skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was a sys-ops admin for a 30-person department in a bank back in 1994-1995. We had DOS 6.0 workstations as well as Win 3.1/3.11 desktops and used WordPerfect 5.0 (F5 Reveal Codes, I felt so powerful!) among other brands (Quattro Pro, Harvard Graphics, Paradox.)

When Win95 came on the scene, we were hesitant at first -- let others figure out the kinks -- but we were rolling out new desktops within 6 months. We had also been waiting for a Windows version of WordPerfect. The DOS version was ok, but it was awkward running it in Windows.

So we waited. And waited. And waited some more. Finally, after I don't know how long, we got our hands on WordPerfect 6.0 for Windows. It royally sucked. The WP folks had spent approximately zero time imagining their product in a Windows environment -- GUI, mouse click, that kind of thing -- and instead just pushed their F-commands into a menu system. It didn't flow at all, and our staff complained mightily.

So, we took a look at MS Office (I think it was version 4.x or something around then.) I didn't like MS Office, and knew we would have re-training issues (especially going from Quattro Pro to Excel). Nonetheless, we decided to give it a try.

Staff loved it. Not jumping-up-and-down loved it, just that it let them do their job quite easily. The analysts in our department raved over Excel, however. And personally, I could rid myself of Paradox, which seemed to dislike me more than others.

Summary: it's a small sample size, but from where I stood WordPerfect basically blew it. I can't speak to the MS/WP relationship, but I can without a doubt say that WP didn't put any thought into their product. Why they released their Windows version, I'll never know.

Was MS a tough competitor? Of course. Did they make it difficult on WP to provide their version on Windows? Maybe. But being completely unimaginative about the application and workflow? That's nobody but WordPerfect's fault.
Better, could you take higher-paying freelance work from Germany or the UK but continue to live in relatively lower-cost Portugal?

Or, even better, take even higher paying freelance work from the US. With modern banking systems offering easy direct deposit between most western countries, it's reasonably easy. The employer just might need you to file a W-8 so they don't need to withhold taxes in the US.
Don't sign me up for a newsletter just because I logged in through Google.
The problem is not the poor state of the reading experience -- that's the symptom -- the problem is the per-page-view model of the online advertising, which breaks an article into pages, sharing buttons in your face... etc.

A better paradigm has to come.
It's funny, I recently published an HTML5 book, and can say that in the book itself this problem is largely caused by the publisher and their space contraints. So much copy text and code samples get cut just to "make it fit" in pages divisible by 16. Pain.

However code examples that appear on the book's site obviously have no such constraint, and as such may just be formatted as per the author's personal taste. Either way, no one is happy :)

Speaking of the book itself, it's not bad. Though I thought they glossed over the Canvas too quickly, and could have spent more time on helper libraries, like jQuery, etc.
Code-share source-censoring
List of products that Google has discontinued
Malls track shopper cell phones on Black Friday. To opt out? Turn off your phone
China Beats U.S. In Q3, Becomes Largest Smartphone Market By Volume
Zune Music Pass Sucks
I'm no expert in webdev, but while CSS comments may be useful for maintenance and for new team members, they are also a waste of bandwidth. I'm honestly curious, what HN webdevs do with comments in CSS - do you use them, or not, or maybe have some deployment scripts that strip comments off?
Microsoft looking to buy Yahoo again
As far as we know, they also aggregate news on commodities, but we analyse and aggregate the news by commodity and by identifying price movement information. We also provide a large number of sources, bringing in news from many different providers, let them be new sites, blogs, research papers, etc.
This book has been out since 2010. They beat mine by a few months.
Interesting. But I wonder why I'd use this instead of EaselJS: http://easeljs.com/.
What I see on Windows 7 (64-bit), Chrome 15:

http://tristanperry.com/pics/BullBearScreen.jpg

So it's not too bad, but some parts (e.g. the 'Trading assistant for commodity traders' and the footer text) looks aliased.
Mothereff.in
It depends entirely on the publisher.

