skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
3. The interface has to go. It was clunky
back then and now it is downright horrendous
compared to nearly any interface we have.
Gnome might feel like 2004, but this feels
like 1997.

I use windows 7 at work and os x 10.6 at home (as well as ubuntu 10.10 in VirtualBox) and I can't see what feels like 2004 about gnome, or what feels like 1997 about this one.

In fact I can't off the top of my head really think of any major UI improvement between windows xp (2001) & 7 beside the clever resizing/positioning of windows & the new task bar.
It's not specifically programming, but I've done homework exercises in a night or a weekend as a grad student in mathematics that were main results of PhD dissertations years ago. It's all about point of view. If you have the right way of looking at the problem, things become possible that would look like miracles to someone looking at the problem a different way.
That still does not explain why I'm losing signal in the middle of Queens, for example. You can be damn sure, that nothing similar happened in the middle of Munich.
I use this library at my work, and I'm happy with it - but a word of warning: it's not trivial to integrate into your project. There is no makefile included here, and you'll have to modify the logging.cc/logging.h code to even get this to build under linux.
I've got nothing against people having an ideology opposite to mine, though we're not talking about polar opposites here -- we probably both agree about the importance of net neutrality.

What I do have a problem with is people holding beliefs based on little to no actual evidence. I understand the appeal of trying to slot this into your worldview, but it's totally unsubstantiated. All evidence suggests that neutrality is threatened by major corporations lobbying the government to allow them to make more money, not the government lobbying major corporations to turn the internet into a walled garden.
Snort - Open source network intrusion prevention and detection system
Yes, they do. Our site tracks pricing on Amazon products and recommends when is the best time to buy.

Amazon pricing on a large range of products pretty much change daily; for example Books:

http://www.happybuy.com/search//all/books/by-savings
I can only hope that Android 3.0 will be available on the swath of 2.1 and 2.2 tablets that have been released thus far. Neither of those operating systems were well optimized for tablet use.
The x86 comfort zone is always by your side. With virtualization (and app virtualization) you can run x86 apps seamlessly. Fortunately Office apps aren't CPU bound.

Right, this has always been the play on virtualization for the OS. Don't get stuck in legacy mode, virtualize, and move on. MS may finally be doing what everyone said they should do.
Wow, this looks like the exact opposite type of person I'm looking for when I hire.

I'm willing to pay high wages and even stake in the company, but if I do, that person should be willing to work hard and be dedicated to the building quality projects, rather than clocking in and out.

Is this how all developers feel? Do they all expect remote work?

I understand the need for working from home, but as a business builder, I like being able to sit with a developer and plan and build together.
Ask HN: Best examples of apps that change behavior with positive reinforcement?
Looking for apps for both personal use and for learning sake (I am trying to build one myself). Please list any you think are quality and worthwhile.

Interests:
- Productivity/Self-Realization
- Health and Wellness
- Social Change
- Environmental Change

Please and Thanks.
It betrays a desire to avoid a large chunk of bad candidates while discarding only a few good ones.
You're right; Facebook easily can go public. I think the subtext is, had SOX not happened, it's very likely they would already have gone public.

What I'm suggesting happened was, SOX took the IPO mechanism, which was a common and easy path to liquidity for VC, and made it a much bigger deal --- not just because of the regulatory burden that it imposes, but also because it washed out many hundreds of companies that might have gone public instead of taking a C round.

Being one of a small number of standard bearers for tech's return to the public markets is a different thing than being one of the best of hundreds of tech companies at varying stages of growth on the market.
And Microsoft just announced ARM support in Windows 8...
I really like this. I'm actually using it now. Could you not join Facebook Groups and start 'talking' about your website? For example, join some music lovin' group and mention it... or even get in touch with the owners/admins and ask to "affiliate".

Those are just random thoughts, I'm in the same boat as you. :) Good luck!

EDIT: Signed up and everything, but I like to listen to other peoples playlists, however if I'm signed in, I can't find any, because it redirects me to /me and that feature is on the main page ...
Release date for the Motorola Droid Xoom is currently scheduled for Valentine's Day. Sure, it may slip, but I'd certainly take a bet that said less than 3 months.
I am not talking about interacting with their API.

