skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Andy Hertzfeld one of the original Mac hackers was once working for a company called Eazel, that worked on GNOME before it went bust. They folded up in 2001 iirc - I bought their T-shirt to help them out. But after ten years of the GNOME UI, I don't have high hopes. Check out John Gruber's post titled Ronco spray-on usability that's very critical of open source attitude towards designing UIs.

Andy was not very impressed with GNOME:
http://cycle-gap.blogspot.com/2005/10/andy-hertzfeld-on-gnom...

The problem with GNOME is the programmers who think they are UI experts. At least with a web UI, you can be minimalist (like Google) and not expose your lack of design skills. But it's very difficult to do that on the desktop.

Mark Shuttleworth spatial Nautilus experiments don't inspire any confidence in his taste. Even before Ubuntu the Ximian stuff (that ended up in Novell's distro) was pretty polished.
Hi - Not to be obtuse - But what are you after an opinion on? The site, the design, the concept, the open sourcing, the code?
Sadly I dont see Ubuntu doing that any time soon (I could write an essay on how much I dislike Ubuntu's UI!).
It's just not a "glamorous" part of the OS-making process (IMO it's the great stumbling bloack of all modern Linux distros...).

Agreed over the luxury branding of Apple though. It will be interestign to see how they fare over the next 18 months.

Although with that said the Ipod is (probably annoyingly) one of those luxuries that isn't a luxury any more - so that should keep them going.
Matt, you're right. I thought he was looking at a portfolio of individual stock, not an index where bankruptcies are supposedly included.

My bad...
> Maybe I've just been reading all of the right books.

The sad thing is, by reading books at all you're already way ahead.

The flexibility data-driven programs have is why people say that "data is code" (the flipside of Lisp's "code is data").

Also, I found working with ML (OCaml, in my case) made thinking in terms of types and overall data-structure design much clearer. It's a major strength of the language, and spending some time with it will probably give you insights usable in most other languages. ML was designed by people who knew Lisp quite well, and felt that (for some problems - in their case, theorem proving) it would be greatly improved by having a better type system.
Even if they were free, [wtf do I need a TV for](http://www.theonion.com/content/node/28694)?
Windows 7 might be a debacle that makes Vista look like the best thing since sliced bread. No-one knows yet.
You can chain !, so "true == !! true" is true.
I was hoping from the title that this would be an article about language features, instead it's more like "what Kubrick should have learned from Spielberg (in terms of box office success)"

I don't write Ruby personally; are there actual features (as opposed to ways of generating ephemeral hype) that could make Arc better?
In general, the idea of "public responsibilities" is controversial. The country was founded so that the government would do the minimal amount necessary to insure the maximum amount of freedom. Freedoms don't mean anything unless they involve the ability to fail. As an example, any American can build their own airplane and attempt to fly it (in the right areas, such as a desert). Freedom to form a startup and make a lot of money is the same as freedom to form a startup and fail.

So governmental power is used to insure freedoms. Traditionally, civic organizations are used to fulfill "public responsibilities" We have groups dedicated to local infrastructure improvement, fostering leadership skills in children, making sure people have eye care, giving healthcare to the poor -- the list goes on and on.

This is changing as more and more politicians and voters want the government to do the good things that civic organizations used to do. But we still have a long way to go to the point where we view government as the tool to handle all of our moral civic duties for us. There is a strong feeling that centralized governmental planning leads to waste, corruption, inefficiencies and the politicization of service delivery.

Education, I was told, was institutionalized after WWI as a way to make sure that soldiers had basic literacy and math skills. So this movement was a part of national defense, not some collective civic duty. (I understand education has a much more storied background. I abbreviate here)
I don't believe that Windows 7 will really improve on Vista's issues. Mainly because the real problems with Vista are either imaginary (cf. Mojave) or completely out of Microsoft's control (third party applications, drivers).

A fundamental problem with Vista was that switching operating systems is a pain and users don't like to do it. Further, Apple and Linux now have a lot of mind share among the technical trendsetters. For Apple and Linux users, it's not enough to like Apple or Linux, you have to hate Microsoft too.

When Windows 7 comes along, the press will be exactly the same as it was for Vista: Why switch when your programs already work on the old OS? Why won't it run on X or Y type ancient hardware? Etc, etc. And the Apple and Linux fans will make Windows 7 into exactly the same sort of dirty word that Vista is.

Joe Average computer user doesn't choose his next OS based on what he likes, he does it based on what he hears, and that won't be anything good.
And we're officially Reddit.
Except that's not actually true. Apple has luxury products like the iPod, sure. The current generation iPhone has features that are very obviously aimed at competing with corporate stalwart RIM.

