skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Google today announced that it has 135 million active users checking their Google+ streams each month"

I usually check mine accidentally, one every few weeks. I have an account and lots of circles that are populated, but I don't post on it or look at others posts unless someone points me to something which happens once every month or two.

They should have stats on the number of hits G+ gets vs. FB. I know many of you use G+, but you are in a bubble. It isn't as big as FB and won't be anytime soon.
Wow. I really like that. Lots of stuff I haven't seen elsewhere.
It seems that every 6 hours, some other blogger witnesses the great epiphany that when you greatly reduce your daily distractions, you are greatly less distracted.

Insightful.
Tech Guru Mark Anderson's Top Predictions For 2013
There are hundreds of distros, and Ubuntu is the only one that does this. Ubuntu != Linux. Who is using the rhetorical trick, again?
The funny thing is, there are plenty of things I don't like about Android. Areas where Windows might provide a better user experience.

But malware fearmongering is a bizarre tactic. For the vast vast vast majority of users, it's a hypothetical rather than an actual experience.
You seriously expect your car's auto-headlight-dimming feature to be regularly inspected?
28 days later style chaos: this is what he'll experience when the US gov drops the hammer on him for scanning "strategic" installations right ?
Are there specific news outlets that the SEC considers as official press release outlets? or is merely the act of releasing a press release? My point is, what if they issued a press release in some Podunk town ( with say 1,000 people) instead of on facebook?
rMBP here and yup ghosting issue
Doesn't work on cards that need 2 answers selected... can only select one.
I don't know why Google+ doesn't have 'vanity' URLs yet. It's not like it is that hard to do, especially if you own the servers.

I know they are 'coming' and some people supposedly have them. But would it not make sense for their own properties to have them?
Thanks for the tip.

Here is an Emacs command that does the same thing that your Chrome keyword does:

(defun gmail-search (string) (interactive "sQuery to submit to Gmail: ") (browse-url (concat "https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?shva=1#search/" (url-hexify-string string))))
Thanks! It's was interesting to see how a 3rd party view made different connections, especially as some of your correlations never crossed my mind. Notably, the red header was a short-term random color test (I tried tons). The timeline was actually inspired by a dribbble shot I ran across for mac app. Souncloud certainly had minor influences, I do love waveforms :P (not sure what the "moment" was though).

EDIT: You did forget the Rdio phase :). I do love their UI. Unfortunately I couldn't find a way to get the cover look right with the complex titles and art I often deal with.
I think this covers a lot of it. A mixture of being good at your job, and making sure people know of you and your competence. You also need to be seen as a safe pair of hands.

Especially at the more junior levels, you also need to make yourself stand out. Competence is a given, so sometimes you do need to work longer/harder than your colleagues to get ahead.
I'm pretty surprised that Shuttleworth didn't see this kind of reaction coming, considering his long-time involvement in free software. Or maybe he did see it coming, and just doesn't care?

In either case, you're in a bad position when you're distributing a Linux distro that RMS starts to call out. Shuttleworth would do well to observe what happened to GNOME: they ignored their core user base, and they've been in such hot water for it that now they're backpedaling (GNOME Legacy). If Linux can't even please its core user base--aka the evangelists--it doesn't stand a chance in the wild.
The idea that languages influence the way you think about things is sometimes called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
Quick dumb question about the RASPBERRY-PI: What do y'all do with the board itself as far as a case? I mean, are most of you just letting it sit on a self or something (it's so dang small anyway)? I've seen a few plastic cases floating around and they seem like the only option really (outside of just building a simple wood box and screwing it to the wall...
[The deceased nurse] was the person who answered the call from the Australian DJs and was not the nurse who discussed the duchess's medical condition.
Looks like the dev version of Zapier.com
Why don't public companies report their finances more often? (Quora)
So far I've found that the best communities are the ones that have very good categories on the left. Being able to separate your posts like that is great.

For example, check out "3D Printing" in "Makers, hackers, artists & engineers" https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/11284500688414839186...
I'm afraid I don't keep myself well-informed on the mobile space, and I've heard reference to malware in Android several times recently. Could someone fill me in? Is there fear of malicious software at the system level? Or is this just FUD about spammy apps?

edit: Also - it's unfortunate that only yesterday was I reading about the Scroogle campaign. Not to single out Microsoft as the only company that advertises like this, but it's sad to see them sinking to that level...
Then, in an emergency, some drivers won't know what to do or react erroneously, causing accidents. Just like what happens in aviation.

Will drivers have to have the same kind of training for their self-driving cars that pilots have for modern fly-by-wire airplanes?
Please, please let this be a lesson to Microsoft that gamers aren't interested in gimmicks, and that the casuals who do want gimmicks are far more fickle.
Honestly, what were they thinking? Android has a large userbase with plenty of fanboys (I'm one of them). This is just another case of large corporations treating social media like another advertising platform instead of using it to interface with customers.

