skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I worked at a very Windows-heavy company until last year, and we were still on a very old version of Office when I left. (It was the pre-ribbon Office. 2005?) The reality was all the knowledge the employees had (not to mention their shitty macros) didn't transfer to the new version, so we simply did not upgrade.

The reason new laptops ship with a new version of Windows rather than Ubuntu is because people are used to fighting changes in their software, but they'll notice that they don't have "the real thing" when they buy a $13 Windows-only LED keychain charger and it doesn't work when they plug it in to their computer. Then they'll complain to their computer's OEM, and Microsoft will laugh evilly. (I don't really understand it. The amount of hardware I never got to work in Windows is approximately the same as the amount of hardware I never got to work under Linux.)
If only there was an OS where you typed what you wanted in an omnibox and it would just work...
I never got art until I started doing it myself. The internalization of the creative and technical processes of it are, IMO, crucial to "getting" it.

And like one might expect, I still only really "get" art that has a close enough analog to the work I do. So... sculpture? Right out.

And like others have brought up, art is contextual. One fundamental fallacy I see people make is that all pieces of work need to be conceptually complete and self-contained. A lot of good art can only be appreciated in aggregate.

FWIW, I don't "get" any of the art in the article either, save for the photograph of the woman. It's important to know that for photography geeks, it's often not about the subject, but rather about geometry, tonality, color, and more abstract notions. After all, there's a huge genre of photography dedicated to the everyday and the banal, whose only real claim to anything is beauty in composition and light.

As with all art though, there are territories that are incredibly facile, and therefore tend to be heavy-handed. Pictures of kissing couples, that "ring in a book with the shadow of a heart" thing wedding people use all the time, portraits of the homeless, etc etc. Stuff that's conceptually and technically been done to death, and IMO makes the artist appear more self-absorbed than anything else. Likewise, my gut reaction to the "money against the vagina" shot is "how obvious and ham-fisted", but that's just me. It's a me-too "exploration" of a topic that's been explored to death, without adding anything new to the concept or discourse.

In general, if you want art that you might find personal connection in, look at artists without an ego the size of the moon, and run far, far away from ones that do.
the software is the most important part. the hardware should be all but irrelevant except for aesthetics.
Oh cracking, missed the point completely and is first page on hacker news? My trousers could write more insightful articles.

Point: If you can squeeze a couple more years of service out of an upgradable laptop by maxing out the RAM, you should probably do so since the alternative is, basically throwing it away as landfill (note that the iFixit article said that claims about the body being recyclable were basically bunkum.)

So basically, every time you "never upgraded a laptop anyways, and that's OK", God kills an environmentally friendly kitten. Or something like that.
If you would like to upgrade your laptops, there would be many non-Apple products.

For most people, replacement would be a better choice then upgrade.
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It's neat to see how much more expressive F# manages to be compared to C#. One of his examples (passing an operator as an argument to a function) would probably take dozens or hundreds of lines to express in C# because it's just not something that's built into the language.
When the Ribbon first appeared (in a radical redesign of Office) I heard relatives and friends say they "didn't like the new Windows". They didn't even realize at the time that only Office had changed, not Windows. The upgrade was being forced on them by their workplace IT departments.

That's what it boils down to: people don't like it when change is forced on them. It's one thing if you see a cool new product on a shelf, choose to buy it and are happy to try something new; it's quite another to have your existing products keep changing.

This is human nature. And that's why Microsoft is insane to radically change Windows; they're going all "new Coke" on their cash cow. If they really wanted a new product then they should have created a new product: new name, new marketing, new everything, leaving the existing product alone!

This problem isn't limited to Microsoft. I've been disappointed by several iPhone app purchases for instance, as companies keep "improving" their apps with updates and occasionally destroy the essence of the original that I liked so much (e.g. maybe they mess up the UI so it's not as good, or they add in-app-purchasing crap). That's not the way to treat existing customers. Sometimes products should just be left alone.
Very cool! Flatmin looks like an awesome service! Payback is definitely still feature-minimal :p Everything you suggested is actually a major item on my to-do list! Facebook integration has been brought up several times and I very much agree about the hex string scheme - the next thing I'm going to do is look into an invite by email/ join with referral link, etc. I have no intention of trying to monetize either - I made it purely as a learning experience for my own apartment, and it does seem like a difficult space to get into.
The difference this time is that many of the bad reviews are coming from historically pro-Windows sources.
If Facebook were a country ... it would far outstrip any regime past or present in how intimately it records the lives of its citizens.

