skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Minimalism is fine, but all the proselytizing around it makes no sense to me.

It's just the next iteration of "I don't have a TV", now that not having a TV doesn't mean much anymore.
Corporations, small businesses and even people will rationally pay only the minimum tax that they can get away with under the law. The law favours big international corporations so this is what you get. If you find this inequitable then laws need to be changed. On the other hand big corporations as well as wealthy people usually have more leverage in terms of being able to move and operate or reside in more tax-friendly or hospitable regimes.
2000 shouldn't be in the list as it was a Windows NT so that clears it up.

98 - good, ME - fail, XP - good, Vista - fail, 7 - good, etc. (Although this whole idea is pretty silly to start with ;-))
In that case, amazing. I've been looking for something like this. Will have to give it a try.
Before getting married, my husband spent several years getting rid of most of his stuff. By the time we got married, he literally had one suitcase of clothes, a car, laptop, and golf clubs. As for me, I had shelves full of books, old papers, yearbooks, photos, drums, costumes, snowboard, etc. You get the idea.

So, I asked my then-fiance for some help. Here's what we did.

Phase 1 - Sorting:
My fiancé came over and took all of my possessions and dumped everything onto my living room floor. The pile looked like a big ugly hill. I never imagined that I had so much stuff because when it was all so organized back then. He also brought a bunch of file-sided boxes with handles from Staples, and brought in the large outdoor garbage can (the huge one that you put out on the curb every week).

We then got to work. We had boxes for things to keep, things to give away and the large trashcan for things to throw away. I sorted through everything until the floor was clear.

Phase 2 - Digitizing:
We then went through a digitized everything that could be digitized. Photos were sent to a photo scanning service. Yearbooks, journals, birthday cards, important books, etc were torn apart and put through a fujitsu scanner. For things that couldn't be fed through a scanner, like my drums and gifts that had sentimental value, I took a picture of it and donated it. This was a large project that took several months.

Phase 3 - Detaching:
There were things from phase 1 that I knew I didn't want to keep, but that I didn't want to get rid of either. So I kept those things in boxes in my closet until I was ready to get rid of it. It took probably several months to a year to get rid of some of those boxes. Keeping those items in boxes helped me to detach from them emotionally until I was ready to get rid of them. However, there were some items that even after a year and a half, I still was attached to. So my husband took them out and put them in our living room again so that I could face it. I eventually got rid of those things too, but I took a picture of those items so that I could still keep the memories of what those things represented before donating them.
> If you're going to say the content industry can ignore the Constitution,

I didn't say that. I was implying that the gov can, and it has been. Guess who lobbies the gov with more money?
A lot of the Metro apps are a bit broken (even the Microsoft-provided ones) - a big problem is them trying to go to websites that have moved since whenever they were released.
Do you really want to solve every single problem yourself? Do you think you are the best person for every problem? Outsourcing can be a good idea because it leverages other people's strengths to build a better overall product....
Why not?

That symbol has been consistently used as a save icon for decades now. A lot of people know what it means.

I doubt you will be able to find a save icon that works better. I see no point in fighting it. It will fall out of use soon enough anyway (when automatic saving finds more widespread adoption).

If you think about, it works pretty well exactly because no one is using those disks anymore. No one would think that this icon saves something on an actual 3.5″ disk, it’s the concept of saving that’s meant with this icon. Using a HDD icon or an SSD icon (i.e. going the naive update route) would only be potentially confusing. Those icons were and are commonly used to access the file system (and are consequently more likely to be thought of as representing opening something, not saving something).

I think there is a case to be made for sticking with older (but nevertheless in pop culture widespread and formerly popular) symbols. Take the old fashioned telephone receiver on the icon of the phone app of the iPhone. Why not update that and stick a modern phone receiver on there – you know, a smartphone! Let’s stick an iPhone on there! I think it’s pretty obvious that that would be a bad idea.
I have achieved simplicity with my significant other (female). It is important to address the need to nest, while also focusing on preventing/removing cluttering. Ensure her nesting needs are met, while focusing on minimalism, and it is achievable.

Also, go for the smallest living space that is needed, or the need to nest will fill it. Quality, in what you do have, also helps.

The caveat is we are not planning on children, which simplifies this.
"Be as mobile as possible" is what this guy is saying.

How do you do that? Avoid responsibilities in one particular place and only buy products you can't live without.

Big deal. I don't see what's so special about it.
Why do we Sometimes get Nonsense-Correlations between Time-Series?
I understand, I've just never thought of tv complicating my life. I was once considering "cutting the cord" and my life got more complicated trying to figure out what services to use to subscribe to my shows I wanted to watch, managing downloads and trying to see if it made financial sense.

