skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was using Mint until last year until I switched back to Ubuntu again last december, for 11,10. I was not really looking forward to that since I had heard so many things about Unity being a horrible choice and so on. I was pleasantly surprised that it was far from being the broken interface many people were screaming about. It may not be perfect (I still prefer KDE for several reasons) but it is, nevertheless, functional and it does the job.

Mainsteam users who can't adapt to those kind of changes are not going to use Ubuntu anyway. Windows is already very good at keeping its interface consistent from one generation to another.

I see no reason to hate Ubuntu for their choices - I don't think they are after market leadership, they want to make a place for themselves, and differenciation is key to achieve that. And at heart, Unbuntu still retains a number of qualities like stability and relatively good compatibility across a large range of hardware.
The point of it is to get you to keep clicking next.
I think you are mistaken in suggesting that my main argument is that of human rights. That is because everyone agrees that human rights should be upheld, thus there is no argument to make.

You make some very good points though. If Apple is to charge just above the cost, thus making "enough" profit, whatever that may be, then you say Apple would beat all competition. You say that is so because they are very efficient. Perhaps, but I think it is more likely that they would beat everyone because of their inventions. Iphone, Ipad. Efficiency therefore has little to do with it. Just as Bill Gates became a billionaire despite of any efficiency. They invented something. Then they have gone on to exploit such invention by ripping people off through charging them 30% more than the product is actually worth. Not 10, not 20, but 30. That is greedy and the consequences are concentration of wealth in the hands of the few for their benefit alone.

As for the solution, government already decides how to distribute wealth through taxes. I think it should go further. Perhaps there should be a law that no man can be paid in total above, say, 1 million per year. Nor can any company make more than 10 billion in profit. Both, of course, increasing by the base inflation point. With an individual is easier, you just make it illegal. With a company is more difficult. Maybe the profit above the 10 billion can be a rebate to those that purchased their product or service.

The very existence of the law would probably incentive companies to treat their employees and their customers better rather than focusing on a Darwinian jungle of eating everyone at any expense and ripping off everyone as much as you can get away with.
That seems like a huge stretch. Lisp has nothing to do with that paper, and minimizing state and complexity could hardly be more obvious design concerns. The concurrency aspect I can't comment on, but it's not a major theme there either.

Perhaps I just don't get it, but I'm a little miffed at having tried several times to absorb the gems of wisdom in that paper and come up with nothing that isn't obvious (even the idea of functional programming over relational data is obvious) and that couldn't have been said less pretentiously in easily a tenth of the space - ironically, for a paper about minimizing complexity.
There are only 7 billion people on Earth. Apple is essentially making $0.14 in profit per human, per week.

Of course, it's a much smaller number of very rich humans, probably less than 1 billion, actually buying their products.

There is a limit to how long this can continue, before every person on earth, who is so inclined and can afford it, has 1+ of every Apple product that they could ever want.

Assuming $300 per user every 2 years - with 50% margin and 1B users - they can only grow income another 44% before the growth (in real terms) is totally done.

So introduce new products? Fine, but almost every possible HW function is already in the iPhone4, and they are rapidly running out of things that current technology will enable them to improve. How many people are going to drop another $600 to get 128GB instead of 64GB? Or 1920x1080 on a 3 inch screen?

Seems like it'll be time to short pretty soon.
> There's no rational reason for a stock's value to go up just because the company does well if it doesn't mean the company will pay out dividends.

But the company is worth more (in real terms, not just market cap) and stock is partial ownership, so there is a reason. Just look at it in terms of assets - Apple has a bunch of stores and other stuff they didn't own 10 years ago. That stuff has value, the stock represents a portion of that value.

You are right that a huge part of this is pretty irrational, though. Hell, look what happened when Steve Jobs was rumored to have had a heart attack.
I can see NimbleBits being miffed a bit, but they have not released an update in a very long time. I tweeted @eeen and he said there is no update anytime soon.

My wife cannot play Tiny Tower anymore, she has every floor possible (153), 12 vacant floors (waiting for more floor types to build), 30 million coins and 250 bux.

Is this what an "iPhone Game Of The Year" acts like?

It seems to me that Tiny Tower was a great fad.
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By that logic there is only one first person shooter.
Nimblebit team is 3 people, Zynga is 2,800 strong. There's a disadvantage that makes the ripoff harder to fight.

Plus, Zynga sues when they think they get copied (http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/16/war-zynga-sues-the-hell-out...). There's a good chance that Nimblebit won't have enough money to fight back.
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According to this article 65% of bills are written by lobbyists:
http://www.mercurynews.com/politics-government/ci_15452125
I've spent over $20,000 of my own money and have yet to launched officially. I'm able to afford it because of a lifestyle business I set up years ago (that has closed down since).
How do you feel about non-social things in your search results, like maps or videos? If pictures are a big deal in SEO, it seems like everyone would be communicating via video. Ultimately, I think relevancy is what "converts" people.

