skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Whenever these posts come up I question to myself whether an ideology for "stuff" is actually required, desirable, or helpful at all. They are usually thoroughly entertaining and informative, but I always leave feeling it's been therapy for the writer, a defense of their preferences whipped up into a reassuring formal-looking philosophy.

Like much writing, the damage is in the contextual assumptions imposed on the reader before the article even begins. Once you've started reading and focusing on the details of the piece, it's too late - you've unwittingly accepted the assumptions and are playing by the author's rules. In these cases, one such assumption is that an overarching, complete and consistent methodology can be applied to personal property in the first place (and that certainly if there's a good one then it can be knocked out in a few hours on a blog post...).

This is part of a larger pattern I'm falling into of scrutinously questioning the motives behind articles posted on personal blogs. I could be going in the wrong direction entirely but it seems very often to be validation-seeking behaviour, whether by submitting one's views for the approval of others, or simply that writing it all down gives it some mental gravitas to assuage personal doubts that the individual might be "doing it wrong". It certainly appears consistent with the range of submissions to Hacker News related to personal improvement (or, "lifehacking", as the internet seems to be running with these days).

Why did these authors write these two pieces? It's very difficult to analyse! If "for validation" seems a little condescending...well, I'd prefer it to the standard interpretation: "The Best" is unsubtle status-signaling, "The Worst" is equally unsubtle counter-signaling.
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Nothing at all. Emacs is wonderful. But that says nothing at all about Ninja.
About wp plugins : there is no quality control whatsoever in plugins published on wordpress.org . One should review the code before installing one.

Unfortunatly, because of the architecture of Wordpress and PHP , there is not "sandboxing" possible for plugins. However , always separate a wordpress blog or any downloaded scripts from the rest of your apps. they should not have access to anything but their space and their own database on the server.

A good architecture for a plugin system would be that the plugin uses some kind of DSL(like a template language , so no direct php) , and the core should be able to manage plugin rights ( like : "can read database" , "can write database" , "can write files" , ... ). A slideshow plugin should not be able to write files, or ever write to the database.

I'm really thinking about trying to develop such a system , with security at the core, which is not the case of Wordpress.
A banner at the top of the store now reads: "Google Play is currently experiencing very high traffic. Nexus 4 is not sold out and will still be available for purchase. Please try again shortly. Thank you for your patience."

Not sure whether "will still be available" means "today" or "one of these days"...

Update 14:05 PST now the banner is gone.
So happy to see that others have this habit of selecting and highlighting bits of text as they read. I've been ridiculed for it, but I'm not the only one!
The Emacs next-line and previous-line bindings C-n and C-p also work well for history navigation.
As Silicon Valley matures, I think age bias will become less prevalent. I think there will be an inflection point where novelty is going to have to give way to quality. Facebook is illustrative. Facebook is exactly what you'd expect to get if you hired a bunch of recent college graduates to build something: creative, but otherwise utter crap. It's not what you would get if you hired a team of seasoned professionals to build a product with well-defined requirements. At some point, I think in the near future, you'll see Facebook (and the other companies like it) transition from the former into the latter.
Do you also use your text selection as a bookmark?
I'm 37, and honestly this has started to scare me over the past couple years.

This is a coping strategy - not a fighting strategy - but think about options for working by/for yourself.

Playing the grizzled consultant rich in lessons learned can play well. You're, unfortunately, working with the opposite age bias that anybody under 30 doesn't know what they're talking about.

Ageism wasn't a major factor - but it was a minor one - when I decided to start my own company up again when I hit forty.

I figure that I'm not going to discriminate against myself ;-)
Great points, your article was spot on. No, definitely that's not the main issue, although it is one. You can't keep reinforcing why the user is signing up throughout the process the same way you can on the web. All mobile sign-up screens pretty much look the same and I see a lot of users look at it and just delete the app, or delay until later at which point they forget why they downloaded it. And even when they get past it, if they see something else they perceive as a "this is going to take a while" moment, they are going to leave and delete your app. On the web, the time to signup and get use from your app is faster and perceived as faster so I think given a choice between the two, more users would do it on the web.
Ask HN: What is a smart guy?
I'm occasionally told I'm a smart guy by people 20+ years older than me (I'm a college student), and on the rare occasion by a peer.
I've told other people something like, "You're a smart guy, you'll figure it out."

I'd like to know what you think makes a smart guy.
Is it a personality, type of thinking, IQ, achievements or something else?

Thanks!
The Politics of Saying and Receiving A "No"
How to Create New Habits
I think they don't mention it because they think it to be obvious (I hope). However, with all the special built servers that big providers use to reduce costs, there is some margin to doubt.

I think Google may be able to get away with it. With enough checksums along the way, memory (and other hardware) errors can be detected in software pretty easily if you have independent machines checking the data and can afford the processing penalty.

