skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's completely it - it's a commercial and cultural thing, rather than a technical thing.

Much of the technology involved in a cinema today is a world apart from how things were 50 years ago, but at the heart of it it's the same experience - a big picture on a big screen being shown to a load of people sitting in comfy chairs who are getting aware from their normal lives for a few hours.

Do what you want with the technology, that sounds like a great experience to me and something I'll want to do for a lot longer.
And your anecdotal account of OpenOffice vs MS Office is supposed to mean something to the rest of us?

It is one persons opinion, are you a recognized authority in usability of desktop applications? Can you provide non-biased large scale research studies with clear and concise points of why MS's solution is better?

Here is my counter point. I have been using office suites since 'Display Write 4' for MS-DOS in the 80s. I have taught classes on advanced document production using open source software. I have converted hundreds of users to Linux and the only complaints I get about office suites are why are MS formats so incompatible with everything else.
> the whole ruby culture seems to be this toxic one where you're respected in proportion to how rude you are

I'd be genuinely interested in seeing concrete examples of people held in regard in the ruby community who are respected in proportion to how rude they are. Matz, DHH, Avdi Grimm, Steve Klabnik, Yehuda Katz, Aaron Patterson etc. off the top of my head strike me as gratuitously nice human beings.
I used to use Word daily when I was in college, but since graduating, it's an usual week if I open an Office app more than once a week. I've switched 100% to iWord for the times I need Office stuff, but 99.9% of the time, a plain text editor is all I need.
The classic lets bring secure information to a insecure location/enviroment issue always crops up. Usualy funny, usualy lamentably stupid.

This fits into the whole group of peole who are not hackers attending a hackers conference. All trades have there initiation practices, in the building trade noobies are asked to go to the store for a long wait/weight etcetc.

Why did the SEC have employee's at the event who were not properly trained, would you send the head of HR to a financial meeting, no.

Security is an illusion after all at a point in time and whilst a system is secure today, tomorrow it may not be due to some expliot and with that was not exactly secure the day you thought it was secure. With that the best security is when you don't need to secure something at all.

The need for laptops with such data in such area's is sily.

Sadly until somebody invents proximity based data encryption which only allows you to access that data at certain locations, whilst not foolproof, it would help. Take the data outside area's it should not be then you can't read it.

Still people just don't think, imagine if they had a iPhone or other mobile with lots of office pictures, that is harmless to many but useful to others and with that is data that gets overlooked much more.
This initially seemed like a really good argument.

Then I realized that you could make an even better sounding argument like this: "Imagine if copyright was only 10 years. Look at all the works that would now be public domain: Seinfeld, Friends, The Batman Movies, etc. etc.". This argument will probably be even more persuasive for the people who liked the original argument, since works from 10 years ago are even more recognizable.

In other words, this argument isn't actually saying anything interesting - it's simply an emotional appeal. Why should or shouldn't copyright be 10, 20, or 70 years? Why is the 1978 law wrong? Why was it created in the first place? I don't know from this article.
They cannot. There are quite strict laws regarding usage and handling of personal data, especially for government and other state bureaucratic things and that pretty much rules out Google Docs or any other cloud-based provider. They're fine for personal use and companies might opt using them too (although depending on what they do, it could well bring them into legal trouble too), but for governmental work, especially in Germany it's a big no-go.
Where do you guys see this? IRC and StackOverflow have always been extremely helpful and nice when I needed help.
This reads a lot like blog posts from back when Rails was catching on (~2005). I thought we'd moved on since then: I genuinely wanted to read an intelligent critique on the Ruby language.
> It seems like everywhere I look, people act like they're too good for me, and I'm probably too stupid to ever be a good Rails programmer.

Where did you look? Could you introduce me to some of these people that made you feel stupid?

I've been doing ruby for a relatively short amount of time and I've found the community to be a hell of a lot nicer than most programming/technical communities. Where do I have to look to find these ruby assholes?
Am I the only one that prefers my widescreen monitors flipped to portrait mode? I have it both in the office and at home, I only flip them when watching a movie.
The linked article is so overly dramatic that it was hard to read.

It's an opinion piece written by a guy who's in the business of scaring people about identity / data theft and such [1].

He's writing about a Reuters story [2] which itself is based on impressions of a yet-to-be-released SEC report.

Sure, the large point about data security is valid, but don't bother reading this piece, just jump straight to the Reuters stories [2] or the Huffington Post summary [3].

1: "Adam Levin is chairman and cofounder of Credit.com and Identity Theft 911."

2: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/11/09/net-us-sec-cyber-i...

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/11/16/sec-cyber-nyse-idU... -

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/11/09/sec-cyber-report-i...

3: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/08/sec-cyber-attacks_n...
Actually it can be February 3rd. I've seen YY/MM/DD format in use. But yeah it's horrible.
Thanks! I was more lamenting for wide adoption! Myself, plain old LaTeX is good enough, but my collaborators get anxious having to markup pdf...
It might not be racist, but could be ideologically charged.