Facebook returns a uid.
When the user takes an action, this uid is sent to the server.
The server trusts the uid, and saves this action as taken by the user identified by this uid.

And let's say it's not the uid. Let's say it's the user's name.

It trusts the user input basically. But it should probably be getting it directly from facebook, or in a signed structure, right?
I couldn't be more creeped out by Ayn Rand-ian philosophy, and I like Goldman.
That's a crazy thing to say. The UI, the APIs, etc. will all be based on Windows 7, and any all-CLR apps should run without change. On Windows 8 running on x86, current apps (and Windows 3.1 apps, and maybe DOS apps?) will undoubtedly still run.

It's just like the Mac Intel transition, but without an emulator to fill in the gaps.
Yes, you should definitely throw out the water you soaked the beans in. (Even better, change the water halfway through the soaking. The key point is to shift the equilibrium point by making sure that the dissolved oligosaccharides don't redeposit into the beans.)
"At our first meeting with Paul, we showed him a PDF presentation and he sort of freaked out and it was really awkward for about 10 minutes as he tried to digest why we had made a presentation for him."

Why is that? I'm genuinely curious to know what would be uncomfortable about having a presentation, especially at a first meeting. It seems like that would be a good way to say "here's where we're at" in a few quick screens.
Man, functionality aside since I haven't used it, it is not very impressive. I would describe it as ugly as sin. It looks like the graphics were all thrown together in an afternoon. I hope it is placeholder.

- They replaced the nice soft gray/blue Chrome UI with a harsh gray one.

-The keyboard buttons are flat and lifeless.

-Arrows for selecting text has no depth and high contrast border.

-The page turning looks like something from the 90s

-The Youtube videos pop in from the left

This has really set my expectations low for what was suppose to be a significant UI upgrade. As a designer this makes me cringe.
Strong competition is (almost) always good, at least for the consumers.
With virtualization (and app virtualization) you can run x86 apps seamlessly.

Not on ARM. Emulation is possible but will be really slow.
Airlines using reverse auctions to determine true seat pricing
Dude just said he'd pay $5 a month for it. Where's your business sense boy?!
Yes, if it wasn't for SOX, I think a lot of companies no more sound than PETS.COM would have gone public. They'd have lots of users, moderate and consistent revenue, but no real prospects.
yeah, we just wanted to get it off the ground quickly. we will add timezone support soon.
A friend of a friend was asked to implement sqrt in hardware during a phone interview with nVidia. If you're smart enough to do that and you can't maintain the equivalent of a 2.7 GPA then that betrays a poor work ethic.
I haven't used soap or shampoo in a year, and it's awesome
The press-release has a couple interesting parts.

http://pressroom.nvidia.com/easyir/customrel.do?easyirid=A0D...

"NVIDIA has obtained rights to develop its own high performance CPU cores based on ARM's future processor architecture"

No shipping date, no product details, nothing.

Wake me up when they have shipping silicon. In the meantime, don't let Intel release anything.

Don't get me wrong. I would love to finally get rid of the x86 ISA, but I know the first ARM PCs (actually they would not be the first ones) won't be high performance. And there is no magic - when we start seeing high performance ARM parts, they will demand more power and will have most of the problems x86s face today. Both camps have very smart people working on the processors we will be using a couple years from now. Presuming one of them has a secret weapon that will annihilate the competition is ludicrous.
> What I can't figure out is why such ignorant and short-sighted policies are still tolerated, given that they directly impact the effectiveness, the reputation, and ultimately the bottom line of each business that adopts them.

Where are the numbers?

