skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd like to complain about people who hold things up by complaining about people that complain. It's about time something was done about it.
It isn't a matter of comparing like for like; that isn't the problem. The problem is that the single cheapest Mac laptop is $1000. If all you're doing is web and email, you may not need a Core i5 or SSD. You can get a PC laptop which is more than fast enough for Mom usage for less than half that price, especially if you put Ubuntu on it and don't have to run antivirus.
Take Your Dog To The Office And Stress Less
Is the number of polls getting out of hand? Yes and no. I think there was a flood of them in the past 48-72 hours but that should die as the most common questions get answered. From my standpoint its an easy way to gain statistics on HN users, however it may also be the way to quick karma as you mention. I created a CS degree poll in the last 24 hours not for karma whoring but because I'm questioning my own education and lack of theoretical foundation, finding out whether that attributed to success or negatively impacted members here is helping me on the road forward.
Rather the KobiYashi Maru of robotics, no?

Were this a real battle (to the death?) between real fully-formed AIs, such hacking should be expected. So what you did was in-part assisting your bot. But it was still cheating. ;) (Had I done the same and been caught I would've been expelled. Kudos for being lucky and/or having an understanding teacher. And for sticking to your design in the first place, despite ultimately cheating.)

I wonder if you would've been caught had you not put the terminal spam in there.... Or would the other students kept on scratching their heads and blaming their own borrowed designs?
We played on a computer in the classroom. Just modified the one on that computer.
1969 - Fortran and APL on an IBM 1130.
Plus minecraft constructions. Lots of video games now let you create and share. My son is building automatic doors and creeper traps at the age when I was making sprite data by hand and making it move across the screen using basic
I've not really noticed many on the front page up until the last week. Temporary boom, it'll go back down soon enough.
GoCardless is built on top of the Direct Debit scheme, which is pretty great.

Some details about DD here:

https://gocardless.com/direct_debit

Fun fact: Without scaremongering, as I'm certain it happens once in a blue moon, technically speaking someone can ask for some or all of their money back from their bank without even talking to you whenever they want and GoCardless will give it to them.

But as I said, blue moon. I did this to an electricity company that had failed to close my account 3 times, walked into the bank, asked for 6 months DD payments back. Bank did it with no quibbles.
Our Culture of Exclusion (or, why I'm not at JSConf this year)
You can get sued for anything. Whether or not the lawsuit has merit or not is another matter. I think that's the key here. Would you be liable give my hypothetical scenario?
> The real enemies here are insecure defaults & lack of education around how & why to control personal information online.

The real enemy here is the rapist. Among the measures that a person can take to avoid being the victim of a crime, not checking in on social media sites is pretty low. The fact is that crime is generally very low tech. Cyber-rapists are exceedingly rare. If you're going to opt out because you fear this type of threat, you might as well not leave your underground bunker.
Long time Windows user and developer, switched to OSX a few years back, now can't imagine working without it. Love the terminal access to Unixy stuff. Running Windows in Parallels for the remaining Windows only software. As I tell people, my MacBook Pro is the best Windows laptop I've ever owned.
Windows on the desktop. Android on the phone.

I don't have the time to dork around in Linux as I once did (never was that great at it) and while I'd like to take OSX for a spin I'm a penny pitcher so I stick with Windows at home. I'm happy with it.
What gets me.. is that i did this poll and it just dropped! http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3781723
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I'm just a troll
Which may be too tautological to be useful

Depends on what you need it to be useful for.

Understanding the root problems in a philosophical sense? Maybe not.

A rough guide for where to put a factory, do business with, startup ideas? Useful.
I did get to meet a lot of entrepreneurs there... but I knew her, so I said hello.