The mere observation of an uneven distribution is not enough evidence for a power imbalance. It could also just be caused by deviation of interests, which would be totally fine.

Power imbalances cannot be reliably detected from the outside, so I won't comment on the ruby conf case.
re Wordpress and Markdown: I've been use 'Markdown on Save Improved' for a while now. Works nicely for me.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/markdown-on-save-improve...
Same way they prevent fraud with cash - paper certificates with features that are hard to copy. Also, the company has a record of what was issued and isn't going to pay off the same bond twice, or one that doesn't match what it issued. Doesn't stop people from trying -

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/02/17/usa-bonds-forgery-...
In fact, true silence will make you insane. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensory_deprivation

Can't find the article right now, but they once put people in a completely soundproof room; their minds started to make up sounds and increased their hearing sensitivity to the point where they could hear their own muscles move. I believe the longest one lasted 45 minutes.
Imagine a future, where you could simply switch your hearing ability on and off.

When I first thought about this, I got so excited, that I started writing a science fiction story around the implications. Unfortunately, I'm a horrible writer.

I am not talking about noise canceling headphones or ear plugs but something like a neurological switch. I assume the "easiest" way to do this, would be a surgery in which one cuts the nerves between the ears and the brain and installs an electronic switch. But I know nothing about this stuff.
I think their wrong.

Apple has done something wrong with the iPad Mini and that is that their products are can now be resembled through cost comparison.

Eg. Why should you buy a iPad Mini 32 gb. for 429$ when you can buy the Nexus 7" 32 gb. for 200$, Google even upgraded the storage (from 16-32gb) for free in later editions of their tablet.

And the specs on the 7" aren't wrong either. It also has fast upgrades and a cleaner UI because of Android 4.2.
Advancements like Google Now and in Google Maps aren't found in the Mini, actually... Everything that can be done with an iPad, can be done with a Nexus. There are almost as much apps on the Play Store (it will surpass Apple's in 2-3 months) and augmented reality games like Ingress (from Google) make it truely awesome to join Google's community...

And it is a community, not a dictatorship :-)
It will look exactly like SCO's present.
This should be upvoted more, as the "Chairman" is "Justice Markandey Katju" whose legal opinion in this matter is credible. Not only does he say that the arrests are against freedom of speech which is "a guaranteed fundamental right", he says that the arrests are criminal according to law too.

Quoting the full paragraph here -

""
In the letter addressed to Chavan, Justice Katju has written: "It is alleged that she has been arrested for allegedly hurting religious sentiments. To my mind it is absurd to say that protesting against a bandh hurts religious sentiments. Under Article 19(1)(a) of our Constitution, freedom of speech is a guaranteed fundamental right. We are living in a democracy, not a fascist dictatorship. In fact this arrest itself appears to be a criminal act since under sections 341 and 342 it is a crime to wrongfully arrest or wrongfully confine someone who has committed no crime.
""
The binary formats are open too. Mind you, both OOXML and the binary formats are quite tightly coupled to Office's inner workings and implementing them is probably not easy either. But documented they are.
"Anti-discrimination" is part of political correctness.

The example you provide falls under both categories, and it falls under political correctness precisely because it would be discriminatory to celebrate one religious festival without celebrating all of them. It is not politically "correct" to partake in discrimination.

I don't know if you're from the UK, but society today is highly secular. A British Humanist Association poll last year had 65% of respondents answer the question "Are you religious?" negatively. Of those who claim to be religious, most do not attend church on a regular basis, or take part in other religious rituals. Not to mention many of them are not Christian.
Why this attack on "Python folks" when the comment you replied to never mentioned Python? Got a bee on your bonnet?
"I think all of them should be using open source software, for both budget reasons and in principle."

For the budget, you're not calculating the entire equation, mate.

You're forgetting how much the time of an employee costs. Let's assume a single user license for Office costs $100 dollars (I'm not sure how much it costs, but I think that's ballpark). Now, if your employee is used to Office Word, and using the more streamlined MS Office provides him with a 0.5% increase in productivity over Open Office, how much money is that each year??

Lets give this guy a yearly salary of $45,000 and calculate 0.5 * 0.01 * 45000 = 225. => 0.5% of his work time is worth $225 each year.

