skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
BTW Android tried the whole unified search thing. Back in the days of hardware buttons there was even one of the four dedicated to just search. A running app could detect the button press and bring up a standardized search interface. If the search started outside an app (eg home screen) then you get the same standard search interface.

Each app could register as a search provider - responding with content relevant to the app itself. The search system would aggregate the content from search providers. If there were multiples then it would even track the historic popularity of each provider in order to prioritise the results. (For example there are providers for your music, contacts, text messages, google search, mint etc)

There is a settings page where you can turn individual providers on and off. I added this functionality to the apps I developed. Here is the API/usage documentation: http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/search/index.html

Note how it starts out saying it is a core feature. So core that the search button no longer exists with software buttons, although to be fair search can be shown in the action bar. And I never met a single Android user who actually used the search functionality! Many people did have a dedicated search widget on their device, but that was a Google search, rather than the phone search. The current Android 4.2 homescreen search puts google search results at the top of the screen and device search below which is mostly covered by the keyboard and requires additional clicks to see it all anyway.

This is a long winded way of saying that it seems to me that search turned out to be a dud on the platform by the king of search. I just tried search on my iOS device and it turned out to be very laggy, poorly performing and useless (eg clicking on an email search result opened the email app but not the relevant message!) This leads me to believe search isn't used much on iOS either!

As you say, in-app search does seem to work well across all platforms and apps. It looks like a system based generic search just fails to work on current generations of hardware, operating systems and user interfaces.
I am the same way. I always find it perplexing how most people can't spend literally 10 minutes in complete silence with their own thoughts without getting anxious.

I notice this mostly with the younger generation these days (young women especially). They literally feel the compulsion to always have some sort external stimuli coming in, usually in the form of a constant stream of music from their phones/MP3 players. I remember most of my ex girlfriends being like this, they could rarely be alone with their own thoughts for more than a few minutes.

I genuinely think that a lot of people are afraid of introspection and quiet these days, in fear of what they might find if they look inside themselves or just absorb the world around them in an unprocessed and unaltered fashion. It is just easier to shut down any self reflection our minds might attempt with a constant stream of junk stimulation from the outside.

ADD is becoming a huge problem these days and people's attention spans just keep getting shorter and shorter.
The deeper I get into writing, and what it means to write well, the harder it is. Reading Martin Amis's The War Against Cliche was a particularly pernicious moment for me. So was Lakoff and Johnson's Metaphors We Live By.

I think the question is this: does a rhetorical figure of speech help the reader or writer see the things being compared or figurized in a new way? If the answer is no, then perhaps we should look at those rhetorical things as literal, in order to remind ourselves of the power of rhetoric.

I favor metaphors and hyperbole like politicians favor hand-shaking and baby-kissing. But it to be done well.
Ah, fair enough, I did glance over that particular verbage in his post. Cursing aside, the overall tone of his post was pretty level-headed.

I think people can and should disagree with opinions, including opinions of someone as well known as Mr. Suster. And you can and should be able to disagree with someone disagreeing with said opinions.

But do it nicely, yeah?
On consumer hardware, there is typically no mechanism enabled to detect errors in RAM.
Wow, looks like I'm the only person who actually likes this and disagree with several of the points from the article.

First of all, you have problems finding your apps since they tool away your start menu? Get a simple, free app launcher like launchy or executor. Problem solved.

I'm running an older Intel 1.8 processor with 4GB RAM on a 32 bit system. I've had several Adobe apps open at the same time without any issues I experienced with XP, Vista or 7 such as hanging or crashing under the system usage. We all know most Adobe apps are Vamperic on system resources so I was surprised at how well 8 handled the load.

This is probably the first time I've seen an article cry about the lack of information on a news app. When I look at most news sites, it's information overload on the homepage. Try finding a specific article on that LA Times homepage? Good luck.
Amtrak wifi is a placebo. Not sure about others.
Ugh so tired of this.
I'd be fascinated to read any sources you might have regarding the Biotech LLCs. Thanks in advance.
This would make a great plot element in a movie about money laundering.
I'm a computer programmer for a Japanese semiconductor/electronics company, and I'm in the company union, as are all other employees.

Japanese unions are rather different tho; they do seem to serve some purpose as an employee-advocate, but are very strongly inclined towards compromise rather than confrontation. [When I first started working here, I was warned every year during the salary-negotiation period to be "prepared to strike!" ... eventually I thought to ask, and was told there had never been a strike... :]
> Although you might not want to debate whether Vimscript is better or worse than elisp, I don't mind. Most things are better than Vimscript.
I've even written a language [1] that compiles to Vimscript because it sucks so bad.

