skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's a different philosophy. Some of us come at it from the perspective that we want to know how our machine works. And when something goes wrong, we want to dig into it and fix it ourselves. The monolithic and opaque OSs that "just work" aren't for us. Oddly, the only place I've seen this attitude described/explained is in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
> when he laments the anarchy and lack of long term planning on the Linux side

Maybe that is what really makes Linux struggle as a desktop. Fragmentation. It really sucks to have to install hundreds of libraries to run an app because you run Gnome but it was made for KDE. It's always unconfortable to change environments because it's not just different looks, it is different ways of doing things.

Some users and hackers do like choice, but most common users don't, because it is reduces the number of things to learn. You don't have to copy MS Win or OS X to be good, but consistency is good, and unless you select a subset of Linux desktop (and its related apps) you will be missing a more consistent user experience.
I think this policy needs to come from the top - it just doesn't matter if users start flagging stuff that is more general tech fluff.

Websites have big traffic and SEO incentives to get their stories on this site and they'll keep doing it while they're officially allowed/ignored with their employees and auto-submitters and spam. On the other side is the growing user base who collectively average and resemble diggers and redditors more and more each day and want content that would better suit digg and reddit and is often written specifically for sites like digg and reddit to upvote.

There isn't a good mechanism for preventing or reporting this stuff, and if you flag stories excessively you lose the option permanently.
I absolutely agree. I actually prefer the graphical shell of Windows 7 to the one of OSX Lion. But Windows does not have a Unix terminal.

And I think that is the main point here: Linux might lack design graphically, but the Linux command line is about the most beautiful thing out there. There is an abundance of elegance there is probably only rivaled by some Lisp machine.

Who knows, maybe, I will switch from OSX to Linux because of that at some point. It is certainly tempting.
> This would seen to suggest that although
> caloric restriction may not prolong life, an
> all-you-can-eat diet may shorten it.

This is basically what I came to post. A calorie restricted diet may not prolong life compared to a healthy, normal weight, but obesity certainly cuts lifespan short through a plethora of health issues.
> "One second of CPU time per day" got me thinking. Sure there are benefits to having modernly cheap computers, but how did they do it before?

By this argument, do you also pay your bills manually by check at the end of each month? And book all your air travel by calling a travel agent?

There's nothing wrong with trying these things to see what advantage they have, but advocating the old ways of doing things purely because they're old seems more like religion than science to me.
I found it not enlightening for the reasons I listed. I guess I am on the lookout for something that makes sense of Apple v Samsung specifically and how the verdict fits into an understanding of the challenges posed by patent law. This wasn't it and I suppose I am too impatient, it will be written in long form and take more time.
Probably just end up like color scanner and copiers that have "anti counterfeit" measures baked into the hardware.

"Error, I see your printing a spiral bored tube...."
This little 13-year-old girl isn't a truth teller but a racist who apparently resents being taught by white people.

""""
While the issues Williams raises are controversial, even Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has acknowledged that closing the achievement gap requires more black educators in the classroom.
""""

There is absolutely no proof of this.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/11/black-teachers-may-...
Their road map and this strategy cements the opinion that Twitter is a media company and not a social-networking platform.

The question each user of Twitter now has to ask themselves, how and why they are using Twitter on the daily basis.

As a business itself, Twitter is clearly providing an outlook into what it expects its user community to be, i.e, the users are the clear product to be sold to Twitter's customers and clients.

The old model of selling Ads to the free-users, no longer works. The free-users clearly need to be sold to the clients and customers as well.

So if you are a free-user as a business yourself, than you are in a good company at Twitter. If you are a free-user as a consumer (consuming content generated by others) than you are a product and you have to be ready to be sold. But if you are a free-user only trying to have social-conversation with friends and strangers, than you are an idiot interfering in other people's business.

There is nothing negative here, it just all makes sense.
The Best Recruiters Ever
Craigslist isn't suing PadMapper for adding maps, it's suing because it sues everyone who republishes CL data (with the exception of generic search engines). CL's real target is 3Taps, which is where PM gets its data. If CL loses the lawsuit, the most valuable piece for developers remaining will be CL images. 3Taps' API includes links to those images, as well as much other useful data, but CL is never going to let developers hotlink to the pictures it hosts. (One could launder those image links through a 3rd party service, but the scope is too large to be undetectable, besides it introduces an ethical issue.) The larger play here, which may in time overtake CL itself, is 3Taps' plan to open the classifieds space in a big way.
Until they end up with MVCC...
Travel Websites and Hotels Fixing Prices?
Samsung’s Galaxy Camera : smartphone in point-and-shoot camera
What Is A Wussy
The trouble with this viewpoint is it seems to assume that evolution is optimizing for longevity. That fact is very much lacking from the evidence. Many creatures are literally programmed to die as soon as they finish reproducing. This is obviously not the case for humans, but it does show that evolution does not necessarily have our individual best interests at heart.

