skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I cannot help but think optical is a BAD, BAD choice for miscellaneous small external devices.
>> 3. Consider a different revenue model. Charging $15 a copy to OEMs is a tall order, particularly when the competition is free (Android).

Android licence is around $10 per phone: http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20101014PD213.html
If you are into real data analysis on the unix-commandline, including ASCII histograms... and are not afraid of 70s-style forgran programming, you should have a look at PAW; the physics analysis workstation.

library/program site: http://cernlib.web.cern.ch/cernlib/

sample session transcript: http://pastebin.com/w8GxRPzU

This kind of ASCII dumping of data was the standard for a long time, and even in the early 90s, people used things like ASCII terminals (e.g. the wonderful Falcos that could superimpose simple graphics on a "2nd" alternatively shown display page).

E.g. have a look at the printout on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wow!_signal , that's most likely a "waterfall" display of received signals on a astronomical radio-telescope with number 0...9, A...Z (or something like that) representing the bin scale.

Also gnuplot has useful drivers to dump out ASCII pictures (or, using the XTERM Tektronix graphics capabilities, also line graphics). This even works over a simple ssh-session, so it might even be an advantage if you have to check some data on a distant machine.

Or scp the data over, and use Excel ;-) {NO! JUST JOKING!}
Maybe you could make the keyboard shortcut handling stop detecting presses when meta-keys are held down?

For example, if I type cmd-w (on a Mac) it types 'w' instead of closing the tab as I would expect.

I've written a lot of keyboard shortcut junk for web apps so I've had to do this before as well. :)

I was actually using Try Arc the other day to see how it compares to other lisps that I'm familiar with. I like it!
The other thread on this:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1814613
The language I wish Go was
Show me something "not so different" for 3x less.
Full size keyboard is a must. I my give up on trackpad there, but only because no other company has something comparable, so it would be unfair to ask for it. Even on my first gen MBA trackpad is so good that I never connect a mouse to it.
I might consider replacing it with the new 11" — it would be an improvement nonetheless.
I think the adult oriented stuff is a US problem. I see adult apps in Europe and it asks me if I'm over 17 (the local required age I guess) if I download it (it is strange that the one I always get asked on is actually a news app but we show bare breasts over here...).
For what it's worth, the current Sony Z model uses an i7 (and dual SSDs in RAID 0). It's significantly more powerful than anything Apple has in the 13" form factor, coming in at about the same weight as the new 13" Air (3.04 lbs). Actually, its i7 is the same speed as the 17" MBP's top option.
I actually bought trillian, because i like the cross-plattform approach.

I only wished they'd have a Linux client too, since i use their windows, android and web versions, but also use linux a lot.

edit:

One thing i like about trillian astra is that it can send you a mail of missed conversations if your mobile is offline.
>> 4. I don't think the browser on WP7 is based on IE7 just for numbers to match. And this give me little hope there will be quick improvement in that area.

It is based on code from deskotop IE6 and 7: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10452710-56.html
Does that necessarily follow? Are you assuming that he does or can get 10c clicks?
Beware of WEIRD psychological samples
802.11g or n is faster than most consumer Internet connections. Nobody's suggesting streaming HD movies over the cell network... yet.

Blu-ray discs are 25-50GB, but they contain lots of stuff besides the movie (bonus material and other stuff). Dropping extra features, using newer codecs, and slightly decreasing encoding quality can pare a 720p movie down to 5-6GB. Over a 20Mbit connection, that's a 30-40 minute download. Definitely streamable.

In fact Apple, Netflix, and Amazon all do this already. They sacrifice some quality compared to blu-ray, but unlike blu-ray, you don't have to transport a physical disc to your home. Even though blu-ray is higher quality, you have to ship discs or travel to a store to get them. Video on demand is so much more convenient, and the quality is only going to get better as connection speeds and codecs improve.
Indeed, this will presumably affect users of Eclipse, Netbeans and similar. Not sure how many non-developer apps make use of those APIs, though, especially as they don't quite produce native look & feel. (still much better than X11, which is indeed terrible on OSX)
They would have to be utterly insane to try something like that. I would expect the stock price to drop like a rock if something like that came out.
What about physic ? I think they also have an important role in programming and no, it's not just for games.
Why you need a co-founder - Creative pairs
You reckon they are intentionally trying to create a homogenous atmosphere? How do subreddits fit into this? I don't think that makes real sense.
Drupal Task proposals open for Google Code-In 2010-11
My first laptop was an Asus and one of reasons I got it was the feature that you could remove the optical drive and put a second battery instead. I remember using the optical drive only 3 or 4 times. That was 6 years ago.
From http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=716262 - one of the many times this question has come up ..

None - I can't code while music is on. Ditto conversation, and ditto doing math.

