skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From a design standpoint, the green on the homepage is too dark with the black text over it. Lighten up that green, or make it darker and change the font to white. Otherwise, at first glance it looks great. I can give a more thorough review if you'd like (just email me).

G'luck!
Ask HN: How do you explain what you do to your relatives?
I'm guessing others have this experience, the uncle who's the hardware salesman who thinks your sitting at home for the last 12 months and is loud about it, the relative who just nods and looks a bit sad when you tell them what you're doing. All folk who know nothing about startups, IT and what the process is, and with christmas coming I'm dreading it.

Has anyone hit on a magic formula to explain what you're doing in your startup so they'll leave you alone and stop suggesting maybe you can get a job in uncle bob's shop? / you did so well at school / and so on.
Unions locked in benefits in industries that were being, and continue to be, mismanaged by completely clueless and yet highly paid executives. Good for the unions.

Hint: "dehumanizing" was not the word you were looking for, there.

Curious that you didn't point to the billions of dollars "extracted" on salaries, benefits, and golden parachutes for executives who have mismanaged that industry into ruin over decades.

And here's another hint: "free market" effects and "competition" take a toll on real live human beings. It's not some abstract little academic and mathematical simulation of "efficiency". When businesses screw up, people suffer. Workers who may not have the savings and golden parachutes and the perks and a ton of resources to fall back on have to somehow continue to put food on the table, pay mortgages, and buy braces for their kids teeth.

The efficiency and good work of American labor has never been in doubt. The same cannot be said for the intelligence and ethics of business owners.
Your #4 is insightful.

Functional management that treats their employees well don't tend to attract unions at all. While one can argue that some unions are quite predatory in expanding their membership, just the fact that a workplace becomes unionized says a lot about the failings of management.

The flip side is that unions tend to overstay their need. Once the union forms and gets what it wants, it tends to stick around and start looking for other things to campaign for. I would consider joining a union in order to address a specific grievance, but I don't think they should be permanent institutions. Once they accomplish their goal, they should automatically disband.

Making them permanent allows them to respond more quickly, but it also makes them vehicles for those seeking power, which means they usually overreach.
not every developer wants to develop on their os

uh....okay-doke
Top Java Developers Offer Advice to Students
For someone who used a Mac for 3 months, I'm surprised you never figured out there is a right click... there's been a right click for a long time. I use it constantly.

"If you spent a lot of time becoming proficient on your platform of choice, you probably can only lose on OS X."

Until you spend a lot of time becoming proficient with OS X... it goes both ways. I don't understand how people come to these conclusions.
I usually just avoid the subject - my dad is the only one who understands what I'm doing and why, so I'll talk to him about it but usually noone else.

Bu don't worry I'm sure Einstein had some pretty tough times explaining to his family what he did :-)
I'd add Aquamacs if you are an emacs user.
Off-world sex could be messy, awkward
I don't like macs because they are gramma-friendly, I like them because I can run a real bash rather than cygwin. You want to know how a computer works under the hood, you should prefer OS X to windows.
and a really good quicksilver replacement

yeah we call it xmonad. why make keyboard shortcuts a slapped-on app when they can be your entire desktop?

But there is always tons and tons of yak shaving

wtf are you even talking about?
Great question! I would also like to know how these two compare to Google's BigTable?
The First Investor Meeting
how do you mean "separate from the template"

the cloud does give scalability.. but the difficulties in "coding" a cms or getting content up still exist.

one thing that you may see is a lot of "builder" tools that essentially sit as an app on the cloud enabling content creators on the cloud. ie a return back to the time of the page-builders in geocities!

obviously different cloud apps could collaborate (like unix tools) ... or to gain a competitive advantage, CMS App developers could consolidate more and more functionality to lower transaction costs between the tools.
If you truly believe you should have to look at the code and that things shouldn't "just work", then you must not know about modularization and encapsulation. If I have to know about how the C linker works in order to install a program, then the OS I'm using is a terribly leaky abstraction with a poorly designed user interface/API.