I let the entrepreneur finish b/c I didn't want to interrupt and it was only two min anyway.
yes, precisely. they want to use it to create other things. drawing, writing, presentations - they find it interesting. programming? not so. why? i don't know. i tend to think it's the tools, or the complexity of it all. on the second though, i think they all got too used to the instant gratification, in other words, the more time it takes to get the result, the less interesting/inspiring it becomes. and it kind of brings us back to the first point - tools are too complicated... :)
disclaimer: I have an ongoing one (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3788303)

I find both the polls, their results (even considering HN is a very biased sample) and, most of all, the discussions they generate very interesting. When the kind of smart people who comes here debate, I always end up enlightened.
Started with QBasic in school. Currently J2EE.
E-paper device from LG
Working at Pivotal Labs, A New Way of Thinking
Europe according to TechCrunch
My first language was 360 Assembler in 1974. A different time and space.
I guess your value system is just different than mine and a lot of other people who feel like decisions should not just be made on practical expediency.
"If you're a nobody, no investor wants to talk to you."

Well, sure if you go in with the pitch that you are, in fact, a nobody, then I'd certainly be less interested. Who wants to talk to someone who isn't confident that what they're doing with their time is awesome? Tell me why you're awesome... and if you're in and around NYC, I'd be happy to make some time.
Yup. Not new at all. MVC has always been able to automatically change it's output based on the Accept header that was passed in on the request. MVC has always been able to be self hosted in something like a console application or windows service so you didn't have to use IIS.

Oh wait, no it doesn't. I guess you could say this is a completely new product that uses a lot of the same patterns as MVC, but ultimately does things very differently.
Well, yeah. Our joints are mechanical.

(Note that I am agreeing with the notion that our bodies wear out, as do all machines. I am not endorsing the parent post's claims about shoes being better for running.)
The ten points bothers me.

How, for example, did this garner ten points?
http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=Shodiix

I find it really strange that in the space of an hour, three posts get ten points and are all killed. The one I point to is particularly troubling because I have never seen something like that ever get ten points here. And the person who posted that left a "?" as a comment on my submission and it was then killed.
The first bit of programming I did was to enter a listing for a bomber game on the zx81. This must have been around 1981 or 1982, so I would have been 5 or 6. Amazingly, thanks to the power of google, I think I have tracked down the listing; it is the (surprisingly concise) game called Bombs Away:

http://amigan.1emu.net/aw/not30.txt

110 LET A=1

120 LET B=0

130 LET S=B

140 FOR I=B TO 19

150 PRINT AT 9,I;"g" (graphics G)

160 PRINT AT 10,I;"a" (graphics A)

170 NEXT I

180 PRINT AT A,B;" " (space)

190 LET B=B+1

200 IF B<22 THEN GOTO 240

210 LET A=A+1

220 PRINT AT S,B-1;" " (space)

230 LET B=0

240 PRINT AT A,B;">"

250 IF A=9 AND B=19 THEN STOP

260 PRINT AT A,B+1;

270 IF PEEK(PEEK 16398+256*PEEK 16399)=137 THEN STOP

280 IF S=0 THEN GOTO 400

290 PRINT AT S,B-1;" " (space)

300 IF S=9 THEN GOTO 340

310 LET S=S+1

320 PRINT AT S,B;"3" (graphics 3)

330 GOTO 180

340 LET S=0

400 IF INKEY$="F" THEN LET S=A

405 GOTO 180
Doubtlessly, this successful migration to desktop Linux must have been very difficult, costly, and disruptive. The upfront costs of migration surely exceed what it would have cost the city to stay on Windows for one or two more waves of upgrades. The important question is: were these upfront costs & multi-year effort worth it?

The data presented in the article provides compelling evidence that the answer is yes -- i.e., the migration's recurring savings exceed its upfront costs:

* The city no longer has to pay for license upgrades, thereby eliminating a major recurring cost forever -- savings of nearly 3 million pounds every three to four years, according to the article. That's huge.

* The city no longer has to upgrade desktop software or hardware as frequently, reducing another recurring cost forever -- also huge.

* Most surprisingly, the city claims its IT department is fielding considerably fewer user complaints with Linux than with Windows, reducing another major cost forever. Labor-intensive IT support is always the costliest component of operating a corporate desktop, so that's also huge.

