skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ubuntu is not world-class. I think Ubuntu might be close to competing with Windows, though it still lacks a lot of basic stuff. Both Ubuntu and Windows (up to and including Windows 7) are still years away from being on the same plane as OS X. (My policy is, until I see a text editor as good as TextEdit on another operating system, I won't even consider a comparison between the two.)
"The few-micron-thick layer of aluminum oxide is the only thing holding an airplane together."

Jees.
need tinierurl.
Don't Blame Jim Cramer
There's always something awesome about reading a guy's blog that's hosted on the engine he himself built.

There is? He didn't write nginx, or the C libraries it uses, or the linux kernel it's running on, or the Xen virtualization layer slicehost is using, or the C compiler which was used to compile all of the above -- but each of those is far more sophisticated than the blog engine. What's so awesome about a very thin layer at the top of a very deep stack?
"So, copy/paste in iPhone 3.0." Applause. Applause for a feature that every other device in the world has. Odd.

I like the iPhone, but this sums up what I usually feel about Apple products.
The key phrase in the original announcement is "explicitly curate all data".

This was tried before, in the "expert systems" of the 1980s. Prolog and various 'production system' languages (e.g. OPS5) would decouple facts/rules from the execution engine. Then "just add" domain knowledge ...

As far as I can tell, what killed that was the unfeasibility of debugging. One bad item (or the lack of a critical true one) could poison the well, and good luck tracking it down.

The care and feeding of proper 'fact databases' remains expensive, and Google doesn't seem disposed to go there, apart from unit and currency conversions. (Add a 'hmm' for automated translation.)

So, this leaves two ideas for 'Alpha' as a product: a) they believe the database grooming expense can be profitable on a global web scale; b) they automated enough of the database grooming to make it profitable.
Added support for MMS!
People don't like Apple for their marketing, though their marketing is pretty incredible. The best marketing they have are their actual products. People see people using Apple products, try them out, and fall in love.

Apple doesn't advertise showing people using their products. They don't bandwagon you. They don't tell you you're "cool" if you use Apple. Their competitors do, and sometimes they work. Apple never does. Their advertisements focus on their actual products, and their competitors can't do that because it only works if you make incredible products.

Can you imagine a commercial showing the Zune and nothing but the Zune? It would be horrible. So Microsoft shows people using the Zune so that you can see how cool it is.

Meanwhile, even without a commercial I can give a friend a 5-minute demonstration of cool Mac things and that friend will become a diehard Mac fan. At the program I attended 2 years ago, 12 people, none of them Mac users, spent a month using older iMacs. Within a year each person in the program had bought a Mac. It wasn't commercials. It was product love.
Wikileaks Pages Added To Australian Blacklist = Censorship?
Scientists develop Laser Gun to kill Mosquitos
g.propose is out of the question (for now).

if a.accepted
self.move('SF')
g.stay('FL') || g.move('parents')
end
eighteencharacters
Machines or methods cannot create better writing but facilitate it or make it harder. I think the main problem of text editors is that they encourage instant editing, which breaks with the linear/causal character of longer text. The only way around it, the only way to linear writing is to post in blocks. Which is, apart from forcing the writer to focus, the main idea of this thing.
Don't you think the genius is that they created an interface where it wasn't absolutely essential from the get-go?
Which is why they took off with a minimum of fuel, flew around to heat up, and then refueled in mid-air.
thanks. Agreed.
They've also added copy & paste, landscape view in Mail and other key apps, CalDAV support and MMS so far. Looks like they've made an effort to address most of the criticisms of the phone while laying the foundation for a huge amount of additional functionality from apps, especially with the p2p API. I'm quite pleased with what's been unveiled.
Web search only becomes interesting when you scale it up. At small scale it's just fetching pages and tying together library code, which is fine but not particularly interesting or educational. Once you scale up, though, it involves tons of complicated and fascinating topics (math, distributed systems, compression, networking, query planning, databases, etc.). You also start having to make trade-offs among features, which is often a good sign that a problem is complex enough to be worthy of your time.
SpringSource offers Java tool suite
They've added both copy/paste and search. Happy?
Search mail on the server!
HTC to launch 'at least' three Google phones this year
Why is the US still not using metric? That's a compelling change, which would align it with the rest of the world. And it's still not happening. The chances of the entire world adopting a new time scheme just for the heck of it are zero.
Tell me: have you ever spent time researching how writers write? I think that if you do, you'll be surprised by how different each one does. The process of writing is unique to the writer, and that's something that you have to take into account. You can't standardize it: any real system has to encourage every method that works. It's why the best system is still the equivalent of a blank page.
AMD to Intel: Fine, let's make the cross-license deal public
Do You Have An Entrepreneurial Gold Finger? - The Answer Is On The Back Of Your Hand
Actually, hmm.. I wonder how the subscription will work for apps that were formerly free. I assume users will be able to 'opt-in' for subscription payment, otherwise the application is deleted.
A seemingly typical help desk call uncovers the naked truth
Don't bother with them if you want anything more then a personal site. Their slowness and downtime will eat any commercial site alive. I'm a long time member but I can't use them for more then my blog and photos (I have lots and lots - more then 10 gigs and that would fill up most vps's) because when it comes to sites for other people you'll just loose customers.

