skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wanted to like Unity. However, until Ubuntu 12.04 it always was very slow.

In the past, I've found that compositing desktops (as implemented wit Gnome over the years, and now Unity) would interfere with some applications. I would assume they also interfere with games that want to use the GPU heavily. So, I spent quite a while trying to use Unity2d. While I was able to badger it mostly into working, it always felt very second class. On 12.04, it feels even more second class, and of course it is going to be removed in 12.10 anyway.

I do like the idea of a side bar. When I use OSX, I put the dock on a side. When I use Windows 7, I put the start bar on the side. I also love the idea of the HUD. On OSX I use Quicksilver, and on Windows I navigate the start menu by searching it. In the past I've used Gnome Do. When it comes to Unity's implementation though, I've found making .desktop files for applications I want to use that don't already come with them to be cumbersome and error prone. If I don't make a .desktop file, I can't launch it from the HUD, nor can I lock it to the launcher.

When it comes to altering the menus to place the menu bar at the top, this is a decent idea, but again the implementation feels poor. I don't like that the menus disappear until you hover over the bar. That makes it hard to know where I will want to point the mouse until I get over the bar to make it show me the menus. I suspect that this is one of the changes that makes this such a large fork of Gnome 3 BTW. I would have prefered that they put out a proof of concept first, then try to work with Gnome and GTK to make it an option that is merged in.

Despite all that, I still use Unity since I like Gnome3 and KDE even less. I recently tried LXDE and XFCE, but I they seem like an unpleasant jump back to the 90s. For one thing, I don't want to go back to managing my Start/Application menus, I want to keep search. For another thing, I like largish icons on the left or right.

I am currently watching the Cinnamon project. I think they look promising. I haven't gotten around to trying it out in a VM though.
> You can't really "accept the right answer" to this question in any fair way.

I see that as the issue - that there has to be one answer. It's a site that promotes the same issue that plagues reddit, the hunger for karma.
German Police Used Only 85 Bullets Against People in 2011
Isn't it an optimization problem?
I can't imagine a bigger cultural disappointment than Yahoo! quite frankly. Crock was probably the best thing about that entire organization. I've been quietly thinking he should leave for awhile now, but haven't said anything on the internet because seriously who am I to say what he should or shouldn't do. We know he didn't lie about his college degree so I think the move away from Yahoo! is smart.
The Joyful Frog Digital Incubator
I might agree, but what about the fact that Paypal has a user base that many companies can only dream of, so working with / developing new technology that can handle problems at this scale has to have some interesting and challenging projects somewhere?
Leaving students with a huge debt load is counter-productive.

A more interesting question, for me, would be to know why the cost of a college (or university) education has grown so much in the last few decades.
This has nothing to do with being "upset" or "offended" or "proper" or "etiquette".

It has to do with little girls growing up thinking there are entire categories of things they can't do. And it has to do with grown women being unable to do their jobs because too much of their time is spend dealing with the fact that their coworkers can't handle working with a woman. I'm not "offended" that Dell is contributing to that, I'm sad.
Photos of Ashton Kutcher in character as Steve Jobs surface
Racket also has an Algol mode :-P
parsing is absolutely the sort of problem for which functional programming excels. if you think about it, there is no time dependence, no need to respond to external inputs, no concurrent access to mutable data, none of the things that would make pure functional programming a constraint rather than a help. all your are doing is writing one conceptual function of the form output = f(input), and that transformation is in turn made up of smaller transformations that can be written and tested independently, and then composed together to build up the solution.

now it might still be a little harder to do this sort of thing in haskell, which is aggressively pure, simply because some algorithms are pure from the outside but have internal steps that involve mutating data for efficiency. but racket is not a pure functional language; if you need to, say, transform an array in place rather than take an array and return a new one, it will not stand in your way. the difference between racket and, say, java, is not that it enforces functional over imperative programming, but that it makes functional programming a lot easier, and fp has a lot of powerful tools in its toolbox for tackling this class of problem.
California Deficit Swells to $16 Billion, Governor Brown Says
Google Wishes Happy Mother's day with a lovely Doodle
Rails.app successfully surpasses pledge goal
A fool and his money are soon parted. Enter Kickstarter.
Certainly!

I disagree with Linus's digression to insult a member of the peanut gallery, no matter how useless and unnecessary said member's interjection. In my mind, a "No, that's wrong." is sufficient if it even merits comment.
Aren't they pretty much doing anything these days to make it easier for Apple to “steal” their code, considering that most consumers of BSD code are Apple users?
This is great of course, but I'd be more happy to see the actual PDF renderer with a more permissive license than GPL.
Briefly, look at a "buy vs. rent" calculator.

If the costs of renting, inclusive of any possible foregone appreciation gains from real estate, are lower than of buying, then the economically rational choice is to rent, not buy.

