skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I will start with myself. I recently introduced the first version of my wordpress theme "strapfolio" on HN [1]. Got lots of visitors, not so many sales and some valuable insights through comments and analytics. I will be utilizing my coming weekends to improve it.

I am also looking for ideas for my next side project that I will use as an opportunity to get a better understanding of Flask & Angular.js. So, if you aren't able to work on it yourself, let me know if you would like to get some web app that you wish existed.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4753200
Why touch screen voting machines have problems
So, it is just plain SEO for his startup - a primitive on-line course aggregator.
Why is it a strawman? The post is about a certain lifestyle, the comment argues about a different lifestyle. It is a debate about lifestyles.

Is it not true that if you spend too much time obsessed about buying things, you'll have less time to care about people?
The other way to look at it - 97% didn't react to your shameless plug, and probably a good chunk of these were annoyed by it. An ad is an ad, regardless of how you call it.
Is there a way to change the TERM variable. It is by default set to xterm, while it should be set to xterm-256color because it supports 256 colors.
e17 has been pretty darned useful and, from my user's viewpoint, stable for pre-alpha software... and the anti-user, customization is evil attitude of the GNOME 3 developers has pushed me to switch to e17. I seriously recommend Bodhi Linux.
Except Google isn't eating Apple's lunch. It's eating a segment of the market where Apple is less concerned about competing, if you're going to buy an Android phone it's unlikely you were going to buy an iPhone.

Very few companies invent anything, they mostly work off existing concepts and bring them to market. Then make them better incrementally.

A company getting ultra-high resolution laptops out to consumers? That's exciting. That'll push the state of the art forward. Everyone seems to go "They've not made any changes in the iPhone for AGES! BORING!", but they've got a pretty diverse portfolio of products that get very strong refreshes cyclically.
pg's argument reminds me of plato's dialogues where socrates confronts sophistry and searches for a universal truth. At first sight, it seems hard to make a primary ordering of programming languages, because they focus on different areas (ease of use, speed of development, performance etc) and ordering those disjunct areas against each other seems to be impossible. However, it is still possible for a programming language to focus and excel on all those areas at the same time. I am still hopeful of a language for the next 100 years; be it Arc or something else.

As a happy user of Ruby, Ruby excels in many of its promises. I wish Ruby-MRI focuses a bit on performance in coming versions. The ruby community needs this guy who developed the V8 javascript engine to do the same performance leap here too.(Maybe Rubinius or JRuby already do) That said, let us not forget that Twitter performance requirement is kind of extreme for most startups, and most JVM based languages and foremost Java lag in ease of use, speed of development etc to be a viable option for a startup. (I exclude here Clojure, Scala, JRuby etc). For most startups speed of development is what matters.
"Those companies were rendered irrelevant by radically new products they couldn't compete with."

True for Nokia, but not RIM. There was nothing "radically new" about the original iPhone compared to the Blackberry devices that existed at the time. The iPhone is better designed and more attractive, but RIM had good hardware with a rudimentary app store and integrated services (messaging) long before Apple. Blackberry was the default choice for business, then for a while became the fashionable choice (the "crackberry" period). Then their non-business customers moved on to the next new thing. And the reasons for this have everything to do with fashion and popular culture, and nothing to do with quality or features (even though the iPhone is better in those respects).

I suspect that Nokia and RIM will hang on with a miserable future as "another device manufacturer", albeit owned by Microsoft or Facebook or $ChineseCorp. In that respect I think your worst case for Apple and my prediction about it amount to the same thing.
Here are some of my little hacks: http://jgc.org/labs.html
The design seems to feel like they were designed by someone with no aesthetic taste but has just made things they think will look bling. I'm sure that it does something very impressive, but I can't see why everyone raves about it.
Installing Nginx With PHP5 (And PHP-FPM) And MySQL Support On OpenSUSE 12.2
Yes, no system is perfect, and the current system does have that flaw. But "record yourself marking the paper and putting it in the box" doesn't scale. If lots of people in an area do that, someone'll figure out what's going on.
Agreed. I've got a page that takes 20 seconds to render on a dedicated fast machine. I could spend some time optimizing it, but even then it would still be slow. However, it's cacheable so I can fix performance problems with a simple post-deploy script. We can't do that for every page, but it's awesome when we can.
Scroll back about 5 years or so and people were saying that exact same thing about the iPod. They move from one product onto another, and we won't know what's next until it occurs.
Wall Street (among other people) has this belief that Apple products are a temporary fad.

