skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"As a matter of fact, I was too often being friendly to the customers at the expense of the house. It is a common fault in salesmen. They let a thousand trivial demands on the part of the men to whom they sell take their time and energy from the business of the men for whom they sell."

- This is one of the hardest concepts to teach in enterprise sales nearly 100 years later. Too often customers (worse prospects) ask for all sorts of things from compliant sales people who never ask if it's necessary. References, POC's etc. The salesperson chews up hours of their time and other employees times because they don't have the backbone to say "No" or at least "Not yet" The rationalization is "I'm advancing the deal for the company!"
CookDen – Start discovering and sharing delicious recipes
Will have a look at Breaking Bad...
Unity is all about fucked up. And gnome3 in 12.10 has been very unstable for me, getting rather frustrated.
It's useful and well written article - even if the story is fiction, we can take away something from it.
Of course, not wanting to advance is fine. Many of the techies-turned-managers I've worked for hated the advancement because it removed them from the actual tech.

Advancement doesn't require becoming a manager. (If it does, in your company, then change companies yesterday.) It means working on more interesting, higher-impact projects.

Most engineers that I know only become managers because there is no other way to control the division of labor and get quality work. (Of course, in reality, managers don't get to do the decent work either because they spend all day in meetings.)

What you really need is enough control over the division of labor to continually have high-quality projects to work on. One solution would be only to work for open-allocation companies.
No, there's no assumption of "natural rate" or anything like that. The ordinary way of estimating the mean parameter for a Poisson distribution is by taking average value over the sample period (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisson_distribution#Maximum_li...).

>The mean across the years has got nothing to do with this IMO.

Well, that's all well and good, but your opinion is irrelevant. This is simply how this statistical tool is used. And crucially, the data fits this model, so objecting to its completely standard parameters is very silly.
Dexter S07 was very, very good. Some of the best writing on the show yet, even if still completely defies logic and believability. Really great acting from some of the cast too.
Kitchen sinks are a bit different. They are deeper, you don't shave in them, and they are typically sloped a bit so that they don't get small pools of standing water. These new bathroom sinks are pretty bad. They are really trendy in hotels along with the water found style sinks and the ones that look like a bowl sitting on top of the counter top. Every one is a regression in usability solely for the sake of aesthetics.

One day we'll look back on this design trend and laugh. Too bad it will take decades before these poorly designed items are replaced in homes and hotels.
Not really, but I don't think seeing a bunch of code with calls to hidden function would be all that useful.

It is simple enough to distill your approach down into some fictional code that can be easily understood. I do it all the time when I'm posting questions on Stack Overflow and don't want to stick the real code on there.

It might be nice to see some of their production code, but it doesn't really offer any value to them other than being able to fire a shot in an internet war.
Yeah, I feel broadly the same way. In so many ways the US is a fantastic country, but the government and its politics are insane, and frankly scary from the outside. I thought things would vastly improve under Obama, but from what I can see, he's little more than a "Bush Lite". Pity, IMHO.

Worth separating the people from their government, although I would argue that in a democracy the government is the voter's fault. But it seems to me that the US government / establishment fears and hates its own population as much as it does foreigners.

I kinda wish Americans would wake up and see the monster, then do something about it. If the US establishment starts treating its own people better, that might fan out internationally for everyone's good. Not least, Americans.

But then, as I say, the US is supposed to be a democracy, so presumably they have what they want already. So, er, fair enough. Who am I to suggest otherwise?
Code School's Greatest Hits Collection Vol. 1 - Course Jingles
Ask HN: What Software Did You Pay For In 2012
What software or apps did you find worth breaking out your wallet for in 2012?
It saddens me that people who liked earlier Ubuntu releases jump straight to Windows or OS X, without trying Debian or Linux Mint first.

They both offer the good parts of Ubuntu, without the junk and without the poor experience.
I'm not going to comment on the message as a whole, since this whole flat aesthetic thing has been argued up and down on HN over the last few months. But there was one line that stuck out to me as being a little off:

> Get rid of all texture, and you might end up with cold, sterile designs that scare users away.