I want my basic tools to just work so that I can concentrate on developing my own programs and tools.
But it's not "every now and then". Look at the names of "nobodies":

Brady, Bulger, Garrard, Romo, and Cassell

And that's just the last nine years. They're as good, if not better, than "top" picks. Then you have the more historical guys like Wagner, Young, and Montana.

Picking for the QB position really does seem stochastic.
I just bought one. The lack of home/pgdown/pgup/end is still frustrating. I must say, it's a great piece of hardware and the double tap/corner "right click" is a great addition. Frankly, the hardware is wonderful.

The software? Frankly, I'd be happier on a "just works" linux, and I'm tempted to research reverse engineering the touchpad for linux - it's quite a nice addition and it would be a best of both worlds scenario.
Just read your post, and I think that your grudge is probably more with the Italian way of doing things than the European way. I'm from Denmark, which of course is at the other end of EU, but here things are very different. Not all that much politics, and you get credit for being smart and getting things done. And meetings are primarily for making decisions.

If you ever come to Copenhagen I'll buy you a coffee, there are some pretty decent places here :-)
No caching?
http://java.sun.com/javase/6/docs/technotes/guides/jweb/othe...

OSX employs its own pre-caching similar to Vista.

Think for second: how many various files need to be read off your hard drive for JVM to get started. There are some tools you can use (depends on your platform) that will help you with coming up with an exact list.

That's A LOT of I/O. No hard drive will give you sub-second time.
What do you all commonly use MacFUSE for?
I prefer the Hacker method of just trying it, and see if it works.

Also, could they try it on the Moon first?
By end of the day.. just use whatever your comfortable with. If you want to experiment with OSX, just spec and build yourself a hackintosh osx86 with an apple keyboard. Once you get the feel of OSX and you're comfortable with the dev software, get yourself the real deal.
Good practice for my Data Structures & Algorithms final! 79/155
True, it's not likely to happen, given that the union is both politically powerful and responsible for the way things are now.

It would be a worthwhile thing to try, though.
Based on my (unfortunate?) experience of last 4 startups: when a company creates a multitude of these "core values" it begins making the transition from an exciting start up to a mediocre depressing job. If you have to explain to your employees that "Integrity, Passion, Commitment, Competence,
Conscientiousness" are "keys to success", perhaps you are hiring the wrong people.
I think the only answer anyone can give you is whether or not a switch was worth it for _them_.

Will a switch be worth it for you? I don't think anyone can answer that. You seem to have done your homework, so... maybe?

To actually answer the question you asked... I think it was worth it, for me. As some others said, expect to take a little while to learn new shortcuts/OS behaviors.
Instead of looking for an (S)FTP client, you can use FUSE and just mount the remote servers. Writing your own FUSE file system isn't all that hard either, I'm currently hacking together one that allows me to mount my MySpace developer account as a disk to edit things directly :)
You're probably right. You'd think with all the marketing brains and intellect here someone would have come up with an incantation.
> The culprit is the Coriolis force

I remember reading about this (effect on space elevators) years ago, so I'm not sure it's a new idea.
"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."

Thanks for trying to get us back on point ;)
You should have it automatically upload images so everyone doesn't have to start at nothing.
You'll love this then:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=21E...

Images with pre-installed, pre-activated versions of Windows XP SP2 and SP3, running Internet Explorer 6, 7, and beta 8. Microsoft has them automatically expire in January, but they're pretty consistent with making updated images by then with later time bombs. Keeps you from buying XP for your Mac...
Good for the unions.

Yes, good for them -- while it lasted. But since they, like the executives, chose short-term comfort rather than enduring competitiveness, the profits they split with those executives are long gone.

