skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think you might be misinterpreting the first post you linked. He's not bragging about how complicated it is. He's also not complaining about how tricky it is. There are always things in the Windows org that could use improvement (otherwise, I'd be out of a job). However, the vast majority of processes exist to fulfill requirements that very few software projects have to deal with.

Consider that Windows ships in over a hundred languages to hundreds of millions of people. I'm not sure how many languages Linux ships in (I'd bet quite a few), but Linux contributors don't have to worry about getting arrested for drawing map lines wrong: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/alexbarn/archive/2004/08/20/217602.a...

Do we ship software without testing? No. Do we ship software that isn't globalized? No. Do we just hack something together, check it in, and call it a day? No. These aren't the kinds of practices that lead to a stable platform.

Mistakes get made (at all levels of the management chain), but they tend to be the exception in my experience.
Previous discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1904957
Top Ten Signs of things to worry about in your fellow World Leader Friends.
There have been a few previous submissions and threads on this question - you might want to look up some of the previous discussions. Here are some of them:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2073239 Guide to Finding a Technical Co-Founder

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2056630 Can't Find a Technical Co-Founder? Do It Yourself

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2018618 Non-programmer founders: learn code first, find tech co-founder(s) after?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1983569 Finding co-founders, where and how

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1882090 How to Find a Technical Co-Founder

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1872960 Finding a Technical Co-Founder

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1866516 Dont look for a co-founder. Find a Right Hand Man

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1823724 Find Co-Founders, Don't Get Screwed

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1820875 Not in the Valley? How do you find co-founders?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1779750 How To REALLY Find A Technical Co-Founder

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1779092 How find co-founder online?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1778191 Ask HN: Finding a Co-Founder at a Hackerspace

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1689751 Can't Find a Technical Co-Founder? Do It Yourself

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1677066 Network Launches to Help Entrepreneurs Find Co-founders

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1576186 Last Call: Pitch to find a Co-Founder at The Founder Conference

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1575105 Does "finding co-founders" ever work?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1567469 Ask HN: Where is the best place to find a co-founder?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1512715 How to find a co-founder

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1511965 Ask HN: How do you find/meet tech co-founders outside of the hotspots?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1509775 Finding the Right Co-Founder for Your Startup

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1373858 Strategies for Finding the Co-Founder of Your Dreams

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1367637 FoodSpotting founder on finding co-founder, marketing & female entrepreneurs

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1347723 Ask HN: How do I find the right co-founder?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1307167 Help a Startup Out - Get feedback, find co-founders, find advisors, etc.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1297382 Ask HN: Where To Find Design Founders

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1294713 Vokle founder: how to find great programmers & making the most from events

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1238947 Ask HN: I'd like to find Co-Founder(s) / Developers

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1086852 How to Find the Ideal Co-founder: A Seattle Startup Experiment

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=912667 Find a co-founder with this new MeetUp

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=876010 Finding Your Co-Founders

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=849737 Ask HN: Finding Developer/Engineer Co-Founder?
It's not "X Windows", either. It's either "X" or "The X Window System".

I ran X9 on a Decstation in 1985 or so.
I don't see that the current title ("Apple product user experience and the 30% subscription charge (Charlie Brooker)") is editorialised. I see it as more descriptive than the original cutesy newspaper headline ("I don't hate Macs, but they do give me a syncing feeling" --- Ooh! It has a pun! In the headline! Can we be a real tabloid newspaper now please?).
With your claimed grades and intellect you could obtain scholarships to almost anywhere of your choosing, fully paid fees + stipend, to work with the greatest minds in your field. Oxford, Cambridge... the world is your oyster. So it's a completely one-sided proposal; work with the best in your fields, and they will pay your way. How is this a bad deal, and why didn't you take it?
Hiring Web Development Company For PHP Development
The Internet is a tool that has penetrated deep into the bases of life for millions of people. A multitude of new and old companies are ready to dive into the circle of electronic marketing. And, this has effected to the launch of advanced and innovative technologies, apps and stages for the development of the same.
Here's the original article on VentureBeat:
http://venturebeat.com/2010/06/13/seamicro-drops-an-atom-bom...

A few points:

* Interestingly, they use the same image at the beginning of that article and this one. They also seemed to re-use a lot of the original article text in this one.

* Most people were quick to point out that Intel's Atom processors don't support ECC RAM, and at the scale we're talking about here, RAM errors statistically will be common.

* From the article:

Full told, SeaMicro eliminates 90 percent of the
components from a system board. SeaMicro calls this
CPU/IO virtualization.

