skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, if you're approaching a senior age, and you've been recognized for your fundamental breakthrough scientific research in computer science - that you made while having fun writing software - maybe you should think also about writing a book, besides perhaps taking that academic position you rightly were offered.
Multi-monitor support in 12.04/gnome3 is unbelievably good. There are tons of horror stories, that I've lived and that I've read, regarding multi-monitor breaking jut when it's most needed (presentation at conferences, etc). This has happened to me in the past.

Now, my system keeps track of my preferences per-configuration, so plugging in the monitor that I mirror display on automatically does mirroring, and plugging in the monitor I use as a secondary monitor automatically does that. Also, just plug and go for multi-monitor.

It's fantastically better than ever before. Anyone else noticed this?
That's why I have Intel GPUs on my machines. And if I need games, I'll buy a PS/3. As long as they are selling hardware or not getting the bad reputation they deserve, ATI and Nvidia won't fix the problem (of not having proper support for open-source drivers). As it is now, I'd never buy an ATI or Nvidia board for 3D.

If one doesn't want the other using their technologies, make the source public under a non-open license and sue the other if they use it. BTW, offer an easy and automated way to build, test and install the kernel modules.
Too bad they ruined it with this redesign. The old one was pleasant and unobtrusive and overall great.

The new one is making seriously consider leaving Gmail...
Infosec Careers Advice from the Pros at Black Hat EU 2012
Here's tetris in 33 lines of C++:

http://www.gamedev.net/topic/51440-113-lines/#post_id_125427...
TRS-80 Model 100: Interview With John R. Hogerhuis
Unless he can find cheap workers, the labor to produce it would make $100 each a steal. No way does it take less than an hour start to finish to build that.

I'd start pricing at around $350 and see how that flies.
This is awesome Joss! Thanks for your hard work.
How would you react if someone spoke to you as you just did to the author of this post? I suspect you would not like it very much. Perhaps you should consider tempering your words next time. The last paragraph of your post is worthy of discussion, the rest, as written, is an attack devoid of any class, manners and consideration.
I would envision "single-plane reconnaissance" -missions. Lot's of them done from very low tech command "centers". More like a Toyota Corolla with some guy and a laptop, than bunker with tens of people. They would provide lot's to do for enemy fighters, while locating targets for artillery. Pantsir-S1 and Tunguska both have limited weapon systems, only good for targets below 15km. And spotting something that flies just above the tree-line is quite hard with radar.

I'm not saying someone would attack U.S. with huge drone flock. I'm saying that soon deploying marines to some distant country is going to be somewhat riskier.
New Tool Unlocks HTC Bootloaders Without Voiding Warranty
I can testify to this, actually. I had gotten burned out after years of hard grind, and left to go work on a ranch in central California.

It only took a few months being away before I couldn't contain it anymore, and would catch myself building solutions for things in my head, excited to get back to my apartment and code it all out.

It's not always practical, but a break from it all can be really healthy.
An experiment in collecting and filtering Microsoft PowerPoint slides.
That inconsistency bugs me.

I believe on OS X it does the same thing as Windows.
I work at a standing desk and I've noticed several benefits:

* No leg pain. Extended sitting hurts blood flow to my legs, causing leg pain.

* Less back pain. Even in chairs designed to promote good posture, I somehow manage to slouch or arch and give myself back problems.

* Strong calves.

* I'm more likely to drink water. I'm already standing, so there's a smaller barrier to filling up my bottle at the water cooler.
Foo, Bar, and Baz: Not Having It
As well as things like graph algorithms for dealing with Google-scale data. We might even put skills like map/reduce, GPU programming, and some as-yet-undetermined cloud management API into this bucket too.
I started a lengthy reply before realizing you're just going to continue to pick sentence by sentence, ignore the spirit of the discussion, and then even bizarrely ignore the same points you previously attacked.

