skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You seem to neglect the fact Office users routinely experience problems with their own documents and programs. Who never had a Word document that, after some heavy editing, refused to load? I have, many times, since the first version of Word for Windows. I've abandoned Office between 2002 and 2008 and, to my surprise, I still had those problems with Word, Project and Outlook (when I had to clean PST files more than once).

At least with Outlook I solved the problem backing up via IMAP to my own server, who kept the mailbox in a very easy to manage maildir folder. The usual Office workaround - opening with OpenOffice and saving back to Office format - never worked for me after 2008 and backups had to be used.
I posted something similar regarding twitters layout sometime ago http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3310763
I did state that Linux was appropriate for enthusiasts as well as those with minimal needs.

The reason I feel Linux to be appropriate for novices with bare-minimal needs, is that when operating within very narrow constraints the most popular Linux distros are both efficient and safe. For basic functionality, the price can't be beat.

However, hassles really do begin to manifest themselves once users begin to really engage their PC in any number of ways. The vast majority of PC users fall into this category. In other words, they have non-minimal needs but are neither enthusiasts nor developers or otherwise employed in IT full time.

WiFi, external displays, software limitations (e.g. video editing) are only a small number of issues that can and will manifest themselves. For the vast majority of PC users, this constitutes an unacceptable hassle.

Enthusiasts, on the other hand, know what they need and how to fix the above if necessary. I personally think OSX is a superior choice. I value productivity, and don't consider (for instance) mucking around in xorgs to be a good use of my time. However, I respect and understand those who choose *Nix over OSX.

edit : Can one of those who felt this was worthy of downvotes explain what they felt was factually inaccurate?
Seems like an April Fool's Day double bluff. The Golden Spiral is actually often used as the basis for laying out webpages.

A good article I found is here: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/02/09/applying-mathemat...
>8 decimal places

This is a client-specific value, and not a necessary property of the protocol. They can become arbitrarily divisible by simply modifying the client code.

Of course new clients will not be compatible with old clients.
Sorry, but LibreOffice (on OSX at least) has been horrendous for me. When scrolling, cells get repainted in adjacent cells, borders don't show up... There are so many display-related bugs that the entire program was rendered completely useless for me. It has nothing to do with making "databases" out of spreadsheets (I was only using 30 rows!), and everything to do with crappy, buggy interface code.
No more yes. It's either HELL YEAH or no.
"And I'm sad this doesn't even warrant a mention."

Because it's irrelevant. When was the last time you hacked at your OS's kernel?
While that's a good point and a great advantage of YC, did you only try one other investor?

I have met with four VCs/early stage investors in NYC just by responding to blog posts or e-mailing in to contact me posts. I have obviously e-mailed and attempted to contact much more than four, but if you want to meet people the best way to do it is connect with them in a non-generic way via their blog, office hours, whatever means they prefer.

It's obviously not incredibly easy, but every investor knows the importance of dealflow, and it's getting harder to pre-screen for early stage deals (except using YC), so if you are persistent enough I think you can definitely get in front of the right people.
User was equated with programmer

Exactly. That's what I mean by cultural shift.
Apply Mathematics to Web Design
I don't think it was because of the quality of OS/2 itself. It's always the applications that make or break a platform. I remember trying OS/2 Warp and the OS itself did impress me. But most of my favorite games and applications did not run on it. After a while there was nothing that kept my interest so i went back to Windows.
World Of Warcraft License Renewed For Mainland China
Chinese wow enthusiasts can rejoice as they will get to play their favorite MMORPG for another 3 years, thanks to an accord reached between wow creators, Blizzard Entertainment and Netease.com. In an announcement today, both the companies decided to renew the license for mainland China for 3 years following the expiration of current license agreement.
There are many non-traditional routes to get to know investors besides the usual networking events/cold email/calling. I'm friends with the author (Charlie) outside of just the tech world. We became friends a couple of years ago when he tweeted out about needed volunteers for a kayaking program he helped start over at the Brooklyn bridge park (http://www.bbpboathouse.org/ for anyone in NYC that's interested). I had grown up kayaking so was mostly interested in having way to do so in NYC, but also wanted to meet Charlie. When I showed up, there were probably 10 or so people from the NY tech scene that wanted to get some face time with Charlie and over the course of the day he spent 1-on-1 time with everyone. Most only showed up for that one session, but a few have been back from time to time.

This isn't a strategy that you can use to get access to every investor because like Charlie said, it takes time to build up relationships and really get to know people. However, if you do have a few key people you want to get to know, getting to know they outside of the tech scene can be a great way to build a long term relationship. You need to figure out a non-creepy way of doing so (i.e. don't just start showing up where they check in on foursquare (http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2011/03/did-someone-ruin-fou...) but at the end of the day, investors are people and they often have causes/activities that they're passionate about and may overlap with your interest.
A Hard Landing
> and if you want 100% Office comapatability for work by a PC.