For my book, 80 characters was the line max. It was difficult for a few JavaScript things, but it just meant breaking one-liners apart into two liners, or breaking long script includes appropriately.
Khan Academy Opens Its Doors - Carefully
Poisoned candy, though still candid:

Yours is an interesting quality comment that I can read for free in a site without advertisement. The same goes for the rest of my news readings online. The links lead me to other pages that Privoxy makes bearable.

I read (paid) books, soon eBooks, for anything but news. I guess the question is what kind of content people consume.
Chris Dixon Talks eBay’s Purchase of Hunch
It's a little more nuanced than that. The simplicity enabled many more people to express themselves in contexts other than spreadsheets. The Macintosh, for example, ushered in the age of desktop publishing, which was a boon to writers and academics.

Practically speaking, I don't see that as having changed in Apple. They still see the gateway to creativity and self expression being ease of use, as opposed to some other values such as hardware compatibility or UI customizability.
I believe they use gitolite to do this. (https://github.com/sitaramc/gitolite)
Is there a link to a pdf version or a single page version?
Ideally, you would use a tool like less or sass to generate your css (which we don't), so your comments would be in the underlying file but not in the css given to the user.
Kuler
Might be old news, but I just found this and it's become my new source for good color schemes.
Please just use a standard login.
The Difference Between a Pivot and Reboot [video]
Nokia X2-05 Price in India, Nokia X2-05 Music Phone Features & Specifications
Nokia X2-05 is a new Music phone which comes with an audio output of 106phons. Nokia X2-05 is a low price phone coming very soon to Indan stores. It runs on Symbian S40 OS and features 2.2" inch QVGA Display, VGA Camera, FM Radio with recording, Internal memory, Expandable memory upto 32GB, Bluetooth, Java, USB and many more. It also comes pre-installed with new Nokia browser, Nokia stores and social networking apps like Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Hotmail and it is powered by a BL-5CB 800 mAh Li-Ion battery.
> Now matter how hard it is to shop for someone

I'm unsure of what it means to "shop for someone" but I'm pretty sure you meant "No matter" instead of "Now matter"...?
I just installed xmonad on 11.10 last week. It was very straightforward---didn't even need a tutorial. It's just "sudo apt-get install xmonad". The hard part was trying to customize xmonad without knowing Haskell.
"very proprietary" does not usually imply "very strong".
Distinguishing essentials from non-essentials is anything but simple.
Looks great!

A nitpick - when I log in via Facebook, my photo gets resized to a square, which looks weird (proportions get distorted).
I'm pretty sure other websites tended to maintain proper aspect ratio and just crop a scaled down image to fit into a square.
> The worst side effect of the current scoring system, is that a spammer could easily answer only the questions with obvious answers (basic facts and display of non-bigotry) and get a decently high match percentage with a lot of people.

That is exactly what I did which led to my meeting my (now long-term) girlfriend. I was receiving about 5 profile views/week with 500 questions answered. I scrapped them all, answered 20 or 30 questions with non-offensive answers, and skyrocketed to 60-100 profile views/week.
Our project focuses on advanced and experienced computer users. In contrast with the usual proprietary software world or many mainstream open source projects that focus more on average and non-technical end users, we think that experienced users are mostly ignored. - from Suck Less Philosophy at http://suckless.org/manifest/.

I don't feel this translates to "no noobs" as much as it means "don't stop with the noobs." I'm pretty sure inexperienced users are welcome, but there's no interest in adding hand-holding features that conflict with the philosophy of "keeping things simple, minimal and usable." I use dwm & dmenu all the time, and have developed a real appreciation for the Suck Less approach (but I'm not a newbie, so I guess I'm safely in their target audience).
http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Xmonad/Screenshots
8-bit color cycling on canvas
Steroids For Web Design
Cool...other than the parts that need click or keyboard input, all the demos seem to work, more or less, on my iPhone 4S (Canvas Creatures is pretty sluggish, though) and Kindle Fire (both Canvas Creatures and Snake are sluggish there, and Canvas Creatures looks a little weird, like the maybe the alpha channel isn't quite working. This may be a limitation of the Kindle display or browser; I haven't had it long enough to judge).

