skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I will definitely continue using my Microsoft Ergo keyboard -- the Apple keyboard is definitely not as comfortable for me. Interesting point about the Crtl key vs command key positioning. I agree that the control key is positioned better for editing. I just noticed this thread in Apple support (http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=8238419) about modifying the control key to simulate the command key. Not sure if this would impact anything else.
What makes you think that karma is meaningless? I find it meaningful.

Sometimes I read a troll-like post, and check out the user that wrote it. If they have 3000 karma, it is likely that I am missing their point, and need to think some more. If they have -10 karma, then they are probably just a troll.

I know it's "bad" to judge someone by a number... but we do it because it is usually helpful.
i also vent on the other hypocrites who piss on people for buying bottled water yet are sure to lease a new mercedes every nine months
I agree with the general approach.

Core things very very easy for anyone, including grandma. Some things relatively easy but requiring a little code to achieve.

But needing Google Analytics & the ability/confidence to install it yourself do not necessarily go hand in hand.
Coffee can fit nicely here I believe. After I graduated, I started drinking coffee and fell in love with it. (My GF believes I have an unhealthy relationship with trying different blends and styles - ie latte, mocha, etc). However, there's a fairly large market for coffee lovers when it comes to blends and also coffee machines.

Do a quick search for "coffee machines forum" and you'll see what I mean.
"11 fantasy languages"

As in 11 not-real languages. Languages that don't exist?

I'm not sure I follow.
I don't think that's the point. It's a reference application for ASP.NET MVC.
Directory of government presences on twitter
I tend to live on the command line so my experience is a bit different.

then why would you go to an OS that mandates the use of the mouse??
That last point (strike pay == TA pay) sort of makes it a no-brainer, doesn't it?
It just seems like he's claiming citing something and claiming it's a mess, but there's no real evidence that it is a problem.
MacFusion is a nice front-end for MacFUSE:
http://www.macfusionapp.org/
Can you explain how it is incompatible? Ms-PL is OSI-approved (http://www.opensource.org/licenses/ms-pl.html), which I assumed (an uninformed assumption mind you) made it compatible with other OSI-approved licenses.
OS X is great in terms of productivity, I would recommend it highly. There are a number of limiting factors, though.

1) Not everyone needs this, but you won't get absolute compatibility with MS Office - MSO'08 for Mac can't read some stuff that MSO'07 for Windows created - I had severe problems with theme colors, sorting, etc.

2) Out of mine and friends' experience, the hardware sucks in terms of reliability. It seems like every other logic board or battery fails at some point. I'm speaking of pre-last generation macbooks and macbook pros.

3) Applications that you need may not be there. You said you can't find a substitute for Camtasia Studio. I can't find any substitute for Paint.NET (apart from Photoshop that is comparable to my monthly salary in cost) and that's very frustrating. GIMP, being non-native (run through X windows manager), is ten times more unusable than it is on Ubuntu or Windows.
Ask HN: Open Philosophy?
I just asked about people's philosophies, and someone linked to an article that PG wrote on the subject. I thought it would be an interesting idea to have an open directory of various philosophies that people could create or follow/revise.

Does this currently exist anywhere? A place where people write their philosophies on life? Possible leave it open to others to suggest changes to. Might be an interesting experiment. Like a Wiki or something. I could see myself writing a very lengthy one, and I think it's also interesting that PG compares the current philosophy field as being as new as math back in the 1500s. I also think it's interesting that some poeple like Steve Pavlina actively go out and search for philosophies, comparing them to "the brain's operating system" which sometimes "needs software upgrades."

Possible topics to cover: meaning of life, political stances, religious beliefs, best computer languages (might be a stretch), people admired/role models, the type of person the philosophy would work best for (college student vs married adult), etc.
Ever read Max Stirner's: "The Ego and Its Own"?

