skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Less Bureaucratic productivity software. Activation Energy, it's a thing
I am sure that everybody has tried at some point to use some sort of productivity software. A to-do list, project management software, or a personal wiki containing personal wisdom. I am equally sure that most of them have stopped sometime shortly afterwards. For all the wisdom that you have, it feels like you will just remember it, and have no need to open a browser, navigate to the wiki, create a new page, and delineate all that you have learned.

Some people must have succeeded though, and some of those people must have been as lazy and dedicated to instant gratification as the rest of us. I wonder how they did it.

For example, I would love to use a nested to-do list, with the ability to keep notes on things that I have finished. Unfortunately, if accessing it at any time takes more than a single keystroke, and would take me out of what I am doing, it seems like I probably would not use it. At any time when I should update it, I will tend to choose to store the information in short term memory out of expediency. The activation energy is just too high.

Has anybody found a technique for managing themselves that takes very little energy to integrate? Ideally, so little, that it seems like using it is easier than not using it.

Or did everybody just have to buck up and start making the responsible choice to keep themselves organized?

-Alex
House.Resource.org
Why is the executive greedy? I have no idea what their plans are, but is there something unethical about going beyond coffee?
seriously? http://www.mozilla.org/security/known-vulnerabilities/firefo...

I wouldn't be so sure about being fine.
It seems odd that anyone is capable of using HTML5 Boilerplate "without learning". It is almost impossible to use something without knowing what it is useful for.
Really, I was able to click on the cudo logo and it redirected me to today's deal in sydney at http://cudo.com.au/sydney . I guess you can try entering other cities names and it should redirect to deals in those cities. This is very similar to Groupon (and infact a tad easier)
I had a similar experience. Where I just jumped.

The one thing I would have done differently is not tried to do 1 million projects, and I wish I would have learned I was more extraverted than what I thought I was early. It would have saved me several months of worthlessness.
Olin, Roderic, and myself are working on the next major release of scsh. This next version has things like 64-bit support, r6rs support, all done on top of scheme48 1.9. We hope to ship it in the next few months.

If you're interested in participating or testing, head on over to http://code.google.com/p/scsh/

In addition to updating scsh, we're also working on getting MIT Scheme's Edwin editor to run on top of it. Which is over at https://github.com/scheme/edwin48
Interesting that Microsoft's answer to "Why?" seems to be "Because we can." by journalists. Hopefully they have a better strategy than that.

That said, I'm all for more ARM support in the world.

It looks like it will run .NET apps with little or no reworking. They probably borrowed a lot of the work of the .NET Compact Framework team for a reverse port. Expect native SDKs later, after the initial launch.
I prefer the old, not from nostalgia but because if you look at all the striping, the siren is a very busy design element. On the old logo, that busyness was somewhat encapsulated inside the simpler pattern. Now the busyness is more visible and can't be ignored.
Google shows off Android 3.0, the 'Entirely for Tablet' Honeycomb (video)
What establishes the value of something is not what it has inside it, but what the user wants to do with it.

A $999 tablet with 64 meg SSD, USB ports, an x86 processor and an HDMI port is actually less useful than an ARM tablet because I do not intend to hook it up to an HDTV, plug USB devices or run Windows software. I prefer the longer battery life and silent operation. If I wanted desktop OS capabilities, I'd buy a netbook that comes free with a keyboard (which is how desktop OSs were supposed to be used). For the price of this thing I can get both a netbook and an Android tablet.

Microsoft lives in the delusion that Windows is something super-cool everybody wants in every computing device they own. How seemingly smart people fall for this will be studied for generations.
puck ferl
>IT HAS A BUILT IN WACOM!!!

