skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It seems to me that most bloggers talking about the decline of Windows seems to be looking at things from the standpoint of an informed developer or consumer highly in touch with technology and modern innovation.

What these folks don't realize is that they only make up a wee bit of the marketplace using Windows, and it's going to take a lot more than talking above the heads of Lawyers, Doctors and Educators, using jargon only the blogger understands to convince people to make the transition to an operating system. Sure enough, Dell rolled out a line of machines that powered Linux but one company doing this isn't going to change minds either.

People need to be immersed in other technologies, they need to know how they work, why they matter and how to make the applications to their operations. Until then, Windows is going to enjoy the room it has in the operating system market because quite frankly: Windows just works for certain people, and those certain people make up the largest part of the market.

Sure, Vista was a flubb, but a lot of people toughed it out and eventually got used to it because they have no clue how to install other operating systems. And even though installing Ubuntu is as simple as point and click, the barrier to entry is just too high because as far as they are concerned, they'd rather not bother messing with it for fear they may break something and never be able to use their computers again.

Someone link me to a blog that talks about the other side of Windows user experience, and maybe you'll have something worth talking.
Google made information as easy to come by as air. Fb made it easier to know who your girlfriend is thinking about cheating on you with. In the scheme, fb will be a great scrapbook for historians to peruse but Google will have changed the way we learn.
Good to see a balanced perspective; the role of actually selling the product seems to be often overlooked.

To give an example "closer to home" for most readers, one of the Reddit cofounders was non-technical, and was responsible for a big part of reddit's success and eventual acquisition by Conde Nast.
You mean wall street?
Voted up for the crying Mac, but other than that I have to say you dish out just as many stereotypes as you complain about receiving. I am male but I don't care about beer or football, and I would never spread porn in the workplace. If I got lucky with hot babes frequently, maybe I would brag about it - but I wonder, what exactly would you be interested in talking about with men? Seems to me that relationship issues are one of the common themes of human conversation.
2011 Tipping Point For Web Apps In The Enterprise (Read Write Web)
I'd like to see tagging support in the software. I think that would go a long way towards helping. It just might be a long time before someone implements it...
Why do you think it still has a long way to go? It works fine for me (also Ubuntu) - more than fine actually. So fine that I don't want to use anything else atm.

Sure, there were some rough spots in the beginning (solve them once and you are done), but every operating system has them. Overall Ubuntu seems more usable than the alternatives to me (unless you can wrap your mind around the Apple way of thinking maybe - I can't).

Everybody is laughing, but I'll say it again: the single coolest move Microsoft could make would be to switch over to Linux. They could provide a fancy theme (they are actually reasonably good with user interfaces, having a research lab and all), port their applications to Linux, and everybody would be happy. I don't think Windows itself is the big moneymaker, anyway. Rather, I suspect they tend to pay people for using it, so they could save money by moving away from it.
At least they put in a bit more effort than last time:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=125209
I see this often in forums that don't have tagging, where users say, "tagging will fix this!"

I haven't seen so many forums that use tagging where it actually works in a very useful way.
Just curious, how can you identify that a profile is a band? I've noticed the "MySpace music profile" pattern match, is that something you can tag a profile with? Who tags the profiles?
I feel uneasy about sending my data to an anonymous email address, to be honest.
Answering questions posted to news.yc
But do those people really have the ideas they claim to have, or do they only have vague, unformulated notions, whimsies of grandiose vision without supporting thought? Anyone can say "I'll write a book," but very few people can tell you the plot in any great detail, let alone the motifs or themes they'd try to work in. People just think they've given things more thought than they really have, or really ever will.