> It's not as if the empirical data is particularly hard to find,

google "programmer productivity working conditions" doesn't find anything quantitative on the first two pages.
Goldman was scummier than Lehman, how?
If you throw beans into concentrated NaOH they probably won't be edible any more. A pH of 8.5 is probably good -- try baking soda.
argh... pesky email stuff. i'll look into this soon.
I'd pay $5 a month for this site. Definitely.
Not everyone has the time to do well in college even if they have the ability. I worked 30-35 hours a week every week in college. I can guarantee that I would have gotten a 3.9 or 4.0 had I been able to not work, but I didn't have that luxury. Oh well, I got out with a 3.2 which seemed good to me.
So Microsoft sees a real threat in Chrome OS netbooks then?

That's the only place I see this being relevant. Windows in any form that can meaningfully execute legacy x86 code is not going into a non-PC device. (dashboard computers, pocket computers, pmps, phones, tablets, etc)

So the only thing left is netbooks. Is that really a relevant play in 2011? Do they think this isn't a feature Google can match and beat them to market on? Do they think the legacy of Windows will be a compelling alternative to the relative simplicity and security of Chrome OS in that market?
More and more I'm forced to face the reality that ChromeOS is doomed.

Conceptually I still like the IDEA of ChromeOS more but I just can't see a consumer choosing what is essentially a browser over something like this.

My only hope is that Google will try and move Android to a place where Web Apps are just as powerful as native apps on the platform.
I'm not surprised it doesn't make much of a difference with HTML since the markup contains so much ASCII. But 25 vs 18 kB is almost 40%. That might not be insignificant depending on how much text you're storing.

But it's a nitpick really, I just thought it he should have noted some of the disadvantages to UTF-8 as well.
Let's take it to "The Cloud" !
> . . . but less connected to the nations that granted them opportunity—and the countrymen they are leaving ever further behind.

Because opportunity springs not from the ingenuity of man but the granting of nations who "own" him.
Oh its a full aircraft and not just the jet engine! Still as remarkable though, somehow got a different interpretation form reading the title.
Wild-assed guess: it's something people working on projects at BigCo's do in lieu of actual work. It's pantomiming execution instead of executing.

We have a company all-hands this week, flying everyone in from NYC and SF; we're launching a new product and I have to do an hour on it. I don't think I'm going to do a deck. Why bother?
It appears google is requiring a dual core cpu for Honeycomb. So it's unlikely you'll see official updates for them. Even tablets that skipped market access and such probably won't upgrade if there is a serious performance penalty, and it's hard to believe google would make that restriction if it was unnecessary.
Photoshop on a tablet without pressure-sensitive input isn't much of a step up from Photoshop with a mouse. And in the press so far I see a lot of mentions of pressure-sensitive input on the MeMo, but nothing about it on the Slate.
Torn. I like that it isn't just a grid of icons and some apps with split views, but I doubt Google can really pull off a great tablet OS by forking Android. I still think there needs to be an OS built from the ground up to be a tablet and a tablet only. I want an revolution like the iPhone was went it was originally announced, not a half hearted evolution.
I understand your sentiment, and don't really disagree, but keep in mind that it's basically impossible to innovate or build wealth under unfavorable institutions. So... some value probably "should" accrue to nations.
The 10x productivity claim is one of the unfortunate ones, because anyone with a few years of programming experience can relate to the idea, but it's very difficult to define an objective hypothesis that can be tested quantitatively in any meaningful way.

First you have to define what things like "productivity" are for programmers, and to my knowledge no-one has really done a robust job of even that yet.

Then you have to establish who the "best" and "worst" cases are. After all, I suspect many of us would agree that some programmers make a net negative contribution to their projects, taking more time away from more efficient programmers to fix the resulting problems than it would have taken the stronger programmers to do the work themselves in the first place. This may be inevitable, given the learning curve involved in a field as complicated and diverse as programming.

That all said, I will just mention that Glass also covers this subject, with various other citations, in "Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering". Given that his final fact is "Many researchers advocate rather than investigate", a criticism very much along the lines of this article, it would be interesting to know whether his sources stack up to more robust criticism if anyone has access to them.
Starbucks Redesigns it's Logo : An Illustrated History
How slow? I did some quick profiling of Word and Excel doing basic stuff (text entries, making charts, but no hardcore calculations). Avg CPU utilization: 1%. Peak CPU utilization: 4%.

