skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The argument about percentage for use/knowledge of web-based office apps does not support the article.

To clarify, I'll put another app's name in the same percentage.

There was a time when 73% of Americans had never even heard of Youtube.

As long as more than 73% of Americans have heard of Youtube this statement is quite likely true.

While Youtube clearly had a wonderful growth curve, both are horribly useless statements. Just as the knowledge of Youtube was low until it became high, knowledge of Google Docs will be low until it becomes high. Or it could stay low forever. But the current percentage/growth rate doesn't actually mean anything.
It seems to me that allowing them to fail would help the dollar by tightening credit.
I am sure all the top sprinters in the world would agree. They never do weights, or use drugs to make them stronger. Olympic weightlifters aren't faster over a short distance than most sprinters, nor are bobsledders. Most bobsledders are weak and slow, barely able to lift .... if you go to pubmed, you won't find research showing an increase in speed entirely due to weightlifting routines.

/end sarcasm.
Hudson (test automation framework for websites)
What is the point of this article? It reads as "here's a minor nitpick about everything." I can't think of anything else to say.

The article conjures up a mental image of a high school student at a party who takes a shit in the punch bowl and expects everyone to be proud of him. Instead, everyone ignores him. (Let's be that "everyone", eh?)
Genetics has a huge influence over your physique. For example, if you take a random sample of people who do not exercise regularly, there will be a wide variation in their bicep sizes.

Genetics also controls things like metabolism and how well you respond to weight training, so you need to adjust your diet accordingly.
I do agree with you that motivation and a good routine can create superior results in anyone. I was just pointing out that some people will have to work harder than others, diet harder, or eat more, or whatever.
Also, people seem to forget that Apple does have an advantage here. It has complete control over the hardware. Essentially, it is a hardware company.

A GNU/Linux system on the other hand needs to work with everything. Older hardware and newer hardware. This is a maintenance nightmare if you don't have the hardware specs. Which a lot of manufacturers don't/won't release.

As for the browsing/email/administrative use of a system, then i find any modern distribution would do that with hardly any configuration. I use Ubuntu, but Redhat/Suse are also fine. Any desktop-centric distribution that is.
I don't think that desktop apps are going anywhere -- but web apps are going to look a lot more like desktop apps very very soon.

I think it's safe to say that applications written in dynamic languages (like Javascript) that communicate with the Internet regularly are going to become more common. And a lot of these apps are going to run in something like Chrome or XULRunner.

A "desktop app" is a pretty simple distinction. You go to your "desktop" and load the app. From there, the app can read/write the file system, talk to the Internet, read the keyboard and mouse, communicate with special hardware devices, etc. Web apps are going to be very much like this very soon. And then there will be no difference between a web app and a desktop app.
Uh courses! Just install visual studio and start hacking some c#, its super easy to build something cool. A lot of tutorials out there. Start with a screen saver!

Then,
1. Get a mac
2. Look around MIT open courseware stuff.
3. Keep hacking.
Except that on linux tab does two things. When you are halfway through typing something on the command line tab finishes it for you (or at least tries). When you are typing in a text editor, usually tab indents. Being clever and doing both at the same time makes tons of sense to me. I used the gVim smart tab complete for a while and I never had issues wanting to do one, but getting the other.

I kinda want to try it, to get into emacs...
the foreign central banks get their bonds paid for by the American taxpayers.

Given that the bonds are backed by mortgages taken out by those very same American taxpayers, it doesn't seem all that unfair. (And all those T-bills, as well as the mortgage bonds, were bought by dollars paid to overseas businesses to buy lots of cheap goods for American consumers).
Step 1: done

Step 2: in progress

Step 3: never ending :-)
Ex-Googlers: Where are they now? At Cuil
> Body building and power lifting routines involve rest between sets.

I thought this whole thread was about bodybuilding. That would be the target market for the app that was posted. I claimed that a logbook is useful for bodybuilders.

Originally I thought you were saying that logbooks were bad for bodybuilders, but now I suppose you are saying that bodybuilding in general is a bad activity. That's a whole different debate.
Personally I like the appearance of a lean, muscular, and proportional physique, which is what bodybuilding is all about (not that I've attained this yet, but it's a goal).

> They're also slow and have diminished hand speed and explosive power

Bodybuilding won't slow you down, but it's not the optimal way to develop speed, since it develops slow-twitch muscles more than fast-twitch ones.

I don't understand at all your advocating "brief and intense" routines as an alternative to bodybuilding. Most bodybuilding routines are brief and intense sets, with some rest in between.
Ok this is a great book, but also boring as hell esp for self study. The MIT course also has switched to using python.
For algorithms this one http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Algorithms is a pretty awesome read.
Journalists. Late as always.
I disagree about video. You don't need video to explain what you do on the front page of your site.

