skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Frankly, I would say just the opposite. If your needs are minimal, go with windows. If you need more, linux is a good choice. You will never get a decent terminal in windows or good support for some programming languages (such as python).

You are right with Excel although. However, much of the "power" of Excel is really just needed because people are overusing it. Stop making "databases" out of Excel sheets and implement good data analytics system on the server and you'll see that libreoffice is more than enough.
I'm 28 but I've been programming for almost 20 years. Started by retyping BASIC from books taken out from the public library in 5th grade. Hooked since then.

Forgot to mention: got support via a BBS that was hosted by the local school district, ah SEDNet.
My employer thinks that lots of people will switch to using remote `cloud-based' applications. Including web-browser based, but also using custom-clients. But then, they are in the business of selling those remote app software.
Let's assume for a moment the majority of nosql supporters are CS dropouts. That doesn't say the majority of CS dropouts are supporters of nosql. You are falling for the base rate fallacy. That's exactly the kind of highly relevant concepts I've never seen taught for CS. Thanks.

While we are at it, probability theory should have a much stronger emphasis than calculus for CS. It's only seen on graduate CS on most universities. In my uni, we had 2.5 years of calculus and a miserable .5yr stats/probability course, wich was mostly stats and it was one of the less emphasized subjects. Why is it like that? I bet because engineering (and mainstream math) focus is somewhere else.
If you wanted to program a VIC-20, you opened the manual, read the preface, which starts like this:

"You are about to meet friendly computer! Friendly in price,
friendly in size, to use and learn on experience.
Most important you don't have to be computer
programmer, or even typist, to use it!

If you're first time computerist, this manual will provide an
excellent introduction to computing. Unlike most instruction
manuals, you don't have to read through this whole book to get
to the "good stuff." After reading Chapter (GETTING
STARTED), you can go directly to chapter that interests you
and start reading. If you're interested in animation turn to
Chapter 4. If you like music, try Chapter 5.

The first page of each chapter has sample program to start
you off. Just type the program exactly as shown ("Try Typing
This Program") and see what happens. The rest of the chapter
explains what you did, and shows how to do more. Chapter
summarizes some important programming concepts, and
explains the techniques used in sample programs."

(The manual was the baby of Michael S. Tomczyk, who wanted to strongly focus on the "user friendly" aspect of the VIC, including for programming)

Then you'd turn to chapter one, and start typing in the first example program:

1 PRINT "VIC20"
2 GOTO 1

You then had an approximately 150 additional pages explaining how to use the machine that for the most part assumed that "use" meant "program" - only a tiny fraction of the manual dealt with non-programming related activities. My dad learnt BASIC from that manual, and I learnt BASIC from him and went on to improve my skills with nothing but the Commodore 64 manual when we upgraded. Commodore continued that tradition with the Amiga, up until AmigaOS 2.04 (which came with ARexx, but not AmigaBASIC) but pushed it far less on the Amiga than on its 8-bit machines.

That's a large part of the difference: If you bought most home computers back then, and _especially_ Commodore machines, you got programming showed in your face - User was equated with programmer. And though a lot of people learnt how to load games and didn't bother with programming, the threshold to actually finding something exciting in programming was far lower.

I'm not suggesting we go back to the days where people get a BASIC prompt on starting a machine, but surfacing scripting capabilities for automation more, for example, would make a big difference.

Consider even something as trivial as macro recording that displays what it records and give people an easy way of modifying it, instead of hiding it "behind the scenes".

A lot people are programmers today because the plumbing was out in plain view and some of us found it fascinating and started figuring out what it did. But today the plumbing tends to be hidden and people go "magic. got it."
I've a little how-to written up for putting together a nice FreeBSD desktop system. You may want to check it out: http://cooltrainer.org/2012/01/02/a-freebsd-9-desktop-how-to...

FreeBSD has been my go-to desktop OS since 2005 or so, since giving up on OS X post-Tiger.
Homeland Security Uses Wartime Mega-Camera to Watch Border
Just for curiosity: Did you also have a look at PyGame? If yes, how does it compare to Processing?
OK, so you want to give cash to some guy who will give you Bitcoins in exchange. But then he's stuck with cash that he can't move out of the country, so he has to charge very high fees if he's willing to deal at all.
According to a comment from Eric Schmidt, Google makes enough money from Android to pay for its development and more. Apple takes 50% of revenue from ads shown on iOS devices. On Android, Google gets to keep 100%. Google can afford to give its revenue from the Play Store (terrible name) to the wireless carriers because it's making so much more money on ads than it does on iPhone and iPad. Apple has made iOS so inhospitable for Google that it is more financially advantageous for Google to maintain Android.