In urban economics, the value of housing is largely dictated by the potential income one can acquire by virtue of holding it. That is: housing reflects the local prevailing wage.

It makes zero sense to rent a property (as a wage earner) for more than one can make in income living in the area. Hence, rents tend to be much more responsive to wage inflation/deflation than housing prices (student and retirement housing would be exceptions, but they're constrained by similar functions ultimately).

With real estate, there is the potential for appreciation gains. This presumes, however, that there's someone willing to buy at the appreciated property later. Housing prices cannot inflate indefinitely over other assets. And the long-term historical return on housing (since the 1880s or so in the US -- period for which data are available) are in fact lower than most forms of investment. Housing carries heavy costs: taxes, maintenance, improvements, etc. And it's largely an illiquid asset, particularly for the small investor (I may have many of a smaller investment to sell, I generally only transact in a single house at a time).

There are other tweaks on this: rental/owner-occupied housing aren't perfectly substitutable (covenants, HOA restrictions, etc.), there are non-financial returns to housing (or at least longer-term returns), notably school district access and crime/safety rates. In markets with low vacancy rates, rental values may fluctuate more broadly. Bank lending practices may make buying easier (2000s) or harder (2010s) at any given time.

But the upshot is still: rental prices in a given market tend to be a better guide to local economic conditions than real estate prices.
there's vulgarization and vulgarization...I like the example of the required tags. It's really accurate... not.
Thank god, with this, I can finally say that there isn't a corner of the Internet that doesn't have irrational Unity hate. I'd bet money you've not used it for any serious amount of time.
Bored bureaucrats excited to work on hip cases. Instagram was a little startup getting bought by a big startup. If it wasn't for the high price tag no one would have given this deal a second thought. The press made a big deal of it so the bureaucrats will too.
I think most people read too much into the speeds. What they are acutally saying is that you now have a legal right to get a decent-ish connection at any place in Finland. And this should be a right in any modern country, as so many things revolve around having access to the Internet.

Example: In Norway we do our tax returns, apply for school, read up on information about your properties, etc. You basically have to have access to Internet.
I am surprised you didn't bring up monkey gate & security taking a backseat.
Do you mean Linux needs Drive to offer "well documented protocols"?

Otherwise I don't know what "Linux[...] protocols" you're referring to or how it's relevant to GTalk vs. Skype, etc. Skype integrates poorly because it's locked down and has been neglected for... 4 years?
Do you guys use a mix of VIM and Text editor? OR just VIM?
At my company almost everyone uses Windows (it's the official supported sytem) but I installed Linux on my box and no one had issues with this (I didn't ask for any permission, I just did it - as long as I do my work there shouldn't be any issues). We have some internal page for people using alternative OSes (Linux and MacOs, didn't see any other) and there is some kind of support with the availability of an VM image with all the office software that we use.

I really love that my company supports Windows only, because if they would support Linux it would mean that they would force me to use packages that I don't want to or take away my root access.
Title updated as I received confirmation from this post's author: https://twitter.com/#!/billwscott/status/201547332934828032
Careless Network provider exploited. 
A major service provider in Zambia has lost thousands, possibly millions of USD after they left UDP through port 53 uncharged...completely for about 1 year .People quickly discovered that if they used a proxy like cproxy or 'Your Freedom ' ,they could browse and download for free using 3G service.
Ofcourse the slightly more technical fellows using a VPS and openvpn udp proto , could achieve the same. One group on facebook of people helping each other set this up ,had at last check 3600 members, Impossible to know numbers of non-facebook users and with internet bundles charged at average $40 per 2GB ,add that to young people freshly introduced to torrents on basically unmetered internet and you have some huge usage.
They finally silently plugged the hole last week leaving most people in the 'internet dark ',and looking for the next hole, one thing the network has on their side is the reletive low level computer know how of these fellows so most 'probing' involves changing the port or IP of the external proxy.I do not think anyone is running stuff like nmap or investigating other IP over x tunnels.
They are not alone though, last year another ISP lost again possibly millions due to a bug in how the calculated bonus points, which allowed a person to buy pre paid airtime for $2 ,use that to buy a 10 MB bundle and after using it,you are awarded 10,000 points which you could then change for a 2GB bundle ,hours of talktime, thousands of messages or silly physical materials.That hole was plugged 3 months ago.
So they're exclusively thin clients presumably for security reasons? Is that the take away? Sorry if I'm being thick.
you seem to forget that Finland has much higher average income than Texas ,

average finn is probably about 2 times richer than an average texan
Nope, not on a Mac (fucking hate it that there are numerous apps for hackers now that are only made for Mac). This was my first time building a facebook app, playing with cloud hosting and using postgresql so the entire installation and use was complicated. I would have thought that since Facebook is encouraging you guys as the preferred/primary/sponsored cloud host that you'd provide a database that most people are familiar with - mySQL.