I'm on board with the usability argument, but I don't think that removing gradients and drop shadows necessarily results in designs that "scare users away." If anything, I think that abandoning realism allows you more freedom in making a warm & inviting designs (e.g. some downright unnatural combinations of pastels that would look too busy with those touches of realism).
From zero to machine learning in R in 150 slides
Apple vs. Dell: Best Tech Rants of 2012
Not to mention, assuming four years of study is the alternative, it puts one about $1.6M ahead by retirement, even ignoring the costs of education itself.
They're not flat, they slope slightly down to the plughole. It's a design compromise that allows for both dish-stacking and for drainage.
Personally, I think the two space rule is simply bad. Writing text "to be displayed in a mono-space font" confuses content with presentation.
We are launching our beta in a few weeks.. so we are in hunt for some awesome beta testers. If you would like to participate, just signup at the bottom of our landing page! Thanks! ;)
LastPass Premium, best $12 dollars I have ever spent.
>The whole "it is random" BS is based on the pre-assigned value of 2 per year. Why pre-suppose that 2 per year is an acceptable norm, that is not problematic in itself?

There is no such presupposition. The way that you estimate the mean parameter in a Poisson distribution is by taking the average over your sample. "2 per year" is not a normative statement; it's an observation of history.

In statistics, you don't get to make a moral judgment when estimating parameters. If you do that, you will get the Wrong Answer.
I would like to officially formulate this new law:

"Any blog post criticizing a design will in turn see its own design criticized."
Will Google Apps Break The Last Tech Monopoly: Microsoft Office?
No, it's not. Eliezer is still releasing chapters.
I just switched to lubuntu, i recommend it even for powerful pcs
One does not need to be an expert to be critical. I just bought a new coffee table and spend hours selecting one based on the joints, finish, type of wood, price, etc... I know how to pick good furniture. That doesn't mean I know how to build a quality table.

Also, the cobbler's kids have no shoes!
The guy in Germany's problem is his contract.
Love/Hate
Irish Crime Drama
The latest Java/Spring/JEE platforms are much more lightweight than they were 5 years ago. Look at annotated JAX-RS and you'll be amazed. You defectors should really give it a objective try. Nowadays us Java guys can focus on building our applications because our frameworks and APIs are so mature.
I assume they must be getting deals with some relatively big hardware manufacturers in that case. And hoping those manufacturers don't simply take the open source code from unity and use it to build their own system cutting canonical out of the loop altogether.
it's hard to read that without feeling the huge weight of criticism (all the kow-towing and talking about experts). and then i come here and 2 out of 4 posts are complaining.

really, can't you just go somewhere else? ubuntu is fine for my laptop. it might even do for my mother's next time i visit. if you want something else, either use something else or at least have the graciousness to complain without "fuck up" and "muckety muck". you're beyond tiring. go away. please.
Well, Unity 2D was actually really ok for me, but Unity 3D -- now the only option out of the box -- is really FUBAR. I just rolled my girlfriend's laptop back to 12.04, and am going to sit there until next LTS probably.
author seems to be confusing visual styling with hierarchy and information architecture. it's harmless to remove gradients and shadows, but removing context and visual priority is what makes the sink flat.
Wow, I didn't know that one. And reported by mainstream media:

http://security.blogs.cnn.com/2012/10/09/army-to-congress-th...
How you get the 1.6M figure?
Just switch to Xubuntu. Xfce isn't changing any time soon. None of the "interface innovation" Unity is notorious for.
"Works on my machine!"

