skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wonder why consumers put up with all the add-on crap that comes with a Windows PC. I guess maybe they just don't know any other real choices exist?

It's been many years since I setup a commercial Windows-based machine (and the non-commercial installs I've done have mostly been for VMs for testing purposes). But, I remember those machines from Dell having a ton of random extraneous crap already loaded. Crap icons all over the desktop. Crap-ware that auto-launched and made the system tray area extend 1/4 of the way across the taskbar, and so on. Completely ridiculous.

I bought a new iMac for my wife a couple of weeks ago. Took it out of the box, turned it on, and it was (as usual) a smooth and sane experience.

Don't get me wrong, it's not that I an totally anti-Microsoft, or completely Apple fan-boy. I just choose to use and buy the product that offers the best experience for my money, and Microsoft hasn't been part of that equation for a very long time now.
NYT: The Science of Managing Search Ads
Your comment might be more constructive if your offered the OP a solution to their actual problem of tiling two windows (or perhaps the underlying need to compare the contents of two windows easily). What affordances does OSX offer in this respect?
Making tests less brittle (TDD)
This reminds me of another post which had a great quote, "Make Lists. Not Too Much. Mostly Do."
I'm Russian and have experience raising money both in Russia and UK, so hopefully can add a useful perspective.

Whilst the above is true in general, it's not fair to pick on Russia.

It's fairly natural that a vast concentration of wealth in the hands of few and inexperienced (by historial standards) business men leads to ego-driven risk-taking spending. It happens in every country, there are always folks who inherit a fortune and blow it on some business venture within 6 months. You just don't hear about them in the news cause the amounts are too small. Russian oligarchs inherited the fortune of USSR, Arabs inherited oil fields, etc, which make their examples more news-worthy. It's like a high stakes poker game.

There are American VCs that make outlandish investments. There are British banks that invest money in Dubai. And there are Russians that invest in American tech. These are all high-risk high-reward type gambles.

It's only natural that an inexperienced foreign investor pays a premium over a well-known Silicon Valley VC firm: you aren't getting advice or guidance or connections, just cash ("dumb-money"). Similarly a foreign investor often pays a premium when investing in Russia, or an inexperienced investor ends up paying a premium in the form of cash or bad terms.

And I don't agree that there's nothing to learn from Zynga in all this. There's a key lesson: that best valuations don't live in Silicon Valley. Raising money is often a lot easier and cheaper in Russia or the Middle East. I can only congratulate Zynga on getting a great valuation and not being afraid to take the road less traveled, and having $180M to spend on either their business or themselves. After all FarmVille isn't exactly out to change the world now is it? :)

Entrepreneus often forget that fund-raising is a really important skill in building a business (if not the most). I confess - it's something I didn't get when I started out. This is not what US investors want you to think (so they can focus on great deals) - the Silicon Valley hype is all about great tech and ideas. But ideas aren't worth much. And great technical people can be taken on board if there's sufficient capital available. Cash can make or break a business unlike anything else. With $180M you can dream up quite a few interesting ventures, you don't need to invest it into your current idea (eg FarmVille). Maybe Zynga will use the money to build the next Facebook or Google (yeah right).

Having said that, I am aware that Putin has an agenda to promote Russia as the leader in technology. Perhaps investments by DST are a part of that agenda. But it's only natural that globalization brings with it new sources of capital, and that's only good news for startups.

