skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
People still use Windows 3.1, but that's not the point: A relevant proportion of the population still uses Windows XP (businesses, universities...).

Although I remember seeing an old Windows 98 box in my JCR's office... With a 800x600 CRT monitor stretched to a 1024x768 resolution. It made your eyes bleed.
Penn State Tops Recruiter Rankings
Companies Favor Big State Schools With One-Stop Shopping for Graduates With Necessary Skills

I found these school rankings interesting as they come from actual recruiters. In case you don't want to read the article, 1. Penn State, 2. Texas A&M, 3. University of Illinois, 4. Purdue University, ..
http://www.google.com/images?q=windows+2000+screenshot

although I suppose most people were still using Windows Me, the last DOS-based Windows, rather than Windows 2000, which descended from NT. They looked pretty similar, though:

http://www.google.com/images?q=windows+me+screenshot

Windows XP was released a year later and was the first release to unify the workstation and desktop lines on the same foundation (with the Home & Professional variants).
I hate to say this, but ECB is actually the right way to go here. There's no way to send information to the headset, so CBC with a rolling IV wouldn't work well -- if one HID report dropped, you'd have no way of regaining the stream again. Of course, they could've XORed the second half of the output report with the first (CBC across the output report itself), but that really gets you nothing. This is, amazingly, one of the few places where ECB actually makes sense.

That said, when will people learn to encrypt/pack/invert/anything their S-boxes?

Edit: Scratch what I said defending ECB mode. I totally forgot about CTR mode until a friend just mentioned it. Would've been the perfect solution here.
Putting RFID chips in your plates will make lifting more fun if it's tied to a fun, competitive game with teammates cheering you on

What good are gym buddies who can't spot you?

And besides, lifting is satisfying, but it's not "fun" if you're doing it right.
> not something that is ready for the prime time.

Which is of course, to use the technical term, "bullshit" :-)

There are a lot of statements that you could make that would be fair, like "Java is more mature", or "we have a lot of Java expertise, so it was much easier for us to debug it" or "for our particular needs, Rails simply wasn't suitable", but to say it's "not ready for prime time" is to deny the reality that it is used extensively in "prime time".
Tony Hawk Was Live On YouTube, And Less Than 500 People Were Watching
It seems they're planning a soft-force: all URLs will be converted to t.co in outbound tweets, but the original shortener will still be visible in some presentations, and t.co will still redirect through the original shortener -- so sites providing some unique value to users still work.

I can't see a major user revolt over that approach -- even though in the long run it gives t.co such an advantage that other services may whither away.
You can make any app you like. It wont get into the app store if it duplicates functionality provided by Apple.
I think you never know what you may find interesting. I don't really want to find a niche. Mixergy covers founders, but for me it's more exciting to talk to just different people, not necessarily entrepreneurs. That's the point.

About the accent. As you can see in some of the interviews, it's not always perfect. But in my opinion the thing that matters is that people understand you perfectly and enjoy talking to you. That's what I'm trying to achieve. Having a nice accent is nothing if you say stupid things. So, don't worry about it?
True Story: The NMCI network took 5 months and 2 days to create an email address for a new user.

CREATE AN EMAIL ADDRESS.
I'm not sure I agree. It was started by an Apple employee, endorsed by Apple, 90% of all commits is done by Apple employees, and is hosted on Mac OS Forge (http://www.macosforge.org/), where Apple releases its open-source projects (Webkit, launchd, libdispatch, etc.)
I remember buying my first Mac in a decade when this was announced. Microsoft practically drove me into Apple's arms when I tried to install Internet Explorer 6 and it hosed the boot sector on my HD, and I didn't have a CD-ROM driver for the restore disk that came with my machine. I had to spend 3 hours reinstalling from Win 95 floppies, and then upgrading the OS.

To say that experience made any hiccups with the OS X Public Beta seem tolerable would be a vast understatement.
I just remembered something important regarding the use of Vimeo. From the usage guidelines (http://vimeo.com/guidelines):

># Do Not Upload Videos Intended for Commercial use

>* Businesses may not use Vimeo to externalize their hosting costs. Vimeo (including Vimeo Plus) is not a business service.