I'm more pissed about the fact that there are so many show-stoppers moving from 12.04 to 12.10. I like 12.04. It's solid. 12.10 is not. I'm going to bitch about it.

edit: By the way, I did not know "muckety muck" had a negative connotation. I just use it as a synonym for boss. I should probably quit telling my boss he's a muckety muck.
Yes! And those bowl-shaped ones don't even have a ledge to put your toothbrush holder on!
From the Lists Chapter:

Lists are very easy to create, these are some of the ways to make lists:

emptyList = [ ]

strlist = ['one, two, three, four, five']

I find the "strlist" example very misleading, as a beginner might think we are creating a list of five strings, when it is actually just one string with some commas in it.
You're living in a bubble! A good portion of students can't find any job after graduation, let alone a crappy one. The job isn't even that crappy: $40k a year goes a long way in Montana. Wolfram Alpha says the cost of living in NYC is 2.06x what it is in Billings, Montana. Earning the equivalent of 80k NYC dollars is not a bad gig, even if it means working like a dog (isn't that what i-bankers do?).
Users? What do you suppose will happen to machines of users who rely on just the default software for "simple things like red eye removal"?

Of course, I'm not partial to Linux in this case. BSD and Mac users don't have the virus and trojan troubles that most Windows users are plagued with.
Assumed a nominal 5% ROI on the $180K saved during those four years that would otherwise be not earned if going to school.
Thanks, skimmed over that I suppose.

Yes, that's exactly it. I find them pretty annoying because water and food debris builds up in the corners and it's hard to get it all down. Could actually be a feature and not a bug, — I've never seen a garbage disposal there, so you don't want all the food going right down the drain.
> If when they "choose" you already have an idea of what they chose before they consciously became aware of it, it is likely that you do not actually have free will.

That doesn't follow. It's still their brain making the decision. The experiment simply pushes free will into the unconscious mind, it doesn't show you don't have it. You are still your mind, and those are still your decisions.
HTC One S Android 4.1 Jelly Bean Update Ready To Roll
I may eventually, but for the time being I'm going to stick with 12.04 and Unity 2D which I like a lot.
Didn't they kill Unity 2D recently?
I never watched Lost when it ran and even when it ended in 2010. My friends kept pushing but I never gave it a chance until a month ago. Once I made past a few episodes, I was hooked!!
I had wireless issues 10 years ago on laptops - things like "driver X works with card foo version Y.ZZ". I went out and bought card foo, version Y.ZZ, only to find it didn't work, and then would be told "well DUH, driver X doesn't work with Revision D, only revisions A,C,B and F". Basically, stuff that was impossible to find out before a purchase - laptop companies would ship different revisions of the same card out, and just ship the appropriate windows drivers on a CD - no linux drivers (of course).

I got way too tired of having to deal with that, and even moreso of people replying "I've never had to deal with that - you were doing something wrong" or even better "Oh, it's not like that any more". Yeah, it might not be, but I was also hearing that it wasn't like that 10 years ago, when clearly it was like that.

So... after a while, you become numb to the claims of fanboys who've been using one linux distro for 9 months and think linux is the best thing ever and "M$ sux" and all that, and you just get on doing your work with a platform that fits your needs. When your needs change, and your platform can't meet those needs anymore, fighting the platform to change when it won't doesn't make sense.
Rolled back? Can I do that, or did you just reinstall? 12.04 was solid.
Community. :)
It isn't that nobody cares. It's that people see (however irrationally) car accidents as an unpreventable occurrence, while they see terrorism as something that can be stopped if we go and kill the bad guys that are doing it.
If the parent had used "he", would you be complaining?
I can't decide. A few for me! Dexter, Walking Dead, Game of Thrones, and always Dr Who :)
A traditional kitchen sink style is "The Belfast Sink" - an image search shows these to be big and flat style sinks. Not it's not just in the Middle East.
Enthusiast hacks Siri to work with Raspberry Pi to run custom commands
How much have you watched? The first 2 seasons are fantastic, but I watched every season in the space of 2 weeks and after season 3 it just goes down hill and eventually became a chore for me to watch. I found the ending so very frustrating because there are so many unanswered questions...
Very bummed that Awake got axed - interesting spin on a cop procedural.
You have a job. Stop complaining.
Twelve Pis of Christmas: the mods
Best of 2012: UI Animations
They're not bold, I'm just using "font-variant: small-caps;" (here's how it looks for me: http://cl.ly/LooP)

