorry for the confusion.
Gentoo Optimizations Benchmarked
My impression was that he was asking about factoring in general, not specifically in relation to the TI.
Why I Continue to Use Google Reader
Ditto here. I think Peter overestimated his audience on this one.
I've heard from multiple sources that they will appear here: http://webcast.berkeley.edu/events.php. I don't know if that means Berkeley did their own recording, or if this will just be less compressed version of the same videos.
I have 4GB system and 512GB video memory installed. However, I only upgraded from 2GB after installation because the already-heavy Java apps I use (Eclipse, SQL developer) now required twice the memory.

As the other commenter mentioned, there are the CPU optimizations to consider, but what decided my final transition (I've tried it out a few times over the past few years) was when System76 moved to shipping their systems with the 64-bit distro installed. I want to maximize their ability to support me, so when I did a fresh install on a new drive I opted for 64-bit as well.

Most of the problems of compatibility with 32-bit binaries have been trivialized or are routed around easily enough these days. Though 64-bit Linux was never as much hassle as x64 Windows. ;^)
It's my understanding that the "HTML" part of HTML 5 is neither new nor invented; in fact, it's a specification of how browsers already parse HTML documents, with the aim of normalizing that behavior among willing vendors. Creating a realistic specification of how to handle most existing HTML on the web seems to me like a huge step towards better integration and compatibility.

Isn't this the exact opposite of creating a new syntax? You could level your same arguments against XML when it was introduced to browsers through XHTML.
Living in an RV as an Internet Nomad- 3G, solar, cost savings, and flexibility.
One nitpick on an otherwise fabulous article - Mark links to the HTML5 enabling script in order to add IE support but I don't see any reason not to use Modernizr instead, since you'll get CSS3 support as well.

http://www.modernizr.com/
Several reasons for me because that my desktop computer are mainly used to run several scientific computing tasks.

1. It can provide performance boost if you take advantage of that 64-bit calculation (two 32-bit calculations) is done in one clock-cycle, you can actually achieve 100% speed up.

2. Use more than 4G memory is not a big deal in scientific computing, and let's face it, more memory is better than read from disk.

3. The argument about the double memory consumption is plain wrong. All program still use int as the main type, which only 32-bit long. Only pointers takes 64-bit long, but you don't save much pointers in your memory (what's the point of keep 4G pointers in memory anyway?). Thus, the memory consumption is little larger, but definitely manageable.

4. (This point may be wrong, please correct me) double precision is common for calculation, and it takes exact 64-bit long, which makes it more suitable for 64-bit CPU.
The downside is that pointer sizes in 64bit software are double, and this does sometimes have issues with the processors cache. Personally I haven't seen much difference in practice either way (except in cases where you have more RAM ... MySql on 10 GB totally rocks :)).

I was asking because I choose to install the 32bit version ... 64 bit packages are more unstable being less popular.
Iliad moves from Free Broadband to Mobiles
To explain why you're being downvoted into oblivion:

ints remain the same size, but longs and pointers are double the size. 64-bit libraries may be bigger, but there's no reason they would double in size. In general, a 64-bit system uses more RAM, but not double.
Toyota Engineers Unique Flower Species to Absorb Prius Manufacturing Emissions
Marmaduke Explained has the benefit that Marmaduke is worse. It lacks the basic fundamentals of a joke in many cases. For what it's worth, XKCD does not have this. It may or may not be funny, but it is not awful.
The author of this blog is trying to kill the frog.
Resonates with me. Throughout high school math was easy for me because I memorized a few formulas and passed tests.
Then I went to a magnet high school. The first day of mathematics, the teacher gave us a bizarre geometry problem with almost no givens at all. She told us that all could be derived from the Euclidean axioms. The next day, only one person in a class of 30 solved the problem.
Ask HN:  Why not criminalize unsubstantiated assertions made in public?
You could still hold opinions/beliefs, but you would need to explicitly say that something is an opinion/belief.
Correction: Actually the graphics card support is better than Windows for me. One case study is not enough evidence to support your claim that overall their driver support is better.