>* You may not upload videos containing ads before or after the video, unless given prior written permission from an authorized member of the Vimeo staff. Videos with any advertisements in them, including links to commercial sites, regardless of content, will be removed.

>* We reserve the right to allow certain commercial content for those businesses who have coordinated sponsored advertising campaigns or direct partnerships with Vimeo.

To which extent this applies to your project in its current and future is debatable, but I would make sure it doesn't catch you by surprise, in case you haven't already. :)
My pet theory about this is that 10.0's look was as much as about setting a clear distance between itself and the old Classic as it was about real innovation. (I'm talking only of the UI look).

When Aqua was presented people loved it people hated it but nobody could ignore it. The first time you installed Mac OS X made you feel like you were in a whole new world.

Of course it wasn't that practical and funnily most of it has reverted back... before they pinstripes got faded, then we got the metallic grey, and now just a nice subtle grey.

All that is left from those old days are the traffic light buttons, the gem-blue scroll bars, and the standard button look.
I too am careful about what extensions I install and tend to look at their source to see what they're doing and what external urls they're using (if any) for piece of mind. Aside from downloading and inspecting the source directly, there is also an extension that allows you to inspect other extensions right on the Chrome Extension Gallery so you don't need to install or download them to see what they're up to.

https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/bbamfloeabgknfkl...
Yeah I like the idea of a group working towards a common goal that everyone is contributing to more than trying to beat someone else. Competition works really well sometimes but perhaps not in this case.
Refactoring Redmine (ebook)
Startups: Create the least barrier for your customers
One could view it as an accidental death. The mosquito didn't intend to transmit malaria, or to kill the child, it was just a side effect of what it does every day. Though, mosquitoes being parasitic by nature, they aren't very respectful of human right to property (they steal people's blood for a living, after all). Maybe more like an alcoholic who drives drunk.

Anyway, I like your analogy as an answer to the mosquito vs. malaria blame game, but it may be impossible to directly compare a mosquito-inflicted death to one caused by a human in any fashion.

In short, blame is irrelevant...human rights trump mosquito (or malaria) rights, IMNSHO, so if we could somehow destroy mosquitoes (and/or malaria) entirely in the sub-Saharan region, that'd be entirely alright with me, to hell with the consequences (some argue it would impact other wildlife, as mosquitoes are a food source for birds, as well as a pollinator for some plants, and those birds and plants are a food source for bigger animals, etc.).
D.C. Boasts the USA's Worst Drivers
Thanks for the map! That should prove to be useful.
The reason you'd want a different programming language for this sort of thing would be the fact that the language itself (its syntax, semantics and such) gives it some sort of advantage (usually in terms of abstraction) over using any other language. If there is no such syntax or semantics, then this is pointless. Any old language should do.
Not that this isn't a padded contract, but it's preposterous to compare services on the Navy's secure network to things like Evernote and Gmail.
The minute you actually sat down and thought about it you got it, as did I, as would any of the better programmers I've worked with in my career. Walk halfway into an algorithm and it's clear. I wouldn't expect the average code schlepper to get this but that's the entire point. This ad suggests to me that's not what they're after.
Agreed - more importantly, kudos to the New York Times for their original report (which seems to have convinced Microsoft to change their policy).
Tic-tac-toe is proven to be unlosable. (You can win if you go first & you are playing an imperfect opponent)

Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tic-tac-toe#Strategy for the description of the algorithm.
"This is Broken" (Seth Godin)
Nate Lawson actually suggests encrypt then MAC. See http://rdist.root.org/2010/09/10/another-reason-to-mac-ciphe... which was spawned by http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2009-06-24-encrypt-then-mac....
yes but out of those who actively consume this sort of news, Daily Show has higher numbers.
It does not apply to me for now. I'm not using Vimeo for commercial purposes yet. If I ever want to place ads, I'd probably switch from Vimeo to my own hosting.
The App Store is slow, so I built App Store Instant
Well done Roman, keep it up and you'll have something great. To make it more intimate, what about filling the whole screen with the subject? Tarantino does that, he keeps the dialogue going in the background with the camera fixed on the subject.
Or maybe the "Facebook generation" that has grown up with the assumption that this sort of information is public will learn how to deal with it just like any other generation has learned to deal with any other new technology or cultural change.

