skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Users (...) are already struggling with a graphically-based conceptual model of computers and the Internet, so showing them a flashing console cursor where they can type dozens of commands is just too much of a mind-blowing conceptual leap.

I don't agree. Any user that writes anything on the computer (I exclude the ones who don't know to use the keyboard) expects to be able to type something in the computer and that the computer gives meaningful results.

The success of Google proved that.

It also proved another thing: where to type must be clear and obvious and the results must match the expectations.
It would look much different than "best of".

I imagine the principles to be

1. Look for weak signals (i.e. some random post about some random subject area)

2. Monitor to see whether it gains traction up slowly but surely (i.e. not your typical HN burst algo but something that might be months or years to pick up)

3. Deliver to user before it peaks but after it has reached some momentum.
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Waiting For The New Twitter? Get A DM When You’re Eligible
Ask HN: If you would have to choose one book what would it be?
There are many wonderful programming books that I would like to read and understand. Here are some examples:

* PAIP (Paradigms of artificial intelligence programming)
* SICP (I read this but didn't complete ALL the exercises)
* TAOCP
* Others?

The problem is that each of these books would take me months to go through, but that's ok for me because I know that the benefits are enormous.

My question is: which one would you study first? Are there any other books that I should read first? My goals with programming is to create web and desktop (mac, iphone) apps if that's relevant.
To me, this is one of the big unspoken about benefits of working in a startup. There is no room for slack and if someone isn't doing their job it's immediately apparent. Nothing kills my motivation more than working with someone who is technically incompetent and/or generally unpleasant to be around.
Google Fights Back In Battle For Talent
nickb, is that you?
Women in Tech: Look around the World and Stop Complaining
The Seven Best Startups At DEMO
Interview with Bre Pettis (MakerBot) on the future of 3D printing
I'm probably showing my age, but to me the all time classics are:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_C_Programming_Language_%28b...
Android is the most trendy Mobile Os - Mobile site maker
I wonder what we actually want from "social". I know that I don't want to subscribe to some kind of friend spam merged with regular spam from advertisers or share "stuff" with people in my address book. That's totally useless for me and bloating all kinds of Google services with it will be annoying.

What I do want is collaboration, ad hoc collaboration, project based collaboration, etc. I want to connect and integrate my data with that of others with less friction than today. Google should go after Microsoft Office and leave Facebook to Zuckerberg's "dumb fucks".
Twitter Helps Israel Buy @Israel … From Israel Meléndez | Epicenter | Wired.com
I've read the mythical man month already. I've not yet read the C programming language though.
Orkut is popular in Asia and Latin America.
(Disclaimer: happy Google employee here.)

I do know the numbers, though I can't share them, and Google's turnover is ridiculously low. Much lower than I would expect from any company in Silicon Valley, which has a notoriously fluid job market.

It's also false that there's a headcount freeze: the total number of employees at Google has increased significantly over the past year.
I've got an NB30 running Ubuntu, which I think is a (slightly) ruggidized version of the same laptop.

I'm very pleased with it overall. Battery life seems really good even though I've selected the option to only charge to 80% to prolong battery life. It looks good and feels solid.

I didn't bother with UNR, I just set the top and bottom panels to autohide, and use Vimperator to browse which is very economical with vertical space. At first I used full screen to eke out that last few pixels, but it's generally not worth the bother. I might give UNR another go with Meerkat.

I'm trying to think of bad points. You need to hold down two keys to change the volume (fn-arrow), the screen brightness doesn't auto-adjust to ambient light. The touchpad doesn't have multitouch, but you can fake two finger click and scroll, rather than use side-scroll. I used to hit the backslash button when trying to use the right shift-key, but I got used to it soon enough.

You might want to check out this forum, for Linux on Samsung, that's were I got some extra drivers for the function keys etc.

http://www.voria.org/forum/
No amount of efforts or will can ever be more enduring then our love of the work. Then, even if we are willing to use the wills, instead of love, to control our behaviour, life is miserable.
If studying real relationships is so hard, how can you tell if the made up ones are valid?
I am constantly astonished at the amount of people who call themselves "web designers" and yet do nothing but paint pictures in Photoshop and couldn't even attempt a basic implementation in HTML/CSS. This seems to be widely accepted as standard in the industry and yet strikes me as irrational as calling yourself a painter and yet only being able to describe in prose what the picture should look like, never having bothered to learn how to actually paint or understand the medium.

