skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Lots of issues with #2, many of which you encounter on OSX. Immovable dialogs that pop up on one screen while the app is on the other, leaving the app disabled (this is my OSX nit with Spaces). Applications that aren't ready to be shifted offscreen. Applications that can't handle either a larger screen size (if you virtualize as a BIG screen) or the idea that they're not in the minimized state but are not visible. It's a giant mess.

There were always good quality virtual desktop programs running around inside of MSFT written locally, but there was no way to get them up to ship quality when you considered the AppCompat issue.

One thing I both admired and hated when I worked at MSFT is that Apple users are content to purchase updates for every piece of software they own when a new major version of the OS is released.

Sidenote: I'm out of MSFT now and have been in a 100% Apple environment for my research for the last three years.
Please stop it with installers that download other installers. If I want to download Live Messenger, I don't want to download a program that'll download Live Messenger.

"Alright! Download finished! Wait, downloading messenger? What did I just spend 5 minutes downloading?"
The tax debate: Someone will pay
I browse reddit for lulz, cool stories, and sutff like that. I don't really check it out at work because of the damn "surprise nsfw boobs" pics. Hacker news is nice and work safe, especially when I change the background colours to look like a terminal emulator.

While I see your point, I feel there is a grey-area for this item.
In LoseThos:

The only reason I didn't add the upper 128 characters is I pledged ASCII. The compiler and everything else is good-to-go if you just add them to the font. Had I been in an international mood, I could have designed everything to seemlessly use Unicode from the ground up. I hate that, though.

Hold ALT and press 186, for example. You can use it in source code as alpha-numeric.

If I did fill-in the upper 128, I would use the DOS standard. LoseThos will run in text graphics mode as a fall-back. You can set a kernel config option for it, if you like. Must do a hard reboot.

I worked at Ticketmaster on their VAX operating system. The Ticketing stuff originally ran on a PDP-11. 8 registers instead of 16. A little before my time, but there were vestigages.

As for beta? I release continuously. Fuck-it. I've grown pissed at being under-appreciated. Latest version has a change to the compiler which is used by the code. You must boot the new version with the new compiler to recompile the new code. Kinda a pain. In VMWare, it means new installation, unless you know a way to boot a CD-image after installing. Prolly a way.

Run /LT/Demo/Graphics/FontEd.CPZ

Change character 128 to beta

Now, write a CPZ program and use Beta in a variable by pressing ALT-1-2-8. It's an ordinary letter fully supported.

I made the ten or so promises before God many years ago and cannot change them.

http://www.losethos.com/doc/Constitution.html

If I did do more than ASCII, I would just use the standard DOS extended characters.

God says...
effected raging whole womanish occupying malice hear wisely
fearlessly eluding abound pitch speechless AD overflowed
editing Mother uproar private lords foretell None baptise
contradictory honour consumed fiercely prayed Me diligence
twisted Rome detest whole parted version consulters speakers
Contain flow Duad expounded child scattered girl proveth
manna torments hundred delight bottomless unteachable
tumult observation copies town secret wallowed beholds
glow catch eligible wallow prey continueth likest lengthened
happen inspire behalf continency softening disk And thing
masses broughtest revised falsely greater favourites relief
In many states, non-compete agreements are enforceable. In CA, they aren't worth the paper they are written on.

If CA courts had held non-compete agreements to be enforceable, "Silicon Valley" never would have happened as the free flow of technical expertise never would have happened.

These companies are trying to bypass the legal system by conspiring to make their own arrangement of "non compete agreements" without the knowledge or consent of the workers.
Swims like a fail whale: Why Twitter still doesn't make the best Twitter apps
MS should be smart enough to make the best RDP client (the app to connect to Windows machine) for iPhone with the best encryption. And to work with XP too.

Also forget the "effects" that are not good over the wire. The goal is the best possible experience when the desktop is accessed remotely.

Rationale: There are enough people that need the power of the Windows based computer (power means the software developed in all these years) but who want to access their desktops from iPhone. Even if iPhone is the competitor, if you allow users to use your system from it the users will be more committed to the desktop Windows platform then if they have to look for the new solutions for everything.
You don't need a powerfull laptop for most offices you need a thin or zero client like a Sunray and virtual desktop. If your staff to need to move again low power tablet and laptops and connect to virtual desktops for that processing power when it is needed.
The post isn't even about memory allocation or garbage collection, it's only about Python's strings being immutable, yet being fast enough (nb: Java would probably have been a better choice as its strings are also immutable, though the allocation strategy is probably harder to walk through), therefore functional languages being slow because they don't mutate stuff is a lie.

Pretty much the tl;dr.
/* Does your mother know you're reading this stuff? */
Fiverr, Tenbux, Gigbucks, etc...
Use it do small jobs and then up sell...
Stop being bi-polar.