When we talk about longevity these days, we're not talking about living long enough to raise children — we're talking about living way past the point where we serve any clear evolutionary purpose. Thus, evolution might not be the best guide.
I have for several years used Papermate felt-tip pens, almost exclusively. I like the faux-fountain pen styling, and these pens require significantly less wrist pressure than ball-point pens I've used.
I actually ditched Linux as a primary OS as it didn't get out of my way, I had to spend way too much time burying into the system to get the results I needed. That can in a few cases be attributed to poor design, the thought process seems often to be "I get this piece of design fine, everyone else will".
Actually, I've heard that the best camera is the one that you have on you. A smartphone with optical zoom is a good thing, I think.
really? huh. I've sold many, many books. (I still have thousands in my father's garage) and I've written a book. When you sell books (that you haven't written) you have the same problem of selling anything else; some people just want to complain, and eh, sometimes my packaging legitimately wasn't great, and sometimes the mail system messes up. It happens. You can't maintain a 100% positive rating; even if you are perfect (and you aren't) some people just don't give 100% ratings. And really, if you think you are perfect? that the five stars are being unfairly denied to you? you should probably look inward. Thinking that you are perfect, I think, reflects an attitude that probably leads to more negative ratings than you would otherwise get.

I don't really see the generational thing, though; some people are just nasty by nature. Others think they can get a better deal by being nasty, but the largest group of potentially nasty people is only nasty to you if they feel you are being nasty to them. And that group is usually fairly easy to calm. (I mean, there will always be the first group, and you can't do anything about that, and the second group is also pretty difficult to deal with. But the third group is where you get numbers, and I think they are pretty okay.)

Really, just showing some humanity and genuinely acknowledging your mistakes almost always disarms the third group (and sometimes the second and first.)
Samsung overwhelms the tech world by unloading a plethora of gadgets at IFA
Crowdfunding – A silver bullet tarnished
In crowdfunding you do not pay for a product. You bet money on a dream, your hope. That does not mean that there are not awesome people who will make the dream they sold you come true: We see many of those all over the place. Sometimes when you bet you do win. But as any casino goer will be able to tell you: Those winning streaks don’t tend to last.
I think it's more that HN automatically hates any tech company as soon as it goes public, because going public tends to shift the company's focus from its users to its bank account. Decisions based on growing the latter almost always come at the expense of the former.
Ask HN: actions.im - the new community platform focused on empowering people
I'm working on the project: http://actions.im
It's a community platform empowering people to achieve extraordinary results.

You can share your instructions and see how it helps the people follow the steps you've published.

Unlike wikihow and other instructions sharing sites, actions.im provides personal mobile TO-DO lists built based on your instructions.

Please share your opinion on the project.
An in-person rejection is going to have a much stronger negative impact than will a distanced rejection.

It's not about drawing a line in the sand. We're not talking about "fair" here. We're talking about human social nature, and all the quirks that come with it.

There are ways to gracefully exit partway through an interview, I'm sure. But it's much more perilous than is a polite, distanced rejection after a short cooling off period. YMMV.
Aside from ExtJS, most of the dev I've done has used js conservatively alongside server-side templates. Showing my old-school bias, I still instinctively hold js at arm's length.

With all the options available, what drew you to Angular?
What's the point of 16MP if you're only concerned about scaling to Facebook?
I'm sorry..I strongly disagree. You have me on the video support...OS X does a much better job there. You even have a point on audio drivers...they can be a pain at times. But design? Gnome 3 and Unity to me are FAR superior to OS X in terms of UI experience. YMMV of course. I bought a Macbook, gave it a fair shot, and it ended up being a dust collector simply because the desktop experience was painful compared to Ubuntu or Fedora (well, that and the fact that I got maybe three hours of the supposed 7 hour battery, and the fact that I can't upgrade it past 4 GB of ram o.O). Perhaps I'm set in my ways, but the absolute insanse window switching behavior, the piss poor excuse for a terminal, the fact that apps continue to run in the background after you close the last window, and the general SLOW performance made my $2500 investment one I'll regret for very long time. Switching to a Lenovo running Ubuntu was a far better (and MUCH cheaper) experience.
The 404 you usually had to hook in yourself depending on your server & framework, so that was way less likely.
eh, I enjoy a good "Damn kids!" rant as much as the next guy; And really, complaining about how kids today don't know all the basic tools we had in the '90s is about as newsworthy as complaining about click fraud on facebook.

Now, get off my lawn.
Power Searching with Google (Free Course)
PHP: The Right Way [1] was well received here on HN [2] when it was announced a couple of months ago.

