skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Agree on TextMate. Haven't heard of most of the other stuff. I used Xmonad for about six months, then I basically copied the keybindings into an fvwm config, then I switched to KDE, brought over a handful of the keybindings and I seem to be alright.

I would probably use Dropbox if I didn't have a VM. A friend has been trying to get me to use one of their competitors for a while.

Plan 9 is great, just a bit too much ideology to actually get anything done. I hope it's still maintained in 40 years in case I do go that way. :)
pie charts are the worst charts
Psystar DOA: Court Rejects Appeal in Apple Copyright Case
How and Why I think I am Devastated: Face of Malawi Plagiarised My Blog Post
From Maide To Pair: Where Are They Now?
N9 uses basically the next version of the same OS, so they are very much related.
I'm surprised someone hasn't mentioned attempting to supplant IBM's older mainframes with smaller units like Pi, Arduino or Bone. However, maybe it's generally known that ... you can't. Because IBM has the same hardware/software tying licensing arrangement that people decry Apple for having.
If consciousness is a very simple emergent phenomenon, is the distinction between one instance and the other still interesting?
Stunning iPhone app is our first taste of the new Google
Interesting thread. I too am truly sad to see this go, while everyone is suggesting stand alone players, I personally loved that Perian actually extended the native tools to support all these other formats.
Ah, I hadn't seen that. Thanks!
OSX comes with (an old version of) python installed already.
The N9 is the next in the series after the N900, and aside from a lot of very cute UI changes, and a lack of a keyboard (which was relegated to the N950), it still runs on Maemo (though branded MeeGo) and is a Linux phone.

Oh, and they switched to rpms from debs, I think. I can see how that would make you think they were unrelated:)
> We should REALLY do this with healthcare. Who needs doctors. All hail self diagnosis year 2013!

Did you ever take a biology class?
My apologies for the rant here - it's not directed specifically at you, but toward a general attitude I see on HN and in the tech community.

I was more commenting on your phrase "if half of that 1 MLOC is still relevant to new ways of building systems (and given that SQL databases are a 70s tech, I doubt it's that much)".

There has been a TON of academic and industrial research on SQL databases since they were invented in the 70s. Calling them 70s tech is akin to calling LISP 50s tech. The basic ingredients haven't changed much (sets in SQL and lists in LISP), but the techniques on top have evolved by leaps and bounds.

To your point here - there are plenty of companies that have way more data in their databases than RAM available. The early users of Hadoop, etc. were primarily constrained by disk I/O on one machine, rather than constrained by RAM or CPU on one machine. It is certainly convenient that a distributed architecture can solve both sets of problems if the problem space lends itself to distributed computation.

I'm not a huge defender of SQL - I think it has some serious problems - one fundamental problem is lack of strong support for ordered data, and it can be a huge pain to distribute. I agree that having some options with distributed K/V stores is really nice, but you have to admit that much of it hasn't yet been proven in the field.

I, for one, DO think that the world needs something like an english-like language so that "managers" can write their own queries. Honestly, the roles of programmer and data analyst are often wholly different. I think it's a huge kludge that the only people capable of manipulating massive datasets are people with CS degrees or the equivalent. Programmers suck at statistics, and while they're generally smart folks, they often don't have the business/domain expertise to ask the right questions of their data. Software is about enabling people to solve problems faster - why should we be only allowing people with the right kind of academic background to solve a whole class of problems.

Finally, saying that you doubt SQL is relevant to building modern systems is borderline irresponsible. Experimentation with new tools is good - but you have to also keep in mind that people were smart way back in the 70s, too, and that their work may be perfectly relevant to the problems you're trying to solve today.
During my internship at a manufacturing company, I knew enough about VBA to record a macro in Excel (just record, no actual coding involved) to automate ~10 minutes of work I had to complete monthly and included step-by-step instructions for how to run the macro and what the macro did.

When I came back a year later after graduating, I learned the process was again being done manually because my replacement did not have even a basic understanding of how to interpret what a macro does from the script.

A few months ago, I automated ~6 hours of monthly Excel work through ~4 hours of trial and error of recording macros and manually editing them. I have zero training in coding other than osmosis from my brother who is an iOS programmer, but I wasn't afraid to screw up enough to figure it out.

Based on my first experience, unless my eventual replacement has at least a curiosity about how macros work I wouldn't trust them to effectively run my script over the long term--if anything breaks, they won't be able to fix it.

The point is, a lack of basic, basic understanding of coding could end up costing the company the 75+ hours/year I was able to save with a "buggy, dangerous...pile of garbage" when I either move to a new role or leave. This was something which would never have been a high enough priority for our coders to write for us. Multiply that through 25 people in our finance department, and you're talking about needing an additional full-time employee.

Can anyone recommend a good place to learn enough VBA to move past the buggy and dangerous stage?
I am disappointed that there was not more direct information regarding the links between Ballmer and the directions the mentioned technologies have taken.