I ended up going with the clearDB addon just to save learning time, but at $10pm for only 1GB it's definitely a worse plan than the $15pm 20GB postgresql database you offer.
have you seen the discovery channel lately? http://imgur.com/gallery/At0E0
Wow, I thought he would have stuck around a lot longer. He seemed to really like it there. Friday was my last day at Yahoo, it's unbelievable how many people are leaving.
I used for about a year IceWM and I loved everything in it (I always have a single window in full screen) besides the fact that it resized a simple modal boxes (e.g. firefox asking for proxy credentials) to full screen, which was really ugly.

If I would switch (from XFCE) to xmonad, would it do such strange things to small modal boxes? I don't like to split my screen, I always have windows if full screen.
Apple isn't stealing if BSD is explicitly giving it to them for free.

FreeBSD apparently have no issues with donating their work to corporations.
Why did you feel forced to switch distros? My company just switched from RHEL to Ubuntu so we developers could have a < 7 year old OS release for our daily desktop use, and Unity was installed by default on our new Ubuntu desktops. I don't like Unity, but I simply replaced it with my two favourite window managers via 'apt-get install fluxbox awesome'. There is no need to replace your whole distro because you don't like the default window manager.
This is amazing! Wonder how hard it was to make?
I recommend checking out the linked page to the UK govt design principles for websites.

https://www.gov.uk/designprinciples

For something produced by the government it is a surprisingly good set of principles and well illustrated with examples.
That just becomes a debate about the definition of a functional language. The point is that unlike Haskell, SML, and OCaml (the last two aren't "pure" in the sense of syntactically enforcing referential transparency like Haskell, but they strongly encourage a functional design), Racket is first and foremost a LISP. You can use it to write and make use of a lot of functional abstractions, and it certainly is better suited to that style of programming than C or Java is, but Python and Ruby are just about equally suited for that style of programming, and they even have equivalents of map, filter, fold, lambda, etc.

Racket code doesn't look like Haskell, the MLs, or even dynamically typed "functional" languages (like Erlang). It looks like LISP. What drives your coding is not functional abstractions or object-oriented data structures (which it can do equally well) or anything like that. What drives your coding is the fact that syntax itself is a first-class data structure. You have access to the reader. You can write macros that adapt the language to anything you want. You can write a DSL in a few hundred lines that might save you tens of thousands of lines.

Now, Racket is certainly good for functional programming. In fact, some Racket developers prefer the Scheme-style tail recursion method of iteration (via the named let or letrec) to the looping constructs provided in the library, even when for loops would be just as effective. In the same way, not all Common Lisp programmers like the loop macro, and some (e.g. pg) actually use Common Lisp in a style that resembles functional programming. However, don't think of Racket as a functional language. That's as misleading as calling C++ a procedural one, even though you could write all your code C-style without ever using objects. Racket is a LISP, which means it can be adapted to fit virtually any paradigm. Racket is far closer to Common Lisp and Clojure than it is to literally any non-LISP.
So I guess the "Use for good, not evil" clause will finally be removed from jsmin and jslint now.
>Have you read the article?
>>the Finnish government said that no household "would be farther than 2 kilometers from a connection capable of delivering broadband Internet with a capacity of at least 100 megabits of data a second."
>That doesn't say anything on who's going to pay, probably the people.

That's why I said access to a consumer good and nothing about who pays. That said, as far as I can tell, there isn't a western democracy that forbids their people from buying internet access. So if this doesn't have anything to do with assisting people to pay for it and they aren't banned from buying it themselves, what does it do?

In reality this does have to do with assisting them to pay for it, because mandating construction of broadband connections is just a roundabout way of helping pay for it.

>What do you mean by "cheapens the concept"? I don't understand this formulation. What concept?
>From my point of view, water and food could be called consumer goods. Access to food is already a human right (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_food) while it's not yet settled 100% that water is a human right (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_water)

This is exactly what I mean. You are comparing getting internet access to getting food and water. If you don't have food and water, you die. If you don't have internet access, then yes you don't have access to the best, most modern way to communicate. However, in a nation with free speech you have access to many other ways to express yourself. I'm sure resourceful people will find ways to exercise that right without mandating some telco run fiber to within 2km of their house.
Thanks for sharing your VM & games -- I've been reading through the docs & source and finding them both interesting & inspirational.
Do such modified licenses still qualify as FOSS (for those who care about such formal qualification)?
A few years back (6 months before the first Bing study in the article) Michael Kordahi developed a site "Blind Search" that anonymised search results from Google, Bing and Yahoo and put them side by side, letting users vote which they preferred.

