skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
XP is dying- it's ancient technology, Vista is far superior. Of course, Ubuntu and OSX are both worthy competitors to MS, but Vista is rock solid in both terms of stability and security.

The only reason why Microsoft would rather sell Vista than XP on new computers is because the longer they sell XP, the longer they will have to support it. The more updates, service packs, and the longer they have to make software that is backwards compatible with it, rather than focusing on new technologies in Vista/Windows 7. They make as much money off a sale of XP as they do Vista, but XP costs more to maintain.

If Windows developers aren't writing code for Vista, it won't magically work on Windows 7, so if your software is XP only, its time to find a new supplier!

In short, Windows Vista is the future of the Windows platform, and it is a very bright future! As far as most people that I talk to that claim they don't like Vista, most of them can't seem to articulate why, or they just say "That's what I've heard". The MS bashers have done a great job spreading anti-Vista propaganda, but few can articulate any real problems with the OS.

Long Live Microsoft! (And Linux, and Apple)
Sounds interesting. How much is the community tied to Microsoft? "Runs on Mono" is ok, but if no one actually does, that's perhaps problematic for those who don't do MS.
"We tried. COMPLETE WASTE OF TIME." does not apply to everyone. Most likely you weren't doing it right, and didn't try long enough to make it work.
The more people you have working on anything artistic, the more average the result is going to be. The possibility to crowdsource books has existed for thousands of years - all you'd need to do is make a group of people sit together in a room and try to collaboratively write such a book.

But it has never worked with that. And it will never work, because when too many people collaborate, they tend to stay safe. They don't do new things.

The only way to crowdsource is if you make several people work parallel on independent parts of the project, and then mix them together at the end. For example, you have 15 people who are working independently on the soundtrack for the movie, and then a panel of judges picks the best soundtrack. If you let people vote on the result, they won't choose the best, they will choose the most familiar.

Crowdsourcing can work, but you still need to specialize people within it, and then give them creative freedom free of criticism from others.
Don't forget Eiffel and its progeny. Design By Contract and heavy use of assertions feels to me like it's closely related to Test First development. You also get fast runtime code out of it (as in C++ fast) in a very Pure-OO environment. (By many accounts, even more so than Java and C++.)
I agree. Site specific short cuts are worse thasn useless, because you'd have to use different ones for each site.
Strongtalk is definitely worth a look. The ability to have static typing when you want it is awesome!

I could imagine a deployment process where code can't be deployed unless it's all statically typed. This lets you do very fluid rapid prototyping, but then firm up parts of the system once they go into production.
I like Life Frame. What about Web Frame? Nah, Life Frame beats that one.
If I want to open a link in a new tab, I click it using the middle mouse button. This works on Firefox on Ubuntu. On your browser/OS combination there is probably something similar; if not, I suggest you upgrade the software you're using.
Studying graduate-level texts on computer vision

... after re-learning 1st & 2nd year calculus

... after re-learning trigonometry

... after refreshing my memory on algebra & geometry
A Type-Safe Database Query DSL for Scala
Do you have a theory why it didn't work for you?
The issue with SVN is simply the work flow it forces you into. I can't tell you how many times I've looked at someone's repo and see .bak files everywhere. I know right away why they're doing this because I did it myself when I used CVS/SVN.

DVCS's let you branch off, experiment, and if it works out you can push everything into the main tree with the history included.
Thanks for the comments. I'll incorporate everyone's feedback in the next version.

I plan on adding the ability to click on any of the web bugs and find out more about that bug. The pages that you land on will be on a wiki so they'll be open to additions.
> Best practices are that you do not force your users into any particular browsing habit.

Agreed. Is there a plugin in Firefox that ignores target directives and does it the way I want?
The video card used to power my dual monitor setup at work uses an ATI catalyst video driver and it crashes on a semi-weekly basis, meaning both screens flicker and then go out and the only recourse is a restart. It's incredible to me that a two year old OS can still not have some basic video card support while XP has always worked flawlessly for me.
As a high school student, I can tell you that what kids (or at least I) REALLY don't have passion for is tedious, boring work and classes that are boring.

Some teachers give far more homework than is necessary to learn the material. I understand that not all learn as fast as I, but it really can get ridiculous and become a waste of time, which makes kids not just hate the homework but school in general. I like my calc class so much more this year because it's like many college classes--the homework is optional. I get A's on the tests w/o doing the homework, so why should I do homework?

Teachers need to make the material more interesting by applying it to the real world more. So many times in my calc class I've heard "Why do I care about whether this series converges?" and the like. Teachers need to come up with interesting ways to teach and show how it's actually used so that the students will care.

