skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been using Ubuntu for years on my laptop, both for work and for home entertainment.

I've had no problem connecting to a projector, whenever I needed to do that. Of course, I was careful when buying my hardware. Also, problems do happen, that's why I'm staying on LTS and personally I consider the intermediate versions as being beta-quality. And the Unity stuff is not stable and is too rigid, so I switched to Xubuntu (Xfce), which is more stable and stays out of my way.

Ubuntu may not be ready for normal users that would want it at home, but a company like Google has people ensuring that these workstations are compatible and that upgrades work properly. They also afford to pay for support from Canonical. So the employees choosing Ubuntu can benefit from its advantages with less downsides.

considering Creative Suite is Windows and Mac only

If I were a designer I would definitely pick OS X over Ubuntu, but on the other hand you can run Creative Suite in a virtual machine like VMWare. And you can even install an X Windows server on your Windows VM and make that Photoshop window work on your desktop as if it was a native app, only styled differently.

Also, designing stuff in Photoshop is not the only thing a good designer does. A good designer also writes HTML, CSS and preferably also do a little programming for proofs of concept, amongst others. Those changes may involve running a complex app on your localhost. And it's definitely easier to have access to the same tools that the developers use. And it's preferable to use the same operating system Google uses in production for its servers (at least a virtual machine).

none of it was done with the GIMP

True, designers don't use GIMP, but GIMP is a perfectly capable app for doing design work. Along with Inkscape. The only thing truly keeping designers on Adobe's Creative Suite is that Photoshop is a de-facto standard, so it's easier to get training and support for it and it's also easier to send the raw files (PSDs) to other people.
Congratulations Harj on breaking a harmful habit. Keep Going!

You did it by intent, while I only did it by circumstance. As such,
we've probably learned different lessons from the experience.

For me it was my health. Those little things like walking and typing are
often taken for granted until you can no longer do them. Not feeling
well enough to accept invitations to go have fun with friends can wear
on you. The same is true for not feeling well enough to answer emails or
phone calls.

Could you leave your voicemail full for six months so no one else can
leave messages?

With your YC involvement, probably not, but I had to do it, and it
taught me a lot about interaction and contribution. Interacting with
others is a choice. Similarly, making a contribution of your time and
effort is also a choice. When you know you'll be in more pain after
typing an email, or driving to see friends, your perspective changes
since you finally realize there will be consequences, or better said,
there's always a cost to the choice of interacting and contributing.

Making a conscious decision on your own needs and opinions of whether or
not interacting is worthwhile is far better than merely reacting out of
impulsive habits and social pressures to be polite. When you know it
will cost you something and you still feel it's worthwhile, then you are
consciously investing your time rather than mindlessly spending it.

I know I've posted this before, but...

Treebeard: "You must understand, young Hobbit, it takes a long time to
say anything in Old Entish. And we never say anything unless it is worth
taking a long time to say." -- J.R.R. Tolkien
Hell-banned and slow-banned? I didn't know that mods for HN would do that to users they disagree with.

Spammers, I can understand....but users you disagree with.

Wow....just wow.
I can't tell the price in the US, but here in Aus, Photoshop is $1168. That's around the price of a reasonable SLR body (and 3 times the price of entry level SLRs), so it's a bit over-the-top to characterise it as 'measly'. The only context this price being 'measly' belongs in is 'professional'.

edit: found US price is $699 (before tax, Aus is post-tax). That's still not 'measly' in any context other than professional.
I would like an invitation also - if someone is monitoring this and giving new ones away.

Thanks :)
Anybody knows why Marissa Mayer quit Google for Yahoo.
Cesar Chavez was more Ballmer than Ghandi.

Besides, the other lesson of the UFW is that your labor can be replaced by a machine.
What a Difference a Year Makes
Rails is not Ruby.
How many Windows Phones have they actually sold?
My startup uses matplotlib and I was quite affected reading the story of John Hunter's last days and hours. (It also got my attention as I happen to have an elevated colon cancer risk.)

So a small donation is a no-brainer [and done] but I want to do something more. We're only recently ramen-profitable so I'm thinking it would be nice to donate some shares. Beeminder's success will continue to be thanks in part to John Hunter's work (even if we port to d3.js which I confess is in our plans) so I like the idea of having my donation proportional to the magnitude of that success.

I suspect it's difficult to formally donate shares so I'm actually writing this comment as a commitment device to honor the following:

I, Daniel Reeves, hereby earmark 0.1% of my own Beeminder equity for the John Hunter Memorial Fund, to be converted and paid as cash within 5 years of today, 2012-08-30.
It's a mistake to introduce new programmers to OOP before they understand the basics
of breaking down problems and turning the solutions into code.