To put it another way, when I say "idea supply," I am only referring to the ideas hardy enough to survive the communication process.
Strictly speaking, Erlang processes have a type of shared memory -- ets tables -- but the semantics are somewhat different from other languages that use traditional shared memory. However, when you need synchronization, you just use Mnesia transactions, which make working with this kind of shared memory a piece of cake. Also, Mnesia is distributed, a nice attribute that other STM implementations lack.
Weebly hacker compromised around 15 websites.
A computer hacker known as System error the leader of hackers paradise http://www.hackersparadise.synthasite.com/ compromised around 19 weebly websites, then graffitied them with messages saying they have been hacked, shout out to snoxd.net, hack forums.net and other hacking groups.The websites have been restored now but I managed to get a screenshot of one when he was discussing it on a forum: http://img266.imageshack.us/img266/2006/hackedpj5.png

I found on the forums that he created an exploit in the C++ and Java programming languages and he said weebly was a test for something bigger, I do not no what he means by that but it's a major concern as this "System Error" character has even been known for hacking government computers such as NASA, His email address was on the hacked websites 5y573m.3rr0r@gmail.com and I tried to find out what he was planning to do, but instead of getting a reply the next time I tried to turn my computer on it said "Some of system files are missing" and turns off, i am pretty sure he did that!.
But I suppose the server-edition is not as 'bloated' as desktop? Personally I'm not much for using Ubuntu on the desktop, because the standard installation contains way too much bloat. Like a `bluetoothd` running standard. But if the server-edition comes pretty 'unbloated' out of the box, I might consider that for my next setup.
I think I would be more enthusiastic about these sorts of postings if they didn't invariably occur a few days after YC rejected a bunch of people. It's not like they're bad ideas (asterisk), but they'd be a little bit less tinged with the negative association if they were to pop up independently, and not seemingly as a reaction to a failed attempt at YC.

(asterisk) I am not in a position to try for YC myself, and live somewhere where I basically have zero contact with hackers/startup people, so I'm actually pretty enthusiastic about utilizing the internet in order to participate in that "scene".
!(!evil)
I'm very much in favor of banning Valleywag.

They picked up a comment that I made on HN about a friend of mine at Yahoo. They picked up my one comment, and turned it into two articles about Yahoo's attitude towards the Microsoft merger. They also posted information that personally identified my friend as the source of the information.

Granted, it was my mistake to begin with in posting that here, but I tried to make it right. PG edited the offending comment for me, and I wrote Valleywag asking them to remove the identifying information for fear that my friend might loose his job in the upcoming layoffs.

Not only did they not remove the identifiying information, but they were really nasty to me about the entire affair and I though needlessly hurtful.

My friend did get laid off. I don't know if it had anything to do with the article or not, however. I don't think it did, and either way, he's doing rather well for himself consulting.

So, while I do have some issues about quality of the content over at Valleywag; I have bigger issues about the editorial process there. If they can take a random post from an online forum and turn it into two articles about Yahoo's attitude towards Microsoft in the takeover process, all of their content is suspect in my opinion.

My opinion is that the majority of their content has a gossip rag/tabloid feel to it, and I would love to see that removed from the Hacker News listing. I see no reason to reward their trollishness with traffic from Hacker News, even if 15-20 people vote up a post linking to them.
I'm not a passionate MySpace user -- I don't even have an account, and I would agree that it's poorly designed, and the UI's not so great.

But it is what it is -- just because I'm not a passionate MySpace user, although you of course made that great assumption, does not mean it does not provide value for those who use it.

Again, your assuming people use MySpace and Facebook for exactly the same purposes, which in fact, many do not.

You can go on and on about how Facebook is for the great sophisticated people in their early twenties, and again, it shows you don't understand how and who uses the internet.

Show me the app you've designed that has amazing UI and also has 100 million users.

Keep ranting and raving about why Facebook > MySpace and you're still failing to miss the point: while they are both "social networks" their uses, which at times competing, are generally completely different.

Clearly you group yourself in this "sophisticated" category, and for someone as myself that has claimed for a couple years Facebook is a lot better than MySpace, I can see why that would comfort you to think of it that way.

Millions of MySpace users are often times just different than the millions of Facebook users.

