skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I share your sentiment of too many half projects. Creative people always seem to be caught between the thrill of doing something new and long hard slog of making it to the finishing line.

The driver for me to cut down on distractions was the fact the my project was not going as well as I hoped. I guess we all need some setbacks to put us on track.

Loved your website and product though! Good luck
What OS? Client side, or server side?

There's a billion ways to tag email, but which of these are available highly depends on your setup.
You probably already know this, but just in case you didn't; Try directing people the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word. It adds docx support to Office 2000/XP/2003 - (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyId=...)

"Honestly OpenOffice users give me the fewest problems"

Just a guess, but perhaps that's because the OO users that have actually stuck with it are the more technical ones who look for their own solutions first. I use OO primarily at home and when I get files I can't open I try Google docs, Office live apps, or the Word viewer.
From Bollywood to Tollywood with Kamal Hasan: Sonakshi Sinha
No answer can be given to this question, it is one of the axioms of relativity theory. The explanation is trying to explain the axiom in terms of the theory built on it.

I found these answers to be more informative: http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/2230/why-and-how-...
Closing one Excel windows closes ALL of them.

No it doesn't. At least not for the past two versions of Excel (I can't remember Excel 2003). But there is a button to close the current window or specific window.

Excel doesn't let you Undo past the last save.

Yes it does. At least it has for the past two versions.

I don't know if the latest versions of Office addressed either of these issues... and I don't really care

Honestly, did you really ever? Those were the only two reasons you switched to OpenOffice?
Anything can be a currency. You can trade in self-fulfillment futures.
I already had this bookmarked in my Delicious account. The only change to the URL seems to be that it is http instead of https.
There's a joke there somewhere.
DMCA vs. 3-D print shops:  round one.
http://thestartupfoundry.com

and it's even created by our very own g0atbutt: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=g0atbutt

so give these guys some support!

See also: http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-alternatives-to-TechCrunc...
Start-Ups Must One Day Become Stay-Ups
http://thenextweb.com/
Say you just flick the lights on and off quickly just to let one photon escape. Where will that photon be in reality in one second? 300kkm apart from the rocket? one meter apart?
Suit yourself, but Y-Combinator was a big help for us. I personally wouldn't place my startup at a disadvantage just to prove that I'm a "real man".
I prefer http://www.hnvue.com
Dynamically Programming A Cake
The dilemma w/ erasing the line separating my political belief & social media
Really? Loads fine in 3.6.13 and 4.0b11 for me (OS X).
It's possible that the reason the web's still "the same old thing" is because it has been proven an effective platform for distributing services and is, _in practice_, a system that's extremely scalable and evolvable. Infact, it's so successful there's nothing to compare it to - which means no value judgement or comparison is at all "obvious".

HTTP is also extensible (by design), which has lead to stuff like WebDAV and the like. Stuff that is used large scale, over the web. So the web is not 'just' HTTP.

There's deliberate trade-offs in the web's architecture which means, unfortunately, you can keep coming up with edge-case applications which are challenging (although often not impossible) to implement using web technology. The reality is that a large majority of applications are information-centric, are distributed in nature, need to evolve over extended periods of time, and therefore benefit _greatly_ from the trade-offs that the web has made.

The web's not perfect but it's evolving and - importantly - it doesn't have the benefit of being completely fictitious and living inside the mind of a jilted, chippy geek. No offense. ;)
And note that this story is about government. If they're being suckered into cut rate deals that disadvantage small businesses, education and consumers with discounts then there's a failure somewhere.
Taking a double digit percentage of a proprietary juggernaut's market with something free is what I'd count as clobbering.

That report also seems to cover shipments, as in prefab servers with the OS already installed. Don't most larger operations use homemade distributions and configurations? That's on top of any number of spawned instances of Linux in a virtualized environment. I wonder how many Linux instances are running on EC2 at any given time.

I don't see anything in the IDC report about overall OS share. Just shipments. A computerworld blog referencing a zdnet blog (which also cites the IDC report) for marketshare numbers seems fishy, as though they were fudging facts to support a headline.
The only danger for Pandora is that the content industry shoos them out. But I don't see that happening. Personally, Pandora is worth the money. (It's too cheap for the use I get out of it.)
I'm tri-lingual and I suck at multitasking :)
Loi khuyen tot nhat ve doanh nghiep nhuong quyen
Làm thế nào để có thể thu thập được thông tin cần thiết từ kho báu quý giá nhất của bạn: những nhà nhận quyền của hệ thống đó
There's a degree of sexism built into the English language, you can try to change it by creating a gender neutral grammatical personified ("it" usually doesn't work), but unless it's more useful than alternatives, I doubt it'll gain traction. Nouns are almost always assumed to be masculine if assigned gender and it's very easy to slip into saying "he" by default when describing anything you're not certain of. Anonymous internet aliases fall under that "default male" noun rule IMO. In the absence of knowledge, it's equally invalid to assume the author was female.
The biggest event for Java in 2010 was Oracle's acquisition of Sun. It may actually turn out to be a positive thing for Java, to be owned by a company that knows how to make money, as opposed to a company that knows how to make great technology. I've been worried sick about Java, so this turnaround is a great relief.

