skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Still, Microsoft office remains the supreme software suite for the office, I don't see anything on the horizon that is challenging this.

After all the hype about open office it still lacks the compatibility and efficiency of getting things done in ms office, because Windows is such a juggernaut and whether you like it or not many features are built specifically for Windows, which gives Microsoft such a gaping advantage which will not disappear until people stop using Windows, and I don't see that happening anytime soon.
In the video the guy states it is faster than USB and Firewire and is 560 "mega-bytes per second."
It sounds obvious to us, but maybe you overestimating the intelligence of the average suicidal terrorist.

For the high level people you are probably right. I'm sure the kingpins either never use phones and internet, or RSA encrypt everything.

However, I would think the low level terrorist grunts are occasionally going to make mistakes and talk about things they shouldn't on the phone with family and friends.
Make friends.
Uhh doesn't Eliezer Yudkowsky's account explicitly discount the envelope explanation?
I'd like to be able to flag/mark a particular post so that I can continue to follow the comments that are being generated after it falls off of the front page. This would also help to parse "important" posts from those that have simply been visited. Along with this, it would be nice to be able to then unflag/unmark the post once I've followed it long enough. The unflagging could also be done automatically, after some period of time defined in my profile or per post.
Whenever you type that, you usually want has_many :through anyway :)
2009 The Year of the Largest Security Incidents Since the Beginning of Forever
Feeds of comments would be nice.
How about extra karma for the people who take time to up-mod new articles that eventually 'make it'?
If you want it to be public domain, you could use the Creative Commons Public Domain Deed to clarify that. Right now, if I were to download your code, decide not to use it, write something similar, make a successful commercial open-source product from it, and then you got hit by a bus and your sister inherited your copyright, she could sue me on the theory that you didn't really know what it meant when you said, "I suppose you could say it's public domain."

It's a little depressing to hear you say it took you three months working really hard, because it means it would probably take me about the same time. (I have no reason to think I'm any smarter than you are.) Maybe I should stick to AVRs for real-time stuff...
I know I signed that as my final post, but I feel the need to assure you that I wouldn't be offended by something so silly.

Sometimes you just get bored with a place and feel like moving on :^)

I think I'll spend less time on sites like these and more playing this fine Buffet clarinet I picked up on Saturday. It's been a while, but my embouchure's returning already.
It's a bit hard to explain, but it's a copy constructor. Not sure of all the details right now, but I think when it is passes to another function (as a parameter), the reference count goes up, and when it returns (destructor), it goes down. I don't think it can be circular, as it uses types, not pointers. The basic idea is the data stays in the same place in memory.
The first part could theoretically be achieved via your "saved" list (anything you've up voted).

I.e., http://news.ycombinator.com/saved?id=naish
That was a metaphor not an explanation. What's actually happening is pretty much incomprehensible, but is just as unrelated to the transmission of information as my metaphor.
Let's say i have categories that have many products but many products fit into several categories. Or I have a games with several players but players can play in several games?

Am I wrong to you has_and_belongs_to_many without using has_many :through?
That "works" (minus circular references) in simple cases, but it still has bad worst case performance (if your decrements chain, causing many decrements and frees).

And in something like boost::smart_ptr, the cache performance is awful because the increment/decrement is an extra indirection in a separate allocation, which is getting hit constantly.
Agreed, Perl is much more of a real, complete language. If you know Perl, you can pick up PHP basics in an hour.
Provide a notification, within the site or using the email address in my profile, when someone has replied to one of my comments. This could be turned on/off on a per comment basis by providing a checkbox along with the comment form or handled globally in my profile.
A single form is free at Wufoo. Just sayin'...
I'm thinking I want something that users can use to see what's already been reported, and what's being done about it, and to (maybe) allow discussion about the app.
A well reasoned and presented series of arguments in pro (mostly) of many language options.

However it is a bit confusing to me who the intended audience is. The decision criteria--choose this language if...--seem a little beyond what a novice or would-be programmer can answer with certainty ("Pick Perl if: ...your mind fits the mind of Perl.").
For someone looking to expand his/her programming repertoire, perhaps a goal-oriented approach would also be useful? (systems, Web, mobile, desktop programming, etc.)
And a seasoned hacker probably won't be in need of this help.

I enjoyed reading it, but then, I'm not at the moment trying to decide what language to pick.
True, but I upvote articles based on value of the article content, not necessarily the comments. I'd like better granularity, especially since all of my submissions are also automatically added to my saved list.
Wufoo insists on embedding an iFrame (you can't use your own arbitrary form code to submit to their servers).

I don't think that's accurate. I recall when I was joking with Chris about slamming them with thousands of requests a day, he suggested I look into using locally hosted forms, and just sending the post to them. Since I was joking (and was really only doing maybe a couple of forms per day), I never actually looked into that option. But, I'm definitely having a flashback to that conversation.
Sharepoint! You f#@ker! Koss!!! shaking fist

(Sorry, that's lame, take my karma.. I couldn't help it.)