I do agree with the general consensus that people should try to simplify their lives if they feel they are bogged down with unnecessary things though. So, I'm glad the OP could find something that worked for him.
Why Startups Need Marketing
I use MySQL plenty and there's a lot of things I like about it. But I honestly don't understand any of the MySQL related comments on this post. Even if Oracle didn't own MySQL, a migration from Oracle to MySQL is significantly more difficult than one from Oracle to PostgreSQL. The poor join performance of MySQL make it doubtful that it could have ever been a serious discussion at Salesforce (to say nothing of the merits of mvcc and PostgreSQL's license).
>Telling entrepreneurs that one class of businesses is more socially correct than others isn't how the world works.

Start a company selling assassinations, and the wider world will quickly tell you your business isn't socially correct - you will be shut down.
Pyramid schemes are another illegal class of business.

There are also businesses that, while legal, do not appear socially useful. There's nothing wrong with disapproving of such businesses.

>You never know how or when your product will be used, or who it will help.

Your argument is: because businesses can yield unanticipated utility, there is no point reasoning about which business is best to spend time on.

Sure, perhaps the cat-pictures business will, through some unexpected turn of events, yield greater social utility than an education startup: Our models of the world are imperfect, and sometimes we mis-predict which actions will be most beneficial.

But that doesn't mean we should give up reasoning about what the most beneficial thing to do is.
We should still attempt to reason about relative benefits, and act to maximise our expected future utility.

Which is not to say we should always "focus on shipping all of extra food to those who are starving".
Indeed, maybe some technology that looks trivial will yield huge benefits. So we should definitely spend some time exploring new technologies, to try and catch unexpected windfalls.
In order words, we have an explore/exploit tradeoff to make.

But: Trading off exploration/exploitation is not the same as just throwing up our hands and saying "do whatever you want, don't attempt to reason about relative utilities".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-armed_bandit
If anyone would like to see another example, here's one I just did. The original photo was taken with a Galaxy Nexus and no flash. It's a grainy shot and not the best starting point, but I was curious how it would do with a lower quality starting point.

Original: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/24903613/hn/blur.jpg

Using the program I was able to get: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/24903613/hn/blur-edited.jpg with the following parameters:

Defect type: Out of Focus Blur
Radius: 17.4
Smooth: 72%
Correction Strength: 23%
Edge Feather: 34%

It's by no means a perfect end result, but you are able to make out a decent amount. Here's a clear shot of the insert for comparison: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/24903613/hn/blur-clear_shot.jpg
I promise that when I will understand this, I'll call back.

But seriously, can someone please translate this to English? and this comes from someone that writes JavaScript for 12 years (and have read the first 3 chapters of "JavaScript the good parts") I just couldn't keep up with the article and ended adding it to pocket, (formerly read it later) which we all know that it means I'll never read it again.

Is there a good article that will make all this suddenly clear to me? What was so wrong with callbacks?
You can say "add value", but a press release that was posted on my site reposted on TC word for word is adding value - or at least, potentially adding value - to me. Just because it's published doesn't mean anyone had seen it - getting it in front of a lot of eyeballs is a certain amount of value in itself.
It's immensely expensive too - I used wifi on the island of Gibraltar and it was over a euro a minute.....
IMHO the floppy disk works better as an icon today than it did 10 years ago. When computers still had an actual floppy drive, it was potentially confusing that you'd click on the floppy icon to save to storage that 99.9% of the time would be the hard disk rather than a floppy.

Today the floppy doesn't represent a physical object anymore. It is literally an icon, a picture that stands for something on its own.

Compare with the pen and eraser icons: there is no physical paper on which to write (or erase) on a computer. In fact one of the primary goals of personal computing has been to rid us of pen and paper. This has not been reached yet, but maybe the day will come when a pen is as foreign to young people as the floppy is today... But I suspect that this stylized image of a pen will be still around then, with its iconing meaning ("Touch here to edit") only reinforced by the disappearance of the physical pen.
Cutting them out completely might be a little much. Limiting them is a great idea to be productive is a good idea though.
Monday Morning Quarterback - Tweetbot for Mac
Guess what XP was based on: Windows 2000.
These things you speak of are tools, and yes in excess they can hinder more than help.

There's something to be said about staying connected, and giving your mind mental breaks now and again.

The key is moderation.
Ah yeah. I was thinking that the T-slot ones could handle much more power than that.
What are the major programming languages & what are they used for?
The Dot In Your Gmail Address Doesn’t Matter
It depends on what kind of machine you are using. If you are using a desktop then yes a touch screen is not a very ergonomic way to use your computer but then the mouse is not going anywhere. You can use that to do everything a touch would do. In fact in that case the new metro UI is rarely used.