Vimscript is similar to JS. Both have lot of pitfalls, and don't have traditional OOP. The reason JS exists is to script the browser, and vimscript exists to script vim. Coffeescript attempts to add syntactic(and sometimes semantic) sugar to JS. Riml seems to be in similar vain. Despite that, there are people who would still work on dicts rather than using the Ruby style classes your script seems to introduce. == has the same rules as == in JS - don't, unless you are really sure.

I like the default scope thing your language does, but I feel a developer should at least know vimscript variable scopes. Your classes are nice syntactic sugar, but I am used to Lua and JS plain old object based oop, and I am Ok with using OOP that way.

Vimscript has its warts(like JS) but does its job. Some people swear by Coffee and disavow JS; some people prefer JS. I don't have a fanatical position - I use both Coffee and JS. Your extensions look good - I will play with it some.

Generally, when I take a position defending Vimscript is when the person talking about "how vimscript is devil's spawn" has 0 ideas about Vimscript and is regurgitating what he read somewhere. I don't deny the warts(== vs ==# vs ==?), but I do deny the fact that somehow Vimscript makes the job difficult. In fact, if you know Vim, you don't have to learn tons of api functions(though you still need to learn some). You directly use the vim commands(is there a better word for it?). I prefer it vastly over learning a new set of artificial api calls("normal! `<v`>y" over some crappily named copy_marks....). Oh, you don't know Vimscript and you find it difficult to read? Tell me more about how every language in existence should read easy to you(not directed towards you; general comment)
This is all yawn inducing.

I don't remember the last time we had this many articles on HN discussing an OS.

All this "discussion" and criticism of Microsoft and Windows is 90% conjecture or very personal (read biased) opinions.

I too have been using a Surface since launch and have been running Win8 Pro on my laptop since RTM, and guess what? I disagree with the OP.

I highly recommend you go to a store and give it a try yourself, if you can will yourself to cut through the hater-noise.
As Ben already wrote, start-ups have only peripherally to do with this case. I'm pretty sure the person of interest here would be more than psyched to be working for one (and has the talent to do so).

Start-ups in India have nothing to fear from the fall-out of this case or from similar circumstances, it is a very much private matter.

Start-ups are involved in a different way though: start-ups have provided some of the funds, start-ups are what brought us together and start-ups have enabled us to create a support network.

So in a way there are a lot of tie ins into the start-up world but only positive ones.
Show HN: What's next for the lolcat generation-
It is not disabling, it' enabling by right click and selecting "Show image" on element. If image is supposed to be loaded via background style for div then probably enabling will not work, it will not be loaded in "only cached images" mode.
I guess you've never had neighbors who blast music with heavy bass. No earplugs in the world can protect from that, you can feel the music with your whole body.

I do earplugs + headphones thing, it really does help against regular noise.
Probably Google search and it's ads, at this point.

Crawlers, multicontinent data centers, etc. etc.

Easily billions of dollars.
I make my capslock a backspace. Seriously, when do you really need to type so many capitals that can't just be rationalised by using Shift instead? Using it as Control as well is a great idea! You should first try out Autohotkey, instead of resorting to registry hacks.
Cheers
So what's stopping you from writing apps in python?
I'm pretty sure the winner would be the IRS's modernization program, which was to write new software to process tax returns. It began over 16 years ago and has consumed over $12 billion (just for the software development portion).

$4 billion was spent on the first attempt at writing this software before they gave up in 1997 with no usable product. That's a $4 billion "app" nobody ever used.

http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1997-01-31/news/1997031030_...

It's been a few years since I read about it so things may have changed, but last read was they spent another $8 billion in the 2000s trying again, this time outsourcing the development to consulting firms with thousands of developers. And around 2005/2006 had yet to produce a system the IRS could use, forcing them to continue processing tax returns with paper and antiquated systems.
System/360 (if you can count it as an app) was supposed to be $5 billion in the 1960's. So $34B + in todays dollars.
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/04/dayint...

(And if you include the cost of further development of z/OS over the years that goes much much higher again)
Thanks for the hint on Start8 .. looks really good!
> ... how terribly unintuitive it was.

I'm a little uncertain how future proof such a claim is. I used computers before mice became common. Back in those days mice actually came with tutorial programs showing you how to use a mouse! Nowadays we would consider it somewhat absurd and no mice are shipped with such programs. Even typing tutors used to be a very popular category of software.

When I got my first smartphone it was not intuitive that such a thing as a long press existed. If you do not know about it, it can be extremely frustrating doing some actions since you will never find them. Some other cues are almost invisible - for example scroll bars tend to be very narrow. Multi-touch, pinch zoom etc are also all unintuitive before you know about them just as double clicks and drags were earlier.

There are no real cues for mouse interaction (eg double clicking), nor touch interaction (eg long press). But we don't call apps unintuitive - those interactions just became the new normal. You only need to see them a few times to pick up on them.

