skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have some eyesight issues and other issues that can interfere with ability to focus at times. The black text on a white background with nothing to really break up the space or clearly delineate anything makes it difficult for me to even read the site. There are lots and lots of other people in the world with similar challenges. A smidgeon of design work to help set the body of the writing apart from the title and sidebar might help. (EDIT: Oh, and try to cut down on the glare factor. It doesn't take much. HN is much, much easier for me to read. Subtle grey background cuts down on the glare and helps delineate the body. It makes a big difference without being very obvious that anything was done at all.)

I'm not a big fan of the "myname.com" address. If I don't already know you, it tells me nothing about the blog. If someone is already famous, okay, it makes sense, people will look for them under their name. Otherwise, I don't see any real value in it as a positioning thing. But if you want to go with "myname.com", at least give some descriptor of what you talk about/who you are/what the blog is about in the title. "myname.com" followed by "My Name's Blog" -- uh, there's no there there. Wait until you are world famous to go with "My Name's Blog". Until then, you need to do a little more packaging to get across why I should be interested in reading this stuff.

HTH and good luck.
Nick Carr: The Internet changes everything/nothing
Small bug report: releasing the mouse button outside of the viewport doesn't get recorded (mac and windows). if the mouseup event isn't being signalled, maybe an onclick event would be?
Motorola's Xoom Tablet Has A Built-In Barometer
I was raised like this. My mom showed me no real love, nor did my family. I buckled under the pressure and when the time came for any real emotional support, they abandoned me in an attempt to get me to "try harder." I never forgave them and I don't talk to them any more.

In the end, regardless of how they felt or their intentions, I was made out to be nothing more than an ornament, a product for the glory of the family name.

All societies have their pathologies. Witness the stuff women had to go through in the 50's and 60's in the US. There's always ugliness under the surface. People just adapt and accept things as normal. It will always be the case that some part of "normal" is messed up if you look at it the right way.
Andrew Gelman has a great blot post on this:

http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2010...

In a nutshell, the problem arises from trying to estimate small effects and then screening results on statistical significance.
The only problem with Hamlets statement is that he assumes that this "more" is metaphysical.

The answer of course is. Of course there is more things that can be dreamt of in our philosophies. But you don't need to go meta for that to be true.
NeXT and Pixar in the middle, hardly just waking up.
The site is left open for the whole day here... just hitting F5 when I get some free time.
The problem that I've always had with GIMP is that it (menus, macros, general UI, etc.) doesn't mimic Photoshop. If you want to go after a well established product why not mimic these things to achieve a higher adoption rate (due to instant familiarity)?
>So a loaf of bread is eaten just so that it can be produced?

Are you arguing in good faith here? Do you seriously believe that if we got rid of the "useless majority" in the US that the GDP would remain the same or even grow? Where would this extra wealth be coming from when the majority of the actors in the economy would be gone?

It's not that society exists to support people consuming, it's that the US' wealth is almost exclusively based on consumption. If you get rid of the consumers you get rid of... (fill in the blank).

>Also, the developer I mentioned is in the top 3%, not the top 1%. Does that substantively change the nature of my assertion?

Well, the conversation was about the top 1 or 2%, but even so. You mention a developer in the top 3%. Most developers, even most very good ones are not there. Is pg in the top 3%?

>Lastly, when discussing CEOs who fail to turn a company around, you are comparing CEOs to other CEOs.

No, I'm comparing what they accomplish to what they're paid. In my mind it would be pretty hard to do something worth a yearly compensation of e.g. 20+ million/yr.

For a founder it's pretty clear. He/she made something and received that level of compensation with a very small team so obviously what he/she did was worth that much to the market. But CEO's are generally shielded from market forces on salaries. Your "you are comparing CEOs to other CEOs" even seems to acknowledge this. If you aren't comparing them, how exactly are we arriving at the value they are providing?

>Unless you believe that a company would be better off making the secretary into the CEO, it is ridiculous to assert that the CEO is less productive than the secretary.

I never asserted that [1]. I concede that a CEO is very valuable and concede that he should be the highest paid person in the company. What I don't concede is that he should get hundreds or even thousands of times more compensation than any non-executive.

[1] I did assert that for a given task that a given CEO does I bet I could find someone paid a normal salary who works harder on that specific task but that's not the same thing and it was to address the patently ridiculous claim that the most wealthy people are also the hardest workers. Some are hard workers.
Regardless of what have been said above I like to be reminded. It helps to stay afloat.
And the GIMP supports 16 bits for most operations, simply by enabling GEGL in the Color menu, therefore it is quite equivalent to old Photoshop in this regard.
Twitter's New CEO Finally Nails Down the Company's Long-Term Vision
This was written as a clarification since so many people who applied assumed we were in the Bay Area or Silicon Valley.
Duty to the glorification of one family seems a petty thing to me. The egoistic pursuit of personal glory or the pursuit of hedonistic pleasure also seems petty. I suggest instead a devotion to truth and substance.