But when a laptop or a tablet is being used, a touch is very natural because the screen is at the right distance and more importantly at a "right" angle. In fact it is way more convenient to use a touch based laptop instead of a tablet because of the angle the screen is at and the arm rest that the keyboard provides. Try it out yourself. I have RC running on my old hp and it is pleasant to use
I thought they no longer ran a tracker. Does this piece of software fulfill other roles, or am I just mistaken?
The difference is that physical goods have a much higher cost of maintenance than does digital ones.

I have way too many games in Steam and other digital storefronts, but I catalog the ones I care about and have come to the understanding that there are probably some games I will never play/finish. Those ones I just hide and never look at again. It's harder to do that with a boxed game on a shelf, which you need to keep room for, pack away when you move, and ensure it stays in reasonable condition.
Adding value to the reader. Why the reader should read their post vs the Venture Beat quote. As writers that should be their aim.
Excellent post. Thanks for posting it.
Gmail (bot not Google Apps) disregards periods in email addresses
This is silly. Win8 is a step backwards in usability period. You have to do a lot more to perform the same actions.

Whereas XP was actually better.

Win8 is the ME of this decade.
Reflections on Startup School
You obviously didn't read the same article that some of us did :S
Nobody is going to pass a law outlawing the direct sale of "content" to consumers. That was an extremely silly argument.
10 Steps To a Read Only AWS User
1. But those are general statements. Opinions. What I mean is give me a specific case. A specific example, a specific block of JSON and a specific task. Once I have that, then I can ask myself "Is this something I would ever need to do or that I have to do on a regular basis?"

Sometimes I need to write one-off filters. There is just no getting around it. I have to choose a utility that gives maximum flexibility and is not too verbose; I don't like to type. Lots of people like Perl, and other similar scripting languages for writing one-off filters. But Perl, _out of the box_, is not a line-by-line filter. It's unlike sed/awk; it needs more memory. That brings us to #2.

2. If I understand correctly, jq is reading the entire JSON block into memory. This is what separates your program and so many other sed/awk "replacements" from sed and awk, the programs they purport to "replace". sed/awk don't read entire files into memory, they operate line-by-line and use a reasonably small buffer. Any sed/awk "replacement" would have to match that functionality. Given that sed/awk don't read in an entire structure (JSON, XML, etc.) before processing it, they are ideal for memory constrained environments. (As long as you don't overfill their buffers, which rarely happens in my experience.)

Anyway, so far I like this program. Best JSON filter I've seen yet (because I can hack on the lexer and parser you provided).

Well done.
Mythbusters, I would love to try it myself, but then I don't consider the expense of buying a laptop with a touchscreen to be worth it just for this experiment. :)
I don't agree that there really is a big learning curve really. The training you need is about a few minutes with the computer to know to take your mouse to corners and the sides. Once you know the patterns its basically training your muscle memory which for me took a couple of days.
Thank you for the fact check, I am happy to be wrong on this.

It looks like things have changed since I last gave Google Voice a try. It used to be that they would just ignore you while physically outside the US, now it looks like they behave reasonably. Great news!
Nokia’s price for exclusivity
I am genuinely curious - if you were a software developer, and wrote a commercial package, and tried to sell it, but everyone just "shared it" and copied it instead, how would you feel? How would you describe their behavior? What if you were an author, and spent a year writing a book, but instead of buying it from the store, people just made copies of it? Or (in the most relevant example) - you were a production company that invested $50mm into a box-office picture, but everyone decided to share it instead of paying for it?

I'm not sure what word you like to use for "People who make copies of other peoples songs, books, movies and software without their permission", but I'm happy to adjust my vocabulary when discussing that behavior with you.
There's an implicit assumption here that entrepreneurial motivation is fungible, that a person who could found a successful cat picture business could also found a successful education startup just as easily. I don't think that's the case. In turning someone away from something they're truly interested in and guilting them into working on a more "serious" business, the most likely result is a failed education startup in place of a successful cat pictures business. In terms of relative utility, a successful business is almost always going to be more beneficial to the world than a failed one.
I don't know the particulars of the MS supply chain vs Apple. However, I would assume that Apple's chain is rather tight with few loose/weak links. They've been in the game for more years than Microsoft. MS never really made hardware devices like this. The Zune was never popular enough to have the supply chain around it that Apple had with the iPod family.
It looks like Tame is a pre-processo that outputs C++, hardly a C++ language feature. I mean, more power to you if you like to use those, but that is hardly C++.

The Scala question seems to have too many caveats, you should read the comments as there is no full translation of the F# async translation in the stackoverflow question. The answer with the most question states "with some important features lost". The comments on the question and answers should be read as well.

Cute Http Stack though.

The lamina code runs the code on a separate thread (https://github.com/ztellman/lamina/wiki/Introduction) hardly what C#'s async does. Not that I care that much, but that is what the docs say.