I sing as the bird sings
That on the bough alights;
The song that from me springs
Is pay that well requites

Cheers
This is one of those comments that loses authority with every upvote.
karma, the new celebrity status symbol.
Now I might be being stupid here but as far as I can see from the graph of total time that Vista and Ubuntu are roughly equivalent:

http://antoniocangiano.com/images/shootout3/chart_total_time...
What an astonishing waste of money and human capital. Thanks for posting that, I had never heard of such a thing.
I do like the idea; however, the site has aesthetic flaws that need to be addressed.

Notice a site like adagio.com (which sells loose teas): earthy colors combined with attractive closeups of leaves & herbs.

As a tea drinker, the design & color scheme you've chosen really does put me off. Remembering that tea is typically made by steeping leaves, buds, and flowers from nature itself, the abstract graphics and pale blue/white motif feels wrong.

Also, the example recipe on the front page (in addition to many of the contributed recipes) remind me of noncarbonated sodas (or nonalcoholic cocktails), not teas; very sugary, and reliant on extracts and juices (whipped cream?) for flavor. Perhaps you could seed the "teas" section with actual tea blends?
The rhetoric in the article is a little ridiculous, but for a moment let's gloss over his glossed over details:

Professional football teams have an extreme financial incentive to accurately predict an athlete's potential. They have a sizable data set to examine, and a lot of money to spend, but there have still been some very notable failures.

Our education system does not have the resources of the NFL to determine who will be a good teacher. But even if they did, it would be a misappropriation of funds. Instead of focusing on pre-facto credentials (graduate degrees, etc.), we should put them in the mix and see how they perform, and pay the best teachers accordingly.

These seem like the most salient points from the article, and I don't think any of them are particularly false or oversimplified. If you know a lot about something and the article is for a general audience, it's bound to seem like a bunch of outright lies. Life is never as elegant as the New Yorker makes it seem, but that doesn't mean it's not entertaining (and sometimes informative) to read.
Steve Rowe's Blog : Modern Computing Began 40 Years Ago Today
Me too, excellent clean design by the way.
As in 11 academic languages that you would get paid to use in your fantasies (the company advertising the job doesn't use most of them, they just want coworkers that like them too).
Great list. Thanks.
You might as well add Flacco to 2008 too. He's doing fairly well starting with the Ravens.

-- Delaware alumni
I would recommend Komodo edit (http://www.activestate.com/Products/komodo_ide/komodo_edit.m...) over both Coda and Textmate. Mainly because it does almost everything they do (the only thing that seems to be missing is built in svn support), plus a great VI mode all for free.
They're doing it because it's cheaper to develop their own app than to pay vast amounts in commision to someone else's app.

Profitability is the good reason they're doing it. That's the point. They're a commercial company not a non-profit.

You're free to use a non-profit alternative such as openlibrary.org instead.
This hacker is not impressed with the G1
I have to agree about the shortcuts. They are killing me inside.

I particularly hate how fn+arrows and command+arrows change between applications. With no documentation.
As long as it's still cheap, slow is fine for most types of cargo.
I am a high school teacher and I whole heartedly agree with the sentiment expressed in this article. I don't know anything about NFL so I don't know if the comparisons are accurate, however the observations about good teaching are spot on.

There is no denying that those studying under a good teacher learn more than those studying under a poor/average teacher. There has been a lot said about "withitness" in the literature over the years and it is a quality that one either has or doesn't have.

There are lots of conclusions you can draw from observing teachers and it's quite awe inspiring to see a truly excellent teacher do their job.

@Tichy: Nothing in this article had anything to do with 'establishing the "fascist" school of perfect teaching, that all future teachers will have to rigidly adhere to'. The good teacher qualities that were mentioned included questioning, providing direct responses to student questions and treating learning as a team effort (teacher and student learning together). These are qualities that every good teacher exhibits and all poor teachers struggle with.
Anyone tell me the advantages of using .NET for a scrappy web startup?

I learn to develope in ASP.NET in college and found that finding support online is quite difficult (damn gridview).

