jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
I use exactly one SAP application once a month to enter how many hours I worked every day of that month. Let me tell you about it.

First, the width of the app window is fixed and cannot be resized. And some wide columns are fixed in place too, meaning that I can only see three columns at the time (out of 30) and therefore I am constantly scrolling left and right. On top of that, every time the window loses focus it does a weird 2-3 seconds refresh when you come back. As a result, we all write everything in Notepad first and only open SAP when we know we won't need to click away anymore.

Every single cell in that "spreadsheet" can do at least 50 things, but I have never managed to get them to do what I need. If I need the specific code of my position I copy-paste it from last month because that cell's search function has never returned anything useful. But if I check last month's data I lose the data of this month that I didn't save (plus the weird refresh thing happens here too). And if I save something it's there forever and cannot be edited. As a result, if I don't have my employee and workplace codes at hand at the beginning it's faster to throw the partial data away and start all over.

Some fields auto-complete, but I'm not sure under which circumstances. A colleague found that double clicking in a specific cell triggers this, but none of us knows why this specific cell.

This is a single app I use exactly once a month. Imagine having to use something like this every day. Even worse, imagine testing this app and saying "yes, this expensive, slow, uncomfortable app is exactly what my company needs, and I'm glad to know that you expect me to adapt to it instead of the other way around".
>By my count we now have, in no particular order...

There's also Corona SDK, which uses lua and OpenGL. Write once, build for Android, iOS, and Windows Phone 8. UI performance is quite good. Supposedly building Mac and Windows desktop apps is coming soon, but HTML5 support was announced a year ago and has not yet happened.

The free version of Corona SDK supports only a subset of the native APIs (albeit an extensive subset that's probably sufficient for 95% of uses). If you want the full set, you have to pay $1,000+ a year for Corona Enterprise and implement your own os-specific glue logic.
".." does not exist in French typography, we have the Points de suspension: "...", instead.

I'd like to add that it is wrong to think about commas, semi-colons, etc. in terms of duration of a pause in the speech. These signs articulate written sentences' syntax, and it sometimes relate to pauses when read aloud, but it is not a bijection. When analysing recordings, J. Drillon (Traité de la ponctuation française) showed that the correlation is really weak.
Probably not. Moonlight doesn't have the DRM necessary (and won't - MS has no intention of releasing it on Linux) and Netflix doesn't use Silverlight/MS DRM on phones anyway (AFAIK).

From what I understand, on the iPhone/iPad Netflix uses the DRM built into the device. Since Android phones are built by several different manufacturers there is no uniformity in hardware DRM (and some phones don't have any at all). I imagine that it's easier to get content providers to agree to use hardware DRM than software DRM which further complicates the issue.
"I'm not sure who to credit with the modern blog, with its comment threads, "after the jump", and permalinks."

LiveJournal had them all, no idea if it was the first (as you show, it doesn't matter much).
A bit of an aside, but my wife spent the last 6 years teaching high school english and I was surprised to find that there's a number of interesting advancements in the anti-cheating industry. There are a number of anti-plagiarism services that she (and loads of other English teachers apparently) would submit students papers to. The papers are compared to other ones in the database and reports are popped out for ones that match. I appreciated the irony, since it's easy to argue that the internet has made it easier to cheat in the first place.
The Beagle landed on Mars and was unresponsive. The last SpaceX test rocket failed to land. If all we need is money then there would be no failures that would result in masses of tourists dying or billions of dollars in mining equipment being destroyed.

But alas the world doesn't work like that. It takes time to repeat the design, build, test process until you get it right. And no throwing money at the problem doesn't result in a quicker solution:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks's_law
This isn't strictly true. Plenty of iOS apps use e.g. Stripe for payment processing, including the last company I worked for. The App Store billing/subscriptions requirement is only for apps providing strictly digital goods/services. Google has the same policy on the Play store.
It is a very human thing to overcomplicate one of the most basic instincts of life into some abstract human social concept.
If you want to publish your own newspaper, you can. Nobody will stop you. Start your own online video news service, weblog or nes site - nobody will stop you. Post whatever you like to Reddit, or any other discussion platform.