Oh, wow, that MS Office package just paid for itself in less than six months! and that's by estimating only 0.5% work increase. And trust me, a lot of people spend their entire work day using Excel, and having used both Excel and Calc I can GUARANTEE you the increase in productivity is much, much higher than half a percent (for perspective, 0.5% of an 8 hour workday is 2.4 minutes)

Don't forget get this when you're arguing about how to spend taxpayer money. There's a reason why big companies / institutions pay for expensive software; it's actually cheaper in the long run!
Fail Fast - A Lesson In Not Wasting Time
OmmWriter is on Windows too, and is especially great there since there's a dearth of plain writing apps on PCs.
Like Php and other languages, Ruby has one severe sickness:
“One thing Perl’s my() gives you is a guarantee that you aren’t stomping on a given variable. For example, if I’m in a block of code in Perl and want to use a private variable I can just declare it with my() and never have to worry about whether a variable of that name existed previously. In Ruby, if you are inside of a block and want a private variable, you need to choose a variable name that has never been used before. I don’t want to have to hold the entire symbol table in my head!! What can I do?”
source: http://gabrito.com/post/ruby-needs-my-for-variable-declarati...
See, that doesn't surprise me in the slightest; Blu-ray makes the most sense when it is connected to your TV.

I see nothing wrong with Blu-ray being used for your TV, and not at all for your computer.

I agree that one day bandwidth may be great enough to supersede Blu-ray, and I agree bandwidth improvements are tied to the end of Blu-ray. However, as Blu-ray offers 36Mbps data rate, that time is certainly not now.

Oh, and if the oft-dreamt-of switch to 4K in the living room happens, that time will be pushed even further out. You might even see one more format.
How you can do it alone as a solo entrepreneur
Judging by Microsoft's recent choices to kill .NET-based products like XNA and Silverlight it seems to be the case that management aren't fans of it anymore. Dropping support for XNA is particularly mysterious given Microsoft's struggles to get game developers to support Windows 8 - they literally had a dedicated community of game developers that could have put titles on the Windows 8 store on day 1 if Microsoft had provided any support. Instead, even game developers with titles being published by MS are stuck using MonoGame for Windows 8 support. It's insane.
I believe opinions are welcome here.
No, he was suggesting a definition of racism that called anti-racist affirmative action as "not racist", and attempts to undermine affirmative action as "racist". That seems rather specialised to me, and at best a convolution on top of the sociological definition you linked to. Also, most modern academic work != a wikipedia link, do you have any other sources?
Can't you run a private installation of Google Docs?
Human GPS Microchipping - Embrace it or Ban it?
I have seen probably 5 or 6 Facebook friends fall for this one. The typical profile is of a mother who isn't very tech savvy but likes the idea of free stuff.
What are you are trying to accomplish with this response to Mark Suster's blog post? (honest question)

To me, the original post came across as encouragement to all the founders who feel like they are the only ones busting their butts and still feel stuck.

I felt this particular excerpt from your blog post though was a bit unfair to Suster:

> Suster (who’s a VC now) won’t take his own advice though, because:

> > Of course I do [want to be a founder again]! How could you not want to go back to it. It’s addicting. It’s an adrenaline rush like no other.

because in his post, he also says:

> Yet one day you wake up and you realize you can’t run as fast as the young guys. You can’t quite hit the 3-pointers as often. Yes, you have maturity that makes you a wiser player. But you realize that you can be more helpful as a coach.

And yes, I sleep better at night as a coach. And I’m happy as a VC.

"His advice" isn't for everyone to be a founder. I think it was just a pep talk, like: "If you feel like you're spinning your wheels going nowhere and everyone else is a rock star, don't worry, you're not alone. That's how everyone does it."

I don't know Mark or anyone he has invested in, nor am I particularly tied to him. However, it felt a little strong when you issued this warning:

> be careful around VCs like Suster, who’d love to give you heaps of money so you can get up at 4:50am and get a heart attack every time your money starts to run out.

Keep writing. I like your style and I think its great when people write. Just leaving my honest feedback as well because I felt some of the aggression was unwarranted.
I think it's something like 7 years since Apple's touchpads were made by Synaptics. They don't supply the touchpads in all Windows machines, though the non-Synaptics ones I've used are (in my judgement) consistently inferior.

(I worked at Synaptics until late 2006. It's possible that my information may be outdated.)
It'll cost you a whole lot more if BMW were to sue you for stealing their start button design for an app icon...
The reason it isn't 10, 20 or 70 is because this is an argument to reverse the 1978 and other copyright extension decisions and return the laws back to what they were.

Copyright term extensions are continually granted in the interests of the wealthy few, and not in the interest of the broader public.

The argument is summarized as "had congress not bent over in the face of lobbying influence this is what would be public domain today"
I was tasked to fill out an employee self review form (after being with this company for 2 years now) and I was sent a word document. I have always used google docs to view / manage documents (I'd guess I have a new document in my life once every 2 weeks?) and so I figured that's what everyone does. Turns out even at the company I work (an internet company) most people have word and use it. I'd always assumed that google docs have long replaced the desktop word processing needs for most. I guess we tech people live in some sort of word-less utopia.
As a Ruby learner I have to say this post isn't helping.