Video can be a bit 'spammish' IMHO Sure, have some video tutorial or something linked off the front page.
FWIW, M-/ completes (filenames) in bash also.
It's all in definitions. For a lot of people, the web is already their O/S, and they could easily do without windows/OSX/linux.

I think we will see more machines that go that way and just have a bare bones linux o/s with chrome/firefox on top of it.

Sure, desktop software will always be around, for techies and hardcore gamers, but for the average non-tech user, they don't really need desktop software, and webapps are more natural and useful for them. (Tons of advantages to them).

I think some people are underestimating just how much google can throw at chrome in terms of marketing. They already have a link on google.com, and there's a ton of other ways they can promote it.

I think "Windows killer" is unwarranted, but it'll most likely make windows even less relevant than it is now to most people.
One million billionth of a millisecond on a Sunday morning spoilers
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Start a startup that revolverutionizes point based karma. Point based karma is the devil's playground!
Seems like the last time I complained about the trifling point system, I come back and there's no looking down.

Idano, boring reading at least keeps me calm.
I think I can understand the author's frustration. While it might be just definitions unless we are willing to divest the word operating systems of all its meaning, I think we need to be really sure that we need a web version of word.

I can see some kind of apps requiring to live "in the cloud" but I don't think desktop apps need to live there.
True, they are good ads. To dismiss them a twentieth of a century later is muy smug. People talk about them, they work. They're ads. That's how ads work. Not a cornerstone value of the geek caste system, but without the fake hipster, there's no iPhone. Take heart, dear friends, the apple guy really does love you.
Easy Git, git for mere mortals
I did not find SICP boring for self-study at all. Quite the opposite, really.
I found "Concrete Mathematics" to be a great read for maths relating to CS. I don't have a strong math background (took "calculus" in high school...) and haven't had a problem while reading it yet.
Pitching VC's and angels: The Baby is Never Ugly
we need a web version of word

I thought we already had a web version of the word - "web portal"

Google as far as I can tell is already essentially a "web OS" (I think they lost their rights to call themselves a just a search engine a long time ago) and Chrome is just Google's attempt to integrate their "web OS" more readily with your computer/device.
The stack doesn't get taller, but it does get much slower. Javascript just isn't a good VM "bytecode". And HTML isn't a good graphics API.
yeah, I think of the best, and crucial things, about Ruby on Rails, is that for beginners you get that "Your're riding the rails" splash page that says, "you can do it." Github does rock, but to evolve computing in the public consciousness, all traces of RTFM must needs bee radicated.

Okay I guess I'm actually getting to work now. L8trz.
You start by saying people using log books over-train and go on to say that they should put away the log book and pick up the pace. That makes no sense.

Your other points are equally useless personal opinion.
Kate (KDE) has a nice plugin which will look at all the words you have typed in the file and use those for autocomplete.

It's excellent for long variable or function names, and you don't have to preload a list of the ones you want.

After using it for a while I miss it when typing english in a textbox like this one.
"Real speed and strength comes from complete relaxation and not tension, which weight lifting only promotes."

The fastest man in the world, Usain Bolt, uses weight lifting as part of his training routine - as do elite athletes in almost all sports (with a particularly important role in those requiring high levels of strength and speed).
to be fair so is OP. Article is from August first.
"How many people do you know that say 'I wish I could have better charts of my lifting amounts'?"

BodySpace on bodybuilding.com, which does this, currently has over 200,000 active members - so quite a few actually.
Wikileaks auctions leaked documents
Yeah. He could have been watching "What About Earl" reruns instead.
The reality of software projects (comic)
Because it allows you to maintain clean abstractions, which is essential for big projects. The ultra-permissive model of programming (the current fad) is great when the entire codebase can fit in your head, but it fails completely when you're working with anything larger.

For example, every substantial Rails project I've seen has had views that have degenerated into messes of bizarre spaghetti logic (which, in turn, interact with the bizarre spaghetti logic in the controllers, in bizarre, noodly ways). This is mainly due to the fact that there's virtually no enforcement of abstraction boundaries in Rails -- views can directly manipulate the models (whose methods and data are essentially world-writable), which are obtained via instance variables on the controller, which are always implicitly available to the view. Mix in things like shared partials, locals and layouts, and Rails code quickly becomes a maintainability nightmare.
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TechCrunch also believes that Facebook is becoming a Web OS as well.
But the difference is that these sites are more or less niche sites. People will use them regardless of design, as that's what tech people are like.