In China and Russia you cannot do these things. Published mdeia are strictly monitored and censored. The state employs thousands of astroturfers to flood social media with pro-government messages, trash anti-government messages and even directly hook into messaging platforms to delete messages the government don't like. Be persistent at it, and you'll get a visit from the police, or just get beaten up a few times.

The very fact that the BBC could publish that report, and Noam Chomsky could publish his book, is strong evidence for freedom of expression in the west. There are no such equivalent sources published in Russia and China exposing their government's manipulations. Why do you think that is?
It's hard to deal with low-level code without resorting to pointers in some ways, though. I can't think of a low-level language that doens't use them, actually.
In 2012, 84% of dispensed drugs in the United States were generics.[1]

Yes, the original manufacturer often spends money to develop follow on versions that can qualify for new patents, but this isn't always an effective strategy. When it is, it's usually because the follow on version has substantial benefits for patients (e.g., monthly infusions at the doctor's office instead of weekly). If those benefits aren't there, insurers can and will decline to cover the new form of the drug and insist on the generic.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/19/business/use-of-generics-p...
It's like citing Bible verses for fundamentalist positivists, so yes.

Never mind that the quality of published research itself varies wildly, or that this requirement creates an intrinsic tunnel-vision bias toward premature convergence at local maxima. If the measure of veracity is citations, then that creates a network effect, etc.

Not saying citations are a bad thing, just that they're not prima facie indicators of truth or rationality.
For anyone wanting to read the Geoff Wozniak post quoted in the article, here's the archive.org link:

https://web.archive.org/web/20150105063342/http://wozniak.ca...

Perhaps he removed the original article because of increased traffic. At any rate, I got a 404 when I clicked the link.
I guess I have just been lucky and/or my mock ups were so confusing that the text was the last of their concerns heh.
I disagree with your take. It says people will either take semi private jets or pay for more room on jumbo jets before they spend money going faster. It's posited that the private jet people derive greater convenience than they would get from going suborbital.

The thing with rockets and jets and the like is that they aren't going to rapidly improve, they are fundamentally limited by chemistry and simple hydrocarbons are incredibly energy dense.
Yes sure, we are working on it though right now we operate as an email newsletter.
Can you recommend a good English-language collection of his works? The poem you wrote was amazing.
If a Fox News talking head says something mildly islamophobic many people might be offended, but I doubt anyone will be shocked.
It also takes longer and is harder to skim/skip around to exactly what I want to see. I usually kind of have an idea of what I want when I'm looking something up so I'll just scroll an article to get to the good stuff, and then go back if I realize I need more context. That's a lot harder to do with video.
Not to forget that ~90k Microsoft employees got the WP7 for free which is a massive 6% of the active user base!
I've never signed up for an email newsletter in 15 years online and I get 100 messages a day into my Gmail junk folder, and 10 into my inbox, masquerading as newsletters. They're spam. Pretending that people sign up for these things is a tactic the spammers are using to discourage constructive discussion.
i also wondered why it was zuckenberg over assange.
I'm really not sure what people in Afghanistan know or how much "World Media" they consume, but I'm pretty sure more of them would have heard of Facebook than Julian Assange.

edit: Changed name because apparently I get modded down for referring to Mr Assange as "Rapey McRapeHair"
I'd give it to Julian over Mark because of the "Somebody would have done it anyway" factor.
THIS debate definitely does not belong here. Seriously, even if humankind ever does sort out the essentially intractable problem of governmental control over the carrying of lethal weapons by the citizenry, I am willing to bet everything I own that we won't be sorting it out here on Hacker News.

I reckon we could have a fucking boring argument about it though. I've seen it done, it looks easy.
Photoshop is to high fidelity mockups as Balsamiq is to low fidelity mockups--would you agree?

