skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It would be depressing for Android to be our best hope. An OS built by a company that gets most of its revenue from advertising will be subject to the whims of Google's customers, which are advertisers, not people like me.

And you can see this:
1) The market is strongly biased towards ad-supported aps. Who benefits? Google. Whose data is passed to the advertisers? Mine.
2) All of Google's ad-supported services are preinstalled on the devices.
3) Android handsets must be activated before use. I've paid for the hardware, but it's useless until I give more data to Google.

Google's business model is giving away cool stuff in return for milking you for information. I can't believe people think that this is "free" or "open".
J&J is a for-profit company. Nothing to do with the advancement of healthcare, as it does for profits. The same way Microsoft is not for Open Source, no matter how many white-papers they'll publish (and then contradict with yet another FUDish commercial, article, statement etc.)
Not really. I have seen Windows CE version 2. I must assume they didn't start on 2. NT started on 3 because Windows 3 was the first version of Windows that was usable.
sometimes. Usually it's more of a ease of administration thing. If web and DB are different virtuals, it's easy to upgrade one or the other on it's own as needed.
The same way you identify good food.

Trial and error + filtering other people's opinions.
Great example of innovation inside of Microsoft.

One interesting point of comparison - if you look at say Apple or Sun (RIP) open source contributions, they tend to be in the low level, OS and programming fields - I'm thinking of LLVM, OpenCL, ZFS, Dtrace, etc.

MS's innovation tends to be more user visible, like this and Deep Zoom.
I agree. I know many smart people in engineering who only use existing engineering tools supplemented by Matlab for data analysis.
I don't think they're contradictory at all. As you gain more and more fitness you'll have to work harder to get to the pain. As you experience more pain you become somewhat more comfortable with it and can tolerate more of it over time.
He started in 2008--before the financial crisis. His assumptions about paying off loans didn't include a once-in-a-generation economic event.

And to be honest, you don't know if his financial problems will deteriorate to the point where he'll have to sell his home. Assuming he got a 50% stipend (he probably didn't), he still owes BC $60,000. How will he pay that back on a teacher's salary?
Don't confuse object oriented concepts and philosophies with implementation. The two are quite different.

There's also no single definition of OOP because it has evolved over the years.

Start here: http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?DefinitionsForOo

It's important to learn the ideas before you get tied to an implementation.
I think adwords & blogging and other actually effective forms of advertising are upping the amount of pressure on people who sell worthless things. I get called almost every day with someone who tries to sound like a customer to keep me on the phone long enough to sell me something. There's an air of desperation where we're finding out that some companies who were profitable before the recession are not actually adding value when you need to justify their services.
You want to get the pain. But no matter how much your mind wants the pain, your body will be screaming at you to stop. In a way your pain threshold is less of "the point where you can't take anymore pain" but rather "the point where you stopped last time".

An athlete's relationship to pain is ridiculously complex. Partly because pain is so complex, and really should be split out in different concepts/words. Adjectives are just so clumsy. For example, high performance athletes must learn to differentiate the pain of training from the pain of injury. It is possible to push too hard, to suck up too much pain. But it's also possible to be too tentative. Striking that balance is what keeps high performance athletes healthy, but always improving (something I have big problems with).

I cannot speak for everyone, but when I and some of the more competitive athletes I am friends with go to train, we want the pain. Going into training, we look forward to the burn. We know that it's good, that it signals progress, that it will fade, and that it means that we are better. But once we get into the training, all the love and craving doesn't change the fact that your legs are dying and lungs are on fire and arms don't want to move. The love by itself will not keep you going on. You have to push through that pain. The fact that you were pumped up 5 minutes ago doesn't mean anything in the moment.
We strive to have exactly one feature or bugfix per commit. Squashing commits to a single one does not mean we mix stuff randomly.
Okay, before we go any further: can we skip the comments about the responsibility behind taking loans?

It's hard to accurately calculate your degree's ROI when, between applying in 2007 and finishing in 2011, this country experiences the worst recession of the last 70 years. No one expected this job market four years ago.
OP brings up some good points, but even after I thought about it for a while, it's still not for me. Let me explain...

Breakfast alone, no problem. In fact I always have breakfast at my desk while I work. But my morning work is so intense that by 11 or 12, I have to get away from my computer. Lunch with someone else is the perfect break. We talk about all kinds of things: everything except work.

I can't imagine using my lunch break to do other work, no matter what it was.

My afternoon is usually another strong burst and by 4 or so, I'm ready for exercise and then dinner with SO. Whether we eat at home or at a restaurant, I can't imagine missing it. Then comes visit with family and another 3 or 4 hours after that.