Win8 was a great idea (same interface on all of my devices? Great!) but Microsoft has really dropped the ball. I'm glad someone did it, now who's going to do it right?
It's usually safe to assume that when Droopy opens his mouth, what follows is complete malarkey.
>> when he searched for a string in the files of his Windows system, it sent a packet to some server

anyone has a source for this? Was this built into windows? (It's not in mine, or it's not active)
Crowd funding gifts... hmmm - tough case, I'd think. I can think of one case - when my nephew turned 10 years old, he asked for $20 cash instead of gifts. He wanted to save up enough for an iPad which was $500. He invited 22 other kids to his party, each of whom brought $20. When he combined that with the other money he'd saved, he was able to buy it.

The question is would the 22 other nine and ten year old boys have "crowd funded"? No, not a chance!
Malware called 'Eurograbber' steals 36 million Euros
Sounds a lot like the hypermedia discussions going around....
Negative tech marketing is here to stay
Interesting given Musk's tweet yesterday about Tesla being cash flow positive for a week. Could we see SEC action there?
NameCheap is More Popular Than GoDaddy Among HackerNews Users
Haiku edges toward general release
I think RMS's stance is by definition always the extreme. He sees these things in black and white, so there's no degrees of compromise. If software phones home with private information without the users explicit consent, it's against his principles, period. And I think that's an excellent position to have, which is not to say you're not right either--making money is an important and difficult aspect of FOSS. But the day that RMS starts compromising will be a sad day.
I too liked the gradiented look a lot, but I'll say having spent a ton of time with the site I love a current look so much more for a music site. Though rather than jumping on some train there was actually quite a few steps that brought me there. I tried a lot of things, but honestly it's just easier and cleaner to strip details when they are unnecessary, and I added some twists on it (I like having the flat bevel on the buttons).

Just thought I'd note that the influences often came from multiple not-obvious places and decisions, or even, maybe, just occasionally, perhaps, from me!
I couldn't read past the Steven J byline. That guy has lost all credibility, in my opinion.
Thanks for trying to reach out and very sorry that it didn't work. We had some DNS problems. The email service should be back in three hours..
Sorry for the inconvenience.
You can accuse or compliment microsoft on many things, but they've never been slick.
No, you only expect it to send the URL when you hit "enter". For instant results, however, it must send each character typed to Google. Also, when I type a non-google URL into my address bar, I don't expect Google to be notified. As it is, they can track all your internet travels from Chrome, and I don't like it. Hence why I use Firefox and Duck Duck Go.
As with all things, it depends.

If your $1000 included a pretty competent set of drawings, claims, and background, then it was not wasted money.

If your $1000 included something quick and dirty and just a piece of paper with things written on it you're not especially proud of, you could have spent it more wisely.

In either case, if you're serious, you've got a lot more money to spend.

The first thing to remember is a patent is essentially a declaration of war- it's expensive, and you are committing to throw ever-increasing resource after resource, for years, at protecting your idea, so that you can gain income from protecting that idea.

It's definitely not a fire-and-forget approach.

That said, provisional patents are the "clip-on tie" of the IP industry. They offer very limited protection, and they add significant downsides to the health of the patent over its lifetime. You have approximately one year to get a real utility patent application together, which has be for the exact same invention, in order for it to be any help.

Investors judge a provisional patent much as they'd judge a clip-on tie; some may applaud your keen sense of corner-cutting when resources are limited, and some would laugh quietly to themselves and pass on the opportunity of getting to know you.

To put it in perspective, I filed a real utility patent with 20 claims and a very complicated invention for about half $1000. Getting the first stage of international protection brought it to about $1000. Over the next 20 years, if I keep wanting to protect it, it will cost tens of thousands of dollars on the US side and hundreds of thousands of dollars on the international side (the longer you hold a patent, the more the governments charge you to do so). Abandoning or renewing gets to be a real easy decision when the renewal fees hit five figures.

If you really believe in your project, spend the next month getting it up to utility patent submission without waiting the supposed year the provisional can add to your product's period of protection. That will get you past the first lock with sophisticated investors. Hiring a real patent attorney when you've got the paperwork all ready to submit (not when you're trying to figure out what to do) will be both smart and significantly less expensive.
You had me at Apple airships.
Nintendo’s latest export has completely exhausted its initial inventory of stock [..] Moreover, the Wii U only had a couple of weeks on sale in November

So, it was only on sale for part of the month, and it sold out quickly, leaving consumers unable to buy. OK, so it's a pretty much useless comparison, then?
looks like your website isn't either: "Error establishing a database connection"
ID Theft Scam Run from Prison
Considering the Wii U was on sale for 12 days in November, and the 360 was on sale for the whole month, this isn't as bad as it sounds. And as the article mentions, it's been in and out of stock in many locations (though certainly not to the degree the first Wii was).
This is the worst redesign in history, Digg V4 in the making...
Mirror as page was down for me:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.fel...
>Linux isn't free, [...], it costs privacy.

