skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To answer this and similar questions: http://xkcd.com/1053/ :).
> GitHub's code browser works instantly like I would browse the code locally (except the annoying slide-in animation).

Gah, the slide-in animation is the worst. It breaks all the time. The majority of my bug reports to github are about their lame transitions. Evidence:

http://heybryan.org/shots/2012-11-26-1209-github-fail.png

http://heybryan.org/shots/2012-12-03-1530-wtf-github.png
Building a niche site and links
I've found a few keywords that are not that competitive and made a niche site (hair care).
Right now there are 2 pages with a small bit of content (around 200 words), but I'm planning to write more this week.

The problem I have now is that I have no idea how to build links to this niche. I don't want to submit the site here, or to reddit, out of fear of being called a spammer.

Are there any tools (something like google alerts) that help me find recent discussions about my niche, so that I can enter the discussion there?
I agree that Ubuntu is pretty much ruined after version 10.10 or so, but I just got a MBP Retina when I started a new job last July and wish I'd gone with something that could run linux.

He describes a seamless, responsive experience but I feel neutered AND I've had numerous unexplained crashes, application incompatibility and (by far the worst) ... I can't find substitutes for all the applications I rely on.

I'm not willing to call it bad, and certainly not unusable, but it's also not the paradise he's describing.

Executive summary: If you're going to be a power user on a consumer OS, you're going to have issues that require the brains that make you a power user.
Reading this from an Arch Linux machine with everything configured to my liking from the system initialisation to package management to window management to terminal emulators feels very strange. Why would I ever want to give up knowing exactly what buttons to press to make my system behave the way I want it to?

The problem is probably: "Googling for some obscure mail archive to find I need to change “bop” to “boop” in /etc/something/config.ini. The amount of time that I had to spend doing this crap was growing instead of shrinking."

If you take the time and patience to understand your system and sift through man pages, configuration time will obviously shrink. If it's growing it's because you've never sat down to truly understand the cogs and screws of your system.

On the other hand, not everyone wants to read man pages, they'd rather something that "just works"... which Mac does way better than Ubuntu, unsurprisingly.
under the assumption that something like "reading a book" is considered productive

1) surfing the web from my couch

2) some games like plants vs. zombies are sublime on a tablet, much better than on a pc imho

3) pdfs read much better than on a pc or a kindle

4) comic books (cbz and cbr files) on a ~10" tablet are almost as good as the real thing

5) when docked, my tablet makes a fantastic picture frame showing the photos in my google+ account

6) there's some music production software that are really quite good, I like Caustic myself, there's similar for iOS.

7) lots and lots and lots of pretty decent painting apps

8) I use it to see notifications, task, etc. things that I've entered from my PC into some "cloud" service. calendars, trello tasks, etc. Just bringing my tablet into a meeting with trello pulled up on it makes it seem like a have a super human memory and is far less intrusive than a laptop

9) use it as a third monitor, there's some great wifi streaming apps that tell your OS to use it as another monitor. Sure it's a bit slow, but if I stash my email program over there, or a shell that's tailing a log or something, it's perfectly adequate

10) better yet, just put a shell app on there direct and ssh into the server and tail the app that way, keeping tabs on a long running startup process while I'm in the bathroom has never been easier

11) remote to my PC running VLC...it's awesome for this, I can seek fast forward and rewind, control volume, pause play, whatever...custom home touch panel remotes don't hold a candle to this

things I don't do

try to type non-trivial amounts of text quickly without a keyboard, which is where most of the examples from this post are about, which is weird since he's using a transformer prime...who's entire point is the keyboard dock
I live in a country where less than 7 people in every 100 owns a gun and where there are less than 50 homicides per year due to firearms.

You live in a country where 88 out of every 100 citizens owns a gun and with less than 5% of the world's population, you are home to roughly 35–50 per cent of the world's civilian-owned guns. [1]

You have a cultural problem that other countries simply do not have - more guns do not make you collectively "safer".

