skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Should the techies and nerds reclaim HN for themselves?
Are you content with the current spread of topics on HN? Would you like to see it return to being almost entirely about startups, computing, and similarly technical material?

You can do it. Just two or three flags will banish pretty much anything from the front page and relegate it to obscurity. It only takes two or three similarly minded people to ensure that nothing gets to the front page without their permission.

So reclaim HN today.

Do it for the geeks.
Apple Is Talking to TV Companies About a Deal That Could Change TV Forever
I felt that with their ideas, talent, and overall ability, they could have been a company useful to society as Google. Instead, they have focused on their niche and done very well. It was their choice to stay small and avoid greatness, and I don't criticize them for it, but I think that bragging about it all over the place is a little tasteless.
The real story is, I'd rather less people starve to death than more people starve to death. Mass starvation is the inevitable result of giving the masses free food.

If you feed ducks you get more ducks, until eventually you can't feed them all.
Pedantically speaking, I wrote Gnumeric not because I loved Excel, or enjoyed using it or because I was trying to be innovative. In fact, I did not even know how to use a spreadsheet at the time.

Gnumeric was the product of the mood in the early days of Gnome: we need to provide this to have a complete desktop offering and we were talented hackers that could get it done. So I did.
How To Save A Wet Cell Phone Or Tablet
I'd agree with you if this article were more about hacking education, or one of the many education startups around. But it's not, really.

<Edit>
Obviously the guidelines can be used to justify any posting. "...anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" would seem to include anything. But as a community, we don't discuss the intellectually stimulating points of Victorian literature. That's not really what HN is about.

If you read further in the guidelines, you'll see the point that makes this post off-topic: "If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic." This is exactly the type of story the local news channels run.
</Edit>

It's fine to agree to disagree on this point. I believe Hacker News can and should be different from Reddit. It's certainly easy enough to find articles like this on Reddit or Huffington Post; why crowd out articles about gdb in favor of general news? Maybe the HN community would rather read general news here, which is fine as I only have one vote.
This is pretty much spot on.

I believe that the lack of "strong-D" Design you refer to is because Linux's desktop is pretty much the ultimate committee-driven project. It's very democratic: great for preventing abuse, but rather bad when it comes to vision.

Most of us here know how difficult it is for one person in a company to drive an idea through without it being diluted; countless product companies have gone bust over the years because of committee-induced paralysis. It's much worse when you have a distributed group of volunteers who rarely, if ever, get to meet.

Maybe collaborative development is incapable of producing something as complex and difficult as a clean, well-designed desktop environment and API? Forking, competing spinoffs, factionalism are all useful things in some ways, but they're death to this kind of project.
>I far prefer the Windows 7 interface to OSX, it's just stuff like the terminal/command prompt that really lets Windows down.

I'm not sure. Windows has some overall design, but also has tons of design neglect.

One example: due to static compiling and linking, you often get programs (and lots of them) that still use Windows 98 like Open/Save File dialogs, instead of every program automatically getting the latest OS standard widget with late binding.

Or things like the Metro/Windows dichotomy in the latest version.

Windows always feels design by committee to me, and one where some manager can have idiotic ideas and no developer/designer can shoot it down.
I don't understand the problem with eating what you feel like when you're hungry, and stopping when you're full. You'd think a billion years of evolution would enable us to find a decent equilibrium by listening to our bodies. Obviously, it's the stopping when you're full part that's hard...
I think it's a rather silly question.

When you receive an invitation to dinner, is it polite to save your host money by leaving before dessert? No. By default it will be rude and it would be up to you to find a nice way to do so.

Likewise I feel if an interview is scheduled for all day and you accept the invitation, then it's up to you to apologise if you want to leave early. So long as you explain that you don't want to waste their time, then no one should be narkey about it. But if you make it sound like you don't want to waste your time, then I think they have a right to be a little miffed at you.
True I did leave that out. My mistake.