How about adding support for touch events and gestures? :-)
Startup Healthcare searching for dynamic RoR developer 
Start up healthcare giving the uninsured and underinsured populations in the Portland-area direct access to physicians and other health care professionals. The Sprig Health online marketplace offers individuals the ability to schedule and pay for appointments in full before the services are rendered.<p>Individuals who use the site can search by treatment or browse by symptoms to easily find the care that they need. Once individuals find the service they are looking for, they select an appointment time, accept the published price and make a secure payment on the website prior to their appointment.<p>Today we offer appointments with Oregon providers for the following services:<p>Urgent care, Chiropractic, Naturopathic, Dermatology, Primary care, Laboratory tests,
Massage therapy, Mental health services.<p>We're in search of a Design savvy Developer to support development and operations for our main application and web sites. Ideal candidate would be able to participate in an Agile team using an Iterative Methodology such as Scrum. Ideal candidate would be able to contribute to and work with wireframes, sketches, data models working as a team to realize those designs using Ruby on Rails primarily. Familiarity with other frameworks such as Django is a plus. Ideal candidate should be fluent in a Unix based development environment (Mac OSX preferred) as well as Linux. Ideal candidate will be able to integrate well with an already productive team and be comfortable providing new ideas to the team.<p>ESSENTIAL FUNCTIONS:<p>- Develops efficient and maintainable program code.
- Develops efficient and effective program and system solutions in solving complex business problems.
- Continuously seeks to improve job skills. Actively participates in the company's learning environment. Works on compensating for personal limits in both technical and professional soft skills.
- Meets established deadlines while maintaining a high level of quality. Negotiates changes to delivery dates.
- Develops complex programs and systems in support of business processes and objectives.
- Prepares and/or directs the creation of system test plans, test criteria, and test data.
- Develops innovative solutions to problems.
- Understands and participates in deliverables required
- Determines system design and prepares work estimates for development or changes for multiple work efforts.
- Takes initiative and seeks out work.
- Prepares and/or directs the creation of program, system, operational and User documentation.
- Performs and/or directs testing and documents the results.-
- Contributes to the achievement of our Corporate Affirmative Action goals and objectives.
- Responsible for quality and continuous improvement within the job scope. Contributes to and supports the company's quality initiatives.
- customers and IT partners.<p>CONTACT MARISA GORMAN @ MGORMAN@KFORCE.COM FOR MORE DETAILS!
Very good explanation from an expert in the field:

http://mattleifer.info/2011/11/20/can-the-quantum-state-be-i...
I'm actually surprised to find out the USPTO think it's within its mission to do such things.
Part of a series of 10 short talks on different aspects of running a small business - http://www.docstoc.com/profile/thomas-grasty.
Oops good catch - thanks!
I only wish they could put a few more people working on Go, but not too many, wouldn't want to dilute the amazing talent of the current team :)
The Definitive Post On Why SOPA And Protect IP Are Bad, Bad Ideas
Really? I found descriptions of Linear and Logistical Regression, as well as the descriptions of Support Vector Machines to both explain very well why they work. The Neural Networks description could have been a bit more thorough, but I still understand them much better now than I did before.
Is Groupon really a tech company?
Interesting maths analysis. I'd certainly noticed that their ability to reliably rank inside a window of say, 80% and 95% was rather low, along with the ability to filter out deal-breakers. Frankly that remained a manual process, no matter how much data people had supplied, I never could do that reliably from the numbers alone. As a liberal Christian, I end up with quite a bit of filtering of filtering out of people with very great differences in either religion or politics which the algorithms simply didn't pick up.