The HN Discussion:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1429628

What seems to be the original announcement (HN submission 2 months before original VentureBeat article):
http://gigaom.com/2010/01/06/seamicros-secret-server-changes...

HN Discussion:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1070705

{edit} The gigaom article was 4 months before the original VentureBeat one (8 months ago vs 1 year ago). For some reason I was doing the date math in my head in base10 (i.e. 1 year = 10 months). Maybe it's time for bed.
Entirely depends on team and building. I wasn't doubled up until my 3rd year at MSFT. Even then, it was due to cramped space (bldg 9).
For me it really depends on what the question is - if I was in the middle of coding and someone asked me a coding related question (especially about whatever we were working on) then that really wouldn't require a context switch.

However, if someone non-technical comes and asks me something (which usually requires a lot of parsing) then that will require a context switch and I will loose a chunk of productivity.
Oh. That's the "other" Tadpole (previously RDI, who acquired Tadpole Technology, Plc in order to trade its stock.)
Since I'm actually in the process of building a site that helps you find co-founders, I've just set up a Facebook page that you can "like" to get an announcement when the site is up:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Find-a-co-founder/155551604502...

(I'm using a Facebook page for this because I haven't decided on a domain name yet, and if I were to ask people to sign up for an announcement email list, some people would be hesitant to provide their email address, I guess).
Team/building dependent. On my team, the vast majority of interns get a private office. When they get doubled, they get doubled into a window office.
Inside the scripting engine of a window manager (KWin::Scripting)
Pen.io is
"Is this how it goes now?! Does every meaningful reform get hijacked by special interests so that instead of fixing the suck, we get more of what made us need reform in the first place? Seriously?!"

Yes, thanks to basic economic incentives. You'd think we would start to figure this pattern out eventually, but nope, we just keep asking for new programs and committees and regulations and laws and create juicy target after juicy target and then we're shocked when corporations and politicians join forces to pick them off one by one.

Even if we go for something like national healthcare due to pragmatism and expediency, we should do so with the full knowledge that the best we can get out of it is a corporate crony controlled nation healthcare system--it may be significantly better than what we have, but it will still be sucky and corrupt because we aren't going to make structural progress until we face the structural flaws, both in our particular model of government and in government as an institution.
AppBoy Releases A Check-in SDK For iOS Apps
SMBC: How to infuriate a math major
The "True Security Company" Red Herring
I personally did the ports of 4.1.3 and 4.1.4 to both the SPARCbook and SPARCbook 2.
Also, this is true, but I think it doesn't disagree with my point.

I just dread the length of my Own Risk and Solvency Assessment (ORSA) after Solvency II (the regulations for insurance companies in Europe) takes hold next year, if I have to explain the origins of my priors.

I actually think we could do some fuck-awesome work in evaluating our risk capital requirements using priors on all of of our inputs, and the computational requirements would not be 'that' frightening, given the valuations are all Monte Carlo anyway. It's not happening, yet, though.
Server startup using new Intel Atom chip
I once heard in an Alex Karp interview that they sold their products to other governments too(China and India IIRC). I found it quite odd, it would make sense to provide exclusive access to a particular government like the US or some other large country. This isn't a consumer product, it deals with a lot of sensitive data and i'm assuming a lot of governments would be wary of using the same product/company (especially one with 20 somethings at the helm).

edit: I'm not against 20-30 year olds running a company, but i'm assuming government officials would be.
Citrix’ First Seed Investment: Search And Backup Cloud Data With Primadesk
I wish more people would remember that a patent is supposed to be compensation for publishing, because that's supposed to be a win for society over having an invention live and die as a trade secret. But there is no market force ensuring the price of licensing a patent is less than the cost of having each competitor in the industry independently re-create the invention. Too often it's just rent-seeking on the straightforward solution any skilled practitioner would have reached, once they got around to considering the problem.
Why do you say no language problems? They have different problems - educating in two languages, Finnish for home use (a unique language no-one else uses) and English to be competitive in the wider world. The article even makes mention of the issues of English.

I think the confounding factor is not "a middle-class society" rather than "a democratic socialist society", where everyone is given the chance to perform instead of being damned by the location of their birth within their country. None of this 'born in poor location, local schools don't have funding' crap.

If the US could get rid of it's endemic Just World fallacy, half of it's problems would be solved...
Yeah especially as the Atom N550 which has been out for a while has 64 bit support.

Any article that calls a cpu a brain has no place on hacker news.