I also wanted her to be safe from viruses and malware. I think her time is well worth the price difference.
I wanted to write Wuala.
That's what you get when you have autocorrect enabled on Android phone.
Create web apps in SASS, CoffeeScript, and HAML right from your browser
Atari basic in 1991 when I was 9 (remember simple FOR loops printing "trees"), BASIC with sprites on Yamaha MSX [1] consoles in 1993/1994, grew up on ZX Spectrum clones (Russian Hobbit [2]) since 1992 (including dabbling in Logo), GWBasic since 1993, QBasic a year later, Pascal since 1994 and dabbled in C in 1995. Clearly remember pointers sucking: having to figure out whether to pass in char * or char whether to stick an & in front of the string, etc.

ZX Spectrum was the shit though, as a kid. It had everything you wanted: BEEP command to make tones (so you could make music!) and user-definable 8x8 characters [3]. I remember sitting down with graph paper, drawing a grid of 8x8 spaces, outlining something neat like a helicopter, then tracing out the pixels. Then it was trivial to just "PRINT" your custom characters and make things move around.

1 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSX
2 - http://www.interface1.net/zx/clones/hobbit.html
3 - http://www.worldofspectrum.org/ZXBasicManual/zxmanchap14.htm...
Yeah, doesn't really help his case that the way to go is to sit around overthinking something until you gain the courage to act. The girl he made fun of was acting like she'd read Blink and is no less rational than his decision-making.
Being in rural France myself, I am interested in such open minded companies. Would you mind telling me who it is ? (if there are open positions).
Although I had high school exposure to FORTRAN, I began my life-long love of programming in 1970 at Stony Brook University where I had many programming classes that involved the IBM 360/67 and DEC PDP-10. I learned all the major languages at the time, including Algol, PL/1, FORTRAN IV, Snobol, Basic Assembly Language, and my favorite back then - Lisp, i.e. Maclisp on the PDP-10. My first job was programming for a bank in COBOL, and I continued with commercial data processing for two decades. I bought a TRS-80 in 1978 and programmed it in Basic as well as assembler. Likewise I built and programmed an x86 PC every couple of years since they came out. In the early 1990's, the utility company I worked for switched new projects to Smalltalk. And in the mid 1990's I learned Java. In 1999, I began working for Cycorp in Austin where I returned to lisp, and a bit of Java. Since 2006 I have been programming Java and some JavaScript.

At 60 years old, I look back on a long career of programming - with the most exciting work coming late in life as a founder of a tech startup - Android, websockets, semantic web, natural language processing, and programmable web. Its just great! I wonder what the next couple of decades will bring ...
It doesn't help to hide the path the enemies take. It's built on the real world road system. A solution would be to prevent you from completely blocking the destination, but that requires knowing street data which Google doesn't easily provide.

If you want a more winding path, try some place in the world with more winding roads, like Col de Braus, Lucéram, France or Pikes Peak, Colorado. Golden Gate bridge was also interesting in a winding-like way.
That is so sad :( I feel like I should say thanks because I probably wouldn't have found out about it any other way.
Poll: Is the number of polls getting out of hand on HN?
Is it just me or is it a cheap way to flood the front page for a bit of karma?
It seems like "discouraging or prohibiting work" is the common theme, among both these and extractive institutions. Which may be too tautological to be useful: in cases where work isn't worth doing or is outright prohibited, less work/science/innovation gets done.
There's a wide range of weird floppy sizes. Perhaps one of the best known was sold for the Amstrad PCW - a popular word processing system. (This machine kept CP/M alive during the 80s and into the early 90s.)

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstrad_PCW).

There were others. Here's a 2" drive - yet another failed Sony media format. (What's their ratio of successful : failed formats?)

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Floppy)
Samsung, NTT DoCoMo, et al. cancel plans for LTE chip joint venture
I'm sure it's a great article, but seriously it popped up a screen asking me to enter my email address - BEFORE I read what they were trying to say.

Why would I give them my email? Just a thought for future, if you are associated with the site in any way :-)
And don't forget to factor in the anti-malware package, the extra gigabyte of memory it'll take, the beefier processor it will demand and the beefier battery you'll need to run the whole thing.