[1] http://www.phptherightway.com/

[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4212568
He seems to forget that he's not in the same business as startups are; he's viewing startups through a small business lens.

see the sickness in our industry

He's not in "our" industry. He runs a small business that makes good money, and it happens to use technology. Not the same thing.

Are you profitable? Are you building something great?

These are not always relevant questions for a startup, depending on what phase of its life it's in. You certainly try to build something great—or better yet, solve a problem!—but you may very well have to change (yes, I mean "pivot"). See Inside the Tornado for info about having to not worry about treating customers well at some stages.

I'm not sure I'd call any of 37 Signals' services all that great, however, if by "great" we mean innovative. There's nothing special about them except that they were there early and they're simple. But that's not what I'd call innovation, and I don't think it makes them great. I think his cocky attitude has a lot to do with the constant feedback loop in the town he lives in. In SV, I don't see many founders praised for judging other people's work; usually, they're too busy trying to build something truly great, even if it's yet another photo-sharing site. Hell, Flickr was just another photo-sharing site, but I think of that as far, far greater than something like Basecamp.
When the first world gives the third world free food, it enables them to see their children as units of labor, which leads to even greater numbers of deaths to famine when (inevitably) not enough free food can be given.
Samsung makes windows phones as well. In fact they are one of the first to announce Windows 8 device:

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/29/samsung-windows-pho...
It's relevant.
Funny old videos predicting the internet
> Actually, my cleaning lady, for example, she’s great.

There's something a bit... I don't know quite how to put it. Let's just say that I bet she'd willingly trade places with him, cash out, and go enjoy herself instead of cleaning up after other people day in and day out. (Edit to change the wording just a bit)

> The other interesting thing about restaurants is you could have a dozen Italian restaurants in the city and they can all be successful. It’s not like in the tech world, where everyone wants to beat each other up, and there’s one winner.

That's because the economics of a highly local business are very different from one that can have customers all over the world.

Also: restaurants fail all the time - it's a stressful business to be in, and not generally the sort of relaxed, easy-going picture he makes it sound like. You can bet that most restaurants do not have the option of doing 4 days a week, unless they have big margins the other days, which means they probably have something very special about them.

I admire and respect those guys, but there's something too glib about some of their communications that turns my cynic sense on.

Edit: furthermore... live and let live, no? I'm more interested in a 37 signals style business myself, but let the people in Silicon Valley do their thing even if it doesn't float your boat. It'll all work out. As one example, I think the world is better off with PG running Y Combinator instead of having slogged on with Viaweb.
It's missing some angry muttering!
None went to engineers and very little went to investors at the IPO price. The first lockup period just ended a week ago or so which allows early investors and engineers to liquidate their shares. I think by Nov 11th or so, all of the vested shares given to employees will be liquid however it seems very unlikely the stock will approach the IPO price in that time.
Stop being so moronicly myopic. Android is the Linux desktop and is far from dead.
It is an issue of race when race has some influence on public policy and where money is spent, who gets incarcerated, who gets the jobs that pays well enough for parents to have more time with their children, etc.
One interesting feature of html boilerplate was that, in its CSS, it set the background color of selected text to #fe57a1 (hot pink). For the longest time, it was a pretty easy way to identify an HB-based site as many developers didn't customize text selection. It also looked rather neat.

For some reason, they've removed it in v4.
It's still very much alive if you don't give a shit about normal UX conventions or popularity, and there are hundreds of thousands of excellent 3rd party applications that run perfectly.

It's getting really irritating when someone who's jumped ship to OSX declares it "dead" because they have a shiny iDevice and an expensive laptop.
As someone who uses the shell all day, I found that there is no alternative for portage and Konsole.

And since most things are web-based now, a vanilla KDE setup + Icon-Only Task Manager is awesome enough for me.
IETF, IEEE, W3C Issue Joint "OpenStand" Statement About Internet Standards
Looking better is a quality-of-life issue. Who wants to live forever if they are a gelatinous, amorphous blob.
It was never that to begin with. Fried wasn't trying to create an enterprise. He just wanted to own a small business. That's what he has.
Seems to have crashed reddit.com at the moment.
I spent an hour last night working on a math homework assignment with my second-grader. The practice was adding up single digits to sums greater than 10.

The idea behind the problem (say 9+5) is to "make a 10" and then figure out the sum from the remainder. So 9+5 -> 10+4 = 14. But he didn't know which numbers routinely added up to 10. That was never memorized. The assignment was so focused on strategy and technique that it neglected the fact that the basic tools aren't there.