An artist can only excel when they not only understand but learn to embrace and utilize the uniqueness and quirks of the medium they work in.
I have an Intel Classmate PC, 3rd generation with convertible touchscreen. It comes with a 16GB SSD (in my configuration) and runs Ubuntu 9.10 and 10.04 (the latter with some touchscreen driver trouble I didn't bother to fix, but others report success). Battery life five-ish hours, and pretty rugged. This may be a better choice if: you predict dropping it a lot, or if you're longing for a resistive touchscreen.
If I ran a motel in the middle of nowhere, and I was using wireless security cameras, it might make sense to have a separate, secured network in addition to the open network guests use. In this situation, hiding the network would make sense for purely aesthetic reasons - guests connecting to the internet would only have one SSID to choose from. As the article points out, any other uses of SSID hiding are either useless, or create additional problems.
I would say macbooks are a point in favour of the previous poster. They made some serious progress by becoming intel machines, i.e. PCs.
Zuckerberg claims top spot Vanity Fair 100, followed by Steve Jobs
Digital/Web entrepreneurs really are the new cool, claiming 6 of the top 10 spots on Vanity Fair 100. Warren Buffet is only No. 11
You know, I agree with you completely. This thread is rather depressing, a lot of people saying "it's not a big deal, he was young, etc". This is an ethically-challenged 19 year old who is boasting too much. It is a big deal (anyone remember Jeffrey Skilling of Enron, there are some non-trivial similarities between Zuckerberg and Skilling when he was young).
8 Management Lessons "the author" Learned Working At Apple
This article prompted me to do likewise. For the past 24 hours and running, I have used Duck Duck Go exclusively instead of Google. It is like a breath of fresh air. I tried DDG a few months back and it was a bit on the rough side. It has made tremendous strides in the intervening time.

As for Google, they have gone past their prime. As the other comments note, 2008 was the peak. Yahoo is in the midst of what may be the longest running identity crisis ever to hit a company. And the name of the game for both Google and Bing is to keep you on their site with their advertisements for as long as they possibly can. Like some tentacled monster, they don't want to just serve you and let you go. The cheap tricks masquerading as a flashy UI ruin the user experience and make me not want to go back. Duck Duck Go actually keeps you coming by serving salient information (aka 'value') and then lets you get on with life. Kinda reminds me of the difference between the personality ethic and the character ethic from Covey's 7HHEP.

This was a great post. Thanks for putting it forward.
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The questions you should ask yourself are the following:

* Does it matter if you lose the last 5sec. worth of updates? The last 5 minutes? The last day?

If you can lose 5sec. worth of updates, a MongoDB replication pair is just fine. If you can lose a day's worth of updates (or can easily reconstruct the database contents from other sources), you can try out pretty much anything without bad repercussions. If you can't lose anything, you're pretty much limited to the most conservative databases (the SQL bunch).

* What's the most obvious unit of data that you're working with?

If you always update single values (or add things to lists/sets), Redis is an excellent choice. If you have fixed-size records, SQL or one of the table-based options (Cassandra, Hbase) may be for you. If you have documents with substantial internal structure, a document store (MongoDB, CouchDB, or Lotus Notes if you want something expensive and commercial) would be a good option.

* How much data do you have?

If all of your data fits into memory (and for the price of another server, you may well get enough memory to fit all of your data), you can go pretty far with a single server. If it fits on a single set of hard disks, you'd want replication, not sharding, so that the risk of losing data is minimal. If your data is much larger than that, your only hope is a sharding setup - either with SQL+spit+glue, or Cassandra/HBase, or some version of MongoDB where sharding is stable enough for production use (I do remember seeing warnings - so the current version may or may not fit that description).
I guess what I'm trying to say is that as he was typing these IM's I don't think he was rubbing his hands and twiddling his mustache while cackling madly. There seem to be two camps of people on this issue: people who think he's a natural sociopath and was plotting on how to manipulate and cheat people from inside the womb (people who don't think personalities and opinions can change), and people who think he's probably just making a self-deprecating joke at a time in his life when this project wasn't yet as serious as it is now.

I'd rather picture the guy as an (extremely) socially clueless but generally well-meaning person whose sense of humor might be a little off. Sure he's had his privacy slip-ups in the past but the kid is captaining completely uncharted waters with one hand and beating back thousands of influencers throwing fistfuls of money with the other. I suspect that if anyone on this board, including me, found themselves with the almost overnight success of Facebook on their hands it wouldn't be too hard to find some out-of-context IM's to smear them with either. Let he who is without sin, blah blah blah.

