skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> That said, I've always thought it an interesting philosophical question of if we don't have free will and our paths in life are somewhat deterministic, it really puts a damper on our legal and moral systems to a degree.

I was just thinking about this the other day. What occurred to me is that we tend to think of legal and moral punishments in a vengeful kind of way (sort of "getting back" at people for doing something wrong), which I agree makes little sense if we think the people involved had no choice in the matter.

But if you think about it, it's really a lot like training an artificial neural network. If it gives you an incorrect output (does something bad), you give it a negative feedback to train it not to do that anymore. In that context, you're not punishing it per se, and there's no consciousness or will or intention involved, but it amounts to basically the same as punishing a person for stealing or something. It's just a form of training.
Not really, the issue is that having the right sort of experience to get ahead.

I would wager that you are more likely to get a job as a graduate that will provide you with useful experience.

A huge number of non grad jobs don't pay too bad by the standards of a younger person but really don't give the sorts of experience that help one get ahead.

I know smart people who skipped college to work retail and 10 years on are still pulling not much more than minimum wage. With a reasonable degree they would certainly have had more options open to them.
As far as I remember... Only games this year. All of my applications have been free in some form.
I'll grant you that; but abstaining doesn't help much. They should be splitting the party and separating the real conservatives from the religious right.
12 Popular JavaScript Libraries started in 2012
Mono for Android
EZPdf reader for Android (not as good as GoodReader for iOS but better than any other pdf reader): (http://m.unidocs.com/ezPDF_Reader_Android_Pro.html)

Need for Speed for Android and Temple Run (only games I bought this time and)

Spyglass for Windows (http://clockworkengine.com/)
Reeder for Mac (I hardly use this though)
CodeBox for Mac (http://www.shpakovski.com/codebox/)
Well, that's exactly why we created http://live.Roomixer.com A Guest Exchange marketplace where Guest Rejections can be bought and sold. If hotels would cooperate with other hotels there would be less work for Expedia!
They have a list of who's using MongoDB in production.
http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Production+Deployments
Great documentary. A reminder of why we do what we do!
I remember how shocked I was ten years ago when talking to a newly educated guy about languages -- and he didn't know any C?!

Then I realized... "of course, they only learn Java now". I left for scripting a long time ago, but still: Sad.
Sublime text 2

Goodnotes on iPad

Some games on steam
I suggest you also use Wikipedia to get some philosophy: Look up "Qualia". Science is wholly incapable of explaining just exactly why feelings feel the way they do. "Adrenal gland releases epinephrine" is the trigger but it is not sufficient to describe the experience of a conscious person.
- Crashplan.com backup
- billomat.com invoicing
- letsfreckle.com timetracking
- mite.yo.lk timetracking
- github
- "Thomas Was Alone" game on steam
- tons of iPhone apps
Soundcloud, Github, SublimeText2, Carbon-Copy-Cloner, WinClone 3, Netflix, Spotify, Humble Indie Bundle 7
In the 1960s, Gerry Anderson's series Thunderbirds did more than just entertain a generation of kids with his trademark Supermarionation puppetry adventure - Gerry Anderson liked to think big, and he liked to think like a scientist and engineer.

Some of his adventures hinged upon ambitious engineering projects such as mile-high arcology buildings, moving skyscrapers the size of the Empire State Building, and manned sun probes. Some of his ideas were vetted by organisations such as the Ministry of Defence for possible viability.

His stories inspired a generation of British kids to become thinkers, mathematicians, engineers, chemists ... hackers.

For all that his shows were television entertainment, Gerry Anderson's contribution really stands on a par with that of the late Sir Arthur C Clarke, imo.
> Any time I've tried Xubuntu or Kubuntu in the past, I've found the experience to be quite horrible and unpolished.

Then please spend some of your time making it better. Your contribution will be welcome.

With fewer people helping, any open source project will suffer from being horrible and unpolished.

> whether they're intentionally held down, or just neglected and without as much attention.

There is definitely no intentional holding down that I'm aware of. It is clear that the flavors do receive less attention, but that's just down to popularity. Those who care about them more than the Unity route should contribute!