I don't think Wall Street thinks (if any conglomeration of people like "Wall Street" has a single view of course!) that Apple products are a temporary fad, but rather than Apple's massive margins must be temporary. Apple has stunning margins on their products, and the history of technology is that huge margins don't last: eventually competitors come in and work out how to undercut you.

Now, Apple has historically managed to maintain it's huge margins because they not only had the best products that they could sell for a premium price, they also had the most efficient supply chain in existence: look at how no one else could even make a competitor to the iPad or the MacBook Air for years and make any money at the prices Apple was charging when Apple was making a 40% margin on them!

Regardless, the Street view is that 40% margins don't last forever, and the iPad mini is the first real sign of this. If you follow this line of thought, then the fact that Apple is trading at 10x today's earnings is irrelevant: if Apple have to cut their margins in half (which would still probably leave them with bigger margins than all their competitors!) then going forward that share price is 20x earnings (unless they can improve sales), which doesn't look so tempting.

Of course, the Street is often wrong & Apple may maintain their margins & sales, in which case you should load up on Apple stock right now, because it's obviously significantly undervalued! Choose your poison :)
This app very lacks autosaving.
Other scenarios that would be possible with "verify you can

Employers could now request that employees tell/prove/check who they voted for.

Unions could now tell/prove/check who their members voted for.

Churchs could now tell/prove/check who their members voted for.
As far as I recall, the shortcut is to use Ctrl-L in the file manager then drag the target you want into the file dialog. Could be wrong though, it's been a while since I've used Gnome.
They are horribly broken. You can either use Adwaita (GTK3 default) or something like Clearlooks-Phenix to unify GTK2 and GTK3 appearance.
This isn't unique to Nokia. All phones I've used will do this. There was one alarm in my HTC Desire that kept going off once a week for a month before I finally realized where the noise was coming from (it was in my closet, so the first few times it happened I thought it was a neighbor's alarm).
Since I was a little kid I've played on text based "mafia" games, where the idea was like any other game, to be the highest rank, the richest, the one with the most "kills" or in the best "crew", etc.

I started learning to code because of these games in all honesty, over the last couple of weeks I've been working on an open source mafia game (with an installer and configuration page, control panel for moderators, etc) to allow inexperienced people to release their own version of the game (or to give experienced programmers a solid base to work from.)

At this stage I'm getting in the content, the gambling aspects of it, etc. and I am reaching the point where I will consider releasing it. About 90 hours have gone in to it so far at about 6 hours per day (I also have a 40 hour/week full time job with a 2 hour each way bus commute.)

I've come up against and defeated a lot of challenges, and the codebase is very clean and MVC based (I use php5, CodeIgniter and MySQL) so I'm genuinely proud that this revisit to my more youthful days has been a fruitful one. I plan to go live with a demo and release the source on github and via my personal website in about a week or two, depending on how I fare against what I have left to code.
30x slower seems a bit of a stretch for "close enough":
http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64q/benchmark.php?test=al...
For those interested http://utslappisiffror.naturvardsverket.se/en/Emissions-to-A... (Sweden)

http://www.epa.gov/tri/tridata/tri10/nationalanalysis/index.... (USA)
As a Gnome fan, i used E16 as a replacement for Metacity (i believe?) and it was great.