There was something in PeopleWare (I think) about an experiment done with people listening to music. Those listening to their preferred music performed about as well as those who preferred silence and got it, and about as well as those who preferred music, but had silence. The group that preferred silence but had music performed, unsurprisingly, comparatively badly.

The sting in the tail was this. The task they were given had an "Aha!" insight buried in it. Namely, the full set of transforms they'd been asked to implement turned out to be trivial, although the individual components weren't.

All the programmers who had the "Aha!" moment had silence, regardless of their preference. No one with music saw the short cut.

I've since tried to find concrete evidence to support this anecdote, either papers, or first hand accounts, but the recounting in PeopleWare remains the only reference I have.
Yahoo uses a similar setup. Instead of virtual hosts, the hosts here are physical machines. Search team had a dedicated lab(not sure what's happening now with search migration) and all developers would ssh to their assigned lab machines, fire up their vim/emacs and crank code.

Search team has a mixture of windows laptops, macs, linux desktops, linux laptops..and it didn't matter because everyone just ssh'd to a RHEL box and worked.

Yahoo used to be a BSD shop, then moved to linux. Search team used both Debian and RHEL in the beginning, then transitioned to RHEL fulltime.

I don't understand the obsession with RHEL. In my experience, Debian/Ubuntu will give the same benefits as RHEL sans the cost.

The rationale for moving from BSD to linux was practical. The gist was most of the vendors either do not do bsd or bsd was second class citizen. And BSD wasn't as quick as linux in catching up with esoteric hardware. But discarding Debian didn't actually make sense to me.
Gavyn Davies does the maths: How a statistical formula won the war
Not even iWork, iLife and Mac OS X upgrades?
Electric Cigarette
Volcano electronic cigarette nicotine cartridges come in a variety of flavors. They provide a great smoking alternative to traditional tobacco cigarettes.
X11 is horrible on OSX. Applications that use it (e.g. The GIMP on OSX), are terrible and have many usability flaws, such as no clipboard between an X11 application and a normal application.
Alveo
Data Hacks: Command Line ASCII Bar Charts
Call in at http://combinat56.com sometime; there's always a couple of devs doing interesting stuff there.
I like recursion!

"seed in a partially of writing of text. We'll run it done our extremely forward-looking algorithms* and end ware a lovely, wholly unoriginal partly of textual matter"
Urgh, MG Siegler, Techcrunch, their headlines...

No, the CD has been killed by obsolescence, not by Apple. I have used an optical drive on any of my three computers exactly twice in the past year.
Bitly's command line utilities for data analysis
High school is where a select few get to be popular just before they spend the rest of their lives pumping gas and waiting tablets for a living.

Germany, as one example, actually separates out their high school system is split. From:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Germany

> German secondary education includes four types of school. The Gymnasium is designed to prepare pupils for university education and finishes with the final examination Abitur,

> after grade 12 or 13. The Realschule has a broader range of emphasis for intermediate pupils and finishes with the final examination Mittlere Reife, after grade 10; the Hauptschule

> prepares pupils for vocational education and finishes with the final examination Hauptschulabschluss, after grade 9 or 10 and the Realschulabschluss after grade 10. There are two types

> of grade 10: one is the higher level called type 10b and the lower level is called type 10a; only the higher level type 10b can lead to the Realschule and this finishes with the final

> examination Mittlere Reife after grade 10b. This new path of achieving the Realschulabschluss at a vocationally-oriented secondary school was changed by the statutory school

> regulations in 1981 - with a one-year qualifying period. During the one-year qualifying period of the change to the new regulations, pupils could continue with class 10 to fulfil the

> statutory period of education. After 1982, the new path was compulsory, as explained above. Other than this, there is the Gesamtschule, which combines the approaches. There are also

> Förderschulen/Sonderschulen. One in 21 pupils attends a Förderschule.[2][3] Nevertheless the Förderschulen/Sonderschulen can also lead, in special

> circumstances, to a Hauptschulabschluss of both type 10a or type 10b, the latter of which is the Realschulabschluss.

Perhaps the reason that high school is so disconnected to the rest of life is that everyone goes through the same system. After that, you go to college (or not). Whether or not you go, to what school you go and what you study is largely merit-based.

The private education system is better in some ways but isn't merit-based. It's largely a function of the economic circumstances of the students' parents.
What about Qt? It looks good for me, although I never tried on a mac.
Same story, different source, submitted yesterday to thunderous silence:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1810568
the plural of anecdote is not data.

from 2003, http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-110814573.html

Once the decision to purchase is made, 78 percent of the
participants said they wanted to use the product right
away and therefore choose to immediately download the
software. When purchasing CD-ROM versions, specifically,
46 percent requested delivery within a few days.

they don't mention sample size and perhaps have an agenda.
This is right up my alley; I wrote a command line gantt chart generator like two weeks ago :)

I'll definatly use asterisks instead of equal signs for the bars though.
I've found that it's beneficial to embrace the divide between a fast boot drive and a large data drive.

