skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From what I've heard rents are pretty near NYC rents in the towns closest to the oil. Either Billings, Montana is far enough away that you can't commute, or Wolfram Alpha's numbers are out of date. The article even mentions $1500 rent.

The thing about cost of living adjustments to salaries is that sacrificing a standard of living to save more money is much easier in high cost of living areas.
I wouldn't be. Some of the most secure software in the world is fully open source. Having millions of eyeballs looking and touching your code is a lot more secure than having 5 ego-driven devs who think they know security.
This is really fantastic! One of my favorite apps of 2012.
Agregador de links
agregador de links
RubyMine from JetBrains.
Perhaps the issue is that Mark hasn't been the only one working on Ubuntu. Maybe other people who have contributed their time and effort in some form are unhappy to see it go to waste. (You probably don't want those people to go away, by the way.)

Maybe people who haven't contributed anything are unhappy to see a good thing go seemingly bad, as a matter of principle. Or, like someone mentioned, they're sad that Ubuntu's remaining community resources (which might not strictly be Mark's to spend) will now be spent in a way that doesn't benefit them and their friends.

Then there are people who might be offended that they were excluded from Ubuntu's audience in the name of "not excluding people from Ubuntu's audience".
Many email services offer disposable addresses integrated with your real email account.

Yahoo in particular has an excellent system for doing this; you can generate disposable addresses by adding a unique string to a base name particular to your account (but which isn't identical to your real address, as it is if you use a '+' delimiter with Gmail). By default, all messages received at any disposable address go to your primary inbox, but you can designate an alternate folder for each of them. Since all of your disposable addresses are @yahoo.com, it's impossible for admins to blacklist the domain.

Sorry if this sounds like a commercial for Yahoo Mail; I'm just very happy with this feature and almost never resort to using Mailinator et al.
I feel CloudPull was a good buy. It means I'm not vulnerable to data loss if Google decides to freeze my account, like you sometimes hear about. http://www.goldenhillsoftware.com
Sublime Text. Better Terminal Emulator Pro.
I think you don't know what unlimited means. It doesn't mean "infinite" - it means - there was no limit placed on it. Sorry, but you didn't understand that word, plain and simple, and now you really have created an ass-thread for yourself.

Second: "instant". It means, quite literally, "an infinitesimal or very short space of time; a moment". So, calling software "instant" - this is perfectly valid.

I think you should go back and re-read your thread with those two definitions in mind, and figure out who you need to apologize to for being ignorant ..
There are also several OTA's that decide to carry fewer hotels, and actually send an employee there undercover to check it out first before doing business with them. At the one I work at, we also look for hotels that cause lots of people to need to call customer service and remove them. We don't have as many hotels in as many places, but our target customers are the travelers who refuse to stay in subpar hotels.
It works on your laptop, but not on my father's in law desktop, where it used to work. Ubuntu used to work on this machine and, somehow, after each upgrade it has become less stable. It freezes completely and there is no way to solve the problem. In fact, there are some bugs in Ubuntu's buck tracker that might be related, but they are marked as "won't fix".

Anyway, today I'm transitioning my parents in law to Windows 7. It will be a pain for me, but at least it will work for them. It won't freeze.

Good luck Mark S. You will end up with a "very interesting" user interface that nobody will use, because of stability problems or because of the pain caused by such an interface.
Windows 7 is not obsolete. It works, new hardware for many years will have Windows 7 drivers, and new games will work in Windows 7.

Unless you are a MS salesman trying to pitch WindowsRT...
Another HUGE vote for 'Debt: The First 5000 Years'. This book simply changes the way you look at the entire world.

Another one I read and loved this year that is in the same sphere of interest, with a relatively similar appreciation (though it is European history focused rather than anthropologically centered) is 'Founder: Meyer Amschel Rothschild and His Time' @ http://www.amazon.com/b/dp/0571279635
I recognize some thought patterns in what you said here that I have also felt previous to this year, before I started working with an excellent professional coach. Several of the "practices" he gave me to work on involved learning how to say no to people. That includes delegation, qualifying, hidden costs. It's an involved set of closely held attitudes and assumptions that can be hard to break out of.

My advice for you is that your intelligence might be working against you, because it appears that you've constructed a [familiar to me] set of logical assertions which seem to support this viewpoint. It's like a perpetual motion machine which lets you congratulate yourself and seem like both the everyman and an ascetic at the same time. While it's possible that these things are all true, it's at least likely that you're flattering yourself.

Life is not black or white. By participating in HN are you nice for sharing your wisdom or egotistical and vain? By giving to charity are you paying it forward or celebrating your own self-image? People do things for selfless self-serving reasons all of the time. I personally don't think that this is a bad thing, so long as the end result is that people share wisdom and help those less fortunate.