Suddenly this tablet sounds very reasonable. A fully functional Photoshop on a tablet would be nice. (And there's no way you'll see that on an iPad unless they have a similar price markup.)
> A unique retail experience that creates a Third Place for our customers between their homes and places of work

No it doesn't. Maybe if there are no alternatives, but they've taken some of the trappings of a good 'third place' and standardized them into a fairly bland format, and left you with something that doesn't really fit that bill.
Man, I wish I was working for them, but I haven't even graduated yet. It'd be really cool to be involved with this stuff.
Cyberspace When You're Dead
Map with HN users? Hackernewsers.com
Microsoft at CES: Next version of Windows will run on ARM
Announcing the High Replication Datastore for App Engine
How does that limit video to Youtube only? You sure this isn't just a marketing phrase? Is there concrete proof that other video players will not work?
I agree that there could be some price pressure due to increased competition and choices. However, given the inherent differences between iOS and OS X apps, I don't see many iOS developers being able to instantly compete with the established independent Mac developers and companies (e.g. Panic, Omni Group, etc.). The years of experience of the established Mac developers shows through in their quality. If anything, they may need to alter their marketing a bit to justify the premium pricing.
Keep your grades up. When I was in college NVidia had, emblazoned in bold text across their intern ads, that a minimum 80%+ was required for consideration.

Part of the reason I never bothered with them - IMHO a company who heavily bases their hiring choices on school grades is not someone I want to work for. It betrays a belief in bad/unreliable indicators/metrics.
The author has bad style, but he's not writing nonsense. He edited the statement because he was bullied into it, not because it was nonsense.

I would try to avoid words such as "modality"---"qualification" might be better---but the point he makes is clear. He spends several paragraphs defining what he's talking about and then makes a case. It actually follows the lemma, lemma, theorem formula closely. He goes on to offer evidence for his point. Summarized, he says: over time citations can lend credibility to an otherwise unproved statement. He then says programmer productivity disparities haven't been conclusively demonstrated. That might have been a better starting point for the article.

He's guilty of disorganized writing, and being influenced by literary theory, but his point is otherwise legitimate and capable of being proved or disproved. (I don't know how much he's edited the article since.)
It's the word "modality" that throws me. The word by itself is pretty vague -- "somehow related to a mode". The linked Wikipedia article is dense and confusing. You explain it as a way of modifying a statement. Then you say a publication is an "extended modality". That requires another mental stretch. How does the abstract idea of "a publication" connect to modifying a statement? One expects you to explain that in the following sentences, but you don't really. Instead you follow with the seemingly unrelated statement, "A researcher may wish to state a conclusion: “water boils at 100 degrees celsius”. Convention dictates that he should initially add various hedges to his conclusion: ..." So when writing a publication a researcher will customarily add hedges. What does that have to do with a publication being an "extended modality"? Is it really necessary to use such an obscure term? It seems like it shouldn't be this hard to understand what you're saying.
Landsliding Into PostGIS With KML Files
I hope they can modulate Windows 8 OEM licensing price in order to convince some OEM to launch an 8 GB of RAM, SATA SSD ARM-based netbook with a x86-sized battery that gives it 48 hours of operation on a single charge.

Then I can install a decent OS on the machine and be happy.

Unfortunately, I'll have to live with an unsupported hardware. I have no illusion this fad won't be a short-lived one.
Timely: Schedule tweets for maximum impact
0mq is an extension of the standard socket library and does support a reliable multicast protocol. It adds to sockets, its not just an api to make working with the existing standards easier.

http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/maverick/man7/zmq_pgm.7....

Though, it looks like it might need more permissions than just using standard sockets.
Funny. I was thinking that they could have done these people a favor and defined it for them. That would have helped after writing 2 pages about how confused everybody is :-)
Can the current ARM implementations even utilize 8GB of RAM at this point? I recall some OMAP issues with even 512 MB not too long ago.
The article omits that the tablet's screen is Wacom, which is easily worth the markup in price.

Actually, I'm surprised Apple doesn't have a Macbook without the keyboard aimed at graphics people. Graphic design is supposed to be Apple's core competency, and it seems like they're rapidly losing ground to Microsoft. Of course, Apple's new market seems to be earning them plenty of money.
Not quite the 1,000 cores but with GreenArrays you can get 144 cores on a square cm for $20 a piece. They can do only integer math in hardware though. Comes with a free forth based SDK.