I hate this rhetorical trick. The article says "Ubuntu" and you generalize to all Linux distributions.

What's the point of that mud-slinging against all Linuxes, including projects like Debian whose maintainers work at great expense to ensure user's freedoms are protected? (e.g. by having an extra team "Debian-legal" that studies all licenses and ensures there remains a clear cut between free and proprietary software)
I was coming here to say this as well. Made me think this was just a poorly written plugin that didn't work in my browser.
Arganolie helpt tegen slechte cholesterol en ziekte van Crohn
I'm not surprised. Still don't understand the value proposition of the Wii U, despite the heavy PR and marketing currently in effect.

Why buy a Wii U when you can play your iPhone/iPod/Android and probably have an XBOX/PS3 already?
Only a handful of European countries: Germany, UK, France, Italy I think. That's 15.2% of Europe by area.
But why not present it as an option to the user on first launch, or first search? Considering how relatively few people actually want shopping suggestions on their desktop, I expect the majority of users who don't turn it off to be people who simply can't be bothered to find the setting and change it. Exploiting user apathy is not my idea of software that respects its users, which is what the FSF is all about.
You can't build something people want.
Success being quite relative. I was forced to sign up to both Gmail and G+, because that's what my employer requires, and I wanted the job.

I access Gmail exclusively through my Windows Phone. I don't use G+ at all. The community of interest thing doesn't hold much water for me, because I've yet to be pointed at something of interest on G+ that I wouldn't find elsewhere.

Not saying that my particular scenario reflects everyone else's, but it does seem to work for me and my friends, most of whom have GMail accounts as their primary mail address.

If success is defined in terms of ad impressions then that won't work with me either. I use an ad blocker.
Apple's historic legal battles
I think alot of people are missing the point here.

There are specified channels for disclosing "material" information.

These have been designed and vetted so that everyone at least has the chance of getting the same information at the same time.

The SEC may be a bit dated but I think everyone agrees that you can't have CEO's passing out information in private or non sanctioned forums that people can trade on.

Otherwise everyone would have to watch Facebook feeds and twitter and Google+ and every blog in addition to the sanctioned channels.

I don't see any way in which the Netflix CEO didn't do the wrong thing here.

I do agree that the SEC has bigger fish to fry
"It's not harming me in any way".

This is simply wrong. Smoking tobacco is highly cancerogenic and so very harmful. Smoking is also highly unpleasant -- it's just that smokers get used to the abuse of their own bodies (and that of others) over time, and feel good about it, because the advertising industry has successfully fooled large groups of people into believing that smoking makes them more sexually attractive.

I was visiting Berlin a few months ago, and found the smoke in bars and restaurants unbearable. Smoking indoors in the presence of non-smokers is cruel and shows a lack of empathy for others. I couldn't leave fast enough.

I agree however that public drinking (in moderation) is fine and should be legal everywhere.
I saw this and thought it was the typical, flippant, light-grey comment that ends up in newbie downvote hell at the bottom of every HN story. Then I thought a bit more: it's better than that. The Ribbon and the predictive bar in Mathematica are actually quite similar in concept: both attempt to figure out what you're doing and present you with contextually relevant choices.

The difference is that I absolutely detest the ribbon in Office. I find it much easier to remember the path to a particular function in a menu or static toolbar, rather than be presented with an ever-changing soup of psuedo-relevant options; the ribbon denies me the chance to build muscle memory for activating common tasks. Conversely, the predictive bar in Mathematica works very well and I've been using it much more than I expected.

I think this is because Office is a massively limited system compared to Mathematica; it's easy to imagine it as a physical object with knobs and switches for every function, like a really complicated power tool. Mathematica is a gigantic programming language, so large that even its creator admits to having an incomplete understanding of its scope. An intelligent assistant that can show you some natural next steps in your calculation actually makes a lot of sense here.

Imagine if your IDE came with this sort of stuff! You've just added a UIToolbar to your UIView. Do you want to set up matching outlets in the associated view controller? You've just declared an AUGraph; click a button to put method calls in for setting it up and adding a few nodes.
The 360 is on sale in a games bundle for $99. I was thinking of picking an extra one up just because.

The Wii U is a much bigger ticket item.
Larry Page "providing free flu shots to all San Francisco bay area kids"
It's absolutely true that SCADA systems are horrifically insecure and there is very little incentive for a private company to upgrade security. It costs a lot and doesn't give ROI (yet).