Axure (software based, one time $589 price) is in there, but I don't think nearly as many people use it as Photoshop.

That being said, some more time on customer development is a great idea.
"No matter what you do, how hard you try, how well you excel... there is always going to be someone better than you. out of 6-7 Billion people someone will almost always best you. Stive to be better... strive to be in the top percentile... but always realize that you won't ever be #1."

I don't quite agree with this comment which gives the gist of many of the answers. There is a difference between being #1 in the world in a field (which is possible, albeit very hard) and having the humility to realize that there are many other fields that you are not that good.
If all goes accordingly, definitely Wikileaks. Imagine a world a fea years from now where every single country, and perhaps even cities have their own wikileaks site to keep politicians honest without doing bad things behind people's backs.

I'd definitely say that will have a much bigger impact. Besides what has Zuckerbeg doen this year that he hasn't done a year before?
This case is unlike movie or music distribution in there has been convenient online distribution of papers since arguably the dawn of the internet (ok, maybe "convenient" came later).

The difference is, the journal publisher groups realised they can continue charging extortionary prices and get rid of the competition of "free" paper websites by suing everything that moved.

Academics, generally getting slightly-less-than-free copies of the papers at their institutions and generally being apathetic about their universities being extorted, created a gulf and precluded any kind of pirate culture.

But publishers have since become emboldened, prices have risen, the inequality access has been increasingly advocated for and brought to light, and the open access journals had a bit of momentum for moment.

Honestly, if you ask me, the solution here is pretty simple (at least in some fields). Negotiate (if it's not already granted) the permission to publish manuscripts and pre-prints. Submit them to ArXiV or Bio/MedRxiv, or whatever repository.

This doesn't tackle the issue of academics paying publishers to send emails to other academics who in turn work for free to review papers, but one battle at a time.
I agree with this take, and it's the same take I share with friends and colleagues. It's certainly better than FB.

However, are we sure that Apple, in 30 years, will be the same proponent of privacy that they are today? Even if there's a 10% risk that they won't, they'll have your same data then that they have now.

Strong encryption with user-owned keys is the only way you can mitigate against this scenario. I'm optimistic that we'll get there eventually, but we aren't there yet.
An official Sci-Hub Mastodon instance could be pretty interesting :)
Worth noting that Julia's SymPy binding [1] is pretty pretty nice to work with too. If anyone's looking for big Julia project, I think a symbolic math package written fully in Julia would be a really exciting development. As far as I know, there isn't one yet. The better-known symbolic math packages for Julia still use bindings to C++ (SymEngine.jl [2]) or Python (SymPy.jl, Symata.jl [3]).

[1] - https://github.com/JuliaPy/SymPy.jl

[2] - https://github.com/symengine/SymEngine.jl

[3] - https://github.com/jlapeyre/Symata.jl
It's about equivalent to an RX560 or NVIDIA 1030 I believe
In my experience Eigen is not very good either for small matrices, whilst Fastor performs much better.

Interesting
> Poulos said he would like the case to go to trial rather than settle.

Damn straight.

As an aside, I wish settlements were public record.
If you seem to serious about it, you should be more worried about the FBI & Secret Service than Twitter
Hmm, got some OpenStep for x86 disks roaming about somewhere. I should give it a try.
> It seems we've argued over different things.

That happens with annoying regularity. I have a system for dealing with that too, but that's a different blog post. ;-)

> I picked up the "perfect" from the headline and came up with a counter-example.

Well there's a reason "perfect" is in scare quotes. If I really thought the system were perfect I'd actually be advocating it instead of going "Hey guys, here's a neat idea. I'm not really sure if I'm actually for it or not".

The meaning of perfect here was intended to be that it has a lot of the properties which many people claim are impossible to coexist and summarise under the heading "there is no perfect voting system" (it overcomes the impossibilities by being non-deterministic), whilst remaining very similar to the existing and familiar system
By removing comment scores, does it increase/decrease traffic to HN?

