skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We don't use Google Website Optimizer, which I won't recommend to anyone. We're using a .NET framework that I won't name because we're probably going to transition off of it.

I enjoy Rails a lot more than I enjoy .NET, but give me some credit: looking at new languages doesn't cause my brain to throw a WTFCodeIsCamelCasedException.

By the way, Fog Creek isn't strictly a MS shop. There is a lot of "best tool for the job" going on, including e.g. Python being used as utility glue.
The visual is overly complex for the information it provides.
Ask HN: Recommended reading for beginning Android development?
Hello. I'm starting to delve into Android development and was just wondering if anyone has any book, site, blog, etc. recommendations that they'd be able to share. I've read through the Google Android guide a bit but frankly the thing is formatted in such a way that I just can't focus when working through it, so I'm looking to alternatives.
Exactly. Using a GPS to go everywhere will make your sense of direction worse. But that may be worth the easing of the cognitive load for you.

Also, many of the things to automate-such as sorting email or paying bills-don't really improve your brain anyway. The getting smarter article points out that once you get good at something, doing more of it doesn't make you any smarter.
Continued:

If you are not serious about editing text, then you will be served by many other editors.
It really depends. evangineer's tl;dr comment was a decently accurate summarization of the content of the article. If you're meaning the typical "tl;dr [witty/sarcastic comment about TFA's author's shortcomings]", sure, those don't belong on hn. evangineer's comment seemed genuinely useful, though.
Sneak Peak at the MSI 990FXA-GD65
instead is due to the possibility of inclusion in a network of people who are all more likely to find success.

I recently looked into the University of Washington Technical Management MBA program and the University was pretty brazen about admitting this. They spent far more time talking about networks and ROI than academic rigor.

Business schools are all about networking and the social aspect. I feel that as an introvert, I got a lot less out of my undergraduate business education than many of my classmates did.
Could someone please disassemble this and finally tell us why DOS strings end with '$'?

In my copy of "Accidental Empires", one of the Robert X. Cringelys has Gary Kildall say that not even Bill Gates knows why this is true.
Microsoft bothers with Windows 7 because rent collected from IP, while lucrative, is limited compared to the revenue potential of controlling a dominant platform.

Also, I can't imagine Balmer's ego or Microsoft's investors allowing Microsoft to ignore an OS niche.
Number 2 sounds like the two stage reminders I requested, which is awesome. I need to go back in and alter my notifications now.

I very much await anniversary support. Fantastic!

I think your idea of a note for each entry could be very useful, though I'd prefer it be pretty open/generic. Like when I tap on the contact, under the buttons I get a box I can enter text in. That way you can use it for any purpose - gift tracking, party details, etc.

With any text entry, please enable/support the landscape keyboard if it isn't too much hassle. It's not a "sky is falling" thing to not have, but I just prefer to enter text with that way and it screams attention to detail.

One thing I've noticed with more usage is the iAd that appears when you enter into the details of a contact. That's just a pet peeve of mine for a paid app. Obviously I did not pay, so I'm not going to complain :-).

In a non-pro, or Lite, version I would keep the iAd where you have it now and even add another one at the bottom of the home screen and settings screen. For an app like this it isn't terribly intrusive, and if it's a free version you should get something for your effort.

If the iAds end up performing better cost wise than the 99 cent ad-free Pro version, maybe bump the Pro version up to $1.99 to compensate. I'm sure folks with actual app store experience could offer better advice in this area though.
Intel Extends 320 SSD Series' Warranty To 5 Years
I guess the question is whether it's a misnomer or not.

I find "Too Long Don't Read" to be a dismissive attitude that I don't want here on HN, so I almost always vote down such comments (yes, including the ancestor here). But I appreciate executive summaries, and frequently vote them up to encourage their creation even if I didn't find the article itself compelling.