If the recurring cost savings claimed by the city of Munich are accurate, every budget-strapped city in the planet should be seriously considering this kind of migration to desktop Linux. It makes a lot of sense purely from a financial standpoint.

[UPDATE: I toned down the language and corrected key figures, which were off by an order of magnitude due to an incorrect reading of the article. I also materially changed the bullet point regarding support costs, as the article itself was slightly misleading on the matter. THANK YOU Xylakant and luser001 for pointing out my errors!]
Online PR Distribution
Studies of Japan and Social Media
I don't have a problem with polls, per se, but the ones coming up lately seem totally pointless. "What kind of OS do you use" is most often the opener for the Eternal Argument. Plus we're talking about a fraction of a fraction of an already small community, self-selected so those who want to assert that their OS (or whatever) is The Best are much more likely to comment. It might be better phrased "what OS are HN users most passionate about?"

Anyway no one's putting a gun to my head and making me read it, so carry on. :)
ubuntu 11.10
Check out Quill – Jekyll in Node.js.

I've been contributing to the project and it is pretty slick so far. http://github.com/theycallmeswift/quill
Well, the asylum used to largely be a state run enterprise, but it was put on the open market after some friends of the inmates pointed out how expensive and badly run it was.

Then the inmates bought all the shares.
Thanks everyone! I've been reading HN for a long time now and love it! I've messed around with codecademy a bit but was unmoved. I'm pursuing the "solve a problem" route now and as soon as I have something half decent written I'll throw it up on github!
They made the move around 2008 or so.
What did you use for wrist supports? If you can share any specific products it would be greatly appreciated.
An Essay on the New Aesthetic
Tiny Issue - Open Source Issue Tracker
haha... not the first time I've heard it and it never ceases to be hilarious.
Wow, this brings back memories. I was a total OS/2-Head until about 1993 or 1994 when I got both an Yggdrasil Linux CD for my 486, and, a NeXTCube; and from there, ended up a Unix fan.

The problem with installation, was that all development was done on PS/2s. The developers never did much testing on non-MCA (MicroChannel Architecture, a pre-PCI intelligent bus design) hardware.

That is why, for instance, when installing OS.2 2.0 and 2.1 on certain PCs you had to disable the CPUs L2 cache by using the legacy "non-turbo" mode and do part of the installation in 8Mhz AT mode; otherwise the installer would crash and you wouldn't know why.

I think a lot of OS/2 users went to Linux and their disgust for MS' admitted astro-turfing and plain outright lying, fueled Linux adoption.

ADD: OS/2 ran well in 32MB and flew in anything more than that. Unfortunately at that time, 32MB was hundreds of dollars, and some systems couldn't even take that much RAM.
Never used OS/2, so maybe you can clarify this for me:

I thought that one of the limitations of OS/2 was that while it could run DOS programs, it could only run one DOS program at a time (in addition to a number of native ones). Is that correct?
From the comments, you can reprint the ticket with a receipt/laser printer and take pictures of the copy, losing the artifacts. Depends on the length of trouble you would want to go through to reproduce a hard copy document.
EDIT: Re-read question. Total monthly downloads are several thousand a month. Total downloads overall are over 1 million.

Agreed with previous sentiments. Are these overall or monthly figures you are wanting?

My personal experience:

Uploaded my first homebrew app in October 2009. Released a few others between then and now. The original app on the Google Play (Android Market) was released as a pay version as well as a free (ads) version. The free version is almost past 700K downloads while the pay version has done a small fraction of that (respectable, but not life changing).

Overall counts across all my apps and all markets (Amazon, Gooogle, Nook), total app downloads (free and pay combined) is over 1 million.

These apps are made by one person (me). For my next app, I'm contracting out the graphics in order to try to step things up a notch as I branch out into the iOS world.

Here are some links to the apps:
Google Play: http://goo.gl/7iXKB
Amazon: http://goo.gl/kyyGs
Nook (B&N): http://goo.gl/gkQZk
The Jobs example is pretty strange. He was already a gazillionaire by the time he returned to Apple a second time, so that's not really much of a case study in achieving success.