Apple (well, Jobs) doesn't focus on marketing to corporations as a strategy to be more appealing to consumers, but I'm certain if they had to they could. Do Sun have any desktop Unix customers left? They're Apple's obvious first target.
The answer as to when some portion of the economic output of the country became ours to decide how to allocate is when a majority of taxpayers approved of it, including some fantastically wealthy folks who earned their money. Those are the breaks of living and doing business in a democratic country.
Is an iPhone 3G Unlock Imminent?
Maybe PG should have called it a timeless language.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=339601
the center is claiming the footage isn’t faked, and that it’s the best evidence yet that we are not alone in the universe.

Ok, let's think "outside of the box" for a moment : we wouldn't expect a different behavior from time travelers as well. Maybe they're just humans ;-)
Paul Krugman: The mother of all currency crises
register_globals... [shudder x 2]
You'd think after seeing this thing day after day the video taper would want to pick up a tripod?
When the question begins with "Since when", I would expect the answer to involve a date. which I believe to be 1913.

The gist of the question was when the default mode of taxation changed to be for social engineering. That answer, of course, is much more complicated.

The point of the question, of course, is that the tax code is a monstrosity and intellectual abortion and to argue that it's broken, but only in these small areas, is to engage in the same idiocy that created the monster in the first place. To understand "when" -- it's roots and history -- is to understand why bickering over details is specious.
The syntax changes are a very minor part of what "fixing" CL/Scheme means. Clojure makes some serious semantic changes.

For instance, data structures are immutable (not setq). If you need state, you have to use the software transactional memory system. These two features combine to make Clojure very safe for concurrency.

Clojure also uses sequences as it's primary object, which are more like "immutable" python generators than lisp lists.

Take a closer look, Clojure is actually quite nice.
Haven't read the author's book, but the ideas sound very much like Christopher Alexander's work in systemizing collaborative design. If you're not familiar, i highly recommend these:

http://www.google.com/books?id=Kh3T3XFUfPQC&printsec=fro...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oregon_Experiment

and finally:
http://web.archive.org/web/20070528030431/http://www.rainmag...

basically, alexander pointed out back in the 60s/70s that the simplest design problems, when approached from a conscious design perspective & properly considered, spiral out to millions of small relationships that are well beyond any one human's grasp. and so he formulates a system for organizing the people involved with the project & defining a hierarchy that enables the big problems to be settled before the small problems & for individual domain specific/'problem owners' to be established at the right place within overall the process.

that said, for all the beauty in his theories, in practice (in architecture at least) political issues often affect the design process far more significantly than he anticipated - which is why this article is interesting, as it addresses the political value of this approach first.

+1 for social hacking.
Looks respectable, although it breaks clipboard use and also doesn't work on Opera. (not quite sure why)
O'Reilly on "Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing"
I'd agree except that its basically just an iteration of Vista that builds off of the newer kernel from service pack 1.
This one is so interesting because of the amount of tape -- over 2 hours -- and the clarity of the footage.

If it's a fake, it must be faked in some way that it is easy to create frame-by-frame. That leaves out CGI, I think.

The color changes were strange as well.
Why is this dead? It's a pretty clever ad as far as advertising goes.
In much the same way tax incidence passes corporate tax on to employees and customers.
I compare public responsibility for health to public responsibility for fire control.

Fires can wreak havoc upon many beyond the fire's point of origin. It's also unprofitable to run a fire department, so given the public benefit, the public foots the bill for keeping a fire department.

Health care isn't the same in that it can be a very profitable business, but because profits are tied to consumption of goods (e.g., medicine) and services (e.g., operations), the industry has incentives to promote overconsumption of both. Meanwhile, the health insurance industry has incentives to deny coverage as much as possible in the name of profit. You might think this would cause the health care industry to operate efficiently, but health care is complex and not easily overseen, and even if the health care industry ran efficiently, the health insurance industry would still have incentives to deny coverage past the efficient rate.

But the effects of letting people who genuinely need treatment go untreated are nevertheless much like fires. Not only does it stand an excellent chance of reducing their productivity and overall employment prospects, the consequences it can have for a family can likewise be disastrous. That doesn't do them any good and it certainly doesn't do our economy any good. So while the health industries might be quite profitable, the net benefit to society is considerably less than if the profit incentives were properly aligned to maximize health instead of consumption and lack of coverage.

But, you know, some folks just have to be sacrificed on the altar of the completely free market, in the name of their own good.
Yeah. And I think this is the source of a lot of the Mac/Linux bickering that I've seen on that site. A lot of Mac users really do like the idea of open source. It's just that as things stand right now, no one Linux distro comes even close to having the level of polish that OS X does. They're on two separate playing fields. And usually some straw man, like Compiz, gets dangled as "proof" that Ubuntu is graphically superior to the Mac, when a part of OS X is that the graphical flourishes tend to actually aid usability. Think Exposé - any one of the various things Exposé does - or the new Stacks, or even the genie minimalism. And while I'm certain that there are patches for Ubuntu that do each of these things, they aren't as well-incorporated into the system and that's the point of OS X. They're built into the core so developers can rely on them and build plugins that tie into the various features.