I'm confused as to what you're trying to win though. The benchmarks you provide are useless because they're synthentic. No one runs one task at a time (well, unless you use the new fullscreen mode :-P). None of the benchmarks have anything to with the task of programming, which is what the original topic was about. I'd imagine if you stay under the upper bound on load, the performance is roughly on par. But, I can make an 8 GB MBP start swapping like crazy in about 5 minutes. I even added an SSD just to deal with slow swapping. Performing the exact same tasks, I didn't run into that with Snow Leopard. I probably need 16 GB RAM with Lion, but dropping another $1,500 to make that happen was a bit much.

We clearly have different work styles. It's really okay if we have differing world views. I prefer to work with two maximized apps, one on each display. It works best for me. As more apps adopt the new form of full screen, which auto-kills the other display, my life gets harder though. It's really not fullscreen apps, it's single-focus apps. Great. It still doesn't work for me.

If you haven't seen anyone complain about Lion, I really can't help you there. I honestly haven't seen anyone use Lion and not complain about it (well, I guess with you now being the notable exception). A good friend of mine just tweeted a few days ago that it took 15 min. to reboot Lion. I doubt he benchmarked it against Snow Leopard, but I doubt he was lyin' either (pun fully intended).

At the end of the day, Apple is all about the customer experience, or so I've been told. The hardware doesn't work for me. Prolonged typing on the chicklet keyboards introduced with the unibody MBPs has destroyed my hands. The OS doesn't work for me. You don't have to agree with me. Maybe you're right and it's not the direction that's a problem but the current manifestation. It really doesn't matter because I need to get work done today and Lion isn't the best tool for the job. I suspect Mountain Lion is going to exacerbate the problem. Maybe it won't, but you don't know either. The nice part for me is I no longer have to care. I'm much happier with my switch.
^^ this is exactly why the carrier lock is bullshit. Then again, most carriers will give you unlock info if you're headed overseas and have been with them more than a few months.
How do I value an options package from a pre-IPO SF tech firm?
I've been offered stock options in a SF-based tech firm that's completed its Series B, but the firm hasn't revealed the total of fully diluted shares. The company's at 80 or so employees, growing quickly. Any advice on how to value the stock options that I've been offered? I've checked Second Market and SharesPost, but neither lists an estimation for this particular firm.
Agreed.

"Boredom: the desire for desires." - Leo Tolstoy
Oh god, and I sit on my chair for more than 15 hours a day. Does anyone knows the probability of dying after 3 years.

If it's 0.0005% likely that I'll die in the next 3 years, how does 40% or 100% changes that? It still very unlikely that I'll die.
The only cool new feature I'd like would be a flag to make Google stop fucking with the UI.
I agree. This is really awesome but the play button should be effortlessly easy to find.
Ubuntu 10.04 is still there, and still great. I'm still using it on my home and work machines--Gnome 2-based, PPAs and backports to update any apps that are a bit tired, and the whole thing's really stable. I'm not sure what I'll do when support runs out for it, though. I'm kind of holding out that they'll announce another two years of desktop support!
فورد - اكسبلورر - كويت اوتو
Names that exactly describe your product can be a problem if you pivot. If you pivot a bit, then International Business Machines is not too bad, but Wire and Plastic Products was less useful for a media empire. Polaroid was ok for a pivot as it is both specific about polarization, but also just a nice word.
According to Jiri Novotny, 'As popularized by Tim Ferris, according to Josh Waitzkin, “A study at The British Institute of Psychiatry showed that checking your email while performing another creative task decreases your IQ in the moment 10 points." '.

Only three levels of indirection from the (purported) original source! I'm convinced.

I tried tracking down the original study, because I have access to the internet, and eventually found http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002493.h..., in which the guy who ran the original "study" says how ridiculous the reaction to it is.

Too late now, though - every other blog post about productivity mentions how Tim Ferris mentions that Josh Waitzkin mentioned that he heard about it. The next one I see will probably use this post as its source.
Your critique is off the mark. IDE can do things that make no sense as a language feature but help you write code very fast. Command keys for things like show me all senders of this method, show me all references to this class, show me all implementations of this method, show me all inheritors of this method, go to the definition of this thing, show me a tree of the class hierarchy, rename this method fixing all senders, extract this code into a new method, extract these methods into a new superclass, push these methods up or down in the hierarchy.