Wish I knew enough embedded systems to play with this toy.
Comparison between Master/Slave (current) and High Replication (just announced) Datastores:

http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/python/datastore/hr/
Regular ARM should support 4 GB and LPAE supports terabytes (although each app is limited to 4 GB). Current SoCs probably have much smaller limits, like 1 GB. Nvidia's core may be 64-bit, though, which would eliminate these restrictions.
> The way the supervisor model is touted as a major improvement is also very disingenuous: you still need to create and maintain the chain of supervisors yourself, and nothing stops you from doing that in other languages. Erlang really has no advantages there.

This is total nonsense. You cannot write your own supervisors in other languages. The supervision tree works because Erlang processes can monitor each other. If you fail, I get sent a message. Error handling or orthogonal to the calling function stack. This is implemented underneath Erlang inside the VM and is baked into the entire run-time environment. The following languages to my professional knowledge do not support that construct: Fortran, Algol, Pascal, C, C++, VB, VBA, Java, Python, Perl, PHP, Ruby, Lisp and Haskell. All of these languages handles errors up the call stack.

If you want to write your own supervision trees then you need to implement your own run-time environment with your own custom language on top of it.
Apple creating Cloud based Mac?
The Nvidia part at least will be based on the A15 processor, which includes Large Physical Address Extensions to allow up to 1TB memory.
At last, what? This project has been around since at least Aug 7th, 2008.
I think this no fad, and I think Intel must've seriously screwed up. Everyone knew that Intel was promising MS, "we're going to match ARM on performance per watt in the coming years". That roadmap must have disintegrated, as MS would not have come public otherwise.

The batteries will be a little smaller, to reduce weight, but 24 hours of operation on a single charge... that might becomes the standard.
It's just a stupid marketing term that describes things we've been doing for decades. Furthermore, the term brings with it baggage to issues that normally wouldn't be controversial or scoffed at.

Why should I "get" it?
I think you mean "accurate". I'm sitting here with a Starbucks coffee cup right now. I can tell you that I have a strong positive brand image associated with their current logo. As a customer I immediately associate the new logo with a company moving away from what they do well. I didn't even need to read the press release to see the motivation. This is bad for Starbucks, and will result in a lot of negative press. Wait and see.
Thoughts on Developer Testing
Point a) didn't take that long: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2072545
If this is true, then Windows 8 is not a true successor to Windows 7. Current desktop/server apps assume binary compatibility with x86. This sounds much more like a scaled-up version of Windows Phone.
Apparently the Mac App Store has already been cracked and the devs are just waiting for "lots of crap" to show up before they release their pirating tools:

http://torrentfreak.com/pirate-apple-app-store-innovates-wit...
> I believe it is a case of known cost, hidden benefit.

Sure, that much I understand. 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.

It's not as if the empirical data is particularly hard to find, or as if there aren't small businesses (and probably the occasional larger one, but it's rare) benefitting from more enlightened relations between employer and employees. So what are we missing? What overriding factor drives larger companies, for all their more formalised policies and training investments, to such poor people management?
Electronics Recycling Options are Plentiful for Older Gadgets
There are a lot of regional carriers left. I believe MetroPCS, the carrier in the article, may be one of them, since I'd never heard of the firm.

Edit: http://www.metropcs.com/coverage/ Their coverage maps indicate real coverage of a few metro areas, and roaming onto national networks.

