skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's the freaking Bay Area/Silicon Valley. $65-75k is entry-level.
Android User Engagement Paradox - Possible Answer?
> 5% would seem high to me

5% is a pretty standard rate used in these type of calculations. It might be on the high side currently, but it is also low for other periods of time, hence being a decent average to work with.

> and assumes that the money is saved an invested as opposed to spent on luxury goods.

Naturally, but the potential remains.

> It also assumed that earnings potential throughout career will always be as good as that of an average college grad.

It makes no such assumptions. Earnings beyond the first four years after high school are completely irrelevant to my calculations. You will still have $1.6M in hand if you never made another cent, assuming you do not touch the investment until retirement.
> In order to beat out MS in that market you don't just need to be incrementally better you either need a product which is so vastly better it leaves sharepoint in the dust

Actually, all you need is a better salesperson. Sharepoint is sold by salespeople to people who have no idea of what they are buying.
>> I don't understand your aggression.

It's easy, someone shares with you a product of their hard work, for free, and if you then choose not to use it that's entirely fine. If however you choose to snipe at hard work, you deservedly attract criticism in the strongest terms.

A much more constructive response which would attract high praise could be any of:

A) learn how to and then fix it yourself, share this improvement freely with others
B) sponsor someone to fix it for you
C) engage in directed discussion with those currently in a position to assist but unaware of the issue - open a bug ticket
IntelliJ during it's 75% off sale. I'm still experimenting with it, but overall it seems solid and better for Ruby than my previously used Textmate or Aptana Studio.

I also bought a couple of games, split equally between PC and PS3.
>Put everything on the same plane, and you make it harder to focus on a specific section of the page.

Citation needed.

Edit: Since I'm getting downvoted, tell me that https://svbtle.com/ content isn't on the same plane and still readable? You can have everything on the same plane and with proper use of whitespace and good typography, it can be very readable.

Other examples:

http://daringfireball.net/

https://medium.com/about/9e53ca408c48

Hacker News
Been using LXDE with Ubuntu for over a year now.

HUGE fan of LXDE, stable as a rock and perfect for my requirements. I require a couple of minutes of fiddling around with the launcher to get the positioning right but apart from that it's a very solid desktop.
You could use scikit-learn to build your own recommender system if you really understand the math of the models you want to implement: scikit-learn will only provide you with low level building blocks such as a semi-scalable Singular Value Decomposition (http://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/generated/sklearn.dec...) or penalized linear regression models or clustering algorithms such as k-means.

How to build and evaluate the performance of a useable and scalable recsys based on such building blocks is far from trivial though. It's probably even harder than implementing some of the building blocks provided by scikit-learn it-self for instance.

If had to build a recsys myself I would probably just use a fulltext engine such as ElasticSearch or Apache Solr + similarity queries (MoreLikeThis) + custom "features" + custom score functions as explained in this presentation by Trey Grainger (http://www.slideshare.net/treygrainger/building-a-real-time-...), and maybe use scikit-learn models to extract some relevant features to describe either the users or the items for improving the quality of the recommendations.
I agree with the response below, but just to clarify, how do you know there is no such thing (or process, more likely) as free will?

If its the Gazzaniga experiment's you are referring to, then please note that they merely showed that conscious awareness in a student/university staff population lagged behind the brain activities presumably associated with their experience.

One would have to believe that all humans are imbued with free will eternally and for life at birth for such an experiment to convince you. Note that I do not believe this, so for me, these experiments do not necessarily disprove the existence of free will.
Zorin [1] (based on Ubuntu) looks sweet, has anyone played with it?

