skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I use it on my netbook, which goes more or less everywhere with me. It's not only far simpler for, say, my dad (who is still slightly unsure whether computers fall under the realm of science or witchcraft - both being bad), but it also makes things easier for me. You can read that as "one less click to get into emacs" if you want.

But on a serious note, the actual interface of the OS seems to be far less important for tech-savvy people. I'm using Windows 7 right now, alt-tabbing between a web-browser and emacs (finally getting around to exploring Clojure, if you're interested), and would be doing exactly the same if I'd booted into Linux this evening instead. 'Computer people' know what they want to do on their machines and do it; and cross-platform is king for 'their sort of app', these days.

My dad, on the other hand, thinks that computers are largely operated by shout-recognition. He'd love an iPad. He can point at the thing, it does the thing - he's not prepared to learn, to know or to think about it. That's the market Apple will be aiming for; people who view computers as being more like toasters than toolboxes - that thing they use to do that thing. And people love toasters.

However, I genuinely believe that the likes of UNR offer a far better compromise over-all, because most people start out with flailing and shouting - it would be an awful shame to deny them the tools to move beyond that, should they be so inclined.
Description of a NetHack AI
The simple answer: if YouTube and other similar sites didn't exist. We may not have had some of the major innovations of the last 10 years

definitely independant music would be way behind where it is now.
To avoid registration:

http://news.google.com/news/search?pz=1&cf=all&ned=u...
Interesting. I wonder how how cultural differences will effect how the VC market develops south of the border? I imagine part of the reason why American-style VC isn't as widespread down there is due to political and social differences, rather than simply economic ones.
"...jumped the shark..."

If you suffer from literalism (inability to process idioms), 'jump the shark' ~ http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=jump%20the%20... in this instance means Joel's creativity has reached it's maxima - as if.
Ask HN: Boulder, CO meetup
How did the last one go? I unfortunately missed out on it, but would like to try and get another together.
Yeah, I agree somewhat.

The current problems are security, upload bandwidth, and NAT traversal. As well as that your computer has to be on whenever your friends are accessing your stuff.

If (when) ipv6 becomes widespread, we will be able to cut out the NAT. If lots of people start doing it, then the upload bandwidth that ISPs give you will probably increase. And security should be solvable for most consumer purposes when the quality of software (both server and OS level) goes up -- it needs to ensure that your firewall is properly configured, etc.

So we're left with leaving your computer on. And that's an expensive problem, because it's not very power-efficient to leave a desktop computer running all the time to serve a website that gets two hits a day. That actually seems to be a strong argument against everybody running their own webserver. But maybe it doesn't really matter, because a lot of people run a computer all the time anyway. I'm not sure.
Agreed, but most bankers aren't paid to think anymore. I had those other documents in hand as well... but, show the website... whatever works.

Perhaps there is a secret thrill in being a banker who may one day catch a Patriot Act violator, or even a $200 bonus?
Really useful observations, and I'm most grateful.

The colours and kids are part of our branding ourselves away from the stereotypical, 'hard, commercial' business consultant, and while that works really well for people who are introduced to us it's obviously not as clear to people who might stumble across us online.

Turnover must be too jargony. I might change to revenue.

And I think you nailed it with 'explain what the company does'. Easy to forget sometimes that the rest of the world doesn't care about your baby! Many thanks.
Coming from a CS program that thought of design as "scoff that thing they do over in the art building"

Dude, you should name and shame that CS program. Sure the art building can argue about aesthetics, but bad design is a bug and should be treated as such.
Citi has now apologized:

http://blog.fabulis.com/post/411819786/reaching-the-citi-lim...
I wonder how much analyses like these help FlightCaster get good PR and better search rankings. It seems that (1) these analyses would be of interest to publications targeting potential FlightCaster users (travel-related, etc.) and (2) it would be hard for a journalist to reference such an analysis without providing some background on FlightCaster's services.
They just need to connect a voltmeter to the server and purge it of "tweetans".
I haven't had the degree long enough to know one way or the other if it's a net benefit. It's possible that it really helps as you get further along in your career. And truthfully, the downside hasn't been so bad that I've thought about hiding it on a resume (in CS -- I definitely thought about it while hunting for a job in biotech, for various perverse reasons).

I'm just saying that I've personally experienced the downside, so I know it's not a made-up phenomenon.
Joel changed my life! But now his role is over he educated a whole generation of developers, even those who prefer to bash him than give him credit!
This is awesome, congrats.

What really stands out is the way you engage this community, seek advice, and give back with your honest response. Part of what makes HN great.