Personally I wouldn't consider that abuse either. IMHO a good interview is supposed to be hard. How else can you differentiate good candidates from bad? Perhaps others disagree.
"I've used Linux for years and have never had these problems."

Agreed. That is two desktops and four laptops worth in a decade.

"I think the issue is that getting everything working requires a deep understanding of each component and the system as a whole. "

Not so sure. I'm an end user and tend to just shove the CD-ROM in and cross my fingers. Most 'stuff' works. My stuff is simpler than yours however (audio interface, cameras, keyboard (musical) controller)
Playing devil's advocate: it seems to me that a laptop is a mobile device.

Further playing devil's advocate: it seems that the system is not so much that the provider cared about whether it was a phone or computer (I bet a galaxy tablet would get the mobile price... and I can use just as much data on that as on a laptop without trying very hard at all), but whether they were using a browser with a mobile user-agent string. They offered a discount for having the right user-agent string, and being willing to browse the mobile version of Gogo's landing page.

Questions this raises: what if my phone browser was not on their list of mobile browser agent strings? Say it was just a custom webkit thing I built? Or a firefox compiled for a tablet? Would I be defrauding by making my user-agent work for my mobile device? What if I had been working with a mobile browser compiled for my laptop, as I was just browsing with it, but not using my phone, so I could get a feel for various quirks it would introduce over a non-mobile browser, in an easy to side-by-side way on my nice big laptop monitor?
Their true potential was to be a 50 billion dollar public company, in my opinion. I could be wrong. There are more important things in life than money, of course. But I felt they chose to leave too many chips on the table.
So I enjoyed using Ubuntu w. Gnome2 more than any other OS/window manager that I've used, which includes Win 98-7, and Snow Leopard->ML.

I thought it was designed well. So what does that make me then?

"if you want to run a linux desktop and don't value or care about design"

But I do care about design, it just sounds like you and I like different kinds of design.
A lot of custom pens on Kickstarter use the Pilot Hi-Tec-C Gel cartridge. That pen seems to have a very loyal following. I've not tried it myself.
You just confused a design patent with a utility patent.

Frankly, I've personally not yet seen an anti-patent argument from someone who actually understood what patents were, how they worked, etc. They constantly confuse terms, misrepresents what the patents they are dogging actually say, or rely solely on unsupported assertions.

Including hundreds of comments here on HN, all of which seem to be ideologically driven repetitions of talking points, and none of which come from people who have read the patents or which accurately represent what the patents actually cover. (Eg: all the commentary on the Samsung trial, not one criticizing the patents was accurate.)

Its not like patents are secret- they're published on the web for anyone to read.

Near as I can tell-- google felt they needed to rip off the iPhone for android in order to compete, and therefore, suddenly, patents are bad. Yet microsoft's metro UI shows this isn't the case....
in a q&a round at aalto university in finland linus adressed the question why linux never took off on the desktop: the lack of being a pre-installed os.
he mentions that without preinstalled operating systems there's now way to gain a significant market share in the desktop segment.

the whole talk by itself is very recommendable: http://youtu.be/MShbP3OpASA?t=23m45s
This article is spot-on, but 10gen did one more thing they probably shouldn't have: marketed their not-very-scalable, not-very-durable database as a solution to problems companies were having with scalability and durability.
Overlay101: Contextual help for your webapp
Nice work! In a similar fashion I created KinecTunes (control iTunes using your voice via the Microsoft Kinect - http://kinectunes.codeplex.com/) because of the same reason. Innovative use of the webcam!
Modern food availability and composition differs wildly from what we evolved on for 99.999% of that billion years.

It's not a big surprise that finding an equilibrium in this relatively new food and mobility environment is difficult for our species.
StyleBootstrap now works with Twitter Bootstrap 2.1
http://stylebootstrap.info/
I don't know if a "flag war" is going to benefit anybody. What if a group get together and start flagging anything about "startups, computing and similarly technical material."
This would seen to suggest that although caloric restriction may not prolong life, an all-you-can-eat diet may shorten it.
I agree with what you. His style of running a business as likely maximized his personal happiness, and possibly his employees.