Edit: To be clear I'm referring just to these IM's and how they relate to his running FB today, not to whatever history he may or may not have had with other developers. I don't know enough of that backstory to comment.
I'm not sure most people would want their searching habits to be 'social' in that plenty of people want to Google for stuff in their own time without anyone else knowing about it.
Perhaps a mixture of both. To me I made the switch when I got both an iPod and an iPhone so getting a Macbook was somewhat a natural next step when I needed to get a new laptop. Didn't care too much about what's inside the machine, the different OS experience was a major concern at the time though.
the question is: why would I _use_ it even if I joined it?
I am a buzz user but I never posted anything directly through buzz.

Why should I, the number of my friends on facebook is tenfold and does not include people that once mailed me about a typo in my blog.
The comment wasn't meant to be nitpicky and irrelevant. Was just meant to be an interesting sidebar into the discussion of the term 'Great Britain'.

I guess I should have used a different tone or something. All my other comments I've done expanding something like this have generally been well received, so I'm at a loss why this one was taken so badly. Maybe it was the parent thread.
OpenSolaris spork OpenIndiana launched
I misread that, thinking it was odd that Google would fall to copying Microsoft, and surprising they would copy Windows Me.

Reading about the product left me slightly less impressed.

Facebook already has social covered, and I've pretty much stopped using it. Buzz does not - Google don't get it, and they don't get that they don't get it. If Google Me was an upgrade to a desktop application, I probably wouldn't bother to install it. As it is, I'll look forward to having my cheese moved again.
And a few days ago I've found this on Reddit: http://djangopackages.com/
Creating available, consistent and learn-able interfaces is not that hard. Making them completely ignorance proof may be though.

Having to teach something is a reasonable part of any interface. Such as having a sign near elevator buttons that says "press the direction in which you want to travel". Or a cashier that says "no, use this pen." Or a website support person that guides an elderly man over the phone on the differences between a login box and a password recovery box.

Of course, it would be the ultimate aesthetic if interfaces would just do the magic, decide what the user really wanted, no thinking needed. I think this is the unreasonable ideal some designers dream of.

Even better, when we are born we could get a dialog box that says "Lead a Long, Fulfilling Life. OK, Cancel". But then we would have to learn to read to understand the dialog box. Maybe someone could press a button for us that makes us learn to read first. Or maybe an even more magical button could be designed, that when pressed, no one ever would have to read dialog boxes and press buttons ever again, or think or live. I think the Russians actually have a button like that.
Ask HN: What are the worst startup mantras you've heard?
I see tons of the 37 Signals snappy lines about how meetings are evil etc, and I thought it'd be quite funny to collate some spoof ones.
Seems like a pretty haphazard list. Does not convince me to sign up to Quora. The fact that those people are founders or senior people at tech companies does not make their answers any better thought through.

I guess when you ask someone to answer a complex question quickly without giving the subject too much thought, you get a superficial, skin-deep answer - no matter whether they're supposed to be experts in the field.
airtist.com has the same model here in Europe
Ha - I went there to see if Micropayments was already listed. I wasn't disappointed. Though i don't see any sort of e-cash there. I wonder if that's because people have completely abandoned the idea?

Downvote for the suggestion on online groceries - haven't been to a supermarket in months because of online groceries. It works, just needs scale and big bucks.
Bryan Rieger: Rethinking the Mobile Web
Rate my startup: GroupFlier.com
GroupFlier.com is a super simple group email hub. The goal is to make it trivially simple to setup a group email address for a family, sports team, community group etc.

The initial iteration competes with google/yahoo groups. The hope is that it is easier and faster to use. If it gains traction we would add a freemium option for archiving, searching, branding, moderation etc.

Try it out at www.groupflier.com and let me know what you think. Thanks!
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I am one of the few who (I believe) has made a transition from 'high latent inhibition' to 'low latent inhibition'.

It happened through no intention of mine and was quite a scary experience, like letting go or admitting defeat. With respect to Jonah Lehrer I must report that it felt totally the opposite to implementing a 'cognitive strategy’.

All kinds of new sensations, thoughts and impressions now make their way into my consciousness where previously they must have been filtered. The world is enlarged, enriched and more colourful (literally, and with Vermeer-like shading everywhere).

Although these 'extras' are available to me they don't seem to distract in an unhelpful way. Rather they provide subtle analogies and metaphors to whatever else I'm thinking about. (I suppose that’s where the creativity part comes in.)

Am I more distractible? Well, no, I don't think so, because I still get to choose which thoughts to follow. If one is concerned with explaining the world then only truly surprising perceptions (those few that don't fit in with one's worldview), have the potential to distract.