[1] http://zorin-os.com/gallery.html
I think it's too late for that :). I can't even upgrade beyond 11.10 and I'm looking for alternative Linux flavors if anyone has some good suggestions. I've heard Mint is nice.
I've been switching DE like crazy the past year or so trying to find a comfy fit, I've settled on XFCE (Xubuntu) with the bottom panel replaced with Plank, and have completely fallen in love with it.
It's a shame they are pissing away the opportunity to become stronger on the desktop while Apple/MS focus on the tablet and phone market.
On the flip side, 18% of university graduates fail to even earn $20,000 per year. If you are going to roll the dice, $40K now and no income by age 40 is far better than $15K for the rest of your life. There are no guarantees in life, so why not make hay when the sun is shining?
For people who can't access the website: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
I'm planning to learn Perl for a combination of its ubiquity, the cheap O'Reillys I came across recently, and contrarianism. Kamaal's answer also covers it really well.
Well I never even knew it existed. Apparently you have to turn it on for your apps domain if you use a google apps account. And it is hard to find http://www.24100.net/2012/12/enable-google-now-google-apps-f...
The best things and stuff of 2012
'tis here: http://www.asymco.com/2012/11/26/the-android-engagement-para...
I don't know about drag/drop, since I don't use that much, but it's easy to add panel applets for various things, including launching software and viewing directories. I usually just set up keyboard shortcuts for all my software using the Win key though. It's a lot faster than mousing over to the panel and clicking on an icon.
Or, you know, doing open source stuff.
Yes, they are not <Flat>.

I've used a flat kitchen sink, and it is f@cku=ing stupid.

A sink you need to wash/squeegee everytime you put something it it to wash?

Ha ha. No. Thanks.
I'd be interested to hear about this as well.
I'm surprised no one quoted Arrow yet...
Well, not so much as new releases, except for one. But this year I really enjoyed:
Reamde by Neil Stephenson (Can't get enough of that guy)
The Art of Deception by Kevin Mitnick
Close to the Machine by Ellen Ullman
This is beautiful! Thanks for writing this and sharing it. You will be amazed how many capable men and women I come across who demand simple tasks that they are perfectly able to take care of themselves. I finally learned to say "No" and the requests died down over a period of 2 years. These same people are happy to have me around.

Pro tip: If you are sitting in a large gathering and someone asks you to help them out. At best, if you cannot say "No", what you should do is give them pointers. That's it, nothing more. Those who are motivated enough will take your pointers and handle it themselves, others will not.

I have found that people in general are just trying to get someone else to do their work for them, for free, without giving a thought to the other person's schedule.
Well that's an 18% "chance", I'm guessing a large number of those 18% will be people who either graduated doing something useless or had some other reason they could not/did not work a high paying job. Such as starting a family and only working part time, or some medical reason. So not quite rolling the dice.

I would still be reasonably confident that if you have a chance to do a good degree from a good school your outlook is a heck of a lot better than that.

Of course the future is never clear, but that is as much a risk for people who don't go to college to those who do.
Great list of companies. IT is very heartening to see quality startups coming from India.
Also don't underestimate the payback that people who are nice get from being nice. They crave the thank you's and the attention from doing a favor for someone. So they do get something. But many times they will then end up feeling like a schmuck after the fact, and guilty, when that wears off. Then they will go to get the next "hit" by doing a favor for someone else.
This looks great, but still needs more content, and maybe an actual tutorial or interactive component.
I'm not a founder, but the exact same problem comes up at large companies as well. Get it done quickly or get it done fast, get it done right or get it done as well as you know how to.

It really comes down to how much you're going to gain out of this solution, how long it's supposed to (or will) stay in place, and what it will cost you to do it right. Cost is not only a function of time and real dollars, but also opportunity cost that you could have been doing something else.

You may not have to worry about something that doesn't look great representing you. How often is it seen? Internal? Quick and dirty, it's probably going to change in the future anyhow. Do the people seeing it care that much? For example, an admin interface (unless it's part of the reasons you buy) may not have to look good, just get the job done. Only 1-2 users in a company would see that, and the rest see the other interface. You have time to make it better later.
True and this also more or less dovetails with wanting what you can't have as well.
Show HN: ChilledLime - Ask questions, crowdsource opinions, make smart decisions
If You Like the Internet, Don't Knock Down That Building
Have you ever stopped to consider that maybe there's something to the huge amount of criticism? You know, maybe we should all consider listening to it?