But I would have liked to see him say "we could have been far more profitable, but we didn't care about that, so we limited hours and didn't hire salespeople." Instead what I hear him saying is "we are the best business we could be, because we limit hours."
I've been looking for a decent tutorial on EMBER as someone who's of merely limited programming talents and abilities. I love what I've picked up so far, and I'm going to work through this tutorial now. Thanks OP for the work put in on this.
When I was working for IBM (software group) I heard anecdotes that in case of accident power outage mainframes can continue execution exactly from the same CPU instruction where it stopped and absolutely no data is lost. I don't know if it's true or not but this sounds cool.
you are undervaluing the data you and I don't see.... Last time I check Craigslist isn't their only source....I understand why Craigslist did it but I still think Craigslist would have been better with padMapper...
I like Steve Blank's definition of a Startup -- it's an enterprise set up to search for a profitable business model. 37signals is long past that.
For anyone trying to follow along with the tutorial beware that there's a typo the whole way through the code that stops it from running.

connnect -> connect
I believe it's all linked to my personal account.
Samsung announces the "Galaxy Camera"
Well, I'm glad you did write Gnumeric. The graphs module with that tree like properties box is really nice to use.
IMHO; Android and to a lesser degree ChromeOS (as well as other similar platforms) don't quite count as "Linux" for purposes of "the Linux desktop" as they've replaced nearly everything above the kernel with their own stack[0].

[0] Last time I used ChromeOS it was still mostly in line with ordinary Linux (thought it might have been partially Gentoo based?); but a rather impractical one as it's less than simple to run [things that aren't Chrome]. Heard about Xorg getting replaced at some point, I'm unclear on if that actually happened.
It usually goes:

* Write a todo. Ex: Log errors from Fb.
* Ask a question if I'm stuck. Ex: Will Log4R block the reactor?
* Play with various approaches. Ex: Write in thread, plug into Goliath's logger.
* Note any bugs. Ex: Logger blah blah
* Rinse and repeat.

I know its a silly example, but you get the idea. Hope that helps.
Wanted: command line HTML5 beautifier
Right from the frontpage (check the links over there):

"Who uses HTML5 Boilerplate?

Google, Microsoft, NASA, Nike, Barack Obama, Mercedes-Benz, ITV News, BAE Systems, Creative Commons, Australia Post, Entertainment Weekly, Racing Green, and many more."
It's a lack of willingness to invest in the infrastructure. Which is a chicken/egg thing - legislators won't vote for investment as voters don't support something that doesn't deliver value.
The problem with most of these opinions is that they are absolutes, and therefore by definition many of them are wrong. They could mostly be improved with the addition of "sometimes", "in most circumstances", "depending on the goals of your project", etc. For example:

- "Programmers who don’t code in their spare time for fun [frequently won't be] as good as those that do.

- "Unit testing [may not] help you write good code [in many situations I have encountered]."

- "[Possibly the most useful] “best practice” you should be using all the time is “Use Your Brain” [though for some teams in some circumstances there may be more useful best practices]."

- "If you only know one language, no matter how well you know it, you’re [almost certainly] not a great programmer."

- "Readability is the most important aspect of your code, [depending on your company's goals and method of achieving those goals at this point in time]"

Of course, these are [mostly] opinions, and adding all sorts of disclaimers is [almost] never fun, but opinions stated as absolutes are [almost] always wrong.
Are central banks stoking income inequality?
This assumes there are no consequences for such parents. Add strong enough consequences (e.g. loss of freedom) to deter others. A "well-meaning but stretched family" is more likely a set of parents who didn't responsibly plan their family. If that's the case the parents should be punished. (In the US, even the poorest parents can be punished for exposing their kids to lead.)