PS It's not money laundering (as some have suggested) cause Russian banks offer that service for 15% (you can wire cash to any offshore account from central Moscow).
This story is great and all, but it isn't complete. Why don't they mention the original, side-scrolling Duke Nukem games for the PC? I'm pretty sure I remember owning 2-3 side-scrolling, baddy-shooting Nukem games, and they were equally as awesome.
Time Your Attack: Oracle’s Lost Revolution
Sony Ericsson W995 Red Deals Unplug Waves of Music
The Sony Ericsson W995 Red deals are like the hot cakes for the Christmas ahead but such deals are known for its unique music players which can rarely be found on other gadgets.
A Crash Course in Django
Similar: http://www.jgc.org/blog/2008/02/sum-of-first-n-odd-numbers-i...
Get Connected Instantly With the Sport World Through Samsung S8000 Jet
Among us there would be no one who hadn't played some kind of sports. Right from the days of school we had played sports and each one of us has the most favourite sport. We were quite crazy about the sport celebrities. Remember the days when we used to buy magazines on sports. Even we didn't have money then also we managed some bucks and finally, purchased the prominent magazines. How things changed in a faster way! The present young generation is now hardly buying sport magazines because they are busy in downloading sport magazines. The Internet charges have really become affordable and a sport enthusiast of today never mind to spend a few bucks on downloading the top-notch magazines right on their mobile phones. The Samsung S8000 Jet is the one which connects you with the sport world
I feel that I lose hold of my data

OK, I understand what you are driving at. I still am a little confused by the concept where you willingly post "your data" into the essentially open ether, then lament that action.

How about not posting it to Facebook in the first place? It seems that the implied contract with posting data into public places is that the data is in fact public.

What you propose is interesting, but I'm not sure it provides even basic security-by-obscurity. The keys would either have to be so overly distributed to your friends that they essentially become public. Or the data stream has the same message encrypted over and over again, which makes the size of the data grow exponentially (and also most likely makes it easier to crack).
It's an interesting concept ... but they claim ownership of the output of their engine.

That's perhaps reasonable based on what they're doing, and certainly their right, but it drops my interest in it to near 0 (note that based on my personal circumstances anything I do is non-commercial).
you should try a few of them and see which one actually works better. Probably more importantly, you should figure out more specifically what you're trying to accomplish.
I knew somebody would mention Apple. Sadly, Apple is not that much better - after all, you are almost forced to register with Apple (iTunes, MobileMe, etc) to reap the full benefits. In fact with my Mac I just gave in and registered, which I always managed to avoid with other PCs.

It's just that they limit themselves to Apple products, and Apple fans cherish that rather than being annoyed by it.

Try installing iTunes on Windows, and you get lots of crap along with it, too (Quicktime, some Apple Software updater background thread, iPod connector background process even if you don't have an iPod, Bayonet-Networking or what it is called, and so on). Really, they are NOT better here.

Besides, I've had very good experiences with Dell. At least they still provide the install disk for Windows. Maybe it depends on whether you buy from the consumer or the business lines, though. If there really is any pollution, the first step should be reinstalling the OS from scratch, without all the crapware (but as I said, I didn't have to do that with my Dell purchases so far).
But this occurs already with ad networks and has been going on for years, they track your previous behaviours and delivery 'relevant' ads.
Economic Lessons From ‘Mad Men’
I agree wholeheartedly, so many friends of mine are at step 2. Again, some of my friends with jobs doing what they 'love', developing or design – isn't actually enjoying every bit of it, but somehow seem satisfied with getting payed for doing something they know.

I think you should strive for getting payed to do the things you love, not giving up half way.
I laughed at the analogy, but I don't think it's appropriate. DNF didn't fail because the coding was subpar. Far from it: every time they released demos, jaws dropped over the extremely high quality of the graphics and game play. Rather, it failed because the project management had no endgame.

In your analogy, the Titanic would have to be the most technologically advanced ship never to, well, ship.
MiaSole and Silicon Valley bank on green solar energy
It's also possible to "do what you can tolerate" as a day job and "do what you love" as a fulfilling hobby.
It would be interesting to see if SarBox (the Sarbanes–Oxley Act) wasn't the only.the major/a major reason for the death of the IPO in the US, as many have claimed.

(I've always thought it was more of a "last straw" than the answer many portray it to be.)
Password Solutions (to two password annoyances)
Ah, at first I thought these were going to be similar to CLOS's method combination (:before :after :around).
Stickiness or "Spikiness"? Rethinking Repeat Visitors
This, in contrast to your formulation, means that the effect of certain properties of Y is that X is impossible to achieve.