Make a decision on who you are making products for. Either create products that fully cater to MegaCorp Executives or for Consumer/Developers. You will almost always have competing needs and risk serving neither if you build a product that tries to cater to both.

If the choice is the later, tell Balmer he should personally make an effort to listen to the demographics. I bet the benefits of doing so outweigh those of commissioning a research company to post on HN and create a report.
Now that it's clear that OpenGL isn't going away, fix WGL. It takes twice the amount of effort to use compared to other such APIs, and fixing it shows you care about standards.
Make your software more intuitive, I hate digging through sub-menu after sub-menu to find something, then it's not there and having to back track, repeat. Make software for the end user.
I'm sorry, but when it comes to the tea party, a collection of histrionics and hysteria, it's fairly accurate.
7 Tips For Rapid Iteration
> However, it is currently not economically successful. It could be monetized, maybe.

Au contraire. It may be a "cost center", but I have no doubt that it has been enormously beneficial for YCombinator's bottom line, as a marketing effort.
What's Wrong with Stack Overflow: Social Over Substance
Thanks andymoe, I'll check it out!
As I read this, I'm sitting in a Starbucks on my MBP. Now it doesn't JUST mean this, but it's not a bad part of it:)
I realize it would take some more to clearly explain the intricacies, but I see you got it :-)
OT but the phrase you're looking for is the latin de facto .
Starting your own Software Company? Think twice.
Since this guy is addressing 'web developers'... I got out of that game what every client was another person who was harass me indefinitely about minor site changes.

I realized the initial design money was not worth the phone calls and b.s. for the lifetime of the site.

And I'm not even a good developer. Frankly I think "good developers" don't need or want to deal with that crap.
Turning the tables on critical trolls
Researchers issue homemade patch for PDF zero-day bug
Good job on crunching the numbers and making it profitable. Groupon is definitely a win-win in some cases.

Did the Groupon people help you with all this, or did you have to figure it out yourself? My main complaint is that Groupon doesn't seem to be looking out for the small biz owners and steering them toward successful deals. It sucks to feel like you can't rely on a partner to look out for your interests.
I just tried a couple times and got a standard request to reset to a new password. The language you copy-pasted is odd too. "Login password" instead of just "password" is unusual, and "plain text" is programmer speak, not regular English. Something's fishy.
People who say "money isn't everything" are often selling themselves short. You can have all of those things you mentioned, and still get paid a good salary, you just need to find the right company.

Too often, I've found that the companies that don't pay well are also filled with terrible employees, simply because the only people left are those that couldn't get a job anywhere else.

Also, any manager that says "we're not going to pay you as much as the industry standard for someone with your experience, but hey, you get free soda in the break room and you can work from home a few days a week" is ripping you off. Plain and simple - he figured out that spending a few cents on sugar water lets him save $thousands on salary.

You can make six digits plus, and still work from home, and chances are you'll be working with smarter and more talented people because they just won't let any schmuck that can't get a better job stick around.
So you taught yourself 6502 assembly language while there were already internet cafes? When was that?
Thanks for DOS and WinNT. But, since then you haven't been relevant to anything I do or want to do. Oh, and you made the best mouse ever.
Does this have anything remotely related to Hacker News?

Except may be reddit is a ycombinator startup.
This might seem like the case at first, but then you read stuff like this:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/02/why-cant-programmer...

I bet most of those responses are terrible programmers.
1. Make sure that new versions of IE are standards-compliant.

2. Implement a more aggressive IE update policy to quickly remove older versions of IE from the browser market.
I am reminded of a certain Christian organization that I studied in college.

There is an idea in Protestant Christianity (going back to Jesus or to Martin Luther, depending on whom you ask :-) that you don’t actually earn a ticket to heaven by doing good deeds; rather, heaven is for those who believe in the appropriate Christian dogma, even if their actions in this world are not always perfect.

Anyway, this organization expected certain things of its members, and their theological spin was something like this: if you have the proper belief and get baptized by them, you will be saved from eternal hellfire and you will be filled with a God-given spirit to do good deeds, and among those good deeds was working your ass off for this particular organization. If you weren’t working your ass off, your peers and leaders, running that chain of logic in the opposite direction, would suspect that your baptism hadn’t really taken.

I realize that to someone in that organization, there is a significant difference between the above theology and a simple statement of “the way to get to heaven is to work your ass off for us”. However, to me on the outside, the distinction is... rather too subtle.
Now uploaded an HD version: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qif0VSUt_O0&hd=1
When you say "it's hard to find good developers" what you really want to say is "it's hard to find good developers I can afford".
Ask HN: How many side projects do you have going at one time?
When setting up my first site, it wasn't called a "side project". It was my full-on hobby that I spent all my weekends on. It was split up into three separate niche sites in 2002.