Anyhow, I sense I'm rambling but in closing the author isn't suggesting that he stopped being a nice person, he's explaining how he was shocked into realizing that spending his time doing things for other people at the expense of those closest who deserved his priority was not a winning proposition. He could in effect be nicer by putting on his oxygen mask before putting one on his kid.
You should directly use Mahout: the recsys part is quite complete and high level and application oriented contrary to scikit-learn which does not provide high level recsys concepts.

The best documentation I found is the Mahout in Action book (http://manning.com/owen/) while reading the source code in parallel.

Also you probably don't need to run this on a Hadoop cluster unless your data is too big to fit on one single machine.
> By rescuing orgs like that, you run the real risk of being relegated to perpetual clean up guy

You're right, it's a serious risk and you have to address it. Again, being a good, "straight A student" who does what he's told when and where he's told will harm you. You have to know to be bad at what you don't want to do, and at doing stuff a way you consider broken. There's a delicate balance to find between being recognized as valuable, remaining manageable, and not being threaded on. You need to be bad enough that people will try to avoid giving you that sort of shlep in the future, but it must not come off as insulting, and it must not be mistaken for incompetence.

The key point to keep in mind that dumb submission might save you a lot of flak, but will get you neither consideration from anyone, nor better work conditions. Know when to break the rules, and how much breaking you can get away with. You can't hack software in a company if you can't hack the company itself.
Android's Minecraft, BubbleUpnp, Music Folder Player.
This looks like a nice, simple solution. Now I wonder if there is a solution similar to this written in PHP.
I think you don't know what unlimited means. It doesn't mean "infinite" - it means - there was no limit placed on it. Sorry, but you didn't understand that word, plain and simple, and now you really have created an ass-thread for yourself.
Second: "instant". It means, quite literally, "an infinitesimal or very short space of time; a moment". So, calling software "instant" - this is perfectly valid.
I think you should go back and re-read your thread with those two definitions in mind, and figure out who you need to apologize to for being ignorant ..
100GB on Google Drive.
- Transmit
- Sparrow (RIP)
- Tweetbot for mac
- Kaleidoscope
- Echofon for mac (RIP)
- DragonDrop
- Daisy Disk
- Codekit
- Alfred's Powerpack (2x)
- 1Password
- Sublime SFTP
- ColorSchemer Studio
- DayOne
- Reeder

+lots of cheap apps at app store
Nope, you're living in a bubble. Not everyone went to a "good" school. This is one of the things that cracks me up about the HN community. It seems like everyone went to Stanford or MIT and the dumb kids went to CMU.

The vast, vast majority of people do not go to prestigious schools (if they did, those schools would no longer be prestigious, in some sense).

Additionally, these same people often lack social connections that, regardless of what people claim, are often key to getting into a good career track.

The whole "useful degree" argument also fails to hold water. Not everyone has the predisposition or personality to be an engineer. Those people have to do something. Most of the things they are able to do pay very little. So for these people, the chance to make $40k per year for a few years might be quite appealing.

So yes, if you just graduated from MIT with a technical degree and/or your parents are reasonably well-connected, then you are probably doing OK. Everyone else is struggling.

Stop pretending this isn't the case, entitlement isn't an attractive personality trait.
True, but in such a case the real value of that first job comes from the training/education/experience it provides rather than the paycheck.

So it is the value of that which should be compared against the value of college. The article doesn't seem to put a lot of mention to this.
iA Writer & Sublime Text 2
I downloaded Ubuntu 12.10 by mistake. Nothing worked that were not already included in the DVD.

I then downloaded Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and all my hardware (with the proprietary AMD driver) and preferred software (Opera, Blender, Skype) works there.

Lesson learned.
It is a valid point. Though according to the data, one really needs a post-graduate education to really see any kind of future payoff. By that point we could be looking at closer to a $3M difference. If you can make that up, then it is definitely worth it, but it is a long road ahead.

With all that said, education is still worth it for education's sake. You don't really need to justify it with future incomes and better jobs. I find it disconcerting that so many do.
Relevant - this 20 year old video with Steve Jobs giving a demo of NeXTSTEP 3. I first saw this after having bought a Mac running OS X 10.2 and was surprised by how the user-facing stuff was still very similar to its roots (maybe not nearly as much now).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j02b8Fuz73A
C is still my favourite language of its style, and so far I also worked on C++, C#, Java, and Python projects. None other is as simple and direct.

Looking at the book's TOC it looks like there's a bunch of interesting ideas in there, I'm tempted to pick it up.
FreeBSD: http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2012-12-24-supporting-those-...
Evernote Premium (I store everything in this including photos of handwritten notes which it makes searchable)
Aperture (I'm not a photographer but I prefer this over iPhoto and Google's Picasa)
Sublime Text 2 (Excellent piece of software)
If your idea of what you're going to be doing during college and how it will benefit you is such that getting up at 4am and working 15 hours for $50k/year is appealing in comparison, it most definitely is the right option.