> People who have seen their productivity drop because they've been forced to use Unity

Nobody has been forced to use Unity. Xubuntu has existed for a long time, and more recently so has Lubuntu.

If anything has been forced, it is the dropping of GNOME 2. But that has happened upstream (including in Debian) and Ubuntu cannot reasonably be held responsible (even though this seems to be an unfortunately common misunderstanding). AIUI, difficulties with GNOME upstream is one of the reasons that Unity was created.
PhpStorm and RubyMine subscription renewals during Doomsday sale. :D
Ask HN: What are the HN's stats for 2012?
How many visits? How many unique visitors? How many page views?
Venture Capital to Suppress Its Appetite for Risk in 2013
Very refreshing to see all the Sublime Text 2 purchases - I myself have not yet purchased it (I barely use it compared to Vim).

I purchased RubyMotion [1] thru a student license (80% off!) although admittedly I haven't used it all that much. I still get my money's worth out of CodeSchool [2].

[1]: http://www.rubymotion.com/

[2]: http://www.codeschool.com/
The Legend of Korra, the new incarnation of the Avatar: The Last Airbender series.

If you can get over the fact that it's a kids' show, it's one of the best-crafted series out there. I used to say it was the best animated series I'd ever seen, but now I'd go further and say it was the best show I've ever seen in any genre aimed at any age group. To properly catalog its qualities would take a fairly substantial effort on my part and produce a fairly lengthy piece of writing, so I'll just say this: it's a series that's obviously produced by extremely talented people who deeply care about what they're making, and the more you watch the show the more evident that becomes in a ceaselessly pleasing array of ways. I literally can't endorse it enough.
So a major distribution being used all around the world should stop being criticized because it's "fine for your laptop"? That seems astonishingly myopic.
How to Perform Packet Sniffing Using Libpcap with C Example Code
- Bunch of steam games on sale and Humble Bundles
- Several android apps & games
- Minecraft
- Internet Download Manager (Windows)
- Donated to some free softwares I use (GIMP, Blender)

currently trying out ST2, not sure whether I'll buy it yet,,
iaWriter
Pictos
Day One
Tweetbot
Coda 2
Starcraft 2
Civ 5
CS 6
CSS Hat
Dropbox
Color Snapper
Spotify
So what do you want to do? Practically nobody's full-time job is changing the world, and for everyone who does manage to put a dent in the universe, loud opponents will tell you you're doing it all wrong. First step in "escaping" is having a vision of what escaping looks like. What really makes you happy? As others have pointed out, escaping may very likely still look a lot like a CRUD app. Spend some weeks keeping a diary, taking note everyday of what you did you liked and what you didn't like. Try to figure out the "why" for each of those. A pattern will likely emerge.
I picked up on this too. If it resonates, it really resonates. Fortunately, in enterprise sales at least, a good sales engineer can go a long way in curbing a salesman's worst excesses.
Foursquare[1] and Codecademy[2] are two that I know of.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBauy0o-Wzs

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkPmVQNesZA
I didn't say that it was impossible to have good content hierarchy with a flat design, I just said it was harder.

And "citation needed" is the Hacker News equivalent of YouTube comments: snarky, doesn't bring anything to the debate, and totally irrelevant.
Where are you looking? There is a massive community of python developers on linkedin: http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=25827
The Least Common Denominator Will Never Be The Best For Anyone
Well, the changes to the UI starting with Firefox 4 made it much less productive to use. Maybe they didn't realize it at the time, but the toolbars, traditional menu bar and status bar provided a lot of useful functionality. Getting rid of them, or at best forcing the use of extensions or reconfiguration to bring back such functionality, hurt the usefulness of Firefox. The minute gain in space for displaying the web page has not been worth the loss of usability.

Then there are the performance issues. They remain to this day. We constantly hear from Firefox advocates that it doesn't have poor performance, or that it doesn't use excessive memory. Yet somehow the release notes for each major release talk about "fixing" such problems.