Both the auto executives and auto laborers now need to find other gainful employment, like the rest of us. Maybe some will find work in a reorganized domestic auto industry -- but we don't owe them that, and we shouldn't shut our eyes to how they both reached this reckoning.
I'd advocate GNU Emacs over Aquamacs.
He did say he's an Eclipse user though so this isn't likely an issue.
Yes, comparison is just with italians, not Europe. I can't talk for other countries, can merely talk about mine :)
"just never heard that clever team name before"

You obviously haven't been watching ESPN for, oh, the past decade.
Personally I'm fairly pro-union, and I don't really understand the anti-union sentiment that's so prevalent in the US.

In your typical employee-employer relationship, the employer has the bulk of the power, and a union will tend to balance that out. Are unions great 100% of the time? No, but the best way to offset any poor behavior is to get involved (much like any government/organised body), not to ban them or ignore them.

In this particular case, it looks like the University is violating labor laws and refusing to negotiate (pretty typical in pay negotiations). If they're playing hardball, usually a strike of some form is the only option.
Personally, I prefer GNU Emacs (aka Emacs.app) over Aquamacs.

I have a rather large .emacs that's followed me faithfully from Solaris to Linux to Windows to Linux to Windows, and Aquamacs refused to work with it. I spent about a week trying to get them to work together, but gave up and switched to Emacs.app and got everything running in a day.

So, just a warning. Aquamacs is fine for simple .emacs, but might throw a tantrum if you want to do things like have a non-standard color scheme or keep your .emacs OS and Emacs version independent.
Let's be honest, you will NOT want to run CS3 in a VM. Image processing requires full use of your RAM and CPU.
Ask HN: Mac, Windows, Or Linux?
"[2] Y Combinator is (we hope) visited mostly by hackers. The proportions of OSes are: Windows 66.4%, Macintosh 18.8%, Linux 11.4%, and FreeBSD 1.5%. The Mac number is a big change from what it would have been five years ago."

I read this from http://www.paulgraham.com/mac.html. I am just wondering: is this the latest stats? PG, could you please let us know the latest stats?
Very cool. I'm running WebKit nightly 49090 and it's blazingly fast -- 1683965 fitness in 30 minutes
@gruseom, yeah you put that in right words, i agree!!!
Taleb on Capitalism 2.0 and the Economic Crisis
10 Principles of the UI Design Masters
Does it bother anyone else that a researcher has to use "withitness" when other words or definition would have sounded better and read less like pop-psychology noise?
Malcolm Tredinnick: Implementing HTTP Services with Django
My last experience with a MacBook Pro, my friend used the keyboard 99% of the time. The few occasions he used the touchpad, it was almost entirely composed of 1+2+3+4 finger gestures for switching between programs/tabe, scrolling, and so on. This actually became a selling point for me, and why I'm considering a MacBook for my next laptop.

And at this point, I need to learn to stop feeding the trolls. But I thought my point would contribute to the discussion anyhow. :-)
My day job has me coding on Windows for 9 hours a day. My home computer is a Macbook Pro. I don't have any trouble switching between the two every day, except for the occasionally accidental keyboard shortcut (e.g. hitting alt-t in Windows Firefox instead of Ctrl-t).

But then, I use a dvorak keyboard layout and run into qwerty all the time, so maybe I've trained myself to easily switch gears.
it sounds like you're trying to use your pinky to hit the command key. it's a lot more comfortable if you use your thumb to hit the command key.

it's a lot more natural to hit the command key for me, since i only have to curl my thumb in a little bit to hit the command key, whereas i can't reach the control key with my pinky unless I shift my hand.
Hey, just to make sure credit goes where credit is due, this post was written by my awesome co-founder, Cassie :)
Corporate marketing (11 NetBeans mentions and none of Eclipse? Riiight), not that interesting, not new, not especially hacker-ish.
It's not installed, and code I wrote for it a year ago does not work anymore.
katapult - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katapult
It's a lot more than 10-20% for a lot of desktop users because Apple doesn't offer a middle of the road desktop without a monitor built in. Personally I already own two great LCDs, so when I went to pick one out, my options were the mini (which has only one video jack and is pretty weak by desktop standards, though small and silent and therefore great for casual use or probably as a media hub) or some ridiculously expensive beast of a Mac Pro. So the price jumped from like $650 to $2,8000.