Yes Ruby is a great language. That's why I learn it in the first place. But a post like this make people think the author is "hardselling" the language. And good things do not need to be hardsold. Ruby itself isn't opinionated. But this post is. In fact if I know nothing about Ruby and its community, I would have drawn the conclusion from this post that Rubyists are arrogant and opinionated.

People really should not try to convert other's language usage. If the language itself can not convince a person, neither can you.
We will probably go with $5 mo./25GB with some mechanism to extend the limit if needed.

How many of those 10mb photos do you roughly have in your use-case?
Minority/Majority are only terms which makes sense in a specific context. This context can be gender, can be race, can be nationality, age, experience, school of thought, sexual orientation, preference in food, preference in code-editor etc.

If you find yourself in a "minority", it's because you have chosen to identify yourself with something which puts you on the outside.

People calling for discrimination in cases like this often have chosen to identify themselves with a metric which puts them in the minority (race, gender) instead of one which wouldn't (nationality, age, experience, school of thought, etc).

To me it seems like a personal, deliberate choice to weight your identity in on things which are not important to the subject instead of those which are. And I find it hard to sympathize with.

You're not suffering. You're not living under South African apartheid rule. You are not being oppressed. In fact, you are using your freedom, which you do have, to cause a shitfest over statistical anomalies or tendencies.

Cry me a river.
Why aren't we using HTML for documents yet?
Lumia 920 Tops Amazon’s Best Seller List in the US
Nobody ever navigate in w3schools, they come back from Google each time.
That productivity decrease will only take place while your employee is getting to know the software. After a few months it should be about the same, but you still need to pay the license fees every so often.

In this particular case most of the employees have been working exclusively on OpenOffice for the last 4-5 years. Switching them to MS Office will probably decrease their productivity on top of the cost of the license.

Anyway, they didn't even try to claim that it will save them money. What they claimed was that 20% of their word processing cannot be done with open source tools. I am really curious what kind of word processing they do.
LibreOffice is fantastic, give it a try
No, there's no Google Docs "appliance". It's their cloud or nothing.
I want to live in whatever world these people are in where they can just throw up their hands and say, "gee-wiz, why can't EVERYONE just use open source software?" Usually that "incompatible" industry standard document contains real information that needs to be presented accurately. OpenOffice just brings headaches and unnecessary phone calls/e-mails.
The proof of the pudding - Conference Diversity
Of course as soon as you need to include a formula somewhere, LaTeX is pretty much your only option.

http://www.chachatelier.fr/latexit/

I used LaTeXiT for some time when I used Keynote for presentations.
Why recycle an old iPad after a few years? That device is very much still usable and should be donated to someone or some organization, as is.
4 Months And 1k Users
You probably never have encountered Italians :)
When you hear loud voices in the bus here in Poland then you may be sure that they belong to them. English speaking (British and American accents) are second.
Interesting approach to technical interviews
His arguments are so generic that you can change Ruby with any other language and a lot of his arguments still work.
I'm no UEX expert..

Then let me enlighten you. Your ctrl-alt-delete example is poor due to the fact and this is backed up by a Bill Gates interview that that command was meant for debugging and was not supposed to ship in the final product. People started using it and they had to leave it in.

Some music players do not use space for pause/resume.

As for clicking and zooming, these things are so intuitive that children can learn on their own how to do these simple tasks. OLPC and other organizations air drop laptops into Africa and people who have never a seen a computer get them and teach themselves how to use it and how to read.
Isn't it safe to say that if you spill water on your computer, it's trashed regardless of whether it was overheating?
They also have no reason to act snobbish. Reasons 2 and 3 are very important to a lot of developers.

I don't think choosing a faster language is premature optimization. Java might be a bit more difficult to program in, but the performance is a lot better. Java is also easier to program in than c++. I think that is a good trade off. I'm not saying you should not use ruby, but not even considering something else seems stupid.

A lot of developers still develop software for Windows and telling them to install some UNIX variant instead of choosing a programming language just seems stupid. Not all of us are developing web applications. But even if we are there are lots of programming languages that work properly in both Windows and UNIX environments that offer the same advantages as ruby, Python or Groovy for example.
People are trying to discuss this seriously, and all you have is passive aggressive sarcasm?

This isn't a personal attack on you and your lifestyle and your people. It's a call to broaden the church.
6. Ruby is too opinionated and takes away my freedom to do things my way

Convention over configuration is mainly a rails thing, right? When I was learning Ruby there were quite a few ways of going about accomplishing your task, only there was often a more efficient way of doing things (e.g. using blocks instead of loops, etc.)
Tips for buying indoor dog gates for your home
> If you've ever flown on a plane, altitude has been given as feet and distance in miles.

If you fly a plane (not just on a plane), those are nautical miles, not land miles. And speed in knots. And rate of climb in ft/min.
agreed. generally - and i found the title less offensive than the original. an apt response. :)