skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Tell HN: Even Windows 7 is a horror show
I'm setting up a brand new Dell computer for my grandparents. It's taken me all day and I want to vent:

Windows 7- It's as if we're still in 1998. Nonstop restarts to finish installing/uninstalling programs. Unnecessary and confusing messages about installing drivers when you plug in a usb stick. Over an hour of disk churning while installing 59 system updates upon shutdown. No thought given to consistency of layout and behaviour between different parts of the system. Every conceivable icon in the core programs splattered across the tab-tastic "ribbon", rather than having the most useful options displayed in a friendly and logical manner. Nothing resembling a package manager, and you have to download even the basic Microsoft apps from their website.

Am I just having bad luck or is it actually terrible?

Edit: I did use Ninite, which was undoubtedly a big help. But I've just sat through 15 minutes of "configuring updates" after the hour of "installing updates". Makes no sense. I want my Sunday afternoon back.

Edit2: I didn't install Windows from scratch. I removed some packaged bloatware, added some basic software, set up the mail client (Windows Live Essentials Mail or whatever Outlook Express is called now) and copied across their data to the new machine.
United States of Autocomplete
Google correctly translates "Hello world" from English to Latin as "salve mundi". The Latin-English part is clearly an Easter egg. Nice.
I think part of this is following a time line as he grew up. Just look at the abuses 1970s, and the 1980s was a recession time for many.
So, how does this prove (or disprove) N=NP?
By Retric at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1647291

"The following men won gold in a solo swimming even in 2008.

"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Phelps
"6 ft 4 in
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alain_Bernard
"6 ft 5 in
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%C3%A9sar_Cielo_Filho
"6 ft 5 in
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Park_Tae_Hwan
"6 ft in
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oussama_Mellouli
"6 ft 3 in http://sports.yahoo.com/olympics/beijing/TUN/Oussama+Mellouli/217537
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Peirsol
"6 ft 4 in
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryan_Lochte
"6 ft 2 in
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosuke_Kitajima
"5 ft 10 in
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maarten_van_der_Weijden (10 km marathon)
"6 ft 7 1⁄2 in

"Height is not the most important factor in swimming, but out of 10 people, only one was under 6' and he is still taller than average. Now look at something like size of hands and they are going to stand out even more. Practice may be able to get an average person to the 90th percentile in most things but once you start talking about 99.99% DNA becomes extremely important."

(If you upvote me, please upvote the original comment as well: I'm sure Retric would appreciate it)
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1971812
It's not that I expected them to behave differently, I just prefer to give my money elsewhere where possible now. For instance, I am moving my wedding registry elsewhere, simply because I prefer not to give them the profit off of it since it can just as easily be given to other companies.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1971926
Martin, one of the problems with Joe Armstrong's book and OTP is that Joe doesn't use OTP - he always rolls his own servers - bless him. I remember everyone giving him dogs abuse for it over dinner at the Erlang Users Conference 3 or 4 years ago.

I do think we need to be all GNU/Linuxy about it and just always refer to it as Erlang/OTP.
I've actually set up something a bit more handrolled and useful for generating new documents.

In particular, I factored out the "generate a new template file" code that is in a lot of Textmate packages into some ruby scripts that sub in some values into a copy of latex templates that have all the standard goodness I like to have in my initial document.

its pretty light weight, makes it easy to ensure that i can use tex on pretty much any machine or editor with the initial setup I like, and its essentially OS / Editor independent (aside from being cli based).

https://github.com/cartazio/doctemplates
the useage would be eg:
> memoart "what I want to name the file"

To reiterate: this approach lets me have certain values in the files that are automatically initialized when I am creating a new file, such as commented out lines indicating the file's name and date/year of creation.
I do appreciate your suggestions, but this doesn't have anything to do with my ego. I took up the volunteer above (whose name I don't know) on his offer. Meanwhile, the site is fairly optimized. That doesn't mean everything is perfect, but it's not like we've totally ignored speed either. You may think the site is slow, but were it not for a lot of details you've ignored, it would be far slower. All I'm saying is that a lot of work has gone into this and you don't have to imply that we're idiots.

Also, 400K isn't all that much; one of our competitors sends over 4.2MB on their home page alone and it's a very professionally-done site. Aside from all of that, if our server configuration needs more looking at, we'll look at it.

It's great to have constructive criticism like the points contained in your comment, but had it been written without the sarcasm and small insults I would have found it that much more compelling.
I liked this very much. A letter between two of the towering intellects of the modern age that is still so accessible and packed with information puts all those fucking content-free PowerPoint info sinks right in their goddamned place.