Let's hope the government doesn't one day decide to seize it. I wonder if they (Facebook) have any kind of self-destruct mechanism should that ever come to pass. No, actually, I don't really wonder, I'm sure they don't.
That's only true if you have software that can mount arbitrary past sessions, which is rarely the case. When you put in a dvd, what gets mounted is the latest session -- which is supposed to also include all previous sessions, but doesn't have to.
Except that EVERYONE has a dog in that fight, and it seems to be different for just about everyone. That's the fascinating thing about it. When you take away the labels (who made it or the period in which it was created) peoples tastes seem almost arbitrary.

Taken from a larger point of view, it's incredibly complex. Particularly when it gets all tangled up with societies social systems that rely on art to identify cultural similarities and social patterns. After all, every middle schooler knows you better like insert band X or else you're a loser.
> I.E. they hit start and begin typing.

Who are these users and how do I get a job supporting them? I provide support to over 100 people and I've yet to find a single one who uses that particular feature. And now they're supposed to learn how to use "hot corners" (or whatever it's called)? Ugh.
I always say "be interested better than interesting". Everyone loves someone who listen and ask question.
These are the things I use daily (most are free!):

[Development]
Spotlight - OSX built in app launcher etc
SourceTree - GUI Git/Hg/SVN client.
HomeBrew - like apt, yum package manager
MacVim - Coming from the GUI world look at Janus
iTerm2 (Zsh, OhMyZSH plugins)
MAMP - Apache, MySQL etc dev env (like XAMPP)
$ CSSEdit - GUI CSS editor, mainly use vim
CyberDuck - (s)FTP
Sequel Pro - MySQL GUI, SSH connection
$ Parallels - VM

[Calendars] - iCal or $ Busy Cal
[Mail] - OSX Mail
[Office] - $ iWork, LibreOffice
[Feed Reader] - NetNewsWire
[Torrent] - Transmission
[Transcode] - Handbrake

[Utilities]
$ little snitch - Network monitor
MenuMeters - Free limited version of iStatMenus
Flip4mac WMV in Quicktime
Perian (Make QuickTime like VLC)
TwoUp - free window basic management
RightZoom - Maximise zoom button
ClipMenu - Multi Copy, Paste board
UnArchiver - File Decompression
CleanArchiver - File compression (sans .DS_Store)
NameChanger - GUI for mass renaming files
Onyx - System maintenance and set extra OS defaults
Click2Flash - Extension in Safari blocks flash defaults to HD mp4, right click to download video.
Does anyone know a solution for this? When I got upgraded to this version of Chrome (Version 20.0.1132.34 beta), it started downloading RSS feeds instead of displaying them. Much sadness has ensued :(
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TL; DR:

Shit happens. Don't use AWS as your only platform, you will get burned sometime. Guaranteed, you will also get burned if you try to host and run your own stuff. How competent you are determines which way you get burned less.
bad art is very contextual

Much like how a bad joke need to be explained and people ignore and get annoyed by bad elevator music. But, feel free to listen to that used car salesman selling that just like new 1971 pinto.
I think the same can be said of windows phone :p In all seriousness, I love the design of the app! I would definitely use it if I wasn't on Android. How do you have 'taking' set up?
From the article:

"I’ve been following Windows 8 closely over the past few months, spending a lot of time not only with the official releases but also with a number of leaked builds, and I’ve had the chance to install the operating system on a variety of hardware platforms, both old and new."

"You may think that after a while you will become immune to these annoyances the more you use Windows 8. I don’t know. All I can say is that I haven’t come to that point yet, and the depressing thing is that I don’t think I will."

I don't know about you, but if I'd felt this way about the usability of anything (desktop, smartphone, whatever) after a few months, I'd have chucked it and moved on to something else (or gone back to whatever I'd been using before). Exactly how long should he keep beating his head against the wall until he's allowed to complain?
Yeah, I enjoyed them a lot years ago but it seems like they could be in a bit of a rut. Their travel documentaries are indeed pretty great.
Ah yeah, the screenshots that are on there are hidden from small views. I really like your version, especially the graph idea - I would imagine there are lots of possibilities for interesting visualizations!
AFAIK Chrome has never detected RSS correctly for me. I assumed this was special to Mozilla, with their "we should probably provide a basic version of everything - newsreader, FTP client, etc., even if it makes the browser a bit more bloated." Bit like emacs.

Chrome is a bit like vi, if you want more stuff, there's probably some sort of extension.

Sorry for the emacs/vi analogies, I'm not trying to flame :)
So the spammers can just delete all of the "crap" by deleting posts made by the same IP address right?
> (The same goes for Office. People use Word and Excel because they know how to use Word and Excel. Otherwise, they'd be saving themselves the license fee and be using Libre Office or Google Docs.)
reply

I can tell you that this is definitely not the case. I've used Word a lot in (non-software) engineering setting, and there are a large number of features used on a regular basis that simply are not available in LibreOffice or Google Docs. Things like citation support, text wrapping for images, and a good equation editor.
I agree with you. In fact before I discovered that feature on a Mac I was absolutely baffled trying to figure out how people used Macs for real work.