[1] http://m.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2012/jul/22/gun-homici...
Howto: Glanceable UI on Android
Those are great pictures, but the claim that drawing flow charts saved time in the punch card era doesn't make sense to me. My bet is that, then as now, good programmers soon discovered that they were a waste, favored only by textbook writers and managers. They are a non-programmer's idea of what a program ought to look like. There have always been far more powerful tools to work with in the absence of a keyboard, like pencil and paper—not to mention just plain thinking.

There are many programmers around who worked with punch cards. I have often heard them emphasize how important it was to get your program right the first time, because compile time was so lengthy and scarce. But I've never heard one say "that's why it was important to draw a flow chart first". If they had, I'd remember; it would have been such a surprise!

Some HNers must have been programming in those days. I'd like to hear from them about this.
No kidding, the last console game I bought was by an indie developer, cost about $2 and was downloaded over the aether.
The t-shirt is neither sexist or offensive, nor particularly funny. People, please spend your moral outrage on real issues. Honestly, PHP as a language is way more offensive than the shirt is.
Strangely, I heard a very similar rant from my Dad when he swore up and down he had no use for a cell phone. He left it turned off and in the glove box of his car initially because the only use for it he could imagine was if he was on the road somewhere and couldn't find a pay phone.

When folks ask me "What is a Tablet good for?" I tell them its a TV you can carry around. Oh and you can read books and news papers on it. Oh and you can look at pictures you've taken on it. Oh and you can video chat with someone on it. Oh and it will give you directions on how to get some where.

I have a keyboard case for those times when I need to use an ssh client to do something, I sometimes compose comments to HN on the train, but I don't really do any development on the thing.

But I also know that my finding a place for it in my work flow is completely orthogonal to my Dad doing the same. (although he immediately got an retina ipad when they came out to preview pictures he takes, its a much better preview than the display on his DSLR)
This resonated with me - when I am at the computer I just want to get things done - not spend billable time working out why xrandr is not giving the output I need.

I have worked on a FreeBSD machine for years and am now heading to a Debian box - I have been down this route before sadly - but I jus can no longer afford the time to setup and run a box that takes real effort to setup.

I may give virtualised machines one more shot but really I do just want it to work.
Whoops, I missed the line at the bottom of that page which says that this quote has not been found in any of Jefferson's writings. They should really make it more prominent.

How about a substitute?

"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it's natural manure."

And:

"The boisterous sea of liberty is never without a wave."
What? Before Steam, brick and mortar PC sales were already down. Even stores like Gamestop and Bestbuy lowered their inventory. At the end of the day people just wanted to pop in a disc and have the game work without worrying about patches, drivers, and expensive hardware config. I feel that this was one of the main reasons for the downfall of PC Gaming back then, besides consoles catching up in terms of graphical quality.

While Steam doesn't solve everything, it makes the software portion of config way easier; not to mention the games are way cheaper than what normal retail stores would charge.
Problem is, I dont want to fix my operating system. I want it to... operate, so I can get on with work.
Though I understand the frustration that linux can provide at times, its a direct consequence of the freedom it gives you. Don't like unity. Sure, use xfce, or xmonad if that's your thing.
You get what you pay for.

I don't see why everyone feels the need to constantly throw their own opinions and use cases in for why one OS is better than another. If Ubuntu doesn't fit your needs and Mac does... good. Don't see why stuff like this gets so many upvotes though.
I appreciate your response, and I also appreciate the wonderful spirit of freedom embodied in American culture. However, I can't help but find it ironic that the United States' celebration of freedom harks back so strongly to a war with a country that has been its closest ally for the best part of a century.
The only problem I have with this is that (and I say this as an Apple user) it is becoming clearer and clearer that Apple is pushing their desktops to be a good experience for people that don't know how to use computers, which (so far and IMO) caused a poor experience for people that do know how to use their computers.