If I could have gotten something with iMac-like specs but minus the monitor it still would have cost more than a Dell, I'm sure, but at least only by 10-20%.
I was almost in the same boat as you, but decided to get a MAC so I can do some iPhone Development as well. If you are not planning to do iPhone or Mac Development I dont see much benefit in context switching apart from the fact that it's cool to own one ... my 2 cents.
I was lost on this one as well. So I made a TODO from an email. Removed that task, modified my list with what I wanted and then just minimized it. It's always in my gmail now, so it's not perfect but atleast I know how to open the window
I switched from Linux to Mac last month. Definitely love OS X: I spent way less time tweaking the machine, so more time is put into real work. Everything works perfect.

P.S. Anyone noticed the trend that apps developed on a Mac tends to be prettier and less clutter than those dev'ed on a Windows? I think OS X must be part of the reason for this ...
What sort of things do you like about it compared to Amazon and Google's offerings?
I agree, that kind of talk is creepy.
bee brains could have neural nets that produce similar output as the quantum physics models

I think that's the point of the article. Bee brains couldn't with only a few million neurons. That's not to say she is right.
You can actually ask me more about Buddhism. In my country, we have actually 4 different main religions: Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, and Christianity. Most of the Chinese here believe in Buddhism. Here, Buddhism is really a religion.

But, I agree with what you have said. You can actually extend what you believe or refuse what you don't believe in basically every religions as long as you "believe" that you are actually doing the right thing.

So, is "belief" actually a religion?
One point from the article: RDBMSs do not represent data in the same way as in the real world.

This is a horrible misconception. In fact, CouchDB et al. store data like we do in the real world but they certainly do not represent data as it is in the real world. That crown goes to RDBMSs. Suppose we have two physical records of a company's logo. Then the company logo changes but only one of the records is updated. That kind of error took place because the physical storage model (two places) did not correspond to the data model (one entity). That is where RDBMSs shine and CouchDB fails. RDBMSs allow data relations to be expressed and then have the DB enforce these relations. This incurrs some overhead (and I suspect, makes most web programmers think that RDBMSs are "old school") but in most cases, this overhead is paid for several times over in future data integrity.
I tell people I watch jerry springer and wait for the mail for the part of the day I am not asleep.
I'm with you. I've been using PC's since we got a single desktop PC in elementary school. So I'm VERY comfortable using Windows.

I still can't stop feeling that I'm wasting too much time yak-shaving with it though. And the fact that all of my programmer buddies have switched to MacBooks (and half of them own iPhones) that I'm missing out on something big.

Being a relatively young entrepreneur, money is still the deciding factor. It would take quite a bit to convince me to save above and beyond the price of a PC, and aim for a Mac.
I usually just roll with "Im a computer programmer". That seems to work.
A lot of people already have. The fact that school voucher systems and charter schools exist in some areas is testament to their heroic effort. However, it is too little and maybe too late.
If you approach your management independently will they negotiate a custom agreement with you or will they laugh? If collective bargaining is your only option it makes sense to maximize the union's leverage and to help steer the union in the proper direction.
You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother.

-- Albert Einstein
I just realized what the true inverse of turtles all the way down is:

"You're in the desert, you see a tortoise lying on its back, struggling, and you're not helping -- why is that?"
Twitter fixes TwitterFon because Apple takes too long
He's hoping to coin a phrase like "tipping point" and turn it into a best-seller.

(I don't like it, either, but it does make sense from a marketing perspective)
Yeah, what's the deal with home and end! I just got a mac and I'm still trying to get to the begining and ends of lines. Any solutions?