I also appreciated that it wasn't walled off in scribd or something. I was able to, you know, read the text in a relaxing and "natural" manner.
I'm not sure there's anything on my holiday list, as in, anything I would like to receive from others. I've never been very good at receiving gifts, and there's little anyone could provide for me in terms of material 'things' that I actually want to own. Don't get me wrong - there's material things I want - but no one in my gift-giving circle is able to afford those things :)

I do typically get a few gift cards for restaurants from family members - these are nice because it lets me and my wife have a nice meal out. That's a key right there - the gift is providing me a nice experience, not a 'thing' to house and maintain.

What I've started to do - as a bit offputting as it seemed at first - is sending pics of my gift-card meals to the giver. It's a way to let them know we did actually use the gift, and that we had a good time. It gets around the giver feeling like they just handed over cash with no personal meaning. For other sorts of gift-cards, I will send an email or phone call thanking them and letting them know what I selected.

As 'impersonal' as this may be, it's the best balance I've come up with.

Side note:
The emails and pics feel strangely a bit like old-fashioned 'thank you' notes that my folks tried to get me to write as a kid after birthdays. I hated that experience, and when I didn't do it I felt like I was a bad kid.

Between getting older and getting computerized, I'm much more willing to follow up with email. I don't mind the process of thank you notes, but I hate writing by hand, even as a kid.

In my time, we had no real options (well, typewriter I guess) so I was forced in to writing by hand, which I was (and still am) horrible at. I can't write more than a few lines before my hand aches and the writing is illegible (even to me).

tl;dr: I wish I'd had email as a kid and been mature enough to use it to keep in touch with well-meaning family members.
My Happy Farm Blog
Why is this good? Why not just educate people about the problems with printing everything.

Preventing printing seems really silly.
This isn't nice: This is assholeish.

Who are you to prevent printing? Lots of people have considerably harder time reading documents on screens, either due to limited vision, size/resolution of screen (usually correlated with income) or long hours looking at backlit pixels.

Not everyone is a well to do 20 something with a 22" high dpi monitor with perfect vision.
WikiLeaks Swiss Registrar Dismisses Pressure to Take Offline
They also sell books about politics, but it's about the AWS and Amazon selectively shutting down it's services towards clients.
Do you mean to imply that the convention for loop variables came from on high?
As Bullies Go Digital, Parents Play Catch-Up
"Talent is a Multiplier", I think that sums up this topic quite nicely, you don't need it, but it's nice to have sum so speed things along ;)
I had a cherry '79 Yamaha SG2000 on my list; but it occurred to me that there are plenty of people who for whom that $1500 would go a lot further than it would providing the fifth (admittedly nice) instrument to hang on my wall. So I'm taking part in a local charity that collects wish lists from the indigent/desperately poor and I'm going to put that $1500 into making their Christmas' less shitty.

The stuff on the lists, by the way, will break your heart. Used shoes (size 11)?

EDIT: Just to torture myself:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=23055...
My mom thinks I'm Supreme Lord of all Technology, so I would be selling myself short if I got a job as a mere "senior developer", right?

Ignore the job titles and all that. Where will you be happiest? Where will you be challenged and be able to grow, and where will you stagnate and end up with an obsolete skillset in five years? (Hint: you won't be motivated to grow your skills as much if you're already resting at the "top")

I obviously don't know all the details, but if you're even asking this question I'm guessing that you want us all to tell you to break from this place and move on to better things. So I'll suggest you do exactly that.

Go.
Yes, but in my opinion, an ability to perform mindful practice is part of what we call talent. The person you described here is exactly someone who has passion for something, but is not that much talented.

BTW, I wonder, is this some new Internet trend, trying hard to "prove" that talent doesnt exist? I wonder what the motivation is... trying to convince oneself that one can be good at anything? :-) ... just asking
The whole area of ambient displays is interesting. So much information is on screens now, but for certain situations an ambient display would be a lot more convenient for conveying information.

See for example the ambient orb which can change colour according to what the Dow is doing, to name one example:

http://www.ambientdevices.com/cat/orb/orborder.html

Or the nabaztag, the wifi rabbit, who raises his ears to different triggers, such as, I don't know, a broken link on your website or a customer support email landing in your inbox. Pretty cool.

http://www.nabaztag.com/en/m-3-nabaztag-what-does-he-do.html
"I, who am better than you, will decide what you will and will not do."

Self-righteous. Pointless. This will do nothing to help the environment, but will only piss people off.
Beware self-funded Startups: failure can haunt you for a long time
After years of success and decline, I'm stuck with over $150k in debt
when we didn't bring our expenses down as fast as our income dropped.
It didn't help that not everyone on the team was exposed equitably to
our debt instruments (all personally guaranteed, such is the only way
in a new company). I had better credit, and even though I own a
smaller part of the company, my credit lines were the ones that got
expanded (which I didn't even know was happening).

After stripping expenses to the bone, the business might slowly pay
off it's bills, say after ten years or so. It does have millions of
users after all. Which means that this debt will haunt for years, and
I can't just leave it all behind, I'll have to deal with maintenance,
etc, for the foreseeable future.