I can't help but think that there are other factors besides a single individual regarding Zune, Vista, CE, and so on. Can it really be true that one individual is responsible for every one of those going the wrong way?

Microsoft is still a valuable company and continues to be in millions of homes, businesses and schools around the world. Keeping a foothold in that market seems like a success, to me. Losing stock value is one aspect of the measurement of successes of a company, but is it truly the reflection of a single individual?
Long-tail acquirers for medium exits
Sacha, I am a fan of yours and usually like your material, but I just can't agree here. You took so much for granted in this post. Deploying a website that 10,000 people will see is not trivial, whether you personally did it or not. Here's my beef, specifically:

1. You already knew how to design. In fact you are a very talented and well known designer. If you didn't have design skills, chances are a huge huge amount lower that anything you put out will make the rounds - design is super important, and you of all people know that. And that's something you need to learn as well, so tack that on top of the time it takes to learn how to code.

2. Learning how to code != making websites. In fact, they are very different. To make a website, not only do you need to either have a designer on hand or be good at design as mentioned above, but you also need to have a very good understanding of how the web works. That means filesystem structure, http, ftp, domain names, web hosting, then add html and css to the javascript you've been working on. THEN if you want your site to be anything more than static, throw in back end code, databases, web frameworks, etc. on top of that.

This is a MASSIVE stack of things to learn, and I don't know a single person who knows all of this and doesn't work full time doing this stuff. "Learning to code" seems like a cute thing you can make a resolution to work on as a hobby, and maybe it is. You might be able to pick up the bare basics of programming in your free time, if you work hard. But making something significant like you claim here is a completely different deal.

3. You never dispute or even address the main point behind Atwood's article - that while programming is great to learn, the trend that 'everyone should learn to program' as a base skill along with reading, writing, and math is ridiculous. It's nowhere near as important as these other skills, and he makes a number of other valid points as well which I'm sure you don't disagree with. You argument was simply that programming is cool, so you should learn it. Sure, I agree, and I would have said the same if I only read the title of Atwood's article. But I feel like the way you contested it was uninformed and completely missed the point.
I agree with this wholeheartedly. My line of work could be made much easier through some very simple software. The only reason that software doesn't exist is because (I assume that) nobody with programming knowledge understands the needs of someone who does my job. Or cares, for that matter. There aren't many of us.

I'm working my way through Ruby on Rails tutorials simply because I think there's tremendous value to be created without the need for anything groundbreaking. Just tailored.

And if I'm right, I'll be able to afford to hire someone to fix my crappy code.
Dell shouldn't have hired the guy because it was 100% obvious they were going to have to appologize for it later and women are part of their target market (some of whom are sensitive to femist jokes).

That being said, the author of "therealkatie, lighten up" post is ridiculous as well.

I don't make femist jokes at work because doing so signify a complete lack of social skills on my part (same as the guy at Dell who selected the comedian). That being said, her (realkatie's) inability to handle those jokes also represents a complete lack of social skills.

I would guess that the guys making those jokes are probably interested in her rather than "discriminating" against her.
That's a really great idea! You should write to the company. Maybe patent it?
I was bored last weekend, decided to create a demo of my graph drawing library (https://github.com/anvaka/VivaGraphJS ) and visualize collection of sparse matrices of University of Florida. I added WebGL renderers to the library recently and wanted to test its performance.

If your browser has disabled WebGL the site will fall back to SVG renderer, but it's much slower. It's best viewed in Chrome or Firefox. If you still unable to see visualization I made a video for you: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5KrtGB8oA4

Would love to know what you think :)
I couldn't agree more. If nothing else, learning to code is an incredibly useful thought experiment for anyone who enjoys using their brain in new and interesting ways. So what if you never make a cent? How many of us started coding simply because we were passionate about it and it got us excited?

I can't tell you how excited I was when I wrote a simple joystick driven paint program for my Atari 400 in Atari BASIC :)
It doesn't matter at all, that's why this article is stupid.
Great Businesses Evolve Innovation to a Revolution
You could say the same thing about the release of OSX. MS is playing catch up in the mobile sector, a place they never dominated. They still OWN pc marketshare.

Now make me stop defending these guys, I'm getting heartburn.
Hire a solid consultant or consulting firm to train up your existing talent and then learn how to look for new trainable talent in your area.