This one time at a former employer, my boss was touring a visitor around the office while i was flipping the windows just because and it got their attention for a 5m talk ("oh shiny what is that ?") :-)
> ability to re-arrange applications in the taskbar

This is now possible in KDE and has been since at least 4.3 (over 3 years ago).
But how do they sustain themselves as an open source project? The Linux kernel has never fooled itself.. it's a system that's foremost useful for its developer to use all day, and then additionally for them to apply for useful work with server/service/consumer hardware.

So great, you say, not being self-centric but user-centric. That works if you are employed to create a product, but how well will it work for open source. How will they ever gain developers?
There's always stuff to invent and reinvent. Apple is good at interfaces. They took the crappy phone design and delivered smartphones with friendlier interfaces.

There's always room for improvement though. How about devices with no interface at all? Like devices that can read your mind or act on their own.

And this is where I think the fundamental problem of Apple lies. Autonomous devices require a revolution in hardware and algorithms, not just merely building on top of other people's work ... Apple's revolution until now has been nothing more than mere evolution.

Case in point: Google works on cars that can drive by themselves and on smart glasses. Apple doesn't work on anything similar, never did and anybody paying attention knew that Siri is going to be worse than the speech recognition that comes with Android.
That's why Trust is not a spendable Currency (and we need a new one)
Compared to the OP, your post is just random, non-funny sarcasm. The OP has highlighted relevant data points.

1. Writing a system the second time is easier since you already know the pitfalls and avoid them.

2. Ruby, Python, Perl, Java... provide thin wrappers for the underlying IO system calls, and hence, Java IO isn't very different from Ruby IO when it comes to performance.

3. There are only a few CPU intensive tasks. It goes without saying that Java will kick Ruby's(pure Ruby; native extensions will be a different story)ass when it comes to CPU intensive tasks.
I believe in limiting customization to improve consistency and to consolidate your identity.

But if you take this path, you better ensure that your UX is rock-solid and will satisfy the majority of your users (what Apple does).

I believe that the Gnome User Experience (interaction and visual) is poorly made (I have the feeling that most of the decisions here have not been made by UX people, and have not been seriously backed by user studies - but I'd be glad to be proved otherwise).

I also believe that Gnome is targeting an audience they don't have, leaving their current (potential) audience frustrated.
>97% didn't react to your shameless plug, and probably a good chunk of these were annoyed by it

I think that's a pretty bold claim. I can't remember ever being annoyed by a blog post which included a brief "This is me and what I do" plug.
I really liked http://getpopfile.org . I had a somewhat related idea where I wanted to use ML to filter incoming emails and assign/tag them as to-do list items.

Have you considered making a web/mobile version? Email overload is one hot topic these days.
On my summer holiday this year I was walking along Hadrian's Wall & looked down to see a £5 note being blown along the path by the wind. Picked it up & was instantly reminded of this joke :)
Lv新款包包
I'm surprised that this post dosent have more upvotes.
Julia: A Fast Dynamic Language (with macros and double dispatch)
Agree on the point you make. But out of this context, I think, its useful/interesting for Startup founders, to see what acquisition mails from Google look like.
Want to interview awesome startup founders?
Author here: the desired end result is to get clients, but the first step is to get your readers to know what your "offer" is. The objective of the plug was this first step; then you should measure the conversion of the offer itself, but that's probably quite independent from the plug itself.

Anyway, for your curiosity, the end result was only one little gig for now - vs 0 from the first post, for what this is worth. I'll have to work on my portfolio etc I guess.
F# Foundation Launch : Open-source, cross-platform F# (1PM PST/9PM GMT Today)
I think for a lot of Wall Street, Apple remains a loser, starting with their historical loss against Microsoft. So, this winning streak, for a lot of people, is an aberration. After all, how can someone so uncompromising with viewpoints and products be a successful company.