Instead of pushing your kids to play violin to "get to State," I would suggest finding joy and art in music yourself. The former often produces mediocrity. The latter produces the sublime. There are tons of former "young prodigies" who put away their instrument as a forgotten childhood thing, whereas many of the best artists I know received a true joy in music from their parents.

It can even help with the girlfriend part.
Google Research Publication: Chubby Distributed Lock Service
We're working on this with FaceCash.
Hacker Poll: What Was the Best New Open Source Project of 2010?
The fact that HN gets over 80k unique visits a day means _you_ can hardly do anything about it. It's a community and you gotta accept it how it is. Even PG can't do much, as far as 'attitude' towards newcomers goes.

Think of this: You have the same rights as everybody on this forum. You can comment and submit stories, but what you cannot control is how the HN crowd will react to your submissions/comments. I guess that's where one needs self-introspection.

Also, I don't want to sound like I'm accusing you, but in the 11 days you've been on HN, you've submitted 66 items. Now, I am no one to judge, but that's a tad bit on the higher side. You may want to recount what you said about bringing down the site's quality.

Edit: Grammar
It could be, especially since this poll is more likely to be answered by those that visit frequently.
Job Openings in the Azure Group: What They Say About Steve Ballmer’s Latest Move
#2 – Happiness and success are two different things.

Could not agree more. Our definition of happiness often includes "Success". And people's definition of success is quite relative, depending on other people's current perceptions and ideas of how we should be or what people envy, or image.

I retired 6 years back, spend more time sitting and walking in parks, feeding and playing with stray dogs, and remaining in the present moment. I've never been happier. Others see mine as a life wasted - dropping a high paying job, loads of money to spend, and becoming a miserly bum !
Using clickstream data for defining ranking is a must, but not enough.
Manual rating adds value to web site rankings.
Google Toolbar's data adds even more value to the ranking.
I'd say all that clicking data should be affect search rankings even more than hyperlinks.
Despite Limitations and Fallibilities, We're Capable of Greatness
And wikipedia://atom says "The atom is a basic unit of matter that consists of a dense, central nucleus surrounded by a cloud of negatively charged electrons." If you're going by quoted Wikipedia definitions then H+ isn't an atom, so therefore it isn't an ion.
A 2011 “Lightning Calculation” Calendar
The Rise Of Facebook’s Valuation From 2004-2011 [Graphic]
No kidding. I don't see extortion on the list for instance.
There are more phones than PCs. And it’s easier to steal money from phones.
Make Them Stop: AT&T And Verizon Reps Are Now Fighting With My Tweet Stream
I've given up on having the best device for my budget in some arenas. I want a new TV, but I'm not going to evaluate all the options. The time it would take to do so is worth more than the value I can gain by finding the best TV for my budget, so it would be a net loss.

I'm finding it's quite liberating when you stop caring! Even if I do evaluate every option I often feel unsatisfied after a purchase, worried I got the wrong thing, and more often than not a better option comes along a week later. For my new TV I will walk into a shop, ask them for the best ones for my price range, pick one that seems good, and I'll be happy with it. Who cares if a better model comes out the next week for the same price? Not me, anymore!
It uses the same crappy GTK file mgt widget design philosophy as GNOME.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GTK%2B GTK is the GIMP toolkit, and GTK is run by the GNOME foundation. There's quite a bit of relationship between GTK/GIMP/GNOME, even if it may be mostly historical these days.

I've always considered GIMP to be a GNOME app, and most people I know have.
Get more out of your startup reading
Glenn Beck: We Must Stand Together Against All Violence (With A Gun In His Hand)
This is not really the kind of problem it seems to be made to be in the article.

Science is model building, nothing more, nothing less.

Models to predict outcomes with. As long as the outcomes are predictable it's established as a fact.

But these predictions are always temporary that is the very basic principle of the scientific method as put forward by Popper. In other words you can never do enough testing to establish something to be universally true.

The problem with Poppers method is his tendency to see the scientific method as something with a direction. I.e. we build knowledge to gain better and better and increasingly more true understanding of our world.