The idea that Google doesn't care about revenue is an interesting theory, but totally wrong.
Compiling Clang on Windows
State of the App Store: Weather Apps
I have tried powershell. The fact that you can't copy or paste in a standard way suggests a pretty half-assed implementation to me.
I was working in Monroeville, PA doing FORTRAN at Westinghouse. I didn't really consider that programming though. Got into Ruby, found that the web didnt regulate my every move. Quit my job to learn full time and haven't looked back.
BBM Lucu – Kumpulan Humor Blackberry Messenger
BBM Lucu – Kumpulan Humor Blackberry Messenger | halo sobat kahar ngeblog, postingan kali ini sedikit berbeda nih, aku tujukan untuk sobat yang lagi galau, untuk menghilangkan kegalauannya, atau untuk sobat yang lagi bersedih, supaya bisa ketawa, minimal bisa senyum habis baca postingan ini, ayo kitangakak bersama gan ,, haha, silakan membaca BBM Lucu ini [...]
I just had it happen to a submission of mine. Which was pointing out an embarrassing flaw from Google. Oddly, I also saw another submission that was just SPAM that garnered ten points too. So something is screwy here. Maybe someone has hacked a way to add ten points to submissions and those are being killed in the crossfire?
"... and reduced user complaints"

When I hear that metric I think of a homegrown app that was supposed to upload files from PeeCees to the company's mainframe. At the annual IT meeting ...

"And since implementing change foo and bar in the system user complaints to the special helpdesk have declined 90% .."

My boss stood up [1] "That's because the users got tired of calling and not having anything fixed. It's still broken."

The manager/presenter shot daggers at Eric [1]. Cross-hall verbal sniping started. Entertaining.

[1] He was retiring in a few months.
On the other hand, lots more people are creating videos (for youtube et al) than ever before.
When I was 12 or 13 (around the same time as above), I was told I was getting something "very special" for Christmas. I thought it was a drumset, and I was PSYCHED. Turns out it was a Sony CLIÉ.

Still though, it was pretty nice. I still remember trying to figure out how to develop games for it. My household didn't have the internet at the time and my access to the library was limited (we lived on a farm), so in the end I was just a 13 year old who had a machine with all of his classmates' names and birthdays organized on it.

What a time to be alive.
I haven't tried it out just yet, but you should certainly keep working on it. Great idea!
A few years back (around 2008, maybe) I stumbled upon an ATM that had failed to boot all the way and was pretty surprised that it was running OS/2 (and a Rexx script). This was for Brazil's largest bank (Banco do Brasil). Since then I think they've moved to Linux.
What is this "crappy" memory management of OS X that you speak of? When it comes to memory management, OS X is definitely among the best from my 14 years of experience with modern operating systems. For what it's worth, I regularly run two VMs in VirtualBox totalling just over 2gb of guest RAM allowance, on a 4gb machine running 10.6.8, and I don't suffer problems with this. Users of 10.7 claim that it's a wee bit hungrier than 10.6, though I still can't recall the last time I saw anything else than "Swap used: 0 byte" in the Activity Monitor.
The difference is how easy it is to find the information about what to do.

Someone totally new won't know what notepad is, won't know what html is, and won't know how to make the browser show it, and the manual that came with his computer will say nothing about it.

You start a browser, there's no hint what to do. You start searching for "how to make a web page" and you get a bewildering array of information, some of which are totally over-engineered.

On the other hand hooked up a VIC-20 or C-64, opened the manual, and what stared you in the face in the first chapter was your first program.
Sometimes A**holes Make Good Products
Check out Xshell 4. It's a perfectly adequate PuTTY alternative with tabbing and fully re-sizeable windows.
PHP developer since January 1999.
Types of Tests
Calculated 6 years out in my head only to discover this :/

DO I ROUND UP OR DOWN!?
I started with Basic on an Apple ][, followed by 6502 assembly. In community college, Pascal, Fortran and C. At some point in university,C++,APL, Matlab and Perl4. As well, shell scripting (including awk and sed), and Perl5 once it became widespread. Oh, also Java, Scheme and 68k assembly. Many of these were for coursework and I would not use again. Python at some point in my professional career. These days I use Python and/or shell scripting most of the time, followed by C (and C++ as a necessary evil). I'm still hoping to have a long lasting career without having to suffer Java professionally.
JZ Publish/Subscribe jQuery Plugin Version 1.3 Released
I think how long you are programming should start with the time when you first got paid / have customer for your development , all before is learning but IMHO there is huge difference

myself , started when I was 14 , got paid to program when I was 16 , closing to 30 years of programming , this year
Long time Windows user, went to Linux because Windows just wasn't good anymore... and recently to OS X.
The author claims the Internet is the biggest enemy in this "fear induced culture", due to its ease of spreading FUD.