A factor of 10x slowdown would probably be reasonable. Is the current state of the art on ARM able to get it below 10x?
It's funny you say this, because I know many people that would work that and more for much less.

Maybe it's that developers are out of touch with economy trends, or maybe they are just in so much demand that they feel they can ask for this sort of thing...but I'm concerned that you correlate hours with salary in that way.
I agree, but my point stands that most of the people getting bad grades probably deserve them despite the few who deserve better. Companies who want to make the best use of their limited hiring resources would be served by avoiding people with low GPAs.
I used to browse on my n800 a lot.
I now browse on my iPhone a lot more. Because the convenience, rendering, panning and zooming far, far outweigh the lost accuracy of the stylus.
Single page: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2011/01/the-rise-o...
Nah, it just means that they get a large number of applicants. If I had to WAG, it means they'd filter out about 50% of the good programmers and 90% of the bad ones.

I also believe that grades correspond better with ability in chip design then it does in programming. (I've actually done both. Chip design is fun, but I'm addicted to very short code-compile-test cycles.)
Google's Browser Security Handbook
Google Apps Gives Schools a Better "Walled Garden" for Student Email
Riak 0.14 is out
Does your staff know about <buzzword>? If not you should be painfully embarrased. How can you run an effective organization without <buzzword>?
> This is simply false.

You are right, what I meant is that you can set h = 200 s = 100% l = 0% and you will get back R = 0, G = 0, B = 0.

> These are rounding errors, and shouldn’t be especially noticeable. So what?

Not to the eye, but for computers it is. Say you want to check if an element has a background color of hsl(100, 30%, 30%) because you set this color before. Well, you can't. I ran into this problem while building http://memela.com and I had to switch to rgb because of this.
There has been plenty of claims that Google is going to limiting hardware with the next OS update, and those are always been squashed. I mean, when has Google ever shown a even an inkling of trying to lock down Android? I'd be surprised if they could do it even if they wanted to.
Study shows safety advancements make drivers bored, take more risks
I'm not sure if this applies to your situation, but some of the open source hardware vendors run small time operations selling actual, physical things, with only one or two employees, over the internet. Chris Anderson, previous editor of Wired, started such a business and wrote up some interesting lessons for these types of small business:

http://blog.ponoko.com/2010/11/16/ten-rules-for-maker-busine...

Adafruit, and OSHW vendor also did a few write ups recently about shipping with UPS. You can see those on their blog:

http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2011/01/03/shipping-geeks-and-k...

http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2010/04/07/thomasatups-for-ship...

Hope that is helpful!
Check out what happens if you mix a very little bit of baking soda with eggs. Alkalinity speeds up maillard reactions.
KDE 4.6 RC2 available
Aside from the footer, I got a completely blank screen, even after reloading a few times. I think I figured it out: the site loaded fine after I enabled cookies for flowtown.com. I wish the site gave a warning that it requires cookies.
Ah I see, thank you. Hairy problem.
Yes, for sure. Some of the benefits should return to the nation that provided the favorable conditions (and do, in the form of that person's taxes and also in the form of opportunity-seekers from around the globe flocking to the places where growth is possible). But I don't like the notion that people owe their successes to their country any more than I believe they are indebted to oxygen or gravity.
Not my experience in college at all. The bad hackers were the ones at the extreme ends of the scales - the borderline-failing ones were expectedly terrible, and the top-marks usually had some other major handicaps that made them remarkable people but terrible colleagues (extreme lack of team work ability, zero communication skills, tactlessness, gigantic egotism, etc etc).

The best hackers (rather, the ones you'd want to work with) tended to fall in the middle of the pack. Decent marks, not great. Didn't spend their days trying to ace the next exam and spent a lot of time hacking on cool projects instead.

My own experience in college is that marks in the middle of the pack made the best employees, and in fact nowadays an extremely high GPA is a yellow flag when I'm reviewing resumes (though obviously, not a disqualifier at all).