It's just that regional carriers aren't a whole hell of a lot cheaper than the big national guys. Who wants a 10% discount for 1/100th the coverage area ?
Sure; XMPP's actual standard calls for a bunch of extraneous XML to get a basic message sent, no argument there. Also, a basic SMTP message calls for very little additional info (ie: to, from, subject, body), however, the reality is that an smtp message from almost any real world provider contains a ton of extra crap. I am not saying that SMTP is inferior in some way, just that in the real world, reliable message delivery isn't as streamlined as we would like. Here is a basic email from shapeways PR:

Delivered-To: derek@foodomain.com

Received: by 10.216.159.146 with SMTP id s18cs544645wek;
Wed, 5 Jan 2011 11:11:57 -0800 (PST)

Received: by 10.150.158.4 with SMTP id
g4mr22888707ybe.38.1294254716497;
Wed, 05 Jan 2011 11:11:56 -0800 (PST)

Return-Path: <bounces-1e89d88424-b62849dacd@b.cts.vresp.com>

Received: from mkt4-sc.verticalresponse.com (mkt4-sc.verticalresponse.com [74.116.89.111])
by mx.google.com with ESMTP id l18si3840529ybn.44.2011.01.05.11.11.54;
Wed, 05 Jan 2011 11:11:55 -0800 (PST)

...
redacted another 2055 bytes of crap
...

Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
boundary="__________MIMEboundary__________";
charset="UTF-8"

This is a multi-part message in MIME format.

--__________MIMEboundary__________
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

And here is where the actual message started...
Israeli software skills are excellent. Of all the assets the US could provide, that's one Israel doesn't need and likely wouldn't accept. The US could provide electronic surveillance: locations of people, details of local police operations, satellite photos, etc.
(I started learning with a terrible sense of rhythm,
not being able to clap on a 4/4 beat)

Ok so this fascinates me. I also have a terrible sense of rhythm which up to now I have allowed to discourage me from doing much musically. In your experience did you find that your sense of rhythm improved with practice?
A thought that crossed my mind some time ago is some consequences of fine-detail in Minecraft. You would be able to create objects of higher complexity packed into a manageable size. Would you pay money to someone who created a really useful (or cool) object in high-fidelity Minecraft?
For Every Facebook, There's an Amp'd Mobile
Goldman, Citing Strong Response, to End Facebook Solicitation
I used to think the alternative-CPU-taking-over-the-desktop would be cool. In P4 days of 120W+ processors, ARM looked like a savior.

But now, the only difference would be who is pocketing the $50-100 I'd spend on a new processor.
In order for Windows on RISC to succeed, Microsoft and all 3rd parties will have to leave the x86 comfort zone and really support it.

Last time MS tried to be multi-architecture, they failed miserably. They couldn't even be bothered to port Office to non-x86 machines. And nobody buys a PC to run only Windows and Office. They'll have to do a whole lot more than they did and I don't think they would be capable of.
The only languages where I've seen supervision hierarchies an an explicit design principle have had explicit ports of Erlang's concurrency model, such as ConcurrentLua (http://concurrentlua.luaforge.net/).
When anything can be and is called "Cloud" then what's there to get?

Microsoft's stupidest advertisements to date involve people saying "To the cloud" to use what appears to be ordinary desktop applications with an "Upload to Facebook" button included. Is that really cloud computing? I guess? I have no way to say either way.
I can definitely afford to buy a better scanner, but I probably scan no more than 5 or 6 pages of stuff per year. I was actually amused that the scanner worked at all.
Yes the only category that is shared between the iPad and the Asus ep121 is the tablet form factor.

Its like comparing a desktop replacement laptop and a feather weight netbook. Both share the form factor but they are for different uses.

The features of the ep121 put it in that "desktop replacement" arena where power and flexibility are more important than light weight, instant on, etc.

I am excited about picking one of these up and doing more than playing angry birds. I'll keep the iPad (for the record I own and carry an iPad daily) for play time, convenience and for looking cool. I'll use a powerful windows 7 tablet for getting hard core work done in a small package.
I think we should all agree on a definition of developer first. Not just in the sense of "HTML isn't a language", but picking a specific domain in which to compare developers.

I don't think the concept of productivity can span multiple fields. Does a C programmer have the same productivity as a Ruby programmer? On the other hand, maybe some part of a Ruby project needs optimizing, so a routine is written in C. Maybe there can be a definition of productivity that crosses languages... but we don't have one yet.
I agree... the colors hurt. I suggest the guy makes it one pale color and leaves it at that.

