skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sentiments I totally agree with.

So much so that we started a side project to create a CLI environment for exploring the personal cloud. It's a web app which exposes your FB, Twitter, Picasa resources as files and navigate them using a shell and unix-like tools. It's not "launch-ready" yet - still got to write tests, docs, FAQs, and so on (i.e. the last 10% which takes 90%) but there is a live alpha version at https://pigshell.com. (Your data stays 100% private: The app is all static files and client-side JS. The server can't see a single bit of user data)

And yes, Ctrl-L works. Tab completion too. What would life be without them? One damn point-and-click after another :)
To be honest I have seen the same happen here as on other sites. The community seems to pass through phases with its view about a company. From initial interest, near blind loyalty, to OMG WTF they are evil. This happens with individuals in tech too, though there are examples where many end up redeemed in the eyes of the community.

Apple began inching into the OMG WTF EVIL category awhile back for some and others eventually tagged along. That herd mentality that many sites develop does happen here too.

Face it, HN is a community within each community are cliques that rise and fall in their influence and that comes out in how stories and comments are views and voted on
I agree. It's important to be able to laugh at ourselves. One of the dangers of the startup world is people taking things way too seriously.

I think that's why my 'double stealth' parody was such a hit a while back: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4166183
They want to help me find a job - if I let them. I can live with that.
Seems like you could have a search API for the sources that do allow sub-licensing. But I'm not sure putting search into an API would be a good way for DDG to gain revenue.
Grow to Greatness: Smart Growth for Private Businesses
Made me smile.
Dell tried with Adamo. Vaio started out, and was for the longest time, the premium PC brand.

It's not like they didn't try, it's more like they just gave up.
The Algorithm that Follows You from One Device to the Next
"The antitrust lawsuit aimed at blowing up Major League Baseball's lucrative television-rights territories and forcing the league to abandon its antiquated blackout policy will proceed after a federal judge Wednesday affirmed the claims that MLB's media structure is anti-competitive."

Wait, doesn't the MLB have some sort of a bizarre blanket exception on anti-competitive acts? Is the U.S. government finally looking to overturn that?
"YC-backed startup is looking for a growth hacker to help disrupt people's dinners" cracked me up.
The Setup: Linux Kernel Developer Greg Kroah-Hartman
At least in this case it's well known why the permissions are needed.

You could use Titanium Backup to back up SwiftKey, download the new dictionaries copy them somewhere safe, restore your files, than replace the dictionaries.
Kim is turning into a Julian Assange of the Internet and he is now taking this to a whole new level.
The driver for my wired Ethernet card is not included. I hoped it would be when I upgraded from 12.04 to 12.10 but there it was, finished upgrading and no wired connection.
Since it is a work development box, where I am usually in the middle of a sprint, I will put off all future upgrades as long as possible.

Without a strong guarantee that my system will work exactly like it does before the upgrade I have no incentive to up grade ever again as long as I can get my stories done by the end of the sprint.
He taught us how to love music with his enlightened soul.

We'll dearly miss you Dave, rest in peace.
I've seen it before, maybe two months ago.
If you can follow the maths of things like Poisson distributions, the central-limit theorem, etc., then it's the modelling issues that are tricky.

Take a look at Dudley's Statistics for Applications from MIT's Open Courseware - http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-443-statistics-for... - is supposed to be very thorough and easy to follow, but warning, it's based on an expensive textbook.
I've been a Mac user for nearly a decade, first machine I bought was a G4 12" iBook. My Uni final year project was a Cocoa app when saying "Hey I'm making a Mac App!" got you strange looks. I've also developed on Linux for work for about 5/6 years. Sometimes, even cross-platform OS X/Linux development.

Has the situation changed and 'nerds' are no longer Apple's target market? Kind of. A bit. If you cared about upgradability and taking that machine and using it for 6 years and it being awesome then sure, Apple's changed. It's not for you. If like me you came to Apple as you had no interest in upgrading a machine, ever, at all, then they've not changed.