These are things IDE's can do for you to enable you to code much faster by being aware of the structure of the language rather than editing everything as streams of text. I work in sublime text 2 doing ruby code, and I miss the hell out of these Smalltalk IDE features, text editors just can't compare; they're great at slinging text, but I don't want to sling text, I want to sling around semantically relevant chunks of code in ways that don't break it automatically.
With how easy it seems to be to make meat carcinogenic [1][2], I'm going to wait a while on this one. (Yes, I eat meat, but limit what type and how much.)

[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-16526695

[2] http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/23/cut-red-meat-can...
Getting page hits is their business model.
How does this compare with http://plunker.no.de? It is also open source (on github) and seems to have been inspired by JSBin.
This is all stuff to consider, but without actual numbers, this amounts to his sincere advice that you should use his services.

Does anyone have a story of a project or business that was greatly helped or greatly hurt by their name, in quantifiable terms? Let's exclude obviously terrible names like "wyslja.com", or businesses where the whole point is SEO, like "sex.com".

I want to hear stories we can use as experimental data, like, "we used to be called GetHobbyHorse.com, and our sales went up by 30% once we bought HobbyHorse.com." Or, a name change that had zero effect, or even made things worse.

EDIT: I made a Google Docs Poll: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dGF2bkV...
5 rules to pitch to a VC like betting on a horse race
Thanks for the answer. Based on the discussion here, one especially cool new feature would be a 'classic' mode that would mimic the look and feel of the old design :)
Interesting. Is this a recent measure to counter tax evasion? If not, it seems to have failed to have a significant impact.
If you invested in some jigs to hold the components while soldering, then I could see significant time savings. The time to cure the resin really doesnt count. I woukd estimate that with the correct jigs, you could complete the soldering in half an hour tops. I count roughly fifty solders on thus thing, most of them pretty simple.

You also overestimate the per hour cost of semi skilled labor. The skills involved arent that involved or difficult to learn (especially with the right tooling).
If you are using ppas and backports, the security update situation gets complex anyway. People have been trying to pin down the situation for Gnome Shell packages on 12.04, looks like not 5 years because they are 'Universe' packages.

The 10.04 server packages, therefore the base, have 5 years of support, so I guess you could simply risk carrying on with 10.04 after the EOL for the desktop?

Maybe not for the work machine.
Asymmetric Field Reversal Found on the Sun
Anyone who recommends Wine as a solution for running all your Windows applications loses a lot of credibility with me. In my experience, Wine just doesn't work all that well---certainly not well enough for doing real work. Obviously some applications work better than others, but every time I've tried Wine, at least one of the applications I use a lot has had serious problems. In my opinion, VirtualBox is a much, much better way to run Windows application on Linux.
I have never been so frustrated with a UI redesign as I have been with Gmail and Analytics. Unfortunately, I was already using all of the settings pointed out in this post, and I still can't get comfortable with the new design. I can't separate how much of that frustration comes from the large degree of change and how much comes from my long history of use, but the frustration is huge.

I know that many Google employees were similarly frustrated when they were eating their dog food last august. Yet the new look was rolled out anyway.

So I can only assume that the company had solid UI data showing that their target group of users prefer the new design. And I can therefore only assume that the target group of users does not include users like me.

Consequently, there is an opportunity here for somebody to do email right for the people frustrated by the new gmail redesign. I would happily pay for an email interface that makes sense and doesn't change against my wishes... especially if it doesn't require switching to microsoft.