So anyway, some tweaking done. Let's see if it has any visible effect...
Timeless Hospitality Journey from Taj Coromandel to Taj at China
I agree with most of the post. I use emacs, not because I think there is something fundamentally wrong with vim, but because emacs is a much better fit to how I think. I actually tried to use vim (it might have been elvis, I don't remmeber which distro I was using at the time) in the late 1990s. I used it exclusively for two weeks, learned all the common commands, but then went back to emacs. I just could not learn to think in command/append modes. I'd regularly, as in almost every other time I went into command mode, forget to go back into append or insert mode and lose whatever I typed before I either noticed or typed "a" or "i".
An object oriented moment
I'd say learn JavaScript not just jQuery.
Could this mean there is still hope for Google Code Search? I hope so!
But the new YouTube ads that play before video are unexpected. And, for me, quite often a back button. After 6 seconds of watching the ad I usually don't care about the video anymore :/ (call it short attention span).
Specially for a company that recently fights competition with frivolous copyright lawsuits instead of innovation...

But then, somebody once said: institutions fight to maintain the problems they were created to address.
Perhaps "Creating videos as a group."

I agree there is a tradeoff between too many words and too few. I'd suggest that you can improve it by just making the landing page longer, ie - put more information in the scrollable area.
Is your comment meant to be a complaint or a compliment?
I find this on so many startup websites these days.

I think it's a reality distortion field ;)
Amazon Puts Your $1000 Kindle Library 'On Hold,' Apologizes, Shrugs
> why not use the 'foreach' or iterator paradigm?

I totally agree, and I do use when it's available in a given lang I'm working in/it's not overly cumbersome (some implementations miss the point).
Well, duh. They also seem to indicate (in the linked blog post) that they have no interest in the language's syntax evolving (including destructuring assignment or `let` block-scoped bindings)
"Stamped" is Fatally Flawed
If electricity is paid through my taxes, why am I paying $300-$500/month to DTE?
Gates said "viable" and for the users Windows was targeting, Linux was not "viable".
Doesn't work in some countries.
Kicksend (YC S11) is hiring.
I would suggest having an example group video on the homepage, maybe to start the screencast you already have?
Minor point, but if you are using factual questions to filter out stupid people, asking for the "right" number of continents is probably not ideal. You (and I) might disagree with someone counting Eurasia (or North and South America) as a single continent, but it is not really an indicator of stupidity in the way that believing in astrology or thinking the earth is larger than the sun are.

According to the wikipedia article on continents, different models are taught in different countries, so you probably end up selecting for a different attribute than you thought.
In my experience, it is usually an environmental assumption that is mismanaged rather than the "source code" itself being broken.

Whether that is failure to check for a dependency, failure to document a dependency or failure to clearly specify which specific version of a dependency is required. And the pain of autotools is a completely separate chapter in describing how "my" environment can differ from "theirs."

All of that just goes to show that state management is _the_ hardest part of software.
This was posted on LessWrong yesterday, http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/8j1/how_to_prove_anythi... , short, but interesting, discussion.
So, they want to buy Yahoo just because they can't hire sales people?

yeah, makes a lot of sense.
As a person with very strong religious views I've found the matching algorithm to be great at filtering out those with incompatible views. I think matching based on ethical, political, and religious views is the matching system's strength. The true weakness of the algorithm is that it matches poorly for personality. Two people can have very similar beliefs but be a terrible match in terms of personality. I would prefer an entirely separate score for that aspect.
Here's a dynamic graph that shows GRPN's price since IPO:
https://www.google.com/finance?client=ob&q=NASDAQ:GRPN
Dell’s misleading graphics card buying advice
Mobile apps should appeal to 7 deadly sins
The tax code already requires that income tax earned in the U.S. be taxed in the U.S. My father's job essentially involves making up the numbers. Why do I say make up numbers? Often, corporations are multinational. Some part of the corporation makes a sale, but parts in two countries did the work. The rule is that the sale is allocated between the two parts as if they were two companies, and each part pays where it's located. But how much would the part that made the sale pay the other part if they really were two companies? Who knows? So they hire people to make up convincing numbers; they find other transactions between companies that actually are separate to compare to. As you might imagine, this leaves tons of wiggle room.

In short, in this case, the reasonable thing is actually the law, but it gives companies plenty of room to take advantage.
Well, then just Tax Wealth (and set cap gains rates to 0% while you're at it).