The article shows exactly the limits of testing. You can even for a very long time and repeatedly have the same outcomes just until you don't have them anymore. We have no way of knowing whether our observations of various phenomena are universal or simply just some patterns that happen to be true for a limited time (even if we talk millions of years)

And that is ok. Just as we make assumptions in our personal lives that are true for some time until they fall apart. (housing market, pension funds, that death sure job, marriage)

Life's complicated and we never know what it will turn up with. I find that part of why it's great to live.
You can buy anything online nowadays.
I graduated in '99 with a 2.1 CompSci degree - the year a Chinese chap threw himself off the top of an 10-storey engineering building because he couldn't go back with a 2.1 degree.
quote from original WSG article.
"If a Chinese child gets a B—which would never happen—there would first be a screaming, hair-tearing explosion. The devastated Chinese mother would then get dozens, maybe hundreds of practice tests and work through them with her child for as long as it takes to get the grade up to an A."
Do you want to do this to your child?
It may be just me but WSG article looks like a well concealed satire on Chinese/Asian parenting :)
Intel demos MeeGo/Android dual boot and dual core tablet
With consumer electronics, I think that's a wise move. There's very little difference in most devices that are in the same price range these days. I don't recall that being the case 20-30 years ago.

I went shopping with my grandfather a couple years ago for a new monitor for his computer. We got a flat panel 20" for about $160 (IIRC). It was a name he hadn't heard of. He was only looking at the Sony and Dells initially, cause he hadn't heard of the other company before. We spent a few minutes looking at the 'off brand' one, and we went with it, saving about $40. Absolutely no real diff in the quality, weight, performance of this one vs the 'name brands' in this case - certainly not for his needs.
The author wrote "smart" in the title, but the content is valid for everybody, smart or not. ;-)

I guess the use of "smart" in this title is just marketing to atract readers. Everybody knows that most people think that they are smarter than the mean! ;-)
This article brings my experience with OSS full circle. It was the Gimp and GTK that first drew my attention to OSS in about 1997. At the time it was tempting to believe that OSS was inherently a better development model but after almost fifteen years it's clear that it's been wildly successful in some domains but a washout in others.
Running Virtual Machines With VirtualBox 4.0 On A Headless Fedora 14 Server
Notice the link at the end of the infographic. Boosting with backlinks is fun. I never used infographics for SEO, but that sure does seem to work for link/keyword juice on these types of sites.
I don't think anyone doubts that for things like OS kernels, database engines, web frameworks, browsers, libraries, editors etc. FOSS software easily wins.

But for end-user applications where you pay for the competition and where the typical end-users are not developers, or similar, (e.g. MS Office, PaintShop, most games) then FOSS versions seem rather poor by comparison.
I'm pretty sure choosing the best device along all interesting dimensions that fits your budget is NP-hard.
Did a quick search and found this:

http://www.asian-central.com/stuffasianpeoplelike/2008/03/17...

Essentially, they are seen as the most 'refined' instruments to learn and play.

The piano is chosen as you need to learn both treble and bass clef to play, the violin because they are portable and light enough for very young children to hold.

From tfa.
Yeah, but it's Alaska. Walk a mile and you cross two time zones.
UK Slow on SEO but Big on Social Media
I don't think this is what the article is about. At least for physical and biological phenomena, there is some objective truth. For example, Seroquel does or does not reduce schizophrenic symptoms---the reason an original finding is "temporary" and wears off is not because the efficacy has changed over time---it's because it was never efficacious in the first place (and we were mistaken because of bad research practices).
Wow, talk about user engagement.

I subscribe via email using Feed My Inbox. I like that delivery mechanism because it limits my interaction with the site, which can be a little consuming. :P
Indeed. And having progress per se is what proprietary software like Photoshop has to do in order to sell more licenses. Why would you buy the most recent CS version if Photoshop 6 was certainly good enough?

The logic is different. GIMP does not have to evolve in order to survive. It's open and if you need it doing something it doesn't, you can hire a developer to do it. The fact nobody does it is because it's good enough for what it's used for.
True, although I often fall into a worse trap when that 'Get back to work!' message comes up by seeing what's on Reddit instead.
Nexus S receives MeeGo and Ubuntu ports
I forgot what the point was already.
I sense some vaguely spiritual concepts (often disguised as pop philosophy) that are being introduced into public conversations about science of late, probably this is a result of the growing mistrust and desire to return to "a simpler, more wholesome world" I've been hearing about. What the article cites as "cosmic habituation" is nothing more than thinly veiled anthropocentrism, an attempt to explain the behavior of complex systems with simple delusions of how human semantics supposedly influence cosmic reality.

The specific meme discussed in the article has been popping up all over the place in the last two weeks, and to give the New Yorker's editors minimal credit, they strain to eventually reach a balanced view in an effort not to offend anyone. However, some viewpoints just don't deserve equal consideration, and it doesn't matter how many supposed authorities are dragged into the debate to infuse it with credibility.

I worry about statements like "Such anomalies demonstrate the slipperiness of empiricism.", because while factually true, they serve as pretexts to mislead the public into thinking that scientific results are just opinions and open to a debate based on spiritual worldviews. Yes, models are almost always faulty, yes there are tons of results that turned out to be spotty or in dire need of adjustment. Science welcomes these faults, because they serve to point out errors that need to be corrected.