The site (http://blindsearch.fejus.com/) now seems somewhat-defunct, with Yahoo results failing show. Aggregated results posted mid-2009 (http://delicategeniusblog.com/?p=839) (a little earlier than the original study) show Google on 41%, Bing 31%, Yahoo 28%, however.

As a purely non-scientific anecdote, I personally used the Blind Search website for a month mid-2011, preferring Google around 75% of the time, Yahoo 15% and Bing 10% of the time. (The latter two are interesting, because Yahoo is presumably using Bing's engine behind the scenes.) I probably don't represent a "typical user", however, as most of my queries are programming-related, which perhaps some search engines have better optimised for than others.
If the majority believed profit to be morally repugnant and the person in question didn't understand why due to a lack of empathy, then yes, perhaps they would be a psychopath. I think most anarchists would agree that it is not that the majority of the population is emotionless and uncaring, they just haven't been educated about the alternatives in an open-minded, truthful fashion.
"used only 85 bullets"

What an odd way to quantify police violence.

Right? Wrong? Justified? Article provides none of that.
@kiba, pjscott is correct. But what makes countries rich is not laws. It's natural resources. Either having them, or having control over them, even if they are in another country. Give it some thought. Apply the idea to some sample countries. You might revise your thesis.

Form of government might be a red herring. Corruption and injustice might be tied to people and culture, not simply to form of government. Think about it.
Devon Walks - Walking Route Videos
I'm curious--by what criteria is Java a "lower" level language than, say Python? You don't really get more access to the machine with Java than with Python and both have similar reflection capabilities. Java is obviously statically typed where Python is dynamically typed, but that is orthogonal to how low-level a programming language is.
You would be surprised at how many soldiers deliberately miss the enemy, or don't fire at all.

Discussions on the matter:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=536561
http://msgboard.snopes.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_to...

I can provide more solid material if needed.
Interesting email domain pattern stats
Racket really is an awesome language. When you want a LISP that you can optimize to get near-C performance, go with Common Lisp. When you want a LISP that does concurrency more concisely than Scala or Erlang, go with Clojure. But for literally anything else, you probably want Racket. Don't forget to add its ridiculously awesome continuation-based web server to your above description!
If absolutely nothing else (and there are many others), Java has primitives.
This seems strange. His employer uses GNU Linux, open source software and has built an entire business on it. So, in retrospect, who was right?
True its strenuous, but its at least indicative in that he didn't distance himself from it in 2006 either.

You could imagine that if he felt differently in 2006 he'd have mentioned it in the preamble?

He posts one or two entries a year in that blog; this note was not some noise he dumped, it was a deliberate posting.
Complaint lodged against The Natural sapphire Company
But it's not.

Finland has vast, vast areas with no one. Texas has people thinly spread throughout.

You can cover only parts of Finland, because people only live in parts of Finland. You have to cover pretty much all of Texas.

So, once again, the size of Texas is a negative factor.

The so-called "average density" is not the key factor here, the amount of fiber you have to lay to reach everyone is.
It'd make everyone's life a lot easier if these selector methods were simply baked into the browser in a standardized way.
That is an interesting way of looking at the situation; Jef Raskin's idea of 'monotony' in the interface (one way of doing everything and that way fixed) is clearly not what you guys want.

I take your point about Xmonad, and if you know Haskel you can add stuff as needed
Might be a perfectly good idea to help citizens get access to better internet. However, I don't see why that should make it a right.

A right to me is a powerful thing. It is something that the government or others cannot take from you, no matter what. Eg, free speech - no person or government can compel you to not express your opinion. Or, freedom of religion - no person or government can compel to believe in a certain deity.

Consider this, things are relatively good in the western world right now in a grand historic sense. So governments have the ability to bestow "rights" like access to broadband. But what if things get really bad financially and the government and telcos of the nation can no longer afford to maintain broadband access to all citizens? Suddenly the government is forced to revoke a right because it is broke. I contend that if that can happen, it probably wasn't a right in the first place. Now, free speech on the other hand is something that will never have to be revoked no matter the financial status of a nation. That to me is truly a right. It is the difference between promising a person a printing press and promising a person that he may print whatever he wants on his own printing press.
A quick look at Dash for [OS X] documentation browsing
After reading the chain of comments above, I can't help but find your comment inappropriate.

A) Someone gave a back story, that this guys is a actually a comedian. Do I get upset when a comedian makes fun of fat people? No, whether people laugh or not, it is quite obvious that it was a joke. Granted, it sounds like this guy was not funny despite females getting tossed under the proverbial bus, leading to point

B) When its your company you can choose which ever speaker you like. Until then, your just going to have to settle with your opinion, which is frankly is neither relevant nor funny.

And not a fuck was given.