If we make parenting a birthright (as many people support, esp. for the poorest for some reason), mass starvation is the inevitable result.
In fairness, you do get a LOT of exposure to the device with JavaScript & HTML5 on iOS: Touch (including Multi-touch sensing), Accelerometer, Gyro, GPS, Compass, Messages, Contacts, Local Storage (SQL or Key/Value), Airplay opt-in, etc..

https://developer.apple.com/library/safari/navigation/#secti...

So, you can get pretty close to a native experience - Ft.com is an example of this. But yes, a native app adds more (iCloud, 3D graphics, Networking, Files, etc.)
Devil's advocate: It is neigh impossible to judge from the video, but to me, the video shows less of a direct link between hand movement and what happens on the display. It is not as if the hand really grabs the screen. I also got the impression that he had to issue a command, chosen from the top of the screen (outside the video image) to switch from scaling to rotation. Another argument could be that this user does not actually seem to touch the screen (at least, that is my impression). It is likely that all these are due to technological limitations, but if I had to defend this as "not prior art" in court, I would try and work from those observations. There is little else to argue about, as a lot of the interactions are there, in a primitive (technologically) way.
It's my fault, not that of the WSJ. I could have picked a better word to describe it.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3078727

HN was meant to be about startups, because YC is about funding startups. It still focuses on that. The problem you refer to is that the content has somehow declined in quality. I have not been a member here long enough to tell. But one thing, this place is about what you make of it. Only you decide to make the best or worst of it.
> If you have more bandwidth on the legal side of your company for work than your development side, then a lawsuit might make sense.

If you have more bandwidth on the legal side of your company for work than your development side, then your company is getting closer to being undead like SCO or Kodak. In this situation, it's high time to do something about that.
In no way is that "the Linux desktop" "winning" at anything, because (at long last) the navel-gazing of the Linux community has been pushed aside in favor of one group saying "this is how it will be" (and then some OEMs scribbling a little on the walls, but not much).

Android is only "Linux" when it's convenient for Linux advocates, but it's never "the Linux desktop".
That's interesting. I would imagine you would need precision to the hundredth of the millimeter when making guns? I hung around some people who reloaded brass once and they were using these measuring gauges with that kind of precision.
Not sure, but let me ask around.
Yeah, but you need an architect that people will listen to in order to build a cathedral. It has to be many people, united under a common vision. That's really hard to pull off in the Linux community.
I have used Linux as my main desktop and laptop OS for 17 years, and see these problems frequently. It used to be a system I could keep completely in my head, and understand what was happening and why. But from maybe 2005 onwards there has been a persistent and accelerating trend of replacing the old working and transparent (though possibly a bit baroque) infrastructure with fancy new components that are completely inscrutable. And the lack of transparency gets worse and worse the thicker these layers of garbage get. It's mostly fine as long as things work. But things never seem to work if you have a configuration that differs even a bit from the default.

Want to log in from a terminal and start X? Well, too bad there's some new infrastructure this month that makes sure you'll only get access to the sound device when you log in from a properly configured gdm. Want to modify the keyboard layout? Whoops, the xmodmap format that had been stable for a couple of decades now changed for the third time in a year. Want to add a tmpfs on /tmp to fstab? Well, too bad. Some implicit and undebuggable circular dependencies in systemd will make the system unbootable.

And the sad parts are that the problems this new infrastructure is supposed to solve never actually existed. "Great, now audio doesn't work at all. But if it worked, it would have full support for network transparency". It's easy to understand why the problem exists - creating something new tends to be more rewarding than working on the old stuff. It's much harder to see how to fix this madness.
Some big players including Google and Microsoft are in favor of fairly drastic patent reform. The fact that they have to play the game (because that's how the legal system is set up) does not imply that they think the system is good for their bottom line.

