skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the cost for new computer hardware would be negligible if you compare it with the upside of increased productivity. But of course to get the system running (with or without new hard- and software) will need some time...
Mine is xterm-color too. Also, in iTerm the TERM envioronment variable is set to 'linux' and I have this problem with both apps.
Obama Staff Arrives to White House Stuck in Dark Ages of Technology
Fraternity membership is voluntary. Race isn't. "Frat" is not analogous to a racial slur.
When the actions of frats start to reflect the respect deserved by their full name, then we will worry about it.

Disclosure: Was president of ATO at a major university.
Congratulations! Expect some change on how you see the world. At least, that was for me with my two kids. I look forward to read the essays to come...
I agree. I'll have to try it with Consolas to see the difference, but the default "Homebrew" theme is pretty good for me as well.
Plead to HN: Obama will be here for a while.  Relax.
As I write this, there are currently three Obama submissions in the top 5 and four in the top 20. I get it, people are excited. I get excited about things, too. Sometimes they involve computers or programming or business.

Come on guys, you've got four more years with the man. Maybe eight. You don't have to wear the keyboards out in the first week. Exercise some discretion, please -- if Obama puts a bunch of grants for tech startups in the stimulus package let's hear about it.

Obama wears a bullet proof vest? Obama reverses Bush policy decision X? I don't think we'd be noticeably poorer if that kind of story was handled by other forums on the Internet.
I feel sad for the people but not for Microsoft.

In fact, I could even feel happy faster if Windows would load the page a little quicker.
No, it really isn't. Blacks have been (and to some extent still are) oppressed by the majority. The word "nigger" is an artifact of the oppression. It was used as a weapon against them.

Fraternities, however, have never been oppressed. Occasionally, they have been in the position of power (being a white-boys-club), with documented cases of people hiring brothers preferentially.
Yeah, but expensive socializing. :-/
Sure, I mean hypothetically in terms of actually displacing Twitters market dominance :)

I think if Twitter put a step wrong, or start to try and monetize users, we may see some changes :/
Speaking of the design of Hacker News. I think that not having a footer that gives visual feedback that you've reached the end of the page is a glaring usability flaw!

On HN, when you scroll down page by page and you reach the bottom there is no visual indication that you are at the bottom. And since you haven't scrolled a complete page down you are forced to rescan the page to find where you left off reading.

The NYT gets this right. Their footer is big enough so that with a regular window you'll always scroll complete pages until you see the footer.

I like the HN contents, so I put up with the design flaw.
Give me three cases where this defense was used successfully, 'cause I call shenanigans.
What change did you see?
The Economist has redefined "scathing" with this article.
Ask HN: Review our startup - MightyBrand.com
After months of hard work and wistfully watching many other HN members debut their startups to this community, I'm proud to announce that MightyBrand.com is up and live. Please take a look and let us know how you like the idea, and more importantly, how you like the execution.

Elevator pitch: MightyBrand monitors social channels for mentions of your brand, analyzes those conversations, and gives you tools to easily engage in those conversations.

http://mightybrand.com

If needed, my contact info is in my HN profile...I'd love to hear from you!

Edit: for those of you who are wondering, MightyBrand is a rebranded and much-improved relaunch of BlueSwarm.com, which we applied to YC with for the last round.
It seems pg is basically ok with these submissions:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=444408

I disagree, myself - I'm very happy to have Obama as president, but really don't want to see politics here, even if it's sort of possible to connect it with the site in circuitous way. But it's his site, not mine, so I guess they're a go.
The Stig
Anybody has an idea of the percentage of developers out of that?
Thanks so much everyone. You guys are great. I have some reading to do. :)
Sans blog spam: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01...
On the contrary, studies have shown that V1.0s overwhelmingly tend to be the higher achievers.
more valuable? no.

i feel like the article should be addressing is whether or not a PhD is worth the investment. for many people: no, its not.
I hope if they are thinking about doing an upgrade, they consider Linux. I mean, there is already a large government investment in SELinux; might as well use it.
No self-respecting terminal user should suffer with Terminal.app--xterm supports more colors and more features. Even iTerm is a better alternative.
Who here can walk into a data center now devoid of its IT staff, and be fully up to speed with a whole new staff?

Even if you're starting out with a detailed and valid plan of the IT transition, you'll still end up wiping and reloading the various boxes involved, resetting the network access control, resetting the switch and controller and server passwords, re-launching whatever mail server(s) you're going to be using, tracing out the occasional unmarked wire or busted connector, and a whole litany of minutia.