I'm editing to add that I'm looking for a way to move my gallery (10+ gigs of photos) over to slicehost with a mounted "S3 volume" I'm not sure of the performance hits, but I'm willing to bet I'll get a faster site out of it.
On balance, though, I think it's better to have more people trained in CS rather than fewer. Most of these people won't become programmers, but they will apply CS ideas to their own professions.
All the research I've seen seems to draw the conclusion that the only strong predictor of performance in a job -- is past performance.

You are replying to a comment suggesting that there may be value in a process using multiple interviewers over a total time of eight hours.

It could well be that one, some, many, or even all of the multiple people involved use your suggested process and that that it takes a total of eight hours to get a good read on past performance.

So... is your comment orthogonal to mine?
11 Free Services and Products for your Startup. [Seattle based]
You'll likely be eating ramen (and vietnamese sandwiches and dimsum) all the way for the entire summer no matter what. With an additional mouth to feed, you have a lot less runway.

She has to focus on getting optimal grades, you have to focus on your startup -- maybe hyperfocusing on separate challenges and then re-uniting will be best for the relationship in the end?
The raw number of comp sci majors is up 8%. That doesn't mean comp sci is "cool again." There are more people going back to school -- enrollment is up across the board.
One memorable Thursday I got to eat dinner with a writer and a teacher of mine. He cooked an excellent meal. Part of me was thrilled that he cooked for me and my peers.

He didn't plant the seeds that grew into the vegetables he used. He didn't grind out the flour he used to cook. He didn't raise the cattle, or clean the meat. He just took some finished products and he made a meal.

Every step of any process requires an awesome effort. I'm just as impressed with the people who wrote those many, many laters. But in the end, design is that layer you're talking about, and Posterous is very well-designed, and when I use a web site that's all that I care about. That's the product of the Posterous team, and it's a pretty awesome one.

Why bother doing anything if all you're ever doing is building a thin layer? Could it be that any product is a result of lots of people working on something, and that each contribution is integral? Nah, couldn't be. We're all insignificant and nothing is awesome.

What happened to the ability of hackers to look at something cool and say "Gee golly wow"? I still do that all the time, and every time I do I get these little snide remarks. Why? What harm is there in thinking that lots of things are awesome? Lots of things are awesome! Life is so awesomely super-duper cool! Let's not ruin it by sneering.
I have had a fascination with machining for a while, are you guys practiced in the art?
3.0 SDK beta is available today. Can't wait to try it out.
going to add that the first bit regarding getting to cash flow profitability and making some short terms adjustments to reach that stage is solid, not new but def good advice.
No, and I'm not about to go digging around to find one, because:

1, I have better things to do and I've already said my piece and spent enough time on this;

2, I don't think it's sensible to make business decisions based on whether or not your competitors do a particular thing. By that metric, Amazon doesn't need to provide awesome customer service because their competitors don't either. (See also Guy Kawasaki's Rules for Revolutionaries.)
I think we all know that people who are unhappy with something usually speak up louder than those who are happy; as such, claiming that "every other" MacBook Air is flawed is (likely) severely exaggerated.

My girlfriend has a MacBook Air, it's the perfect laptop for her — it's light (she's a Uni student), well-designed, and runs fast enough to satisfy all her needs. No issues with it, so far.
Some people like hacking things, making them work, and then leaving it even more broken for the next person. I don't, which is why I can't work on Wordpress. Every time you change the code, it should be cleaner than it was before, especially if the code is a project that you expect other people to be able to easily start working on.

As to your other point, nice troll.
It is easy to allow plugins, themes, and easy installation without resorting to Wordpress' horrible architecture.
You really should watch the live coverage by someone other than engadget. I get the impression their person is only there because someone threatened to fire him if he didn't go.

If you are looking for information the Grumpy Mystery Science Theater version of the live cast is the wrong place to be.
This goes both ways, you never know if the technician knows what their talking about or if they're just another dolt reading from a script.
Dreamhost have a pretty bad reputation, but its amazingly good value as long as you understand a few things.

You arent going to be live 24/7, in the 4 years or so ive been with them I have been down 3 times for more than a day, and a few sporadic is it down / is it up moments.

It isnt going to be the fastest connection in the world, mine is reasonably fast, but it has slow moments.

people hosting business critical applications are just asking for trouble.

but past that, you have a lot of preinstalled software, svn takes a minute to set up, ssh access which you can install most things you want on and a silly amount of bandwidth / space. its pretty perfect for a first host, to put a blog up and share images folder etc.