Education is expensive, both in actual cost and opportunity cost. If you're not looking forward to applying yourself to four years of intellectual challenges (and hard work), it's a huge waste.
Why do people act surprised that C and C++ are still as viable as ever, and still very widely used?

Do they not know that basically every important piece of software today is still written in those languages?

Has this realization somehow been lost over time with the rise of languages like Java, PHP, JavaScript and Ruby, even though the major implementations of those languages are themselves built using C and/or C++?
A great must-read on the same idea - with lots of examples from very different social situations - is the popular book "How to Win Friends and Influence People" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Win_Friends_and_Influenc...) . It's only 300 pages long, but there are a lot of great principles in it that one can follow.
Because most of what is actually said is inaccurate.
Ask HN: Home for the holidays with a baby and a toddler - what to do?
I am off work for the next week. I have two kids - a 19 month old and a 1 month old. It's cold and snowy where we live so limiting time outdoors with the 1 month old seems wise.

Any tips on how to keep the kids and wife happy during this time off and fight the urge to work on side projects?
What is it exactly that you'd like to know?
> [being sycophantic and treacherous] is not what I'm advocating.

Indeed; I was just outlining a third option, between dumb submission and preparedness for job hopping.

> No one is indispensable. No one.

Replace "being indispensable" with "being perceived by your hierarchy as indispensable". Which, as you outline, can be two very different things, usually to the detriment of the delusional company.
Thousands I guess. Take Wordpress for example. Didn't it change the world? Take PHP itself, or Perl. Didn't they?

Also, I think the phrase "change the world" is overrated. Sometimes it's not less important to keep the world running, which also requires constant work and a lot of human genius.
Probably more attractive, but not because he's attainable, just because he's helpful, which is a good quality.

If being helpful gives you one point, being confident gives you a hundred. You can be a confident and a bit selfish (but not mean, or a jerk) and still be at around ninety-nine points, which is a lot.

I can't give many examples without the context, because they won't come through correctly and people will just think I'm being mean.
I wish there was a new great desktop environment focusing on THE DESKTOP.
> If you want a better job, do your current job better. It will get noticed, and that's how you advance.

This has not been my experience. If it were true, I'd be the lead architect. I think politics are more important. It's not simply good enough to do your job well - you have to make sure everyone sees you doing your job well. In fact, you don't even need to do your job well to get ahead, you just have to step out a few critical times and make sure people see you doing a good thing. Hoping that you get noticed is, in my experience, the worst advice you can give.
"And in this regard, we know, scientifically, that Ubuntu with Unity is better than anything else out there."

Quote from the linked article, emphasis added. I'm actually interested in the methodology in use by Canonical. I can find the following reference easily...

http://design.canonical.com/2010/11/usability-testing-of-uni...

together with some work on application software

http://design.canonical.com/2011/08/thunderbird-evolution-us...

Anyone got anything else solid from Canonical?

PS: I know and rather like Unity as manifest in 12.04/12.10. It will be interesting to see how the UI changes and what implications the UI have for the underlying system as the transition to mobile device moves forward. I think that users should stick to LTS or move to a 'rolling distro' if they need very reliable and/or specific interfaces. Of course, that will reduce the pool of testers and the range of hardware tested, but it looks as if Canonical will be working with hardware manufacturers anyway.
> What do you suppose will happen to machines of users who rely on just the default software for "simple things like red eye removal"?

Um, they won't get infected with viruses or trojans? But what do you count as default? Random, preinstalled crapware from HP, Dell and others or Windows components? If the former, then I saw similarly bloated and useless versions of these for Linux, too.

I'm a FreeBSD user and I love it. I can't imagine my grandmother using my system for longer than five minutes. She certainly wouldn't get a virus, because she would be completely unable to install anything.

But, she now has Windows XP installed and, she has no problems with viruses or trojans. It took me awhile to convince her NOT to click on anything that has the word "free" in it, but I managed. She does not want to watch porn either. This eliminates both most common ways people get 'infected'.