However, Some of the sites linked are poor - it would be prudent to look at the sites linked in more detail (ie more than just a glance at the home page) before deciding to attack Scoble.

For example, the Plastic Logic (sorry if anyone here works for them, but I'm just trying to show something) is very poorly designed. I'm actually surprised that a company that is "technology related" would launch a new site that is circa 1995 web design.

Clicking through to the product page shows an image that is roughly 200x300 that takes an incredibly long time to load. Upon further inspection, it turns out to be 10 times larger (a 2.25mb file) that these guys uploaded and resized with html instead of resizing in a graphics utility.

I honestly don't know anyone who would do something like that anymore.

I think the way Robert handled his post could have been more professional, especially since there may be a conflict of interest with him judging at TC50, but he did have a point - some of the site designs were not in line with some of the markets they are trying to attract.
The problem with long-running tests, however, is that they don't reflect real-world, in-browser use of JavaScript. If your browser doesn't respond for half a second because your JavaScript is doing some computations, then your users aren't going to be happy. DOM performance must not be forgotten either, along with rendering speed of said DOM changes. That's not so easy to benchmark, of course.
I'm not sure that saying you're too busy writing code to deal with every other aspect of your business really is a good thing.

That being said, if you intend to sell your service to nerdy Unix sysadmins, not having a shiny website requiring all the annoying plug-ins probably is a good thing.
Keep the suggestions coming. I'm currently kind of in the same situation, except I just started Business School and I have been full-time developer and occasianally a entrepenuer over 4 years.

What happened to me was that I got tired of hacking little things. I never kind of had the time or motivation to learn any advanced cs or math(since I suck even in basic math).

I didn't choose CS school since I got quite a variety of intrests(like business, economy, arts, cs...) and I'm not sure that I have such a burning desire to be a hacker, or work as one, but I still want to learn more.
Strawman, and you know it.
Personally I believe the singularity will never happen.

For one reason: The entire premise of the singularity is that humans will be able to invent a machine that is smarter than them. Or at the very least invent a machine that can invent another machine smarter than itself.

I think that premise is simply wrong. I think it's impossible.

Let's assume you give the smartest people on earth an unlimited budget and computing power. None of them will be able to even propose an idea for a working AI.

No one has any idea how to program an AI - no matter the computing speed.

Humans are not getting smarter. If we can't even propose an idea for an AI today - why would you think we can do one tomorrow?

One argument is basically evolutionary design - let the machine invent itself. The big problem with that is no one even knows how to create an algorithm to measure smartness! If you can't create a fitness function, you can never create an evolutionary design.

So don't wait for the singularity - it's not coming. Work on upgrading humanity, not computers.
This essay is not very well written. The author's points are pretty hard to grasp, and it's even harder to see how they support his central point. I'll just go over them:

-No civilization has been more advanced than ours. There is no historical reason to claim that we are about to "return to normality".

+Predicting future technological development has (almost) never worked.

+We might in the future find out that Kurzweil's ideas were bad. -> History is overflowing with examples of this.

-"Suppose that all over the universe, civilizations arise and continue growing exponentially until they exhaust their planets’ resources and kill themselves out. [...] I wish reading the news each morning furnished me with more reasons not to be haunted by this vision of existence". -> Suppose instead that reality is just a dream, and you are the only conscious mind in existence. There is little reason to believe any of this. And (ad hominem alert) no doomsayer has ever been right, although the profession always has a comfortable number of practitioners.

-"AI hasn't made any progress". -> No one has ever sent anything into orbit, so it might be impossible.

-"There is a ceiling to computational expressive power. Get up to a certain threshold, and every machine can simulate every other one, albeit some slower and others faster". -> Correct, but the consequences of this are just speculation. My speculation: Being 1000 times faster gives you entirely different capabilities. What's the use of decoding an MP3 in anything less than real-time?

+"Yet while I believe that the latter kind of singularity is possible, I’m not at all convinced of Kurzweil’s thesis that it’s near". -> Yes, specific technological predictions have never been very successful. We will probably have some of these technologies by 2045, and also some we weren't able to think of.
The name is a funny thing, this app has been a hobby of mine I have been working on here and there for a bit. It has always been geared towards the serious lifting crowd.

I thought the name was easy to remember, easy to tell someone that they can spell again, and was slightly controversial (as seen in this thread!)

But since I am gearing this towards serious folks I don't think they will act like noobs do and fear overtraining like its some kind of infection one suddenly contracts with after doing one extra set. In fact most of the people I talked to (standing around between sets), mostly people that compete in bodybuilding and power lifting, thought that the name was funny as most people would call what they do 'overtraining'.