With the maturity of Django, RoR, and PhP frameworks is it worth it to find a bizspark partner and pay microsoft tax until the your business dies?
Another (old?) rant about open classes aka "monkey patching". There's a lot of fear and hand wringing over open classes. It's certainly a language feature that can be abused, but it's also incredibly useful. There are things you can do to be safe:

Check for the existence of methods before adding them. Don't overwrite existing standard lib methods. If you do overwrite one, alias it, call the alias from your replacement which should add something without noticeably changing the original behavior.

If you write unit tests, it shouldn't be too difficult to detect that a library you depend on has changed the behavior of a standard method in an unacceptable way. I've encountered collisions like this, maybe, a handful of times and each time finding and resolving the problem was not difficult.

I've been writing ruby software for several years now, and there are definitely libraries that annoy me (ahem activesupport), but the utility of having open classes has far outweighed any of the negatives. Let's face it, in any programming ecology there are going to be some awful libraries. Bad programmers don't need open classes to do damage.
Wow. I will agree that that is a failed idea.
Ask HN: Thoughts on CouchDB vs. SimpleDB
I've decided to use a document based DB for my next project but I'm still in the discovery phase when it comes to SimpleDB vs. CouchDB.

They both seem to offer the same type of functionality, although from my initial research it seems like SimpleDB has more traditional query options. Any thought from HN readers who have used either, or preferably both, of these products?
I've used both and find OS X preferable. For me it's really OS X vs. Linux, and I like OS X because you get so much shiny stuff, you can run consumer software on it, and it's not really that much work to make OS X really really hacker-centric.

YMMV.

Anyway, in terms of the question, workflow, yes, overwhelming improvements in workflow. You get all the shiny goodies of a consumer GUI OS and all the power-user magic of Unix. I'm much, much faster writing code on my Mac than I was on Windows - better editors, imho, and a much better command line.
Evolution of Mona Lisa in JavaScript & Canvas
I've thought about starting a wiki just for the purpose of personal theories and philosophies. The caveat in this takes the inherent nature of the Internet into affect: someone disagrees, things will get difficult.
I like the look of the site, too. Do you have a designer in-house, or did you use a firm? I'd love to hear anything you are willing to say about the process.
I reimplemented the algorithm from [1] in JavaScript using canvas.getImageData for fitness computation.

It's far from perfect, but it seems to work. So far I'm at around 1/30th of the original iterations (took ~1 hour) and it already looks a bit like Mona Lisa :).

I'll be updating the page with more evolved images.

Note: it works only in few browsers: so far I'm aware of Firefox 3.0.4 and Opera 9.61. Firefox is significantly faster.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=389727
I recently switched, and didn't find it took more than a week to adjust. OSX is great and the laptop I bought is undoubtedly a beautiful machine. I've found servicable replacements for all of my favorite software, and have come to love a few mac only applications. One caveat:

Most people I know agree that hardware reliability is poor. Anecdotally, everyone I spoke with when deciding strongly recommended getting apple care. More objectively, friends I know who work in the IT support groups at large tech companies, said that they see roughly 3-4 times the number of hardware related problems compared to thinkpads (which run about half the price).

Many people tell glowing stories about the great service and support they receive. When my new macbook pro shipped with a defective optical drive, I WAS impressed with how friendly support folks were, but I was NOT unimpressed that the fix took 9 business days even when at an AppleStore and after paying for apple care. Note: getting a new machine with upgraded RAM was an estimated 15 day turnaround including shipping the machine back to the factory.
Ruby Implementation Shootout: A Bright Future for Ruby Performance
While I agree that writing code defensively is the way to go when a team is involved and/or you plan to have to maintain the code for years, I don't think it's the language's job to take away all the 'sharp objects'.

Programmers should be smart enough to know what is sharp and how to avoid it when needed, and they should collaborate enough that no one can sneak through sloppy code.