Given how well I remember my classmates with little-to-none programming experience struggled with understanding pointers while not being able to write the simplest algorithms, I thought this was a no-brainer. Is it really a controversial opinion?
That's not really a cost-of-carry (in the financial sense), because it is independent of the value of the patent; It's just a delayed payment. And really, it is small - $10K over 20 years, some of it delayed (and you can "back out" in the middle). If you use professional help (a patent editor or patent attorney), you'll pay them at least as much, often 3 times as much, and you would do that upfront.

By cost-of-carry, I mean that if a patent is worth $1B, it should bother you like any other $1B asset. Are you aware of any other $1B that you pay (on average) $500/year to maintain, and yet get police forces all over the US (local, feds, custom officials) to underwrite and execute said ownership for you?
A few years ago oracle DBAs used to (and some still so) dismiss MySQL and PostgreSQL saying they were toys that didn't scale. 10-15 years ago 'real men used Solaris' and Linux was a toy for hackers.

Any time any with any technology those that have mastered the 'premier' product, especially those that are paid because of their knowledge of it, will always think it superior.
I'd appreciate an invite. My email address is in my profile for the moment.
if reddit and HN had a child, it would look like lobster.
If the hardware conforms to standards, Linux is the most likely to be able to support it of all three - and that's even without having to install a driver.
There is an about page, though there’s no link to it on the site: https://lobste.rs/s/bkeYe9/about_lobsters
I don't think it is helpful in this situation to insinuate that medical error was involved, or that Mr Hunter's death was preventable. Also, thinking that a simple checklist will solve medical error reflects a very simplified view of the problems in the health care system. There are a lot of smart people in health, if the solution was simple the problem would have been solved by now.

Not knowing anything beyond the post about Mr Hunter's situation, in general advanced colon cancer may involve surgery (to prevent blockage) and chemo. These are risky and have high chances of complications. In this sad situation there are no good options, only less bad ones. From the post it appears he fought bravely and was dignified. Very sad.
How white is the Internet? The demographics of Svbtle, Medium and App.net
I'm talking about all these Tony Robbins wannabes and content companies using startup/entrepreneurship as an angle.

Useful voices: 37signals folks, Eris Reiss, HBR, anyone here, etc.

Not useful voices: Inc.com, Forbes.com, Random dude running on investment alone, linkbait like "<insert superlative> <noun> for <insert phrase about startups or entrepreneurship>".
Unions originally worked because they could stop the flow of all labor (union or not) into a job site. Now there is a legal process that avoids the violent bits, but it doesn't really apply to the current situation.

Moreover,the equivalent to a picket line is what, a DDOS? Shit will get you sent to jail, yo.

The structure of desirable APIs <-> Developers makes collective bargaining not super useful.
The easiest antidote to an article such as this is to out yourself. If everyone knew this was coming out, she most probably knew.

The advantage of her outing herself would be that it would be far less damaging and considering people love those that seek a sort of penance, something positive would have come out of her outing post.

It is not too late though. She should write, ask for forgiveness, NOT blame TechCrunch for her woes and move on. Everyone loves a comeback stor so this might end up having a positive outcome if told well.

Ironically, I did not read the post the first time I came across it. This post brought far more attention than the original one.
I'm a Debian fanboy, but in all honesty, the RPM-based distros have long since caught up with apt in terms of sophistication.

I did find yum (the apt equivalent used by Red Hat and friends) a bit slow (it's written in Python) and slightly rough on the usability front in some cases, but perfectly serviceable.

Mandriva and its derivatives (Mageia is worth looking at) use urpmi to provide the equivalent of apt. I really, really like urpmi, but none of the distros that use it have satisfied me (for unrelated reasons).

SuSE and friends have advanced package management baked into YaST, which handles other configuration and setup tasks as well. I haven't used SuSE in ages, but it the package management seems pretty robust.
"Google had the approach where it leaves its hardware partners out in the open unprotected from patents."

If Samsung didn't want to get sued then they shouldn't have copied Apple. Google sent them an email to that effect so blaming Google is ignoring reality.

"Microsoft provides patent protection for hardware partners when they develop a device. That is one of the reasons none of the devices got sued."

Worthless when the products don't sell.

"Besides android UI, particularly the original ones are a shameless copy of iOS UI."

Which is why none of Samsung's latest products were included in the lawsuit.