Part of their bad reputation is from how transparent they are, they are honest about when they go down and what the fault is, their sense of humour about everything grates some people, but I appreciate not being given a canned coorporate response
I often found myself wanting to copy stuff from my to-do list to an email message. Or a URL from Safari.
I've noticed something really interesting about articles that
criticize Java or PHP. The comments defending Java or PHP are always
attacks, they are never technical arguments. (This is a perfect
example. It's clear that the parent is a PHP fan, but can't think of
any technical grounds to argue on.) This is really sad -- if you like
something, you should know why. You should also like things for
reasons other than "it's the only thing I know".

(As for Java, I wrote an article about things I don't like about Java
on my blog, and all of the comments were either "I agree" or
literally, "U are the dumbest person in the world." Maybe, but at
least I can spell "you".)
Atwood is starting to become Emmanuel Goldstein around here.

Am I in time for today's Two Minute Hate?
I was surprised to see in-app sales were only for paid apps. I imagine a big market where apps "hook" a user by being free, then make money from in-app sales.
So, I see where you are coming from, but one advantage Google has in any vertical is the ability to do PageRank. Google crawls billions of pages, and the results they give you in any given "vertical" benefit from being ranked by the directed graph of all pages, not just the "vertical" pages. You seem to think that limiting the number of pages you look at is an advantage, but I'd suggest it's a big disadvantage. Google is very good at not returning irrelevant results, even while using them for context.

Looking at your points above, in my experience, Google already provides "perfect answers," which often link the docs. I have no problem with how current the results are - they often include recent bug reports. And I think your custom relevancy algorithms are nice, but I think you'll find that Google's results are so good, because they crawl so many pages. Their algorithms aren't generic - they are highly advanced indexing and linguistic analysis, mixed with machine learning to tune the thing.

I think that if you are trying to return the most relevant web pages for a query, it's going to be a long uphill battle to beat Google. I have never thought to myself - "Google isn't doing a good job, I wish there were a Django search engine." I can always answer my Django questions using Google.

When you are looking to make money off of something too, it's important to be a painkiller, and not a vitamin. And right now, I don't have any Django search pain.

Good luck with the thing though. I'll check back later to see how you are doing. I encourage you not to try and compete with Google though, that is to get in the game of "returning lists of webpages." If you want to make a good Django search, you'll need to find a different niche. Your point about metadata sounds interesting.
It's promoted by Esperanto Corporation, a front for Shadowloo.

"Of COURSE!"
what? no, this is ridiculous.

did jim cramer or CNBC directly cause the financial meltdown? of course not. but that does not excuse bad/irresponsible behavior of the individual or lower levels.

edit #3: i'm having trouble getting my point across correctly, i feel, so i'm going to just leave it at what i've written.
Do you Twitter or micro-blog? Help save the Earth
References, by and large, are useless.

Marissa Mayer says, in all their studies of the Google interviewing process, references are the best indicator of future performance.
Clippy resurrects himself from the grave and pops up in the lower right-hand corner

It looks like you're trying to copy and paste. Would you like to pay $0.05 in order to continue? (Continue/Cancel)

It looks like you're trying to exit the application. Would you like to pay $0.10 in order to continue? (Exit and pay $0.10/Stay for free)

It looks like you're shocked to see one of Microsoft's worst creations pwn your smartphone. Would you like to buy a copy of iLithium(R), iXanax(TM), or iProzac(TM) to soften the blow for $14.99? (Yes/No)
Ask HN: Consider Banning Infoworld
Also see users 'ccraigIW' and 'snydeq' at http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=ccraigIW http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=snydeq.

Notice they both have left no comments and only submit Infoworld. The articles do not generate much discussion. I suggest we will lose nothing banning Infoworld.
No kidding. My point was that the line count difference is probably not principally a matter of Wordpress being terrible or PHP being inferior to Clojure, but mainly of having a radically simpler feature set.
Because powers of 10 are less useful than other more useful numbers like 60. That's why IMHO metric isn't generally as useful for day to day uses. eg you get a dozen rolls from the baker so you can divide them between 2,3,4 or 6 people. Getting 10 would be silly.
But other people work on Wordpress all of the time. The sheer number of plugins, themes, etc. all testify to that. And if it's so broken, then why do so many people deploy it day after day?

Can you cite specific examples of where it is broken?

Or why don't you say what you really mean: Because it's written in PHP it must be junk.

And, seriously, who is trolling who? You posted how broken it was, and that you're building something new and better, but don't provide any examples of how Wordpress is broken exactly.