I can see how it might appear that way, but take note of the word "virtually" in the Webster's definition. It's an unfortunate word, because it undermines the absolute strength of the word it modifies...which, in your case, would be the word "impossible" (had you not dropped the word "virtually" from your paraphrasing, that is).

Here's another example that shows someone else using the word in the same way that this author does. His system is copying files very slowly, and while technically his system is able to copy files, he feels it can't effectively be used for that purpose, even though a more patient person might disagree:

http://www.vistax64.com/vista-performance-maintenance/120356...
Isn't most of Facebook's PHP a view layer around a load of custom C/C++ modules which do all the heavy lifting anyway?
MobileMe? Really? I've never registered for that, and I don't think I'm benefit deficient.

iTunes, only if you have an iPod, and I think most people recognize what they are opting in to if you go down that road. (Is the Zune any better in that regard?).

I've bought Dell and HP home and corporate desktop machines (again, though not in the last few years). Both were burdened with a lot of pre-installed junk. If I have to reinstall the OS on a new PC, I think that is sort of a non-win.

I suppose it is a matter of perspective, but the Apple machines I've purchased have not come burdened with a ton of 3rd party crap, and have not made removal of what IS installed (iWork as an example) overly difficult if you choose to do so.
Clever concept, but it took me a little while to figure out that the left and right margins were independently controlled by the radio buttons to the left of centre and the radio buttons to the right of centre, respectively.

I think a single group of radio buttons to control both sides would have made more sense.
Благодаря

(That and the very basic greetings are the only Bulgarian I retain - I will have to go and investigate the "re-narrative" in my copious free time. Thanks.)
Top hackers gather to compete in a hacking competition called NetWars
Run by committee and funded by an even bigger committee. On a project like this, chances are that money will be coming from both of the local councils involved and via the Regional Development Agency, money from central government and a couple of different European funds. All the various organisations will want something to show off at their various powerpoint presentations. A tacky bit of "viral interactive multimedia" is just cheap entertainment for the beancounters.
It's a joke - "why aye" is a geordie term meaning either "hell yeah" or "no way" (depending on context)!
Jquery and ajax best demos
>Imagine being a foreigner and having to learn that in English one tells a lie but the truth.

This makes sense, given the idea that there is only one truth ("the" truth) but any number of falsehoods (each being "a" falsehood).
We use rsync to deploy all our front-end code/files.

It is pretty robust, but, syncing multiple files is not an atomic operation across the batch as a whole. So if one file fails you do get an err report. But the other files would have been synced. Once you fix whatever the problem is and you re-run your script, that one file will then be synced.

In practice, rsync is really great for deploying.
It is also neat for backups - in fact, before I got my Mac and started using Time Machine, I used rsync for backups (and in fact used rsync.net for offsite backups).
I learned all I need to know about resource management from Starcraft.
I think that URL got re-written by the moderators. Other URLs to this story don't have the link to the "all pages" version, or have loads of other cruft. It happens.

Before submitting I always look through the "new" submissions and do a search:

http://news.ycombinator.com/newest

http://searchyc.com/
takes too long if your project is of reasonable size, why not just send the diff
Browser Speed Test: Chrome Gets Competition
More details from the Opera developer blog can be found here: http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/2009/12/22/from-all-of-...
Ribbit App Delivers Voicemail Transcripts to Your iPhone - ribbit - Lifehacker
I'm referring to the "friend-space", where info is public but only among these friends. I want to share stuff with my friends, and FB seems a rather good technology for that!

The public key is used for encryption, not decryption, so anybody can have it...To read a message I send you, you use your private key. The message will be encrypted by me using your public key. So, any friend can send me a message but only I can read it. If more friends are to be able to read the same message, the string must actually include an instance of the message, encrypted with the "other" friend's key.
If this was Reddit, I'd ask since when did all white people come from colonizing countries? As a white guy whose folks got invaded and didn't invade anyone else, this race-based generalization certainly doesn't apply to me.