I'd rather have the ability to do certain things and rarely use it than not have the ability at all. If other programmers are constantly doing really dumb things, don't use their code in your projects.
If somebody is interest in seeing this process in real-time, I implemented the algorithm in JavaScript:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=392036
This is a nice idea and as another mentioned tea trends in Google Trends.

Adding coffee would be good too, as well as others mentioned adding earth tones to the design.
Q&A: TheFunded.com's Adeo Ressi offers advice to LPs on picking VC funds
Visual Studio cannot be beaten, especially when free. C# is evolving towards better support for concurrency and functional style programming. F# is getting much acclaim even from die hard critics of .NET. You can use one framework for your entire application--be it frontend (ASP.NET MVC), backend, enterprise, even distributed computing on Amazon (MPI.NET). An added bonus is that the majority of professional programmers out there are familiar with .NET in case you ever need to hire (this is slightly more true outside the realm of web development and silicon valley).

Regarding support online, I've never had a problem self learning .NET, especially with MSDN, the ASP.NET community at large, and now stackoverflow.com.
not every developer wants to develop on their os. rather, I would like computer that "just works" so that I can do my development work.

yes it's cool to be interested in what's under the hood, but once you've tried to get your wireless working for hours on numerous occasions, you start to appreciate when things just work. i got sick of wasting my time.
I didn't cherrypick, I simply pointed out that the QBs scouts rate the best generally perform very well. Every now and then a Tom Brady or Kurt Warner sneaks up out of nowhere, but for the most part almost every starting QB was first round drafted and often first overall.

Also, don't confuse best passer rating for best quarterback. All sorts of things factor into the QB's passer rating, such as the quality of his receivers and offensive line, his team's style, etc. Those numbers aren't very meaningful.

Nobody would ever suggest that scouts could get it perfectly, or near perfectly, in order, but they do a pretty fantastic job. You can cherrypick data to show a few black swans, but for the most part they're highly accurate.
There's less yak shaving on a mac vs. linux/windows. If linux had minimal yak shaving and a really good quicksilver replacement, (and a bit more elegance to their program suites) I'd go there in a heartbeat. But there is always tons and tons of yak shaving and i've found laptop hardware support to be painful.

You can get a refurb macbook pro with comparable specs to a dell laptop for the same price right now. And the macbook pro has a better build quality. Worse comes to worse, you can install windows xp on it and get a better machine out of it. Macbooks also keep their resell value a lot better than the typical laptop too, so you can sell them used for alot higher vs. an equally specced dell.
I definitely see your point. But I think if someone disagreed, they would simply look at a different philosophy.

From there, I think it would basically involve recommending changes or additions to the theory/philosophy. That would probably be up to the person who "manages" the philosophy, but certainly open discussion and changes would be recommended. Perhaps even a list of recommended public figures that are well-aligned with the philosophy.

I know that Steve Jobs, for example, is Zen Buddhist. But Buddhism is one of those things (if I understand correctly) that isn't necessarily considered a "religion" and people are also encouraged to change it to their own likings. For example, I believe a lot of Buddhist concepts (4 truths), but I don't believe in reincarnation at least in the physical sense. I believe that reincarnation means someone goes through mental changes, and metaphorically become a different or new person through mental and psychological changes.

Sort of thinking out loud on this. Some of it may make no sense.
Well, neural integrators are known, I know the ocular system has some. A quick google search finds this:

http://hebb.mit.edu/courses/9.29/2003/athena/bearlee/Neural_...

An integrator basically solves the ODE y'(t)=f(t); the firing rate is proportional to y(t). So if you wire up integrators appropriately, you could solve most ODE's (obviously, there are scaling issues, noise, etc). In principle, one could reproduce the bee's behavior by appropriately connecting six of these.

But I admit, this example is one of the more fantastic examples I've seen. It's a simple algebraic manifold (1) and obtained purely from observation of behavior rather than lab work.

(1) In biology, you usually get shapes which are big ugly messes, imagine the surface of a child's playdough sculpture. Instead, she found something pretty like kepler's conic sections (to borrow the analogy from the article). That's uncommon in biology.
The Mouse That Soared: 40 Years of Douglas Engelbart's Indomitable Pointing Device
Visual Studio cannot be beaten.