I still have: a built in, relatively decent Terminal. I have command line build tools (and yes we can argue about the quality, and whether Apple should be forking their own versions, but that's a topic for another day). Apple ships their own IDE & SDK for the system, to anyone, and they've done that for as long as I've been using them as well.

Apple reducing upgradability isn't them thumbing their noses at us. When they release a version of the OS without a Terminal we can all go "Well, Apple has moved on from us developers", or if they pull XCode from the App Store. Until then, it's Apple improving their products inline with what a large portion of people want.
Well, if you consider that becoming the next Steve Jobs and running the next Apple is a dream/fantasy endgame for many startup people, then anything and everything related to Apple is interesting. Especially due to the prevalence of Apple hardware in so-called hacker circles.
The funny thing is that I know a few people who do this. (Holding Caps Lock = CTRL, tapping Caps Lock = ESC)
It's missing the "Why I'm leaving HN (This time for good)"

and "A front page HN story about how being on the front page of HN changed my business"

and "A rambling article about how voting is broken on HN"

and "How I lived out of a shoebox and traveled the world on a bicycle while creating my startup"

Anybody interested in more, I refer you to my javascript parody of two years ago, "Roll Your Own Linkbait Tech Headline": http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2011/01/roll-your-own...
I really love my work thinkpad, except I'm not a big fan of trackpoints, and the touchpad is truly hateful. For work that's fine because I'm always docked, but I probably wouldn't consider them for personal use for that reason alone.
I kept trying to click the upvote button but it didn't work
I remember these arguments, they always were a bit elitist. But even today I am doing a big part of my productive work on a command line. I wouldn't want to part with the GUI and mouse, sure. But given the choice between either a GUI or a command-line only Unix I will pick the Unix system any day just because it allows automating things easily. Automation and programmability is the thing that sets computers apart from dumb devices like TVs. Many of these things can be done with the help of a GUI nowadays. But most of them cannot be done efficiently without a command line.
I laughed at "How I bootstrapped my company in 6 hours (with breaks)" :) I always wondered why this was a thing on HN, it doesn't matter if something took one weekend, one month or one year to finish - it's the result that matters, and saying "I build it in 24h" is the same as saying "it has a lot of bugs, but I want to launch it anyway".
ClearStory Data Raises $9M
"Why C++ Is Not 'Back'."

12 hours later...

"Why C++ Is Back."
No warrant, no problem: How the government can still get your digital data
What about an OSS app like Darktable (which beats the sh*t out of Lightroom, in many use cases)?

None of the devs has an Apple Developer account and not one of them, understandably, is prepared to churn out the 99 USD just to be able to sign the OS X flavor of their app:
http://goo.gl/gzFZO

Shouldn't a kick-ass app like Darktable be easily deployable by anyone, not just those who know how to circumvent the 'walled garden'?
Google Updates Maps For 10 Countries and Regions In Europe
They should update the list so that when this gets posted for the third time in 2013, the top item is: "Great HN parody (2012) (linkedlistnyc.org)"
Pretty cool. I had heard that the Army had been working with Android products in the past for a bunch of projects. This seems like the natural evolution of that tech.
Learning by doing - lessons from GREP101 beta...
Contracting, contracting, contracting.

Set up a limited company, get contracts. I am the owner of my company and set my own salary level and stock dividends, I also get to pay myself a huge bonus every quarter and it's more tax efficient than salary payments. Not tax-free, this is not some dodgy scheme involving offshoring or any of that nonsense it's just how contracting and/or freelancing tends to work. It is more effort and involves juggling accountants and various forms of insurance, you also need to be careful not to be hit by IR35 (mostly through working short term gigs for specific projects and having well-written contracts) but in the end you can be far better off.

The permanent jobs I'm offered/considered for tend to be in the 40-60k range, so I reckon I have a bit more experience than you, but I can make the net equivalent of that in six months contracting. I mostly program in C and I'm not even in London any more. I could probably almost double my rate if I was prepared to move to London.