[I apologise to any readers who consider this report unfalsifiable nonsense or arrogant boasting. I can only reply, respectively, that presumably only the experience of transition can convince, and, as I said above, it was most humbling.]
That assumes, though, that there is more than one elevator. There is already well-known and battle-tested solution for that case: put a destination-floor-number panel outside the elevator bank (not connected to any single elevator, but rather offset), with the current floor's button removed. To remove the possibility of thinking that the panel of buttons has anything to do with the numbers the elevators display, remove the external displays from all the elevators. When you press the button, the first elevator available (and going in the right direction) opens at your floor, already set to go to your destination floor. (If you really insist, you can pulse the backlight of the activated destination floor button as the elevator nears, in a sort of marco-polo way; I've seen a very upscale hotel do just this.)

Now, what I was referring to in my previous post was a single-elevator scenario (which is most elevators outside of hotels and apartment buildings.) In the case of a single elevator, there's really no difference between the elevator either:

1. passing you, turning around, arriving at your floor, picking you up, and heading to your destination floor; or

2. opening at your floor, taking you along with whomever else is inside to their destination floors, then turning around and heading for your destination floor.

Either way, you spend the same amount of time waiting (arbitrarily either inside or outside of the elevator), and the elevator opens the same number of times. When there is one elevator, all that really matters is getting inside it.
Bre Pettis | The Cult of Done Manifesto
I would say that a truly great programmer isn't necessarily technically amazing. For example, a vast knowledge of programming languages is something that anyone can learn with enough time and patience. However, it's the ability to problem solve: to look at what exists already and make something new out of it, that really makes a developer 'great'. It doesn't really matter if they know a language inside out when tackling a project - it's the ability to help themselves: use the language and any tools available / relevant to solve a problem in an innovative way.

It's kind of a hard thing to evaluate, I suppose. I would say that to 'become great' - you can't just sit around programming all day (although this will no doubt help). It's a kind of 'knack' for working problems out, finding new techniques, using tools in new ways etc. These are all the things that make 'great' programmers great imho, and none of them are actually directly related to programming. In my experience, people who are REALLY good at solving programming problems are REALLY good at it outside of the programming discipline too.
'How piracy works' according to Minecraft creator
Someone that study computer science or something like that and told me what is the big deal about this , what is the special thing about,? it is the backend algorithm ? maybe this have porcion of I.A or Genetic Algorithm or Probabilitys metrics?? I dont know. to me this is just make a request using ajax to the db youtube and search for the most relevant search recently made (maybe 1 hour o 15 minutes i dont know) 3 hours or less look a pretty razonable time to do this,.. but maybe i'm wrong about my conception, somebody could please give an explanation about this? what's the big deal ????
The Myth of the Boy Wizard
By making these counter-offers Google is using real money to back up their assertion to (at least some of) their employees that their growth prospects are better than Facebook's. Think of this as a dividend-like unforgeable statement of corporate fiscal self-confidence.

If enough Googlers go fishing for counter-offers at Facebook, Facebook will be wasting a lot of management energy reviewing and making offers to Googlers that were never going jump in the first place.
Indeed, I can remember being told by experts that nobody would ever:

- Use the Web as it wasn't a very "rich" experience

- Do banking transactions on the Internet

- No airline would sell tickets online

These were all predictions by real experts in their respective fields.

Arthur C. Clarke's First Law of Prediction applies:

"When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is probably wrong."
Quoting from his website "Yehuda Katz is a member of the Ruby on Rails core team, and lead developer of the Merb project. He is a member of the jQuery Core Team, and a core contributor to DataMapper. He contributes to many open source projects, like Rubinius and Johnson, and works on some he created himself, like Thor."

But what that doesn't say is his contributions through his blog (both personal and EngineYard blog). I have learned more Rails 3 from his articles than anywhere else.

He co-authored a book called 'jQuery in Action'. Another excellent read.

To answer your question directly, Yehuda adds a lot of value to whatever he takes up. Apart from writing excellent code he explains it succinctly through his writing. SproutCore will benefit from this.
* An Intel chip means that it's faster to run Windows (without the need for x86-on-PowerPC emulation).

* An Intel chip means that I can run Linux on it and still have access to closed-source programs (Flash, Matlab, etc).

* An Intel chip makes it possible to boot Windows natively.

* An Intel chip makes it easier for Apple to maintain forward momentum without needing to goad Motorola/IBM/etc to improve their PowerPC offerings to be competitive with Intel/AMD chips.
Is there any reason one would use this instead of an AMI from Alestic?
Crazy stuff, I wonder how long google's stockholders are going to tolerate overpaying (relative to market) for talent.
Not sure about "Anything involving paying people to look at ads". Lockerz seems to be making a business out of it.
All startup ideas persistently fail — until they don't. Maybe it's not the idea that failed, but the implementation?
Sites for sharing music note sheets can move to use this technology instead of using static pictures. This allows collaborative editing of music sheets directly on the site.