The experience on Mountain Lion is irritating enough for me that I am considering switching back to Linux (it works fine on my old laptop, even wireless). My current laptop is still running Snow Leopard and I think their next update will determine if I ever purchase another Apple computer again.
The last month or so, I've taken the author's advice when they start an article with TL;DR. Thanks for saving me time!
May I humbly suggest Linux Mint? I had all the same problems as you and I made the switch a couple months ago and could not be happier. It's been more stable, the monitor config is better, the UI is way better than unity IMHO. Also my laptop is running way faster, I'm pretty sure the switch freed up 250mb of ram.

Anyway I've also been eying a Mac, but running Mint has been making it really hard to justify buying one.
It's not been a month since the last time I posted my list of research articles on the productivity drop you get from not having teams co-located so I won't post it again in full... but for those who are interested you may find these old discussions of interest:

* http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5145358

* http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5071701

* http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4800412

I'm always on the look out for new non-anecdotal research on the topic if anybody finds any!
Perform Recurring Billing on the 3rd and the 17th of the Month
Apple's Official Technician Guide for the iPhone 4/4S [Leaked]
Stuck at Loading... after successfully loading several Loading... screens.

Gotta say I've never been so impressed with the loading capabilities of a game engine before.

FF 19.0 OS 10.8.2.
Yeah dude the gun slaughter of 20 children in an elementary school wasn't even going to make national news until "the Democrats" and their "near-monopoly control of the media" got a hold of it. Good thing there are people like you who can pierce through the bullshit with the Eye of Truth.
I'm actually pretty much in the same place. I spend most of my time in front of windows and all I can say is that it is the spawn of hell. When it works, it works pretty well but if something goes wrong you're going to lose half a day to it easily. For example recently we had a client who couldn't download a document in their IE8 on Windows XP due to a cache control bug. It took literally hours to find the issue and get a resolution (which involved setting an undocumented registry flag to an undocumented hex value) and having to issue a group policy update to about 5000 people.

Same with Ubuntu although to be honest it just doesn't work properly, ever. Nothing whatsoever ever does what you tell it and it's a shit to maintain. I'm stuck with two LTS 10.04 machines and there is no long term support - they've shipped a broken MySQL version for 2 years. It's so reliable they turned off hibernate! Launchpad is like an arid desert when it comes to support. We even had paid support from Canonical and it was shit. All out Linux stuff is on debian now.

I've owned a few Macs as well and they've been the most hassle free devices so far although I've had some serious hardware problems such as a 2010 MBP catch fire on me. Before it caught fire, it was the only machine I didn't have to wait for all the time or argue with.

I now reside on a windows 7 x64 on a ThinkPad t61 with virtualbox running debian for dev work.

Persuade me to buy another Mac! What has changed in the last 2 years?
Actually math and stats applications are very common, developers could really benefit from knowing more math, recognizing known problems and applying known solutions. People just do things the dumb way more often than not, and then spend months if not years fixing the mess they've created.
Very similar experience here. Got a MBP for work in 2011 - never looked back, it just works and lets me get to work. The amount of time I need to spend tinkering with this is just tiny!

Also, it really feels like Homebrew is a better apt than apt ever was!
Could be. This is Boston. Remember Aqua Teen Hunger Force?

I'd still like to know what actually happened, though.
"Productive" is used in its more literal definition here: producing, m/aking, creating. It doesn't have to be shakespeare or picasso to still be a creative work.
AppleCare Service Training Doc for Macbook Pro Retina [Leaked]
Can someone change the title to indicate there's a registration required?

Thanks!
Cheers, me too. Any ideas on what to switch to?
I thought I'd write a graf about how much I disliked the "Screening" section of this, with its instruction for candidates to have "attitude" and to "make it fun" for him, but then I reread it and at the end he's saying things like "send him an email about one of his blog posts", and that sounds totally sane.

I recommend reconsidering "culture fit". The "culture fit" meme is poisonous. Mostly to the profession, but also to you, because it'll cause you to eject people who would be solid performers, eventually in favor of prima donnas who will underperform, feel no ownership of their work, and use your team solely as a stepping stone.