But I'm v happy to hear this: i've struggled with my ATI graphics card the last 2 major versions of ubuntu (7.x i managed to get working after days of hacking around. Never got compiz working though. 8.x I got compiz running, but the general performance was so sluggish it was unusually).

I'll give it another shot.
So, the trolling here extends to trying to imply that the guy's racist?

Nicely done, I guess. I figure this one will ping up to 150+ with this crowd.
If this is greasemonkey script, anyone tried it with Chrome?
To a certain point your name matters because it can make it hard to spread by word of mouth and if it's downright stupid, that can reflect poorly on founders.

Beyond that, it's pretty much the color of the bikeshed:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_Law_of_Triviality
The explanations of the jokes are funny because they're not funny. You see, you'd normally expect explanations of jokes to be funny. But these explanations are not funny. That's what makes the whole thing funny.
Managing to make a satire of XKCD less funny than XKCD is itself a kind of perverse achievement, and I applaud them for that.
I think you are mixing two unrelated concepts: "language purity" and "language preservation". Places like France (and apparently Iceland) are very concerned with excluding foreign loan words, but not because it makes more people become native speakers of the language. As far as I can tell, it's purely for aesthetic reasons. On the other side of the fence, you have the Germans, who find most attempts at "Germanizing" foreign words laughable.
Its all well and good for Ubuntu to push further ahead but they would do a real big favor to the push of Linux on the Desktop if they could solve 1 major issue , remove the ugliness in the default rendering of the Fonts.
Yes, i know it can be done via a bazillion font config options and yes its very powerful and flexible, but lets get it right by default.
San Francisco Questions
Hi all,

I'm from the UK, and my company has just received some seed funding, and I'm thinking of coming to SFO for a month or two, at some point to check it out.

I just wanted to ask:

1. How much can I expect to pay for rent? I'm looking for something I can eat and sleep in. I don't want to have to wear Kevlar to the shops, but I don't need a jacuzzi bath :) I'm not fussy.

2. Where does the magic happen? Wheres the place (town/city) to be staying?

Any info will be very much appreciated.

Thanks,

Geoff
You guys assume a lot about Randall. Jew-hat? Seriously? Why not a generic black hat?

The second explanation has the benefit in that "blackhats" are generally considered bad guys (descending from the old Hollywood western tradition of bad guys wearing black hats and good guys wearing black hats).

You seem to like taking the worst possible interpretation of Randall possible.
It was that snarky comment on my first post on "awesome" and "lifestyle" (although I thought I'd make pretty clear that I don't consider Redis a lifestyle) that made me write this second one. I'm glad it helped clarify some things.
One reason that hindsight makes us feel good about our past decisions is that we change the rules of the game when we look back.

Sure, the likelihood of football leading directly to a career path is far lower than art, but if the football choice was made, he may look back and say, "I'm so glad I chose not to get into the career rat race and follow my football dreams instead..."
I feel like this blog is an optical illusion where, if I stare long enough, I'll see John Campbell.

Except I'm still not seeing it.
In that particular case, you missed the joke, so no.
I do wonder what leaps in logic get you from a stick figure's black hat to "Hasidic Jew’s black hat".

Not only did those two posts forget the funny, they might actually create trouble for the xkcd (politically correct activist + google search + no understanding of humor or satire = pain in the ass). Stupider things have happened.
It's my opinion that you haven't thought your ideas through.
About The Ever-Changing Value of Time
A few words about the most volatile currency: Time
I posit that people who can't convince themselves that most of their life decisions, no matter how arbitrary, turned out good in the end are depressed.
You'll need some mechanism to re-deploy major updates that cannot be accomplished via custom mechanisms, and that's most likely to still be ...

Why wouldn't the virtual machine bootstrap itself from network loaded code -- then it wouldn't be necessary to update the root Xen image.