The Ubuntu community got so large because Ubuntu was something that people found very useful. Then a few years ago, questionable decisions started being made. They brought a very poor experience to a huge number of people, without offering any benefit.

The criticism is valid, and it should be voiced loudly and often.

It's not isolated to Ubuntu, either. There are other major open source projects that have started to actively defecate upon their existing user base. Firefox and GNOME are two big ones. We see the same kind of widespread, large-scale anger from their communities, too.

The leadership of Ubuntu, GNOME and Firefox have all chosen to essentially ignore the ever-growing disillusionment within their existing communities. I think it will cost them dearly. We've already seen a lot of people moving to alternatives.

More importantly, these are the power users who are moving away. These are the very people who are needed by any project that really wants to succeed. They're the ones who help drive others to use the given product. Without them, the project is nothing. It may take a few more years, but I do think that we'll see GNOME, Ubuntu and Firefox go the way of XFree86, if things don't change today.
Dilbert-style ass-licking and treachery is one way to play the game

That's not what I'm advocating. You can get ahead without being sycophantic and treacherous, but you also need to know that other people will be, and you need to do whatever it takes to get enough credibility to defend yourself.

Acquire credibility. This doesn't mean "kiss ass" or "screw the other guy". That shit blows up as often as it works. It means that your job, when you start a new job, is to figure out what makes some people credible and others not, and either (a) to do what is required to be in the first set, or (b) to leave. I prefer option (b) over being slimy and sycophantic.

being indispensable because you solve unsolvable problems is another.

No one is indispensable. No one. Never forget that. I've seen companies fire their best people, losing millions of dollars, over inane political bullshit. Ego trumps money, which is just one way of keeping score to most people. Some people are more painful to part with than others, but there is no such thing as an irreplaceable employee.

The rest of what you are saying I agree with.
> 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."

He didn't talk about gradients or drop shadows, he talked about textures. Wood grain is texture, the paper fibers in most book pages are texture, ... There is such a thing as too much texture, but there is also such a thing as not enough texture: when there's no texture, the work feels dead, like holding a single chord forever.
A way to illustrate this would be the nerd in the library helping the pretty girl vs. the jock who gets the girl.

The question is what would happen if the jock also helped the girl in the library? Would that make him more or less attractive because he had become attainable?
Stuxnet is Back  Iran reported another cyber attack
>I miss the FISH protocol in Konqueror something mad.

The feature I miss most is how selecting text with the pointing device on Linux copied it into the "clipboard" without my needing to type Command-C or Control-C.

Like you, the beach ball (i.e., general lack of responsiveness) is at the top of my list of OS X's disadvantages relative to Linux.

Unlike you, I do not experience any crashes of OS X. It hung and needed to be rebooted by holding down the power button -- once in about 4000 hours of service.
We will be launching the beta in a few weeks, so now we are in hunt for the most awesome beta testers.
If you would like to participate, just signup at the bottom of our landing page! Thanks! ;)
Does facebook expose their email address to you? I would like to use this to allow people to invite their friends to sign up for my service but I'm not sure how I would do that. I guess I could use facebook APIs to send them a message in lieu of email.
I'm not talking about the past. I'm talking about their latest release which came out two months ago.
Christmas Strategy
Both for the iPad:

* SmartGo Kifu
* OOTP Baseball
Super Beginner stuff is on the standard python tutorial. That normally doesn't need to be on every website.
Similarly, I bought WebStorm. I'm happy enough with Eclipse and at work we have a few plugins for the build system, but I'm not a fan of Aptana, so WebStorm seemed like a nice IDE for JS related projects, and in the 75% sale it was $12 or something, definitely worth the price.