Plus the fact that Steve Jobs has been the one associated with all the success that Apple has had. Of course, the real impact of an approach stays within organizational cultures for far longer, but then, perceptions are seldom based on facts. And this constant harking back to 'how would Jobs do this' can't be healthy for 'objective' thinking among investors.
Maybe. I don't use Apple products, so I'm not sure how much their customer service contributes to the strength of their brand outside their hardcore/loyal customers. I'd be interested in your opinion on that.

My view is that if you live within travelling distance of an Apple Store with a genius bar then the support is excellent. Otherwise, its not significantly better than Google's (poor) support, and adds little to the strength of their brand. Most people don't live near an Apple Store [1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Store#Locations
haha. I wish I took the advice during a recent programming interview, in which I thought a recursive function would be the best way to accomplish the end goal. forgot how much i hated them until it was too late.
There is alot of unnecessary Windows bash in that article, mainly because most of the arguments applied could also be said about Apple eg:

"...as I read some of the GNOME developer comments below, I was given to believe that this breakage stems from a Microsoft-like climate of preventing users from customizing their systems..."
I agree that that would have been the best way to measure the effect of the plug. But that wasn't an experiment, I just wanted to get as many readers as possible; the idea to measure the effect of the plug only came later (actually, it was suggested in a comment here on HN).
Isn't it Apple's fault that they basically are designing OS X for fixed-size UI. You can't scale text sizes independently of the UI elements for example.
That's why i used the black alternative scheme, that was muuuuch better. :)
Urea electrolysis: direct hydrogen production from urine
Have you seen this?
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/08/wireless-sensor-tags-...
Low cost ($15 each) RF sensors connect via a separate 'tag hub' device, which in turn is connected to the Internet.
Yeah, profits is what I meant. That;s what they are doing using the competitive tax structure of Ireland and recognizing all EU revenue in Ireland instead of the repective countries in which the product is bought. My assumption is that these loopholes will eventually close because they are being reported about and taxpayers in those countries will be disgruntled that a company only pays 2.5% of its profits in tax because it's recognizing the revenues in a different jurisdiction to which the product was bought.
> Nice hand-waving of an argument, by throwing a useless Wikipedia link in there as some kind of appeal to authority

No need to get agressive over this :) I disagreed with your first comment regarding the dynamic nature of the JVM, and replied trying to explain why.

I posted the wikipedia link not as kind of an "appeal to authority", but to give the readers a full listing of bytecode instructions, so that they can check what I was saying for themselves.

> Disregarding primitives, the JVM doesn't give a crap about what types you push/pop the stack or what values you return.

It depends how you see things: the JVM can't possibly provide instructions for every possible user type, so apart from primitives, the other object types are passed around as pointers or references, but whenever you try to do something other than storing/loading them on the stack, the type checking kicks in, ensuring that the reference being manipulated has the right types.

For instance, the putfield instruction doesn't just take the field name where the top of the stack is going to get stored. It also takes the type of the field as a parameter, to ensure that the types are compatible.

Constrast this to Python's bytecode, where the equivalent STORE_NAME (or the other variants) doesn't ask you to provide type informations.

But then again, we might be splitting hairs here: since this type checking is happening at runtime (when the JVM is running your code), you could indeed question calling it "static typing", which is usually performed at compile time (an is partially performed by the java compiler for example).
Actually what I considered doing was making it a service. Since it can all operate transparently through IMAP (including training and filtering) it's trivial to make it work with any IMAP based email. I have it working against my own gmail through OAUTH, but I decided that the market was likely too small.
Sounds cool, I used to play an PBM (Play By Mail) game called It's a crime... been waiting for a modern version of this since forever.. (http://www.kjcgames.com/crime/index.php)
This facility is located in the town where I live:

http://utslappisiffror.naturvardsverket.se/en/Search/Plant-p...
I'm reading 'Inside Apple' at the moment, and there's a line near the start that says (paraphrasing) "Apple views investors as an irritant to necessary evil". I'm sure whilst analysts pontificate on the prices going up and down and the tech community view it as a sign Apple is waning, the fact is they're selling more product and making more money than ever before. They're very much in a comfortable position, they make about $6bn in profit most quarters, that's just a silly number.

