skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Of course the result is what matters. But hypothetically, if you can throw together the basic CRUD of an app in 5 minutes with one toolset, and it takes 2 days in another, which one is more likely to let you hone in on the fine details? If one toolset lets you automate testing really easily, and the other doesn't, which one is going to make you feel freer to experiment and improve?

Yes, tools don't matter. Output matters. But tools affect output. So tools matter.

I'm not saying one should rewrite one's codebase in The New Hotness every 6 months - that would be crazy. Which maybe is the author's point.
Quest Venture Partners: Current VC investing not “irrational”
When I click on 'continue reading...' it doesn't do anything. Is there supposed to be more to the article? The last sentence I got was :

If you’re a teacher, go where the students care about what they’re learning.
Both of these require the application to specifically support them (per the asterisk after the features).

I'm assuming they'll be supported by Apple's first party programs, then sporadically by 3rd party developers, as it is with Time Machine, QuickView and Spotlight document helpers support.
Room 77 helps travelers pick the best hotel rooms (and peek out the windows)
Clay - A 3D engine on canvas
Agreed. Try going 4 years older. My IBM branded X41 is the finest laptop I've owned and ubuntu works flawless on it. I bought a replacement battery for it and get a good 5 hours and a few days standby. I like it so much, I even consider not telling people so I can buy up more used ones and set aside for future parts. But hey, what's life if you don't share. Considering the cost of these on ebay (as much as some new netbooks) I think the secret is already out.
Loosecubes offers free workspace (their office) in NY.
Hopefully it works better than XCode snapshots
USB3 has probably already won

Why do you say that? Are there more USB 3 things on the market than I'm aware of? With Intel and Apple behind it, I wouldn't say Thunderbolt is a sure thing, but it seems promising.
I like this but how can I do more than 5000 emails?
We thought this would be fun to make and fun to work on for an hour or two. Let us know if you have any feedback or questions.
During transitions like this it would be nice to give both numbers on the new and old machines. This at least gives people some type of comparison point.
How the Servant Became a Predator: Finance’s Five Fatal Flaws
The other mini-jack is an audio line in.
http://lucidchart.com
British court orders WikiLeaks' Assange extradited to Sweden
How to watch the last Space Shuttle missions
Don't miss it, I especially like the last live broadcast down the page, it really is amazing.
I found another formulation in reddit, a few days ago, that you might like also: "if you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room".
Your last sentence... I'm in the same camp.

I was waiting for the MBP announcement to see if the 13" would be so compelling that it would become the perfect laptop for me, but the keyboard still isn't for me, and I really wanted USB3 and was hoping to lose the CD bay in exchange for more battery.

The T420 is slightly larger than I wanted, but Ubuntu on my T61p is such a sweet thing for development and lifestyle use that the smaller T420 looks really good. If Lenovo had a 13" in the T series spec'd like that, they'd have me instantly... as it is they probably have me anyway as the MBP hasn't moved enough to be compelling to me and I can deal with the slice battery on the T420 for a long weekend of use when travelling. The Lenovo keyboards remain without compare, which I guess means I'm now talking myself into it pretty convincingly. T420 + Ubuntu seals the deal.

Edit:

Just checked out the T420 dimensions, and they're: 13.4in x 9.05in x 1.18in.

It's not bad... a little larger than the new 13" MBP (12.78in x 8.94in x 0.95in), but not by enough to dissuade me. The higher resolution on the T420 is a good trade-off for the extra bit of size.
When the Itanium first launched, we got some machines from Intel so we could port our software. After excitedly unpacking one machine, we plugged it into the office power outlet and flipped the switch. Suddenly all the lights on our floor went out. Turns out you were supposed to only feed it from a data-center-strength power grid.
If I have an email sent by Person A to people B C D and E, and E is me, will this app also pull emails and names for B C and D? (as well as A)?
I would probably read it differently depending on the background of the person who wrote it (mostly based on how aware I'd expect the writer to be of the problems involved). I've seen people with a basic understanding of compilers stumble over it and not know why others in the room chuckled. In this particular case, I don't know enough about the author to say, but EPIC/VLIW architectures are kind of known for making things difficult for the compiler (meaning the joke would be very appropriate here).
who else has done awesome challenges? Greplin had a cool one...seatgeek...who else?
If this allows for daisy chaining monitors I might just get the newest one.
That assumes you save any time at all. I use a ThinkPad with Win7 and I think honestly say that I lose no additional time vs using a MBP. In fact I'd argue it saves me time as I generally like the keyboard more and I can't stand trackpads (I turn mine off and use the stickpoint -- which I actually even prefer over a mouse).