--edit-- just thought I'd add - I wish I'd thought of it sooner, as your situation is a very familiar one to me from my time in the big smoke.
"How I remapped my capslock key to be both ESC and Ctrl"

That really got me thinking. Then I realized I was reading a parody. I am still thinking.
Not only is this a great thing (well, everything about github is pretty great) but now I know that the funny icon can be called "breadcrumb".
What about Thinkpads? They seem to be Windows/Linux equivalent of the Macbooks.
Generate Windows 8 applications without coding
It's not alleged that he was synthesizing the drug himself. However, his own messages say that he was a routine user.
Apple still has plenty of cash , and its fundamentals are strong.

This is what people said about Nokia when the iPhone came along.

Now Apple needs to realize that Android has come along, and it's not going to go away.
I've heard before startups saying "yeah, but once you're a bit older you can't commit to the 14 hour days, you have family and stuff". 14 hour days are bad and wrong anyway, no one should do them, and no one should expect them. Grumpy grownups have probably done them before, but have enough knowledge of the languages that the 14 hours can be squeezed into 9.

Anyway, startups should hire the right person for the right role. Is that the 21 year old kid who can sling code like a ninjarockstarboss and cut her teeth when she was 12? Maybe! Or is it the 40 year old dude who's seen the rise and fall of titans and has 10 years experience in the domain? That depends entirely on what your business needs when you hire someone, and what the business is going to need long term.
Wow, that's a powerful article, and worth a submission on its own.

I wasn't aware that those stimulants could produce such long-lasting (and devastating) results.
This should be pinned somewhere... it's just great :D
I love HN but this made me laugh :P, nailed it pretty much.
I would just add "Why X sucks because now I'm learning a trendy hipster new Y that no one knows of"
Japan: high tech image, low tech reality
Vice: Exclusive Footage of John McAfee Detained in Guatemala
I found this perl cmd util that does exactly that ...

http://search.cpan.org/~getty/App-DuckDuckGo-0.006/bin/duckd...
Is JA not the JA of the internet?
My favourite HN piece ever:
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/216352/guys_youre_not_helping.png

So, guys, should I or should I not learn to code? :D.
You ain't done nothing till you coded a 3d engine on a HP48 GX: 131x64 pixels and a 4-bit Saturn CPU. The timing tricks to extort four shades of gray from the monochrome screen were awesome.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_(microprocessor)
Gotta admit he got both balls and the backbone to keep pushing this matter forward.
>> If you have any cognant and articulate arguments why this guys opinion (which I happen to currently share) is a stupid opinion to have, by all means, I'm interested...

Nowhere did I say his opinion was stupid, I'm not one to judge opinions. All I'm saying is that I don't see any value in reading it, particularly not in the context of HN.

The cognant and articulate argument (?) here is that the internet has plenty of places to go if you want to read rants about why <insert technology or technology company here> sucks and why someone decided to leave for these elusive greener pastries that other platforms supposedly offer.

Everyone knows Macs aren't the most serviceable computers on earth, and everyone knows iOS isn't intented to be an open platform for all purposes power users or developers would use regular computers for. I don't think many other arguments are required to illustrate the point this article doesn't add much -if anything- to HN as a medium for the technology startup space.

Or, maybe it's just me, and other people really feel enlightened and satisfied after reading this article... :-/
police search, illegal seizure raids, great show of force, attacking him in his safe-house, unlawfully intercepted communications, unlawful surveillance, (still!) freezing his accounts... But somehow people pirating music/films is the worlds biggest problem? I'd say any government willing to break so many of it's own laws is the problem.
Disgruntled IT guy stole terabytes of secret data from intelligence service
mSATA is the standard for tiny SSDs.
I thought the funniest was "Why Go can't scale past 2 billion users".
I use SwiftKey too, and am quite happy with it. Nonetheless, 'm not really convinced when it comes to enhancing a keyboard with such a feature without first having tweaked it to near perfection. At the moment, I still get quite a lot of autocorrection errors that I need to then fix manually (if I happen to notice them before hitting send..), which is not as quick as it could be, but still bearable. I can't imagine going back and trying to fix something if whole sentences are typed in one go. Having said that, if I didn't have to worry about autocorrection errors, this would be awesome.