Keep in mind at this school 80%+ would put you in the top 10-15% of all marks. I'm not against filtering for low marks, but in this case NVidia set their sights on the top 10-15% of the student population and disqualified everyone else as a matter of course. IMHO a dumb move that unnecessarily turned away a lot of qualified people.
Average CPU utilization is misleading. Just wait to see how long those small brief moments when you have 50% CPU utilization will extend into minutes under emulation.

And, BTW, nobody would buy a computer that can run only Windows and Office.

To be fair, only the Office part would have to run under emulation. As soon as the code calls into core Windows, the machine would be running ARM code. I don't know where the boundary is with Office.
By meeting frequently with the constant push of “have you launched?” and then “can I see your chart?”, PG and Harj helped us focus on making the right trade-off to do what it takes to make a great product but not a perfect one.

What chart is he referring to here?
Apologies - I should have been more explicit. The point is that I am the type of individual who has the means, and desire, to purchase applications and show my appreciation to the developers that create them; I have done this on the IOS platforms (iPhone/iPad) - but I have NOT done this on the OS X platform - despite using that platform as much, or more, than my iPad/iPhone, and despite there usually being somewhere, a PayPal funding button for those more popular Apps.

Some other thoughts:

o Once there is a curated environment that offers
low friction, and reasonable prices for applications,
I will buy them for OS X.

o Even though there will be $10 VNC apps on the MacStore
I will still pay $119 for Microsoft Office.

o Finally, (and not stated) - I am looking forward to
paying through the MacStore for tools like VLC,
Colloquy, etc...

As to _why_ - I'm not really sure. It might be the desire to believe that I'm not the only chump clicking on the Paypal button (Though, rationally, if my desire is to reward developers, that shouldn't play any role). It might be the convenience of having the curated store track, and filter out the nefarious malware (Though, once again, google, plus only choosing the popular software out there, is a good substitute for that). It might be the belief that I have some control over what is installed on my laptop (though, ps -ef, launchtl list, netstat -an, and find / -cmin -3 after an install usually gives me a pretty good hint)

All I know is that this time, next year, I expect to have purchased about $600 worth of OS X software from the Mac Store, which is about $500 more, on average, than I have in the last 10 years for OS X.

I may be a couple standard deviations away from the mean, but I don't think I'm three.

Net-Net - I believe the MacStore is going to be great for Mac Developers, and will result in significantly more income flooding into that software channel, without wiping out the higher end products. I disagree with the posted article's hypothesis.

Let's check back in a year and see who ends up being correct.
Microsoft confirms ARM support is coming in Windows
I remember a few weeks back, Paul Buchheit was talking about how he believes ChromeOS may get merged with Android or similar and he mentioned "The basic idea is that apps and data all live on the Internet, which is has been renamed "The Cloud" " - and the response from some IT people was astounding. I had friends go, "no that's not true! Cloud is a new thing blahblahblahblah CDN blah blah blah". I mean, what the hell? It's been around longer than I've been alive!
What specifically could Goldman do to reduce the risk to a bank of lending money to a small business that will be spent mostly on salaries and (in the balance) on equipment that will be worth 1/10th its purchase price if they need to call in collateral? Businesses are risky. That's why companies finance with equity.
"It's a blowout," said the guy playing NBA Jam on his Goldman Sachs-issued Sega Genesis.
If "cloud" is to have any meaning, it can't merely be synonymous with "client/server on the Internet". From here, I can't tell whether Gmail or Salesforce is a single server or a "cloud". Yes, logically I know what they are, but it's not relevant to me as a user.

I can come up with multiple possible meanings of cloud that are not vacuous, but this article does not seem to be using any of them.
It's hard to tell from a 60 second video, but that looks pretty darn awesome. Like a MovieOS(tm) that actually works.
Where? Bay area (Palo Alto or Mountain View).

When? No idea, could be June through October. Last time it was announced only a month ahead of time. I hope it's late this year, so you have two great conferences on starting startups, Startup School in October and the Founder Conference in May (mine :-)
Official Google Video Preview Of Android 3.0