Also, I don't get the big push on "SEO". Just buy an ad and now you're above all the organic results anyway.
It is a good question. When the iPhone 4S launched and started to sell really well I questioned the same thing, maybe the sales were related to the death of Steve Jobs and I was downvoted. I really don't understand the urge of some people to go against it, it is a quite common feeling.

I have a Macbook but I really like Android phones and I had a strong desire to buy an iPhone after Jobs death. I noticed the same feeling with a lot of people around me.
I don't know why, but this had me laughing uncontrollably:

1983 - Bjarne Stroustrup bolts everything he's ever heard of onto C to create C++.
In my opinion, most developers can produce a good, or even great, design in acceptable time if they just wish so, while the reverse doesn't apply.

For a developer to come up with a good design, it takes:
(a) common-sense,
(b) compatible-to-mainstream perception of what is ugly, and
(c) willingness to look around for ideas and play with things they might consider boring.

I have yet to encounter a decent developer that manages to do without (a) -hm, ok maybe I know one java developer, but he's a special case!- (b) seems about equally common and (c) is only a matter of motivation.

On the other hand, most designers I have met appear unable to try grasping and utilizing the simplest of programming concepts. I don't know if their brain is wired differently or if they despise or fear that stuff so much that their subconscious blocks anything related, but, in any way, they seem much less capable in producing any code in any amount of time, than most developers in producing a pretty and usable design in a reasonable amount of time.

That's just my simple observation, based on the 15-20 people of both professions that I know well enough.

So, for projects that want just a good design (i.e. at the level of twitter's) and not an WOW-super-original design, I think that the work is fundamentally simpler than coding, doesn't need much expertise and most developers can do it pretty well if they want. For those projects at least, which is the majority, I don't see how designers are, or should be, more valuable than coders.

For more specialized projects, like a desktop environment, usability experts and designers might be a requirement, but still, I wouldn't go as far as to consider them more valuable.
I'm surprised the makers of Zelda haven't sued Bethesda for Skyrim.
As the web gets smarter, your privacy will continue to decrease over time
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Here's another thing that impresses me.

Last quarter DID NOT include sales of the iPhone 4S in China.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405297020462420457718...
Modern FPS games have detailed stories, considerable original acting and dialog (motion and voice capture), and incredibly detailed artwork. So your analogy doesn't really hold.
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Would be cool if you added pushState or /#/ history.
You can for example use history.js: https://github.com/balupton/history.js
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Bad advice. To-Do lists can work well, if you have the right tools and use them effectively.

I know the cool kids love to criticize IBM Lotus Notes but it has several great features for managing To-Dos.

* To-Do documents can be created with priorities and deadlines (including repeating).

* To-Dos can be assigned to yourself or others.

* To-Dos can optionally display on your calendar, and if you like it will show all overdue To-Dos on the current day.

* Any e-mail can be easily converted into a mini To-Do with a follow-up date and comment.
Google to track users across its sites, whether they like it or not
> If you're not prepared to take that risk, you should probably avoid committing the crimes in the first place, no?

That presumes you have the capacity to know what is and what is not legal. In the US, no human being is capable of that. On top of thousands and thousands of federal statutes, you also have state, county, and local statutes to worry about.

If the prosecutor comes up empty and you piss him off by playing games, guess what? He'll go on a fishing expedition and he will find something because, quite simply, it's impossible to run a business for any period of time without breaking some regulation or statute somewhere out there.

There's a reason 90% of criminal cases end in plea bargain. It's not because the people pleading are guilty nor because they are dumb.

Look. Don't do things to piss off cops or prosecutors. Be cordial, be kind, be helpful. They deal with assholes all day, it's easy to forget the nice guy. Also, hire a lawyer who used to be a prosecutor and who is on very good terms with the prosecutor and the local judges. The evidence isn't going to matter. There's a 90% chance you won't even get to trial. Focus on ending things cordially and quickly.
If your ISP offers you email service and you take advantage of it, you aren't asking it to just be a big dumb pipe.

ISPs do nothing of the sort when you get your email through third-party providers like gmail, which people obviously do not want to just be a big dumb pipe, since the entire purpose of using gmail is as a email service.