And you can't do any of the client-site transition until the old staff and the old IT staff is out of the building, and you have the keys to the facility. Even if you're running your new servers and such remotely and completely in parallel and need only flip DNS and thus you're staging your client gear, how long does it take to carry in and unpack and install and connect it all?
Interesting read, but I have my reservations about laziness as default, and the apparent lack of shipped Haskell applications, despite the language's popularity and age, seems to confirm those reservations.
yet they lack the capability (and even willpower) needed to see it through

With enough willpower, you don't need capability.
I think it's very fascinating when you're talking about perhaps the most technologically-saavy president in history. What he does will drastically affect the direction of technology. Nearly all of these articles are related to him, his administration, and technology. It's very relevant.

I'm not even a democrat and I think it's great.
What's special to the United States about this?
More info leads to less knowledge
will this work in OSX 10.4?
Microsoft lost half a billion on the web last quarter
Given how dangerous being the President apparently is [1], this seems like a sensible precaution.

[1] http://crookedtimber.org/2008/12/23/the-future-is-a-shoe-bei...
Hmm, if you stumble across it let me know. If you've build some secondary app that people are using you can probably get away with scraping out bits of the graph along the way, but most of the ones I've seen just do some very simple counting of friends rather than trying to do anything like finding clusters or trying to figure out which of them you're not likely to already know about.
We have both of those guys on our team. But hey, they do usually get stuff done.

The guy who is not interested in good software design, can't learn or pick things up for their job, who requires constant repetition and babysitting, and finally breaks your software out of ignorance is worse than both of these.
I think you've got the NSA confused with the TSA or CIA.
You're not doing a very good job here of dispelling the stereotypes people have of fraternity members.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=444673
This is a great resource for mashup creators.
Tribal Biases and the Inauguration
In this particular form, it's probably not very useful at all -- but identifying edges, or extracting 'foreground' images from 'background' images automatically with clean edges is something that would be ridiculously useful for videography, photo editing, or just graphic design in general.

Furthermore, if you advance the technology to being able to scan a photo of, say, an airport lobby, break each component into layers, and then perform shape identification on each of the identified pieces, you've got left-package detection or weapon identification technologies available to you (potentially.)
The question I think is based on relative things; so for some it possibly could be. Your question is also very important.
Puleez the article had one line describing how it was different than typical kevlar vests -- wow incredible description of the technology being used.

Explain how the article talking about how Obama making Bush's Record public relates to technology.
Angel Investing 2009: Leading Investor Networks
Stop crying and start hustling
Old but still good. It's one of my favorite blog posts of all time. He is also written a book http://www.managinghumans.com .
Two points stand:

1. Regardless of how tech savvy he is, the intersection of politics and technology is much smaller than either politics and technology. I come here for tech stuff and politics is just noise I don't care for. It doesn't matter that the politics relates to a tech-savvy politician, it's still politics.

2. For a non-US audience, news about/from the US government is not the be all end all. It may be so in the USA, and there are lots of people living in the US that frequent HN, but I'd wager that a large minority is non-US based.

FWIW, I'm very excited for reasons I won't go into here :)
I think your prices should be $5/month "blogger" then I would just rename the others and perhaps shift the price downward too, "startups" will probably do this themselves with google alerts or other services.

I think your market is small; I feel those who know enough to care about brand mentions - care enough to already have ideas of how to do it, and those who don't won't probably 'get it'.

Good luck in your endeavor
I will have to say one of the most moving moments for me on Tuesday was watching the helicopter with GWB departing over Washington DC. I only wish it could have come sooner. I used to think that one person could not have a dramatic impact on the world as a whole, I no longer believe that.
...and that if you change a bunch of other things at the same time, putting an entire team in a single room can be more productive than putting them in offices with doors that close.

Could not disagree more.
* I greatly appreciate that the 30-day trial doesn't require a credit card. Bravo! Finally someone gets that right.

* Why do you start at 3 brands? I'm guessing that there are enough users that would like to monitor a single brand maybe for $12-$14/mo?

* The plan pricing isn't good. The Big Shot plan costs $100 for 10 brands/users while the Blogger plan costs $19 for 3 brands/users. Why shouldn't I just get 4 Blogger plans? Clearly the convenience of not having to deal with multiple accounts and who can access what where, but it just doesn't look like you're getting the value you should be getting. As 37s said about their pricing "Each tier is roughly double the previous tier, but we deliver more than double the benefits." (http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1287-ask-37signals-how-di...).

Overall, it looks like a great way for companies to track their brands online and see how things are going. I'd say you could easily create a sustainable business model out of that.
I just tried out the application, and it's really great! The interface is really smooth and easy to use.
This concerns me... I've got a ton of friends at Microsoft including my co-founder that is moonlighting with me on a start up (hopefully he won't need msft for much longer). I don't understand why a company that spends so much trying to get the best talent in the industry and has as much cash as Microsoft does would throw a good percentage (5.5%) of their workforce back to their competitors. Seems priorities are misplaced, not to mention the tons of negative morale that mass layoffs cause.
Don't make 'readonly' fields less readable
he was already hired, he was just pitching a new niche` in the relationship.
The topic is certainly OK, I think the OP's point was that we don't need this to become the pseudo Obama-blog documenting his every step and breath.