Also why does iPhoto open every time I connect my iPhone? That's pretty annoying.
Two techniques I've used in the past:

1) Figure out the "regular" job that is most directly related to what your startup does and say you do that. For example, I have largely been involved with ad supported startups, so most of my relatives think I work at an ad agency.

2) If you have big clients, partners or vendors that you think your relatives have heard of you can say something like, "I work with company X". The fact that you have some relationship with a company they have heard of is typically good enough for them to think you are doing something right.

That being said, your non-technical family members are also a great audience on which to practice refining your pitch. If you can figure out how to explain what your startup does to your family, then you can surely explain it to users, clients, investors, etc.
Just to put it into context, one reason U.S. auto makers are in pretty bad shape because of the strong unionization of U.S. auto workers. Their joint negotiation was powerful enough to force the companies into deals that are now really starting to hurt.

Of course, I don't blame the unions completely for the sorry state of the industry, but it is silly to ignore that aspect.
Better than trying to explain what you're doing with a PhD.
> I assumed (an uninformed assumption mind you) made it compatible with other OSI-approved licenses.

In the genreral case, you can't just assume that one OSI-approved license will be compatible with another.

Back to this license, the Ms-PL. Term 3(D) says "If you distribute any portion of the software in source code form, you may do so only under this license". In other words you can't dual license it under another license. This means that I can't take some code licensed under Ms-PL, other code licensed under the GPL, add my own code, and publish the result; i.e. the Ms-PL is incompatible with the GPL.

It's my opinion that this is a deliberate incompatibility. When the Ms-PL was undergoing OSI approval process, I asked Microsoft's lawyer whether it was intended that the Ms-PL be compatible with the GPL, and he refused to give a straight answer.
A quick googling turns up:

http://www.starryhope.com/tech/2006/mac-os-x-home-and-end-ke...

Yeah, something that should work by default, but it is at least fixable.
fill it with commonly understandable phrases: i work in a new "small business" as a "computer programmer" who does some "other stuff" too
Curious. What's your opinion of Perl?
Functional management will actually encourage unions, since it's easier to deal with your employees as one entity, rather than in bits and pieces. A good union will also help to keep your workplace safe, employees happy, etc. etc.

Also note that it's hard to start up a union if you don't already have one, since a hostile management will tend to sack anyone who looks like they might start getting organised, as well as choking off channels of communication.
Anything by Van Tharp. He trains traders at all levels for a living. My personal favorite is "Trade Your Way to Financial Freedom".
> Device loss can be mitigated by security policies (remote wipe and wipe on N bad passwords) and basic executive training on what to do in the event of a loss or theft.

Nope - device loss can't be mitigated by any post-loss action. At best, you can try to reduce data lose, actually exposure, but only to folks who don't know what they've "found".

Any wipe scheme depends on the device continuing to be run under the original programming. If the KGB gets Obama's cell, they pull the storage devices and start looking at them with their own tools, completely circumventing any "wipe" scheme.

BTW - "wipe on N bad passwords" can enable a denial of service attack....
What is the threshold?
I didn't switch from Linux to the Mac but I did buy a mac(book pro 17") because I got sick of my Linux laptop not being able to connect to encrypted wifi and having suspend/restore break randomly.

I do about 70% development on Linux and the rest on the Mac. I'm really happy with my Mac now, but it did take a long time to get used to it. Particularly getting the keyboard to work reasonably similar to Linux so I didn't have to totally retrain my fingers for Emacs, and getting GUI Emacs (Carbon) to use the same keymappings as Emacs in the terminal. (Doublekey helps with that.) Other things that are still irritating are the impossibility of focus-follows-mouse and the single menu bar at the top of the screen.

Anyway, I'm really happy with the Mac now and it's great how nice things like fonts, functioning accelerated video drivers, and general work-out-of-the-box-ness are. I'd definitely buy another.
I use CocoaMySQL, Dreamweaver, and Transmit.