Contrary to OP, I need meals with others to get away and recharge. My day (and my life) has many sprints, but it's the still a marathon that needs to be paced.
The "RepLegoRap."
A few answers, off the top of my head:

> Why doesn't Exchange and Outlook expose enterprise IM better? This should be standard everywhere.

Office Communicator handles inter-office IM well, including handy features like integrated desktop sharing.

> Why does collaboration with Office products still stink?

I loathe it when used as a public-facing CMS, but the recent versions of SharePoint offer impressive collaboration/versioning when coupled with Office on desktops.

> Why does the built in defragger suck so bad? Why do I have to defrag at all?

You don't. This has been happening automatically in the background since Vista. The tool is mostly still there just to scratch psychosomatic itches.

> You know what I routinely need? I need a best in class OCR tool to mass OCR lots of scanned documents. That would make me super productive. Why isn't that part of Office? Why am I stuck with an absolutely unusable and ancient format designed for digital faxes?

Office started shipping with OCR starting in the 2003 version. It's integrated in the products if you scan directly into them, or look for the Microsoft Office Document Imaging tool that gets installed along with Office to do that standalone.

> Why doesn't Microsoft control the end-user software distribution channel by now? Why do I have Steam installed when Microsoft built everything to support gaming on my PC except for that last bit? Seriously, what the hell?
> Why do I have to get virus scanning software? Why does Microsoft make virus scanning software and hardly promote it? Why isn't that just part of some Windows update? Don't look for something to certify protection status, and then not be the provider of that software.

Things like that are anti-trust minefields.
This guy must have boring coworkers. Seriously, because when I go to lunch with my colleagues we talk about work or related things and it's almost always productive. We either walk away with a more knowledge or a decision to a hard problem.
That's something I tell people who aren't used to training: you have to learn to tell the difference between good pain (you're working hard, so it's hard going) and bad pain (you're injured and if you don't stop it's going to get worse).

The fact that you were pumped up 5 minutes ago doesn't mean anything in the moment.

A thousand times yes.
The tricky part is that the math works out something along the lines of there being ~200,000,000 domains and there being ~20,000 Google employees. At a simplistic level that works out to 10,000 domains per Google employee. Which means that even if Google stopped doing everything else and everyone at Google spent all their time talking to webmasters, they'd each have to answer 10,000 peoples' questions about rankings, how to make their site, whether they have ranking issues, etc. That's oversimplifying somewhat because there's lots of parked domains, but not too much--you'd be surprised how many people want to talk about their parked domains and why they aren't ranked the way they want. My team is vastly smaller than the number of Google employees, of course. And our first order of business has to be worrying about what users see when they search; talking to webmasters is the secondary priority.

The net effect is that we haven't found a way to talk 1:1 with every webmaster, and I'm not sure whether that's possible. The story of webmaster communication for the last few years at Google has been trying to improve scalability of the info. The earliest Google webmaster communicator ("GoogleGuy") answered questions on a webmaster forum. In 2005 I started a blog, which has the advantage of permalinks for posts like http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-mistakes-autogenerated-doo... . We tried doing live webmaster chats, but that would only reach 400-500 webmasters at a time.

The most scalable thing I've found so far is making videos. Here's a video that came out last month about the dangers of autogenerating pages for example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8bgpWtVHo4 . We're at almost 300 videos now, and we're getting closer to 3M total views on our webmaster video channel. The hope is that this additional guidance helps people self-identify what can cause issues to avoid or to correct them without needing to talk to Google.

The other big tool that has been helpful is http://google.com/webmasters/ . That provides tools to identify the common errors/mistakes that webmasters make (crawl errors, 404 pages, canonicalization, robots.txt issues, identifying hacked sites using the "Fetch as Googlebot" feature, etc.). That helps with many of the straightforward issues, but of course it doesn't solve the issue with "sheer number of webmasters who have ranking questions vs. number of Googlers." If anyone has suggestions on how to tackle communication with webmasters in a more scalable way, I'd appreciate feedback on how to do better on that.
How to Safely Surf in a Hacker’s Paradise
Many individuals do not bat an eye when they see that their restaurant, dry cleaners or even favorite hair salon is offering free wireless Internet. Most consumers expect that the wifi is their god given right
Maybe the alternate store has a better presentation of apps (I find App Brainz on Android easier to browse than the default marketplace app). Maybe I want to see an app store that's filtered out all the porn, maybe I want to see one that only has porn in it.

The I think rather than open vs. free, Android and iPhone could better be compared by choice vs. simplicity. Android gives you choice on just about every bit of the phone (new marketplace, new home screen, new soft keyboard -- all without rooting) whereas on the iPhone it's Steve's way or the high way.