I like learning infinitely more when I'm building apps at home than at school, and it's not just because I like coding more than other stuff. I see it's use. The use of learning about lamdas is so that I can make x work so that this app will do what I want it to do.
Your right I'm waiting for them to review the site. I meant to link to our softpedia "clean" page, http://www.softpedia.com/progClean/Ghostery-Clean-115003.htm...

But your right, being an extension you can just peruse the source yourself.

I like your description better than mine, I'll change it to something a little easier to understand. Thanks!
I would like to ask - is Siemens somehow unique in doing this? In the region where I live, from unofficial sources of course, I heard this is a very common practice when a company wants to win a contract...especially government one.
iMac 24 inch (refurbished, with Applecare) running Leopard, with two Win XP VMs and an Ubuntu VM available via Parallels.

Extra Viewsonic 24" widescreen monitor on the left, on an Ergotron arm. Macbook Air (refurbished, with Applecare) on the right, on an Ergotron arm, running Leopard and controlled from the desktop with Teleport or Synergy (I'm going back and forth on that one.)

Kinesis Advantage Pro keyboard on a very nice articulated keyboard tray that I scrounged from the side of the road in Arlington, MA. (The quality of the trash is one of Boston's perks.)

Primary backup using SuperDuper to a Drobo (FW800 version) stuffed with 1 TB worth of old hard drives. (The Drobo doubles as a large external storage device.) Secondary backup to a pair of external 750GB drives, one of which lives offsite. Tertiary backup of critical files to Amazon S3 using Jungledisk. Liberal use of Github, Dropbox, and unison for syncing between the desktop and the laptop.

Aeron chair (my oldest piece of hardware!)
Well, it looks just as awful as every low budget slasher Hollywood puts out these days. Do you count that as a success? If so, then good job.
Dell's charging 99 dollars for XP downgrades. I'm guessing that's an industry-wide tax imposed my MSFT. Sheesh. Vista's finally paying for itself.
Actually not trying to spread FUD at all. I'm the founder of one of the companies detected, Lookery.com, before that Compete.com, which relied on 3rd party clickstream sources.

It's not the data that is sent that is a reason for concern but the "cookies" attached to that data especially when unified across sites.

Anyway the reason to use the tool is to alert you to what the page your on might be doing. I.e. Visit any popular newspaper site and you'll that beyond web analytics trackers and ad networks your data is being sent to behavioral tracking companies like Tacoda and Revenue Science.

Thanks for the comment,
;dc
As will holding Control while you click.
How to offer internships?
I was wondering for advice on how to offer internships at my startup for undergraduate students. Thank you for your time.
I'm seguing directly from XP to Leopard.
For those who vote down: take your time to also put down what is factually wrong; or what is untrue nor real in the above.
Shouldn't that be 17,326th
If you could meet one person that could help grow your business who would that be?
Does it work with SaaS model?
> The MS bashers have done a great job spreading anti-Vista propaganda, but few can articulate any real problems with the OS.

That's not entirely fair to some people. In Vista's early days, things WERE problematic because of how new the platform was and how not-used to it people were. In fact, it's the same kind of criticism people had for Windows XP before SP2 or so. If you give it time, most of them will go away. Probably sometime around the release of Windows 7 :) Then we can await the "Microsoft Gives Windows Vista its 10000th New Lease on Life" article.

Personally, I sort of skipped Vista for Server 2008. O:) (and Mac OS X, etc.)
But considering the fact that you can view a users history with simple css link color hacks...

I'm skeptical though. I think the people who are worried about this sort of thing will likely be already using adblock or disabling javascript, 3rd party cookies, 3rd party scripts etc etc.
Reading this article made me curious just how much is owed to foreign countries. But what I found to be scarier is our internal debt obligations to programs such as medicare, social security, etc. "As of October 1, 2008, the total U.S. federal debt exceeded $10 trillion,[16] about $31,700 per capita. Including unfunded Medicaid, Social Security, Medicare, and similar promised obligations, the government liabilities rise to a total of $59.1 trillion, or $516,348 per household.[17]" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_United_States)

That's 428% of our yearly GDP. The current tactic has been to use new debt and current tax witholdings to pay social security benefits - but does that not sound like one big crazy pyramid scheme? And how the hell do we get out of this?
I've been to the Facebook app planet. We picked all the minerals from the surface, now you'll need to dig a bit deeper to continue to survive there.
If Microsoft can work out a sane licensing arrangement for compute farms/clusters/clouds (whatever we're calling them this week) of Win 2008 Server, then F# is a game-changer of a similar scale to Google's MapReduce. That's a big if tho'.