Since then, I've launched some side blogs, and then two more real sites. The latest has taken up a large portion of spare-hours home time for the past 6 months.

Meanwhile, the original project is still the most popular, but doesn't get a share of my brain power since the newest project is on the go. Having my wife help with customer support these days helps a lot, but there's still the question of further developing the sites.

HN, how have you dealt with this type of multi-side project approach, juggling with the rest of life?
Securit holes are subset of bugs.
I really wish Microsoft would stop making half assed versions of stuff that other people have done better just because they somehow think they should.

Each time I see something like Bing or Zune I just wonder why MS does it, they're pissing away their credibility by desperately trying to be google or apple when patently they're not.

I'm an app developer for iPhone and I would love Microsoft to up it's game in Mobile. Apple are a bunch of elitist control freaks that piss me off every time they open their mouthes, google just want to sell more advertising and are desperate for the chance to do that in your pocket as well as on your laptop. Build me a platform I can port my app to with a minimum of fuss and I will jump at the chance.

Now if I were them I think I'd try and build on the one area they've been a success in the consumer arena. xBox. Build xbox mobile, do a deal with one of the other major carriers (who isn't at&t) for the exclusive ability to do multiplayer gaming over their 3g network for a flat rate. Get your existing game developers to build for it, but make sure it's possible for independent developers to build for it as well. Doing that would be something seriously exciting and would offer a choice that doesn't currently exist.
Maybe that's just because you're a developer and can more easily attract and evaluate good developers, as opposed to the fields of law and plumbing, which you presumably know less about.
I was very happy to read this story. I found in interesting and I don't read reddit, so I wouldn't have gotten it another way.
"That guy" here. I know what you mean, and my solution has been three-fold:

1. Batch maintenance tasks together a few times a week, and manage client expectations accordingly.

2. Charge. A lot. In 1-hr increments, even if it takes me 5 mins.

3. Find a junior dev to sub that stuff out to. I taught my brother to program and he's paying his way through private school now doing maintenance work for my clients. Win, win.
Since neither I nor most of my friends have a server at home, that means hosting the data on some server in some hosting center.

No. P2P networks like freenet and edonkey already distribute content over many nodes, just with different goals and priorities. It would be possible to adapt these mechanisms to ensure that data you push to the network actually stays in the network for a reasonable period of client-downtime. I could think of various ways to achieve this technically (n-copies, caching superpeers, and each of your friends would naturally hold on a copy anyways).

One important bit to realize here is that the data volume is rather small because only meta-data (friends-graph, profile, wall, messages, etc.) needs to be handled in a truly distributed fashion.

Big chunks, such as images, could and should mostly remain on centralized services for the time being.

Another important thing to realize is, that the privacy in such a network could be made to be much better than on any remotely hosted solution because you can implement end-to-end encryption. All data on the network would naturally be transmitted and stored only in encrypted form. You would reveal chosen pieces to your friends by sharing the respective keys with them.

So Rails isn't a necessarily stupid idea for a social network consisting of people like me.

People like you (the end-user) aren't even supposed to install diaspora on their machines. Instead (if I understood them right) you are supposed to sign up on someone else's diaspora installation and generally trust all diaspora nodes in the network because your data travels freely between them.

Disclaimer: If this description is wrong then someone please correct me. There's some conflicting information about what diaspora is and what it wants to be.

Rails surely has its place in many applications. But for this one it just screams "We have no clue what we're doing" to me.
Chrome 7 Will Get 60 Times Faster
I think the biggest problem is that many developers never make the leap to professionalism after they graduate college. They bounce between firms without ever going through a mentorship that increases their ability to effectively develop software at scope, learning tool after tool and shipping little application after application and never growing.

But, those UI controls aren't going to align themselves...
It all depends on skills and experience. It also helps to be currently employed. I had recruiters bugging me monthly this past nov-jun. Current employer and another local company struggling find enough devs to hire.

[Edit: I also get inquiries for jobs and contracts weekly through Linked-in. It's a great job tool.]
But this is a function of very high demand relative to supply. Why else would a 25-year-old with no college degree and five years of experience be able to charge $125 / hr for his services?*

* Not talking about myself, regretfully.
Banking Glitch: Chase’s online banking fiasco
Have you tried the free VMWare vCenter Converter? http://www.vmware.com/products/converter/features.html

I do not know whether or not they have overcome issues preparing Virtual PC images to run on the Mac yet...
I don't post to either, but Tumblr makes it 100x easier to explore content on the site. Posterous doesn't even try - they bury the "Explore" link on the bottom of the home page and clicking that just gets the visitor a list of random and unorganized posts.
There's no career path to get good at development.

As soon as you get good at development, you start getting promoted into roles where you increasingly do things that aren't development.

