skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am one of the worst offenders of the "keep the tabs open variety". I have several hundreds of them open for months on end.

For this rather unusual browsing habit, no other browser other than FF works for me. FF does fine even on my 512MB Pentium-M laptop, Chrome for instance will make such a box unusable . Am somewhat relieved/piqued to see that this behavior is not unique.

I have been asked to defend my habit many times, so here it is: I use open tabs as a volatile bookmark. Things that have been on the tab for long and have been revisited several times, I usually bookmark permanently.

The crucial capability that open tabs have but bookmarks dont, is that it stores the context (in particular the trajectory that I took to that page) as well as the link.

So its a combination of an in-your-face-reminder and a semantic call-cc function that I can resume when I want...and I just love it.

It helps to have a few add-ons. The load/unload on demand been moved into the browser, so its not so essential to have it as an add-on anymore. Well, FF only does load on demand, not the unload part, the latter helps especially on low memory m/c. Another helpful add-on is one that allows searching for text in open (but possibly unloaded) tabs. Yet another is Xmarks, with it I have access to the tabs and bookmarks from any location. I dont have to pay for xmarks, but I still do anyway.

And a heartfelt thanks to FF developers for taking care of the memory footprint and the leaks. FF gets a lot of unwarranted flak, but mostly, I think from users whose experience have been formed on really old FF versions. Although I have to admit I was very reluctant to upgrade from FF3.5 thinking the new versions wont tolerate such tab abuse. I have been pleasantly surprised.

@hnriot It was indeed months, though I must have had to restart a couple of times, but no more. Also I did not mean 30x24. I would frequently let the laptop hibernate when not in active use.

Forgot to mention I use noscript and flashblock, which helped elliminate a lot of the crashes and other resource consumption badness. Another reluctant admission, FF has been stabler on windows than on linux, so much so that I have a dedicated windows laptop just for browsing. Things might have changed though, I havent checked back since the time i elliminated all X based browsers from my linux box except dillo. Linux is my "serious" box, so as a byproduct I waste less time on the net when I am on it (...in theory)

@lukifer I was quite happy with 3.7 not so much with 4.* 8 and above have been nice to me, but all these were on a very stable XP installation. So it could be related to an OS specific build. Also the addons: flashblock, noscript and memoryfox must have played a part in the stability too.
It’s most certainly not hypocritical to believe that there should be time limited monopolies on designs and copying designs for which that monopoly has run out. Simple as that.

Don’t argue over ridiculous stuff like that. There is no need for these cheap polemics.
My guess is there will be a hat for people who have run the game on linux at least once, very similarly to the way there was a hat for people who ran the game on mac at least once
No, but this is how Rosetta should be teaching language. Instead they hawk their "immersive" language learning. Immersion is great for children, but adults learn differently (I say this as someone who learned a foreign language as a child and two as an adult). It's not sexy, and it's not pretty, but to build a foundation for learning a language as an adult, rote memorization of vocabulary is by far the most effective route in the beginning. Once you have a good base (say 500 of the most common words), you can start learning grammar and then, slowly, starting to practice speaking, reading and writing. But continuing to build up a vocabulary is vital to continuing to learn the language. Once you reach about 1000 of the most common words, things will start falling into place if you have adequate exposure to the language. In my opinion, it's only at this point that Rosetta Stone becomes worth using, and then only if you don't have access to friends, family, or tv channels in the language you're learning.
Questioning some well-thrown-about statistics about rape does not make Ted Ts'o a rape apologist. In no way did his email question the veracity of victims' claims, but rather the numbers that were drawn out of anonymous surveys and espoused as hard data.