Having said that, Windows is cheaper than RHEL already...
I guess my point was that it would be a translucent cloud of items that followed the mouse. This way, you'd be able to see/read what was under the cloud but could switch your attention to the translucent cloud to see what was there.

Context menus are invisible until you right-click. Also, there's been some evidence that we remember the locations of things better if they're arranged radially (like the demo approximates) rather than orthogonally (like in a context menu). A combination of a translucent constant reminders of tasks available plus a radial arrangement of those tasks floating around the mouse might make it easy to remember what's available after a right-click. It might be distracting as hell, for all I know.

One thing's for sure, it would be more than just a context menu as we know them now.
Self seems to be a dead project?
> "so why should I do homework?"

Because the ability to just suck it up & get things done even when you don't enjoy every minute of it is a very important trait to have. It's not just about the tests.

> "Why do I care about whether this series converges?"

You can abstract anything to the point of irrelevance. Don't. Try to learn something from it. You're developing problem-solving skills, not merely finding the sum of a series.
You can specify which emails are allowed to send pictures to your frame. We have some software that will filter out forged headers on emails as well. So far, it hasn't been a problem for us.
For me half the point of HN is discovering what other people are working on and trying to give them useful comments about their work. The other half is finding interesting articles to read.
Word to the wise: Start-ups and hacking aren't the solution to everything.

You can't solve all the world's problems with technology. And this one is also one that requires good old-fashioned human work.
Are the Chinese making things that Chinese want to buy? Most of the country is still rural; they don't want trainers and consumer electronics (or rather they do, but not before the infrastructure is built out). China's foreign-currency earning economy is almost a completely different entity from its interior economy.
What about Prolog? Why it's not in the list?
If you do think Perl is a productive language then you (a) are a unix system administrator and/or (b) have never used a truly productive language.
I'm learning F# now because it will be another weapon in my arsenal that I would be allowed to use here. My impression of it, so far, is: "Heh, kinda cool". It is basically the total compromise functional language, but in a good way. Immutability is optional, you can write imperative code whenever it makes sense, and there is a reasonably syntax for defining .NET object oriented constructs. It is very much a functional language that peacefully co-exists with the rest of the .NET ecosystem and that is a strength if you need it. Sure, all of that interop comes at a power and complexity cost, but it is surprisingly small.
The ability to avoid pointless work in favor of things that matter is probably my most helpful learned trait.
Aerial pictures
The problem with the prevailing method of education around the world is that its really inefficient in many ways. You have to be in class for a specific time of the day, you get interrupted every 40 minutes by recess, you have to change the subject very often and different subjects require different types of concentration. The working environment is not good for learning, its too noisy, and its not optimized for the individual paces of learning, that the different types of students have. You are also tormented socially in so may ways, you don't even need to be physically abused to feel miserable in school. All this even without mentioning that most teachers just plain suck, and even if they don't, very often they have to teach boring and tedious material, only because the system requires it. I spent the last 12 years in this hell, I'm literally suffocating intellectually!
He was actually pretty nice to perl (even went as far as to say you will have to use it). What exactly would he have had to say for you not to be offended? Say it's as readable as Python? It isn't.
When I saw this, my first reaction was "Randall is stalking me."
I'm in 11th grade. It's Ruby, not Perl, and regular, not just a weekend, but it's basically my life.
All the school work I have leaves me not enough hacking time.
I wish I could get sucked into a startup so I'd have a reason to drop out.
This rocks. You, or someone, could do a similar Twitter mashup for movie reviews - I just did a few searches for movies and the some of the short reviews are pretty entertaining.

It'd be even cooler (and much, much harder) to do some NLP on the reviews and try to give them a star rating based on your model.
Your totally right. If your worried about web bugs you can and probably already run tools like you mentioned.

Ghostery is for those of us, like me, who just want to know what ad networks, widgets and other web bugs the sites I visit are using.