Visual Studio is a provincial piece of work that can't even get its imitations right - viz. the need for plugins (Resharper) to bring it up to minimal acceptability. The only people I know who praise Visual Studio are the ones who believe that Microsoft is responsible for all computing innovation.

(Though I seem to recall that as a C++ environment 10 years ago it was pretty good.)
What you describe is the intended, valid use of the metric. What I am complaining about is people who care on a personal level about what their own karma is, and who do things just to inflate that number. Facebook/Myspace "friends" whom you don't actually know? "Vote up if *" posts? Lolcat or comic or whatever posts? I know HN is (mostly) blissfully free of these things, but they are a direct consequence of the karma system.
Currently the biggest opponents of performance testing of teachers is the teachers union. Good luck getting rid of them.
i wonder how locking and synchronization would work then. will there be any keywords for allowign this. my (loose) understanding was that with the old (current rather) js there is a single thread that does everything so locking is not required.

the spec does say message-passing is the coordination mechanism, but that does not automatically imply mutexes and conditional waits...
I switched from Windows to Mac about 2 years ago and never looked back. My main reason for going to OSX instead of Linux at the time was because Photoshop wasn't available on Linux and GIMP makes me cry. I used Photoshop a lot. Still, I'd do it again at this point.

I found the adjustment period to be quite short, but then again I had been working on both Windows and Linux for quite a long time so I was already used to using multiple platforms and switching between them easily. My Mac experience has been nothing but positive; no defective hardware, software has always just worked, etc. From all the detractors, I'd say I might be a minority. Mac notes:

* There is some seriously great software for OSX. Yeah, you have to pay for it most of the time, but it's well worth it. There are also tons of free apps which are still leagues ahead of their Windows/Linux counterparts.

* The user experience is so much better I actually enjoy using my computer now. No more fighting Windows stupidity or Linux incompatibility / quirks. Well, I still use Linux for all my servers, but that's another story.

* Fusion / Parallels provide very robust and mature virtualization. I use Fusion to run a single Windows app 24/7 and also use it for IE testing. Best of both worlds.

* Specification-wise, stuff is still overpriced. Prices are coming more in line with what you could make yourself, but you're mostly paying for guaranteed compatibility and the OS at this point.

* It seems Apple have had some serious quality control issues recently, especially with laptops. I continue gaining anecdotal evidence that suggests the new laptops are awful. I have an old-ish Macbook Pro which I don't use heavily anymore (though did for about a year) and a Mac Pro; I have never had an issue with either machine.

So there you go. Macs aren't perfect and they aren't for everybody, but I maintain they are a hell of a lot better than any prefab or hand-rolled Windows box (except for gaming of course) and still hold advantages over Linux, at least for those of us who use software not available for that platform. As far as Linux goes, I like KDE a lot and detest Gnome. Maybe that will give you some insight into my opinions.

Just remember: The camp that says there's no reason to go Mac over Linux are just as bad as the one that says there's nothing better than Mac. Choose whichever one suits your purposes better.
Interesting article but I wish the author would be a little more concise. Rambling on about football picks when the topic was teaching was a bit annoying even though he tried to tie the two together.
You can win more than 50% of wagers even over fairly large numbers if you're -EV, especially if you're only slightly so and the variance is large. And with tens of millions of people attempting to do this between forex, stocks, futures, etc., it's a virtual certainty that one could find a large number who have.

Again, read Fooled by Randomness.
What is your experience with tools and technologies besides .NET and Visual Studio? Can you compare fairly?
Even machine code vs C is a leaky abstraction which is why people use it. It is making tools that compile the code properly and allow proper debugging that is the problem. I suspect things might improve if and when these newfangled javascript engines provide some standard bytecode that supports metadata for debugging.
Back from United States or how I learned to copy something else ...