His initial success was not really a nose-to-the-grindstone kind. He spent some years bouncing between part-time college, traveling to India to seek enlightenment, working on and off at Atari (where he paid Woz to do some of that work for him!), doing some LSD, miscellaneous other stuff. Then co-founded a company with Woz that got big within about a year.

After that he seems to have developed perfectionist workaholic kind of habits, which is an odd case of a slacker who made it big, and then became hard-working. Strange trajectory.
They will certainly wear out faster without shoes, no matter what you're running on.

Is that a conclusion based on evidence, or a belief based on intuition? I have seen studies that support "barefoot" running (where the feet may not actually be barefoot, but have hard, protective coverings) based on less accumulated injuries, and based on bio-mechanical arguments on force dissipation.
Yep, direct debit is great (I'm originally from the UK). The US doesn't really seem to have an equivalent, though- you can do direct transactions on a checking account by giving those details to a provider, but then you end up having to maintain a balance with that provider (e.g. Dwolla). Pretty awkward.
Bitcoin, the City traders' anarchic new toy
Yahoo's Mojito is Now Open Source
Why would Y Combinator want to IPO? What possible good could it bring?
whats the definition of web-scale?
I had some colleagues use the alpha of a new shiny thing the company was building. But none of them ever reported bugs to the bug tracker, because it was "too complicated and nothing ever happened". So the company had someone flying down to our offices and do a presentation on how the (homegrown) bug tracker works. It was a simple, 18-step process just to file a bug... turned out, it was even worse for developers handling those bugs. Yet, people pointing that out where looked at like the were from mars :/.
Once we can have polls inside of comments inside of polls, then things will be out of hand.

Otherwise, it's just people trying to take a temperature. It doesn't bother me, as the polls I notice are typically in some way relevant to the community at large.
i like checking me against
HTML5 Scorecard: The New iPad and iOS 5.1 — A Mixed Bag
Are you being deliberately obtuse? Popular Reddit memes are "not always good"* because of their frequency and continuous presence. April Fools is once a year and [apparently] popular on HN, you can't seriously compare that to the sort of memes that "infest" Reddit.

* to some. I don't mind them, personally. And they're easy enough to avoid--as soon as I log in and I get my personal programming/comp.sci/math/netsec related subreddits, my personal Reddit frontpage is about as good as HN, with the exception that one of the two does not constantly shit on the other at every possible opportunity (seriously, and you say April Fools is "played out").
If the rumors outlined in the Ars article are true, there will be nothing to subsidize -- the console manuf are going for the Nintendo model after having their asses fed to them for 5 years while Nintendo turned a profit on 2-year old tech from launch.

It makes the most sense for Microsoft to go the compatibility-route a la Apple and iOS -- Apple proves it works, Middleware companies will love it (Crytek, Unreal, Unigen) and gamers won't need to skip a beat.
I think it's gotten significantly better as time goes on. Going back to the SNES/Genesis days, ports (either direction) would often be an entirely different code base, so it'd be the same game only in spirit.

I also don't recall very many PSX/DC/N64 --> PC ports. MGS and FF7 would have been some of the few that I remember from those days.

It's definitely better today than it was 10 years ago.
IOS Text Editor Roundup
Probably depends on how you run. If you're a forefoot striker, running on asphalt is probably better than running on grass, because the vast majority of the impact will be absorbed by the calf/foot muscles. The danger from stepping in a hole or tripping over an object hidden in the grass probably outweighs the minimal increase in impact from running on concrete (not that either of these should actually be a significant danger).

On the other hand, if you're a heel striker, the reduction in impact might be worth it. Stomping on concrete with your heels sends a lot of force through your ankles and knees.
Ashton Kutcher 'to star in Steve Jobs biopic'
RIP Caballo Blanco. Chris Mcdougal's tweet gives a fitting tribute to him, from his id @McDougallChris :

"caballo had the only funeral he would have wanted: his friends spent days running in the wilderness in his honor."
> my computer literally dies with Mac OS X. Now this is all with VirtualBox, which I suspect isn't the best all around VM application.