He is guilty, however, of going against the feminist narrative, and that in itself can be harmful to attracting educated women to open source. I'm not sure he needs to apologize for his claims, but linking to the MRA rant was not in good taste.
Eddy Cue is also the one responsible for getting Apple to make a 7"-8" tablet:

http://allthingsd.com/20120803/apples-eddy-cue-saw-market-fo...
zipzap has an easy-to-use interface and an efficient implementation. If you're interested in the design rationale, I've written some of them up here: https://github.com/pixelglow/zipzap/wiki/Design.
Refactoring C++ with Clang
You likely know this already, but Downcast is an awesome podcast app, it has location based downloading as well, which is great if you're a commuter.

(I also listen to a lot of podcasts and have been disappointed by the Apple Podcast app).
Breaking news: It's possible to be a jackass on the internet. This time, with javascript!
Shake-Up: Apple's Mobile Software & Retail Chiefs to Depart
Generally I only bookmark stuff that's going to be useful to me at a later date.

What I'd really like is for the bookmark to also cache the page locally so that even if I click the bookmark at a later date and the site has gone I can still read what was on the page.
OK, but if you're looking for tablets that can be proper desktop replacements (as parent comment says), its not going to be cheap
I hate to be "that guy" but what does this have to do with hacking? Maybe someone can explain it to me, I am asking legitimately.
Bank of England official: Occupy Movement right about global recession
Thanks! Interesting quote:

Although a major sell-off can sometimes mean an executive
is leaving a company, that might not be the case with Forstall.

I wonder why this didn't generate any rumours of his departure at the time?
Skeumorphism the root of Scott Forstall's departure?
Why Social Media Stocks Always Tank
"That makes it all the more telling that Apple’s press release contains no quote from Tim Cook offering kind words or thanks to Forstall."

Indeed, this has been expected since Jony Ive was observed standing immediately to Tim Cook's right at the last Red Square May Day parade.
That would explain why Currys and PC World are also ridiculously awful.

Every time I go into one of those shops, it's because I need something immediately, to take away. They never have it in stock, and ask if I'd like to order it. If I wanted to order it, I'd do it myself, online.
I just don't understand why, as a CEO, it would ever be in your interest or the company's interest to appear in an article to be taking 100% of the credit. Wouldn't you want to do all you can to make sure your other team members get credit for their contributions? In my experience the answer is absolutely yes. No boost to your personal brand could be worth the possible backlash, resentment, and hit to morale within your team. After all, these are likely people that you'll be working with for years. I just don't get it.
Journalism v. commerce: When is the news important enough to drop paywall?
Exactly what Yen said. People generally say "solve" to some sizes of the problem,. Obviously it isn't hard to solve a 4x4 minsweeper... maybe I need to rephrase: "I wrote a minesweeper game..."
Reasons:

1. That Braun thing was produced decades ago, and probably they haven't sold a single one of them in the last decade or so.

2. A podcasts app on an iPad, is in no way competing to an ancient cassette player.

3. They're in different categories. It's like if I "copy" a Mercedes logo for a window. Though I'm not particularly in favor of Apple/Samsung case ruling, it's clearly different to copy an element for a competing product (a tablet) or another product that's a whole different beast and is no longer for sale.
I really hope you mean extensions and not that NPAPI crap.
Rounded corners aren't necessarily skeumorphic; they're a style choice just as rounded cabinets and trim are a (popular) style choice. Likewise, shading and gradients to give an impression of depth and lighting are often used to distinguish items that are clickable or as a separator. These are artistic tools that can be used to various effects, but are not skeumorphic in the sense of trying to imitate a familiar object from everyday life. Virtual representations of objects can be 3D without being skeumorphic; the illusion of depth can be used to convey information.
> I'm surprised he got fired over maps. Mapping is hard - comparable to writing a search engine. Apple did as well as can be expected for a first attempt.

The problem is that they released that first attempt. iPhone and iPad weren't their first attempts at phones and tablet computers, they were simply the first ones good enough to take to market.
I am not surprised with "Interviewing candidates" getting low score, but it did receive some votes.... any proof?
Internet Survival Kit
It is a fantasctic exercise for game theory ! If you have success with your post with lot of forks on github and upvotes, we may expect that a lot of people will follow it and the success of HN posts will be not following your script.
I go now make an anti-script ;)
Yeah, you're right that there's no 1 law that fits everyone. Still we can say that in general it's easier to work together than alone with a note that there are some exclusions, of course.
They are. But no more than any other vendor is.