Is it any surprise that developers aren't good when companies systematically remove good developers from development?
Are women really closing the paycheck gender gap?
But as long as ripping concerned - does it really need to be realtime?
No idea about posterous but there are lots of robot created profiles on tumblr (presumably for SEO purposes)
What decline? Microsoft reported $62.48 billion in revenue and $18.76 billion in net income for their FY 2010.
The Unwelcome Return of “Best Viewed With Internet Explorer”
Ouch. I'm not sure how admitting that my knowledge of the subject in question might be less than perfect constitutes "not having argued anything".
Really good! Somebody knows if there's a more simple implementation to exhibit something like a building project? (limited space with a great zoom possibility).

The maps implementations don't seams to fit for this purpose.
They yanked it way before it had any chance of succeeding. I wanted to use it and didn't get the chance before they yanked it. I saw the video in early 2009, thought it looked awesome. The website said it would be available to the public "by the end of the year", or something. I kept checking back. It wasn't available, even in early 2010. Finally, in June 2010, I noticed it was available. I signed up. I didn't have anybody to Wave with (so sad). Then a few weeks ago, I needed to collaborate with a friend on a project. I told them to sign up for Google Wave. My friend said "didn't they cancel that?"
The company needs to split in two internally. One side can be the "MS Stack" side that continues with the current strategy milking it for every last penny while it dries up, but the other side needs to become a software company again (as opposed to a stack company). Start bringing your software to other platforms. Why was Office canceled on Mac while Mac is gaining market share? Don't you want money from all the people that are switching their OS but still want your office tools?

Make your products for Linux as well. You could really innovate here because I don't know of any players selling home user level software on Linux. You could even make your own distro to make Linux friendlier without having to take it on as a long term maintenance project (make it open source almost from the start). Then you could even put little stickers on your Linux software that says "Runs best on MS Linux".

The peasants have tasted freedom, you're never going to be able to herd everyone back onto Windows desktops. Those that are gone will stay gone so stop trying. You have a platform to easily be everywhere if you wanted to. Port .Net everywhere and then releasing your products on different platforms becomes extremely cheap. This is really something you could have over all your competitors.

I really think this stubborn insistence that everyone be on your operating system is hurting you. It should be obvious by now that you're not going to out-innovate Apple or even Google so stop trying to. Let the big dogs fight. Get back on everyone's minds again by making sure there is no platform out there where you don't have a best-of-breed, highly talked about product. Make money off them both. Go back to your roots.
I agree with you about the generalizations. However, I think injecting humor into the current political tension is really a powerful thing. I don't agree with name-calling, but it might do us all some good to take ourselves a bit less seriously.

To me, the most interesting aspect of this rally, will be to see how the MSM deals with so many making light of issues that supposedly divide the country.
If Yahoo, Amazon, and eBay were late-comers (much later to Google's search dominance), would these companies have used these names?

Particularly now, I would assume it is much more difficult to "brand" a company (a search engine, auction site, or super-powered ecommerce site) with so much disparate media, particularly with Google as the gatekeeper. Newspapers, television, and radio does not have the impact it once had.

Amazon was the only name based off of a real noun. Whenever I buy from Amazon, I still wonder what the name has to do with the business (besides being the largest river and having alphabetical priority).

It is interesting to watch Google's influence on business names, particularly for local businesses.

Unfortunately, for most businesses today, the public mind is "censored" by Google search reslts. Not intentionally, but because Google knows better than you.

Name your businesss after popular search queries.

It is better to name your restaurant "townname foodtype", rather than anything unqiue.

springfield bar b q vs. tex's bbq pit
springfield chinese vs dragon phoenix
springfield plastic surgery vs
My one main weakness is what i find stands in my way of being great and that is i make a sucky employee.

I detest routines, my life doesnt fit a 9-5 schedule, i often stay awake for over 30 hours and then sleep for 12-14 hours, i get extremely bored of work that is the same every single day and i will quit and i also dont fit into the "professional" sector at all as i detest small talk and stroking other peoples egos for the sake of it. I also dont understand "company loyalty", thats something my Grandparents valued, to me it seems really quite silly. Sure, i'm not going to disclose the companies secrets, but i'm not to stop myself looking for other, better, higher paying jobs just out of loyalty.

This is why i freelance, it suits me well, i can work whatever hours i like, i'm perfectly comfortable with meetings with my clients because its always on topic and isnt about shmoozing, and i'm paid way more, also, i know if its boring work, its always temporary so i can get through it.

The other thing is, what companies call "benefits" arent beneficial at all in my book. Pensions, stock options, gym memberships, free lunch, corporate retreats, private healthcare (i never get sick and i'm in the UK so the NHS is good enough for me), dental, etc. I dont consider any of those a benefit to me, i'd rather have the money.

So yeah, i'm a technically competent developer, but im a sucky employee, so i found a groove that works for me, it also suits my life very well, i dont have a wife/kids so its also very easy for me to travel around etc.