I realize that "TL;DR" is "just an abbreviation", but parsimony encourages me to conclude that it still connotes the words that it abbreviates and represents an attitude I do not like. Perhaps I'm reading too much into word choice, but in the end, word choice is really what makes the comments here worth reading.
KFA2 Launches Two Nvidia GeForce GTX 560 Graphics Cards
According to the Article, Greenlight Capital owns 9 million Microsoft Shares.

Steve Balmer owns 333 million shares - which is more than any institutional investor and thirty seven times the ownership of Greenlight. The only person or fund with more is Gates, himself.

[http://www.dailyfinance.com/company/microsoft-corporation/ms...]
Design Basics: Proximity (Or, Why Skype's "End Call" Button Is All Wrong)
Chomsky is just appealing to our own biases. We don't want to be statistical approximation machines, so that makes it easy to dismiss attempts to mimic us with statistical approximation machines.

However, the preponderance of evidence* so far suggests that we are just statistical processing machines. Hence why Chomsky seems way off the mark.

*We know that various layers in the visual and auditory systems basically just compute ICA, and we know that the brain is incredibly plastic. Large areas can be removed and the remainder will compensate. That makes it seem likely that all neurons compute something like ICA (or at least that degrades to ICA when confronted with visual or auditory input.)
Interview: Robby Russell on oh-my-zsh, community zsh framework
Your reply was regarding efficiency. My reply has to do with free. Let me put it in an example. Electric cars are more efficient than gas vehicles. So consumers switch to electric cars. Those workers whose jobs were rendered useless transitioned into higher knowledge jobs in the electric cars industry. There might be more jobs in the new industry. And customers will likely pay the same amount for the new electric cars (IMPORTANT: demand, the willingness to pay for said utility, still exists). So net loss is neglible. As for the oil/gas industry, the consumer pays for less oil/gas for their cars, so the oil/gas industry switches market to focus on other utilities for their oil/gas.

On the other hand, if the electric cars were free !? People would not have to buy cars ever anymore. Therefore an existing market was destroyed.

But I don't have to explain this to you, you spent lots of money on your economic classes!
This makes sense as an experment, and I don't really doubt Apple wants this eventually. i wonder what will happen first, Apple pulling the trigger on the switch to ARM or ARM matching in speed to current-time intel.

What strikes me as weird is that the source couldn't pinpoint if it was iOS or MacOS, which is cool because it means it looked completely different that both (a good sign that Apple is not settling down).
Should I be linking to the NY Times?
There's a disconnect here. How does the absence of analytics mean the site continues to function with reduced usability? You could argue that over time the site's usability would not increase as much as it might be due to missing analytics data, but it won't be reduced just because the Google Analytics beacon isn't present on the page.

If you think that having analytics data is such a benefit to the user, explain to them why you want to track how they use your site and let them decide whether they're happy with that. That's all this law requires.
http://www.businessinsider.com/htc-pays-microsoft-5-per-andr...

The actual link that the above compressed link goes to.
US Government can access data stored online for 180+ days without a warrant.
tl;dr: http://raganwald.posterous.com/why-i-downvote-tldr-comments-...
Ignoring this law means ignoring the privacy concerns of your users. If you're happy with that, you're part of the reason this law was introduced in the first place.
I believe the only ones of those that are Android are the Nexus S and the Galaxy S II (which apparently only offers it on some models, not others).
11 Startups Raised Over $162 Million In Funding This Week
"Consumer", "customer", "user". What is in a name?

Personally, I like to put myself in terms of the second two. The first carries connotations of more passivity. The second has that old "... is always right" adage on its side. The last takes the money out of the discussion and bridges nicely back to other movements toward user freedom in the realm of computers.
Poker Chips Set for casino games (Iphone,Ipad,Android)
Probably dependent on whether you have enough money to scare people from getting into a legal battle with you.
An ARM A5-Powered MacBook?
Friends to Gmail
It's a form of bigotry which is also deeply aligned with hate, often violent hate.

Meh, the vast majority of practical racism isn't really about hate. The most common form of racism is the over-generalization type -- most of the people of race X that you meet or see in the street have characteristic P, so you form in your mind the idea that "Xs have characteristic P". This, even when statistically true, is unfair to the Xs out there who don't have characteristic P, especially when P is negative, so it's a trap we need to avoid.