My point... the $1000 savings for many comes with no penalty at all. With that said, I don't have a Unix environnemnt requirements, which would change the equation in a big way.
Sparrow is faster, doesn't take up the same memory that a tab does, and it's faster to find the icon in your Dock than dig through 40 tabs, plus it's nice to be able to quickly switch between Gmail/Google Apps accounts.
Snow Leopard (and probably earlier) already support this. When an app reopens twice after from the "reopen" button on the crash reporter it opens without loading the preference file.
America, You Ain’t Got No Moxie.
How I came up with my product name
I'm disappointed that the 13" still has no high DPI screen. I think Apple will start pushing higher DPI screens into their laptops when their OS becomes more resolution-independent.
Hate?! Trust me, I have no intention of pestering him/her with every minute detail of the chart. But I do know I have a (somewhat) higher risk for prostate cancer in advanced age, and I sure want to have a talk with him about ways to mitigate it. I was under the impression that is pretty much his job...

But I think I understand a bit of what you mean. For example, my results lists obesity at "normal", with a whopping 60% chance. Same way, one slightly raised chance of a certain disease may not mean much when compared to a host of other illnesses with much higher baseline chances. As it happens though, prostate cancer is already high on the list, so I do intent to fully make use of the information.
Awesome prizes - would love to win the the one month desks at Hyperpublic HQ in NYC or (and?) one year free Dropbox account.
I just get an error when I click grant access.
It's both true and obvious that buying index funds externalizes the cost of researching equities.

However, active investors engage in self-delusion that they can somehow beat the market. Unless they have highly rare insider information, this isn't true, and the top 25% of fund managers are simply that because the bottom 75% is other fund managers.

So it's your trilemma--delude yourself, externalize the cost of research, or watch inflation erode the value of your savings. I'm comfortable with my choice.
Feels highly political, especially with the original title.

We're not trying to get into Harvard, so not particularly relevant.

While you may be a lurker here, and so may not have it, many of us have a "flag" button. This will delete the article from the site if a pretty small number of us click it.

Therefore, I wish, in addition to this button, I also had a button that said "has some value, just get it out of the curated HN space, and transfers it to reddit".

So if it's interesting to hackers, it's via politics (which HN tends to be flag happy about), and about a stage in life where pretty much everyone here is past (college admissions), to an institution which isn't really that common for the startupy type of person to strive for (usually preferring Stanford or MIT).

I do think it's interesting, I just would prefer to see it on a site where the politics can be discussed without the stink of political opinion interfering with the startup community.

I view sticking stuff like this on HN is akin to having heated political discussions before interviewing for a job or partnership: a universally bad idea.

I wasn't being glib. It is an interesting article, just not one I want to see change my opinion of people I discuss technical things with all the time. People tend to be more blind to assumption about politics than many other topics, so it's a good way to make yourself think less of people.

Things close to this I would think on topic for HN:

A blog post going into how the hacker community isn't like this.

The ways that scions of tech are different than other parents when the second generation comes around.

Etc.
I was responding to your post above, specifically you said

> I'd argue typical tasks on them involve only single app

I think that's absolutely ridiculous. I don't know about "productivity" since even defining that is a bit vague. I'm not trying to comment on productivity.

I'm suggesting that most users will be multitasking frequently on their tablets; or they might not be and it's just too early to know either way! Take for example what I expect to be a pretty typical use case.