And even then, that's ignoring all of the small details, like the completely polished beauty of the current window system, or the drag-file-icon-in-window-to-move, or the ability for programmers to change their Dock icon's image to represent information. There's just too much that any distro right now would have to do to catch up, and it frustrates me - and, I'd guess, other Mac users - that rather than acknowledge this ridiculous gap and figure out how to surpass it, Linux users raise stupid arguments and claim that every last Mac user uses their computer because of marketing hype. It's getting the Linux distros I've seen and participated in the community of - Ubuntu and Kubuntu, so maybe I've missed something - nowhere.
VAT on lists is 10%.
Viddler and others have done this for years.
I once wrote "Dad's house" in there and this was enough to get me searched. I didn't know the address off the top of my head. What I've found even funnier there is that I have US citizenship and still have to fill that out -- like, what are they going to do, not let me back in if I don't know where I'm staying?
I think this requires one "Ubuntu UI czar" who has some ability to enforce uniformity. Otherwise you get tons of nice looking parts of the system that don't abide by the same intuitive rules so they don't lead to a nice combination.

Honestly, cloning the Apple interface as much as possible wouldn't be such a bad strategy.
They're not like us. So, you know we should be scared of and hate them.

"Terrorists could theoretically use ..."

What couldn't terrorists theoretically use? The next successful attack will use things they didn't think of. It's not like we had thought of crashing planes into skyscrapers. Oh wait, we did.

This sort of "intel" is an utter waste. The signal to noise ratio sucks so bad it just gets ignored. Military and our leaders need actual information on what the opposition is doing, not theoretics.

This is just security theater meant for internal military consumption.
I killed it because it was about politics. I have to admit I loved it though.
Exploiting Android (exploit found in G1's browser)
Mainly because the real problems with Vista are either imaginary (cf. Mojave)

This is a bullshit argument, and I'd really love people to stop using it.

Mojave showed that people using Vista for short amounts of time in factory-approve conditions will think that it's "pretty neat." But Vista's always had the "neat" factor about it. Never as much as OS X, but then, not many people get a computer based on "neat" factor, despite what fanboys on both sides say about each other's products.

Where Vista sours is when you use it for a while and notice the little things. Of course, the security windows - even though you can disable them, that's the iconic one for Vista. I've had that security window crash my old computer, too: if your computer is running a lot of stuff, that window sometimes tips the entire thing over.

The little things bottle up. They build up and tip out. I just came across a post yesterday on Tumblr that mentioned one: I'd never actively thought about this feature, I wouldn't have ever thought to diss Vista for it after I got my Mac, but remembering it, it was awful in a small way.

http://tumblelog.marco.org/56149922

And when you've only used Windows, stuff like this is acceptable. It's commonplace. There is no alternative. But when you use any other OS, you realize that a lot of things are done much better. Linux has its own problems, namely drivers, but that was enough to make me hate Windows in no time at all. OS X is even worse for that, because it's better on an order of magnitude. And once a bunch of people started using OS X, and Apple started its campaign actively against Vista, people got very curious, and a lot of people starting noticing the things about Vista that pissed them off.
But one of the core constructs of a language is "how libraries work".

In practice Arc could have plenty of libraries if Arc had a process for accepting contributions from the community. Right now Arc is technically open source, but it does not work like most open source projects in the sense that there is no way to contribute yourself. Which is okay, but encouraging a community of programmers to use it and then not letting the excited ones help in any way is kind of a tease.
The quality of the tape is unremarkable. At no point in time was the camera focused on the craft so every frame is slightly blurry at best

2 hours of footage is a lot to fake although I did not see a moving craft once, only stationary objects. That substantially reduces the difficulty of producing this video.
Also see:

http://news.ycombinator.net/item?id=181164
I am just reluctant to say that engineers at fb are not first-rate. Are we saying that they are second rate?

That's exactly the problem that I had with my comment. They're only not first-rate if you expect every engineer to be literally genius. That's too much to expect for any one company. So first-rate is as close to accurate a description as you could get.

I've always found it odd that not many hackers that I've met really get into discussing video game mechanics: either hardware or software. It's odd because video games are what got me into programming software, and the only time I've ever felt like making hardware it was designing imaginary game systems.
Allow me to gloat a little:

Just a couple of days ago, I gave a ten minute presentation on computational complexity as part of a high school English assignment (sic) to my classmates who mostly had hardly any programming experience at all. I based it on Knuth's paper on The Complexity of Songs: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/arvindn/misc/knuth_song_compl...