I'm in favor of a "King James I moment", revoking all prior patents. The problem with pure maintenance fees is that it does nothing to prevent overlapping patents. Also, truly innovative patents may not prove their worth for several years (this is sort of the point), but the original company may not be able to afford the huge fee during the early years. If a big company could just buy it for 20x whatever the inventor is paying for maintenance, the inventor can easily be shut out of the market.
A Special Thanks from Nodester
That's pretty much a hallmark of an evil company, is it not? (At the extreme end you have patent trolls who have nothing but patents and lawyers.)

Whatever one's opinion of Padmapper and their legal/moral standing is, one has to admit that Craiglist's actions are completely contrary to the image of a non-evil company that they try to cultivate.
From the guidelines:

"Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them."

There's only one item in the top 10 at the moment that isn't relevant to the criteria as you've laid them out.

I for one would like to see less meta complaining about the impurity of HN. Submit something really interesting that gets to the top instead.
> Design is about usability and understanding the user

Here's the point you're missing. The overwhelming majority Linux users don't give a flying hoot about the average user or mass adoption. They just want a system that gets out of their way and let's them do their technical tasks. Linux succeeds and excels at this because it is precisely designed for that niche and curated by its end-users.

There are however people who do care about mass adoption, i.e. Canonical, "Linux Advocates". Generally they're either emotionally invested in Linux for some reason or they get a paycheck for their work. These people are the minority of Linux users.

Saying the culture doesn't care about design is absurd, it's the non-technical user we don't care about. Let's not conflate the two. Looking at a piece of software like XMonad or TMux it's hard to not appreciate the elegance in it's design. It's just different form of design that say iTunes or Photoshop.
Also, start boxing. Short of military boot camp there is no more effective, more intensive (and, frankly, more badass) exercise out there. Three times a week for 60-80 minutes is all you need.

Think it looks easy? Pick up a 1lb weight in each hand (16oz gloves are standard), make a fist around it, and throw fast punches continuously for three minutes.

Finally, take the weekend off paleo. Get a pizza on Friday, have some beers on Saturday. Make a giant bolognese, cover it in parmesan. Enjoy the things mankind discovered between leaving the caves and building cities.
Design without a language in mind, but to solve a problem. PHP is just how you tell the computer how to do something. But your solution is what ends up being elegant or messy.
Planetary Annihilation hits $900K goal with 16 days remaining
Nailing community and ease of use (drivers for everything, easy to install) and documentation wouldn't have been much use if the product sucked; it doesn't.

A lot of people that I've seen with issues around Mongo haven't understood how it's expected to be used: i.e. it's not a relational database and the schema design is therefore different.
>> everybody
Interesting idea, but it seems to give even more power to the big guys, who can easily afford to pay the fee.
Problems of Inertia versus Problems of Momentum in Startups
I recently talked to a good friend who is a gifted and extremely talened developer and we puzzled over our professional life together. It occurred to me that there are two classes of problems one encounters throughout the life of startups. They are not the same and require different solutions.

One class, the Problems of Inertia, contains things like getting started, releasing, and finishing. Solving Problems of Inertia means doing whatever is needed to get moving, to overcome fear, to ignore doubt. These problems are mostly pyschological and social. We all know what these are. Once a course of action has been evaluated, options are limited. Either do it, or dont. This does not require great intuition or judgement or analysis. The important part here, however is that there is great cost to not acting and that is that things stay the same. Acting, however, creates momentum.

Problems of Momentum, contains things like changing a product, scaling, and exiting. Solving Problems of Momentum means doing a more subtle analysis, weighing many choices, and relying on intuition and judgement. There are more options and choosing among them is less psychological and more a rational cost/benefit and risk/reward evaluation. The important part here is that not acting is a valid choice because you have momentum.

So its important to understand what kind of a problem one is facing so that one may either suck it up and do it or follow a more subtle decision process. All in all I would rather face a Problem of Momentum!