No. The Mac is cheaper in the end.
Mod_php means you harm
The guidelines have this to say:

Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Essential Guide To Managing Google Contacts
Just because someone hasn't made it, or hasn't promoted themselves to the point of becoming a 'household' name doesn't mean they don't have wise or intelligent words to type

I agree with you, but I do find the intersection of people and ideas sometimes more interesting that just ideas.
I'll be checking this thread today and would be happy to respond to anyone's feedback or criticism.
Well said. I agree. I work in a 99% Windows IT shop, therefore Windows is the OS that will help me get the most work done in the shortest amount of time. I run Fedora and FreeBSD virtual machines in my spare time, but for most of the day, I need to get things done and Windows 7 helps me accomplish the tasks set before me.
What I do have a problem with is advertisers tracking people across websites, and that all of the major browser vendors are happy to facilitate/encourage this.

I think everyone has a problem with this to a degree. I'm ok with Google giving me personal search results and Facebook recommending me products based on recent wall posts. What I'm not ok with is my Fiancé searching for wedding ideas one night on her laptop at home, and the next day having all the website ads being shown to me from a particular ad network on my iPhone being wedding related while connected to my home WiFi. This really happened to me 2 weeks ago.

I expect a certain amount of privacy, for both her and myself. Nothing needs to be written in law that says that I cannot be tracked, but there should be a moral code on what kinds of ads are displayed and where they will be displayed. If advertiser networks can't develop a system that isn't invasive then they need to go away, via adblock or otherwise.
What primary operating system? I use whatever fits the bill at the moment, and I have enough computers to run 'em all.

Operating systems are a tool. All problems are not nails.
Machine Intelligence Evolution
GrooveShark still free, but now with strings
I asked this question a few days ago but did not get a response. Does anyone know of a company that is working to deliver a platform for the new crowdfunding laws? I have not seen anything that says Kickstart will pivot into it, but I assume that they will, but I would like to know if their are companies working on delivering a platform for it now that it looks to be a reality.
Assets management with Sprockets on Goliath
unfortunately in the selection that I have of 8 (mine), 9 (not mine) and 10 (mine) none are bright enough to grasp the concept of a 'sprite' yet, i'm not even talking about relating code to that sprite. flash/actionscript? ho many steps are there between typing something and actually getting stuff appear on the screen? I've written 2-3 simple swf's, and it caused my head to spin... you think a kid could do it? on their own?...

friend of mine ('owner' of the 9yo), tried some sort of python environment which was supposed to do just that (i think it's this: http://rur-ple.sourceforge.net/en/rur.htm, but not sure), but failed - quite limited in what it does, or get way too complicated if you want to tweak something.

so the whole experiment was a flop really...
Really? I thought everyone here was at the knowledge level where we consider secrecy and security through obscurity to be frown upon.
If you really want it, doesn't linux run windows applications in some compatibility mode? Wine?

Linux is definitely cheaper than Apple.
Fortran in College in the 70's. First programming job in NYC 1983, writing EDX\EDL on the IBM Series/1 and c on the PC.
MagStream is hiring in The Hague, Netherlands. We are looking for both Junior and Senior JavaScript developers.

We are currently building an HTML5 / CSS3 / JavaScript based platform for designing and viewing multimedia magazines. We are a small, dedicated company that works for big companies and other happy clients.

For us motivation and team spirit are more important than experience. We are looking for programmers who enjoy creating new products, learning new tech and solving problems. Join us in building the best publication platform!

Contact me at jan at magstream dot com for more info.
The money that Google pays to Apple has to be all but meaningless. This is a company who has $100 billion in the bank. What does $100 million mean to them?

>Google having Android guarantees a large percent of mobile searches go through Google.

That may be true but what is it worth? From every survey I've seen, consumers are using apps more for search than using browser search. Browser usage is continually going down in the era of mobile apps.
Twitter Guide for Small Business: A Great Read
The difference is based on how people perceive the inequality. If it is seen as being unfairly earned, it severely hurts the incentive to work (through, say, paying lower taxes than poorer people, being awarded business through lobbying or social classes, being born into wealth, exploiting or underpaying the working class, or more generally anything where random Person On The Street couldn't do the same thing).

It doesn't matter what the outcome is, as long as it is seen to be fair. As soon as it isn't, people will resent the system, subvert it or rebel. This is a trait we share with monkeys and elephants, and is possibly the basis of social organization.
Is it just me, or are there large gaps in the possible answers?
Ask HN: Which Cloud Hosting Solution would you recommend for a Young Start Up?
Dear HN Community,

We're a young European start-up planning to release in a few weeks the alpha version of our idea. Right now, we are looking for an appropriate hosting solution. It seems that the scalability/flexibility/price allowed by cloud hosting would represent a good start but, as always, it is difficult to get a general picture of the market and it is even more difficult to read objective reviews/past experiences about the different providers.

It looks like Rackspace (http://www.rackspace.com) and Gandi.net (https://www.gandi.net) both propose interesting cloud hosting solutions. Did you try them or did you try any other company?