People have been dealing with sensational headlines for a good while now. However, it may or may not be apparent when you buy your first smartphone that it is broadcasting your location along with all of your social networking posts.

The real enemies here are insecure defaults & lack of education around how & why to control personal information online.
Well, they'll have to change that for 12.04 unless they compile their own!
Is it helpful to make a distinction between managing and funding? I am unconvinced that most people hold that "advertising is socially neutral or good" but rather are left with the question "how else will it be paid for?" I deliberately phrase the question passively - it is easier to ignore the downsides of advertising compared to asking "How will I fund what I value?"

I hesitate to bring up the BBC licence fee because it is still a very consumptive model but as an expat Brit in the USA I often wish I could still pay it for the privilege of accessing the BBC content.
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I haven't seen any evidence that transaction fees will increase. It looks more likely that both block rewards and transaction fees will approach zero, mining will become unprofitable for everyone, and then difficulty will drop.
"Luckily, all of these changes will be purely non-destructive and won't have any negative effects"

That sounds like what economists like to call a "pareto improvement", always a good thing :)
You would use a 15$ usb 3g modem, just like I assume the pwn plug does.
The layout issue is really an intrinsic problem with almost any word processor. Primarily because such programs are not made for page layout work. I've had just as many issues with transferring word files between various platforms ( win <-> mac). If you want your layout to be accurate, only transfer files in PDF with the fonts embedded or just create them in indesign or some other application that is actually designed for layout work.
Today Is National Peanut Butter & Jelly Day
Could Hackathons One Day Become More Popular Than Tech Conferences?
Geotechnical and Structural Foundation Design (2.4 CEUs)
The most likely explanation is that your story was 'flagged' by people. I could understand how this could happen, if you read what you wrote again with the eyes of a stranger you might see that to some people it could come across as spam. You talk about some sites you have built but there is no technical content and it's not clear that it's anything other than an advertisement for your sites.
They moved from Windows NT to Linux in 2006. No wonder it reduced complaints. I'd be far more interested in a migration from Win 7 or Win XP to Linux.
I chose 10+, although I wrote my first program in 1982 when I was fifteen (it was a calculation of Mendel's inheritance series, written in BASIC on an old HP 2000 series). But then I had a break until about 1995 when I started writing code again, first in HTML (so no real programming), then moving to Javascript and eventually server-side Web development. As if anyone cares. :D
"Unlike Windows, OS/2 didn't crash, and it wasn't from a company that had an obnoxious sense of entitlement."

IBM as the corporate model for humility? Quite a thought.
Probably because, so often, it really doesn't mean anything. This phrase is usually put there by HR departments; most hiring managers couldn't care less about an applicant's (lack of formal) education if the person can actually do the work, which, in computer science, is a lot of people with no degrees.
I too am eager to see Google experiment with AuthorRank. Not only should it be much harder to scam, break and abuse, I believe Google is thinking about those things in the creation phase, something I'm not sure occurred with PageRank.
I think I gave up before Warp so only OS/2 2.x -- the API bindings were for BP7 I think. There was a German computer magazine that released a patch for the compiler to output OS/2 executables.
"ReactOS is incomplete" = still needs development attention, which is what I've said - "it also awaits contributions". "user-hostile" as much as Windows has ever been. "Very little actually works on it" is actually more than what works on Linux + Wine, which at it's turn (like many would claim) do cover enough needs already, and that's only the "alpha stage" we're talking about here. ReactOS is getting better and better at the fastest pace relative to the rest of the OSS. You see, even if the ReactOS project had to start right now, it would still have a guaranteed chance of succeeding thanks to it's principles: it is free and open source like any other "free-as-in-speech" option out there, plus the one thing that makes the difference - it avoids alienating the users by breaking the backward binary compatibility for the sake of whatever reason. It offers the Windows simplicity.
April 1?
Poll: How many downloads per month on Android Store ( homemade apps )
How many downloads do you get from your homemade, a.k.a side projects in android store ?

I mean application made by individuals or groups or friends, not companies.

Is the money good ? is it worth it ?

I am asking this because I only see graphs in Google play with huge ranges like 10k to 50k... And that would be a lot of money to earn from a homemade app.
1 - 100
101 - 500
501 - 1000
1001 - 10k
10001 - 50k
50000 - 100k
100001 - 500k
500001+
> Apple takes 50% of revenue from ads shown on iOS devices

Where are you getting that from? They take a 30% cut on iAd, but few apps use that; for other networks, like Google AdMob, they get nothing.
I don't think the original author groks REST particularly well. Fundamentally it's really simple, once you understand the difference between actions and resources.
Take the Money and Run for Office
HomeAway Acquires Spain's Toprural
You're making several anecdotal assumptions based on your personal situation and extrapolating it to the entire target market for the Playstation 4:

1. Everyone has a fast internet connection to the point where downloading a full BluRay disc of content (~25GB) is a non-issue.