If the limos and G5 jet that your company bought were inefficient assets, then as an owner of the company you would still have to pay for them but your return on investment would be decreased, penalizing you for this poor allocation of resources.
You did read all of the letters from King Crimson and the Eagles who try every day to get their music taken down from Grooveshark and cannot, right?

Now who's the bully?
That's not yet known. It's not even known if that sequence contains infinitely many primes or not.
Here's one example of a (trivially) hackable thing flying above our heads:

http://www.strategypage.com/dls/articles/U.S.-Navy-Satellite...
Signal of Destroyed Dark Matter Seen in Space Telescope’s Data
Its a database-query issue, always has been. HTTP is a terrible database query pipe. Too granular an API results in scores of HTTP requests, adding latency and bothering the app writer with details.

Now EBay is proposing stored-procedures - surprise!
There is a Reddit group to discuss these classes:

http://www.reddit.com/r/OnlineEducation
Which is the exact basic use case for almost all modern source control systems. Git doesn't do anything new or unique for that use case.
>The sudden explosion in shorting caused by this drop in cost to borrow is probably seen as a negative signal and making some investors nervous, causing the stock to drop as they sell it off.

I'm still trying to learn how investing and markets work, but isn't this stock manipulation? I mean, if I get a bunch of people to agree to short this stock, and others observe this happening, then the short will come through by virtue of a fall in share price because people saw that I was shorting.

I'm still trying to wrap my head around how markets work, when making observations on the system necessarily changes the system, rendering your original observation invalid.
I have a question.

Since the coupon magic/mania started (everybody and their dog is doing a coupon site). Has there appeared a site/service that disrupts this whole model?

What I mean is - the Service Providers are getting really a shitty value out of GRPN other daily deal sites. Initially GRPN needed loads of cash to get their sales people on the streets and logistics behind this were pretty massive.

But today, I see this market as completely commoditized. Everybody and his dog knows of the daily deal sites. Lately I haven't really met anybody who is doing some kind of services who doesn't know of daily deal sites (and I'm from Slovenia).

So here is my question - is there a sort of service that would take a one time fee/subscription for service providers and let them run their own daily deals.

This way you cut out the middleman and the (expensive) sales people and this would even offer sufficient value to the service providers.
It is a nice ideal, but I highly doubt that is the fear of Grooveshark. If that was the fear, they would have sued Myspace out of existence back in its heyday (which they probably could have, tons of pirated content was there). But they embraced it. A quick perusal of http://grooveshark.com/#/explore/popular shows that Universal Music Group artists are by far the most played, and UMG doesn't see a cent of that. I think that is the fear, a well justified one even it is trying to hold onto a dying business. Occam's Razor and all.
"Not all that fair I'd say."

If you have a more expensive house, you are paying a much higher tax rate and not actually getting much more out of the money you are putting into the system.

If their kids are in private schools, they are also paying double or triple what the average person is paying, yet not actually using it.

There are also many taxes wealthy people pay for but never actually use.

so it's fair. Also, whatever happened to "paying your fair share"? This phrase seems to be going around a lot, yet it only seems to involve people at a certain income level.

I just wish people would be a little more honest.
I'm still sad that ion3 is getting so little love these days.

It's easily the most advanced of the tiling wm crop, and by a long shot. Just some bullets:

- Floating/tiled can co-exist on same workspace (just attach/detach as needed), can also trivially set filters to have e.g. all dialogs and "all gimp-windows" float automatically.

- The tabbed frames metaphor is infinitely superior to the "one window per frame" metaphor that everyone else is stuck with.

- All configuration and extension is lua. It's an absolute joy to work with.

- Mouse works as expected. Just drag frames to resize the grid, drag titlebars to move windows into other frames, etc.

Up to this day I don't understand how people put up with the obscure limitations of the other tiling wm's (foremost: the one window per frame constraint, forced set of layouts that never work quite right, etc. etc.)...
>What we need much more of is what I call "memory processability", which roughly means "how many times per second can you process the whole memory"

I might be misinterpreting, but I think the phrase you're looking for is "memory bandwidth".