And I just like stripes :)
Once you use scikit-learn to figure out what you want to do on a reasonable data set, you can use Mahout (http://mahout.apache.org/) to translate the algorithm to hadoop pretty easily.
If Canonical could make a pretty interface that is as fast as Lubuntu, that would be great. For example Lubuntu works much better on Cortex A9-based Nexus 7 than Ubuntu.
Website Optimization is Extremely Important to Any SEO Campaign
Maybe a full reinstall gives less regressions than upgrading, but I didn't have the time to do full reinstalls.
The most absurd things seem "obvious" to you. What is obvious is that you have not had to support friends who keep getting viruses, keep running out of free space on their massive disks, keep complaining about slower and slower performance.
7 Free SEO Tools for Site Owners
Bulgaria - it was 2001/2002 I think. Ancient times when Dialogic phone cards were considered sexy. And ISDN speeds were fast. I was doing some dev work for them on a outside project. The company had payroll of 35 000 and a modern telecom needed only 6-7000. The new owners used every possible combination of scare, carrots, sticks, severances to try and achieve the goal.
Breaking bad, no doubt
Gun ownership advocates publish personal information of Journal News employees
http://linuxmint.com/

If this is the official website of the distribution you're talking about, then the site doesn't inspire confidence as much as the original Ubuntu site does. Anyway, I'll give it a shot, thanks :)
Totally, and I didn't mean to suggest it is. The lateral moves I mentioned were to technical architect roles, which aren't daily coders, but also aren't management. However, that's not the path some people want to take, either.
I don't live in a bubble.

What the article doesn't really mention is future earning potential. $40K doesn't look bad when you are 19, but if you are late 30s with a house and kids and are still doing physical work and a 3 hour commute everyday it doesn't look so good.
Last Resort.
Too bad the show got cancelled but it was the most promising new series.
"being indispensable because you solve unsolvable problems is another. It is, by definition, the hacker's way."

Those problems are 'near' insolvable often because clueless people were in charge making decisions they shouldn't have been allowed to make. By rescuing orgs like that, you run the real risk of being relegated to perpetual clean up guy, and you bolster the decisions.

Rough example: System X was built so badly because of bad directives, that it's taking 3 hours for a report, and you need 10 reports per day, but you can only do 8 (8x3=24 hours). Every current employee and 2 outside consultants all say "this can't be fixed", not because it can not under any circumstance be fixed, but the cost/benefit doesn't even come close - it's a crappy bandage at best.

You, being "indispensable super dev" work overtime for 3 weeks to 'fix' things, and reports are now 15 minutes (like they should have been). Great - you just 'solved the unsolvable'. Whoop. You've perpetuated the bad decision making process, and it will be months or years before there can be real change in the org now.

Being 'indispensable' also usually means you're tied to crap projects and will never get moved out of that department/division in an upward capacity - you'll have to quit that company to get any real advancement.
I've seen those in restaurant lavatories.

The disadvantage is that when filling a sink e.g. for shaving, the water pools at a line rather than a point. this is obviously not a problem in a restaurant.

See the third illustration "With a flat sink, you need more water to get the same depth" - an angled flat surface would be somewhere between the two in efficiency of water use.
the site's consistently down, good thing there's Google cache
5% would seem high to me and assumes that the money is saved an invested as opposed to spent on luxury goods. It also assumed that earnings potential throughout career will always be as good as that of an average college grad.
Wow, with the exception of Adobe’s Source Code, those fonts are pretty dreadful. I’d say they’re worth exactly the price their creators are asking for it.

For lists of good new webfonts, try MyFonts’ monthly ‘Rising Stars’ newsletter: http://webfonts.info/webfonts-know-how/november-rising-stars...

Also, Typographica makes an superb list every January: http://typographica.org/features/our-favorite-typefaces-of-2...