My classmates told me this was the best presentation they ever attended, but that's possibly because I used many pointless gimmicks such as walking around the entire room tearing a dictionary in half to explain a binary search (giving away the halves as souvenirs), making self-deprecating remarks on how boring it is and showing a picture of a friend sleeping, starting to sing like a crack addict, etc., etc..

However, whenever I asked questions, I did get immediate answers such as "this is a logarithmic relationship." So I guess I succeeded in explaining the topic.

I need to submit a writeup on the talk, and I guess it will take me a few minutes to finish typing it out. I'm not sure how many of you will want to read an explanation of big O notation written by a high school student who can't even solve the simplest of recurrence relations, but I could upload my slides and talk transcription here if you want me to...

EDIT: Ok, here it is. I am aware of the numerous blatant technical errors I have made, so please be nice :). I've also shamelessly stolen stuff from 4 or 5 places, but all those were meant for people familiar with the subject matter.

Transcription: http://www.scribd.com/doc/7539835/The-Complexity-of-Songs

Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/guestacae495/the-complexity-of-son...
Healthcare falls under "life".

Oh and quit talking for all Americans.
Very cool, I was actually working on a start-up that suggested available domain names, and the Markov-Chain was just one of the ways I did this.

I'd also suggest looking into Natural Language Processing, (Great Python toolkit - http://nltk.sourceforge.net/index.php/Main_Page). Between NLTK, Markov and affixes you have enough reading to keep you busy for quite a while.

Also, consider looking into using Yahoo BOSS search results for synonyms through word association. Things like table, desk, wood, etc... are extremely useful for generating domain names--this is pretty simple doing some basic natural language processing on search results and yields awesome results.

Finally, there's a fantastic business model behind this. Other than the obvious domain registration affiliates--keeping a database of all available domain names and then selling it to people who do this for a living (ie. domain squatters). This type of information is very valuable to them.

Unfortunately I had to give up on this idea because life gets in the way (and will for at least the next 2 years) but it looks like you've got a great start.
I'm more interested in microblogging as a battlefield awareness tool. Anyone know if someone's working on it?
The original idea that the Shuttle would be reusable and therefore cheap has not really succeeded.
Upload them for sure!

> "if you want me to..."
Those who want to read it will, those who don't wont. There's no shame in posting a high-school report, and you don't need to ask permission, IMO :)

As an aside: I did some work on image compression in high school, and I only wish I had had access to a group like this then, to get some quality review. Now I sound old..
I believe they resell some of the services. In our case, they had to set us up with a different merchant because we are a payment aggregator (we take payments on behalf of our customers and charge a transaction fee). I believe our merchant fees are $0.20 + 2.34% per transaction. That's still lower than PayPal unless you're doing over $10K a month. I believe they charge a monthly fee for the gateway/online services too (I don't know what it is because my biz partner handles that stuff).

All in all, I would choose this over PayPal regardless of the fees. The user experience is far superior.
Scientists build world’s smallest storage device
Is there some organization of open source UI/design folks? It seems that this could also be done by some kind of approval/standards organization.

For example, can I submit my YetAnotherChatClient app to some UI approval group (say Works Well for All) and get a stamp that says I conform to their standard of goodness?
Sorry, but I run Linux, Windows, and OS X. Vista isn't worse than XP in any meaningful way (better in a few), and I have never run into any problems using it. OS X is pretty, but there is nothing about it that makes me go "wow!" And Linux is for people that know way too much about computers (like me, unfortunately) and who don't value their time enough (again me, apparently).

I think that Apple can do really wonderful things -- my iPhone is miles ahead of any Windows Mobile phone I've ever owned. On the other hand, the Zune software simply destroys iTunes in usability and prettiness -- the Zune itself is a very nice device.

The link that you referred to talks about Windows XP (2004 should have been a clue) and isn't quite accurate anyway. I think that Tumblr may want to concentrate on reading dialog boxes a little more carefully.
Yes, I think you might be right.
Andrew, I believe the short-selling "ban" was actually only on a bunch of financial firms. You could still have shorted the indices.
Choose some other prefix then as long as we can use Paamayim Nekudotayim for namespaces :)
This market cap stuff is not really meaningful when looked at this way. Microsoft pays a dividend if it didn't all that cash would stay on its books and would have to result in an increase in its market cap. If you want to make a proper comparison (of this dubious stat) you should subtract the cash of each company from the market cap and then compare. Microsoft has returned more money to its shareholders than Apple is worth.
Understandable, but I don't want to deprive you of your portrait keyboard, I just want the option to use landscape. More choice > less choice.
It is working MUCH faster, great work.
PHP 15: PHP 6 finally available in most shared-hosting environments; 95% of developers first read of "\" abortion (errr, awesome new feature)