At some point, one just gets tired of being strung along. The alternatives aren't necessarily perfect, but at least they're better in some way. If Firefox is going to try to look and behave like Chrome, yet have far inferior performance and consume more memory, we might as well just use Chrome.
More likely bad editing. Joe was his roommate and eventual boss. It's only once near the end that his aunt calls him Joe.
That's not all too different from Democrats who criticize Obama w.r.t. drone warfare, whistle blower prosecution, etc, but vote for him anyhow.
Well, he is investing at about 0.15% per month =)
Well, it depends on what the product is exactly. Some of my internal tools it doesn't matter if we gut the whole thing so long as at the end the same functionality remains. However, if it's the core of your product, then that should probably be done correctly, even if it takes you a while. Side features (changing passwords, logins) can evolve over time.

I can tell you no one will remember, but that's false for certain values of users. New users will never know the difference. Old users may welcome the change, or despise it. There's a delicate balance between something you know is better for them, and users being stuck in their ways (some justified, some not). See the Office Ribbon. How many people complain anymore about that? In the beginning though, everyone was up in arms. To some extent that's because there was nowhere to move to except Office, but over time the changes become the new norm and people accept that.
Agreed... On my second year of $12 and happy as day one.
In my experience at large companies and small ones, I've never seen overperformance turn into unemployment.

It's more subtle than that. People don't get fired directly for overperformance, so much as they make enemies who later sabotage them. It's hard to do anything important and not piss someone off.

I have an overperformance story from Google that's legendary, although I didn't actually get fired.

Overperformance doesn't inexorably lead to termination, and it's certainly not immediate. It is, however, more likely to lead to termination than the opposite. (On the other hand, underperformance is more toxic to your career in the long term.)

"Performance" is a middle-class myth for AFCs (Average Frustrated Chumps). You get fired if you fail politically. Being at either extreme, performance-wise, increases the likelihood that this happens.
> The level of anger and displeasure within the Ubuntu community is at an astounding level.

I have called you on this above, and I will call you on it again. You make this statement as if it is fact, yet you have provided no justification.

The only noises of displeasure come from those who don't use Ubuntu anyway. You might argue that they left when Unity was created, except that real community members (edit: who don't like Unity) still use Ubuntu through Xubuntu, Lubuntu or simply a stock Ubuntu installation with GNOME added. Every argument made against Ubuntu does not apply to these users. Thus the arguments cannot be being made by members of the Ubuntu community.
"First: A man’s chief loyalty must be to the woman who has joined her life to his; to the children who call him father; and to the business which feeds and clothes and houses them all."

A greater truism can hardly have been spoken.
Nope, i'm saying is that the more you abstract and take out of the way of the coder, the quicker they can write code. Java did this to C type languages, and people got quicker. Ruby and python did this to Java. But the inverse im often told by my C colleagues is that the abstraction means you fundamentally lose control of performance. I don't agree with this statement, but what I do agree with is that if you want high level, human oriented lprogramming languages that you can quickly write code in, you need to solve very similar problems
Is it actually harder though? I don't think so. I think there is some truth to the idea that content over chrome is a good usability principle (obviously to an extent, Win8 takes it a little too far sometimes), and in my opinion, it is easier to learn proper use of whitespace and good typography than how to make textures and less "sterile" designs.

My point is you are stating your opinion as if it is a truth, when it isn't.

Sure, citation needed is a little snarky, but I disagree that it doesn't bring anything to the debate and is irrelevant. Maybe you could have pointed to usability studies, so there would at least be some data to back up your claim.
Nice approach, though it would seem to not be needed with Backbone 0.9.9, with the new 'update: true' option for fetching collections. (If you have a central data model for your application that is.)
Ask HN: When do you start over? 
Bill Atkinson, author of the original MacPaint, once said: "It’s an art form, like any other art form… I would spend time rewriting whole sections of code to make them more cleanly organized, more clear. I’m a firm believer that the best way to prevent bugs is to make it so that you can read through the code and understand exactly what it’s doing… And maybe that was a little bit counter to what I ran into when I first came to Apple… If you want to get it smooth, you’ve got to rewrite it from scratch at least five times."