My business partners bought homes at the peak, so between the business
and home, bankruptcy is looking like their option (I was not so, uh,
unlucky in my timing and have equity). Either way sucks.

And now I'm looking to do something new. And while failure might be
rite of passage in startupland, hiring someone with such unrelenting
financial pressure is not really likely, is it? And the credit report
problems (business cards get switched to personal cards when not paid
on time, and guess which ones of them all didn't get paid on time?
Yeah those with my SSN) will cause problems with a corporate job, as
credit reports are such a big thing in hiring these days.

Lesson learned: get investors; share the wealth, share the risk.

So HN: what on earth do I do now?
Installing SugarCRM Community Edition On Fedora 14
I recently switched to Windows Live. Google sites is a joke. I can make a call with my computer using Google Voice but only through gMail. I can't use the Chrome Google Voice extension to do this. Things like this have made me give up on the Google.
Take the new position. A few thoughts:

1. yes, it's a 'step back' - but so what? You don't have to stay there forever.

2. You're obviously not appreciated to the level you want to be where you're at. You can't ever change that.

3. If you leave and they're really that bad technically, they'll suffer and you can gloat a bit. They may surprise you, either by getting along without you or finding a replacement who they don't have to string along with broken promises and lies.

4. You will probably be happier simply because you're not dealing with the broken promises. I've been in that situation, and it distracts you from more important things, but is often hard to shake off.

5. Only you can look out for yourself - no one else, however well-intentioned they may be - will ever really look out for you (certainly not in the long haul).

It sounds like something closer to home with perhaps even a bit less responsibility will allow you to get settled mentally, rethink your career, and give you some more options without being distracted by the atmosphere at your current situation. Maybe I'm reading too much in to it, but that's how I'm reading it.

Good luck.
Amazon's choice: (1) host Wikileaks and risk getting shut down, or (2) drop Wikileaks, get boycotted. If choice (2) is as bad as choice (1), something I guess the boycotters hope for, then Amazon's choice is a Morton's fork: two equally bad outcomes. Why don't the boycotters stick their Morton's fork where it belongs: into those who wrote and enforce the laws they object to?
I have waaay too much "stuff", so I usually strongly discourage anyone from buying me anything. Trying to give things away instead. Anything that can fit on a hard drive is OK though.
Is there a difference between Senior Developer and Lead Developer (in your case Lead might mean solo?). VC can sometimes take a long time to work out so I'm not sure we're told enough to know if they are being disingenuous.

But here is the important bit,

"although I have taken the company from strength to strength, when it came to promotions, those with the right surname have seen rapid progression"

Disregarding your mention of discrimination (not relevant to this discussion) you don't feel like you have any upward mobility, and if you don't feel like you have a founder you can talk frankly to about this I think you need to move on.
New comments have to compete with old ones on the page. Once a page hits one million words it is pretty much done, unless there's a mechanism by which it gets edited, condensed, summarized, or updated.

One technique that has been tried is giving every visitor the power to edit, summarize, or update the entire page. That's the Wikipedia model. But, of course, you lose the history of the conversation [1], and the individual voices, and you're subject to the editorial whims of whoever happens by.

Another idea is to keep the content in the form of discrete comments but allow visitors to rearrange the comments. That's kind of how Stack Overflow works. The HN voting system also serves to rearrange comments on the page. These things are kind of indirect, though, and they do nothing to deal with the volume problem. Words take time to read; you have to cut down the supply somehow, and that inevitably requires some rewriting as well as cherry-picking.

Or you could just periodically archive the discussion and start it over with a fresh page, ending up with a series of discussions, each lasting only a day or two, but possibly related to or built on predecessor discussions that stretch back into history. This is pretty much how HN works.

---

[1] Yeah, there are edit logs. Most people don't read those for fun. Most of the events in an edit log are tedious and unenlightening, like reading raw Postscript source.
Depending on your laptop model, there are a few LEDs that can be controlled, at least under Linux.

IBM and ASUS seem to use stuff in /proc/acpi/asus|ibm ...

The SD-Card interface in my Laptop exports a LED in /sys/class/led... (but it seems not to be connected to anything).

So there is often one or the other thing installed, but how to control them differs.
No new tracks are created in someone else's footsteps
There's definitely huge opportunities in the medical sphere. We do have customers from this sector in our cloud although how they handle client data is always very strictly controlled and I think its fair to say that only a subset of the potential is being realised properly in terms of the broader market.

Kind regards,

Patrick
Maybe given training anyone can recall 100 digits.

However, given an equal amount of training, some people will recall significantly more numbers than others.

"The race is not always to the swift nor the battle to the strong, but that's the way to bet."
I don't know of any offers LinkedIn or Technorati turned down, and I know Xobni doesn't regret turning down early offers.