If you only store your OS and programs on the boot drive, space isn't a big concern and you gain a lot of flexibility. It's less hassle to repave the OS, migrating your data to new machines is simple, and it's easier to upgrade the boot drive as faster ones are available. That's especially nice with SSDs because you no longer have to care very much about the write limit. If my SSD boot drive wears out, I have 0 data recovery/restoration to worry about.
I don't think the lack of optical or hard disk storage started the hole in history. Rather, perhaps IBM did when it invented the hard drive in the 1950s. Or maybe it was as early as Edison's phonograph in the 1870s. Whenever artifacts started requiring technology to interpret them (external dependencies, if you will) is when this hole in human history really began.

Perhaps future generations will see the digital revolution as a time of strictly furthering the bottom-line; a time when it became prohibitively expensive to print most data. Yet currently, we call this "being green."

How will future generations perceive this period in history?
Unlikely - I had 4 year old cds that I couldn't read because they had degraded too much.

So this is already an issue.
Your original text is:
Is this as interesting as it seems?

Your reworded text is:
Is this as uninteresting as it seems?

I guess so.
fuck oracle :)
I've spent about $8,000 in 2010 six to eight cents at a time. You don't literally need 10QS to do so, but a generally high QS is one factor. Others include Conversion Optimizer, several years of history, rigorous pruning of nonperforming keywords, being in a niche which has lowish competition for the keywords I care about, being able to outspend other competitors through having a higher price point, etc.

Incidentally, I am not very good at AdWords.
There's also quite a bit of interest from some of the Android guys internally, so I'm optimistic it'll continue to grow in that direction.
there were a bunch of totally bogus complaints a while back about Arc's lack of utf8 support

Those claims were not bogus at the time. When arc was released Paul Graham explicitly stated that unicode support was not there and was low on the priority list.
Huh? His "dumb terminal" is a Mac laptop that will run on a single machine most less-than-Google-sized tasks...
Yes, but you can't extract money from the military-industrial complex that way.
Anyone else looking forwards to iAds in every free app they use on their Mac? Just me?
This is the more rational title though. Thanks OP.
First Alpha Of Opera 11 Released, Developers Can Now Build Extensions
Managing Risk and Keeping Your Network Secure
> Not that there aren't already frameworks that do this

Like Linux package managers since... ever. On my Ubuntu box I have the official software sources (OS and applications) but also have Skype, VirtualBox and Google repositories registered. It makes the machine self-update soon after an update is published.

I really wish Apple integrated that kind of behavior into OSX's core.
Lemonade: On the fly generated CSS-sprites with Sass and Compass
You got it wrong, actually, your comment is boring.
For Average Joe there are still significant pain points that a Mac App store can remedy.

For example, I produce accounting software - here are the problems my would-be users face:

1. Where can users find a list of suitable accounting software products? Usually they Google 'accounting software', but this gives them plenty of crud such as: a) accountants websites; b) accounting software from other countries. c) advice websites. d) accounting software for big companies

2. When users get to a website for an accounting product, it can be difficult to to find out even basic information such as: a) The price; b) Screenshots; c) the Download button; d) the 'Buy Now' button. The App Store listings make this as plain as the nose on your face.

3. How can users compare accounting software products? At the moment you have to find a website with software reviews and hope the information is up-to-date, impartial and accurate. The ratings system in the App Store is better than almost any website.

4. The user doesn't know how easy or painful it is to install the software until they try. On windows, if they try downloading setup.exe they get TWO warnings saying 'This could harm your computer... are you sure?'. Maybe they remember last April when they clicked OK to a similar message and ended up with a virus. With the App Store the user knows that it's a one-click install and will not get any scary messages about harming their computer.

5. Can the user trust the website to process their credit card details correctly. Maybe they remember the last time they tried on another website and the site froze after they clicked 'submit' so they didn't know if it had worked. Or they read about a company that had all their credit card details stolen. The Mac Store is seen as far more trustworthy by Average Joe because it is run by Apple.

6. The software update process for App Store is a breeze - better than most ad-hoc software update solutions. And the user knows it before they install the accounting software because they have already used it for updating other software.