On the other hand, I do a decent amount of desktop support in my job and I have yet to find a user who knew it was possible to hit the Windows key and start typing. There's a huge difference in usage patterns between the "power users" and "everyone else".
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Point: If you can squeeze a couple more years of service out of an upgradable laptop by maxing out the RAM, you should probably do so since the alternative is, basically throwing it away as landfill (note that the iFixit article said that claims about the body being recyclable were basically bunkum.)

Sorry, but even this strikes me as dangerously close to FUD. A generic recycler couldn't be bothered to separate the screen glass from the lid, but I doubt there's any reason why Apple couldn't figure out a recycling strategy that would work. (And they basically provide the FedEx fee for you to send it back to them.)
Has anyone looked at using ELSA?

https://code.google.com/p/enterprise-log-search-and-archive/...
yes, it's on my bookshelf right besides my computer :-)
Or, if you use AWS as your only platform, accept that shit will happen from time to time. Unless your application is a matter of life and death, or unless billions of dollars are at stake, a little downtime now and then probably isn't that big a deal. (All my sites went down when Heroku did (including railstutorial.org, which pays my bills), but the losses are acceptable given the convenience of not having to run my own servers.)
Major drug companies fun a lot of drug trials, but they buy most drug research. That might seem like the same thing to US but if your country does not feel the need for FDA style drug testing you may not feel there is any need to cut them into the game.
That the software works correctly with the specific hardware is the important part.
Cory Doctorow has an excellent examination of this issue (which he coins "nerd determinism") and another similar issue ("nerd fatalism") in his Guardian piece "The problem with nerd politics": http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/may/14/problem-ner...

For those on the go, here's a direct link to the podcast of said column: http://archive.org/download/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_229/Cory_D...
love @ first sight :)

btw how did you generate those nice charts?
You mean calibrate the CGM? There's no pump calibration needed.
So basically, he dismissed philosophy as irrelevant, then happened across some obscure papers by cranks at the margins of philosophic thought, and concluded that he was right all along. Unenlightening.
A laptop isn't meant to be a PC, it's meant to be small, so Apple is doing their part in my eyes.

That being said... I recently replaced the HDD in my girlfriend's Macbook and was pleasantly surprised as to how easy it was.

If it comes down to a tradoff between 20% larger size OR 100% inoperability if any single part goes down... I think I would choose the larger laptop.
Turns out most girls really don't care.
No redundant power supply?
It is in fact stealing, just as "copying" a song is stealing (I know the HN audience won't like that!). "Copying" software is stealing it. Using a euphamism to alleviate your guilt regarding a crime is just self delusion. And I realize this is a difficult subject, and I myself lost a brother to cancer, but the fact is that stealing actually hurts cancer victims in the long run. You might help a few cancer victims right now with some cheaper pills, but what about the thousands or millions in the future who lose out due to the lesser research. And honestly, this pharmasutical giant in India is really just looking at a new way to make money and get some great press. And it's obviously working.
Having been affected several times by colocation facilities bouncing the power during a test of the failover system, I can tell you that such tests are not without risk. Yes, you should test redundant systems, but how often, at what cost, and what risks are you willing to run while doing so.

It's a fact of life that when dealing with complex, tightly coupled systems with multiple interactions between subsystems that you will routinely see accidents caused by improbable combinations of failures.
I have never seen anyone do this. Ever.
> It would be completely ridiculous to define the word "hermeneutics" in an academic article.

My point exactly. If everything written in your field is an academic article, how can you attract new people to your field?
Most contemporary artists works need to be appreciated as a whole, not as isolated pieces. The author here looks at trees but misses the forest.

Most people look at art as if they are portfolio pieces in dribbble.com. (Hmm, I like this icon, Hmm, I don't like that color). But art does not merely reproduce the beauty of forms, instead, it gives language to the "soul" so that it may speak.

Protip: Keep an open mind.
There are foreign investors or directors and then there are one man corporations with no employees, zero capital and where the only shareholder is a non-resident.
I was quoting from the iFixit article

"The design may well be comprised of “highly recyclable aluminum and glass” — but my friends in the electronics recycling industry tell me they have no way of recycling aluminum that has glass glued to it like Apple did with both this machine and the recent iPad."

I took this to mean that recycling was essentially impossible (by Apple or anyone else). Perhaps Apple can indeed figure out a recycling strategy. I doubt they will spend any time on it unless prompted by adverse publicity (like this article is generating).
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It is alleged that the CIA sought to influence Western art, coordinating the bankrolling/support of artists (including Warhol if I remember correctly) that represented a depoliticized vision of art. A potential cultural/intellectual enemy of capitalism was neutered by the transformation of institutionally championed art into a game of conceptual accounting rather than reflection on the human condition.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1862070296/lewrockwel...
Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're looking for, but you should be able to do this already. For the first one, you can select specific group members (a 'group' expense is just the default) and then do the split option. For the second, just select the user and the payback option!
Yes there is an extension for it, by Google too.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nlbjncdgjeocebhnmk...
It's Called Progress, Folks
I agree, it sounds like this could have been discovered had the two backup power systems been properly tested.