Bottom line: Windows Phone doesn't sell and Android does so if you think Samsung is going to stop shipping Android devices you're dreaming.
Is FB Testing Out New Newsfeed And Skyscraper Display Ads In New Zealand?
[update: I've got hold of some of the code. Here's a copy of one of the programmes http://pastie.org/4615158]

I have an awesome story that i think I've told before, but I'll tell it again anyway :)

My father-in-law is a pharmasist. back in the early 90s computers were starting to make their way into Pharmacy and the first few pharmacy sortware packages appeared. this increased with time, as you'd expect. At some point he decided it was inevitible but he decided (I have no idea why, except that he's always been quite independent) he'd write his own software. Took himself off to nightschool and learned dBase III. He'd never written a line of code prior to this.

He then proceeded to write an entire pharmacy suite of software tools that are still in use. They've been heavily updated and added to over the last 20 years but it's still all DBase III running on DOS. It's a saggering amount of code over hundreds of files but it all works. I've seen the code and it wouldn't pass a first semester coding course. each programme is a single 10,000 line spaghetti-fest. I've tried to explain functions/methods to him but he didn't understand and in the end I gave up. apparently he doesn't need them!

I can't understate how complex this software is - it's stock control, point of sale (including the usual things like birthday vouchers, discounts accounts etc etv), prescription dispensing, patient records etc. everything for a modern pharmacy. The australian health dept know about it and it's met all their criteria. it does everything.

It's mindbogglingly awfull bad code by any metric imaginable but yet it's robust, appears to be as-good-as bug free and has been able to be maintained (gov regulations for pharmacy change constantly so it's required major changes each year to keep up to date) and in production use for almost 20 years. oh, and it's fast :)

[Edit: looking at the other comments it seems I've replied to the wrong thing. I was actually writing a comment in response to this http://prog21.dadgum.com/87.html (Write Code Like You Just Learned How to Program) which was linked to from the main article]
Who came up with the idea that anyone deserves money for coming up with an idea? :-) that is the concept that sits at the heart of this broken patent system.

We should all just agree that execution is everything, and only fight when someone copies actual code etc.
"And plenty of these plumbers and barbers and cafes probably do great work and treat their employees well. Do you really want to read articles about all of them? I don't."

Personally I believe there are many great lessons to be learned from those local/profitable businesses which if written I'd gladly consume. If the press would only dig for those types of stories I'm sure they would come back up with gold.

As an entrepreneur who is interested in growing a long lasting and sustainable business there are many lessons which I can imagine a seasoned business owner, no matter the market, could teach me (i.e,: how had they dealt with times of feast as well famine. What was it like when they had they'r first repeat customer, etc.).

"What makes a company newsworthy (unless it's as a case study) is its size, or potential size."

To be honest I believe this sums Jason's point in one line.

The current tech culture doesn't seem to acknowledge nor celebrate the stories of those founders, entrepreneurs, developers, or business minds whose offerings are geared towards providing impecable customer service; so that doesn't get written about fairly frequently.

Now I may be wrong in my observations but it would seem as if this current generation of the tech vanguard simply aren't interested in those things. The signal, which has become an ever increasing continuous one, seems to be about more, more and bigger, bigger, bigger.

Hey, maybe that's all there is to it, but I'd like to believe we've got much more in us than simply who can amass the largest seed round, or who has had their Series A round over subscribed.

Again, I may be wrong but just a thought.
What are you talking about? Carriers and retailers aren't bound by law to sell windows phone.
By public forums I meant Q and A with public audiences.
See my clarification
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4453460
> If we help boost agriculture productivity and work on our economy most people will be able to buy food.

[Citation needed]
True, I've had my share of bad updates, but Windows goes "pear-shaped at odd times" at least as often as Linux, IME. Care to elaborate further?

(I do agree that it is harder to get support people for Linux.)
FinFisher Can Hijack iOS, BlackBerry, More Indicates New Report
I think his point was that a guy driving to your house for this single purpose is itself hugely wasteful...

[I suppose if they do it once a year, and deliver an enormous sack full of these pods, it might be in the noise, dunno. Still, a "retail" solution seems much better.]
> Interesting idea, but it seems to give even more power to the big guys, who can easily afford to pay the fee.

The devil is in the details. For example:

When filing taxes for year Y (which is usually done in Q2 or Q3 of year Y+1), you have to assign a value to each and every one of patents you own, and pay the tax accordingly.

Let's say Microsoft has only 1000 patents. If they valued each at $1M, the fee would indeed be a rounding error. However, it would also be much less frightening to competitors: $1M if sued is not such a big deal for a company in business.