Also, be willing to pay more for high talent that may not know Rails today. Don't assume that you can pay way below market rates for talent that can easily pick up the framework in a few months.
Upgrading Caltrain is probably the most cost effective solution on infrastructure. There are several great ideas out there:
http://caltrain-hsr.blogspot.com/

Also allowing higher buildings along Caltrain corridor would be the easiest solution. That way population can grow without putting much stress on interstates. Moreover, It will be a boost vibrant places (e.g. think Castro St. in Mountain View).
My basic question is this: may _I_ copy content from TheNextWeb without crediting it and publish it myself? After all, "50% of all publications is content sourced from other publications".
Twhume (Tom Hume) on Android fragmentation - Not as bad as it used to be
I've tried out the consumer preview as well. Can't say anything about how it performs because I tried it on VM but it had some obvious flaws that affected usability. I don't think we should judge them before the final release though. (or maybe we should wait till SP1 :D)
They have made a lot of progress on the Sharepoint side which will keep them in the enterprise market for a long time. .Net was released in 2002 and it's become a completely viable alternative to Java which was vital in the long term. Bing is an also ran, but it's still the #2 search engine in the US which IMO is not that bad of a place to be considering where they where in 2000. And Windows 7 was fairly good, heck Vista was fine on decent hardware far better than there old school failures like Windows ME.

With that said, I think they are in for a vary long vary profitable decline but IMO so is Apple. Honestly, that's just what happens to large companies.
I've downloaded a few OSS textbooks (mathematics), and overall they've been great.

I haven't done any coursework, though.
Yes/no/it depends - pick an answer :)

I believe Derek kinda went back on this answer a bit and ended up taking up Rails again later on, but the issues regarding PHP being more practical and flexible for him at the time were pretty important. These issues will still be relevant for many developers and even as a Rubyist myself, I'd say Rails is certainly not the right choice for everyone.
What are some of the best ways to learn something?
We all know that learning does not have a one size fits all. But what are some of the ways to learn something effectively and with fun ?
- Game that teaches you something as well?
- Interactive group exercise/quiz/puzzles with winners/runner-ups ?
- Movie/Video on a topic of your interest ?
- Watching others learn (in person, online/TV)
What else ?
Incognito mode has its own ephemeral cookie store, so it serves exactly the purpose he suggested. Yes, that doesn't address the fact that web protocols can still leak quite a bit of identifying information.

Torbutton tries to address information leakage, but it incurs its own costs (e.g. blocking things like HSTS and sharing the entire connection with whoever runs the tor nodes).
Thinking that everyone should learn to code is an absurd idea. Most folks can barely use their computer, let alone care to program. A good percentage of web designers can't write markup, do you think my mom is going to fire up a shell?

Perhaps teaching some basic digital fluency is a more realistic goal, e.g., the role of computers in society, a primer on hardware, basic security, etc.
All free web usage data is terrible. (And probably all the paid stuff too; it's a hard problem.) But I trust Alexa for order-of-magnitude relative position for consumer web properties. That's mainly because I had access to the internal stats for a couple of sites like that for years and the Alexa stats weren't egregiously wrong along that axis.
Open Apple is a description of a fundamentally different company. Apple does do a bit with open source and could do quite a bit more without problems.

But what "Open Apple" implies, are things like an "Open" specification for the Dock Connector. And "Open" specifications that invite vendors to write their own device drivers to handle those accessories.

And that's an invitation for third parties to sell crap accessories with buggy or broken drivers and generally annoy the hell out of users who are currently paying Apple a premium to not be annoyed.

Similarly with services. "Open" the specification, allow the world in, and you get crap and esoteric support problems.

Again: things that people pay Apple a premium to not suffer.

And none of this is to say Apple is perfect, or their way is better. They make their mistakes, but they believe they're the right people to fix them. And they naturally support fewer devices, fewer services and fewer use cases. So it's far from appropriate for everybody. But it's damn sure appropriate for Apple's customers.

Woz's statement reads like a musing from someone who doesn't understand why the best of intentions don't always become the best of manifestations.

If you Open Apple, they'll get new, different customers. And lose all the old ones.
I'm actually kind of tired of hearing, "there's no other field that lets you create something from nothing" vis a vis programming. Look: I LOVE coding. I LOVE programming. I think it's fun and challenging, etc. etc. But it's not the only creative outlet that has ever existed.

Have you considered a pencil and a paper? Crayons? Markers? Paints and a canvas? A hammer, some wood and some nails?

"Ah, but that requires something to create something!" Yeah? So does programming. It requires a computer (or access to one). It requires programs to run your code - free or otherwise. In fact, I'd argue the barrier for entry into programming is SIGNIFICANTLY HIGHER than MANY other creative outlets.
This isn't the first time that I've read some amazing claim about dramatically improving the efficiency of batteries. Heck, I'm sure it's not even the tenth time. But we're still yet to see any amazing advances.

These kind of things make it sound like we can catapult the technology by a factor of ten, but the truth is that we will most likely just end up pigeon stepping our way forward slowly.

Don't get me wrong, because this is still very exciting, but just ask yourself the question... is this the first time you have read an article about improved battery efficiency that has been developed by researchers?
Neat! This would be an interesting direction for Github to explore.