Something must be done, sooner would be better than later.

I would rough out a plan like so:

* CIP companies must upgrade their security, which will be audited by Federal pentesters.

* Their security upgrade will be funded partially through grants.

* Failure to implement security will incur fines sufficient to ruin the company, without exemption.

* Audit findings will incur fines scaled according to the severity of the audit finding.

Note that CIP companies are in a different class than other companies. These companies ensure that life goes on. Water treatment plants, electrical utilities, other similar installations. These companies by their nature ought to be subject to a more careful eye by the public, because the public depends on them.
1.26 million Xbox 360s vs. 425,000 Wii U. Seems to me the Wii wouldn't have caught up even if they'd had more time and more inventory.
$50 per user per year (or $5/user/month) is a lot of money when you're just starting a business, and especially if you weren't planning on having to spend that money. Just in time for Christmas...

Now I have to contact all of the people I've sent proposals to, telling them that the "free email service through Google Apps" I promised them is no longer free. Google should have told us Apps Resellers, or, at the least, they should give us an opportunity to create a few more free Apps accounts for clients we've been pitching their product to. Not every business starts out with a need for >10 users. Google has been telling their Apps Resellers to get people 'hooked' on the free version of Apps, then migrate them to the paid offering. Now what?
Linux Mint as a Debian based version of their distro, which comes with all the desktop polish of Mint, but in their own words: "it's not as stable. Things are likely to break more often but fixes can also come quicker. For this reason, LMDE requires a deeper knowledge and experience with Linux, dpkg and APT"

Personally I'd take a look at OpenSuSE. It was a pretty good as a Just Works desktop last I looked, but that was a few years ago.

Another option is actually PC-BSD. I've never quite gotten along with it, but that is mainly because I want to do all kinds of hacky strangeness, but for a newbie desktop it's solid with great documentation and easy to install software.
How to know which publications and blogs to pitch
They can't reprice these too much without causing a huge issue, so they'd might need to do yet another product, but a surface pro at, say $299, with the keyboard bundled, would do well.

That's a price point where a lot of corporate people can get one to test, without needing approval (under $500 vs > $1000).

"But they'll lose money!"

They've already lost the money (it's already spent). It's a matter of whether they can get marketshare with the money that's been spent, or whether it will go down in flames.

Look at HP TouchPads. They were doomed at $499, but flew off the shelved at fire sale $149/$199 prices, even when people knew it was an 'end of life' product with no hope of a long term ecosystem in the future.

I guess I don't understand why it's acceptable for xbox and game consoles to lose money on hardware, but make it up in game sales, but for tablets, it's not acceptable to lose money on the initial hardware, and make the profit on software. Seems a double standard at the very least.
The kind of attack Panetta was talking about would be very obvious. Obviously espionage is most effective when secret, and will probably be ongoing, but those attacks don't affect civilians, and rogue individuals can't accomplish anything useful with them (if a lone hacker grabbed a copy of the F-35 schematics, so what? It's only when combined with the traditional machinery of a nation state that they become useful)
Just wanted to note that, if I'm not mistaken, your reference to "accidental complexity" should be "incidental complexity". Nice post. A Rich Hickey groupie here as well - like you I love his talks for their mind widening value.
Ask HN: What's the easiest way to set up email forwarding on your own domain?
I've used Google Apps in the past for a simple use case: redirecting email aliases from various personal domains to a gmail.com address. Unfortunately, it's no longer available for free.

Whereas Google Apps is good value as a full service to businesses, $64 per year (UK pricing) per email alias is a bit expensive for this use case.

What would be the most simple replacement for forwarding-only email addresses on your own domains?
Although Ruby uses English terms, a lot of the development happens in Japanese.
> Are we really that lazy?

It has nothing to do with laziness and everything to do with being able to communicate. Would you learn all of japanese, chinese, russian, spanish, german, french, italian, polish, swede and english in order to be able to contribute to projects in these various languages? Unlikely.

We need a "babel fish", and currently that babel fish is simply "learn english". At various places and times in history it's been french, chinese, latin or greek. That is not a problem, it's just how things go so that people can talk with one another across countries and cultures, and work together.
Like I said, I don't mind the US giving up control, just so long as that control does not go to the UN.
Communication is at the heart of our problems. Your attitude is rather toxic. The xkcd you linked does little to soften your stance which appears to I don't care if the other person and I don't agree on terminology; to quote, "but if the other person calls it the wrong thing, I don't really care."

There is REAL value in being able to communicate complex ideas effectively. In my opinion, agreeing on definitions for terminology is step #1 to having an effective conversation / discussion.
For context on what the Ubuntu Dash actually does and how it's evolving - please see http://blog.canonical.com/2012/12/07/searching-in-the-dash-i...