You forgot to show us how Node.js is supposed to support async-like programming without callbacks. I suspect in a rush to enumerate a bunch of languages, you merely listed everything you could think of and hoped some of it would stick?
PostgreSQL is an RDBMS.
Oh, yes, of-course, now it makes it perfectly clear!

Reading HN sometimes make me wonder how I'm still getting paid for writing code / managing others that do so. Was software reinvented in the past few years while I was sleeping? Is functional programming taking over the world? Is understanding things like Monads and Promises now a must have for anyone calling themselves a programmer / developer / software engineer / hacker?
Honestly, you can take good photos with a phone. It's about composition and timing. If you are a professional photographer, better than 98% of people in the world, an expensive kit might take you to 99%. As an amateur, the gap between your ability and a pro's will never be filled by the 1% improvement nice gear will make. So many of these "hobbies" are actually rich people giving themselves a reason to buy expensive toys.
yes we are :)
> But shapes, textures, smells, etc are important too.

He lives in a three-dimensional world, so I don't think he's missing out on any of those things. I'm not arguing for the elimination of physical toys - merely observing that apps have their utility and are less wasteful, resource wise.

> A cheap rubber toy piano might very well be better than an app.

Depends - physical things have a certain barrier to ownership: money. The toy he never had is easily beaten by the free/99c one off the app store. The fact that a tablet is expensive isn't lost on me, but for the amount of utility it has served it's basically paid for itself (it's his dad's tablet).

> Not to mention that they're easier to share with other kids.

Sharing is important, but it's worth noting that with apps you can have collaboration - he and I can play instruments together (like the free split screen piano or guitar apps) or play basic games all on a single screen. Of course physical things do this as well - my intent is to show that apps can be treated like physical objects.

> Personally, I can't picture my childhood without those "injection-moulded fossil fuel by-products" called LEGO.

My nickname is Uncle LEGO - he won't be missing out on that stuff. He's stuck with DUPLO until he's older though.
No.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Demon-Haunted-World-Science-Candle...

(Also, for fun, I have tried actively seeking them out by staying in places that are on top ten lists for hauntings. In some cases I've gotten to spend the night thanks to cash bribes. Unlike TV, you know what happens in a really "haunted" place with no electricity? Boredom and darkness. Mostly darkness. )
We are now into year 5 of "HTML5 is going to obsolete native apps in the next couple of years"... with no end in sight.
They're supposed to make things nicer. Syntactic sugar.

Personally, I don't really see them helping in most cases. They have just as much code and generally rearrange it into a form that I find less readable. For his first example, he provides the callback function (which is actually empty, but whatever) but the promise version doesn't show the function. If it did, it'd be just as verbose and hard to read, if not moreso.

Now, that changes a bit with the .then syntax later. With callbacks, you'd end up with a series of nested callbacks, which can get just as ugly as a series of nested if statements. The .then syntax lets you chain it all together in a more visually pleasing way, and I think it's easier to read, too.

In short, the way promises are often done is wrong (and he's saying so) and there's a proper way to do it. Unfortunately, a lot of frameworks are missing that feature, and so they're just screwed up.
Oh great knower of things, inform us as to how terrible chrome mobile is
Not sure. But I am getting curious about why. It's a hell of a tooling tolerance or it's a Jony Ive last-minute caprice? Considering the overall packaging accuracy I'd be inclined to file it as the latter.
Are you perhaps thinking of their change from .torrent files to magnet links? My understanding is that the tracker is something of a necessity.
Dang. This is an amazing guide. This could have saved me so much time and money if I read it before buying a crappy mill and having to rebuild most of it from scratch.
I disagree strongly with pretty much all of your points.

You acknowledge that the vast majority of the evidence points towards universal healthcare systems being more economically efficient in your first sentence. You then proceed to make an argument that basically asserts the US is a special case and that a universal care system wouldn't "behave" as it does everywhere else and reduce costs, but instead increase them. I see no basis for this assumption and I want to challenge you to demonstrate why you should be granted it.

I also want to challenge you on your implied definition of "useful" or "efficient". You say you would favor a universal system if you were to see convincing evidence that it would reduce costs. In your argument, I at least, read an implicit assumption that cost ought to be the deciding factor. I find that point of view detestable. For corporations, whose sole purpose is profits, it makes sense to think of efficiency that way. You and I, however, are people, and shouldn't have values that put resource acquisition higher than human well-being. You're free to disagree, but doing so would convince me that we have very little common basis for dialog.

In the last part of your comment you give France as an example of a country that will suffer dire economic repercussions for having run an unsustainable universal healthcare system. I haven't double-checked your references, but I'm happy to grant you, for the sake of argument, that the data is on your side. You've chosen to ignore the vast majority of strong economies with universal healthcare. You've also failed to mention that whatever problems France may have in the future, they pale in comparison to the budgetary problems the US is facing due to the privatized healthcare system it is currently running. References forthcoming should you ask...