Good marketing though, since they presumably have a bunch of free space, and offering one "free month" is costing next to nothing.
I find this article weak in places. Software patents are already on the rocks - if you look at cases like re: Bilski, it is clear that many software patents do not meet the new requirements for process/business method patents.

I am continually surprised the hacker community cares less about reform and more about abolition. Not only is there a higher chance of success passing reform, but the legislation can be reworked to support the inventor / the hacker / the startup once again.
Automatically downmod people who don't have websites and e-mail addresses in their profiles. I subscribe to the greater internet fuckwad theory.
Thanks, I'm coding now I'll enjoy it later.
A pretty nice survey and well balanced post - nice!

My only gripe - it missed out on my favorite - Groovy - which is my favorite because it combines the best features of most of the others.
ability to show comments for a specific time period(10-20-30-60 minutes).

Right now in long threads when you go there a second time you pretty much have to read the whole thing over again. Granted you can use ctrl f and search for minutes to find the stuff made in the last hour, but its kinda ghetto
Ah, that video brings back nice memories of bleary-eyed nights in the Real-Time lab. :)

... That and rage at the crappy, broken, unreliable sensors we had at the time. Damn hardware always messing with pretty software abstractions.

What was your gratuitous fluff process to "prove" that the OS was mostly real-time-ish?
How about submissions over a certain # of upvotes. That way you'd have your own custom "Best of"
When submitting a new story, automatically add it to the "threads" tab.

I usually just click on threads to see if there was anything new since I last logged in, and this way everything will be in one place. Instead of having to search for the thing in the username > submissions
Aha, well I'm an only child! Either way, I added some text saying everything is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Canada License; thanks for the advice.

I'll plead ignorance with your second sentence. AVRs? And why should it depress you that it took me three months? (Keeping in mind that I was taking other classes at the time, and that there was a ton of competition for lab space.)
Who moderated you up here? You give away the ending of a movie and then figuratevely give me the finger with a too-bad-for-you response and you get applauded for it.

Sheesh. Would it kill you and jacquesm to put a courtesy "spoiler alert" notice at the start of your messages?

(This is all incredibly off topic so this'll be my last post on it.)
Jinni: Wants to be Pandora for Movies
I think it might be interesting to see some sort of user-voted category system so that people who aren't interested in certain topics can filter them.

Conversely, if someone was more interested in one topic at any particular time (eg, depending on mood) they can instantly grab all topics in that category without having to trawl through the whole site.

But that's not really a personalised customisation thing.

Another thing might be the ability to grab someone's "about" box just by hovering the mouse over their username (when reading the comments on an article) - so you can get some more perspective on their point of view without necessarily leaving the page. That would be something I'd personally like to see.
I know what I _don't_ want to be able to customize. What I can and can't see. Similar sites give the ability to block submissions or comments from a particular user. I think this is a horrible idea given the special nature of this community. The most defining aspect about Hacker News is its high quality. Any type of ignore feature is just going to take away from that. Just because you can't see the garbage doesn't mean it's not there. The flag feature is already sufficient; ignore functionality would be a huge mistake.

EDIT: I just had another thought. I also believe that any type of functionality that allows the categorization or filtering of topics would be bad, for the reason outlined above. If there are too many high quality stories that people need to filter or categorize them, the rate at which stories fall off the front page should be increased. Having too many high quality stories is a fantastic problem, but it should be solved by being more selective, not by filtering.
Bob the Impaler
Demonstrating that the OS was real-ish time consisted of showing that (1) it never dynamically allocates memory, (2) it uses constant-time algorithms. More practically I did a bunch of timing to show that, under real loads, it generated responses under certain (arbitrary) thresholds. In conclusion: a process lacking even the smoke and mirrors of rigor.
That sounds great, do you want to set that up (are you involved in the poker night?)
I haven't had to market my services since January 7th (I started just a few weeks ago back on Dec 26 when realized I needed a better way to pay the bills than try and get a student loan), and I'm still booked solid. It's all been word of mouth since. Before then I posted on industry forums and hung out in the same IRC chats they did. You'd be amazed how many people hang out in IRC still these days. The real beauty is most gigs are rather small, and most clients understand my reputation as a great serviceman so they usually send me a payment and then tell me what needs to be done.

I've been a freelancer off and on for the past few years. I'm 22, in university, and have a start-up habit, so I need a way to fund myself. I found a great niche for myself in the past month that allows me to focus on delivering great work at breakneck speeds.

My main focuses are to be fast ("wicked fast", "what do you mean you're done already?", etc. from some clients since), to deliver great quality, and to deliver more than I promise, and act beyond professional--yet not quite too friendly--to clients.