Accept it.
still you don't answer if is irreplaceable and why
Non-competes don't stand up in court. Who would sign this type of agreement, though? I've signed non-competes before, but "I agree to provide a copy of this Agreement to any person or entities seeking to hire me before accepting employment with or engagement by any such person or entity." is insane.

I've never been so glad to not have taken a Google job.
Simply have a lsit of who voted up this article, and add a mechanism for changing your vote. It's easy to upvote something that's got a good title, then realise it's crap and not be able to retract your vote.
Because this is a legit story and prime argument as to why blanket bans are imperfect?
great idea...done.
Europe says no to cutting off filesharers
Another advantage is that, since the desktop version is pretty nice and easy to use, you can get all your developers using it on their desktops, so that they're running the same system as the servers. In the last company I worked for, we were set up like that - Ubuntu everywhere. It made things easier to keep track of, as well as cheaper because no one had windows, except for a few machines where it was indispensable for running various program.
Feds Charge Porn Producer With Selling Adult Content to Adults
Linux is difficult with new hardware. I have a low-end HP that I've loaded with Fedora 8, and am still (months later) unable to use the wifi or my new (low end) epson printer.

Now, before I get lectured on the fact that it's not the fault of Linux (drivers are proprietary), it is nevertheless the problem of Linux.

I love to fool around with that stuff, but I simply don't have time to learn and hack my own solution. And there is no way that someone like my wife would even consider it.

With Linux, you really have to pay attention. Most people don't want to do that with their computers any more than they do with their cars.
I meant it more as an analogy, in the sense that the MySpace crowd is generally happy with what they've got, and don't feel much incentive to switch to Facebook.
Declaring RSS Bankruptcy
Actually that was intentional. I'd been planning on setting up most of these things anyway, but I figured, "This is the time that people will be most open to try out new stuff."

I don't think there's anything wrong with translating some of the feelings that people have of rejection into momentum for something positive. Quite the contrary, this is exactly the time to bring up these ideas. They'd get nowhere near the participation were they brought up randomly and independently at other times of the year.

Edit: Oh, and for the record, you're like a one hour flight from us. :-)
It is, but not because of the technology.

http://www.horsepigcow.com/2008/02/23/social-capital-and-the...
How to choose a Linux distribution for your server
I'm in a web entrepreneur mailing list with a couple of other guys from this forum. We started on email, but quickly moved on to using the wordpress prologue theme on our own URL, http://EntreList.com. It's working out pretty well, it's more fun to share the discussion across the web, and it's given me a ton of ideas for my own app.

Prologue wouldn't scale for the level of discussion that YC news handles, but it's good for small groups (perspective co-founders, perhaps?).

Maybe you could set up a tried & tested discussion forum via http://www.lefora.com/
>hacking government computers such as NASA

So are aliens real?
Great topic, I think.

Scaling has a lot of non-technical components - often people doing it wrong. That's true, sometimes I don't have time to do it right - creating a demand for an out of the box solution.

Currently I'm experimenting with http://vertica.com 's VerticaDB. It's easy to install, uses regular SQL and other RDBMS concepts, has some newer techniques for optimization out of the box (compression, joins, etc). I can't speak to scalability, but since it's designed for just these issues I'm looking for, I have high hopes.

I also looked into Hadoop/HBase - and there's promise there. Other DHTs are known to have issues with certain kinds of work.

Hadn't heard of Mnesia.
Whether Facebook can be replaced is an interesting question.

I'm leaning towards "no". For any site to replace Facebook it would require either many, many users to make the transition to another site or to outright leave making the site less useful for its users, and I honestly don't see that happening. Facebook is honestly nicely designed, has plenty of users and I can't see any killer app or nicer equivalent of Facebook appearing to make moving worthwhile.

The only thing that could replace Facebook is an unprecedented sharing of data between many significant players allowing interoperability between sites much like how E-Mail works. The existence of DataPortability may be a slow but sure approach towards this goal but there's too many factors to consider influencing whether this will ever actually happen. I certainly hope so in the long run - one site having the amount of influence that Facebook potentially can worries me.