Since this is HN, however, the entire discussion is irrelevant - this is a technology, tech culture, and business site, not a politics site - I'll flag it.
I saw The Man From Earth a coupla years ago; it's interesting.
Apple Wants to Kill Cable Television
I quite like OpenFlashChart (which uses JSON as an input format, though that JSON is typically made with a server-side language).

I use the Python bindings (which use Chart objects) and the output generally works with my brain. Users like that mouse-overs give exact values in the line at that point.
I love to eat with a roof over my head, and I love to sleep in a warm bed.
Life and Times of Georgy Voronoi
I'm building something right now that includes page parsing, and so far I've only been building in regex support. I like your jQuery selector idea as well, are there any other ways that you can think of that would make searching the contents of a page programmatically easier for you?
EBay listing auction software
AuctionSplash's advanced eBay tools specifically designed to buy and sell easy eBay. Also offers FREE eBay image hosting, FREE auction templates and desktop convenience. Free to download and use.
SongBird 1.4.2 su LinuX
If the rich get taxed more, effectively being taxed out of being rich, what incentive is there to become rich? Would it not be better in that case to do what you like and let the government pay you for doing absolutely sweet FA?
Cloud-based gaming demo with no lag.
Steve Jobs Named World's Best-Performing CEO
I haven't registered with MobileMe either, it was just an example that Apple DOES try to push things on you.

And you mention the difference: one is 3rd party stuff, Apple pushes Apple. It still pushes.

Again it is the useless comparison between "Apple" and "PCs". There are bad PC vendors and, OK, less bad PC vendors. Shop smart, and you don't have to put up with preinstalled crapware. Not even with Dell.

"Overly difficult" is entirely in the eye of the beholder...
While I like the concept of this, the problem comes in when the richest people don't actually get a wage, or they get paid far less than their actual income. The rest of their wealth and income comes from dividends and owning companies, which are not taxed the same way.

IIRC there was an article from Warren Buffet in which he ponders why he pays less tax than his secretary, even though he earns far more than her.
Breakly - a jQuery plugin to break long sentences
I haven't seen Avatar just yet. But I can comment on District 9, which the author lumps into the same bucket.

District 9 is doubly interesting because not only was it written as a reflection of apartheid, but became a mirror to South Africans during the upsetting xenophobic attacks that happened in 2008/09 - http://www.mg.co.za/article/2009-03-11-local-leaders-behind-...
Thorium, the New Green Nuke
I agree.

What works for me as a programmer is to get into the zone as quickly as possible. I like to set aside one day of the week to handle miscellaneous tasks. Other days its all about the zone.

There is a story about Schwab (Carnegie Steel) hiring a consultant to gave him the best productivity advice. The advice was to start with the most important thing first. Stick with it and when its done move onto the next important task.

Schwab loved the advice and promptly paid the consultant his fee. It worked even then.
I wonder if this sugests that teaching in public schools is better, or that tests are prefering students that graduated public schools.
I'd like to know, does anyone actually do all these "productivity" methods? I've never known anyone who tries all the things you read on blogs and sticks with it for very long.
The real problem with hardware is that you can't revise it. That used to be a problem with shrinkwrap software, too -- it was revisable, but only by shipping out a lot of physical disks marked "upgrade" and praying that people installed them -- which is why it used to be so much harder to embrace the "ship early and often" plan.
I raised this point on Twitter and they got back to me very quickly with a DM. Unlike @Oreilly they were actually pretty nice about it! Basically "It's a laugh for Christmas".