My gut is telling me that traffic is likely to be lower. Reality might be different of course.
Poignant conclusion:

> The romantic image of an über-programmer is someone who fires up Emacs, types like a machine gun, and delivers a flawless final product from scratch. A more accurate image would be someone who stares quietly into space for a few minutes and then says "Hmm. I think I’ve seen something like this before."
You're right.

Their Internet subs are seeing 10% Y/Y growth, but their video subs are flat.

Looking at the last 3 years, it's unlikely that Comcast will report any major uptick in video subscribers during their next earnings.
Warning, there's sound that comes with this emulator, so you better turn down your dial. :/
Yup, Econtalk did a recent podcast on bitcoin which is a great intro for anyone interested. The discussion on HN:

http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2011/04/andresen_on_bit.htm...
> won the geographic lottery

America is great because it is filled with Americans. The geography is relevant but not so much as is fashionable to claim.

If you fill America with people from other places it ceases to be America. It will more and more resemble the inferior places the newcomers come from.

> FOB doesn't matter

Have you renounced your foreign national citizenship? How many passports do you hold? It definitely matters. You're going to go wherever you can earn a buck. Rootless cosmopolitan and you know it. I'm here until I die for sure.
I remember having an email conversation a long time ago with someone who wrote their own search engine in C++. I think that system was Blekko. Congratulations to Blecko for a (hopefully) nice exit.

IBM Watson absorbed AlchemyAPI a few weeks ago.

I helped a friend's company integrate IBM Watson into their product, and I have mixed feeling about IBM Watson: plenty of potential, but some rough edges.
I'd go as far as to say that it was actually discussed.

Meanwhile, I believe the submission guideline is to include the year (2007).
Yes, it will absolutely help the individual while doing nothing to solve the problem (and arguably perpetuating it).

I had a teacher in high-school who was black, and in the first integrated class at a formerly all white school. He said his parents made him do it, he hated it, and he got less of an education than had he been at an all black school because of the controversy surrounding the situation.

Clearly, while it's a good thing in the long-run that the schools were integrated, there is a price to pay for those who take part in the transition.
And (from what I understand) this is just the kind of thing that High Frequency Trading algorithms are doing.
I find it sad that, to this day, one has to spend so much time worrying about memory management to get decent performance. I've yet to work on a performance oriented project where I didn't need to write at least a couple custom allocators to reduce memory management overhead.

GC systems are no better in this regard. I was told of an interesting hack in a Java program that implemented a large cache of objects by serializing them into a large memory block so that the GC saw it as one big object and didn't traverse it. This resulting in dramatically reduced GC pause times (10x+). When needed, objects were deserialized from the array. Disgusting, but effective.
Hacker News is a great community, but not really the audience we are looking to attract. With little to no funding, what're the best ways to get people to just take a look?
If I were them, I'd look at an approach that was based on either SimpleDB or S3. I've been working on a couple of prototypes of systems similar to theirs for my own stuff at work, and I've been toying with a system that uses S3 to store what I'm calling "absolute fallback" sources of data for conversations (basically, JSON documents) and SimpleDB as a front-line store.

My general take on this issue is that if you're running your app on EC2 and your persistence medium is something that's also on EC2, you really have no ideal high availability scenario. Of course, even in my case, if SimpleDB and S3 go down, I'm still in trouble, but at least I have the option of throwing Akamai in front of it.
As far as I'm concerned, Joyent look like idiots after this post. Had the post been written in a tone that reflected on own prior experiences and used a tone that was solidary, it'd be a nice post. But no, this is 20/20 hindsight, where everyone can say "I told you so" with no evidence to prove that they knew this was coming.

Poor etiquette, terrible argumentation, and atrocious PR.
> The native OS typography engine, you mean? Firefox uses the native text rendering stack on every platform it supports.