When the telephone and telegraph came around did we suddenly stop hiring people because we could check their references without so much as lifting a hand to dial the number or send a telegram?
No. What Twitter is asking for is that you keep that "user agent" secret, even though you have to distribute it to everyone who uses your app. And they have demonstrated that they will happily block that user agent value if you don't do so.

If they're relying on that "user agent" key for anything important they're asking for trouble.
Yes, but (to my shock), their speed makes even R look fast. Which I didn't think as possible. My problem was taking a matrix market formatted matrix, loading it, turning it into a sparse column vector representation, then computing norms of the columns. It was running for roughly 8 hours on 12MM columns.

R of all things was running faster.

I reimplemented in java and it takes < 1 second.
If you're looking to go into a programming career immediately, I would focus on building a portfolio of work, but if you are planning to go to college (where you'd be studying programming full time), I would get a non-programming job. Even what seems like mindless labor can improve your work ethic and discipline, and teach you how to work with other people (and all the fun challenges that brings). Gets you out of your home/school environment. Sometimes you'll connect with others who may be able to help you down the road. Plus you will likely still work on development since that's a big interest of yours.

I'm a full-time developer, but I remember fondly a lot of washing dishes, busing tables, mopping floors, mowing lawns, and delivering pizzas....
Real-time Satellites in Google Earth
For JVM, there is Incanter which is a statistics library written in Clojure. It is backed by Parallel Colt for the heavy number lifting. Note that I'm not trying to say that Clojure would be a scientist-friendly language :)
To be fair it probably took 5 months to obtain all of the required authorizations / paperwork and a few seconds to actually process the request. A five month wait is a lot easier than an unauthorized user.
This reminds me of the amusing trivia that it is faster to say "world wide web" than "WWW".
I think the interviewee has, elsewhere, been pretty explicit about his desire for the R committee to get away from maintaining their own language and to build on a platform maintained elsewhere. Basically, it seems like he thinks R should be a package and some libraries, but not in the runtime/compiler business.
Some HNers seem to hate Rails. I want to know why.
So wait - this is about clientside cookies that a developer would knowingly choose to write versus something that is just automatically happening behind the scenes with asp.net? Aka, if you never write any cookies - encrypted or otherwise - then this doesn't apply to you or your app?
4 Best User Interface Design Pattern Libraries
I actually feel that leaderboards are mostly bad only when there are too many people participating. With a small enough number of participants they can be motivating (although they might be better yet if they were opt-in). There are a subset of people that like to rank themselves and "see how they stack up" against others. As you mentioned, it can also degrade motivation for others which is why an opt-in method might work best for something like this.
BTW, that was my motivation for starting the www.r-bloggers.com website. It now has over 110 bloggers (who write about R) there. When I started and looked for them on google, all I could find was bloggers who wrote about pirates :D
Encrypt-then-Sign addresses this problem, but it's a design change, and it's not the case that Encrypt-then-Sign is an industrywide best practice (Practical Cryptography, for instance, recommends the opposite).
The official “Tweet Button” has increased user interaction 427%
Congratulations. You just gained a bit.
o? what is it that you're doing?
"Doing it right" by whose definition?

Why can't something be satisfying on one level and fun as it relates to other things?
I don't like emails in my inbox - most of my Gmail filters are set to skip inbox and archive immediately.