The result is amazing. I'm already at a stage where I need to decline work and were I to be doing this full time I easily bring in enough requests to amount to what I've totaled as $525~ worth of work a day, which I could complete were it a full-time gig.

It's very easy: Make a dead simple portfolio that lets your work speak volumes where most people use gimmicky words (mine's at http://sicret.net ). Make your clients proud of your work (a lot of my clients love showing off their new designs, even though it's an industry that typically keeps things very private for competition's sake). I'm brutally honest with a client as well. If I am running behind because of some other mix up or I am not satisfied with a design, I will tell them, and offer them a discount or to redo.

Customer satisfaction is more important than customer acquisition. So is being truthful.

Don't be afraid to drop ineffective clients. You're in it for business, not to make everyone happy. your happiness comes first.

The most important thing I've learned: constantly charge more. Eventually you'll plateau, but until then or until your own project takes off, keep learning and keep getting better; then keep charging more. You'll be worth every penny if you give half a damn.
I'd like to be able to change the gray text on the article itself as well as the visited link color. For some reason, when trying to read it I find myself highlighting it, to give a little contrast.

If this occurs after breaking a karmic threshold, I am sorry I did not know about it and disregard my request.
I've been wanting this feature for a while.
I'd put PHP in a category with JavaScript, since they resemble p/py/r but were designed for web programming rather than scripting.
It seems like "buy a media company" = "jump the shark" for manufacturing companies. Does anybody have any good exceptions to this rule of thumb?
" ... and make the links be target=_blank."

Please do not do this. Let the user decide how to handle links.
Pew Poll: Global warming ranks dead last as priority
Ditto. But, I have to point out that what also works is a good morning run for me.

Run before work. It's like 3 hours of regular brain bootup/procrastination are all taken away by that run.
Ask HN: Why hasn't anyone launched a Feedburner competitor since their collapse?
Techcrunch has been bemoaning Feedburner's deteriorating service for a few weeks now. Others are complaining about it all over the web. Why hasn't anyone announced a competitor service offering feed analytics? Is it a tricky service to duplicate? Hard to make money from? Fear that Google will turn their act around and smite you?
I disagree here Shamiq, from my experience that's not entirely accurate. Typically 4-5 votes makes front page - though yo uare correct, often 2-3 votes is sufficient. Sometimes 2 votes will, but not always - it's more a function (I believe) of how much front page upvoting is going on at the time.
I want this feature too and add ability to hide stories I'm not interested in but I've already seen on the front page.
ML was the first language I ever learned. I didn't appreciate how cool it was back then though. The pattern matching concept makes for some really elegant code. It replaces a lot of control structure code.
Cool! I installed it, and selected the option - and nothing happens. I still see 30 items at the bottom

Can you tell me the exact URL that I should be seeing it at? I see toolkit. When I use that I see the search YC buttons etc, but when I select that option specifically, nothing happens.

I am assuming http://news.ycombinator.com/ is the main page you are referring to right?

Edit: SOLVED. http://news.ycombinator.com/news - now all is well! =)
Yes! Yes! Yes! I would get so much more out of the site if I could revisit some threads I'm interested in. I quickly forget when the post is no longer highlight as unvisited.

Maybe threads can be "floated" to the top of the page until they are "unwatched".

In fact, I'll probably forget about this thread by tomorrow -- a thread I'm very much interested in!
Not downmodding, but I call bullshit on #2. Every project is different and not everyone charges by the hour. Also, I skimmed Fling's site and all they are basically saying is that they have a $5k minimum, which is pretty common. Although I admire the hell out of their Manifesto point #11. :)
Thanks for your reply.

My tool for eBay had an E-mail to a Friend feature before eBay did. eBay later added that feature, and these days it's prominent on top of every auction.

My tool also had tabbed web browsing before Internet Explorer did, a Microsoft product.

My tool also had a popup-menu where a user could scroll up and down via a mouse (to enter bids from a menu rather than having to type them in) before the iPhone even existed (with their calendar date picker), an Apple product.

It itself was a desktop app before eBay every announced theirs.

It's really not whether a feature is obvious in hindsight. I've done stuff that seems "obvious" right now (never mind just "thought it was obvious in hindsight without implementing anything"), and it was new. You can't think of it that way. Amazon's new feature is quite new and groundbreaking.

But I can see your point. It's because it's a big company, that when it finally got around to implementing something like that, that it's a miracle. In fact, it wasn't until very recently that users have been allowed to select quantities when adding an item, versus in the shopping cart.

And of course, they are a big company, and so part of the news is that they had the panache to allow tracking of other companies products.

Funnily enough, my tool did that exact same thing, earlier--the entire point was to track items a user was planning on buying from eBay, Yahoo!, and Overstock auctions; Amazon was the fourth but I never got around to implementing screen scraping for their auctions, for various reasons, though it had it's own ID reserved in my code/database, as it was originally a planned feature. I think my YC application mentioned creating something similar, but a web app.