You pull your tablet out and start watching YouTube videos. You've got one app open now - YouTube. An email notification comes in from a friend, it's about a funny incident found on Street View (or something). So you click on the link. You've now got three apps open: Gmail, YouTube, and Maps. The email distracted you from the YouTube video, so now that you're done with streetview you hit up HN. Four apps.

Maybe you'll go back to the YouTube video. How will you do that? On iOS you have to leave the current app - I think, I don't own any iOS devices - then slide around your homescreen until you find YouTube, then open it up.

The idea behind Android 3.0's multitasking is that you have an easy-to-access list of running applications and tasks.

I'm not suggesting people will be seriously coding on Android tablets anytime soon (but that'll happen eventually...), but I think it's pretty clear that users will very much enjoy having many things going at the same time.
IPhone 4 no longer in the top 5 selling smartphones in UK
How often should I tweet?
sweet thanks!
Really good idea.

Anyone know of good tricks to extract contact info from Outlook email? ( XObni is good; but it doesn't let you export the data atleast not in the free version)..
how can i get help with finding who owns an email address?
The nice thing though is once it was installed, you save money because you can turn off the heat in your building.
So sorry- I confused your handle. This site is such a PITA with my iphone that I didn't trouble to double-check (and the app I bought for it is crashing every time I try to post). After reading your comment I went to a computer and verified that I had, indeed, fucked up.

But, anyway, since I brought it up, the book I'm checking out is here: http://exilelifestyle.com/learn-network-better/
It contains a similar point-of-view as the article here, but, of course, has a lot more depth. Networking is something I'm very bad at, and so I'm interested in learning more about it. I don't want to make a career out of it. I just want to be able to do it well in the appropriate situations. I'm pretty much a social clod left to my natural state.
Google - Slice and dice your recipe search results
is there anyone here? I thought this was live chat
Apparently you missed the part where he quoted PG saying: "Take a luxury and make it into a commodity"

It's because he's charging a commodity price that I decided to give it a go and pony up. I would never ever pay the going rate for a 'professional' in this business.
What happens when you plug a Thunderbolt plug into a DisplayPort port?
Calculus Revisited - a complete self-study calculus course from MIT OCW
A very good article, though I wish the author weren't so enamored with David Brooks clichés.
Ask HN: can we assemble a business from components yet?
In the old days, it seemed that every company wrote their own inventory control system, accounting system etc in-house, to cope with their specific business: their processes, their data etc.

Then, companies began to customize solutions, such as SAP.

Now, it seems that many webapp companies can get started by stitching together services, for the generic business stuff - things like payments, user-interface forms, forums etc. Note: I don't mean assembling the product (or service) - what the business actually does to create value - but all the standard generic "business" stuff.

How easy is it to assemble these services? Is there quite a bit of work in the actual stitching together (gluing/interoperating), or is that pretty straightforward? Are there gaps in what services you need, that you'd think really should be generic?

In the bigger picture, if we truly are at the point of plug-and-play business-creation, it would enable an even greater explosion in businesses exploring niches to fill, how to reach customers, and experimenting with different ways to solve each of the "real" problems.
I didn't realize Intel still made this stuff.
Apple Shareholders Silence Demands for Jobs’ Replacement
IANAL. If you reveal trade secrets in a review ("John has done so well implementing our XYZ algorithm trading system for Yen") could open you up to liability. Also, they could just fire you because you didn't follow their advice, then it would be up to you to sue them for wrongful termination (if it even qualifies).
Just submitted our order. Should be interesting to see the results.
National Canadian Broadband Plan
> It looks like you would have to implement USB on top of PCIe in the monitor, though.