2. Everyone has an Internet connection where downloading up to 25GB of content for a single game will not go over their transfer caps, possibly incurring usurious overage charges.

3. Everyone that will buy a Playstation 4 will be well-off enough that they don't need to resell their games after they have played them in order to afford the next game that they want to play (effectively only paying the difference between the original cost and the resale amount).
Is Java the platform of the future? by Mark Little, JBoss Tech Lead
Huh, funny. I always think it's interesting how boot times have increased over the years regardless of Moore's law. My Apple ][ took about 6 seconds to boot, yet a modern PC or Mac takes much longer (and even longer to shutdown, usually)
Subtle Sans: A Free (Pay What You Want) Font
If it went from being on the 1st page straight to the 3rd page (say from #15 to #75 or so), I believe that is an admin kill that any YC founder can do. They don't seem to have particular standards for doing them. If it dropped significantly less than that (say from #15 to #35 or such) that would probably be the net effect of a number of normal users flagging the post. This Ask HN post will probably end up being admin killed (or whatever the right term is) as well, they don't seem to particularly enjoy discussion of what's behind the curtain.
Advertising has less friction than any other possible solution (so far). That simple fact overrides all other concerns because it means stuff gets paid for where otherwise it wouldn't. Any other solution that creates more friction will fail.
Hard to imagine, but true. Largely as a matter of contrast, because Microsoft was _way_ too big for its britches at the time.
Windows 7. With a Linux VM always running.

It used to be OS X, but Lion was a curveball out of nowhere. Enough things don't run on Snow Leopard anymore to make that viable.
OS/2 was one of the first CDROMs I ever owned, when 1x drives were on the market.
Totally agree. You're describing how I started... for a kid wanting to write a web page over 10 years ago you were lucky to have access to lissaexplains.com & w3schools.com. Nowadays you've got stackoverflow, smashing mag network, nettuts etc - not to mention a whole shitload of resources offering free code / designs / icons, ready to roll stuff like wordpress, etc.
Sounds like you think humans aren't animals that have evolved to endure nature's full power. The article made some dumb statements, but the overall idea is sound. Humans can run prey animals into the ground in the same way that the wild dogs of Africa do.
This is an interesting idea. The recent HP LaserJet firmware vulnerability immediately comes to mind.
Besides performance, Intel's compiler offers somewhat better error messages / warnings

(Not affiliated with Intel. Just very satisfied with their performance on numeric-heavy workloads).
Is there any resource explaining how flagging works on HN? To me it has always been a black box. Is there a manual reviewing process involved or is it all automatic?
I got incredibly excited about GoCardless... then I realised that it's UK only. Sigh. I guess the best we have in the US is Dwolla.
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Should I resubmit it?

There's no technical content because it was me sharing a marketing strategy which worked for me (and besides, I'm not a dev). I don't want to come off as a spammer and resub something which already got nuked, but on the other hand, I find it mind boggling that it got nuked in the first place.
Oh those nights! Waiting 15 minutes for a program to load from a tape recorder just to find out that tape is damaged at the end ;-)
So much nonsense? Where? I agree the "only if forced to" sentiment feels misplaced, but that sentence is in the third paragraph out of more than 15. Did you actually finish reading it or stop there? He didn't conclude that humans are the best runners cause herp derp dogs don't run that far unless they have to.

> ask those guys to run 50km for fun

The Indian tribe in born to run play a game similar to soccer. The course is about 20 miles long and the game lasts upwards of 48 solid hours, with players joining and leaving as they feel. So yes, they do it for fun. And we are still talking about present day Africa, this is not millions of years ago. The persistence hunters there have weapons, they have bows and arrows, they will not starve if they don't hunt this particular way. It's their way of life.

Most of the animals have evolved millions of years...and, humans didn't? I think there is so much nonsense in your comment that I cant believe it was published :p
That may well still be so, but these benchmarks did not seem to pick that up, I dont think any of the code was significantly vectorizable anyway....
I didn't read the book but I wonder if what the scientific evidence concludes isn't necessarily the refutation of that equation, but rather that it's more complicated than x-y=z. For example, foods that require a bit more energy to consume such as foods high in fiber.

I mean, calories are just a unit of measure for energy, so if you consume energy, it must go somewhere, either expended or stored in the body. What happens if the body lacks the energy for its processes...doesn't it then burn fat? If you turn fat into energy, that means less mass in the form of fat, with the excess energy dissipating into heat. Isn't this just physics?