I've bought a few games in the Steam sales over the year.
I'm curious, are there any other examples of people changing the world through their open source work other than Linus?
Yeah, Unity 2D isn't an option in 12.10. Unity 3D doesn't support the video card driver in this laptop (a Radeon M6xxx series) so I'm pretty much hosed with my HDMI out. That was a dealbreaker for me.
Yeah, just reinstalled.
Sons of Anarchy has been better and better each season, this years topped it off for me. There may be a few other shows and cartoons (Oh noooes.) But as far as live action it's SOA all the way.

(I must disclose that I haven't seen breaking bad yet, and from what I hear I need to watch it very badly. Especially since I love SOA as much as I do, or so I've heard)
Well if one is married and lacks sex then one should make it clear , and discuss it with his wife , because sooner or later things will break apart.
After hanging on to vanilla 11.04 (the last gnome2 release) until it became too out-of-date to use, I switched to xmonad with a dzen workspace display in place of gnome-panel. It took a fair amount of time to customize (which I can do now, no thanks to you, Ubuntu), but now my DE is optimal again.

I eventually wound up switching off Ubuntu altogether when I realized that I seriously disagreed with its general direction of removing customizability and features for marketing reasons, that I disliked most of its core applications, and that Arch, with its AUR, had a more complete and up-to-date repository of software that I cared about. That particular switch was pretty time consuming, but I learned a decent amount about the modern Linux userspace. I have a nice sleek system now that does what I want it to, and not the other way around.

Have a nice life, Ubuntu. Good luck getting grandma to install you.
Google in 2012: Android soars, battles with regulators and a tricky new role
to be fair I don't think that being a telecommuting software developer is glorified anywhere really.

From France, the view seems to be that small businesses are mainly for artisanal things. People don't really have this idea of working your life away because our culture believes (rightly so? I imagine here the opinion might be opposite) more in that work is not the meaning of life, and so the idea of spending so many hours toiling away (especially in something like software eng, where there are 10000s of consultancies you could work for and probably be beter paid) seems counterintuitive. That or you're just greedy.

I'd also like to point out that Europe is not a country, talking about "Europeans" is silly outside of the context of "people who have access to affordable healthcare", and that mentalities change enormously across borders.
Find programming projects that you want to work on, and just start programming. Sometimes you will need to look up how to do X every line and sometimes every 5 lines, but the way to learn to program is by getting started and getting used to structures and control.
Remember that Ubuntu flavors such as Xubuntu and Lubuntu exist, and that their existence is supported from the top (just read TFA). Members of the Ubuntu community who don't like Unity just use them instead. No dissenting voices are needed within the community, since all are accommodated.

> ignore the ever-growing disillusionment within their existing communities

You assume that the voices of dissent come from within their existing communities. I don't think that's true. I think they come from people who wish their own favourite project/fork were as popular, but fail to see why it isn't.
Don't forget: No ability to transfer ownership to other companies. Google docs can only be transferred within a company. Documents can be shared with accounts on other companies, but the ownership stays with the creator. Ie: I can't create a spreadsheet and send it to my downstream vendor, unless I share it -- which means I can see any changes the vendor makes.
IntelliJ IDEA
ClassicShell
SecureCRT
SmartGit
Copernic Desktop Search
xplorer2
I had the pleasure of supporting such people - believe it or not, they used different OSes, from old Windows versions to shiny new Mac OS (which, I admit, I couldn't help with) and they all had the issues you talk about - running out of free space and worsening over time performance and more.

It makes no difference which OS do you use if you have fifteen copies of the same 10Mb bmp image in different places. It also makes no difference if you never uninstall anything and keep piling shareware/freeware apps like a Pokemon Trainer.

I'm sorry to break it to you but users of PCs generally should NOT own a PC, because they have no time nor intention to learn about using such a machine properly, and large percentage wouldn't be able to even if they wanted. That's why shift towards tablets is a good thing.