I agree Digg got an offer they probably regret not taking.
Because Amazon does not appear to have been compelled by law, so there's no law to change - just a vague sense of not wanting to be on the wrong side of powerful people. This is how the mafia works. It shouldn't be how the government works.
As others have said, this is just not really true. It is distorted thinking that is driven by a desire to see the tenets of egalitarianism in the real world.

It is as if (excuse the dorky analogy) we are all D&D characters with 100pts to spend on our qualities. In reality some people do just have more points than others.

On the other hand though, I am prepared to believe that most of the difference between individuals can be due to factors earlier in ones development, sometimes single turning points/epiphanies (e.g. having older brothers for sport, reading the right book when young ... etc.)
Verizon and AT&T will do what they are told as will other large ISPs, if they want to keep doing business as usual.
I don't have any specific suggestions, but thinkgeek.com is a good place to shop for our kind.
I think a whole lot of people would react to 'those who wrote and enforce the laws' when scenario 1 was picked. Shutting down Amazon sounds a bit to extreme imo.
You probably know, but the people to contact are your ISP to tell them of their DNS poisoning, and also the "rewards" company to complain about their sneaky affiliate.

You mentioned that it's not confined to just your ISP - It's possible for these DNS attacks to cascade due to the nature of DNS, so the attack may have originated higher up than just your ISP's DNS servers. But they should be able to have a better idea of what's happening.
What I wasn’t told was that the viewers were going to be encouraged to send in e-mails during the discussion; what I didn’t expect was that the Y would take the temperature of those e-mailed reactions, and then respond to them by sending a staff member onstage, mid-conversation, with a note that said, "Discuss Steve’s career."

This is a classic example of a solution looking for a problem.

Just because technology enables something doesn't mean we should actually do it.
Steve Martin is a class act.

This is all I need. This lamp and this remote control and this paddle-ball game. Oh - and this.
The initial setup is a horror show, but it isn't bad after you get it set up.

FWIW: (un)installers that say you must restart are usually lying. And when they're not, you can often avoid it by killing a lot of processes first.
Only if you're an established company or have wealthy founders that can personally guarantee the account. That is the good (and maybe bad) thing about paypal...pretty much anyone, with a decent credit score, can open a merchant account.
I assume these are just PDF files renamed, and that PDF has a "disallow printing" flag which these files have enabled.
No founder/CEO of a profitable startup who was making $200k/yr before starting the company and then takes a VC A-round is making $40k/yr in her fifth year at the company. No such person is making $40k/yr the day after the first round of funding they take.

CEOs of VC-funded companies make market wages.
- Restarts are required when core OS components are being updated. Linux doesn't make you restart for things like this, but it is still insecure until the restart has been accomplished. Microsoft just removed that option. I agree that they ought to sometimes be consolidated and should definitely be faster (although if it took an hour, maybe the computer is just slow), but it's a minor thing that happens once at system install time.

- Most people seem to think ribbons are a pretty good idea.

- Nobody except Linux users care about package managers. Mac OS X doesn't have one either.

Anyway, I don't see what about your review is related to 1998.
Looks interesting, but with all the hyphens it get's kinda nauseating to read the whole text.
I just set up a new VM to test IE9 in. From fresh install to working IE9 install + usual apps (flash, acrobat, Office etc. for fonts) took almost a whole day. Constant update after update, with restarts for each one. If you try and install an app whilst another installing, it doesn't queue, it just cancels itself, so you have to sit there and wait. Many updates to get the platform previews of IE working are hotfixes can't be installed for some reason (yep, even on a fully updated system), so had to give up trying to get the platform preview going (which was my main aim!).

There truely isn't a package manager, or even any way of setting a list of things to install so you can leave the computer to get on with it.

It makes you understand why so many people think they are "bad with computers", or say things like, "when I touch computers they break"...
I remember seeing Heroku mentioning it - http://jobs.heroku.com/ruby_web_developer
If only there were a cheap, easy way to automatically send appointment reminders in Mandarin. ;)

(Sadly, HIPAA -- American health privacy legislation -- means that there is a lot of uncertainty about whether they can actually use it or not, and since I'm not a lawyer and don't have an extra $100k lying around I can't resolve that ambiguity at the moment.)
The Billboard Social 50 is powered by Next Big Sound - music analytics and influence.
Microsoft doesn't care about the home/small-business user experience. Windows is optimized for being "deployed" en-masse to a corporation, with all updates and configuration pre-slipstreamed, and then managed remotely using Group Policy (as that's how, you can imagine, Microsoft's own computers are set up.) There's a package manager, but it's externalized—the sysadmin pushes packages to you, not the other way around.

Also, the cluttered ribbons everywhere is a side-effect of the success of Office's ribbon; there was a lot of user data-gathering put into designing that one, but all the rest are just slapped together because "I know what users use most in MS Paint."