I am a firm believer in this philosophy and in my own projects, I have had to write several modules several times over in an attempt to make a cleaner interface with changing requirements and features. However, more often than not, imposed deadlines can make this approach daunting. At what point does one decide to stop "hacking" on top of existing code and decide to start over from scratch with a re-write that is presumably more flexible, robust, and easier to maintain. I presume a lot of this has to do with how long I envision the code will remain pertinent. How does one gauge such a metric? More practically, how can one justify to project managers that starting over is a good strategy?
Pixelmator

Emacs for OSX

Diablo 3

SteerMouse

An OSX upgrade

Civilization 4 (was cheap in the Mac App Store, but I never ended up playing much)

GTA 3 for OSX (also cheap, also only played a few times)

If we're including web services, then also:

GitHub

SmugMug

Vimeo

Flickr
I know people with degrees who have the same struggle, and people without degrees making six figure salaries. Of course anecdotes are just that.

I have never been able to find evidence that the 25% of the population made up of those with degrees fare better than the top 25% of the population without degrees. But since we are going on gut feelings here, my gut tells me that you will find no discernible difference between the two groups.
This simply cannot be possible. Perhaps you've been fortunate enough not to encounter the sort of people the article is referring to, and consequently aren't familiar with the drain these people are.

Some examples from my own life, a more modern context:

- acquaintances ask me to "fix their Internet" because I'm "good with computers": I point out I have other priorities and they're already paying the line provider/ISP so should call them for assistance

- similarly, people who ask me to fix their computers: I point out that they wouldn't expect a mechanic to fix their car for free, and besides IT != software development

- back in university when people asked me to help develop or debug portions of their solutions: if I couldn't figure it out in 15 minutes I told them I had other priorities but gave them general advice about what the problem or solution might be

- people asking me to work longer for the same amount of pay and unpredictable benefits (i.e. bonus formulas): I became a contractor instead and I've been immeasurably happier for it

You simply cannot consent to every request from such people - they will literally drain your life (i.e. time) from you, to what end?
Too many generations of poorly-educated and/or dependent voters are making your wish something that is less and less likely to be realized.
Cinnamon desktop - the same one that powers Linux Mint
Sublime Text 2, Logic Pro, Rdio, 1Password for iOS, and a small handful of other iOS apps.
Tired of CRUD? What about learning CRA (Create Read Append)?

There are so many places where people did add "time" information to CRUD DBs because of the 'U' and 'D' that it's not even funny.

Learn a CRA DB and go apply to companies using today technologies that shall be used in the future mostly everywhere.

Most CRUD DBs I've been working with would have had absolutely zero space issue had they been using a CRA DB. And this would have solved so many issues. The only downside of "CRA vs CRUD" is that CRA DBs tend to be bigger (not than the CRUD one who did poorly re-model time that said)... But with today's hardware and especially memory growing up so fast and going down in price so quickly (the two being related but not identical), it's really not a problem anymore for 99.99% of the companies out there to simply store facts in a "ever growing, append-only" DB.

Just an example: there are many times where someone up the chain asks for some information and you either have to ask the DB guys to give you a backup of the prod DB at "time X" on some DEV/PREPROD environment or you have to go fetch business information by parsing logs.

These are two major fails. And they're mostly related to the fact that most CRUD DBs are modeled as "non factual". The 'U' and 'D' are irreversible operation losing business information and developers time.

So learn about CRA DBs like Datomic (which you can, btw, back with a SQL DB like PostgreSQL) and then go apply to companies who "saw the light".
I think a lot of people are surprised that C and C++ are still widely misused. Certainly for a lot of domains, their performance characteristics are not only attractive, but essential to the success of the application. But in many other domains, they could be replaced with other languages that would offer performances that are just as good, and be safer.