Now Steve's way is pretty damn good and it benefits a ton from the simplicity of not having choices, but it's not really possible to make a "best" choice for everyone, and Android can really hit a wider range of tastes. Whether any of the manufacturers/networks are doing that well now is very debatable.
name of the business is? jason at calacanis dot com if you don't want it public.
Unlike Google's altruism?
PRs: 5K 14:53, 10K XC: 30:29 all from college.

Nothing fancy compared to people I trained with.

I've read Once a Runner a long time ago. Training life is similar - it's all consuming really. In many ways it's like a job and a way of life.

Since I gave up running and got on with my life, I still train and compete competitively - even low key competition is enough to keep things interesting and motivating even though it's not the way of life it used to be.

I don't recommend that people do marathons actually. I've done 3 and they take such a tremendous effort to recover from that a lot of people just stay on the couch and don't start running again.
I was implying he stay at law school and finish it out. Does he owe BC the money, or a bank?
Sounds like lot of food to me :) any other ideas ?
Maintained Relationships on Facebook
What is your opinion on the massive college tuition bills people have to pay for them to be able to dish out salaries anywhere near this? Teaching staff scale badly, sure some would be benefiting greatly from this professors expertise, but others would have little contact paying the same hefty tuition to support this kind of salary.
WikiBhasha
Here's a nice Radiolab piece on pushing past limits
http://www.radiolab.org/2010/apr/05/
I don't understand this at all. Especially not installing a browser toolbar.

I competed in a "business plan competition" called Venture Cup here in Sweden a few years ago (it didn't give me much, it's very focused on business plan and not so focused on actually doing, but it was started by McKinsey so what can you expect...) and one of the competing teams did pretty much what you're doing. I didn't get it then (back then, Epiphany had this and no other browsers that I knew of, but it was a pretty obvious browser addition) and I don't get it now.

Nowadays, I don't even bother adding keywords to the browser since Google directs me to the correct page anyway when searching for "amazon|wiki|ebay something" directly in the address bar.

The team that did that (or at least some of them) went on to do better things and created SoundCloud so I have my hopes for you too!
Debian to accept non-packagers as Debian Developers
I think this further illustrates the theory put forth that ideas are worthless, and it's only implementations that matter.
Huh?

Where was it suggested those salaries were typical?

I'm saying in those cases where you see a seven figure salary for a department chair or chief of surgery position at a teaching and research hospital, it's because the state believes they have the very best talent available.
I was pleased how easy it was in Chrome too. I made a flickr CC image search shortcut to make it easy to search for images to use on the blog.
Opera Browser AMA (Ask Me Anything) on reddit
Not overly price sensitive, as anything will probably be a savings over what we are paying now. (Budget ~$1000 a month)

The site is RoR and while doesn't have performance "problems", it is slower then I would like.
If you want the benefits of scaling without the hassle of dealing with server admin, check out Rackspace Cloud Sites. It's good for a site like yours that has low traffic but spikes several times per month. Putting it on a VPS might backfire during those spikes in traffic. If you do go the VPS route, look in to Cloud Servers...you can resize the slices on the fly, from 256MB up to 16GB to scale vertically, or add more slices to scale horizontally. http://www.rackspacecloud.com/605.html
If you buy the right hardware, you can get rid of all of the Google stuff if you want.

Also, it is open source, so you've got a very good base to fork from to make something of your own, should you so choose. I think we'll see more of that in the future.

Sure, Google adds some stuff on top, but I think that's a small price to pay for all the free stuff you get underneath, which is more than enough to build your own Google-free system should you choose.
Note that there are many other hosters besides GitHub, like Bitbucket, Savannah and SourceForge. Also, there are quite a lot of self-hosted projects out there.

So aggregation services like Freshmeat and Ohloh are usually a better source of information. Freshmeat is great for announcing new releases and makeing new projects public. Ohloh is great for summarizing and counting lines of your public work and contributions. For example:

http://freshmeat.net/users/vog

http://www.ohloh.net/accounts/vog
Possibly (you never know). Actually if you take the idea a bit further, you could create "custom" search engines for various other topics.

For example, a search engine for chef's looking for new food to cook. A search engine for auto-repair for do-it-yourselfers. And of course a programming one. Basically, any major topic or profession.

This could be done by taking a large engine (such as Google) and customizing its queries, filtering out non-relevant stuff. Because currently everything is bunched up together in one giant index. It's not as efficient as it could be.
> I always thought pain was the body's signal that something was wrong

I have heard it said that "pain is the feeling of weakness leaving the body".

It's a signal that your body is under stress, but that can be a good thing. One of the keys is understanding the difference between the pain of "I'm stretching my capabilities" and the pain of "I'm damaging something".
> Or are you saying we should program in visio-style diagrams?

Yes. It should be possible to develop an interface that is actually faster and cleaner to program in than text. I'd love to see what touch interfaces can do in this regard.