My guess is that the Mac App Store will be huge, and being ranked well will be like striking gold. Let the gold rush begin!
Compared to what? Your comment is like saying "A house is bigger."
Genius presentation on stylesheet authoring with Sass and Compass
I'm really sorry that thread got killed. I thought it was great, and I was really disappointed too. I'm glad you're here and I'm glad you posted it, and I hope this community gets better.
On FaceTime
Mixing Flash With Fashion – It’s Soo Last Season
Why do fashion websites insist on creating highly user-unfriendly and unaccessible Flash websites while there are many worthy alternatives widely available!?
Over a 20Mbit connection, that's a 30-40 minute download. Definitely streamable.

Unless you're in Korea, 20Mbit connections are far from commonplace. And in many countries download caps are the norm, which would preclude watching more than a handful of movies a month.
The old ones were. It seems the industry migrated to cheaper materials with time, or something with similar effect happened... I have problems reading some 2 year-old CD now, but a stack of disks from random newspapers from 1996 is working perfectly fine (found a big pile just a week ago).
I think "may be removed from future versions of Mac OS X" sounds pretty much like it is very likely that it will be removed.
China, India, and the Socioeconomic Determinants of Their Competitiveness
Excellent PR from Nokia. This is how you respond to negative press
But this seems to be AWT. And the GUI just doesn't feel as snappy as native Cocoa.

Actually, I wonder why that is. I always thought that it is Java itself which makes Java applications feel slow. But I haven't noticed this in Cyberduck. So maybe it is just AWT.

I wonder why that might be. Maybe because AWT does all the drawing itself, which is much slower compared to the native toolkit?
Still it is installed on pretty much every machine i know, be it server, desktop, windows or linux.
Like Flash it is most of the time one of the first 3rd party tool to be installed, i guess..
Its all About:Flash player installation without administrator in 3 easy steps
> Steve hawked it in one of the early OS X keynotes as being the future of the Mac platform

That's standard practice. You make it easy to port apps to your platform until you gain traction and until your exclusive technologies do, then make it hard to port away from your platform by phasing out technologies that would enable that.

A Java app that runs fine on OSX but that's easy to port to (or directly run on) Windows or Linux does Apple no good while an application written in Objective-C depending on the latest *Kit stuff locks both developer and user into Apple's walled garden.

Their move from GCC to clang is no coincidence.
Nope, they were bogus then too. I was hacking a Chinese website at the time. Basically what happened is PG didn't use utf8 and didn't check to see if it worked, but it did anyway. From the very beginning,

(def 什么 () 1)
(什么) => 1

worked. Python, for example, can't even do that. As is often the case, the people complaining didn't even bother to try it out to see what they were actually complaining about.

There were a few tiny places that needed improving (I know, because I wrote most of the utf8 improvements in Anarki), and they almost all revolved around parsing / producing web-related utf8 stuff.
Arc seams to be just like Scheme. I can't see anything that makes it mutch better. What is better in Arc then in Scheme?

What is the concurency story (does it have one)?
Does arc have full tail call optimisation?
Make sure you are writing good accessible semantic HTML to begin with. If your HTML isn't semantic, you are already starting with a huge disadvantage.

Google is the most important blind user on the Internet. If the blind can't read and navigate your site, then Google can't index it.

Check out Jeffrey Zeldman's book Designing with Web Standards, 3rd Edition, for advice on making sure you site is as accessible as possible.
CERN used RH too, 6 when I was there. I believe they've now switched to Scientific Linux.

Actually I don't understand why Google would use virtualisation. Why would they split a physical box up? Making many hosts look like one, yes (is such a thing possible?), but not the other way around.

And AFS was cool: it was actually a global filesystem that many institutions used. you could cd /, ls and browse to nasa.gov amongst many thousands of others (much was protected!) (cern was mounted on /cern.ch)
My MBA had lots of heat issues initially. When having a Skype call from waterpipe cafe terrace in Istanbul the Air would shut down when sun started shining.

However, the Apple firmware update from autumn 2008 fixed most of that, and things were even better after I disabled Spotlight. Now I'm running Ubuntu on this and it doesn't get too hot to keep on lap any longer.
There already was a app store for desktop apps on macosx: http://appbodega.com/

I think it is a pity for bodega...
Why Lose Your Shoppers to Yahoo Answers?
I wonder if Ubuntu could do something similar
Using GAs to Represent Higher-Level Planning in Simulation Models of Conflict
pg wrote it and the backend of the site is written in it. You can read more about it here: http://www.paulgraham.com/arc.html
iPad: Scroll or Card?
30+ Blue Logo Designs for your Inspiration
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Fully agreed, the portability is simply amazing. And unlike my iPad I can actually use this for development work anywhere.

That said, I'm a bit disappointed about the battery life estimates on the new MBAs. The lease on my old Air will run out in spring and now the contest will be between the 11" and the 13". Though I'm also waiting to see if Nokia ever does a refresh of their Booklet that had integrated 3G and 10h battery
Awesome radios. Loved it, thanks for the tip