Anyway, sufficiently non-tech-inclined user WILL kill his OS rather sooner than later, no matter which OS he happens to have. If you want to stop supporting these users just go there and disable all the features they use to make a mess of their PCs and lock them down in a sandbox, which is perfectly doable with every modern OS I'm aware of, or just persuade them to use tablet or chromebook.

And stop hating decent OSes just because your friends are unable to use them properly.
Why MongoDB Never Worked Out at Etsy
LXDE's multi-monitor capability is broken in several ways, otherwise it's pretty good
This goes without saying but no one is forcing you to upgrade from 12.04 to 12.10. 12.10 is not an LTS release so naturally you should stick to 12.04 if you don't want any of the kinks that are a side-effect of being on the bleeding edge. For me personally, I upgraded from 12.04 -> 12.10 last week and after a 'apt-get remove unity-lens-shopping' I can barely even tell I'm running 12.10!
I love Peep Show. They're currently airing the newest season, and I'm impressed by it so far, it's managed to live up to previous seasons, although it would be nice if they pushed the storyline a bit further from the same 'two dudes in a flat, one doing drugs, the other obsessing over a girl' theme that they've had since the first season
Google's Original Search Computer made with Legos
I assumed based on "it puts one about $1.6M ahead by retirement" and since you won't touch your retirement funds before your retirement (or at least not within 4 years) then it would make sense to take future earnings potential into account.

In other words by going to college you are still "investing" some amount of money in yourself for a future payoff that is presumably better, though of course may not necessarily be.
Exploring Ruby’s Regular Expression Algorithm
It seems like you should recognize that a user does not want interesting offers when they submit a black hole address to you. Or maybe that's what you're saying you do?
> that is as much a risk for people who don't go to college to those who do.

Statistically, you see a correlation of less risk by going to college because only people who fit a certain mould are able to go to college at all. For example, those with certain disabilities will be unable to study in school, and will also struggle in the workplace, which skews interpretations of the data in interesting ways.

Keep in mind that the college educated make up about 20-25% of the population. The unemployment rate is around 7%. That means that the vast majority of the population are employed just fine without degrees, and many are making decent incomes at that.
Ask HN: Got a Belkin WeMo for Christmas. What should I use it for?
I'm a new single family home owner who got a Belkin WeMo for Christmas. Anybody have some good "hacker" uses that they've used theirs for? Wondering what ideas other people might have.
Tell HN: GMail partial outage
Is failing to send over and over this morning...
Lightroom, Resharper, Sublime Text.

Then several of the Humble bundles and a dozen games on Steam.
An Early Tale of the Internet
TrackTV.info - Follow TV shows and get notified before they start airing
Nokia Lumia 920′s fascinating Christmas sets stage for battle with BlackBerry 10
I'd love to get feedback from other HNers about this! Thanks!
The earning potential comes from up-skilling and potentially applying yourself to other fields - literally. For example, the 40k mark seems awfully low compared to the pay up in Alberta. Mind you, the quotes of ~100k+ are typically for skilled labor - typically welders or the like.

You will also note that generations of North Americans raised their family this way. Certainly not the easiest life, but definitely doable.
In The Cage With Predators | Your Funny News
Semantics3 Playground - A Web Interface for our API
So, XKCD.
http://xkcd.com/947/
Zen and minimalism must vary by the observer...

A curve or spheroidal section is zen and minimal (1 stroke, 1 surface) A box with 5 sides, 4 corners, etc is not. There are zen circles http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ens%C5%8D, few to none zen squares.
http://logmein.com for remote desktop (subscription)

http://www.displayfusion.com for multi-screen management

http://mirc.com for irc
Ask HN - any non-software projects you did this year?
Writing, hardware, building - anything that is not building software?
SublimeText 2. What a great piece of software.

And on a completely unrelated note, I then got thoroughly enamoured with Emacs. Thus donated some money to that.