@OP - Awesome! I'll give it a try, I'm currently in the midst of something where this could help me tremendously.
I've heard that cooking them in fresh water (throw out the soaking water) helps as well
@rbanffy, they HAVE left the x86 comfort zone, see .NET.
One set of studies: http://norvig.com/java-lisp.html

The focus was more on the language factor, and some programmers were students while others were pros, and in some they were self-selected; but still, >10x variation in development time among the Java programmers. 30x if you allow all the above differences. The 10x thing gets quoted way more confidently than the amount of study justifies, but it's not just made up.
Aquamacs is emacs with osx styling, I've heard good things. http://aquamacs.org/
Ivi TV Launches First Internet Cable Network
I spent about an hour trying to get Imagemagick to produce scaled images that looked as smooth as those produced by Snagit. I tried most of the options described on http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/resize/ . No go.

I remember twm, and I once met "t" (Tom).
You didn't know Kasparov played chess?

Seriously, though, from what I can tell, Thiel is rated 2199[1], which isn't Master level. That's still enough to be the 21,246th best player in the world.

[1] http://ratings.fide.com/card.phtml?event=2022389
Needlebase - Acquire, integrate, cleanse, analyze and publish data on the Web
The problem is that Microsoft is dragging behind it thousands (millions?) of existing applications. The argument that they should not support their existing application base (for better or worse) is a difficulty one to make.

It took several tries in the Windows Mobile world for MS to give up homogenizing the PDA and the desktop. By throwing manpower at it they think the tablet is "close enough" to a desktop that it can be solved. I don't know if it can or not, but I believe that's the mentality.
Steam Hardware & Software Survey
Oh, I did. I was just wondering if others thought that a second bailout was a likely scenario.
Anyone who says that "net negative productivity programmers" don't exist is a person who has been really lucky in his professional career.
Thanks for the follow up. My girlfriend has kindly offered her design skills, so I hope she can make something much nicer soon :)

I'm glad the tool works - let me know if you have any ideas for it.
Sure, I can zoom effortlessly, but it would be a lot easier if I didn't have to, since that also involves zooming back out and scrolling the page once you go back. 4 steps instead of 1.

Except when you zoom way in and still miss, because what you're clicking on is a javascript implicit trigger right beside an explicit link, so the browser tries to be helpful and assumes you really wanted the explicit link.

I used to browse on my N810 a lot, and now use a Nexus S or an iPhone. The switch to a capacitive screen had many benefits and was the right move, but I sometimes do miss the accuracy of the old resistive screens.
Can anyone shed some light on why logos and names matter so much. I know they do because millions of dollars are spent on getting these right. But I cannot see myself consciously saying "Nah ! I wont be their customer I don't like their logo". But I must be doing it at a subconscious level.

I can understand associating a small picture with a company. Its something like cash: transfers perceived value from one location to the other. But why does not any form that is moderately memorable do.

What I find hard to understand is that a little tweak here and there apparently has a huge impact. Not talking about he new Starbuck logo, just in general.
Ask HN: What did you learn from your most recent performance review
Since we're ( http://beta.rahfeedback.com ) aiming to build a start-up friendly automated peer review system that doesn't suck we're interested in whatever you'd like to share with us about that whole process, for example what worked, what didn't, what you learned, what you would have liked to have known more about, etc. If you do give us said information please let us know what size company you're working for.
How can WP be used as a CMS? You can't host or deploy HTML pages via WP... right?
I would be surprised if more than 30% of their codebase cleanly compiled for anything other than a x86...
Like others, I'm a little puzzled by this objection to what seemed to me to be a coherent and interesting piece.

I love the self-awareness implied by referencing your own disagreement hierarchy, and humbly wonder whether the following insightful remark may be pertinent here:

“Someone who has a chip on their shoulder about some topic might be offended by a tone that to other readers seemed neutral.”
Video: Android Application Development - A 9,000 foot overview - Marakana
Long-standing mystery of excessive heat on the Neptune may be solved