You could take it even further - It would be great if there was a way to figure out who has written (for example) a Computer Vision system in Go in a geographical area. The ultimate recruiting tool.
Known in Denmark.

This guy is not world famous.

Should someone lose their job over this? Sure. Maybe even a few someones. /Someone/ knew who this guy is and hired him.

Should the whole of Dell be cast as misogynist for hiring someone that I bet Micheal Dell couldn't name if you asked him this morning? I don't think so.
Rookie Hiring Mistakes
Right, because that's totally the only other option.
My Name is Robbie And I’m a 0x (Zero x) Entrepreneur.
2012 Salary Guide for Creative and Technology Professionals [pdf]
Sensationalistic title: The article says the increase is only 2x, but they believe they can get it up to 10x eventually somehow maybe.
Google Patents its Wearable Display for Google Glasses
> for the purpose of providing the Preview Services

Is it really that different?
Part of the reason for doing it like this (I think) is because it gives a huge boost, as a student, to know that a thousand other people are going through the same course as you, at the same time as you..

I know that's one of the bigger reasons I managed to make it through the AI class last semester.

Whether this benefit outweighs the negatives I do not know.
"I think everybody should learn to code, for one simple reason: knowing how to code is hugely empowering."

Oh please, before lecturing what everybody should do - first learn some empathy, that will blow your socks off!
Dynamic State Machines
I think that's a fair assessment, and it's one of the reasons I left .NET about a year ago.

The average .NET developer usually works in a 9-5 corporate environment that is completely bought into the MS ecosystem. This environment has traditionally been very opposed to Open Source and discourages hobbyist programmers as a result.

There are hobbyists and "I love to code" types in the .NET community (many will likely jump into this HN thread) but there are comparatively fewer hobbyists in the .NET community when compared to other communities.
Jeff mentions advocates the need for "a basic understanding of how computers, and the Internet, work". As expected from him, he even insists a second time on understanding how "to get around on the Internet".

This is all great, but I advocate learning how to "code". I think that learning how to plug in your printer, transferring your pictures from your phone to your PC, or being familiar with the latest trendy webapp that automates your microwave's behaviour according to your GPS coordinates (a million dollar idea) is not enough.

I don't think everybody should learn to code, just like I don't think everybody should learn math. Also I become borderline elitist when it comes to coding professionally.

But as far as education goes, I'd like to live in a world where any college (heck, even high school) graduate would be able to read a simple Excel macro or bash script and understand the gist of how it works.
Build a chat app in 5 minutes
Why David Gewirtz is a schmuck. This.

Eduardo Saverin owes me nothing. His father moved him here for safety not wealth. It seems he (via his father) already had wealth. He went to Harvard. Harvard is a private school and someone paid for that... doubtful it was our tax money. Is the Government really subsidizing Harvard educations? Doubtful. Sure he made use of our legal system to get his due share of the company he helped found... so what? As a US citizen he was entitled to have his case heard in the court. And now he has decided to move to another country. So what? People leave the US all the time.
How to End A First Pitch
And most of the current mp3 players, as far as I know. iPods are the broken ones.
To turn your statement around, are you saying that no one should bother learning first aid unless they are planning on becoming a medical professional?
America's Obsession With Being Fat
Here is an Account of Learning to Write Code, Sans All the Glamour
"DuckDuckGo gets its results from over 50 sources, including DuckDuckBot (our own crawler), crowd-sourced sites (in our own index), Yahoo! BOSS, embed.ly, WolframAlpha, EntireWeb, Bing & Blekko. For any given search, there is usually a vertical search engine out there that does a better job at answering it than a general search engine. Our long-term goal is to get you information from that best source, ideally in instant answer form."

source: http://help.duckduckgo.com/customer/portal/articles/216399-s...
Redhat stopped targeting the "cutting edge" demographic about 10 years ago. They enlist them as QA for their real customers now.
Underscores are stupid
First iranian entertainment website discovery
Your comment made me think of "Everything is Amazing & Noone is Happy": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r1CZTLk-Gk
That little smudge represents Android revenues
Things can seem reasonable and not be true.

Lots of hackers continue to use Apple laptops because the software and hardware has combined what they perceive as the best quality in the industry. They don't do this because they look cool.

One can't also assume the iPad is the only runaway tablet success because of a cool factor or hardware design. The iPad was laughed at on first release by most geeks and pundits. But then people got to using one and found it more useable than a laptop for many daily tasks.

One also can't look at the iPhone margins without noting the key differentiator: iOS and iOS Apps. Software, in other words.

All companies have something to fear - they're in a competitive business. Apple just seems to be better at it than most (this generation).
If you are right there are probably a hundred people on here able to provide a working MVP alongside you and do it faster, cleaner and pick up on solutions you cant possibly know yet. Be a domain expert.

But learn to code anyway :-)
Why I am Creating a Programming Language