For every racist who actively hates another race, there's fifty who don't hate 'em but merely have negative beliefs about 'em, the same way I have negative and overgeneralized beliefs about (but don't actually hate) people who wear Ed Hardy t-shirts.
I think it is a neat idea, but why do you choose a name (and the tone) to irritate people? I would like to use STFU sometime but I love Visual Studio most of the time. Why put me in an irritable/angry/frustrated state? I hope you come up with a better name.
I agree that learning to produce and interpret varied utterances is a worthy goal, but the fact is that (far as it still is today) lowly statistical methods have gotten us closer to this goal than the other, chomskian approach. It could be a situation where aiming lower lets you shoot higher.
Would anyone like to add any questions to this interview?
"'We claim to be part of the American dream and of a system based on merit and opportunity and talent,' Mr. Marx says. 'Yet if at the top places, two-thirds of the students come from the top quartile and only 5 percent come from the bottom quartile, then we are actually part of the problem of the growing economic divide rather than part of the solution.'"

Is your college a meritocracy based on talent or a means of attempting to right social wrongs, Mr Marx? If it's the former, then the income of student's parents should be irrelevant and you should only be wringing your hands over lesser talented pupils getting in over more talented ones. If it's the latter, I can see your concern - patterns of behavior beget success and children often emulate their parents, leaving you stuck with those blasted high achievers. Tough break, that.
I can't say that I've run into this exact issue, or even exactly what the issues have been that I've run into with Emacs, but I know I've spent many hours reading instructions, following tutorials and generally just trying to get a basic emacs/lisp setup running. It's really difficult to do. I think I had a partially working Clojure setup, but then I tried to make it support Common Lisp in addition, and things completely broke down.

I'm not claiming to be a genius level programmer here, but I don't think I have to make that claim either. There's something seriously wrong with Emacs when an experienced programmer has serious issues setting up a basic development environment.

For comparison's sake, I hit "comfort-level" with Vim within two weeks, including a fully customized .vimrc, colour files and keyboard navigation. After a month of using Emacs I was somewhat comfortable with the keyboard shortcuts for basic navigation, but didn't know how to do several things that I could do in Vim. I also had no idea how to add syntax highlighting for language X - managing only to get it working for one dialect of Lisp and nothing else. Ah, and installing from ELPA had a nice tendency to show me error messages instead of actuall installing anything.

Bah, sorry for the rant. It just frustrates me when I hear about Emacs and how great it is, and I totally get on-board with it, but then it's just this fustercluck of configuration hell that never ends well.
Event A: Manned Moon landing

Event B: Unmanned probe landing on the moon and returing soil samples

Event A is rare and happened 6 times (Apollo 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17), event B happened 3 times. Thus event B is even rarer(?) than event A.

I am not a native speaker, can you please tell me the correct word to use in place of "rarer"?
I read as much of the title as is in the truncated URL and really hoped it would be "Schools win right to use corporal punishment".
One would think that pretty much every company that puts out even remotely decent products in the market has some sort of patent loyalties to pay? I mean there is just no way for one entity to own all IP shipping in moderately complex goods.

In this case may be HTC pays Microsoft AND Google (for shipping Google properties and accessing their services) - but at the end of the day Android enables them to sell in volumes and the $5 they pay to Microsoft would still be substantially less than if they were to license a full OS and application stack from Microsoft. So win-win I think.
By being a wage-slave, it's possible to make just enough money to live. Cool.
How to open a weed dispensary 
The medical cannabis industry is exploding. Here's how you can break in.
Microsoft collects patent rent from other companies (such as Amazon) solely because they run Linux. This is another major defect with our patent system. It is cheaper to pay licensing fees than to challenge bogus patent threats.
More importantly, it won't be updated for things that aren't it. As in, you can have a class called 'i', used in 50 files, and confidently replace those usages and only those usages with another name. That's something you just plain can't pull off with Regular Expressions.