Now, for virtualization I seriously doubt it. Not unless their instances run simultaneously on more than one machine to check for inconsistencies between them (something that the mainframes do since the dawn of time, but that I don't see as feasible in a distributed environment).
I've included these, thank you!
When you say "utilitarian, post-apocalyptic, hellscape Bartertown where people scavenge through wreckage looking for makeshift utensils and clothing", you mean Wal Mart, right?
What's absolutely hilarious about it is that it's not the same frat culture that typifies Wall Street. It's the nerd frats.
Yes, and in addition it's also a system to ensure that elected officials and their parties have accountability. If you win an election and then "betray" your voters, you won't be reelected. If you can't be reelected, you could damage the chances of your party. In essence, democracy in its current form is not so much about choosing the right/best candidate. It's more about making sure the winner cannot become a despot.
I agree, I'm a third year CS student and 90-95% of what I know I learned from in class projects or projects on my own. I didn't learn how to write good code by studying for exams.

The best class I ever took was a graduate level course called Internet and Web Systems. It was entirely project based and, more importantly, the projects were entirely spec-based.

For example, the first assignment was to write a webserver in Java that met the HTTP 1.1 Spec. The prof didn't care what algorithms we used or what data structures, all that mattered was that the server performed as desired when subjeced to tests. These were not unit tests that tested specific method interfaced but real-world test like 100,000 concurrent connections or testing for proper response codes in uncommon situations.

The last project in that class was to build a search engine. I mean an entire search engine, a crawler, an indexer, PageRank, a frontend, etc. all distributed over a DHT on AWS. I learned so much about disk/memory management and concurrency while building that project. In the end it was graded on 2 things: the robustness of the architecture we invented, and the professors experience when using the search engine. These criteria gave us a lot of freedom to learn and explore new programming techniques.

TL;DR - I agree, projects are the way to go.
Doesn't shit-talking Nutrivise in a public forum kind of reflect poorly on both of you? I'm always weirded out by people who call-out their employer in a public space like that...
> people who become adults after smart phones were commonplace have an entirely different worldview.

Care to elaborate?
Wow, I gave jgc credit for the non-obnoxious title, and then I realized that the title is obnoxious, but the HN gods improved it.
I somehow missed this post of his, but you are spot on and rightfully disgusted with both his post and HN reaction to it.

Stuff doesn't make you more free, it enslaves you. The stuff you have, more you need to care about it. Thoreau would be horrified :) ( Said he writing on macbook air, simbol of cult of stuff)
Any news on enterprise adoption of Windows 8? I assume that this will be like Vista -- many large companies won't bother upgrading. That will be a huge drag on Windows 8 adoption.
Introducing The Smashing Library, Annual eBook Subscription
mail.app on OS X also does this ( can be turned off i think ) and its always a similar annoyance to me ( select something to copy paste and the reply only has that)
I agree that it is critical, but don't think it is actually a subtle distinction. It is a huge, glaringly obvious distinction. Which makes it all the more unfortunate that so many people reinforce incorrect terminology. I find it hard to believe people seriously don't realize their phones can access web pages, and that web pages can be designed correctly so they are accessible on all platforms.
I wonder how many Windows 7 licences were sold in the same period
That's not strategic voting according to the definition. In both cases you're still voting for C, the candidate you like the most.

"In voting systems, tactical voting (or strategic voting or sophisticated voting or insincere voting) occurs, in elections with more than two candidates, when a voter supports a candidate other than his or her sincere preference in order to prevent an undesirable outcome.[1]"

If you mean it in the larger sense of using strategy when voting, Gibbard–Satterthwaite theorem shows that no voting system is strategy free unless it's either dictatorial or nondeterministic.
Nexus4 swinging in and out of stock. Missed it? Get an email once it's back.
If you conduct a placebo-controlled study, but all the participants can correctly guess which group they're in, is it really a placebo-controlled study?

No, it's not, and the question of how many allegedly double-blind studies are compromised by this leakage deserves a lot more attention.
Would it be better to have something like 0/1/2 which is essentially IRV, or some other method of point distribution among candidates?
So, in other words, Gmail just added a feature that Hotmail/Outlook.com have had for years.

golf clapping
Unfortunate that this thread will probably dissolve beforehand, but coincidentally there's an IAmA on Reddit by an assoc. dean of admissions at Colgate about to start: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/13vel5/im_karen_gianni...
Good to hear you guys survived that challenge. The new name's nice, it should be popular with outdoorsmen, hunters, and gamesmen. I'm not sure how well it'll go over with backpackers, conservationists, and tree-huggers like myself.
canibuyanexus4.info

disclaimer - this is my site.

also, i won't use your email address for anything other than telling you when it's back in stock.
"How does this compare to Windows 7 sales? Microsoft said it had sold 60 million Windows 7 licenses from the end of October 2009, its launch date, to the end of January 2010 December 2009. So that's 60 million Windows 7 licenses sold in two months. So far, Microsoft has sold 40 million licenses of Windows 8 in one month."
Doesn't really matter to MSFT/your OEM if you remove Windows 8 after you get it, unless you go through the hassle of getting a refund for it.
The Verge reported 60million in a bit more than 2 months and 90 million in 4 months.