Until then, I will be very grateful to the person who pointed out the 'slow-connection' interface is still available.
I hate to say this, and I'm sure it doesn't apply to anyone reading HN, but in my experience the ability to sit down at a keyboard and end up with a useful nontrivial program a few hours later is inversely proportional to the number of years of graduate school.
(self-plug: I run a naming company)

- Mint's name definitely helped them, and Wesabe's name definitely hurt them. In short, Mint's name is simple and straightforward, which helped users trust them with financial information. Wesabe's was neither. http://nomvilla.com/blog/how-mint-beat-wesabe/

- Under Armour's founder thinks that the name helped win over athletes (getting big tough guys to wear leotard-lookalikes) http://nomvilla.com/blog/how-under-armours-name-won-over-ear...

- FeeFighters' business increased 25x after they changed their name from Transparent Financial Services http://nomvilla.com/blog/feefighters-new-name/
I totally agree. I've named quite a few small projects over the last couple of years and every name I've been happy with has come to my in an "A-HA" moment. Everything just clicked about the name, and it was available.

Any time I've settled for a name that I didn't really like (usually out of lazyness), I end up feeling like something is missing from the project. A little bit of the love I had for it is lost.

That's why I'm building http://domiy.com , a tool which helps teams of people brainstorm name ideas. I believe that the best names arise when a number of people are trying to come up with a name over an extended period of time. You have to give the "A-HA" moments time to occur.
Gas taxes (and vehicle registration fees) can completely cover the cost of road construction and maintenance -- several states work this way. A number of US states have constitutional and legal requirements such that this is the only way they can fund their transportation departments. That some states spend many times as much per road mile (I am looking at you California) is a reflection of their inefficiency and politics, not necessity.

I am a strong proponent of the model where all roads and road maintenance should be paid for by gas and use taxes. It works well in states where this is a reality and a couple of studies have shown that they tend to produce better quality roads in addition to being more cost efficient than states where roads are funded out of the general budget.

The lack of a politically guaranteed budget forces a measure of long-term fiscal conservativeness and cost control on the government organizations that maintain the roads. There is a concept of long-term ROI; if doing a better, somewhat more expensive job today significantly reduces costs a few years down the road, it is worth it because it is effectively like increasing the DoT's budget via investment in future years.If they waste money, they can't go back to the taxpayers and ask for more. It provides a bit of negative feedback to the government decision process that is often sorely needed.
Delphi is very popular outside of the U.S: http://www.google.com/trends/?q=delphi,lisp

(I'll leave it to others to correct my Google Trends query to the proper search terms for Lisp variants -- or it could be that Lisp programmers tend not to Google their own language much :) )
> If you specifically have evidence that real world systems written in Clojure still look this tidy, that just makes me want to learn Clojure all the more.

Go look at any Clojure project on github. Seriously.

Stuart Halloway, one of the more prominent Clojure committers and evangelists once (semi-)famously said: "No function should ever be longer than 5 lines. And if you think you have one that needs to be longer, show it to me, and I'll prove you wrong."

That is some of the ethos behind the language.
Show HN: StartUpLift
This study does support that conclusion, which is why it's interesting. The authors explicitly control for physical activity in their analysis, so you have to argue, as I do in another post, why they are doing that wrongly in order to continue to uphold the "it's all activity levels" view.
How to Unlock Your iPhone 4S, iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS Using SAM [5.0, 5.0.1, 5.1]
how can that theme be high contrast? it goes from black on white to black on gray!
Most, if not all of those patents are expired (20+ years old). Once a patent expires, it's in the public domain and can't be re-issued or re-assigned. So yeah, overly cynical in this case. :)
If you're getting only 2 or 3K RMB per month, I think that's seriously robbery, even if you do have the ability to claim expenses on everything else. That's what only new graduates get, and low-level Chinese university new grads at that. I have a friend who just moved from IBM to Microsoft recently (we're both in China). Microsoft definitely pays more than that. I have no idea where you're getting this 2 or 3K number?