For example, I go on IRC with weechat, which is written in C. An IRC client spends most of its time idling, waiting for network data or input from the user, so certainly it could be written in a language like OCaml.
That is the vomitous self-congratulatory thing I've ever read and what I've come to expect from our multi-millionare South African marketing overlord. Mark: if you're reading this, please take note.

Translated:

We're going to push our own goals rather than asking what people want, you know like Amazon again.

We're including everyone in our statement, apart from those people with an opinion other than ours.

Giving, giving, giving dammit giving giving!

We're lying about Unity with a sample size of 15 people that we all knew already, even though the community hates Unity. It's like Ballmer saying how everyone loves Windows 8 Metro but it's not selling.

Mobile bandwagon jumpy jump. Let's dumb it down so it can be use for gefingerpoken as well as anything else (not going to happen - probably worse than Windows 8).

More cloud tie in - we want your data just like all the other vendors.

Completely ignore the foundation that everyone else such as GNU, Linux kernel people, Xorg and surprisingly Debian have
provided them.

Completely ignore the humongous bug database which makes Ubuntu like a pre-Alpha release of Windows for reliability.

Ugh it makes me sick. Sorry to sound cynical, but the above is 5 years of using Ubuntu canned in a few statements.
If I give you a blackhole e-mail address, it's because I suspect you are going to spam me. Blocking the blackhole addresses only alienates me as a customer, confirms my suspicion that you intend to spam me and adds one more barrier to my trying your software or service.
The problem is that your rotation is relative to the dodecahedron, not the page, and that it uses inverted vertical rotation but not horizontal so it's kind of hard to get used to IMO. I would also switch to movement when a user clicks and drags as opposed to whenever they move the mouse.
Legal Curbs Said to Hamper A.T.F. in Gun Inquiries
Get Flying Saucer Sled, tie a rope to it. Dress your 19 month old really warm, put him/her into the sled. walk around your backyard/park pulling on the rope, your 19 month old should have fun. You can have 1 month old in a baby carrier, they will have fun just being close to you.
How to remove all shares from your stumbleupon toolbar
Christmas Isn’t Awesome For Everyone
Why Not Events
Oh, that's the most likely cause of your problems then. There are all kinds of issues with upgrading Ubuntu installs. I always do a clean install for that reason, never an upgrade.
I love C for its simple syntax and "charm" (can a programming language be charming?) While the book does look fascinating, I can't help but wonder if it would be easier to go with languages like "Go" which was supposedly designed with 21st century considerations in mind?
> Do they not know that basically every important piece of software today is still written in those languages?

A blatant overstatement. There's lots of important work done for the CLR (MS, many others), Java (Sun, Google, Amazon, bits of Facebook, IBM, etc, etc) or in Python (Dropbox) or in Cobol (banks...sigh). Yeah, there's plenty of important C/Cpp code but it's probably in a minority of "important", even if important just means "commercial" or "popular".
I've implemented something similar in the same manner (over-riding `new`). The original idea came from here: http://backstage.soundcloud.com/2012/06/building-the-next-so...

One implementation detail I ran into is how to detect dupes. When you have Backbone Models, this is easy: every model has an `id`. But say you want to apply this same singleton behavior to a Backbone Collection, which don't have natively have `id`s. I saw two options:

1. Assign an `id` to the collection when instantiated (could just be a string, so that you can force a singleton only when you desire it).

2. De-dupe based on `instanceof` checks. The downside here is you always get a singleton even if you might want a one-off instance of a collection.

Are there any other options? Can your Identiy Map handle collections?
I was expecting a post describing why MongoDB specifically weren't fit to their use case, but the TL;DR version is basically:

"Before you get too excited, the reason for the failure is probably not any of the ones you're imagining. Mainly it's this: adding another kind of production database was a huge waste of time."

The blog title is misleading IMO. It could as well be titled "Why [any other DBMS] Never Worked Out at Etsy" and the conclusion would be the same.
1Password for Mac and iOS, because remembering 50 passwords sucks and having only 5 leaves you really exposed when something like PSN gets compromised.
Sublime Text 2, iA Writer, Pages / Numbers / Keynote (iOS + OSX), Reeder (iPad), CS6