Put another way: The person you're replying to was using the term "ISP" loosely, and you're using it very narrowly. There was a time when your ISP was almost always your email provider, and third-party services and self-hosting were extremely rare.
The Data Liberation program is all about being able to move your data from google to anywhere else. It has nothing to do with privacy.
Except we have good reason to believe that Zynga has peaked. They haven't been able to replicate the success of Farmville, their active user base is shrinking, and customer acquisition is becoming prohibitively expensive.

All in all it certainly looks like the "glorified slot machine" formula of "social gaming" is dying, and that is immensely gratifying to me.
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I find it truly bizarre just how many employees Zynga has, considering the number of products they produce. Mobile development has shown us time and time again that a game like Farmville can be easily made with 5 employees. There must be a gigantic bureaucratic they have to fight in order to get anything done with that gigantic mass of employees.
Is it related to what Tim Ferriss recommends in the Four Hour Body when he suggests to take cold showers?
This should be downvoted like crazy.
That's good for your wife, she has better things to do.
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I use this. http://newsyc.me/
I don't think you should try to draw conclusions by comparing commodity personal electronics to luxury automobiles.
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looking forward to the announcement that Facebook buys Wolphram Alpha
iHackerNews looks great, except it doesn't seem to go past the first page of HN. Or did I miss something?
I could do a screen-for-screen comparison of Battlefield 3 and Modern Warfare 3 and you would have a hard time telling them apart. Each actually has distinct gameplay that sets it apart. I think it's a stretch to say there's clearly "little or no change" from 4 cherry-picked screenshots.

Zynga has actually had an improving track record in the last 6 months with Adventure World, Hidden Chronicles and Dream Zoo. They're still sticking to "hit" genres, but they have been pushing out of cloneville and taking more risks.
Ram failure? May well be PBCK - last month I bought 8 GB RAM, tried to install it in my MBP, got the 3 beeps, said "bleeping newegg", put the old 4GB of RAM back in, used the MBP for a while, got annoyed because it was now quite slow, managed to look at System Profile, saw I now had only 2 GB, said "Hmm...", reseated the RAM, now had 4GB, removed it, and tried again with the new 8GB, and lo and behold, the PBCK was solved...

I've never had a Mac Mini, but I wouldn't be surprised if the RAM installation process there is as tight as for the MBP.
There's still plenty of opportunity for growth on the software and content distribution side.
replace Zynga with Epic and Tiny Tower and Dream Heights with Quake III Arena and Unreal Tournament.

Video game companies copy each other. It's up to the consumer to decide which version is worth their money. I for one welcome some competition to Tiny Tower, especially after the game was ruined for me when I found out that setting the iPhone clock ahead allowed you to cheat the game..
Ok, a third time for the literalists, but I think it is my last attempt. Nothing spoils a news.ycombinator.com comment party like the scolding professor who comments: "We've had this story posted a number of times here. One ruler to the hand for each iteration." Particularly with something so comical. This blog post should be re-posted at least monthly. And for the humor-impaired weekly.

No do as you will with me cruel world. You can take away my karma and even my upvote, but you can't take away my dignity.

(On the other hand, if the down votes were for recommending GOTO instead of GOSUB, then this is completely understandable.)
According to some, Zygna is not targeting casual gamers but casual gamblers (same motivations, same demographic)

There was a discussion about that on HN some days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3453040
Now all it needs is some good content
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. As long as Zynga is not directly using digital materials from Tiny Tower, I don't see the problem.

The game industry is a massive fest of copying each other. How many Doom clones are out there? Or the Pacman variety? Or the Breakouts? Space Invaders?
Edison’s Failed Plot To Hijack Hollywood
Sorting is not a good subject for discussing an advanced/intelligent programming language. Try to solve hard problems which are difficult to solve with current languages.

Declarative programming can be very helpful in domain specific tasks. You start with a set of constraints that the computer can understand, and then the core AI will automatically give you the answer. Perhaps then a lot of common people can start to tell computer to do things for them without writing a single line of code, but they need to talk in the languages that computer can understand.
Shouldn't interest do that?
Or scrolldit.com
To expand on what beagle said:

1) owning stocks gives you some legal rights; in particular, management cannot spend the earnings as they wish (though in practice interests are rarely well-aligned). Also, if you control enough shares you might be able to make the company pay dividends.

2) more importantly, stocks tend to be more liquid than baseball cards. Though I'm sure there are counterexamples. :-)
They'll buy Hollywood before launching their "TV experience".
Why have one motivation when you can have two!
I would bet against that saving the day. iTunes and the app store bring in maybe 5 billion a year? Even at 100%/yr growth, that's not enough to smooth even a minor bump in their HW revenue. It's pocket change.
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Yeah and you've underestimated how much mobile web apps will dominate. There will always be native apps, but their percentage of total mobile apps will dwindle. Many, many apps require nothing more than what webkit offers today. A couple years or less of hardware performance increases will push us past the inflection point.