But the 3rd best-selling title was Professional Android 2 Application Development, so that's certainly a factor.
That's a great idea, I put it on my j list. I hope to have time to hack on this tonight.
Mainly because the enterprise is guaranteed to buy at least a few hundred copies.

Also this is pretty common in other areas too, the rich and celebrities always seem to get more for less.
Ask HN: Best 3-month cell phone deal?
I'll be in the bay area for 3 months trying to raise some capital. I come from abroad.

What'd be the cheapest/best deal to get data and airtime on my phone? I own an iPhone 3GS.

Thanks in advance for any tips!
I especially like the picture link:

http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/dangerroom/2011/02/fuckinm...

edit: fuckinmagnets.jpg
Interesting, I didn't know about that. I prefer the link/comments toggle instead of the side-by-side view because I like content panes to be as big as possible, but hnvue is very useful anyway.
Apple should ban explicitly GPLv3 software. v2 is likely compatible with the idea of an appstore with some tweaks to the license agreement.
It's really weird (and a bit alarming) that they don't link to the license on this page. Open source is pretty damn vague.
what about a ruler ?
No other game makes me so nostalgic. Though I've been bitten by the Judy bug, not knowing what it was at the time, I was more than happy to start over. I figured I just missed something critical and would have to immerse myself even deeper into the game.
It works for me on Firefox 4 on OS X. I'll check with 3.6 as soon as I'm back home. Do you get any output in the javascript console / error console?
It isn't for me to say what you should look for. I can tell you my experience of what employers want, but then again most employers probably want .NET experience, so what most employers want isn't the most important thing. The question is, how do you find the one employer that's right for you!

One way to find a middle ground between your interests and a company's concerns is to restate your interest in terms of the company culture. For example: I'm looking for a team that owns its stack and uses that ownership to do interesting and disruptive things with its product. For that reason, I'm less interested in the size of the company than in the way it approaches technology. If a team is working from algorithms and bit -twiddling on up, I'm sure I'll be happy.

That answer might apply to any company from Apple on down to a YCombinator startup.
Wow. That was an amazing post. Having a penchant for ancient greek due to misplaced enthusiasm for seminary, I was seriously enthralled. I didn't realize I might have a latent typography fetish.
Props on the Zebra F301, though I prefer the black ink.
Ok, here are few examples of being bad:

1) No communication, whatsoever, when somebody is expecting an answer - especially, during recruitment process. All I meant is just a confirmation - "We have received all the documents we needed to prepare the offer; kindly allow us till Monday evening to get back to you."

2) Mistakes (Name/Joining Date/Designation) in official correspondence. Larger companies might be getting this correct by having a central database driving everything; but those with less than 500 employees act really bad here.

3) Not intimating enough in advance about events. E.g. I received a mail about a next morning's get-together just the evening before; and that day I had left office 15 minutes early and obviously didn't check the office mail that night (I never do) - thereby completely missing the get-together; many people in the office did. This happens often. I know, it might not be very common across many companies; but I am just giving specific examples of 'bad functions'.

4) Last minute preparations. Some time ago I had to travel abroad. After reminding almost every day during the final week before traveling, I was handed over all the document just a couple of hours in advance. The tickets, too, were booked with unnecessary delay; leaving me with very little scope for advanced planning. The hotel bill wasn't settled so I had to use my credit card on arrival and then claim reimbursement. Again, just giving an example of what happened with me - I am sure, other people might be experiencing similar things.

5) Attitude. I understand, HR is an important function in any organization. But one needs to understand that, especially in IT industry (or any manufacturing industry), non-technical departments are just support staff. They are there to facilitate the technical guys to make the production happen. The HR people should be highly accessible and easily approachable; very hard to find.

I can give few more examples, but I hope you might have got an idea of what I wanted to say.
If you want to see comments and link at once, http://hnvue.com/ was linked in this thread and does that.
How To Automate Tasks In Firefox
A nice lockpick set.
1st off I belive this conversation was about building software not houses.

2nd how big, how many rooms, also is it made of bricks, does it have a fireplace, etc are all functional and not visual design.
Click a font.

http://www.google.com/webfonts/family?family=Astloch&sub...

Complete with a link to: SIL Open Font License, 1.1

I would imagine they don't link to it on the index because they're reserving the capability for fonts to have different licenses.
MyCube, The Social Network You Control From The Beginning
EliteProNet
Duh, I left a console.log statement in the JS and never notice because Chrome supports it out of the box, and my Firefox has Firebug installed.