Win8 seems to be doing in the ballpark (if not better) than Win7 in sales.
It's a secret?
For a start... how about the stupid menu that pops up when I try to use the scroll bar? A stupid menu that actually has an entry titled "Logo", with a "I love blogger" graphic? What the heck is that supposed to mean?
I used to think so, too. But then, IDEs and developers are kind of special.

IDEs are mostly just big rectangles full of text, which are eminently platform independant. Developers are special in that that we are very used to staring at terminals and logs, and are very accustomed to work with colored but unformatted text. Also, workflows tend to be very similar, across platforms and environments.

So that leaves us with not much reason for platform dependance, and thus Eclipse, Emacs/Vim/etc., and terminals. Even Visual Studio sports many things, but a native look is not among them. I guess XCode is the only really platform-dependant IDE I know. All the others could just as well run on different platforms or even do so.

So, umm, I respectfully disagree.
I don't believe this satisfies the Condercet criterion either. Consider these rankings of preferences:

20% A ...
20% B ...
15% C ...
15% D C ...
15% E C ...
15% F C ...

In a two-round run-off, one of A or B will be elected, despite the fact that 60% of voters prefer C over either A or B.
I'm not based in the US and I rarely see people use KDE compared to other Linux DEs
Yes, and it is more used than their mobile app. Were you referencing their use of html in their app? That is an entirely different issue, but yes they also did that.
What's that, Microsoft announced record profits? Uh-oh, that's a sign they've hit "peak-desktop"- the desktop market will only decline from here. Microsoft is doomed!
For anyone who's still trying, I did a window.setInterval to click the "Proceed" button. Mine hasn't gone through yet, but better than constantly clicking :)
Crypto for the Masses
This feature is also present in Apple Mail, which is fortunate because ever since Apple Mail caught up to Gmail's last remaining interface enhancement (having an "archive" button), the greatest Gmail feature I use is IMAP access.
> If your company is aspiring to the Goldman Sachs culture, I will never apply to or do business with it or you.

There are a lot of things to fault Goldman Sachs for, but they are a tremendously effective and efficient organization. Most startups should be so lucky to be so well-run.
Didn't he get the Cue? Sorry, lame joke.

I hope Apple doesn't enter this soccer team emulation mode, where by firing the coach and keeping all else the same is supposed to mean things are changing.
i don't think i'll be using it in the future

most of my email flows like a conversation, i don't need to bring back older parts if my recipient already has them in front of him.
On USENET, especially without a threaded client, top-posting was a sin because it often removed valuable context - or forced the reader to scroll down to see the context then back up to see the reply. It also made for poor arguments in long threads where a poster would address multiple points at once rather than inline, point-by-point.

Similarly, when using non-threaded email clients the same problem exists. The bottom of the post becomes a mishmash of quotes and arrows (ah, "> > > > > > > > > > >", how we miss you) and almost impossible to figure out what the original poster was trying to say.

With threading, and especially Gmail's aggregate view of threads, top posting is far less of an issue. If everyone is using Gmail (e.g. Apps set up within a company), there's very little reason to reply inline for shorter messages, and more reason (phone consumption) to top-post. For longer discussions, though, it still helps to address points individually inline rather than attempt to pull them out on top.

Even within an organisation entirely using Gmail, there are still people who are sticklers for bottom-posting and seethe when they see top-posting. I used to be one of those people on USENET, but for the reasons above, I've changed my stance considerably.
Svbtle is new; I'm unaware of any sites other than his own that he's designed. What am I missing?
It keeps crashing on me. I'm on Lion. :(

Looks good though. I thought it was going to be YET ANOTHER ECLIPSE distribution, but apparently it's not. It seems to be pretty fast. Hope they fix the crashing issue on Lion soon.
'STRING HIM UP', 'STRING HIM UP', the crowd roars.
His managers looks down from their perfect white offices, then one mutters, 'We'd better give the people what they want, he's the one at fault after all. We can't have this imperfection here any longer'
So many people in this thread are saying they highlight sections of text as they read. I don't do that, and no-one I know does that.