Analysts might say Apple is on the wane, but they really don't seem to be at all. And for what it's worth, I can see iPhone/iPad sales staying consistent, because once you invest a reasonable sum into the ecosystem it's not like you're going to be able to walk away.
Allan Day is not a developer. The blog didn't quote any GTK+ developer or maintainer.
Sure, the law of diminishing returns applies, just like it does with most things. I don't know Dustin, so I couldn't guess where he falls on the curve. What I can say with a degree of confidence is that most people position themselves too far on the other end of the curve.

Some context though: Dustin's article expresses that he enjoys the process of researching products that are well-designed. Therefore, I think it's reasonable to elongate the curve just for him and others like him.
Frankly I was surprised so little of people viewed the 'about' section, I've read it's common to check who's the author, and I do it myself. Until I tried to find yours and it took me a moment. You should expose the menu bar better and maybe get rid of the highly distracting binary crap. It may be one of the reasons why the plug generated more views of the 'about' and 'consulting' section - nobody sees those links without it.
LOL.

Me, I like system notification areas that apps other than two or three 'official' gnome apps can use. I like to put my toolbars and menus in the place I want to have them. I don't know why you would consider this 'relentless customisation'.

Gnome hasn't sold out or gone mainstream, quite the opposite - they are losing people in droves, chasing some dream of going mainstream but actually slowly sinking into obscurity.
On the other hand, 99.7% of my readers didn't react to my website in the first attempt, so it is a net positive anyway. And, from a marketing point of view, those who are annoyed by that most likely aren't going to hire you anyway.
Racing to get everything done by 5 pm, telling yourself that you can't work on weekends... hmm, sounds almost exactly like being a parent!
On one hand, I agree that these projects (Gnome, Unity) are going in bad directions, for much of the reasons the post outlines.

On the other hand, I understand the practical necessity of limiting the number of moving parts in a project. If Gnome thinks developer manpower is better spent in a place outside of the theme framework, then that's just a symptom of not having enough developers. It's the practical reality: some parts of the OS get more love than others.

I also don't get his Launchpad example either. Canonical never built it for anyone but themselves. Why complain that they won't give open it up? They wrote it, they can do what they want with it.

What I think this article is truly complaining about isn't lack of choice or branding, but the core cause of those things: the slow creep of "I know better than you do" design. Personally I blame two actors for this: Steve Jobs and 37 Signals. Steve Jobs made a zillion bucks cramming his design decisions down peoples' throats. 37 Signals was the developer's darling for many years, and were the big early proponents of "opinionated design." Both of these things appeal greatly to a human being's ego:

"Yeah, Steve Jobs is right! I'm such a great designer, so if I want to make a zillion bucks, I must realize that users are idiots and my beautiful product will make them love their lives again, and if they don't like it they, can suck it!"

"Yeah, 37 Signals is right! I'm so smart, I can decide what my users want, and if they don't like my opinion, they can suck it!"

Well, there's no doubt that those models worked for Steve Jobs and 37 Signals. Both are very successful. But when they start preaching that stuff to regular developers who lack the luck and talent to become a multi-million-dollar success, what we get is projects like Gnome 3 and Unity. People acting like design dictators--Steve Jobs--but forgetting that he was a once-in-a-century genius. People acting like their opinions are the best and different ones can suck it--37 Signals--but without the special sauce and determination that made that team successful.

Folks: You are not Steve Jobs and you are not 37 Signals. With few exceptions the cult of design dictatorship is the worst thing to happen to fledgling software projects in the past decade. Good designers (both graphic and architectural) can succeed as dictators, but good designers are few and far between. What the cult really does is give bad designers an excuse to be always right. And when bad designers are always right, bad design becomes par for the course.
JAM with Chrome - play music live with your friends online