Would this extension manage stats around emails that don't appear in the inbox as well?
Life-hacking Productivity Tip #1: You're gonna' die.
What does that have to do with hunting down microwave ovens?
Hey look at that. Good journalism still has a place in this fast paced, linked up, tweeted world we live in. I don't often say this but grats, nyt.
Made me think of http://thestory.org/
The Washington Post should publish a matrix comparing responsibility at the paper with highest degree or certification reached and source of undergraduate degree if any. I may by now have the story wrong, but it seems to me that in the early 1980s a friend who applied to work in a Post advertising department--not selling, and administrative assistant job--got the message that her pitiful midwestern state school B.A. made her undesirable.
Android tablets: Google giveth, Google taketh away
Chattanooga becomes home to 1Gbps Internet service, just $350 per month
Great retrospective. Change was, indeed, scary.

I was so scared of OS X, I stuck around on OS 9 until, I think 10.2. I might have stayed longer but my G3/266 (with AV personality card!) ended up biting the dust. The G4 that replaced it shipped with OS X and I took the plunge.

It was tough, at first. At that point I'd been a Mac user for ten years. I was a power user. OS X made me a newb again.

It was all for the best. OS X has been perfect for both home and work use. In the end, I give it so much less thought than what System 6 - Mac OS 9 required. It stays out of the way and just lets me work.

In addition, Apple gave developers a boatload of APIs and UI classes that let you build a surprisingly solid app with minimal effort. I cranked out a little desktop app a few weeks ago in about 25 hours. This results in an amazing freeware and shareware scene.

What a long way to come, for Apple and for all of us.
Beth is our new marketing manager for social media...
By diversity, do you mean "lots of people of different races and ethnic heritages live here in harmony" or do you mean "lots of ethnic food to eat"? Because I would call hijinx on the former, this city is pretty white, at least all of SOMA/FiDi, North Beach, NOPA, The Sunset, most of the Mission, most of the excelsior, and at least 70% of every other neighborhood is white. Having been here a decade I feel this city is far more segregated than others I've lived in, and I've lived in 7 different neighborhoods now.
What is the website that lets you build a browser/ftp/music/etc bundle?
This website lists a decent set of choices for browsers, music players, anti-virus programs, ftp, system utilities, etc, and then gives you a downloadable installer that installed everything you selected. Kind of like a better version of Google Pack.

Anybody remember the name / url?

I don't remember if it was a YC startup or not but I've tried google, ddg, searchyc, skimming through my saved stories and I can't seem to find it.
Who cares? He'll make, what, a dollar?
This post bothered me probably because going to Burning Man reinforced the side of me that wouldn't demand a free meal because of poor service.

Burning Man (at least for me) was a place where you would go with a big crazy project that you could never hope to accomplish. But somehow "the playa would provide" and people would come help you complete it. And "gifting" isn't about cheap trinkets or bartering. It's about giving your time and skills to people that could use it. I've helped repair an engine, build structures, painted a boat, clean up trash, and more. People have fed me, taken care of me while dehydrated, given me rides, bought my ticket, etc.

In some ways, it's helped me be more adventurous with creating a business. Sometimes you need to take that leap of faith that resources will show up.

I came back the first time and literally cried at seeing all of the trash barrels overflowing in my home town on garbage day. (EDIT: I live 2500 miles away.) I also spent months researching all sorts of things I was excited by as a boy. Lots of people go to Burning Man to "rage" and take lots of drugs and go wild. But there are lots of others that create things and share them with people that create things too.
I'm surprised the authors of this article completely missed the many extended query languages specially made to process large sets of data, published in top computer science conferences by Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo.

Microsoft has SCOPE:
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1454159.1454166

Yahoo has Pig:
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1376726

Google has Sawzall:
http://iospress.metapress.com/content/99vjkgkae3jkvu9t/
MakerBot Automated Build Platform
rvm juggles your bash path for you. When you say '$ rvm use 1.8.7' your 'gem' command is now the one for rvm's 1.8.7

It doesn't conflict with anything and you don't really need to think about it. '$ gem install whatever' and it just works on rvm.

Do you use whatever ruby comes on your system or do you install the one single ruby you use? If the later, it's much easier to install it with rvm and rvm will keep it in a nice little box that doesn't screw with any other ruby on your system. You can get rid of it with a single 'rm' if you want to.