What can we help with? I have a dev team that might be able to spare some bandwidth. If there's anything we can do, please let me know (email in the profile). No strings attached.
What you should do if you just lost your biggest customer
John Carmack: "Obama’s plans are a good thing for space flight"
Poll: What was your reaction to this item?
Yesterday I posted a link to a small script I wrote and, as expected, it pretty much sank without trace. I'm always interested to learn more about the people here on HN, what they find interesting, what they might find useful, so I thought this would be a good litmus paper test. Did you see it? And if so, what was your reaction?

I'll put a link to the item in the comments, and thanks in advance for letting me know.

ADDED IN EDIT: I'm finding this really interesting - thanks to everyone answering. However, if this item doesn't get to the front page then it too will sink. Please upvote it, and if you don't want me to get the karma (which I understand) then downvote the scapegoat comment further down - thanks.
Didn't see it
Saw the item, didn't follow the link.
Followed the link: tl;dr
Followed the link: Hated the page and left.
Followed the link: Not something I'd use.
Followed the link: I'd use it, but it looks too complicated.
Followed the link: I might/will use it. (and thanks)
The iPhone's OS is feature-poor and anemic, hence the lack of controls. It has a very, very limited set of things that it needs to perform when you compare it to a real computer. "math is hard, let's go shopping!"
Getting traction for your startup – how we did it.
"... But as the business matures, I've come to realize that blogging is holding me back ..."

SO83 ~ http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail4403.html goes into detail why?

There is an audience bigger than blog reading, tech/web crowd. There is also the time poor "Exec" for example, who carry a Blackberry and read email all the time but not the Web. This is a tactic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Calacanis devised to reach a broader audience. Create an email list a broader audience can read.

- blogging: to market his company & product to developers

- podcasting: to market stackoverflow & his company to developers

- email: to market stackoverflow to execs in prep for IPO and broader business market

I always watch what Joel does carefully because changes he make signal new opportunities.
The first form screams "Add me to your prospects database, so your automation can start your sales people hounding me". The second form softens that impression a bit. I suspect it might work better on me.
As promised: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1149364
How much Linux kernel code has survived the past five years?
FlightCaster (and SeatGeek) are a new breed of startup that uses statistical modeling to empower consumers in an industry that they usually have little to no say in.
http://friendorfollow.com/ is also pretty good for this kind of thing.
I considered that - right now they're just penalized as normal @mentions. I'm not sure if

". @steve Going to the grocery store now!"

is much worse than

"Going to the grocery store now, @steve!"

I've also considered extra-penalizing manual "RT @steve", but will wait until all the main clients support it (Tweetie for Mac, for example.)
No they shouldn't, simply because police shouldn't be able to enforce immoral laws. If there were a morality field generator that magically allowed only the enforcement of morally sound laws within their sphere of operation, it would be a good idea to build a bunch of them and turn them on.
I'm not trying to advocate alcohol & drug use, I just thought it was a fun quote and somewhat on-topic. It's supposed to be tongue in cheek, at least that's how I interpret it.
The Fallacy of Hoop Jumping
Yeah, the grocery store copy machine still exists some places - if only there were a way to print documents to them.

The Kinko's docstore is a great idea, I think, but they need to find a way to take all of the human contact out of the small jobs.
Dropbox, AFP and the Olympics.
If employees don't like what they're being offered, they should vote with their feet.
I don't understand why public employees are allowed to unionize. If the public does not have a choice whether to pay your salary, then at least the public's representatives should have the right to easily fire you.
New Discovery: Photosynthesis uses quantum effects
If companies can than why not the police?

There would be guidelines and you could take them to court for breaking them. There will be new sections in the law and new court judgments to base actions upon. It would evolve. Let there be a special department trained and specialized in this.

All I am saying is pass the onus to government and give them a way to do it.
Yeah, the lack of GNU tools is what really annoys me most about Solaris. The Solaris kernel (and assorted kickass technologies like dtrace and ZFS) with a GNU userland sounds pretty great, but there is some FUD surrounding its future and roadmap.
Thanks!

I'll drop you a line off HN.
Online Video as Publishing: This Is How We Do It
Hosted document management is still not quite popular within big enterprises. It will be worth to make non hosted solution available with MS Office integration.
This is true, but if most people don't use all the features of a real OS anyway then you're better off removing them in favor of a really good implementation of the few features people do use. And then you're right back to iPhone OS: it does little, but it does that really well.
Congratulations and good luck crocodoc team!
According to the article there's a version that companies can install themselves on their own servers.
We May See a Chrome OS Netbook Mid-2010, But Not For Sale
I went to one of his StackOverflow Dev Days. While I didn't speak to him, I caught glimpses of him every so often standing by himself amongst a sea of developers that made me think that he's getting a bit bored with... things... for lack of a better term. I'm not sure whether "things" would be his business, software development, or a combination of things in his life. The problem with being Joel from JoelOnSoftware is that you have to always be on. You can't ever have an opinion about anything without getting into a discussion with someone about it. Like you, I hope he just goes on sabbatical.