As already mentioned, we are based in Europe, our platform will rest on a standard PHP/BackBone.js/MySQL model and we would like to have the possibility to run a fully customizable server (eg, Debian 6 64bit).

Thanks in advance for your input!
Ask HN: Payment Page Conversion Articles
We're about to start redoing the payment screens at the company I work for and I thought it would be a good idea to read some articles on payment page conversion. Looking for any and all relevant material you have stockpiled. Thanks!
Actually it should. Else those team projects would not make sense. I was asked to work in teams repeatedly, and I see this recurring in a lot of classes I stumble upon on the web. Try it yourself, pick a popular computer science class that gives the students the ability to work in teams and try to find a reference to version control.
Poll: What is your primary production server operating system
The server-side counterpart to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3786674

When in doubt, select the one where most of the application logic lives. If you have a dozen cache servers running brand A in front of one application server running brand B, select brand B.
BSD (FreeBSD, NetBSD, etc)
HP/UX
Illumos (and other OpenSolaris derivatives)
zOS
Democracy and its discontents
I learned a lot reading this; in particular the discussion about fragility as it relates to using test-doubles for some collaborators and not for others in a single test instance. However, I absolutely love your conclusion hook as it validates (most of) my testing worldview.

I only say "most of" because I have rarely worked on a team where maximally realistic tests were anything but slow/fragile monstrosities that became stale very quickly.

I <3 isolation testing :)
When you walk into the living room to watch Mad Men, the TV should know it and adjust the in-screen Twitter feed accordingly. It should hear you laughing at Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia and provide suggestions to other shows people laughed at who laughed at the same joke.

That sounds awful. The issue at hand when compared to video games is that television and film are not interactive- people have tried time and time again to make them so, but I honestly think that is a mistake. I don't want to read instant Twitter reactions to Don Draper's latest verbal beat-down of Peggy, I want to watch it. There is nothing wrong with television and film being a one-way experience.

It could come from Apple, but my money is on a startup.

I doubt it, simply because television is an extremely expensive medium. The existing players make it more expensive than it should be, but creating TV shows will always cost a lot. That's why the moves by the likes of Netflix into original programming are particularly fascinating.
Sorry for the noob question:

How does one prevent cheating/hacking with a client-side runtime? Is there a crucial dividing line of functionality between server- and client-side functions? Say perhaps fog of war and client's only get the position updates of visible enemies?

If there are best practices / conventional wisdom, pointers (links) would be appreciated. Thanks!
We're a fast-paced, creative, software startup team working on an exciting new web app (tell you more about that in person).

Unlike most startups that starts with nothing, we're proven and profitable. We have already developed a product, inFlow Inventory, for small businesses that's #1 in its class with 300,000+ installs in 60 countries. But the new product that we are making is even more exciting!

We're looking for world-class talents to join us, kick ass, and have fun here in beautiful Toronto, Canada.

Check us out at http://www.archonsystems.com!

Some of our job benefits:

* top market salary: our target is better than 75% of comparable companies

* stock options

* work from home at least 2 days a week ; flexible office hours

* all-expenses-paid conferences

* 50% subsidized gym memberships and school courses

* top-notch computers ; beautiful office ; awesome people to work with

* make a difference: you'll be the first 10 members of a rapidly growing startup

A sample of our other members background:

* ex Googler @ Silicon Valley who previously graduated #1 in U Waterloo math faculty

* ex developer and designer for Mozilla (organization that made Firefox)

* ex lead developer of another web 2.0 company

* ex marketer who won international marketing competition twice, beating out Fortune 500 companies

* and other great people!

===============================================

WEB APPLICATION DEVELOPER @ Toronto (rails with backbone)

===============================================

As our Web Developer, you will be working on our new Secret Stealth Project. You will be responsible for programming in an entire feature from front-end to back-end. You will also focus on getting the usability and look & feel right in order for our users to have the best experience possible.

You should have:

* Ability to complete an entire feature from HTML/CSS/JS to RoR to SQL

* Care deeply about UI (both usability and look & feel)

* Serious skills with HTML / CSS / Javascript

* Hands-on experience with Ruby on Rails and SQL

* 1+ year of software development experience

* Bachelor degree or higher

Nice to have (but not necessary):

* HTML5, SCSS

* jQuery, jQUI, Backbone, CoffeeScript

* MySQL

* web/graphic design

Other stuff we'd be happy to hear about:

* Experience with business systems (accounting, inventory, CRM, etc.)

* Experience designing and building web applications (not just websites)

* Experience with social media (blogging, Twitter, hardcore Facebooking)

* Open-source or recreational coding projects

Email us your resume at jobs@archonsystems.com!