If you're convinced that "culture" matters, find a way to distill it to the culture attributes that directly implicate job performance. But then make sure those attributes don't exclude whole classes of life circumstances, like parenthood.

PS: I interviewed at Bloomberg about 10 years ago and enjoyed the experience immensely. I got hammered with concurrency and distributed systems questions; everyone who talked to me was smart. Maybe it depends on the group you're talking to there.
Apple iPhone Visual/Mechanical Inspection Guide [Leaked]
The "Daily Show" is an interesting phenomenon because it's like, we're still going to feed you the corporate 24-hour news garbage, but we're going to do it satirically so that you can feel superior to all the plebes who watch this stuff "for reals".
Invest in America: Re-evaluate the NASA budget
When I read, I come up with ideas. Key is to stay off News, FB.
How cheap is it to start ie how much is the dev subscription and how much do you have to pay for hardware?
he is holding ubuntu to a different standard. he expects ubuntu to install on arbitrary hw, but he's willing to buy a dedicated "just works" device for osx. well, they do sell these for ubuntu as well.

no linux distro will install on arbitrary hw. nor will osx.
3 hours of overlap with the SO is really not much, but I guess it depends on the people involved and the circumstances.
You must realize that the gun is not a shield and that you cannot block projectiles from other guns with it. Your protection is the fear that you might instill in a possible attacker by being able to kill him/her first. If you're fast enough. And always alert. Always suspicious of your surroundings. Always ready to unleash that preemptive strike you've been training for every week. But you're not living in fear. No sir...
Each OS has its own quirks.

I bought a Mac in 2011 my first ever after about 18 years of Windows PCs which included about 17 years of Linux. I still use both, I even have Windows 8 and Ubuntu 12.10 with Unity.

Macs can be infuriating with some quirks such as no true delete key only backspace which for ex-PC users is labeled "delete". (Yes I know fn+delete=PC style delete).

On a Mac you click a file to highlight it then press delete key gets? Nothing. The intuitive reaction would be it deletes the highlighted file, nope. Sure command+delete but a mouse click and then two keys really? Very inefficient.

Transferring files to a USB stick such as an mkv refuses to move. Lots of space HFS, FAT32 or NTFS formatted? Nope, won't move.
I left reddit to get away from those with facile arguments which relied on an appeals to emotion rather than logic and fact. Yours is one of the former.

But I'll bite anyways: how many more children have died under oppressive regimes where the people were not able to defend themselves?
Loved the presentation and looking forward to the book. Appreciate you taking the time away from your business to do this — it's nice to get an honest feel for how someone else has done it, mistakes made, and successes achieved.

We need to share more like this among entrepreneurs — the Marc Andreessen quote about the entrepreneurial roller coaster of euphoria and doom is spot on.
I can say that when I was stationed in Germany that I felt safer.

I grew up around guns. I was a pretty good shot -- expert with the M16, M60.

But I own no guns now. I never will.

I simply don't understand how someone can feel safer around a loaded gun. It's a fallacy to think that because you've gone through training, or that you go to the range, or whatever, that you are better equipped to handle a weapon; it's akin to claiming that you are safer walking around with a lit stick of dynamite -- just because you have done it a lot.

Which leads to why I felt so much safer in Germany. It wasn't the idea that criminals didn't have guns, it was that every empty-headed fool didn't have one. The real problem is that I am subjected to every fool's second-ammendment rights. It's not just that they can blow their own head off with their foolishness, but that me and my family are also endangered by them.

Although they may be our family, friends and neighbors; although they may be good people; they endanger us through their "rights." I would much rather live in the "danger" of a place where only criminals, police and soldiers carry weapons than to live in the "safety" of a place where any fool with a pinch of paranoia who has watched too many action-adventure apocalyptic movies can play soldier.
This lack of fear is interesting, because Britain's violent crime rate is higher than the US.