Note that when these four or so companies added the features I mentioned to their own products, boy did they get tons of press and praise! :)

And regarding features that are "obvious" that I haven't created, it's not a useful metric. There have been many YC companies that have done something I've thought of, but didn't: an eBay seller tool, a program that runs on your computer and tracks your time and the apps you are using in a web app interface, a tool that backs up your files on your computer via a local network to other computers whenever two or more are running, encrypted and seamlessly, a hands-on survey app for the iPhone, an expense tracker, a work log, all before those companies started YCombinator or switched their idea to their current one. It's all obvious. It's all execution.

Off topic, but interestingly enough, some of the earliest users of my bidding tool for eBay were from San Jose, CA.
Or maybe flag new posts since your last visit, so you can scan a thread more quickly?
So if you can just put the main program statements into the file without wrapping it in a function or anything, it's a "scripting language", but if you have to wrap it in a main() function or something, it's not? That's a definition of "scripting language" that includes x86 assembly for MS-DOS .COM files as a "scripting language", but excludes VBScript macros for Microsoft Word, I think.

Now, I don't know what you think, but these two languages seem to me to be almost perfect exemplars of the opposite extremes from how this definition would classify them. x86 assembly for .COM files has no type checking, no type coercion, no strings, no hash tables, very little in the way of runtime support (it pretty much owns the whole machine when it's running, under actual MS-DOS anyway, and you have to build everything yourself), takes months to learn enough about a computer to program in, typically is only used by fairly hard-core programmers, and there are no compatible interpreter implementations. VBScript is strongly dynamically typed, has strings, is used to "script" an existing application, runs in an interpreter, and is typically used by people who don't think of themselves as programmers.

So I suggest that Matz's definition may not really express what people are normally thinking of when they say "scripting languages".
About time!

It's actually really nice to surf on the iPhone, I hit up several sites on my phone when I'm out of the home/office.

But Y!Hacker isn't on the list because of that issue. Not sure how you are going to deal with it though, different style sheet for iPhone users?
Very clever! I wouldn't be surprised if you find a "Buy that on Amazon" link.
nice idea and very clean. I have a site that gives out an RSS feed. how do I get three feeds to see it?
afri-silicon you need to update your profile to include at least an e-mail.
Yes, the title is misleading. Simply having a form where none existed before doubled his RFPs. No reason to think there is anything magical about WuFoo forms, although it is a good service.
Style sheet? What's that?
Actually this would be a reminder for me to check if an item is also available on Amazon.
Cohort effects!
I must be a workoholic: http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/rVJcTSk8x1mNm6ewL4lImQ?...
The first online DOCUMENT aggregation site
Is there any document aggregation site out there or are we the first one?
Thanks for the clear up.
Google as your competition with a product used by almost everyone is probably a little scary. And really a bunch of people have tried it and have yet to find a way to make money.
How could this have happened? Ballmer was just so confident. I mean, it was like yesterday when he was bragging to the entire assembled Redmond staff how they would "continue to allow others to innovate." Looks like that's worked out really well for Microsoft.
Wait. No way. Really?

checks source

Wow.
Will VCs Continue to Suspend Disbelief
Are we the first document aggregation site?
We have just launched the document aggregation site. Are we the first and the only one that does this? Please let us know. The address is:

www.buzzup.com/docs

Thanks for your input.
Thanks. These look pretty good.
All of them, even Kamba, Miji-Kenda, Luhya and many others.By the way, we are 42 tribes in Kenya.
I think it is, but not for the reason you think. Google is slowly porting a lot of their own applications to GAE and those savings alone make it worth it even if it never gains major market share with the outside world.
* user customizable keyboard shortcuts. I currently use GM script: http://www.acunote.com/files/acunote-shortcuts.user.js but something natively supported and configurable would be good
Exactly. Darfur is wretched because the government has a stake in keeping it that way. Anything that threatens to weaken their stakes will in every likelihood meet resistance from the government. Had the government’s intent been to see a thriving and safe Darfur, the crisis wouldn’t exist in the first place. It’s not surprising that any attempt to improve lives in Darfur would be frowned upon.

Be that as it may, it never ceases to amaze me how some nifty startups come up with innovative ideas that discreetly transform the lives of people more than what UN’s billion dollar diplomacy fails to pull off. For example the stoves that helped keep Darfur’s women safe.

http://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/africa/12/27/stoves.darfur...

http://www.darfurstoves.org/
The problem is, unless you're using MyBrand, switching to another competitor means loosing all your existing subscribers.

Well, it doesn't if you leave the feedburner account alive. But it would be great if google somehow allowed us to redirect the feedburner account elsewehere via a 301 redirect. Ofcourse, that will never happen.