I pushed a fixed version, can you try again in a few minutes (when the github page is regenerated)?
These sequence questions drive me up the wall. It's so unbelievably stupid that out of the near infinite functions that can produce a given list you should come up with the one the interviewer thought was the "obviously correct" one. The sequence in the example: 1, 11, 21, x ... with the information given then the X=31 is just as valid as anything that the interviewer came up with.
Well, fortunately I don't think any of the above items are good ideas. But, just speaking from my own experience, the list in the article is a most positive list for shaking things up in life. Particularly if you are feeling at a crossroads.
More specifically, two things I always find useful:

1. Write down EVERYTHING. It doesn't matter if it makes sense or not. It probably will at some point.

2. When you discuss with people act as you are giving a pitch and encourage the other person to "tear your idea apart". Positive responses are usually worthless, negative ones are amazing. Why? In most cases you've already convinced yourself its a good idea.
3.6.13 here as well on Fedora. Works fine in Opera.
MOG does what you're looking for rather nicely - just switch on "MOG Radio" and it provides a Pandora-like station with similar artists.

I liked that but have gravitated to Rdio, which doesn't have that option in its mobile app yet - it's much, much faster (at both search and playback) than any of the other services I used. They recently implemented a Genius function in their (excellent) browser client, so I expect it in their apps soon enough...
The project used to live on Google Code. Moving it to google.com directly shows, to me, that Google put more importance on it now.
"Savings were limited" but they decline to say how much. Also "Users complained of compatibility problems" -- all the more reason to switch; a proof of the MS lock in.

I wonder if they write something like "We were only able to save $5K/year/person, but we didn't want to inconvenience our workers for such a paltry sum", what the response would have been. I can assure you it is very far from the $100/year licensing that people mentioned in other threads. If that were the case, no one would switch on one hand, and Microsoft wouldn't be the behemoth that it is today on the other.

It's $100/year/person for their desktop software, + tens to hundreds of thousands for the server software that goes with it (to microsoft), plus a $2000/year/person for lost time due to viruses, spam, and being able to play WoW on their work computer, plus $2000/year/person when you look at the administration cost -- windows shops everywhere I've seen have a much lower admin/user ratio (e.g. 1 in 10 or 1 in 20) compared to unix/linux (1 in 50 or 1 in 100), and even more so when the end users are doing just word processing+spreadsheet work.

Also, what the hell were they doing writing printer drivers? I've been using linux on the desktop since 2005, and didn't have to install a printer driver once.
I never worked at a place willing to put up with supporting the 2007+ versions of Office.

Those were certainly the "I can't take this anymore" reasons, yes. OpenOffice also read the new XML-based file formats better than the older Offices with the converters.

Since then I've also switched to Linux, which simplifies my decision.
There's no question. Your comfort after the comfort of your users.
the decisionmaker is not bright but vain. Intelligent would be to test if applicants understand the concept of a function that creates a sequence.
I think, like almost every other problem, it's a matter of [not] getting the right people for the job. The HR employees I've interacted with have, almost to a T, been completely process-bound and extremely hesitant to take any kind of initiative or show independent thought. They aren't problem solvers, they're process followers. Even when the process is causing unnecessary problems, they follow it unless directed otherwise. The result is the suck you're describing.

I think the reason is fairly simple, although the solution might not be. Folks who have strong soft skills but lack critical thinking ability aren't going to flock to engineering or finance, for example. Even if they made it in the door, they wouldn't last. These people might work in sales, but sales seems to select for a certain ambition and ruthlessness that many people just don't have. If you look at the pool that's left, there just aren't a lot of qualities left that would add value apart from following a process, and in that case, those employees will only be as valuable as the process lets them. So what you get is sucky process (because the company doesn't want to expose itself to lawsuits or get taken advantage of) and sucky employees who don't know when or how to circumvent the process when it becomes counterproductive. Add those together, and you get an HR department that functions very badly and, at best, adds a kind of cynical WTF entertainment value to the employees it's supposed to help.
An Open Letter to Apple on the Readability App rejection
In those cases I usually try to pronounce the words with an accent of the language I'm speaking in, rather than the way they were in the source language. Sometimes this actually takes more work if I know both languages, but I find it makes me more understandable, and helps keep me mentally "in" the language I'm speaking. For example, if I mention an American city while speaking Greek, my instinct is to pronounce it as in American English, but it's more colloquial and easier to understand if I pronounce it with Greek phonology. So for example, I'd pronounce Chicago roughly as see-KAH-gho (i.e., how you'd pronounce Σικάγο), George Bush as Tzortz Bous, etc., rather than switching to an American phonology for one word or phrase.
Sadly, these types of strategies don't work for me. I have to have an itch I need to scratch before I can really learn a programming language. Eventually when something annoys me enough to write code to deal with it, that's when I deep-dive into the language.
Aglasem Tweets
> It's not a method I'd recommend, ...