Isn't that basically UHCI?
AnandTech reviews make the things called "reviews" on many other tech sites seem very misnamed. How about an HN embargo against some of the worst such offenders around until they shape up?
1) The article says "thread level parallelism" when they mean "instruction level parallelism"

2) There is way more ILP available at run-time than compile time, and what ILP is available in both is much more tractable at run-time. An out-of-order CPU is constantly filling a buffer with instructions (or microcode), and hardware is determining the dependencies dynamically to issue them to the ALU. This is a much more tractable problem than trying to guess the control flow at compile time. A large enough prefetch buffer can overcome a really dumb compiler.

3) Requiring software to be aware of details of your hardware implementation is a really tempting idea, but it has been historically much worse than the opposite. Consider a modern x86 that is nothing like an 80386, but runs the same software, often at higher IPCs than an original 386. Now compare to MIPS which has its delay-slot for branches which often just gets filled with a NOP. Furthermore on modern MIPS cores, which have longer pipelines and branch-prediction, that slot is more-or-less useless!

4) Assuming IA64 doesn't die out, by the time compiler writers figure out how to make code that runs fast on an Itanium of today, Intel will be performing hardware gymnastics to make that code run fast on the hardware of tomorrow.
The End of Comments
In my quote I say typical task will involve only one app.
Your example does not contradict that: checking email is different task from watching youtube.
On iOS you press home button twice, and tap on Youtube app, it will nicely swap places with whatever you have open.
I don't argue that multitasking (in OS sense) is bad. I argue that multitasking as a way for human to deal with tasks is actually less productive.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000022.html
Sounds more like the "Copy to WebDAV and "Copy from WebDAV" options currently present in all iWork apps.
oooo I want a free Dropbox pro account!!!
I got a refurb 13" 2 weeks ago, probably as they were clearing out stock. It's a really nice machine, solid in all the ways it should be. And it was only $1k.
I for one don't miss serial, parallel, and PS/2 ports.
This does not surprise me. In the dark ages, before the proliferation of internet usage, the only real source for information was newspapers, and most youth don't read newspapers. The primary sources of information for them were TV and radio and friends, which do not cover current events and news as deeply as newspapers. But with twitter, facebook, and all the other online sources, they can see and feel what is happening to real people all around the world. It is almost as if their social circles have expanded beyond their schools and neighborhoods, so now they care much more about what happens to their comrades abroad.
Good point - I'll get that up in the next deployment. Appreciate the feedback!
Hey Hyperpublic, kudos for keeping things interesting
Onkyo Receivers
If you are a lover of the best sound in your home! you must know the best product! Onkyo Receivers count with the best solution for your sound problems. Please take a look to the different models and read the details of each one.
In Pursuit of Radical Innovation
The article isn't really about university admissions at all, they're merely provided as one cause of an environment which also has its parallels in startup life.

Arbitrary illustrative excerpt:

Whether American or Chinese, individuals who focus too much on ‘achievement,’ and who believe the illusion that they’ve achieved everything simply through their own honest hard work, often think very little of everyone else as a result.
no doubt it is a great innovation, but it is a Epic Fail with its logo or symbol or branding whatever you call it. it should be something special like USB, Ethernet, Sound symbol etc.
The AppShopper app also allows you to view "price drops" on all apps. It's a very useful feature. It's nice to be able to browse the on-sale games on your site though.
This challenge sounds fantastic! Great job -- I really want the prizes, too.
Hi all, Shawn Carolan here, partner at Menlo. I highly recommend talking with associates and analysts at firms, every funding starts with one internal champion and especially when you have a smart energetic guy like vineet get excited about a deal the partners listen! This is a major myth of the VC industry that anyone besides a partner is a waste of time. Most shops are pretty small so every fan counts. Good luck!
No, I got that part, and also the part of his positioning where he said "name consulting was previously only available to big companies and we want to make it available to smaller companies".

Pricing isn't a binary decision between "cheap" and "nosebleed". This is another geek pricing pathology.