Perhaps Microsoft needs to have TV ads etc (dare I say a tutorial program) so their interactions become the new normal?
While we're on this subject, a related rant/question:

Why are so many people so totally oblivious to so many announcements, signs, and otherwise?

You've all seen it: Boarding a plane, for example. "Ladies, and Gentlemen, we're boarding rows 1 - 5 now. Thanks." And as sure as Spring, there will _always_ be someone from row 324 who gets in line. The staff are far more polite than I'd be: "Sir, we're boarding rows 1 - 5. You're in row 324. I literally just made this announcement four seconds ago." And still, more people from other rows will attempt to board.

This happens endlessly, everywhere. "Please don't stand here." Someone will stand here. "Please step forward if you have a yellow ticket." Someone will say "But nobody called the yellow tickets?"

Perhaps I'm too attentive or perhaps I shouldn't be annoyed by this, but I am and I am.
Actually, the requirement is that you area tax resident. Similar but very different.
If "app" includes any kind of app and not only mobile, then I would say Microsoft Windows.
I really wish Opera was more popular. It's a really good browser and helps to drive the open web, which is ironic since it's closed source.

I use it nearly every day, and it's really annoying how some major websites (cough Google Apps) don't support it. It is very competitive on html5test.com (beats out Firefox) and works really well for everyday browsing.

You don't have to be socialist to use Opera...
You're getting a lot of replies that aren't mobile apps, but just software products in general.

In terms of mobile apps my money (hah!) is on one of the many medical apps that are in development - we're talking about apps intended for use by medical professionals in actual medical institutions.

Not only are they extremely costly to develop (someone's got to pay the army of consultants, after all), they face incredibly costly certification processes before they can see any actual users.
Apple and Twitter
I would guess Facebook because they would be changing it on a daily basis to keep it consistent with their web version, and adding dedicated functionality unique to the mobile platform.
I think your love of your country is blinding you here. As someone who has lived in India for many years, I can say that such things do happen.

Moreover, it's not exactly a closely-kept secret. If you read the Indian news on a regular basis you will discover such stories from time to time.

It also seems to me that the quality of the government institutions in India varies quite a bit from place to place, not to mention from individual to individual.

I do not think that jacquesm has indicted the whole country, but I can appreciate it may be difficult to take what he has said from a foreigner posting on an international forum. You might consider that in light of the claims he makes he has avoided sweeping generalities that many others would not.
should have
A new (old?) model for understanding the stages of a startup
Unified search was removed from Android because Apple has a patent on it and successfully sued.
I hear what you're saying and you've got a point. Makes sense. But for the record, most of the people on that car I actually do see 3 to 5 times per week. So far it's been very rare for the regulars to have annoying moments. I've been keeping track for six months now.
Yes.

It is not mode or app; if you use multiple monitors then desktop is always shown, because Start Screen or WinRT app can use only one.
Of course, anything will go when you're a foreigner (the so-called "gaijin smash"). But I can definitely see them taking offense when a fellow Japanese person makes this mistake.
It was for me, I regret nothing.
Great news for the Meraki team, who have made a wonderful product. Unfortunately it means I need to find another wifi vendor, as my company chose to resell Meraki specifically to counter Cisco's portfolio.
Linux already runs fairly well on the A10's, see http://linux-sunxi.org/Main_Page for more information.
The estimated payroll costs for Windows Vista are estimated to be 10B. Now consider the costs for every Windows version released since 1985, and include R&D/marketing expenses.

http://seattletimes.com/html/businesstechnology/2003460386_b...
That last line is interesting. You lead up to presenting a scenario where one might rightfully expect a conference to naturally reflect a diverse speaker lineup, reflecting the diversity in the industry overall. I agree with that.

But I am not sure what you mean by the last line. Do you mean:
1: "This is the last industry where it should be necessary to criticise or cancel a conference with an all-male lineup [so the fact that this conference does in fact have an all-male lineup, in the context of this particular community having problems with sexism in the past, raises a huge red flag, and probably should be canceled]".

or do you mean:
2. "This is the last industry to have issues with sexism because we are so diverse, so when one conference comes along where this diversity is not represented, it shouldn't be an issue".

I find both reasonable I guess. Although considering the fact that this topic is already a sensitive issue, I lead more towards opinion 1.
Dirty object handling with Backbone.js
Reducing Database Latency
What bothers me about the OP though is that if you really dislike Metro so much on a desktop, you don't have to use it!

I'll repeat that even though I think we all know this already: if you don't want to use Metro apps, you don't have to use Metro apps. It is really that simple.

So, if you're a power user and want to stay away from all of that nonsense, then click on the "Desktop" tile and you're done. Sure, you have to return to metro when you search or for a few other minor scenarios but overall it should not be a big deal.

And then for a lot of the other complaints (e.g. hidden interface, icons that you don't think you can click) it is just a matter of time before people learn it. Then it will become a non-issue.