One of the reasons why SwiftKey doesn't perform as well as it could for me might be that I use it with two languages, typing in each more or less 50% of the time. The fact that it can predict the next word based on the current one does help here in order to get the language right, but the three measly slots it has for word suggestions are still cluttered with words from the other language most of the time when I type. I think performance would boost if it could detect the language during the first few words and only suggest words in that language from that point forward. Then again, I often mix the two languages in a single sentence..
Would have liked to have seen "Recruiters suck. AMIRITE?"
I don't disagree with the substance of what you're saying but software jobs in the UK, even in London, do not pay on the same scale as they do in the US AFAICT. Or Australia actually, by moving over there from London (where I was not in a bad job) I pretty much doubled my income.

The market has always been low for permanently employed computer folks here so far I as I can see, with the exception being the late 90s before the bubble burst.
Open source is great for infrastructure software. The number of high quality open source tools that exist now is actually quite amazing. All you need to start learning cutting-edge software development is an internet connection, an old computer, and a desire to learn. This has changed drastically in the past 20 years, and much of that can be attributed to Stallman's efforts.

But for consumer-facing software, I don't think open source is the right solution. The auto-updating marketplaces provide tremendous value to the average consumer. Installing software and keeping a machine up to date is a job. Most people don't have the time or inclination to do it. If I give someone an iPad, I can be 99% certain they won't make it unusable or full of viruses in a month. Have you seen the average person's Windows desktop?

You may disagree with what Apple deems an "approved" app, but we do have competing marketplaces. I think that is an important check and balance.

Apple also did a magnificent job at creating a DRM-free marketplace for music. It didn't happen all at once. Their negotiation with the music industry was gradual. That is something that an ideologue like Stallman is completely incapable of accomplishing, I'm sorry to say.
This comment suggests that Best Buy, a publicly traded company, is incentivized to minimize its gross margins. That is an extraordinary claim.

Meanwhile, Best Buy no longer operates the buyback program. The program wasn't a golden goose.
Because that's not a company, it's a website. It takes 6 hours just to file all the paperwork to get a company started.
"double stealth mode" is a classic. Very funny. I'm stealing that one.
"I learnt Haskell and just had to write about it"

"Surely I can spin this Tweet into an article"

"Why latest Apple product is the best thing you have ever seen" - Marco, Gruber or MG
They no longer operate the program.
Google Doesn't Understand People
"I probably sound like complete hippie saying this, but"

I hate it that sentiments like this are so prone to be cliche that thoughtful people completely avoid them. It is absolutely reasonable to say something like this. The internet has shrunk the world, strengthened global solidarity, weakened our illusions of nationalism.

I'll see your hippiness and raise you a poem. Cheesiness be damned.

We loved the easy and the smart,
But now, with keener hand and brain,
We rise to play a greater part.
The lesser loyalties depart,
And neither race nor creed remain
From bitter searching of the heart.
Not steering by the venal chart
That tricked the mass for private gain,
We rise to play a greater part.
Reshaping narrow law and art
Whose symbols are the millions slain,
From bitter searching of the heart
We rise to play a greater part.
The "don't" has more points so.. it's obvious, majority can't be wrong :)
> If like me you came to Apple as you had no interest in upgrading a machine, ever, at all, then they've not changed.

Not true; at some point in time versions of OS X kind of stop working (no new version of Firefox or Chrome for you if you're running anything prior to 10.5 for example).
Nothing about Ruby and scaling? :O
Agree with your sentiments, I won't be so nice though ... this article is stunning in its naivety and ignorance.