The difference is Google gives you all sorts of services to export those insights and use them for your own benefit. Most of the google tracking data is exported (with the big exception being the backing to Google Now for card selection). But most people don't realize how much data you can farm from the Latitude API.

The problem we face is that a lot of the features we want delivered from our products are really only achievable if we offer up our data for analysis to some big external compute farm. We aren't at the point yet where your mobile devices can do it in house. So we have things we want, but the only way to get those things is to take a privacy risk.

But this is hardly a new situation. Why do you trust your banks not to do this? Credit card providers? Stores? Loan and insurance issuers? Cellphone vendors? I'm asking why you are not creeped out or outraged all the time because a trivial search of the landscape reveals all these institutions are doing such things but not providing any value back to you for it.
Mapping is very hard, and he shipped it before it was ready. That was a pretty bad event for them; caused lot of negativity from users. I'm not surprised.
Natas, the free hacking war game.
Penguin and Random House merger to create biggest book publisher ever seen
The problem with maps is the back-end data, which he was't responsible for, as far as I know.
It's not sold at a loss, but with a very low profit margin. At a loss would mean that they're actually bearing the cost of manufacturing the device even after they got your money, which is not true.

They also get a much higher profit margin on the 16gb (now the 32gb for the Nexus 7) than on the 8gb which is what a lot of people will buy. There isn't a $50 cost in manufacturing a device with 16gb more of storage but there is a $50 markup for the customers who want more local storage. Storage is much, much cheaper than what you're paying for when you buy a tablet or phone with bigger SSDs. The profit margins on the 64gb iPhones are INSANE compared to the profit margins on the 16gb.

The base, $300 Nexus 4 is going to have a paltry 8gb. Most of the heavy users are going to spend the $50 more for the 16gb, while the $300 will still be there to please those who have to be more careful with their money.
>But you can't run a Metro app that anyone else has compiled.

It's metro - who cares? You get more functionality with the desktop.

On a less snarky note, yes you can. All that's necessary is your system has to trust the CA that signed the app - which is itself a few mouse clicks away.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsstore/archive/2012/04/25/depl...

I've personally done this to load a leaked Skype beta for Metro. Put the requisite commands in a powershell batch file and it becomes so easy your gran can do it.
also like something that was posted on HN not long ago, a company from Ontario, Canada who built software to do this but the name of their app eludes me.
The key to success at most companies is to be a unicorn.

Let's quantify ambition using the letter A. At A > 1.0, people are interested in advancing their own careers and are only going to work hard on their assigned stuff when there's a long-term, career benefit. If they have a surplus of time (which is common, because they're good at getting shit done) they will pursue their own education rather than asking for more work. They are hard-working, but they focus on their own objectives and take a mercenary attitude. They only go "above and beyond" in the context of a mentorship arrangement where someone senior is genuinely looking out for their careers. Otherwise, they calculate exactly how much to invest in their assigned role and how much to put in the skill or networking bank.

People at A < 1.0 just don't see career growth as very important, and it's hard to motivate them to work more than an 8-9 hour day. They're not lazy-- they're often more than competent enough, and they tend to consistently do good work-- but they have more interest in life outside of work than in their paid labor. Give them 6 weeks of vacation, and while they'll generally give decent notice, they will take it.

People at A = 1.0 are ideal employees, but that's a single-point set, and we don't have Dirac delta functions in this analysis, so that's probability zero. It's a unicorn. (Note: I know that probability zero doesn't mean "impossible". Unicorns are also not impossible.)

Succeeding at work is about pretending to be at A = 1.0... or at least fading A to 1.0 enough to keep people unaware of your true leaning-- which is that you're either too ambitious to prioritize your boss's objectives over yours, or you're too lazy to care about anyone's goals.