When some truly significant happens, post it. 8 stories about his Blackberry are hardly useful info.
New Antarctica Study: You'll still freeze your butt off, but it's warming
New employees of a large organization dislike long-established IT policies. News at 11.
It seems to me like he's talking about that particular story, which deals with something becoming more transparent and accessible. He specifically mentions "hacker values." So I think that for that story at least, we're getting a lot of really relevant discussion over the nature of open government.

Some of these submissions have seemed really off-topic, but the one the comment's on fits pretty well. It works best to go case-by-case. I'm sure people will flag the ones that don't fit in.

We survived the surge in November and things went back to normal - and that one was even worse than this is right now. I think this is just a temporary occurrence.
Agreed. If I wanted to see a half dozen stories about Obama, I'd head over to Reddit.
Thanks for the feedback. We're definitely still working through our pricing model, so I appreciate the suggestion.

As we state in our FAQ, there's a number of ways you can cobble together a free solution on your own that will accomplish some of the same things, but it'll take longer and will lack a lot of features. At $20 / month, our solution doesn't have to save much time to be worth it, or at least that's the thinking. Guess we'll see :)
Better Than Owning - access trumps possession
I don't know about you guys, but this is called Hacker -News-, not Hacker 'Ignore the News'. Just like you said, he'll be in office for a while, so things will die down. Until then embrace the articles and discuss them. Otherwise, introduce other articles and posts that you think are more important.
The announcement mentions R&D and IT, which probably includes some developers, but it doesn't say Engineering. They also say they're going to continue to hire, while reducing headcount - sounds to me like winnowing the herd.
Microsoft are cutting up to 5,000 from a total of 90,000 employees - 5.5% of its workforce.

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1100931&cid=26559719
I hate that Feedback tab. I don't know what service provides it, but it ruins my process of browsing the site, it's ALWAYS slow to load, and I think a contact form is much more useful.

The design is clean. Two things: make a hover effect on the "Free Trial" button, it feels oddly static right now, and "60 sec signup, no credit card" bleeds off the button in Safari 4.

Now, question, from a genuine newbie: how is your service better than my just subscribing to a set of 6 RSS feeds?
Your points are excellent ones, and we'll definitely consider adjusting our pricing model and perhaps adding a solo plan that allows a single user to track a single brand.

Thanks again for your feedback. It's always nice to hear that someone "gets" what you're trying to do :)
iPhone developer: App Store rewards "crap" apps
Voted up for knowing way too much about sniper stuff.
"a person in the FedEx corporate communications staff apparently took umbrage"

That someone on FedEx's communication team posted that child-like tirade about a TWEET indicates just how much help FedEx needs for social media interaction. And if Henderson thinks Andrews was in the wrong, he has issues.
No offense but you just added another story. People won't get over him for the first couple months.
Interesting, but I was hoping to get more information on the actual internals of the signs rather than just an overview of the normal controller.
I disagree. People know that they can't change the contents of a greyed out box. Less savvy people may see a box with black text and think that there is something wrong with their computer, keyboard or the web page if they can't click in/edit the contents.
"I greatly appreciate that the 30-day trial doesn't require a credit card. Bravo! Finally someone gets that right."

I'm torn between this. On the one hand, it's less friction for the user to sign up... but then you wind up bugging the user later on. I feel like it's better to just get all of the "administrative non-sense" out of the way at the start. Also, if they're willing to give you their credit card (even if you aren't charging it right away), I suspect the data would show that they're more willing to pay for it later. I've got no data to back that statement though. Does anyone have any experience with this to share?
Well, it is also €15.95. This guy should really investigate others banks, right now he is asking Europeans for $20.70.
Although I don't think its safe at all, I think this is awesome.
You may consider http://www.kubelabs.com/phpdug/
Since stories don't have a downvote, I'm just upvoting much that's non-Obama.
Thanks for the feedback...we're still working through design and layout issues, so all feedback and advice in this area is welcome.

You can definitely put together a free service to monitor mentions of your brand, but there's a few things that you miss:

1. No analysis or deeper meta info about the conversations and the people who are talking

2. No dashboard to quickly see an overview of what topics and brands you're tracking have new mentions

3. Takes more time to put together the feeds and keep up on what new social channels are relevant and should be added.

4. No integrated ways to engage in the conversations you find, which just saves a bit of time.

5. No collaborative features, such as being able to see which items someone else on your team already responded to.

Obviously, for some users, a free solution using RSS feeds or something similar is the way to go, but if your time is worth $50 / hour, our solution only needs to save 24 minutes per month to be cost effective.
Don't know about mops, but apparently there are people who broom for fun: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curling

Canada. I don't understand it either.
And don't join companies that seeks references ( != back ground check ) for programmers.
I remember about 7 or 8 months ago or so I had made a string of comments very similar to the one you have made and was subsequently modded down into oblivion. I believe with the new influx of users the line has been blurred as to what qualifies as Hacker News. This is evident with the recent rise in not only political stories and stories pulled right from Reddit/programming. These types submissions are key to maintaining the integrity of a social news website and refreshing in some peoples minds as to what deems a story relevant to the intended goal of a site. New users need to be reminded of what is expected from both comments and submissions or soon the level of intellectualism and substance will be drowned out just like every other website.