But the main driver will be supply. There just are'nt enough Android, iOS developers. Web devs are legion.

And no cross-device solution will be able to keep pace with webkit & HTML/CSS.
That's why I use GMail. Its spam filtering is top-notch.

I use Verizon FiOS for internet. It works pretty well. But no way do I want Verizon doing my email. I view it as a conflict of interest. It pisses me off that they also provide TV and continually try to upsell me to it. I'd much rather the whole bandwidth of the fiber be devoted to internet and none to TV.

I don't have a problem with the low-level filtering you mention. That just makes the pipe work better. But I do have a problem with ISPs wanting to morph into more that.
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Really? Don't the use cases overlap? Like I said I don't think existing users will switch or stop using dropbox since they are already hooked and/or invested.
I think someone at Canonical ate some old pizza or something. Taking us back to the keyboard .. the keyboard? For menus? Seriously? Wasn't Unity bad enough? Lenses? Really?
Nitpicking one aspect of my argument that RIM declines in marketshare based on whether my argument that Apple is or will become the dominant mobile platform is most certainly the absolute definition of pedantry.
> I'm sure this is going to be unpopular, but sorry, when it comes to corporate success, values don't mean shit.
The HBS case study on Google won't even mention "don't be evil" except maybe as an example of how amateurs shouldn't be permitted to do corporate communications.

...Huh?

You appear to be replying to me, but I'm puzzled by what you've typed. Who mentioned anything about values? This is about ruining a core product's user experience and the repercussions of any strategy that allows that.
Make this for 9gag! Please.
I've been wondering about this every time someone brings this up. So you use Truecrypt to secure your disk, and have say a "naughty" partition and two "clean" ones, for plausible deniability.

Won't the police in the event they have compelled you to unlock your HDD check how big the partition is? If you have a 500GB disk divided by three say with the 20GB "naughty" partition, a 20GB "double-decoy" and a 460GB "decoy" partition won't the police pull the disk out, look at the label on it which says "Seagate 500GB" and say "You have 20GB left on this disk we haven't seen yet. Unlock it."?

Or is there a way in which trucrypt can hide your hidden partitions in a way that a) they don't look like randomized/encrypted data and b) it isn't obvious there is space "missing" from your disk.
Eh, you're a little to glib here. This sort of dismissive (and imo shortsighted) response is a problem.

Let's say it's 2003 and instead of being a post about laptop internal microphones, it's about SQL injection vulnerabilities in [your favorite blogging engine]. The quick & easy response is "Oh, go adjust your tinfoil hat, do you really think you're important enough for the hackers to focus on? And if they do, don't you think they could do a little more than rely on a silly SQL injection vulnerability?"

But we know the problem with SQL injection vulnerabilities usually aren't focused hacker attacks, it's fire-and-forget script kiddie exploits that most of us have to worry about. This is no different. Not too many folks are worried about "the Agents" surreptitiously monitoring their laptop's microphone, it's some bored 14-year-old with time on his hands and an easy-to-use exploit tool.
That's exactly the same thing as saying the number of people who fall prey to email marketing has peaked.
As a programmer you should really try unhooking your mouse for 2 weeks straight then report back your findings. If you see the potential after that, then give something like HUD a try. I don't mean to be rude or antagonistic, but first person shooter mode sucks.

I think HUD looks pretty kick ass. I barely ever use the touchpad on my macbook and I'll never go back to using a mouse. It's like a context switch. Spotlight is great, but also having contextual search within the application looks so much better.
I would have to disagree very strongly here.

Farmville in its current iteration is designed to involve your facebook freinds at every level.

Its reward schedule is blatantly designed to encourage social sharing - basically making players skinner boxes for other players.

Tiny tower on the other hand can be played in entirely single player fashion, without really being bothered by "Oh you need 3 paint flecks to paint window X! 5 windows, 2 chairs, 4 cuboards, 2 cashiers left to open store! Ask your friends for parts"

Farmville is far more diabolical than tiny tower. Its obvious the tiny tower guys are more into making a game, while farmville is just plain sinister.
The HUD on Mac OS X
Next time, get the thinkpad T-series. Yes, it's plastic rather than pretty metal, but the build quality is spectacular, even compared to my (Stolen.) MBP 13 inch. It runs both Linux and Windows like a champ. Oh, and it's easy to put in your own memory and hard drive, which decreases the relative cost. (I have an HDD and an SDD in there right now in place of the CD-ROM.

But people do build their own laptops, relatively speaking. They get Clevo bare bones and put what they want in it. I happen to think the clevo bodies are clunky, but to each their own.