So some researchers discovered their assumptions turned out to be false, I get that frustration. But it's not a cosmic conspiracy. Articles like this one often play with the sentiment that "the truth wears off", it doesn't. It is really hard to define models that stand the test of time. If you're a scientist your goal is to find models that best explain your data. You accept your models will be incomplete at best, and have a decent chance of turning out as totally wrong later. No matter the outcome, finding new data contradicting the old model is always a good thing, because it's a chance to update it, to make it stronger, or to throw it out in favor of something better.

We're dealing with a number of complex systems that have complex interactions. It's hard to isolate factors. And even if you do, many researchers fail miserably at basic statistical reasoning when it comes to determine the relevance of variables. It happens even to renowned physicists. It's hard. But it's not the mysterious work of an anthropocentric cosmos. The universe really doesn't care what we believe or not.
Google Docs introduces video player
I prefer too and that could be because I don't want to bother the other one, when I only have a short message I just want them to get notified about.
I don't want an immidiate answer or hear their feelings etc.. I just need an answer in the near future.

And because text gives me the possibility to get my thoughts ready into consumable form too, there's no question why we use it more often.

But these things point to the differences of real-time/delayed messages, like email or chat and both have their places.
I always wished the decay with time was normalized by the number of visits someone makes per day. That way, when someone visits frequently, they're often see more stuff, but if someone only visits once a week, they'll see the highest rated stuff over the past week (and some lower rated stuff from the last few days).

Perhaps not completely normalized by number of visits, but at least nudged a little by number of visits, to produce the user experience mentioned in the above paragraph.
Nothing's a requirement, they just raise your chances of success.
Analog sunset begins, all the new Blu-ray players will only output HD via HDMI
Wikipedia: Delete Earth
#12 there seems to be an endless supply of this drivel / content spam being upvoted in HN.
The Plan to Catalog the World’s Visual Language
Hey here's a wacky idea: stop reading a dozen startup articles a day and do startup stuff.
Tried anti-procrast check box, didn't work...
Ep.io: The First Few Weeks
People of HTML5 – Remy Sharp
Wordpress, despite it's "n00b"-y feeling, makes it really really ridiculously easy to get your MVP out the door. Simple account management, simple CMS'ing, and well documented enough so you can spend your time on your business and not your framework.

Groupon's MVP was an WP blog and we used it for http://playlookit.com
Google Goggles solves sudoku
But that is my point. Whether we call it objective or not is solely based on our practices, our observations. And these can never be completely satisfactory. The scientific method no matter how rigor is not telling us whether something is objectively true but rather that as far as we have tested something to be true it is.

More specifically I was commenting on this:

...For many scientists, the effect is especially troubling because of what it exposes about the scientific process. If replication is what separates the rigor of science from the squishiness of pseudoscience, where do we put all these rigorously validated findings that can no longer be proved?...
For every AT&T Android user there are 15 iPhone: What will it be at Verizon?
Responsive Web Design with HTML5 and the Less Framework 3
Wondering how hard would it be to build it on top of GNUStep. Anyone cares to try it?
This is partly related, but fascinating nonetheless: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8552410.stm

'mapping the growth of the internet'
Network protocol analysis prior art?
When the GNOME project was founded, they looked around for a widget toolkit, and found Gtk+, that was created for GIMP at that point.
Does anyone know of a good resource to read on game design? I'm not interested in the programming aspects, but on the psychological mechanics game designers use to make games fun (or, if you're Zynga, addictive).
> You should leave in the "fuck you".

Only if he'd say it to lionhearted in person, over a dinner conversation, per the HN etiquette guide. He's certainly within his rights to feel strongly about this, and to convey his belief in the harm caused by the demanding, uncompromising style of child-rearing; but there should be a way to do that with a modicum of tact.
A Nature article suggests it's music training in general with regard to verbal memory: "...adults who received music training before the age of 12 have a better memory for spoken words than those who did not. Music training in childhood may therefore have long-term positive effects on verbal memory." http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v396/n6707/abs/396128a0... I do wonder if the same effect would result with any memory-intensive task. Reading and playing music would have to be one of the most intensive and enjoyable, however.
Because they are using their software? And the the entity that built the app for the "App Store" was not the sole copyright holder of the software.
That was footnote #1 in the article.
The consumer market (especially for electronic doodads) is segmented into low, medium and high-end products (for a given function, e.g. tv, phone, computer, etc). I find that the best value is in the middle because the low-end is often poorly built or poorly engineered and does not last (too many corners cut, missing critical features, etc). The high-end gear usually well-built but includes fancy bells and whistles that I don't or won't use (with some exceptions). The best strategy that I use is to shoot for the mid-range product made by a manufacturer that offers high-end products. To create a mid-range product a manufacturer often has to gussy up a low end product or plain jane a high end product and the latter approach usually works better in the end.