Disclaimer: I don't actually use Facebook, and probably never will.
I dont know, so what should be done about this? should I contact the owner of weebly and tell him that it was test for something bigger and to tell the police? i'm sure because he'll allready know though because when I saw the snoxd forums he say he email the owner for money.

sorry for my bad english, I'm not very good.

Thomas
I still use W2K, in about 1% of my coding time...
Genomics, genetics, and biology news (made using brett of News.YC's slinkset software)
Would you like for that to be added to the Planet Site? (I've got a couple of pending requests that I'll be adding this afternoon.)

http://planetstartup.directededge.com/
Does this does introduce a serious sampling bias? Is 100-101M in the middle of the id range? Or at the head or tail?
Ask YC: column-oriented databases and BigTable clones
AppEngine has renewed interest in Google's BigTable. Has anyone used Hadoop's Hbase? Or Hypertable? What is your opinion of the usefulness/applicability of column-oriented databases (distributed or otherwise) in web applications? Do you use or recommend this approach?
OK, I forgot about that, because I bought my hardware accordingly. You can't run OS X on a normal PC either, and nobody considers it a dealbreaker ;-)
If you buy a new computer, it should be possible to buy it with Linux drivers (Dell does it).
Gartner Says Vista Will Collapse. And That’s Why The Yahoo Deal Must Happen
To YC or to VC? That is my question…
Windows is 'collapsing,' Gartner warns
> Why do you think it still has a long way to go?

Have a play around with keyboard shortcuts and try to get WindowsKey+E to open your home folder. The bugs in keyboard shortcuts has been an exercise in balloon squeezing for as long as ubuntu has been around.

Another - audio. On a default install to my laptop sound didn't work at all, and now I can only play from one device at a time. I don't have these problems on my Apple.

Much as I love my ubuntu, it simply doesn't compare to the level of polish in XP, Vista and OSX.

> I don't think Windows itself is the big moneymaker, anyway

Why do you think that? I think that Windows is an spectacular moneymaker.

> Rather, I suspect they tend to pay people for using it, so they
> could save money by moving away from it.

Not sure what you mean by this. Can you rephrase?
"You can't run OS X on a normal PC either, and nobody considers it a dealbreaker"

Still - it's easy to buy hardware in which you can have confidence that OSX will work seamlessly. Not so with Ubuntu. Ubuntu is my preferred OS and I went through this recently while getting a new laptop.

Part of the problem is that people in the Linux world are so accustomed to having to do tweaks to get hardware working (and sneering at people like me who can't be bothered) that there's always a blur between hardware that "works with ubuntu" in the sense that you turn it on and get all functionality; or "works with ubuntu" in the sense that you can install it, invest lots of energy tweaking in order to get some functionality kind of working until you do the next major kernel upgrade.

Another example of Ubuntu not doing so well - wireless networking. The UI doesn't make sense, and is unhelpful when you can't get a connection. These are complete deal-breakers in terms of Ubuntu as a consumer OS.
I had to work really late last night because I spent the whole afternoon watching videos from this page! I loved the old videos of sidney coleman from the 70's lecturing about physics. Thank you so much for this resource.
Idioms and Anti-Idioms in Python
edit: did you miss an option "auto post to reddit" ?
You are correct in that you can get an out-of-the-box working configuration. But if you get a new scanner or printer (or other hardware), it could be trouble.
I think the description is an interesting functionality on slinkset. It's much better implemented than description on digg and the like because it doesn't take up much space and it is optional.

http://news.thinkgene.com/links/Al_Gore_Helps_Navigenics_Lau...
Nomads at last - special report on wireless communication
Are you thinking of adding an element of geo location of the hackers in?

I remember hackertrackr doing something similar.