If OP claims he is a fan of Win7, then he should also like Win8 as the desktop and core OS is very much improved.
But that's an operating system, not an application. You've got to give credit to the IRS spending more on one application than Microsoft spent on their OS.
Great list.

Slight misspell of pingdom.
'hello, world' for mbox
basic email processing for nerds
Sweet, I've got the 2.7 app and have been waiting for 3.2!
If I organised a conference, and failed to attract a single female speaker, especially in a community where sexism is a sensitive issue, I would immediately decide to cancel it of my own volition. I don't want to contribute to the type of things that make women feel excluded.
I had an interesting thought experiment after replacing "quiet" with "privacy".

While not everyone may not agree on the word replacement, I go through similar emotions (as the author describes) when someone posts a photo (that has me and others) on facebook without permission.
I like to think that there are others out there like me. I am one of those "quiet" snobs.
Also still under copyright:

"I Have a Dream" until 2038[1]. This is particularly frustrating because the copyright holders include the estate of the person who delivered the speech, but not the estate of the two other people who wrote it (and likely most of it) - not to mention the fact that, by any web-era definition, it was a public performance and also a 'general publication'.

"Happy Birthday" (certainly in the EU until 2016, and potentially in the US too until 2030 though this is disputed[2]).

There is also one movie - whose name escapes me now - which entered the public domain and was then put back under copyright protection subsequently.

In the case of "I Have a Dream", think of the societal cost of raising two generations of students without a complete copy of the speech in their textbooks (as is generally the case).

Alternatively, think of how a 2012 version of "I Have a Dream" would happen today. If hundreds of cell phone recordings of the speech were distributed halfway around the world within mere minutes after the speech, of what relevance would copyright protection be?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have_a_Dream#Copyright_disput...
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Birthday_to_You
Occasionally I enjoy attempting to communicate entirely with cliches. Its easier than one first imagines.

Your own little "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" moment.
> If what can be reduced to the above really takes half an hour for you then I think it would be a good time investment to try and speeden that deployment process up.

You are still telling me how to allocate my time.

For historical reasons my blog is a mix of badly interacting scripts called 'octopress'. I already spent a day and a bit just getting it to work properly and to migrate the content from Drupal.

Whenever I so much as touch it something breaks. This can be for random reasons, a misplaced character here or there does wonders. Drupal sucks (for different reasons) but at least it worked.

Octopress is nicer in theory but it simply does not scale beyond the trivial, there is a lot of content in those pages and clearly octopress has a problem with that. Just correcting a typo takes several minutes (if it works at all).

So let's make a deal here: you allocate your time and you run your blog and I won't tell you what to do or change, and I will do the same with mine.

And if and when that rainy Sunday with nothing to do rolls by (I wish...) then I'll spend the time required to re-write the software underpinning the blog to improve the turn-around time. Likely that will be several Sundays.

Until then I thank the guys that wrote Octopress for doing the job they did. Figuring how to make the template to change for just one file is beyond my current level of knowledge and I do not have the time right now to improve on that. It most definitely is not as easy as you make it out to be, this is a generated blog, not one built up from separate pages of pre-rendered content. So any change I make to the end product is automatically reverted on the next generation. The pages themselves are flat text (markdown), and do not have the ability to output javascript.
Maybe it would help if they pitched this similarly to http://www.emperorlinux.com/ - taking other people's hardware, making sure it works well with linux, and selling an out-of-the-box linux experience.
Do you mind explaining that last part?
I think random special characters generally are used as a replacement for some profanity / rude words
The article describes the bonds as being soaked in diesel and sewage-tinged water.
> Also looking at the code for pastie.org support in Vim and Emacs -- I would definitively prefer extending Emacs

To each its own, but tpope's pastie is doing a lot more than the emacs pastie. Compare the usage https://github.com/tpope/vim-pastie/blob/master/doc/pastie.t... to emacs http://emacswiki.org/emacs/pastie.el

tpope's pastie supports registers, regions, windows, buffers, files and snoops the login cookies from firefox. If it were to be reduced to pasting whole buffer, region and reading a paste, it will be incredibly simple.
I see the confusion. When I said heavier, hotter, and worse battery life, I meant as compared to the current Surface. I would expect Surface Pro to land somewhere right in the middle of Surface and an ultrabook. People already ask the question, "Is a tablet worth the tradeoff?" In this case, the positives will be less than they are now.
My office at work is a virtually silent team room. All of my coworkers are exceptionally quiet people. It drives me mad.

Most days I spend my entire productive workday in a coffee shop across campus, precisely because it is loud and busy. Only with the surrounding noise can I avoid being distracted by specific things. The environment is so noisy that it allows me to ignore to entirely.
Well, guh. The point of those DEs is too be highly customisable. Although, I agree that they should be more appealing out of the box.