To the gp, I usually don't get fapiao if I don't ask for it, but it sometimes comes. I always get it if I ask for it, or they offer me a Pepsi on the house or something to avoid giving me fapiao. So it's always in play, as far as I can see.
For these reasons. I am generalizing from specific cases in my past: having used Drupal but not Joomla, knowing Java and C++ and object-orientation in general but not having used C# outside a brief school project, knowing early Perl 5 but not the changes up through 5.10, having programmed a bit in Ruby but never used Rails when the job description just said Ruby. "I can learn it" is never an acceptable answer when they can get someone else who already knows it well.
Discussion on the earlier submission:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3874872
http://health.yahoo.net/experts/menshealth/most-dangerous-th...

"British researchers found that (sitting) bus drivers were twice as likely to die of heart attacks as (standing) trolley operators."

The idea is that bus drivers and trolley operators are similar in all the other important respects (e.g. socio-economic backgrounds).
The current obsession with tablets is maddening. Tablets are great for many things, but I still spend much of my life sitting at a workstation: a computer with a keyboard, a mouse, and (lucky me) a big-ass monitor. So, for me, it's just sad that everyone is now rushing to optimize their OSes for tablets, often at the expense of usabilty in a workstation-like configuration.
Excellent! I went to submit it as an issue, but several people had beat me to it. Guess it's popular. Thanks!
I'm happy that Pascal lost:

- Everything new that Pascal had (record file io, for example) were suboptimal. Everything useful in Pascal came from C (including loop controls).

- Useful things from C are bolted on Pascal in gross, inconsistent and ugly way. E.g. break; loop construct is a procedure! Lol, what?
Thanks man, this soooo much better than the default.
I suspect that maybe one in a thousand people have the tools and wherewithal to open the case of an electronic device and replace a broken capacitor.
A great example is Nyoombl. Guess how to pronounce it. Go on, guess.

Read the comments of this TC article to gather how impactful the name is: http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/11/nyoombl-debuts-social-video...
Novel virus groups found to emerge from disparate virus types
> but t until you don't have to think about changing your window manager it can't win.

What is the value of "win" in the above sentence? Because for me it's much more useful than either Windows or OSX for development. It won me for package management and for being very similar to the actual deployment environment. Even changing the desktop environment is easy - an "apt-get install" does the trick.

I don't care about achieving desktop dominance - the desktop is going the way of the dodo for most people and for everything that's doesn't sit on a desk or has an Apple logo, Linux is the dominant OS. I'm at home now and there are 9 machines running Linux (phones, e-readers, tablet, router, modem, notebooks) and 5 that don't (Macs, iPod and iPhone).
This is a very powerful message. I've been trying for three years now to recapture the feeling that sucked me into computer science. It was an introductory CS course, and the assignment was to draw a scene using Python's turtle graphics module. The idea I had was to draw cube structures in one-point perspective, as I had long done on graph paper. This was in ignorance of how the entire field of computer graphics worked, and so my method was laughable in its simplicity. Analogous to Feynman and the tap water curve, I suppose; I was immensely proud of the final result[0].

That very week I switched my major from physics to computer science. The code I wrote then was truly, truly awful[1], but the feeling it brought the first time a line of cubes was correctly drawn was incredible. I, and only I had made it do that.

I've not felt that way again. Programming contests bring only the feeling of excelling in competition. Algorithm textbooks bring only the short-lived satisfaction of having a magic trick explained to you. Now it seems any time I research a new project I'm drowned in best-practice recommendations and intense fear of writing my own extensive library when a tested, vetted, and fully functional copy exists elsewhere.

What to do? I would do anything to recapture that feeling.

[0] http://i.imgur.com/wih35.png (find the tetris pieces!)

[1]* https://github.com/ahelwer/UofC/blob/master/cpsc217/as3/grap...

* If you want to run the script, you'll need the modified turtle graphics module found in the same github directory.
Show HN:  Hacker News 2.0 - A Work in Progress
Even standing still burns 10-50 calories more per hour, depending upon your physiology. That adds up in a full day. Standing up also engages muscles that are important in maintaining good balance and keeping your skeletal structure properly aligned.
Simple yet amazing CSS3 border transition effects