It's never been done, granted. But it should be possible. I hope developers aren't dissuaded from attempting graphical programming interfaces just because everything that has existed up to now has sucked.
Ubuntu 10.04 with Firefox 3.6.8.
This is a major contributing factor in the deterioration of the quality of higher education. There are two ways to approach higher education. As an opportunity to gain access to resources, knowledgeable professors, and fellow students to aid in gaining knowledge. Or, as a burden of little more than money and time that one must endure in order to obtain the credentials necessary to get ahead in the job market.

The latter is a self-perpetuating cycle so long as people buy into the credentialism of a college degree, but that road is utter uncritical of the quality and so is ultimately destructive (of the quality of knowledge and experience imparted by degree programs and also of the time and money spent pursuing them).
When I went to law school, orentation consisted of 3 days of being repeatedly told:

1) Your degree will not get you the salaries you expect. You will be paying these loans off forever.
2) Most law school grads hate being lawyers
3) There is an extremely high level of dis-satisfaction with this degree and this career path.
4) If any of this bothers you, LEAVE NOW.

I am the only member of my class who actually listened, and left after one semester.

Nobody can blame the schools, as they seem to be very clear on these issues.
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Very impressive. I'll have to look into that.
> Anything less than 100% correct is incorrect, it isn't necessarily broken.

> run and/or produce useful answers (it would depend on the input)

The fact companies can and do sell broken products that generate wrong answers, lock-up or crash from time to time has no relation to the fact the products are broken.

An old joke said that IBM stood for "Inferior, but marketable"
In the UK, you pay back student loans at a rate dependent on your earnings, so he would have no problems paying it back, even if it took 50 years it would never become a hardship. I'm guessing the US is not so generous/socialist though.
Poorly written and poorly substantiated crap. The author provides no references to backup her claim that "porn" is harmful, not to mention she has no relevant professional credentials. Why should I listen to what a corporate lawyer says about sex?
Looks like you missed his second intentional mistake in the same sentence.
I'd say its worse. At least when running you have endorphins and hormones to help you out over the course of your few hours of "pain". Launching a product involves months or more of numbing drudgery, self-doubt and incertitude about whether a finish-line even exists, with coffee the pitiful substitute pick-me-up. Try that, runners!
Optimizing for Happiness - Tom Preston-Werner at Startup School 2010
> You're either a terrible typist or a poor listener. Make sure your email address matches in both fields.

I would humbly suggest "Oh, I see you haven't mastered cut'n'paste yet."
It's a shame about Ray Ozzie
The economic fallacy of 'zombie' Japan
Dup: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1806539
A very real and sad startup story: Escapia
Thank you very much for the link.

What exactly do you mean by "implementation"? I didn't talk about any specific language or framework.
I don't think this is really a viable startup. There are so many ways to do exactly that, and in lots of the cases they're better. You can do that with other browser plugins, you can do that with chrome automagically, and there also Quicksilver and Alfred (this is the one I use) type of quick launch app that integrate this. I honestly don't want to have to install anything on my browser when it does it already out of the box and for added speed and productivity it's also hooked into my application launcher. And lets not even go into the profitability part! If you're planning on doing it as a hobby, I reckon I'd rather do something a bit more unique. If you're planning on doing this for money, how the hell are you going to monetize this, specially with a customer base thats already broken into a gazillion little niches?
It's definitely an intentional joke.
If this is a joke, then it's a riot. Else do not read into this, this is not javascript.
Oh OK, no worries. My comment went from many upvotes to several downvotes, because people assumed that you were saying that my information was redundant and should be removed. We got to experience a bit of a hive-mind on HN. :)
Twitter mood predicts the stock market
He's focusing on tool support (for manipulating representations of code), but languages (representations) could do with improvement as well.

Or perhaps you could think about both together. How would you coevolve a language with tools? If you could make assumptions about the tools people have, how would that change the language?

Ah, that's just smalltalk. Done.
Er, there's a quantitative difference between one mistake and two mistakes.
> Yes. It should be possible to develop an interface that is actually faster and cleaner to program in than text

http://scratch.mit.edu/ ?

I am not sure I would like to use it for anything complex.
Microsoft Cloud Apps v2 - Office 365
My coworkers, the C# ones at least, have been talking up Azure and how easy it was to work with on their recent project.
The difference is that any criticism of any Apple product anywhere on the internet is somewhat likely to provoke rabid responses. On the other hand, criticism of the newest Sony Vio, will probably be ignored and rarely elicits ad hominem, and the idea of Motorola fanboys is a bit absurd.

It is not really surprising given that Apple actively provides talking points to its customers (e.g. I'm a Mac).
That defines "open". Free is defined here:

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

Also, the FSF (and I assume by extension RMS) has no problem with the Apache 2.0 license which is a free software license and compatible with GPLv3.