Why couldn't I write a network service (also on the VM) that runs on other Xen instances and serves up the netboot code?

Why would updating the root VM require SSH? Couldn't I have a nice web management UI that I can just upload a new bootstrap JVM image to (on the rare occasions that I need to?). Perhaps systems could directly self-update the root Xen image on reboot?

I don't know why I'd have turtles-all-the-way down and then require some ugly update system that involves editing RC scripts.
It's hard to think through something that would require an experiment to determine its effectiveness.

It's pretty obvious that free speech without limits results in a lot of nonsense that many people believe.
I replied to someone else with the same issue, font rendering has always been by far the best with ubuntu for me than anything else

http://junk.arandomurl.com/type.jpg

all default installs, ill reply in 10 minutes or something confirming which is which
Nice. I like how each page links back to the source that generated it.
In my opinion, this is a horrible time for you to be checking out San Francisco. You've just got seed funding--why do you want to blow that on one of the most expensive places to stay in the US? This is when you should be very frugal and concentrate on creating a kick-ass product. Worry about location later.
Porn Maker Turned Farmer Joins Move to End Japan Co-Op’s Grip
1000$-1500$ a month for a studio-1bedroom.

Magic happens: The Mission, SOMA, North Beach (more of an LA scene over there)

Most of the tech stuff happens in those areas but a lot of it happens down in the south bay.
Java (or Erlang) as the main process can't (easily) configure the network adapter, add routes to the routing table, access/configure the IPMI module, modify firewall/IP forwarding rules, etc, etc.

There's still a lot of shell-script automation that has to be done via tools like chef/puppet/cfengine.
It is a good read to see how entrepreneurs are trying to change a system that was beneficial but is corrupted now.
Droid, Pre, and iPhone compared
Seems like you just want to hit someone over the head with your indignance, not actually discuss anything rationally.
This is where common sense comes into play. If you were in front of a judge, your argument that you are just posting a mathematical fact wouldn't stand for more than 10 seconds.

Tell the truth: why did you choose those two numbers, specifically? Oh, because they allow you to unlock a TI calculator. So (the judge would say), you are publishing a secret key. You are not publishing random number products for the fun of seeing how many digits your calculator can handle.

Taken to the extreme, this is the same argument as a hacker saying: I didn't break into the bank's computers, I just wrote a program, and the program is the one that broke into the bank. I was just typing on a keyboard, that's all I did.

Intent.
Reminds me of GetSatisfaction, in the sense that they are setting up an ad hoc community around someone else's product in hopes that the product creator blesses it as the official community.
You may try what happens with Redis server-side Set intersections. This could help in theory, at least if you have a way to sort the output data (that will be unsorted).

Basically you need a lot of RAM, and to put in keys called something like "tag:<tagid>" all the IDs of your products having such an ID.

Then if you want all the products IDs having as tags both foo, and bar, you ask Redis the following: SINTER tag:10 tag:20

Using SINTERSTORE is also possible to put the result into a new key, and then use SORT to sort this data.
Mixergy: Questioning Basic Assumptions Made StubHub $310 Million
And the government are just the people to decide which truths are actually true!
1) OS X

2) Windows (XP I think...)

3) Ubuntu

I may have transposed OS X and Ubuntu though...
One other point I think is critical to understanding its lack of lift is that it solves some problems most modern languages don't have with code organization. Earlier languages were much more restrictive about how you could organize code, and giving the programmer the ability to rearrange code in a more flexible manner could be a genuine advantage. Nowadays our problems lie more in unwise use of our extensive ability to organize and reorganize code, rather than our inability to do so at all, and adding in "conventional" LP only gives us another dimension to screw up on.

I do not believe this is the entire story, but it's an important part of it.
How long has it been since you looked at Ubuntu's fonts? I use both OS X and Ubuntu, and Ubuntu is at least equal to OS X these days IMO.
Beautiful article. Well said.