How close you are to A = 1.0 determines how long you can stay at a job. At A = 0.5 or 2.0, you'll last 6 months and get cold-fired. At A = 0.9 or 1.1, you have an expectancy of two years and will get a severance. At A = 0.99 or 1.01, you can probably stick around for 10 years and you'll be gently "managed out".
Please stop calling it "Lake Geneva", its name is "Lake Léman".
I'm not an Apple insider. Pushing Google Maps away seems to me like a political decision reserved for someone like Cook, not Forstall. If Cook shoved Google out and tasked Forstall with the impossible task of developing a better maps offering in what amounts to a year, this would be a sign that upper management jumped the shark, not Forstall himself.
When I read Propeller my first thought was http://www.parallax.com/propeller/ which is a 8 core micro controller.
This is likely been coming for quite some time. IIRC he was brought in by Jobs and was likely protected by him while he was alive.

Steve being gone meant the didn't have to keep him around, and the maps debacle was likely the straw big enough to break the camel's back.
I'm hoping for a pocket penguin myself (kinda like the pocket medic that already exists)
They probably won't limit it like they did earbuds, which are the most fungible of high-dollar-value game items (c.f. http://tf2finance.com/ for dollar value).
Neat! I sympathize, trying to read books in Russian. Tracking progress with individual words reminds me of some of Michael Walmsley's work at the University of Waikato:
http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/genquery.php?linklevel=4&lin...

His software actually picks things for you to read based on words that it knows you still need to learn.
Interesting how they position it as one third of an ARM x64 GPU strategy. GPU is still the dark horse if we get serious general purpose programming. GPU and ARM works once sequential performance is not the selling point. ARM instruction set on GPU could work too.
Mea culpa on the die size...

That said, this is where the R&D done by AMD and NVIDIA have expanded what is amenable to running on a GPU. Specifically, instructions like vote and fast atomic ops can alleviate a lot of branching in algorithms that would otherwise be divergent. It's not a panacea, but it works surprisingly well, and it's causing the universe of algorithms that run well on GPUs to grow IMO.

What I worry about with Parallela is that by having only scalar cores, and lots of them, it has solved issues with branch divergence in exchange for potential collisions reading from and writing data to memory. The ideal balance of SIMD width versus cores count is a question AMD, Intel, and Nvidia are all investigating right now. But again, ~26M transistors - no room for SIMD...
Sorry for the novice question, but what does PL stand for/refer to? My best guess is programming languages [creating them] but I have zero confidence in it.

EDIT: Sorry, did some research and assuming its this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_language_theory
Apple shakeup: Mobile, retail execs leaving
You can drop the "Tech". Education doesn't happen in the classroom - It happens in the student, when they are inspired or driven to learn. Get kids out of the classroom more, give them something to play with that uses their skills.
Very cool! I added an entry to build something similar to my maybe-build-someday-list 10 years ago, luckily not everyone is as lazy as I am ;)

Congratulations to the team at MIT Game Lab! Downloading now...
There are ways of dealing with hard problems- managing scope, managing expectations. I'm not too surprised he was fired for not executing. Remember Papermaster and the antenna?

http://daringfireball.net/2010/08/papermaster_damn_antenna
> Apple's gross margins on its devices, essentially the selling price less the manufacturing costs, is about 30-40% company-wide. That translates into an operating margin (which includes all costs) in the 20-30% range.

Of course there are other expenses (those $10M Apple Stores don't build themselves), but you're incorrect about the operating margin. For Q4 2012 AAPL had an operating margin of 34% (gross margin was 40%).
How Much did it Cost Youtube to host Gangnam Style?
You're probably thinking about http://kera.io/
Exact :) But I did a really humble job here. I just wrapped a desktop client upon the Hacker News Story Pickup Ratio website (http://hnpickup.appspot.com/). All the intelligence is done by hnpickup, I just get the data and displays it in another way.
Initial thoughts:
1. A circle is not a very effective content area at this size, particularly for instructions or steps.