Blogging/writing on a regular basis is a lot like polling vs event-driven programming. Joel's been polling himself way too often trying to come up with something to write so that he can publish something. When you poll for something, 90% of the time you'll find the thing you're precisely NOT interested in. I'm sure he'll be back when there's something good to talk about.
The difference is that these are specifically works which are no longer on sale from the manufacturer. The basis for being sued for "piracy" of music or software is damage to the publisher in the form of lost sales, if the publisher is no longer selling the product so there is no longer a valid claim of damages. In theory you could still be sued on other grounds, but that seems very unlikely.
I know a lot of this is obvious to some, but I gotten feedback that it's helpful so I thought I'd share with the community.

Bottom line - SEO is your friend when you're looking to build a large, sustainable audience.
we pulled it from a data feed provided by cricket archive, presumably they're still doing that now.
I guess I don't see the point. Windows isn't hard to learn, neither is OS X. Heck, even Ubuntu isn't too bad, if you only want to do three things with any of them: mail, word processing, web surfing, for example. I've taught numerous seniors how to do these things on a computer.

I don't get questions until they want to know how to do more with their computer than they already knew. Using the iPwn model, I'd have to say "you're shit out of luck, that's all this system can do." and I really don't see how that's good for anyone.
I just skimmed through article and missed that. I think they are on the right track then.
I'm confused.

Are you suggesting that Joel has long since jumped the shark, or that he has not come close to reaching his full potential?

The shark jumping incident I am referring to occurred in 2006 so it's not like this is a recent idea. http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/09/has-joel-spolsky-ju...
They do, by never talking to startups. Startups suffer without every knowing any better.
I found it interesting they used Flash- it seems like all their features could have been done using JavaScript.

While Flash almost certainly works better in this situation, I wonder how it affects their odds of an acquisition. Is "increasing chances of acquisition" important or talked about at YC?

Scribd uses Flash (and their document viewer looks a lot like Scribd, another YC company- is it the same code, or just a homage?), however it seems to me the features would be more at home at Google Docs or Zoho.

Either way, awesome startup- it was incredibly easy to use, and did exactly what it said it would. Well done, and congrats!
SEO for bloggers: Crafting high-ranking post titles
There are many interesting points here, but "programmers will not be able to afford to be ignorant about the energy cost of the programs they write" struck me especially.

I worked in the embedded space and we had rough notions of the (power) cost of using various instructions and hardware blocks -- more or less related to the number of bits flipped (for example adding 0 does less work that adding 0xfffffff).

It would be grand if this filtered down to the mainstream. If a program runs on a million machines, making it more power efficient would be a big win economically, but the programmer probably has no incentive.

Working out big O assumptions for power use on your platform is an interesting exercise!
I agree that it sucks when you make something that you think is cool and no one seems to care (or notice) even when you actively try to share it. That said, it happens all the time...and it makes it that much sweeter when people actually do care/notice.
I think those are ohmmeters, actually. I forget what they call them, but the one they used on me to show me that I need help was an ohmmeter. I declined the help; I was only there because a smokin' hot blonde woman at Balboa Park invited me. Back in the seventies.
The SO podcast is one of the few I occasionally listen to but it suffers from the same problem that nearly every podcast does: it is extremely boring to listen to people ramble on for an hour.

IMHO, podcasts as they exist today need to be more like radio programs: sharply edited, with a narrative progression. I have very little interest in listening to you and your buddy talk about how great XYZ is.
I wonder if students would use this to read notes/textbooks cooperatively?

I can't count the number of times I've wasted half an hour trying to figure out WTF an author or professor is talking about, only to learn two pages later that I was hung up on an over-generalized equation, badly-worded simplification, or similar. One yellow sticky note in the margin that said "gets more specific 2pgs later" --which a lot of readers would pencil in for themselves anyway-- could save man-years of time over the life of a text.

It would be useful for authors too. Teaching documents usually have a feedback cycle measured in years (if the loop is ever closed at all), whereas this would allow them to access their readers collective impressions almost immediately.

You could start by adding publicly-available PDF textbooks like:

http://www-stat.stanford.edu/~tibs/ElemStatLearn/

http://diestel-graph-theory.com/

http://www.plasma.uu.se/CED/Book/

(I'm sure there other open texts out there that are less wonky, of course. This is just what's on my menu).
Is there any evidence of that programmers avoid working at startups?