I do worry though, they're positioning against a very serious, techie brand with games that include Viz and Newcy Brown... :/
Open is in the eye of the beholder
Am loving the new Win7 integration with this release. Definitely feels snappier!
Fort Mill SC Master Planned Community
Baxter Village of Fort Mill South Carolina, the next generation American small town.
Protecting the laptop herd
This used to get my wife when we were in New York. Passing PS108. "What's the PS stand for?", "Public School". "I'd never pay money to go there.","That would be a private school."
I'm not sure how natural resources are a bubble. They might not compete in the same way companies which innovate on their products do, but they're certainly not under-valued. Financials, on the other hand, are a bubble in which major shareholders have complete control of the legislative process in the US. Consider the power of the federal government to bail out those "too big to fail", and that bubble seems pretty unlikely to pop.
I've stuck with a fair bit of Getting Things Done for a couple of years. And I think it really helps me keep organised.
Why Apple's rumored iTablet will fail big time
Rotterdam, interested

Utrecht or Amsterdam won't be a problem
i'd love to have an ultralight laptop with an e-ink screen. something like my thinkpad x60, which is a few years old now, but with a current processor, 4GB memory, and a screen i can work on outside.

i don't give a damn about games - i just want to be able to write and test code wherever i am.
What's the argument? That Mozilla makes it too hard to use self-signed certs?
Is it possible to start playback on the HTML5 video element without Javascript? I thought it was a requirement.
Windows 7 user here. It's been a long time since I tried out Opera properly last time, but I have to say this new release is snappy, smooth and very, very clean. And unlike Chrome it actually tries to mimick the native UI conventions without getting boring.

And as other's have mentioned, the Windows 7 add-on features are a nice bonus.

I like this very much.
This article's got a lot of inaccuracies (Unix based systems all use X and a window manager? Has the guy even used OS X?) and honestly, it doesn't really even say that much about Haiku!
Does "Shop Smart" mean "Reinstall the OS from Scratch?"

Apple pushes Apple. It still pushes

Difference between Apple and Dell: Apple prompts you fewer times, doesn't try to make you feel insecure about opting out, and looks respectable throughout the whole experience. Last time I set up a PC, it was like passing an aisle of carnival hawkers.
I have a friend or two who do fairly significant amounts of tracking and auditing. I think the key fact is that they are doing that about their work time, not their play time. It's especially important if you're not working from an office and have a dangerous amount of flexibility.
Really good point. By nature of my startup, I have to achieve highly complex tasks in short time. These are heavyweight tasks that require high precision design decisions and, I often find the following two things happen to me in cycles:

1.) I feel highly motivated to achieve the task, and I become a very high achiever. I finish a task in 2-3 days that would otherwise be achieved by inefficient communication and discussion of a 5-employee team in a month. I do this without feeling any obligation to do it and without thinking about schedules, startup deliverables etc. I concentrate solely on the design problem and the reward of achieving it. I feel rewarded when it is finished. It feels like a celebration of the mind's capabilities.

2.) I look ahead and start planning about deliverables and deadlines. Since the tasks are so overwhelming on their own, the overall project looks very complicated. I feel overwhelmed, freaked out, and immediately stop having progress. I also start to have stress-related health degradation signs, and I get into an unproductivity cycle that is very hard to break.

I got this so many times that now I try hard to find ways to keep myself in (1) without going into (2). I find that keeping my focus on the challenge but not the time schedule helps. Think of it this way, if you stay in (1), you will get very timely progress anyway, so no need to think about schedules and deadlines.

It is also ironic how the same task may look so overwhelming and so much fun in different perspectives. It is actually fun that becomes your hell when you get schedules, deadlines, competitors and finance in the loop.
North Pole Compression Algorithm
Are there any PC brands out there that (default to) selling clean systems? In the last years I only had one shocking encouter with a HP laptop (Compaq brand) and don't really know what the others are doing. I know that my good old ThinkPad came (five years ago) in a pretty clean state (but I found all the custom stuff - special buttons HUD, trackpad confuguration and so on - to be not very polished.)

It's really a shame. The hardware is not so bad. Build quality is ok (ThinkPads: great!). The price is great. I would feel only a bit terrible if I were forced to switch my MBP with a HP laptop based on hardware alone. It's the software. Yeah, you can solve all this. But that's something annoying I want to avoid. And that is worth quite a bit of money.