Note how in the case of backup power, "properly tested" doesn't mean 'Does the generator turn on? Are we getting electricity from it? Ok, pass!'. It means running the backup generator in a way that is consistent with what you would expect in an actual power failure - i.e., for more than just a few minutes.

Same thing with storage backup. Checking your backups isn't just 'was a backup file/image created?', it means _actually trying to recover your systems from those backup files_.
Can we have a variation that is something like: you have read even a modest amount on it? I'm not a philosopher, and my philosophical knowledge amounts to having taken 3 courses in undergrad (as electives while getting a CS degree), one in grad school (same), and reading a scattered set of books and blogs that interest me. I wouldn't consider myself qualified to opine on Philosophy In General. Yet, this blog post seems to be by someone who knows less about philosophy than I do, yet is more confident in his opinion to give a sweeping judgment of it. That's sort of impressive, but doesn't give me a lot of confidence that I'm receiving well-informed opinions.

Actually, that seems like a logical critique in any field. If someone who clearly had read only a handful of things about quantum physics holds forth on why quantum physics is bullshit, it would be a good heuristic to assume that they probably don't know enough to make that judgment, and maybe they should learn some quantum physics first.
The datacenter I use, has a policy to do full load runs for 30 minutes each month.

AWS would have found this, and been able to fix it in a timely fashion, if they did the same (the genset lasted for 10 minutes under load before failing).
> but I never remember the names of rarely used apps: should I be typing "Monitor settings" or "Display" or "Desktop" or whatever, if I need to change the background or a screen resolution?

Windows Vista and up automatically help you with this. Even typing things like "DPI" or "wheel" into control panel come up with a list of all possible relevant actions that could be taken, as opposed to just different panel screens. Here are a few examples of that in action:

http://i.imgur.com/c9uN1.png

http://i.imgur.com/hZStY.png

http://i.imgur.com/dQR9U.png

> why are they all trying to re-invent how we're launching applications?

My comment said why! It's not a re-invention, just a unification of the look and feel with the rest of Microsoft's ecosystem (xbox, phones, tablets, PCs will all have the same "start" screens).
His first suggested reading is The Bell Curve.

He's a management professor.

Flagged as BS.
Kareem,

What were you trying to measure in KISSmetrics that you were unable to? Did you try using the Data Export feature? http://support.kissmetrics.com/apis/data/data-export-setup

Btw- You can import data into KISSmetrics as well: http://support.kissmetrics.com/advanced/importing_data

I'm the Product Manager at KISSmetrics, so I'm genuinely interested in your issues to understand what you're struggling with. We try to cover key use cases like cohort reporting, but perhaps missed something for you.

Thanks,
Jason
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In some ways, software is like law (or accounting) - why do we pay lawyers so much money, even though in many cases we can simply file the paperwork ourselves? Why do we pay someone else to file our taxes, while we can do it ourselves? Being a "decent lawyer" is a very valuable skill, so is being a "decent programmer" or "decent anything". Just because something is not difficult to do, doesn't mean people would actually do it. They are busy, they don't like to learn something new, programming doesn't interest them etc.

Every skill is valuable. What is trivial for us, could be very difficult for someone else, and vice versa.
What I don't understand is why this is an either-or proposition ... was it really that impossible to build these laptops without alienating the 'enthusiasts' ... people who actually want to swap out hard drives, or RAM?

I just spent two years transitioning my life away from windows, which I used for about 15 years, to OS X just to suddenly find that I can't run out and buy a new SSD hard drive to try on my system if I wanted to ... brilliant. The best part is, If reading HN threads where people are basically agreeing with this nonsense, because Apple made the decision.

Thats right, just keep taking away choices from the user until the entire company and its customers become one huge parody. oh, hang on ... we're already there. yuck.

PS: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYecfV3ubP8
Awesome, the charts are Google Charts.
I agree with this article. I was actually thinking about this earlier today and amazed at all the backlash. There is a trade-off between form factor and upgradeability. I suspect (and I'm sure they did their homework) that a large percentage of apple's target demographic favors a sleaker design. This has certainly been the case with ipods, iphones, ipads, etc.
While I agree with 2, I'm not convinced by 1--where can you get data that is unbiased without FORCING random sets of people to participate in a study in the way you want them to? Even FDA-mandated experiments are biased by the fact that it requires volunteers.
I'm curious as well...and while I'm at it do you store the analytics in a db?