I think $50 is too cheap. I think, if your market is "people that actually need names but are smaller than PepsiCo", there are very few three-figure prices that aren't rounding errors. Why would he want your business? How many entities are there like you, and how often do they pony up for names, and how much does it cost to support them?
PHP has one advantage and it is that you can deploy it on most cheap hosting providers and it just works, you shouldn't solve deployment problems (like DB drivers) and pay more as with Rails, Python or Java.
FaceTime for OS X out of beta - costs $1.00
I worked at a place that developed FireWire peripherals. I can tell you the $1/port price never mattered to us, despite the loud backlash on the internet.

The real reason USB "won" is because Intel really pushed it and integrated it into every one of their chipsets. Possibly even licensing it to the other PC chipset makers for cheap/free up front.

Given that Intel is backing Thunderbolt, it stands a good chance at achieving the same widespread usage.
[Update] Warn HN: How to accidentally, irreversibly nuke your Facebook account
Yesterday afternoon I posted about the disaster that happened to my Facebook account: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2256150

Someone at Facebook responded extremely quickly -- yesterday evening they updated documentation (a blog post) to prevent others from accidentally doing this, and when I woke up this morning my account was completely restored.

Thank you whoever at Facebook reads HN and fixed this for me. :)

However, other developers still have broken accounts because of this issue. I hope that it can be fixed for them, too.

http://www.skybondsor.com/blog/undo-test-account-on-facebook

http://forum.developers.facebook.net/viewtopic.php?id=90196

http://forum.developers.facebook.net/viewtopic.php?id=89194

http://forum.developers.facebook.net/viewtopic.php?id=88696

http://forum.developers.facebook.net/viewtopic.php?id=85580

http://forum.developers.facebook.net/viewtopic.php?id=75057
Both types of analysis have their place. The "small picture" is the most important picture to news organizations, for example. They want to know which news stories are trending right now to determine homepage placement and what content to focus on covering in the next few coming hours.
Julian Assange Ordered by Court to Be Extradited to Sweden
Who's shown Fib?

If "it just doesn't matter" then what's the point of 1.9.2 performance improvement?
From the website:

"By using the FontSprite generator, you can create sprite images of glyphs from your chosen font. Then, give the FontSprite engine your image, and the metrics data that the generator calculated for you. On your website, the engine creates a span for every letter, and perfectly sprites and places the rendered font as a background image, to create the illusion of custom fonted text! Best of all, you can copy and paste! (kinda)"

This is such an ugly hack. I'm giving this story an upvote just for the persistence this guy showed. To see how this affects selecting text, go to the examples page: http://jasper.clarkberg.org/fontsprite/engine.html#examples And try to select the text at the top of the page (viz, Here is some text set in Adelle. Make it casual with some Idolwild! Even Zapfino kinda works)

Notice how the selection appears offset from the displayed text? Jarring.

I admire this hacker for his ingenuity and persistence, but font-embedding will only be practical for websites with a dedicated audience, I'm afraid.
Killer iPhone App for Parents
Seems to me like a good way to farm start up ideas. Willing to sign an NDA before I give you my idea?
Also, being a native app (Cocoa app) integrates it with OS X, which is really useful.
1% of a year is 3.65242199 days.

So on the extreme end 37signals could be down for over 3 days in a single bout and still have 99% uptime. 3 days downtime is serious.

However, this case is unlikely.

Also unlikely is a scenario where they are down for the same time each day---14.4 minutes @ 99% uptime.

Its most likely that they're down for a few minutes here and there across the day during working hours, which makes for an incredibly frustrating experience. You can never just click a button and know your form will be submitted.
HP's refreshed Elitebook series is also around the corner it has not received much attention either. The 14 inch model will also offer up to 32 hours with the use of the extended/slate battery. They also will use discrete graphics from AMD switchable to onboard Intel video if less performance is necessary.

Early preview from Anandtech: http://www.anandtech.com/show/4190/hps-business-notebook-hat...
i.e. the semantic web, circa forever?
So I (blindly) thought that an Apple-integrated SSD might somehow be better than an aftermarket add in I drop in, RE TRIM. Is this not the case?

IANAHDS (I am not a hard drive specialist)
Startup Quote: Jessica Livingston, co-founder, Y Combinator