[waits for somebody to post the 4000 character Regex that actually does this correctly]
« The German language doesn't even have an expression for "small talk", she says. »

When will this idea that because Language X doesn't have Y, the idea Y represents is alien to X speakers finally disappear ?

Although language does have an influence on one's thinking habit, this idea is a gross misrepresentation of very complex phenomena.

There's no word in French for the verb "to need".
There's no future tense in Finnish, nor are there any articles.
There are no perfective verbs or declensions in English.

Yet, if an idea is intelligible, chances are you can express it in any language, and translate the result in any other.
The idea that Microsoft should imitate Google and go wholesale into a revenue model based on advertising sales ignores Microsoft's fundamental strength - the trust upon which its B2B relationships (the crown jewels) rely. Microsoft has a customer base which is likely to be stable over the next five to ten years - Google's customers would abandon it in a heartbeat if consumer habits change and Google's platform becomes less cost effective than a competitor's (Google has the same sort of vulnerabilities that newspapers had to Craigslist).
I'm sorry, your English was fine, my brain just wasn't turned on and I misread what you wrote, and indeed what I quoted you as saying. Apologies!
Microsoft did not sue HTC.
I think the Germanic approach is particularly helpful for Asperger people, which are obviously prevalent in the IT industry. The social protocol is easier to parse.

Interestingly, attitudes differ even among German-speaking countries: Austrians often criticize the German "yes means yes, no means no" attitude. I've read an article which attributed this to Austrians' centuries of experience with their Balkan neighbours, which has increased their acceptance of slack and thus has made them much more relaxed than the Germans. Not sure in how far this is true ;-)
ECS Reveals Computex 2011 Hardware Lineup
This contentious relationship you state implies a fixed pie economy in which a person can get rich only at the sake of his fellows. Any thinking person would roundly reject such a notion.

On a similar topic is an essay by Paul Graham that you may enjoy:
http://www.paulgraham.com/gap.html
PC-BSD 8.1 Review
Elizabeth smart interview Kidnapping 
The Elizabeth Smart kidnapping occurred on June 5, 2002, when 14-year-old American girl Elizabeth Smart was abducted from her Salt Lake City, Utah , bedroom, Her abduction and recovery were widely reported and were the subject of a made-for-television movie and a published book, Ed and Lois Smart resided in the affluent neighborhood of Federal Heights in Salt Lake City, Utah with their six children. On the evening of June 4, 2002, the family attended an award ceremony at Elizabeth's school, Google
What's funny is to see someone in their first paragraph nit-pick the use of a single word ("so") from the article, and then in their second paragraph go on to grossly misuse a phrase ("patent troll").

It is not patent trolling to ask for licensing for patents that you developed and that cover technology that you use. It is in fact how patents were designed and meant to be used.
In theory, all those jobless people would now also not need to buy cars and could spend the savings on learning a how to do the new jobs created by all that extra money that's being spent on stuff besides cars.

In reality, changing careers is hard. Fortunately the government supports this some with low-interest loans, unemployment benefits, etc. Yet evidently it's not enough.
The links provided in this comment

http://www.cringely.com/2011/05/insecureid-no-more-secrets/#...

I'm finding interesting. Not done reading them, yet.
We haven't been able to find any great news API alternatives.

avoid the (perfectly valid) question of whether it's wise to build an app entirely reliant on some third party's good graces.

In my opinion, it isn't wise to build an app entirely reliant on a 3rd party API. Looking for a new API to migrate to says you haven't learned from the mistake you made. I've made the same mistake with an attempt at a SMS to Social Message tunnel on facebook/myspace back in the day. Then facebook made it a native feature. It was an important lesson to learn.