Perhaps the author realizes that for every successful startup there are thousands of failures; young people are being convinced (usually by clever older people with money) to use up that most precious commodity e.g. time.

An analogy I see is in the stock market; where hiring young (malleable) young guns to work 24/7 ... most of these people don't get wealthy, most of them burn out or used as responsibility fodder. Most of them don't enjoy their youth and end up regretting it.

as for the age bias in the article ..., lets hope a few decades from now that his article will be preserved for pleasurable reading later on in life as much wincing will ensue.
They included "A Legitimately Interesting Technical Blog Post", that's pretty generous :)
"How I bootstrapped my company in 6 hours (with breaks)" :D
> it's unlikely that any unbiased reading of history would place it SOLELY at the hands of the west.

You are responding to a point that I did not argue. I asserted that in the context of recent history and current events, the west, and the US in particular, has done inordinate amounts of damage. I did not claim anything more than that. I did not state that they are the only ones causing damage, just that they are currently the most effective at it. This was in response to:

> I'd put our record up against that of any other nation in the world. ANY nation. Look hard enough at everyone else and you'll find all the reason you need to hate their countries too.
WePay: https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/69

Authorize.net is pretty old-school, aren't they? I think of them as complicated credit card payments. Do they also do payouts?
I used to work for big blue in London and that would probably be about right for there too, if not slightly more generous.

Outside of the financial sector the money is just not that good in this country.
A very special thank you from me to Simon and Simon for creating what I consider to be the coolest language and the smartest compiler out there. Haskell has made me a lot better programmer than what I was before I started out with it.

I really should take a look at the GHC source and see if there's anything I can chip in with. I might have some skills that I could help with, maybe looking at the LLVM backend or something that I'm at least a little familiar with.

I recently wrote an LLVM compiler backend for a toy language. The compiler was written in Haskell, of course (it isn't a coincidence that "research" languages are excellent for writing compilers). It's miles away from what GHC is but maybe I learned some relevant skills along the way that I could apply to GHC development.

Here's my compiler for anyone who is interested:
https://github.com/rikusalminen/funfun/tree/uncurryllvm
> R is somewhat slower
Actually it's MUCH slower, up to a point of being entirely not usable for very large datasets (even ~100GB). True, much of MATLAB speed comes from using highly optimized BLAS (Math Kernel Library by Intel). But not just it. R lacks JIT optimization and numerous attempts to add it were unsuccessful. In fact it's so bad that Ross Ihaka, one of R's creator, proposed to
"simply start over and build something better". See http://xianblog.wordpress.com/2010/09/13/simply-start-over-a...

TL;DR don't use R if you work with large datasets
It's all about the timing ;)
which is why, at GitHub, they use Visual SourceSafe for all their configuration management.
RMS says things, people angrily disagree with RMS, people passionately agree with RMS.

RMS is RMS. His idea of a computer is much different to what most people want. Out of curiosity does anyone know what he was talking about when he mentioned "two spy features" that Apple removed? I can't remember ever hearing about it.
Maybe you should stop name calling. Just putting it out there.
> I also learned that our justice system, while slow and imperfect, does work.

How does this follow, when this story clearly demonstrates that the average company is not able to get their justice, unless they get VC funding for the lawsuit?

In my eyes, this demonstrates the exact opposite: In the US, most companies cannot afford to get justice when faced with a large corporation doing whatever it wants.

It's great that these guys got funding and did finally win in the end, but to me it underlines all the companies that probably do get screwed by large corporations because they cannot afford spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on lawyers.

What use is a confidentiality agreement if the only power it gives you is to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to make the other party stop ignoring it?

In which case, some people might get the idea to come up with a whole lot more fun and creative ways to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to make Best Buy stop ignoring a contract. Now substitute "fun" with "quicker and more definitive", and you get something the justice system is supposed to prevent, and one of the reasons why it should not only function for those with sufficient wealth.