2. Why an image instead of CSS?
May be the second time I've found a genuinely insightful piece by Gruber. Skeuomorphic design was a nod to my non-computer using father in the 90s. It no more represents useful metaphors for interfaces than steam engines represent a good way to build cars.

iOS is stagnant, reviews of recent Apple designed skeuo-heavy apps bemone the lack of functionality -- while noting what must be hundreds of hours of graphics work -- and not seeing that the tradeoff is worth it. With finite development hours the general public realizes that they'd rather get shit done then look really great sorta getting some things done.

So who makes the money at Apple? It's two people, Cook and Ive -- supply chain and product design. Let's give turning the entire device design over to a holistic human interface designer a try instead of running hardware and software as two disjoint efforts.

Between Siri and the maps screw up the decision made itself.
Or, you could watch it on NetFlix...
I don't really understand how the research led to the result. The survey of Firefox users showed that 34% of users knew about dragging the favicon, and only 21% actually used that technique. Instead, the "star-clicking" behavior seems to be most popular, and "bookmark this page" is also well known. Why not focus on those two mechanisms and attempt to combine the two, instead of improving one that is not well known?
Analyzing AWS post-mortem
The entry level, 16gb iPhone has a profit margin that is bigger than average, but not huge. The 64gb iPhone on the other hand.. it's like printing money. The markup doesn't even begin to compare to what the bigger storage actually cost to Apple. Apple makes a LOOOOT of money out of the customers who have bigger needs than average.

That's been Apple's strategy forever, people who want more have to pay a lot more than what it's really worth. I can remember the entry level iBook (during the PPC days) being sold with goddamn combo DVD reader/CD writer drives in a time where EVERY SINGLE PC LAPTOP SOLD, even the cheapest crap, had a DVD writer. Just to push people onto the higher profit margin.

I love Apple products but they really know how to milk their customers dry. Hacker News's audience wouldn't fall for that, but I can remember the markup on ram, when they still sold devices with 1 or 2gb of ram when the competition had 4gb on their cheapest stuff, with huge markups on the online apple store if you ordered a laptop with more ram. People here know how to put more ram in their computers and know not to order a macbook with "Apple's ram" (... a traditional thing that is going to die with the retina mbp and its soldered ram), but the average joe just got ripped off hardcore.

If you only look at their entry products, like the 16gb iPhone, the 21" iMac, the 11" MBA, yeah, Apple seems reasonable. Any other Apple product ? the margins on those things is something no one else could pull off without getting lynched.
In my mind, a CS degree is all about rewiring the student's brain to better interact with computers and to instill attributes in the student that are useful when working with those computers. Very few of the points in the article cover things that vastly change your computational world view. Off the top of my head, the five things (in no particular order) that I'm getting out of my degree are:

- Understanding down to processor and assembly level. And the visceral (and unfulfillable) desire to eliminate "magic" from things.

- Extensive exposure to functional programming. And finding out for myself what it does better than imperative programming and what it does worse.

- A deep appreciation of the need to know the user and the need to consider people at every stage of specifying, building and shipping software.

- A rigorous grounding in discrete mathematics. Not because I'll use it every day, but because it completely altered the way I reason about the functioning of my programs.

- Learning to work in groups ranging from two to ten people. And learning how to put myself in their place even when that's really, really hard.

I will probably never use 80% of what I learnt after I graduate. But the mental restructuring caused by learning those things has already helped me many, many times in practical situations. I think that there's a false distinction between the "practical" and the "theoretical". Just because something is not immediately useful, doesn't mean it's intellectual masturbation or ivory tower naval gazing. I don't think that CS degrees should neglect the directly practical aspects of the field, but I would much rather learn things that I wouldn't otherwise pick up (such as machine learning or parallel algorithms) than something I will have to learn eventually anyway (such as version control or system administration).