And for some inspiration, you can always check the most popular fonts at TypeKit: https://typekit.com/lists/favorite-fonts
I need to document that better. Here's what's passed to the callback:

[
{
id: anFbId,
name: "Some guy",
picture: "a url"
},

//other friends in the multi-selection case
]

If there's other kinds of information you'd want, I'd love some feedback on that.
First choice is http://mailinator.com/

If its blocked then, these surely do the job

http://10minutemail.com/10MinuteMail/index.html

https://www.guerrillamail.com/

http://www.dispostable.com/

When on tor, tormail.net
I'd just like to say, as a self-taught hacker, that I would pay $500 for a "_why's poignant guide to machine learning", and I'm sure I'm not alone.
Same here on 1280x800. Also some faces of the dodecahedron moves weirdly compared to the others (Firefox 17.0.1).
Please, please don't listen to this article! The author is far worse than the processes he is demeaning. This article gives no reason whatsoever to believe the title. The main argument seems to be "we learn lots of new things, therefore most of what you previously learned is wrong." This has numerous and obvious problems. We can easily be learning new facts about things that were previously not considered or not known. Most facts that humans know are not scientific facts but rather personal. The large majority of people don't know very much about recent experimental results and only hear about ones after they have been so long and well-established that there is little chance they are significantly wrong. A fact can be 'wrong' while still being nearly right. That the list of ten largest cities in the US has changed just means that the person only knew the list of ten largest cities at the time that they learned it.

If 'half of our facts were wrong' is taken at face value, then our truth-determining process is no better than flipping a coin. Do you think we could engineer bridges, build computers, get to the moon, sequence the human genome, or write software if every time we didn't know something we just asked it as a yes-no question and flipped a coin?

So as much as I want to support skepticism and free-thinking or whatever this article is aiming at, this article is wrong and bad. I have the means to go out and determine true facts and I do this routinely.
It depends on what you are trying to do. If it's a complex model, Excel wins. If you are trying to get two people on different offices to work on the same spreadsheet, Google crushes Excel.
Right, an IP isn't identifying. But these people want us to think it is when it's convenient for them so we MUST treat them like they treat others. Huge fine, life/company running big, and punishments involving never touching anything that uses electricity ever again.

Like torture, I wouldn't wish it on my enemies. But I do wish it on those who user it on others.

Besides, unlike everyone they've attacked they can make it stop whenever they want simply by admitting an IP address is not user identifying.
Stuff like this make me wonder if we really need all the things we think we need to be happy, if we really need to "solve the money problem" or would a simple and humble life be enough?
Is there a way to drag / drop arbitrary files onto the panel (ie, directories, executables, scripts, etc)? Setting up launchers and what not is so cumbersome.
I've seen ones like that. They've generally been stone countertops with custom sinks with low-pressure fixtures that don't have aerators.

Very expensive custom work though. The fixtures alone are probably $2K. So yeah, I'll stay with my $50 Moen for awhile yet. :-)
Ubuntu has the big advantage of being the most widely supported Linux distribution.

Of course if you don't like it you could switch to arch or something, but then you have the problem that you want to install program X that only has ubuntu install instructions and you end up having to read forums just to install the thing.
Will SMS Go Beyond Social in 2013? Yes, Says TalkTo’s Stuart Levinson
I know. It's like when people say "money makes the world go 'round." That's just factually wrong.
The problem is that bitching about past issues adds little value. We all know that they made bad choices in the past, it just isn't really useful to keep reminding everyone about those facts every time something about Ubuntu comes up.
Days Alive Calculator - What have you done? Start doing in 2013.
Thanks for the list! I will add them to our blocklist :) Our business values e-mail destinations where we can actually incite the signed up user with interesting offers, or new product features, instead of sending it into a black hole.
That sounds highly company specific. I am Dutch, and I have never encountered this before, despite working at many different companies. While working overtime is not the norm, it is certainly not unheard of, or even particularly rare, when deadlines are approaching. Depending on your contract, you may get comped in money, extra vacation or not at all.
"Cool, but don't fuck up my desktop experience with your experimentation like you have been doing."

Yes, Microsoft has a patent on that with the release of Windows 8... :D
Peep Show. It isn't from 2012 but I found it then on netflix. Best laughs, best writing etc. I loved the way it presented life in London especially the day to day grind. Definitely worth checking out.