Someone might not have the capacity to add much to a conversation or provide any insight, but when they have a point of reference as to was is expected they should still be able to follow accordingly.

This argument wasn't the appropriate side for me to take on months ago so surely it is not appropriate now. If the community decides that this is the direction it will go, then I believe it will suffer the same fate as the other social news sites.
Congrats Paul, wish you the best! How long are you going to wait 'til you start teaching him/her lisp?
The design is really great. Very clean, lots of white space, clear call to action. Just wanted to say: Good work!
Ditto !!!
Entrepreneurs should be opportunists rather than ambitious to succeed.
http://www.whoshouldifollow.com/

Think this is the one he was talking about.
> I bet he even got a couple of hundred of even thousands of followers more now.

And FedEx got a whole lot of publicity.
RIAA Fears 'Manipulation' of Courtroom Web Broadcast
You are just showing the application areas and the "best" languages for them. If this is the way you approaching languages, then the problem is not with Lisp, but with your application area. Find an application area first, then design an environment to solve the problems of that application area using Lisp. The next step is to create a community of people interested in solving that problem, and finally offer the Lisp environment to that community.

It has worked before with:

CAD application -> Autocad Lisp

Text editor -> Emacs Lisp
I see this as resources getting freed to go towards a better use.
HN now blocked by WebSense: URL Filter category Hacking;Information Technology 
Stupid Corporate Firewall.<p>Good thing I can SSH tunnel out. I had to file a request with my IT folks, with a link to the wikipedia article explaining the ambiguity of the term 'Hacker'.
I'm american and this is the first I've heard of "waitress" being frowned upon here. My experience draws from Philadelphia, New York, and Silicon Valley (San Fran, Mountain View, and San Jose), but there are so many cultures in America I wouldn't be surprised if some places were moving away from the word.
I personally hate being asked for a credit card for a trial because I know the company is hoping that I won't cancel in time and that they get to charge me. If your product is good, I'll be on board. If it isn't, I don't want to go through administrative hassle (especially since many sites make it difficult to cancel - sometimes even requiring phone calls).
Terminal.app isn't so bad once you install TerminalColours and MouseTerm. xterm can be difficult to configure, it doesn't do tabs, and copying and pasting follow X11 rules in it. I prefer native applications wherever possible.

iTerm on the other hand is slow and bug-ridden. The last thing I want when using a terminal is for it to render choppily and crash on me.
I guess because hiring a mediocre secretary or janitor will not jeopardize a software company in the same way as hiring a team of mediocre engineers.
If only rms's parents had known that.
The word "leading" is a bit misleading, because these angel groups seem to be irrelevant. I don't know what they invest in, but it's not Internet startups. More YC alumni have received funding from Sequoia alone than from all angel groups put together.
The motivation behind requiring a credit card for free trials is that many people forget, or can't be bothered, to cancel before they start getting charged.
I will deviate a bit and also wish Jessica a warm congratulations from the whole HN community. I'm sure we will have to do some kind of gift at some point....
They only talk to people with Ph.D.s in the humanities. Getting a job related to, say, a Ph.D. in English has always been hard.
What does Microsoft's bad news day mean for the future of Windows?
The Showmanship of Steve Jobs, 20 Years Ago
Microsoft has been hoarding cash instead of reinvesting it. http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=MSFT

I think it is time to regulate market capitalization (not more than 2 times quarterly revenue) of all listed companies.

I believe it will enhance entrepreneurship in America.
For $15, It would only have to save me a little time. About 30 minutes over the lifetime of the product would suffice.
User manual authoring.
As a non-US based person, it really doesn't bother me with all the Obama related material that is appearing (which is to be expected as obama-mania is still occurring)

It will die down eventually, just let things run their natural course.
It looks like a great site especially since you allow filtering to some extent. I was just deleting my account with Techrigy.com earlier since they just didn't get it right, MightyBrand has a lot of potential.

When I tried blocking an author though I got the following error from Google Chrome:

The webpage at http://mightybrand.com/brands/block has resulted in too many redirects. Clearing your cookies for this site may fix the problem. If not, it is possibly a server configuration issue and not a problem with your computer.

All the best,

Eiso
Replaced it with the original.