Only seems to be 2Gb RAM support too, single channel, non ECC. And Atom is very slow...
I'm a big fan of the ones when it goes wrong.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/03/12/giant_pliers/

How do people think those pliers found their way into that picture? I like to think they were accidentally left on the roof of the car but that doesn't really make sense.
The Problem Isn't Email, It's Microsoft Exchange
Whoops - sorry I misunderstood the nuance
I still miss SiCortex. Now those were cool low-power supercomputers.
Pretty much the same information provided in an earlier submission of the same story from a different source:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2267964

This does have the video of the finish, though.
I think many of them are no longer on google maps, particularly in areas where they retake the photos quite often.
Clearly, the main benefit of using those microprocessors is that you get to say that you are "dropping Atom bombs."
Best point made in the article: "College is an oversubscribed resource". This rings factual, and I think it would be useful to discuss the ramifications of oversubscription. And the extremely high cost despite oversubscription. And MIT doesn't count because... it's not oversubscribed as you generally learn industrially-applicable information there. Contrast with Yale, Columbia, or Vassar. This also goes for art schools- you can use those learned skills in industry.
This story provides some nice insight into why not all money is created equal, and why it is important to do your due diligence about past behaviour of your sugar daddies.
Go right ahead kid.
The biggest battle designers have when working with developers is getting across the idea that design is not "how something looks", but, "how something works".

This means that, ideally, the design process comes before the coding process.

It can be very dispiriting for a designer to come into a project somewhere in the middle to find that major design decisions have been made and cannot be overturned. It is common, for instance, to find open-source UI that mimics the data structures of the code rather than the foibles of a human brain.

If a designer were to join an open source project they would be seen as "trying to change everything", "dumbing down" and "trying to take over". Which would, in a way, be true - and probably exactly what was needed.

I've often wondered if we designers could start open-source projects: start designing, publish & document our designs, release our work to the open-source community and wait to see if anyone bites.

I have seen this happen before and it was amazingly successful: Coverflow. Andrew Coulter Enright, a designer and artist, published a design for "how iTunes should work" on his website. Jonathan del Strother, a Mac developer, bit and published an implementation. Cover Flow was purchased by Apple Inc. in 2006.

I'd love to see something similar happen with a larger open-source app. Any designers out there want to join me in starting a site for exactly this kind of workflow?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Coulter_Enright
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cover_Flow
I'm just going to leave this here:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2361579,00.asp
Here's another (much cleaner) way of reading two variables:

$ { read A; read B } < <(echo "C"; echo "D")
$ echo $A
C
$ echo $B
D

See http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/process-sub.html for more information.
Boston (US) as well as London (UK) - youDevise, Ltd.

We're a 65-person financial-software firm committed to learning and improvement as well as great web software and agile development. Some of you may know us from our sponsorship of Hacker News meetups in London. We're hiring developers and other smart folks of many kinds. See https://dev.youdevise.com and http://www.youdevise.com/careers.

While we don't have remote workers, we do help successful candidates relocate to London or Boston including arranging visas where needed. For example, last year we hired HN readers from Denmark and the US, and we moved a Polish employee to Boston.
I'm not 'relying' on Vim, I'm just wondering. I got the impression that backticks were the only POSIX-approved way outside of Vim, but Vim highlighting it as such did help to re-enforce that idea (along with the exclusive usage of backticks in other people's code that was attempting to be strictly POSIX-compliant).
And it affects every area of the company, not only developers.
You mean, by voting and manifesting support or opposition to bill proposals?
I dont think its worth using the Ubuntu install its just too old. At the moment easiest to install by hand, and script something for production.
Immaterials: Light painting WiFi
> automation reduces the difficulty of working with a complicated system.

Effectively preventing it from ever being simplified. Like you said, complexity is evil and has to be addressed because no amount of automation will correct it.
Just a slight correction: the towels mentioned here aren't paper towels, but real actual towels. Many MSFT buildings have showers stocked with towels. At one point, the towel service was discontinued as a cost-saving measure. Lots of employees took issue with this and wanted their towels back.
Still reading through it; nice so far; thanks for sharing.

In Tip 14 (Getting a logo), the link (a cj.com aff? URL) shows 'expired'. You might want to fix that.
Can Cloud Computing Enhance Compliance?
I certainly think so - I'm in the process of quitting my job to work on a company, and the health insurance will be my biggest expense other than rent and food. If it was more affordable, I could survive a lot longer without running out of money.