You were throwing fud. You could have asked, "how does rvm do xyz?". Instead you decided to state that you doubt it makes your life easier and probably makes it hard, based on nothing. That's the very definition of fud. Here's what you said, "Personally I find it a bit of an overkill for me". Really, based on what? Does that sound like "only a doubt"?
> I know there's a lot of disagreement in the community over the lack of real Python code in your templates, but it would just encourages sloppy spaghetti.

You'll see a lot of this in the Rails community too; lots of people use haml over erb for exactly this reason.
And storage for only $5 per GB!
Apple only talked about web apps for a while because their native app SDK wasn't ready yet. Apple has never fully embraced the Web, preferring to stick with "rich" better-than-web UIs.
Great developers can get good results with any language and any framework - some tools are just more effective than others for specific tasks. Rails (and specifically Rails 3) is a great DSL/framework for writing web apps and is actually not too difficult to follow if you want to browse the source code.
How French Laundry's chefs reach for the stars
Works now. I see you limited the amount of search results. No pagination?
Why Linux Should Never Win
My theory was that the point of the pinstripe look was to blur the line between the UI and the hardware it was running on.

Mac hardware at the time had a pinstripe look, just the same. Today the interface has an "aluminum" look, as do today's Macs.
Anrdoid 2.2 Adoption Grows
San Francisco proper is one of the most diverse cities in the country. It is only 45% white. Over 30% of the residents are foreign born. These stats are from Wikipedia.
"No, we are a proof that the TechCrunch club is not
hyper-exclusive and if your startup has a good product
or service, they will eventually cover you."

I actually got the opposite impression. You had to beg and plead to get covered...made posts asking for community support and you only got covered because you just became too big of an annoyance. And let's not forget that you actually got yourself established with paying big name customers first.

Meanwhile the YC company got coverage just for launching.
China's auto ownership expected to exceed 200 million in 2020
I'm not at all surprised to hear someone point out that London is more expensive than San Francisco. I am shocked to hear someone from London say that San Francisco has better cab service.
How-To Create Your Own Instant Search
Dupe http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1649860
MIT Researchers develop a way to funnel solar energy
"A story in yesterday’s New York Times reports on anti-piracy enforcement actions in Russia that have been used for more nefarious purposes than protecting intellectual property rights."

It's good of Microsoft PR to classify protecting IP rights as nefarious, though somewhat less nefarious than actually using IP for supressing dissent. A step in the right direction, to be sure!
New PIE Demo - Tabs
Capsicum - practical capabilities for UNIX
Top Ten Most Delicious Desserts And Sweets | Top Ten
From the video, in case you're a TL;DR kind of person...

Reasons why something is broken (not a transcript, my interpretation in parts, FWIW)

Not my job - Instead of addressing the problem, this is a poor band-aid by someone who is lazy. Someone needs to take responsibility. e.g. Signs on killer gates

Selfish jerks - People who do something selfish in the short run hurt their image in the long term. e.g. "Organic cigarettes", email spam, tricky contracts

The world changed - Trying to make something "better than the original", "Vote for Pedro" shirt from Napolean
Dynamite: official one isn't like the ones in the movie!

I didn't know - internal contradictions, subtle oxymoronic things, e.g. "Professional Gum", wine lists on a Windows ME tablet

I'm not a fish - The designer is out of touch with the end user, e.g. bad (empty) signs, poor dashboard design to chill coffee

Contradictions - e.g. "water salad in a jar", "pocari sweat drink"

Broken on purpose - things that are broken intentionally, like mismatched socks sold that way
The Geek Syndrome: Autism surging among the children of Silicon Valley [2004]
Investment banking was just a silly example.

America did use lots of foreign help back in the day. The British helped finance the railways. But America did not rely on foreign finance forever. After the First World War there were the greatest creditor nation.

The rise of America has not dented the European standard of living. And neither should the rise of China curb the American living standards. Relative decline is not absolute decline.
Microbes'll eat it.
'Super Wi-Fi' nears final approval in U.S.