What's the method you'd recommend to solve this issue?
Same here: it's working with Chrome 11.0.672.2 dev , and the page allows nested frames like this:
http://screencast.com/t/Tg32EOZXXA
While not open source, there are free(mium) solutions like Tungle (or doodle, etc) do this quite well. Tungle even allows you to do this with people that aren't on the same exchange server

Disclosure: I work at Tungle
Put an end to the "why is a manhole cover round" question in articles.
Poll: Would you go for reduce pay and some equity to join a startup?
1. I realize this heavily depends on the situation/idea/etc and each scenario may differ greatly. But having said that, try your best to vote for an answer with what is said and assume the ideal scenario.

2. Startup in this case are fresh companies either pre-Series A or post-Series A. Companies like Facebook or the like does not count even if they are considered a startup. We're talking about smaller ground zero just done with prototype kind of startups.

3. Assume that typically your salary will probably drop to mid 5-figures/year ($36k to $60 depending on location) and you'll receive the typical 1-5 pts as an early stage employee. Assuming the startup does well or raises money, you will get closer to normal salary. Typical 4 year vesting applies.

How many here would consider reduce pay + equity and join a startup and how many would not. There have been various threads in the past on HN regarding whether its worth it for hackers to join a startup for equity and many people come into this with various arguments of different kinds on both sides. I'd like to know what each persons thoughts are on this and get a more accurate up to date number of where people stand.

PS I came up with a short list of stuff for the poll that I figured would be appropriate for voting. If your answer does not fall into any of the options, pick 'Other'.
Yes, pre-Series A
No, pre-Series A
Yes, post-Series A
No, post-Series A
Maybe/Undecided/Unsure/etc
Other (founder, happy where you are, etc...)
I think a lot of it comes from trying to protect/justify their jobs by introducing process etc. See also "why do most IT departments suck"?
Nothing is better than my simple Moleskine and a pencil.

Simple, gorgeous and can be taken anywhere.
Interesting. 10 years ago, printing and scanning from Linux was just agonizing. But today, I actually find Ubuntu 10.10 almost as easy as the MacOS: I ask it to look for new printers, it gives me list of printers on the network, and I choose the one I want. Everything just works. Similarly, the Gnome scanning application is a lovely way to make PDFs.

This usually surprises the Windows users, who were telling me, "Oh, you're going to have figure out where the CD is, and install some software, and you may have problems with <X>..."

Now, I'm sure that there are other printers and network configurations where Ubuntu will fail. But for the most part, they've done a great job.

On the other hand, I do need to keep MS Office around for marking up contracts. Open Office doesn't support Microsoft's Track Changes feature, which is a dealbreaker.
An interesting tangent to this discussion is OTOY (http://www.otoy.com/), where your browser simply functions as a display and input device; all the heavy lifting of 3D rendering and game logic is processed server-side.
I switched to felt-tips a few months ago and will never look back.
I don't want to rain on the parade, but I can't believe there is no search box! :) On the other hand, great selection of fonts, and betting on Google not being down is probably safer than betting any other font service not being down.
No real surprises here, except perhaps the rise of Python and the decline of Ruby. Note this undercounts sales for books covering the smaller languages. A lot of these books are self published or sold outside mainstream channels and so won't show up.
I'd never heard of OPTIONS before. Do you have any links, besides [1], to more resource on it? Is this a common tactic, or is there a more standard way to add "discover-ability" to REST apis?

I usually try to mimic this kind of functionality with something like this [2]. But it always seems kludgy.

[1] http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec9.html

[2] http://gemdash.tumblr.com/post/2798389935/restful-api-design [Half-assed attempt at an blog post]
Tease! You started out by saying you would get to the name and shape of the Pilcrow in this article, but you never quite got there. Oh well I guess I will have to wait for part II.
You wouldn't want that. But OTOH it exists already: economic hitmen and the jackals.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Confessions_o...

btw: maybe this is to be torrented on meshed freedomboxen?
I should add that i have done several things on the above commenter's list and they did not work out as well as the items on the list in the article.
Living in South Carolina, it'll be 75-80 degrees F every day for the next few months. Not being able to read a book/magazine/blog.. outside would make me go a bit bonkers.
Amoral does not mean immoral. I think you're confusing the two.

Nature is amoral too. That means it does not have any sense of morality, it functions based on a different set of rules. Immoral is against morality. Amoral is without morality.

The market isn't unfair, or fair - it's neither.
Twitter apps restored over the weekend
Arabic and English here.

My favorite question to ask people who speak different languages is, "Which language do you dream in?"
Open source no, but Google Apps does this very well, including sending email invitations to people not also using Google Calendar.