Also, if you're starting a company, you shouldn't even consider not having health insurance - while expensive, at least there is a limit to the downside. Without it, your potential downside is almost unlimited.
Designing an optimal keyboard layout for 1-finger use
Just a tiny reminder that beauty, ugliness, comedy, and tragedy are ordinary, everyday occurrences in the world.
Teach Undergrads or Grad Students
I have taught entrepreneurship for 5 years to undergraduates in a business school. I am now being offered the opportunity to teach masters level students in an engineering school. My instinct says that it will be more enjoyable with the more accomplished masters students. Thoughts appreciated.
Ah you've misinterpreted my point. I'm not assuming that people know who Theil is, rather that Palantir's biggest shareholder waxing lyrical in some PR-blurb article - calling his investment 'the next facebook', no less - counts as news on HN.
Some of it for me is pure selfishness. I just care a lot more overall about having an interesting day than being productive. An interesting day includes work and solving problems, but it also includes conversation on both technical and random human topics, connecting with people on a deeper than working level, and just plain screwing around. Luckily this all tends to balance out (at least), because maintaining high spirits and an active imagination gives a boost to productivity that's at least as strong as having a private office and slogging away in it stoically every day for 10 hours.
>So is there a big gap in the scores of Northerners and those in Southern border states?

There is. Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously quipped the crucial determinant of the quality of American schools is proximity to the Canadian border. Things have gotten worse since his day.

>And how do they get into school if they don't have citizenship or visas?

That's the way it works in the US. Get your kids over the border and they can go to school. They don't need papers or English.

>It's gotten to be a royal pain in the ass to cross the Canadian border into the US since 9/11---how is it so easy for millions of Mexicans?

Things are a lot easier if you cross illegally. It's a long border, and there are various interests in the US who benefit from the influx of cheap labor. So the border isn't well policed and people who are caught crossing are simply released in Mexico. Then they hop back over the border again the next night.

>And how is standardized testing supposed to solve that problem? How is throwing in an extra $3000/head supposed to solve it?

Eh? Testing won't solve anything, and I didn't mean to imply it would. I was just trying to say the situation in Canada isn't directly comparable. US schools will never score as well as those of other first world countries no matter how much money we spend.
This is why code coverage numbers are a much better metric.
Ask HN: Teach Undergrad or Grad Students
I have taught entrepreneurship for 5 years to undergraduates in a business school. I am now being offered the opportunity to teach masters level students in an engineering school. My instinct says that it will be more enjoyable with the more accomplished masters students. Thoughts appreciated.
It was fun last time. I will be there!
Then you miss out on the steam train!
It misses the one with me and my neighbour :)
http://i.imgur.com/vRdaU.png
IBM sets patent record: IBM Inventors Break Patent Record
I thought basically the same thing all through grade school and college, and for a couple years afterwards, right through doing my startup. And I still do - as far as you go. But I think you're missing something very important.

School is not about learning facts. It really, really sucks at that - go grab a book or twelve out of your public library and devour them for that. And it's not even for learning skills - the best way to do that is to get a private tutor, mentor, or coach, and then practice your heart out.

School is for learning culture. And culture, by definition, can neither be learned nor taught. It functions on a subconscious level, in terms of the little behaviors that people can never quite articulate but certainly notice. You have to be immersed in it to pick it up, and it takes a significant amount of time, and an open mind.

It's an open question whether all school cultures are worth learning. For me, elementary school bus culture and middle school culture certainly were not, and probably set my development as a human being back by a decade. But the culture at my high school - a public charter school that was just starting up - was a good portion of the reason I decided to go into startups, and played a major role in me becoming the person I am today. I wouldn't trade it for anything. The culture at Amherst, my alma mater, taught me to look at everyone I meet as a peer and equal, no more and no less, and to feel that I have nothing to prove, whatever silly hierarchies people dream of. And the culture at Google, IMHO, is without equal in the software world. You pick up so many practices and ways of thinking simply by being there.

So yeah, I think you are basically right. It's interesting that you pick out the pledge of allegiance as the most ridiculous thing in all of schooling. That's exactly what I mean by culture. And in this case, that particular ritual was designed to create a culture of subserviency, a form of indoctrination so that the masses of public schoolchildren would mindlessly support their power-elite overlords. It's bullshit, as you say.

But by recognizing it as bullshit and then putting up with it long enough to "win", you open the door to many other communities which are far less fucked up than the public education system. Google is nothing like middle school, and it's only similarities to elementary school are the colorful beanbags, the ballpit, and the massive quantities of Lego. But it's much, much easier to get into Google if you did well at elementary and middle school.
Jesus why do you downvote this when you disagree? I have to select the text to figure out what the 10 responses here are responding to.
Vacri hit the nail on the head - the locking out users on the desktop combined with the licensing restrictions on the server make it a tad too restrictive out of the box.

Having said that, when properly configured and licenced Terminal Services is freaking awesome.