If I were you guys, I'd stop looking for APIs and start building your own backend. This way, you can pull in more than one source of data. Also remember that there are other ways of getting data.
visit for me. is celebrity kidnapping

http://windi19.blogspot.com/2011/05/elizabeth-smart-intervie...
Using pattern recognition to guess words based on occurrence frequency is not a new concept, but the way they applied it is awesome. I saw something similar in Defcon 17 where the researchers recorded sound from a keyboard (using lasers as microphones, but that's irrelevant), then analyzed breaks in typing to attempt to guess what the victim was typing. Fascinating stuff!
When I attended GWU, we were required to take two semesters of Ada.

The professor who wrote the Ada 95 book would give us cash as we found logical or typographical errors in the book.

Not sure if there are any other universities that push Ada so hard in intro classes. Perhaps this has changed now.

Any recent GWU compsci people care to comment?
Open source OCR programs have not yet reached the level of what is commercially available and none of this stuff is packaged together in an easy to use manner for OCRing scanned documents.
Andy serves up a ton of great advice, a must read for designers who wants to step it up, and don't just be a pixel pusher in Photoshop.
Marketing Strategy. What The Hell Does That Mean?? [iOS]
It would be foolish to ignore potential income. Remember they have people to pay, they're not one being with one attitude of patent trolling.

There is a big trend of people from Microsoft starting sentences with 'So'. You can see it on a lot of interviews on Channel9.
'There's no word in French for the verb "to need".'

Sure, but there is an expression for the idea - the article didn't just say that there isn't a word for small talk, it said that Germans don't even do small talk. The example given was that th German translation of a Paddington Bear book actually just cuts out the small talk, which does indeed seem to support the idea that you disagree with...
It's not that difficult to finance a small war like this.

You start settling for little money and use this money to fight the next target and go, from target to target.

It's little comfort for Android developers that Lodsys uses money it got from Apple to threaten them.
Check out the pizza-related search spikes on NYE
Has anyone here used GNUstep? How complete is it?
So do they make more on HTC Android phones or Nokia Windows Phones?
Also, apparently, the midwest really likes pizza: http://correlate.googlelabs.com/search?e=pizza&t=all
Does this apply to in-going mobile communication as well?
Lots of professional authors use "advanced" text editors for their stuff. And sadly, that often means old editors, because they often tend to have features that modern word processors lack (or make it easier to accept then). And of course once you get used to something...

There was a Salon article about people still using XyWrite[1]. As mentioned in the post, GRRM is one of the people[2] still using WordStar. I know that Steven Brust is using Emacs[3].

[1]: http://www.salon.com/21st/feature/1998/08/25feature.html/

[2]: http://www.sfwriter.com/wordstar.htm

[3]: from the front matter of http://dreamcafe.com/firefly.html
Does Quantum Theory Explain Consciousness?
it's just a simple exe that will compile a cs file without much fanfare.
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Zuckerberg: Privacy anxiety is fleeting
Thanks! Your outline makes what I didn't know quite clear. Maybe the question I should be asking is should I build using PHP, Perl or Python?
OK. There are still some computers with Firewire ports.
I've used a Neat scanner, which is similar to the Doxie. I can't imagine going paperless with a slow, manual scanner. Unless my life were a lot simpler than it is right now.

The ScanSnap seems to be universally praised for its speed and reliability, and a better bet if you can afford it.

I usually toss my old documents in sink filled with warm water and detergent. It turns them into slurry quickly enough, with no need for a shredder taking up space in my office.
Under what grounds does MS get patent rent from Linux?

(I'm legitimately unsure why this works, not saying it's impossible)
I think even with the existing lisp it would be interesting to keep the interpreter and rewrite a lot of the basic elisp modules. Another Emacs "distribution" would be quite interesting...
Dealing with Critical Bugs at the Beta Stage
This is the first time I've ever seen someone inject humor into technical writing. /s
Google Responds To PayPal Lawsuit: People Have The Right To Seek Better Jobs
And once you're convicted there is even more additional lying and frame-ups while in prison:

http://www.westword.com/2011-02-03/news/211-crew-rapes-extor...
That's a very interesting perspective. I hadn't thought of it that way but it makes sense in hindsight. Is telling Visual Studio to STFU being taken personally?

When tools get in the way, they should be told to STFU.