What is the benefit? Is it intentional, or is it a habit with no real use?
Sorry, just putting the word 'Best' in double quotes wasn't clear. I am using the word "Best" to be Dustin's definition. Where the author is arguing the [best] is the "worst".
Forks and knives might not be the best examples here, but buying "the best" (as in the most likely to last the longest, has a generous warranty, and is relatively simple to repair) is often sound financial planning. It tends to be a more expensive outlay at the beginning, but it sure beats the disposable "planned-obsolescence" stuff we're usually suckered into buying.
Are you OpenVZ only? Can I deploy my own Xen VPS on it.
I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft is actually already kind of banking on this. When better to venture towards mobile, than on the cycle that enterprise is less likely to pick up?
Curious question: They are not releasing this in Canada at the moment, but I can go through one of my US-based servers to add it to my cart. Assuming I ever get past the high-demand errors, does anyone know if I'll be allowed to ship it to Canada?

Keep in mind, both Canadian and US customers access the site via play.google.com. They are only determining your country based on IP (or something similar) and presenting a different experience.
My best guess would be he's referring to an OEM license that came with a PC he bought.
What's the actual question?
But just think of the internet points!
> habitual selectors

Ah, my condition has a name. All it needs now is a support group. My case become terminal when I discovered three finger drag on OSX.

HN is a particularly good site to do it on because of the little lines and gaps that appear between selected blocks of comments. You can get a very satisfying 'pop' of a multi-comment selection springing from a single one if you move your mouse just a bit while dragging over the gap between one comment and the next.
I agree about module dependency tooltips. I'm happy to hear I'm not the only one.
Yes - it does run both ways ;-)

Back in the distant past when I was in my 20's I was the Technical Director of a company (kinda-sorta CTOish equivalent). One of the guys I hired in ops was in his late forties, early fifties.

We worked in the same office.

We regularly got great entertainment value from people who had come to talk to me naturally walked over to the nicely dressed distinguished looking guy at the large desk (needed for building new kit) rather than the pony tailed youth in the corner ;)
Beautifully Simple Blogging
A job in Washington?
I'm guessing that a lot of HNers spend a lot of time in their Gmail account, and that this functionality (which was news to me) was perceived as a significant time saver and judged to be worth sharing with the rest of the community.
PG - I wish you can reply :)
I don't do this, but I could see someone doing it to keep track of where they are in a large article.
This is absolutely amazing, I would love to see some pictures of the scale model!
I'm not sure why you're getting those quota errors, but I can assure you that we're not trying to pressure people to stop using SMTP and IMAP.

If you post on the forums, some user support folks should be able to help you out and escalate to engineering if they find you're hitting a bug.

Sorry for the issues you're seeing.
"Smart" is in the eye of the beholder. It's subjective, and how it's used tells you about the person telling you this.

This means a lot of people consider you to hold above-average processing and retention abilities, such that you'll be able to solve the majority of problems you encounter in life. And you're probably friendly to most people.

You're probably more quantitative than those who tell this to you, so they likely are less sure about which metric they're identifying than you are.
Enabling MMS without jailbreaking on GoPhone (and others) (not tested)
No, IRV actually makes the strategic voting problem even worse than our current system. Approval voting seems to have the best mix of desirable traits.
Important info but I think you have the wrong topic.
> I was an employee at Vicinity Corp (the first provider of Yahoo Maps back in the olden days)

I don't know if by "olden days" you mean 2005-2006 or so, but I can tell you that at that time Yahoo Maps was the only serious competitor for Google Maps. It had actually better data than Google for many big cities outside of the US.

For example only in the last 6 months or so did I see that GMaps actually had geo-data for my city's neighborhoods (their "boundaries" etc.), a thing that was available in Yahoo Maps back in those days. Plus, the Yahoo data was quite open, unlike the walled garden that is Google Maps.
I host a few personal sites with them (and have apparently been paying more from the German site), and it's been fine.
If it's being recommended for re-introduction even knowing what actually happened, and is responsible for the health of the overwhelming majority of those who took it, I don't think that counts as an example of a case where you "needed" to corrupt journals to get it approved.
I'm already shocked Google, Apple, etc, haven't been slammed with class-action suits for their overt anti-competitive hiring practices re: non-poaching, etc.
Why don't you think it'll go over well? We're backpackers, conservationists, and tree-huggers ourselves. :)
You're overloading the term to the point of it being meaningless.
Are you using a Mac? Because if you are, those Emacs motion key bindings work in almost all text input fields in all apps.
I am a serial overliner and I love the feature anyway.
Maybe this is their strategy to sell Windows 8 and then also sell a copy of Windows 7.
...and everyone focuses on the dinnerware when really they were just examples held up in each author's actual point. A completely absurd amount of time and words have now been spent discussing a message that apparently nobody actually comprehended.
Its what I say when I want somebody to do what they were supposed to do. For example, if I think an employee is bugging me too much or is not thinking hard enough I tell them that they are a 'smart' person and that they can figure it out (alone).
Mystery worm scrambles Iranian databases
Approval voting suffers the largest number of "Especially Intolerable Failures" in the comparison here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_instant_runoff_vo...
LeagueHeads - The Head to Head Fantasy Wagering Game by Brendan Joyce