I can have Wordpress installed and working in under 15 minutes. I'm not sure how that is broken.
According to this article:
http://www.theness.com/neurologicablog/?p=27

This news article, like many others, ignores the true source of this optical illusion and instead claims it is a quick test to see if you use more of your right brain or left brain. This is utter nonsense, but the “right-brain/left brain” thing is in the public consciousness and won’t be going away anytime soon. Sure, we have two hemispheres that operate fine independently and have different abilities, but they are massively interconnected and work together as a seamless whole (providing you have never had surgery to cut your corpus callosum).

...

Further, how your visual cortex constructs this optical illusion says nothing about your hemispheric dominance, and is absolutely not a quick personality profile.
Ask HN: Why don't I get some indication of a response to my comments?
One thing I like about Reddit is I get a little red mail icon when someone responds to my comments.

I tend to check if someone has answered my current comments on HN, but if someone answers something I wrote a while ago, or in a deep thread, I'll likely miss it.

I'd really like to get some indication when I get a response. This seems good for the community too, in that it promotes more conversation.

It seems sort of sadistic to make me dig through my old comments to see if I missed anything.
From its Wikipedia article:

"The illusion has been incorrectly[3] identified as a scientific personality test that supposedly reveals which hemisphere of the brain is dominant in the observer. Under this unproven interpretation, it has been popularly called the Right Brain–Left Brain test,[4] and was widely circulated on the Internet during late 2007 to early 2008."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spinning_Dancer
What was the report on streaming video? if it's what i think it is, this is a huge win for qik and others.
I suggest we lose nothing by not banning them.

It's not like the articles ever trickle to the top. That's the beauty of the site. And if someday, they actually submit a good article, then I want to see it. We don't need some heavy-handed witch hunt.
My Life in Child Porn
Offering in-app sales in free apps would be bad for user experience. When you download a free app you do so without intention to spend any money-only to try it out.

A lot of developers may try to abuse this by creating tons of free apps with paid content. Then it will be impossible to know whether the apps your downloading are really free.
ah yes, the weekly "why don't we ban (insert site here)" thread. i liked what came of last week's:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=510309
if you need more @charactersJustUseAt
Motorola KRZR K1m Motokrzr CDMA
Motorola KRZR K1m Motokrzr Fire CDMA Verizon is a phone built for the fashion minded individual. While looks it has in spades thanks to the thin frame and reflective body paint it certainly doesn’t lack in the features department.
So, awesome customer service is the goal. And awesome is defined as not 14 days, but 30 days. Wouldn't it be even more awesome at 90 or 365 or 1000? These organizations have to draw the line somewhere. You've drawn yours quite forcefully at 30. It's interesting that you expect so much more than any company (that we can think of) delivers, and insist that you won't deal with Dreamhost until they hit this metric. I'd love to know who you host with, or if you don't, then who you might eventually find that "fits the bill" for you.
Make something people want. People don't want metric. Give up on it... The UK is similarly un-metric. Be proud of it!
Definitely nginx with FastCGI for Django. At my previous company it drove all the 30+ sites.
You're not the first to ask for this. I have asked before, and there is a feature request submitted on the feature requests thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363
Windows Azure goes down for early adopters
Man puts USB drive in his finger
I have no idea why this is getting downmodded. I think it's funny. Maybe I'm just the right age for this joke.

Obviously, this in-app payment feature was deliberately designed to be irritating and intrusive. Apple understands that, to most paying customers, the word micropayment carries a connotation of being slowly and imperceptibly bled to death by vampires. So perhaps Apple is going to provide an API which turns in-app charges into such an ugly, flow-shattering experience that nobody could possibly miss it -- which will also compel app designers to avoid using this feature unless they really have to.
I'd say the main point of the talk is out intuition is often wrong therefore it should be tested whenever possible.

It seems obvious, but more often when not the wrong assumptions are not tested.

* When reminded of their own (self-image) morality, people cheat less

* Magnitude of cheating is independent from a risk to be caught (people are predictably irrational)

* When a member of a group demonstrates cheating behaviour, members cheat more. When non-member of a group demonstrates cheating, people cheat less

From the above it follows that players on the stock market are doomed (or blessed) to cheat.
We also should be careful with Macbook Pros especially the unibody ones...
Or, for me, "Put on your big girl panties."
They take time to get it perfect :/
I think this company tries to do stuff with legal texts: www.cataphora.com
There have been some awesome husband/wife start-ups, too, though.
Every good tech implementation will be abused. I'm sure games will come out that don't leech away on their users, just as some will make lots of money by suckering out lots of micropayments.
It's possible to abuse any feature. I can see this being a win-win for apps that provide layers of value (depth).
Applause because the iPhone went from being the best mobile phone despite lacking major features, to the best mobile phone which lacks no major features.
MMS and C&P are a go.

Backgrounding and video would be nice, but when I think "phone features" they're not what come to mind.
It will be interesting to see what happens with the pricing for those apps. On other phone platforms, they usually cost over $100 per year. A very bad deal, IMO.