That's interesting, because every other browser I've ever used on my WinXP system (including Firefox up to 3.6) could display a 'T' followed by another letter without screwing up the positioning, as can every other piece of software I use on the system for that matter.

I suspect you are mistaken, and Firefox 4 is actually using something other than vanilla Windows typography where it didn't before.

> Like what [terrible usability issues]?

Well, just off the top of my head...

They messed up just about everything on the address/history/awesome/whatever bar: refresh is now a tiny button on the other side of the screen, home is even further over squashed between icons for extensions, you are supposed to realise (presumably through some divine revelation) that holding down the mouse button over the back icon is how you jump back by more than one page, there is a tiny, almost invisible arrow on the right of the tab line that shows all tabs and lets you open a Tab Groups page with a weird UI that doesn't fit in at all, etc.

They moved "Bookmark all tabs" from an obvious place on the Bookmarks menu to the context menu when you right-click a single tab. (A Google for "Firefox 4" "bookmark all tabs" currently returns nearly 30,000 hits.)

Go to Tools|Add-ons with nothing open and you have no obvious way back to a regular browser tab.

Autocomplete of password fields on forms seems to be unreliable.

I'll stop there, because I think the point is made well enough.
What do you want me to explain?
I always make the client prove the business case before I work with them. I have zero interest in building toiletware.

That said, I had a conversation today with a client who has a fun, cool idea that it is going to be very hard to build revenue on and very hard to market. He's 46. He's been an employee all his life. He's poised for a mid-life crisis. Guys like this either get a mistress or an MBA. What I told him is that this is going to be cheaper than an MBA, so probably we should just build the damn thing.
Apparently the Pima Air and Space Museum has tours. You have to stay on the bus while among the planes, no wandering around among the multimillion dollar war machines.
Being an "Entrepreneur" is about one thing only: solving others' problems. Everything else is window dressing or worse, diversions.

This rant includes all kinds of stuff about "me", "my life", "my philosphies", "my problems", "my future", "my", "my", "my"...

Where's mention of others, their problems, and the solutions?

OP may call himself "An Entrepreneur", but supplies no data to support that claim. Sadly, an all-too-often recurring theme these days.
I can't find any license information in that repository. That means all rights reserved, at least in my jurisdiction.
> Frequently docks laptop during workloads

That's not a requirement, you merely need to use your laptop at a desk (or a table, or the seat-back shelf on an airplane) and not literally on your lap. That's usually how I use my laptop anyway, for comfort reasons. Certainly when I'm doing something CPU heavy, since I don't generally edit videos on the subway.

I think the other three requirements are perfectly common.
If you were asked to identify a mystery wine, color would certainly be an important piece of information.

If you, as a wine taster, were asked to describe the taste of a mystery wine, I think it's somewhat disappointing if the color of the wine affects your perception.

Isn't taste supposed to be a first-order sensory experience?

I can't think of a more charitable interpretation of these results than "we have different vocabularies for red and white wines, even to describe the same tastes".
100% anonymity online is a myth. Anyone claiming they have it is lying to you, and should be a large, red flag. Nevermind that the app is proprietary software.
If we look at bitcoin for what it is (the technology and theory behind it), it hasn't lost any real value. If it did (e.g., if a major flaw were discovered in the technology to render it useless), then people wouldn't still be trading bitcoin. We have to remember that for every bitcoin sold (at any price), someone on the other side of the transaction is still buying those bitcoins. If it were truly "dead" or indisputably flawed, trading would come to a halt because there would be no bids for something truly useless.

Instead, what we're looking at with the recent price decline is simply a reflection of how people feel about bitcoin - and in this case, that opinion has everything to do with factors that are irrelevant to the technology (failed exchanges, criminal activity, etc). If bitcoin were a public company, of course those kinds of things would matter (it doesn't matter if public opinion is wrong; it can still ruin your business), but since bitcoin's usefulness and underlying value do not rely on public opinion, it remains unaffected at the core by any of these recent events.