There's a point where you need to memorize something to make the strategy and discovery easier.
Windows 8 is so awesome it makes me want to use Linux
> at board level, it's healthy to have a range of opinions

This is very true... perhaps its one reason why Groupon is struggling so much. Without knowing the board dynamics, its impossible to say, but if I was in their position, I'd want people on the board criticizing every move. So long as it wasn't a majority of the board that is...
I was referring to quotes like

"We think that these patent wars are not helpful to consumers. They’re not helpful to the marketplace. They’re not helpful to innovation." (http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidthier/2012/08/21/google-exe...)

All of the companies have hoards of overlapping patents on technology that was not innovative in the first place. They "defend" their patents in court because that's the game. All the major players do this, not just in technology. When do you think "Coal-fire steam locomotive" was patented? http://www.google.com/patents/US4425763 (1984)

How about three patents for technology so similar the author couldn't be bothered to change even one word of the title or abstract? http://www.google.com/patents/US6470844 http://www.google.com/patents/US6945207 http://www.google.com/patents/USRE40286

Do you really think that Apple, who has been a notoriously slow adopter of NFC (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230483070457749...) really created any new technology in this patent that they were just awarded? http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sec...
I don't think you can extend his/her argument like that in a valid sense. I don't think he was advocating for a luddite position.

The appropriate question is whether or not the move to computers has improved things. Not every step forward technology-wise is an improvement. Some things need to be walked back.

For example, as a Physicist by training, most of the math I had to do was far more easily worked out by hand than fiddling around with a computer to do it.

When you're thinking through a problem pencil and paper are often a better medium than computers. Conversely where once I would have drafted letters and articles by hand, it's way faster nowadays to type into a word processor or tool like Evernote and keep coming back to improve something.

I still pay some bills by check as it fits the specific case better. But some online bill payment, or travel booking is better done online, as you correctly suggest.

...that being said, I wish I could call a travel agent and get it all booked nowadays, but they've been put out of business by book-it-yourself websites. Before these sites you may have been calling a travel agent but they were using a computer too so it's not so much the move to computation that's changed this last 10-20 years but disintermediation of the middle man. However those middle-men actually provided value that I'm only realizing now I'm older and would rather pay a little premium for the convenience of not wading through a gazillion different sites to get the right bookings and prices for a complex itinerary.

New way is always the best way seems more like religion than science to me.
Nope! I respectfully disagree. It's a win for current craigslist users and craigslist, but it's a loss for the ecosystem as a whole and everyone in the future besides craigslist.

Imagine if email was a centralized system instead of a protocol. It would not be good for users in the long run, even if the most righteous person ever was in charge of it (btw Craig Newmark seems like a pretty cool guy). The temptation for the email company to abuse its position would be too great ("Don't like our company? OK, don't use email!"). Even if the company wasn't abusing users (this is the where we currently are with craigslist) it will still always be glacially slow to innovate compared to a decentralized system like actual email.

It actually would have been great if craigslist had stopped innovating entirely and gotten replaced. Now we're back where we started.

EDIT: spelling
Not true. We're processing 12TB of data each month with thousands of writes per second and sub-millisecond response times. You simply have to understand how to use MongoDB correctly which isn't difficult with the out of the box settings and by reading some of the documentation. Figuring out your working set is the most difficult part but that doesn't take long to calculate based on understanding the queries you're doing and creating the appropriate indexes.

Since you seem to be fairly negative about MongoDB but light on details, perhaps you should write up your experiences so others can learn from what you did wrong.
Why on earth would I want my camera to be running a full phone OS? It's one thing to build a camera into a phone for convenience, but when will having an OS and touchscreen in the back of my camera make something more convenient?
Could it be that the main issue is the lack of leadership? We don't have many linux kernels yet we have dozens of incompatible desktop configurations and the list keeps growing. I think if there was a clear winner in the desktop wars, desktop apps would be of much higher quality.

And also the horrible aping of other environments and stupid UI eyecandy. Given that the majority of linux users and developers are technical, that's surprising.
Obama administration hikes CAFE fuel economy standard to 54.5 mpg
Researchers open door to electronics made from single layers of atoms
I came here to say that too
There's a small pop-up style flash, but you are right, no mounting for an external flash.
The machine that ran Windows XP can run Linux (http://wiki.debian.org/Hardware). So you can switch to Linux any time.

However, people cannot switch to OSX. The machine that ran Windows XP and Linux WILL NOT run OSX. So, no, you didn't switch to OSX, you purchased new hardware that is strictly controlled (motherboard, video card, etc).

Then, in an incredible blunder, de Icaza said, "Many hackers moved to OSX... working audio, working video drivers, codecs for watching movies..."

Uhhhh, yeah, if Linux gave up on supporting scores of hardware platforms and hundreds or thousands of hardware components, OF COURSE it would have working audio, video drivers, and codecs.