Is there any evidence that disproportionate returns (as opposed to risk avoidance) is the major reason?

I'm not saying increased compensation wouldn't increase interest (that applies to any job). But, there is nothing in this article to suggest that startups are hurting to recruit and that this is due to compensation rather than life/work balance and job stability.
Does the nature know about and use quantum effects more than we do?[sic]

Yes.

Also the last paragraph is interesting. From another scientist:

"Based on past experience, I predict this work will be misrepresented by those who desperately want to believe that bizarre quantum effects such as entanglement are crucial to biomolecules being able to function in an optimum manner. I see no evidence for such claims in this experimental data."
Also see http://lwn.net/Articles/375550/ from the comments and its associated thread.
Cool project. If I'd seen it, I'd have clicked the link based on username recognition - but the title didn't give me much to expect. Something just slightly more descriptive would have piqued my interest more ("predict time-to-completion of shell commands based on their output"). Also, I find that known community members get more clicks by making it clear it's their own project ("Tell HN" or "My script to..."). I didn't recognize your domain name in this case.
Deer hooves open forming a V shape when touching the floor, that's how they don't get stuck when drinking water from a lake. I would guess speed is also important.
Linux From Scratch, and I put it on a Game Cube. Nothing like researching for 2 months and then realizing your TV and couch made for a lousy hacking terminal.
There is a big difference between "update" and "annotate". The former requires a multi-month review cycle with many opportunities for objection. The latter just happens (apparently).

In addition, the way Tim phrased it implies that these items are already arguably in scope, but let's make it more explicitly clear, as opposed to implying that they were out of scope and a change is needed for them to be in scope at all.
I think that it is likely that many religious organizations learned 'sex sells' much earlier than the marketing industry even.
Ubuntu & Yahoo
"Everything" and "nothing" are pretty strong terms! Good connections obviously help people raise money, which helps them make investments, which is what makes them VCs. But I've never met a dumb VC, and the only "lazy" ones I meet are better described as "efficient."

The VC's job is to raise money, invest it in promising companies, and help them realize the maximum possible value of that investment. Being good at the last two is nice, but being unable to raise money would make it pretty tough for you to become an investor.
You have the gist of it, but the organization in question is the W3C, not the WHATWG (which is a separate organization also working on HTML5).
Also in rural Australia & Ireland.
We had this about a month ago at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1079775 , here are some answers from the lead actors themselves.
Let's Make a JavaScript Framework: Library Architecture
It is important to note though that he is not claiming that he sees no evidence for the claims made in the article, he's just predicting that others will make claims that are not supported based on the same data.
You can also see it conceivably helping with a start up idea that pushes the boundaries, something that requires you to do years of research to pull off well is probably going to be a bigger gap in the start up market that something that just does something in a crowded market slightly better and more efficiently.
"Microsoft Corp. today withdrew its demand that Cryptome.org yank the 'Microsoft Global Criminal Spy Guide' document from its site and said it had never intended for the whistleblower's domain to be knocked off the Web. ... 'We are requesting to have the site restored and are no longer seeking the document's removal.'"

"Interesting" that anyone, like Microsoft, can turn someone else's web site on or off at will.
Maybe some do, but option grants, like salaries, are subject to supply and demand. The prevailing amounts are what they are because startups can successfully acquire talent at them.
I've always used this example for those that think our medicine and medical care in the US are #1 because of our "exchange-based" health care system.

You'd be hard-pressed to name one cure to a deadly world-wide condition that a private corporation has developed based on solely their own R&D. From Diptheria to Polio, the cure or vaccine for the vast majority of diseases afflicting the world in any significant way were developed in Academic laboratories, usually under government funding such as NIH grants.

In fact, alot of our most significant technologies are grounded in academia, then later licensed or commercialized. Google's one. In fact the government's NIST technology transfer and Small Business Innovation Research orgs promote start-up researchers to use NIST resources such as grants and lab space/time to bring experimental technologies to market.

Meanwhile, companies are _usually_ punished by Wall St. for giving more and more toward R&D. Most public companies simply cannot do it for fear of investor revolt.
You would really need to see the distribution as you can plan for a consistently average delay, but unpredictable arrival can be a real pest.
Awesome. How do you guys convert binary DOC/PPT files to files you can work with? If I remember correctly, the only way to do it was to convert it on a Windows system.
Because it's geeky and a tinkerer's platform. There's already a well-researched and established pattern here. Geeks are most likely to be males.

This is like asking why so many Barbie owners are female. No offense, Jolie. It's a good discussion.
Scientologists call them e-meters: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-meter