And she's got not one virus or trojan, for four years now and counting.
Given that Romney got a lower turnout than McCain, it certainly seems that some number of people have left the party, or are at least witholding support for the time being.
Spotify (I guess more of a service than a piece of software)

Wikipedia £5/month donation

Civilization V
Going off the title (can't say I followed the argument in the actual article all that well), this is exactly why I have a hard time working on learning things (i.e. new frameworks, languages, etc...) in my free time. For the most part, at this stage in my career, everything I know I've learned on the job. In other words, I was receiving meaningful income while learning. Why would I want to learn for free? Also, I'll add, it's a much quicker process to learn while working with other people who are already skilled at what you're learning. I don't constantly have that feeling that I'm putting in a bunch of time doing things the wrong way and getting a false sense that I'm making any real progress. What's the saying? Practice doesn't make perfect; perfect practice makes perfect. My last job, I picked up Python (coming from Ruby, which helped a lot) and because of code review, I had a bunch of people every time I wrote code telling me what I was doing right and wrong. That made it incredibly easy to go from 0 to somewhere above average and I was paid to do it. Currently, I'm very interested in clojure and go for various reasons. I have a feeling it might be a bit harder to find a job where I can learn either of those, however.

Now, I'm curious how people will respond to this attitude here. I'm guessing I'll get accused of lacking passion because if I was passionate, I'd want to do all this stuff on my own. I can truly say I enjoy writing software and the act of creation that comes along with that; I just like to get paid when I do it.
rms, jwz, Guido, Matz, DHH, Shuttleworth, even Rasmus, the many contributors to GNU, gcc, Firefox...

Imagine the software landscape as it would be right now with no free software whatsoever. Then imagine the hundreds of brilliant people required to devise and lead each of those projects...
Sublime Text 2, CrashPlan, all the 2012 Humble Bundles, and assorted iOS apps.
Coda 2. I understand the Sublime Text crew is probably going to yell at me, but I freakin LOVE Coda.

Oh, also Spotify Premium. I'm not sure if that counts.

Still looking for a CRM simple enough to be worth paying for, but it's not happenin. I'm building one myself I suppose!
Yes, I think, there are various takeaways at various levels in that book. The way I understood it, at the surface level, there is the lovely story of Father and Son on a road trip.

At deeper levels a lot of things are left to the interpretation of the reader, as it is with most abstract things. He uses the word Quality in the most fundamental way. To me that word held the meaning for his life. Quality in the way in which he understands and reacts to the world.

Before he learned to fix his motor cycle, he was at the mercy of various kinds of mechanics with varying skill levels and attitudes. He particularly cites an example of some listening to music while working on the machine. Which he does not like. For him working on the machine or writing technical documents for his job, is a spiritual activity.

Also, he makes a point regarding his nervous breakdown, that for others it was a nervous breakdown. But for him, the way he saw it, it was the deepest of meditations. Following which phase the understanding and meaning of Quality, dawned on him, and he was at peace with his life.

Also, I found the way he treats his 11 year old son, i.e like an adult, very interesting.

Another delightful thing, was the book full of philosophical quotable quotes. Like the (approximate) one I have cited in my above comment.

But most basic reason I liked the book, is because, it talked to me in the tone, I wanted it to talk to me. For example the moment any book becomes very specific (for example 'Life of Pi' is very specific in being inclusive to all religions, in a rather simplistic way), as a reader I tend to start to disagree. But if it is abstract, and "Zen.." is very very abstract in portions, I can provide my own concrete implementations!
I'm surprised no-one said Dropbox yet. I upgraded to their 100GB account which is now my main backup drive.

Also paid for some iPad games for my daughter :-)
Some Android apps/games on sale at .99c or less, that's it.
Almost all politics thrives on fear. Witness the left constantly trying to tell seniors that Republicans want to take away their social security and medicare.
Is there something better than the new improved Google video chat?
I have been using Google video chat for a couple of years. We have Google Apps at work, and the easy way that video chat was integrated made it simple for my distributed work force to remain in contact via video. Now they have "improved" it with Hangouts which doesn't work as easily or as well. I have no need for pirate hat overlays on video chat, just simple easy to use video integrated with my employee's email address. Does anyone have a suggestion for an alternative to Hangout, or is there a way to bring the old system back?
‘Random free fonts we ran into while browsing the web’
There is only 2 rules in kernel development which you can't break:

1. Kernel APIs to userland are always backwards compatible

2. If you break something, you will take responsibility

If maintainer breaks both of those rules, how can you accept patches from him/her ever again? Remember that amount of patches handled by kernel core team is enormous, you have to able to trust subsystem maintainers at least some degree. In corporate world this would have caused immediate "clear your desk" reaction.
xfce. it's not new but it's great.
When you set up an FB application, it lets you specify what information you want the user to make available to you. When the user approves the app, the dialog specifies what info the app is asking for. I assume that "friends' email" is one of those options. Then FbFriends would be able to ask for that info. So to support this, I'd need to:

1. expose to you as the developer the ability to specify the list of attributes to request from FB (hardcoded right now).

2. just pass the object I get from FB straight to the callback instead of mucking with the object (makes some things, like the picture, a bit more complicated).

3. document how to set up the Facebook application to get the right permissions from the end-users.

That all seems reasonable, and I'll take a crack at it later today when I'm done with my 9-5.