Asked and answered. I like VirtualBox - the price is right for when I just need to run an app or two on rare occasion - but it certainly isn't the most stable or least OS-crashing VM I've ever used.
Your boss had a good point. At some point, users become savvy to the whole thing and stop complaining and start trying to fix it on their own.

It starts with 'Bobby in accounting told me to X when Y happens' and snowballs from there.

It's horrible on productivity and when IT finally does try to fix it, it's often much, much worse. (Though, when the user gets it right, IT doesn't have to fix it after all.)

It's also horrible on morale.
We have done this for many of our projects and saved a lot of money and time. And actually it had only a marginal effect on our site statistics compared to the efforts we had to put into testing and developing for IE.
Well, I've learned a lot from the various links that have been thrown around (and expect to learn more when I get around to reading more of them than I have), so I don't think it's entirely unproductive. I agree these posts are "Not Hacker News", but not for their content, or for their "unproductive discussions", but for bringing out the side of HN members for whom disagreement ==> downvote, and disagreement-from-majority-view ==> downvote-to-oblivion. It's unpleasant to witness and I have enough outlets for my unpleasant-reality-seeking desires; HN is nice because it's still not overall unpleasant like for instance Reddit.
I chose the 500k+ range, because that's what one of my apps (main project, not side project) gets, but that is the exception. The answer to "is the money good?" should also be obvious.

However, the norm for me, for personal side-project apps is between 5k and 100k downloads per month. Income is also decent. A few things I keep in mind whenever I start working on a new app:

- am I sure the target is big enough for that app ? If not, do I really love the idea enough so that I would develop it just for my personal pleasure?

- what are the other apps in that area ? What are they missing ? If all of them are super-complex, can i make a simple one? Or the other way around ? Can I make it better than everything else ?

- Are there other ways of marketing my apps than just by counting on the Google Play search results ? If yes, how hard would it be to pursue them? Is it worth my time?

- If I want to build a game of a genre that doesn't exist yet, how are those type of games doing on the PC ? Would the game be appropriate for a touch-style input ?

Basically, all of the projects I've built eventually generated enough income to cover my development time (even if it took over a year). But there were plenty of them that I just didn't start developing because the answer to one of those question was just.. "NO".
In my experience this hasn't been true of (some distributions of) Linux in several years. I've talked to a lot of people who hold this opinion and they generally haven't tried Linux in 5+ years.
I think the abundance of polls underlines a general appreciation of the HN crowd.

I think most of us would agree that the quality of participants (and their participations) here on HN is a refreshing change from the rest of online communities (Ya, I know, it was better before, quality degrading, yada yada yada, how original).

The point is, we generally like the people here and we want to know more, profile more (doesn't it fit with the mindset of the community?). This is why we care about favorite languages, primary OS, (expect a favorite browser poll soon) and the sort.

In a way, every poll results from people wanting to know, what tools do all theses cool people use/prefer/promote ...
How can I get a ticket to the magical land of milk and honey you come from, where C++ performs well on all architectures without extra work?

As other posters have mentioned, weird processors (notably freaks like the Cell) can require a lot of knowledge of the instruction set and chip quirks (see http://www.insomniacgames.com/category/research-development/ for a lot of good info on this), even requiring you to throw away your nice virtual object hierarchies and things to make the SPUs happy ( http://www.insomniacgames.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/GDC... ).

Also, just because a compiler targets an architecture doesn't mean that it can optimize code for it worth a damn.

EDIT: oh god it may even lie about its program counter ( http://www.insomniacgames.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/gdc... )
Anyone have recommendations/guidelines on checking your posture and setup? I had a friend who worked at Apple and said they had people who could come by and review your desk setup for proper posture, etc. I wish there was an equivalent for people working out of their home office.