I'd reckon your physical location is pretty important in making connections.
The semantic web - Start making sense
Paul, Leave Valleywag alone. They're just a symptom of a bigger challenge. Let's fix the moderation system so we can squash any obvious linkbait.
The wording of this poll is unfair. I don't think they should be banned, because that's censorship, but I don't necessarily "like seeing" Valleywag stories on News.YC. However, that's why I have a mouse, eyes and a brain.. I can "censor" stuff in my head, just like many other humans. Clearly some people here lack that facility, which strikes me as odd.
The last thing entrepreneurs need is "more networking." We need more "doing," more education, and more understanding how to bootstrap our ideas rather than rely on things like YC (although YC does a great job, it should be "an option" instead of "the option.")

There are already more than enough places for entrepreneurs to network, both online and in the real world. There are not, however, enough people developing exciting new ideas and products.
We actually tried using other systems, here's what I thought and why I eventually chose Slinkset.com:

- News.Arc [http://arclanguage.org/install]

I got this installed and running behind Apache but, long story short: this system is to be administered via an Arc Lisp prompt. No other tools exist. If you're Paul Graham, that's great, but most communities will have difficulty justifying Lisp and Unix expertise qualification to moderate a simple forum. Further, Slicehost started baulking about "suspicious memory use," suggesting that we had misconfigured MySQL. Finally, the system was simply not as stable as I would have needed it to be. Everytime a new directory or file? had to be created, the application would simply return a blank screen, for example.

Update: Also, sometimes while writing long comments (like this one), I'll get the "unknown link" error when submitting.

news.arc would have earned us a fist full of nerd dollars, but I understand that sometimes nerd dollars are simply not acceptable tender in all circumstances.

- [http://reddit.com/reddits/create]

Has all the features we want, but is a part of Reddit: Reddit domain, Reddit users, Reddit ads, etc.

- Create Your Reddit [http://reddit.com/reddits/create]

Has all the features we want, but is a part of Reddit: Reddit domain, Reddit users, Reddit ads, etc.

- Drigg [http://www.drigg-code.org/]

Drigg is a collection of Drupal modules to recreate Drupal. The installation and configuration was such a hassle, the effort to strip all the unneeded features was too much, and worse of all, I got a Javascript error when trying to vote. I was not pleased by this precedent of needing to debug complex software to do a simple task.

- Pligg [http://pligg.com/]

Pligg is a very close clone of Digg in PHP/MySQL. I installed this system without trouble, but the required configuration / feature stripping left me open to other suggestions.

- Linkherd [http://www.linkherd.com/]

Kevin (rms) suggested both this and Slinkset three days ago. He showed me http://www.linkherd.com/science/, which I liked better than slinkset.com, but at the time, Linkherd.com was broken. Fail.

- Slinkset [http://www.slinkset.com]

Had all the features I needed to get started, founders were responsive and obviously working on the site, killer auto-submit RSS feature, let us use our own domain, no configuration.

Brett Gibson of Slinkset has been very responsive, and he tells us that more features like CSS and HTML templates are coming soon.
no soup for vallywag
As a business/idea guy I hope I'm needed. I have a a stack of programming books on my desk, I actually look at code to try to get my mind around what is going on. But I don't program. What I do bring to the table is experience, an understanding of why an application needs to exist and why current solutions don't exist. I just saw that Angie's List just received a good chunk of funding. That site's founder is not a hacker, but obviously has been instrumental in its success.
I know. I caught that. My point is that is the kind of logic that the rest of society might latch onto. The risk is that study drugs are at a non-trivial risk of being perceived as a silver bullet for the larger societal problem of deficient school systems and American competitiveness. Maybe it wouldn't be mandated but it might be encouraged.

This entire discussion is making me want to go take a pill.
You're not forward-thinking out-of-the-box. These best-of-breed phrases are multi-disciplinary across vertical and horizontal markets.
I don't know when/why this became reality. On my facebook account, I only have people I know pretty well, many of them lifelong friends. It keeps my list short (Something like 40 I think) but it doesn't crowd it up. I guess that's not the norm