But they have 10,000 patents; and if they wanted to value each at $100M (as seems to be the case for things that go to court), it's suddenly $10B/year. Even Microsoft cannot afford that.

The end result would be that they would actually examine their patent portfolio yearly, and assign value only to valuable patents -- which is the whole point of this exercise.

On the other hand, if you are a small guy, and have a $1M patent, then $10K is something you should be able to easily finance. If not, then your patent is not worth $1M - or you don't have the means to enforce it under the existing system anyway (it costs at least $100K, and some people estimate upwards of $500K, to bring a patent case to court with a chance of prevailing. If you can't finance that, your patent is already worthless).
Ask HN: Is HN one sided with Apple?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4451130

Relevant thread: Bill Buxton: Multi-Touch Systems that I Have Known (1982) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4447408
"As for windows phone I feel that the new Windows version 8 will in many ways encourage adoption of windows phones"

Really? Your feelings are very important so please tell us more.
At some point you have to acknowledge that a substantial portion of your population is in the bottom 10% of the IQ distribution. Holding them to behavioral requirements isn't going to really change their behavior.
Looks interesting. Is it free? It seems like it probably is but I'm not sure. Also when it leaves beta how much will it cost? I don't want to end up depending on something I can't afford.
You realise he's the President and has more important things to do with his time? Taking 30 minutes to answer questions on Reddit is probably an important chunk of his day. Answering 10 questions with mostly paragraph long answers in that time is good.

"it's questionable if he was involved with this AMA at all"

In the opening of the AMA he said it was him and posted a photo as proof (fair enough it could have been a lie but I don't see why they would do that).

"standard set pieces from his campaign that you could have just as easily read off his website"

What else would you expect? He's running for a second term. Just look at how much these people get berated when they make a simple slip of the tongue during a speech or side comment to a camera. Most of what he says has to be run through speech writers and staff to make sure he doesn't contradict policy or accidentally reveal non-public information.
much narrower arc from the current mouse position to the desired entry

Particularly since the top left option (in the easy-to-hit corner) isn't usually one that you want to access much in the use of a program. Sure, you can get your mouse in the vicinity, but you still have to hunt for the menu you actually want. If your screen(s) is large enough that this requires moving your head (or even your eyes significantly), it rapidly eats up any trivial advantage you gain from 'knowing where the menu bar is'.
I agree with machrider that it depends on what you want to do with the language. Since you're browsing HN, I assume that the most likely scenario is to create either a website or IOS/Android app.

Website: I would recommend Ruby or Python and the use of http://learncodethehardway.org/. Both languages provide low-friction introductions to programming, and have large communities focused on web development.

IOS App: Objective-C is the smoothest choice at the moment, but it (and IOS development in general) have steep learning curves.

Android: Java is the language for you, and there are tons of introductory materials for learning it. But the learning curve here will be fairly steep as well.

Best of luck on your journey!
This really isn't true. My dad has spent a big %-age of his life working on family planning in the third world. It's a tremendous challenge getting people to use birth control, even in places without effective food aid.
Come on people, she is a con artist! She deserved every last bit of it, and then some.

If only more con artists got destroyed like this in public, the world would be a better place for sure.
Communities come and go. Small herds migrate towards the latest point of interest and some stick. Groupthink is a large driver of community malaise, certainly within the tech discussion arena. Individuals dominate submissions and discussions and evolve to minor demagogue status. Some communities evolve to tackle a smaller arena than just the general topical discussion field, but topicality remains critical.

I agree with this, but this is also why I have now come to seriously question why anyone would be interested in investing in any community-based site. Let's not mistake that for social networks (which in of themselves have their own potential issues). But regarding community-based sites, I can't ever see any as having long-term value, not after all the carcasses I see lying in decay on the web. :(
"...and the fact that Android has turned into a fragmented crapfest."

How them grapes taste?

"There is nothing worse than carrier customisation - it's the worst kind of turd polish."

That's your opinion, skippy. Consumers see that stuff and they like it. Please tone down the arrogance and see other people having opinions.
LMAO!

Thats a really good idea!
So you're saying that humans have laser-like accuracy in the horizontal dimension, and sloppy accuracy in the vertical? Your interpretation of the science is poor.
"The numbers are, of course, averages. So parents may spend much more time, say, caring for children, while people without children will spend no time at all."

Stuffed at the bottom, of course. Averages lie!
"and I'd rather have vanilla Android over "differentiated" bullshit any day."

Do you think the market gives a rat's ass what you think? Consumers like the skins. Deal with it.
Gimp has the ability to work with color channels. Try it out.