Since there are a lot of obviously knowledgeable people here let me ask, do you think you will remember the name now? do you think if it was named some random jumble of letters you would remember it more or less?

Anyway thanks for all the feedback!
Complaints like this turn up ever so often, but I guess Paul is still bitter about losing the popularity contest back in high school (http://paulgraham.com/nerds.html) and now wants to create a popularity contest that's geared towards him winning from the get-go. Can't keep him from doing that, all we can do is ignore the mods.
Looks like someone is trying to implement erlang in java.
I work on various hardwares (laptops, desktops, macs) so sometimes i need to move an installed hard drive on one mobo to another different mobo

win98 hd can be used across, good luck with XP / Vista

iBookG4 tiger hd can be swappable to mac mini

ubuntu hd, i had occasions when it's not swappable (always kernel panic on other mobo - must reinstall from scratch)

OpenBSD always works (tm) on every mobo, even on my 10 yo XD380 thinkpad

BUT YOU CAN USE VMWARE!!!
errr, i use simpler, OS / hardware independent tech: VNC

my setup now is:
win98 for legacies, win-only software / hardware
mac mini for fancier hardwares bluetooth, firewire, DVI etc

OpenBSD for development, VNC to win98 and Mac Mini (powerPC)

It used to be OpenBSD+Ubuntu ... However, time tweaking Ubuntu is better invested in win98+mac ... i feel ubuntu is trying to be win/mac/BSD* and it's weak in the three fronts -- weak identity, designed by committee for mass

you may think supporting 3 OS is more complicated; however it's not true

if the OS misbehave and need complete reinstallation:
win98: i could just dd if=win98 of=/dev/disk2 and it's ready in 10 mins shrug
osx: reboot from install disc, format tiger partition, map the tiger-image and it's ready in ~30 mins
OpenBSD: just do ftp reinstall, untar Site44.tgz and it's production ready in 15 mins
Ubuntu: i dunno, ... i'll prolly waste another hour+half or two reinstalling it

NB: Can u operate 3 OS (Win/OSX-powerpc/Unix) on a single machine?
* BSD is more powerful than linux ... err GNU/linux ... or should i say GNU/BSD ? ... I dunno, i just want to hack and use the most powerful tools available, no time for silly nerd politics
There are many ways to invent. Intentional design is just one of them, and so far the least effective one.

Many great discoveries in fields like medicine and biology were by accident and enlightened stabs in the dark, not by careful prediction, modeling and subsequent measurement.

Let's assume you give the smartest people on earth an unlimited budget and computing power. None of them will be able to even propose an idea for a working AI.

If you had given doctors around then 1920s an infinite budget and armies of test subject, they would still not have been able to even propose an idea for a working wide-spectrum anti-bacterial pill to vanquish most of that age's deadliest diseases. Yet, by accident, they stumbled on penicillin, and did beat out all those diseases.

Accident is a powerful force.

So don't wait for the singularity - it's not coming. Work on upgrading humanity, not computers.

The singularity doesn't have to come through pure-silicon computing. If we enhance human intelligence enough, we get a similar result.
Humans are not getting smarter. If we can't even propose an idea for an AI today

That's kind of silly. First of all, the Flynn Effect (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_Effect) says we are getting smarter in a very real sense.

Second, we stand on the shoulders of giants. We each get to start where the greatest minds before us ended. Today, we're taught what great men had to struggle for 50 years ago - so each new great man will get a little further.

A 100 years ago we couldn't propose an idea to land a man on the moon - yet we could be done 50 years ago.

Who knows what another 50 years will bring?
Little wonder TV sucks so much.

Huh?
Although this is geared towards the more experienced I would like to hear your thoughts as someone starting out. Let me know at erick@overtrainer.com if you would like to play around with it.

Thanks
Sure, it appears as feed icon in my Firefox 3.0: http://feeds.feedburner.com/github
"if that is you metric of health"

You were previously talking about "strength" rather than "health". At least, you used the word "strength," so I assumed that was what you meant. If you meant to be talking about general health, then that's very different, and I don't have much to say on it. :)
Startups and Assembly Lines, An Essay
I'm confused - does he want international, nationwide, or local shoots? He has a few celebs on the photo gallery so I can't tell. If local, I would suggest taking each photograph and creating separate pages for each that include the town/city/shoot info as content (all in an attempt to raise the PageRank for searches like "beverly hills photographer").

There's no way to make a photographer's site "viral" though, at least none that I can think of. I do somewhat disagree with "iamdave" - not all viral marketing movements are organic. Many of them are carefully planned 1+ years in advance. Either way, no one's going to be emailing around links/videos of your photog friend.