"Swann noted that in the UK, there are 2,034 violent crimes per 100,000 people. By contrast, there are 466 violent crimes per 100,000 here in America." - http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2013/01/10/fox-af...

(I couldn't find a list of countries on Wikipedia sorted by violent crime, only by intentional homicide, so this is the best source I could cite in the time available for making this comment)

Edit to add: I believe that abandoning fear of negative outcomes is the solution to many of our problems, not tightening the reins on society to try to prevent negative outcomes.
Wow is recruiting and hiring practice ever not a dead horse.
I'm using Ubuntu, and I have to say Mac's are very alluring. It's a *NIX operating system that's actually smooth and works without constant bugs.

I love Ubuntu but it can be incredibly frustrating. Every day single time I connect to wifi or ethernet I get system errors. Slowdowns, especially with the unity dash, are so frequent that I simply don't use it. I know where all my files are so I usually just open a Terminal and run nautilus to the directory I want. If I can get away with it I run software from the terminal, or else I have it on the dock and remember the keyboard shortcut.

When I think about it, I never use any of the fancy gui. I don't use the open window viewer, or the worspace switcher, and, as I said, I try my best to just hide the dock and remember the keyboard shortcuts.

Still, it's free and so much better than Windows
The snark is unnecessary. Gun control advocates have had these goals for decades - long before Newtown - and openly speak about them. There is no tinfoil hat, no new world order. Just a political agenda by a minority of the political spectrum that uses tragedy to their advantage without apology.
“If you take the time and patience to understand your system and sift through man pages, configuration time will obviously shrink. If it's growing it's because you've never sat down to truly understand the cogs and screws of your system.”

That's a very big “if”. The author said “I was tired of spending time on my computer working on my operating system instead of working on my projects.”
But if I understand correctly, human eye can't focus on things that close to them.
I think everyone can figure out that he was talking about how hard it is for a small shop or lone developer to get their app on the big three console stores.
I'm an adult -- well, close enough, 25 -- and my mother is a programmer (mostly C#).
I am perfectly happy to increase my probability of violent death from 1 in 100000 to 2 in 100000 if it means I also increase my probability of enjoying an annual Thanksgiving tradition with my family and community from 0% to 100%.

Edit: your reference appears to lump suicide and homicide together, which is not germane to a discussion about gun control. I'd wager that studies would find there's a correlation between owning over the counter or prescription medications and the risk of medication-induced death in the home.
ubuntu server. you get all of the core competencies of ubuntu without any imposition of UI. you can install a wm easily post-install without the tweaking required to get stock desktop ubuntu to use an alternate wm
If you ever feel alone in this...
There are many reasons I'd love to be using a Gnu/Linux system over a Mac but I fiercely, passionately and vehemently don't want to be reading man pages and editing config files to get my damn hardware to work. Too old for that shit.
What stops your MBP from running Linux?
> "I bet this article about how awful Unity is"

I don't think it is. Its about the entire environment - note how he talked about backups, printers, trying in Gnome, etc. I don't think he's saying Ubuntu is bad, but its nothing like the polished experience of a Mac. (FYI: I used debian from 2001, Ubuntu from 2005 after briefly trying Gentoo, and switched to Mac in 2011).

> However, not going to Debian/Mint/any other alternative and just choosing to dump thousands of dollars for a new environment is something I would not do personally.

Here's the thing - that's what everybody said. You know all those Macbooks you see developers with - they all dumped something to get there, mostly Ubuntu and Windows. The entire developer ecosystem dumped thousands of dollars of working hardware and poor OSes because Macs are really that much better.

Try it! Honestly - you will not look back.
Ubuntu Docs: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WifiDocs/WiFiHowTo

Arch Wiki: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Wireless_Setup

I don't know about others but for me one of the above is clearly superior and really the biggest reason for it being my OS of choice.
Italiani al voto. Programmi elettorali in pillole