Cheers,
David
A much better article:

http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/ucla-researchers-advanc...
I stopped doing homework to program. I'm not sure I'd advise the same to others, but because of all the extra-curricular activities I did with programming, I feel it was worth it.
Voting Machines vs Las Vegas Slots
"bug" is appropriate in the "spy" sense of "bugging" a room. "Web Spies" might get the point across better. Wait until you see Persistent Identification Elements. That's what is being used now, because people have caught on to cookies.
excellent idea for a feature add.
Xml+js+css as a high-level rendering engine (not for IE)
yeah, I've contemplated that. doubt I'll do it though. I just do my homework quickly and code some still.
Nice tutorial thanks!
...Erlang is bad enough :P
Do you live in Ohio? I know a great startup looking for Ruby hackers there :)
A little surprised at the negativity in the comments. Most student films suck ass, too, but they're an important accomplishment nonetheless. Come to think of it, the majority of work that hackers churn out is shoddy and a reinvention of the wheel, but it's part of the process that sometimes produces something awesome. Even if this movie sucks, it's still an important accomplishment because they actually created something in a way that no one has before (to my knowledge).

Congrats to everyone who worked on this.
Somebody needs to give you the other side of the story.

Don't even think about dropping out of high school to do a startup. Statistically, you have a ~99% chance (okay, I just made up that number) of failing and then you'll just be a high school dropout. Stay in school, and do something on the side.

There will always be opportunities for cool startups in the future, and probably after you finish college, you'll be much better equipped to go after those opportunities.
http://flixpulse.com/
So it's Microsoft to blame for ATI Catalyst not working?
I tend to do all the homework I have a as far in advance as I can, then have a week or two of near-no-homework in which I can code, both for personal projects and a part-time job. (10th grade).
Before you look into integrating affiliate programs into your sales process, I would suggest hiring a copywriter than can fully explain your product. When I went to www.copilot.com it was not readily obvious to me what your program can do for me.

The key to successfully using affiliate programs for sales is to always test and refine (your creatives, ad copy, and landing pages).
Can you explain how you'd use Gnip in this instance? From reading the API docs, it doesn't sound like you can do anything with Gnip + Twitter other than get tweets from / to a particular Twitter user. So you can't get keyword-filtered results from the public timeline, I don't think. Am I missing it?
Actually, checking out the cvs repository on sourceforge (http://self.sourceforge.net/), there seem to have been some recent commits; though, in general, I think you're right that there isn't much active development.

There's also work on a linux port at http://www.gliebe.de/self/download.html, but I think it might be relatively defunct as well.
oh, I know that. I just am tired of school and wish I could code instead. I am actually considering taking a year off to do a startup or something before college. But I have every intention of graduating college (maybe even getting a masters in CS).
sadly not.
http://forum4editors.com/2008/10/where-did-norwegian-success...

From the article:

VG started online in 1995. In 2007 - the print circulation went down 80.000, profit increased 365 million Norwegian Krowns.
The problem with Vista is largely that it's just not a compelling upgrade to businesses, and only moderately compelling to consumers. XP does everything they want an OS to do. I like Vista better myself, but I can see how the casual user could be largely indifferent to it.

Combine that with their rollout problems and Apple's hundreds of millions of marketing dollars proclaiming how sucky it is, and it's not hard to see why they've got an image problem.
it is kinda of a sham when EU countries go around and tell less developed countries to "curb their corruption", while their darling corporates are a major contribution to global corruption, and that has been allowed for so long.
Also the whole certified thing was not handled well at all. That was sort of the seed of the problems.
Good cross-platform support is indeed very important for a programming language. The F# community is still small so there probably aren't many users on Linux and OS X.

Don Syme (the creator of F#) has said that Microsoft will release the F# compiler under an open source license. I think that the future of the language will depend on it. If the F# compiler cannot be included in Linux distributions then the uptake from Linux and OS X users will be low. That would seriously hinder the (open source) community aspect of the language. I don't think that a young advanced language can survive without it.
Ah, 11th grade. That's the year I both failed English (with an A average in classwork and a B on exams, because of an F in homework) and taught myself enough Perl to create a sample-based text-to-speech system inspired by Evolution Control Committee's "Rocked by Rape".

Call me crazy, but I still think being able to make Dan Rather say "wild and wooly Nazi war criminals hooked on drugs and drinking binges bug out on fire" is more important and valuable than any essay I could have written about symbolism in Huckleberry Finn.
Those were legitimate criticisms at the time. I certainly would have never got one if they hadn't started using USB.
must be nytimes member to read this article.
Agreed, that is a very important skill. But it's not always possible to avoid the grunt work ... even running your own business, someone still has to take out the trash (metaphorically), and the buck stops with you.

I've run into this a lot doing data analysis. Sometimes it takes 20-30 minutes to manually clean up the data (or more often, if it's structured enough, write a script to do it), but other people often overestimate the amount of work required, and decide that the grunt work isn't worth it. But it lets me make better conclusions from the data, so it's usually worth the effort.