skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>My first encounter of this was the stupid filesystem abstraction iPhoto decided to enforce upon me.

iPhoto is an application. Not the OS. Tons of apps in Windows and Linux that work with similar abstractions as iPhoto. If you don't like the abstraction use another app. There are around 10-15 for photo management on the Mac, from big guns like Lightroom and Aperture to tons of lightweight image managers.

That said, what you write makes no sense. You might as well have written: "My first encounter of this was the stupid filesystem abstraction PostgreSQL decided to enforce upon me" (I want my tables in plain CSV files, damnit!).

>This slowly cranked on until I ended up with basically OS-X as a window manager for a terminal emulator, browser, ViewNX and Apple Mail connected to GMail (which didn't work properly either and ended up just being done in a browser).

I fail to see how it "didn't work properly". Been using Gmail and Mail.app for 7 years. Any particular real-world problem?

>As iWork was shit and corrupted documents left right and centre

Never had that.

>Granted I could have used Office for Mac but it was the 2004 version which was a POS that relied on Rosetta.

Ever thought of upgrading it?
Simplify the Firefox API's. The J2EE-like APIs in Firefox are complicated and a big turn off. Make debugging background pages easier. Make logging easier. We've built several extensions on Chrome, Firefox and IE. NOBODY volunteers to do Firefox or IE tasks. Chrome is fun.
I'd like to see a way to compare the CSS values on two different elements, like two buttons that should look the same, but aren't. I do a lot of manually flipping between the two elements, and trying to spot the differences in the property list. But it's pretty clumsy that way. :)
OSX has a very narrow band of hardware and peripherals to worry about supporting, so they can afford to spend person-hours on device drivers and compatibility layers.
Yup. I wrote AutoCAD add-ons. Public domain and some shareware. The "big money" was in site licenses. Architects wouldn't pay for anything. But anyone doing work for the government was serious about making sure they had licenses for everything.

Promotion and distribution were major challenges. You'd upload your wares to CompuServe, BBSes, etc. I'd also visit conventions and tour user groups. I never felt the need for classified ads (not targeted enough).

The real shareware players had their own BBSs. I went a bit further and started a network of CAD/CAM, computer graphics themed BBSs and served as the hub. Much like FidoNet. It was huge fun, but a lot of work.

Someone else noted that majority of income came from consulting/contracting and some writing. That was my experience too. I had the view "your work is your resume" and publishing shareware was the best way to get known. Much like working on some open source projects today.
But he concludes "Linux just never managed to cross the desktop chasm." Direct quote in conclusion. That's a far cry from saying Ubuntu is not as easy to use as a Mac.
I think he's right, for desktops that try to do a lot, or for people who expect their desktops to do a lot. Gnome and Unity and KDE try to do too much, if you want what they're trying to do you might think of Windows or Mac and ssh to a VM or a server. That's fine.

My own view of the linux desktop is just something to give me nicely presented terminals and a very wee bit of eye candy. I use Lubuntu for that. Some urxvt terminal windows, a nice basic graphical browser and imap client, I'm good to go. I don't care if I can watch a movie or not (I can), most of the sound I want plays and never stops working (can't play midi for some reason, meh).

The tool chain he talks about is right here.

I want minimal things on the desktop, and Linux does that, minimal things, really well. Especially with something like Lubuntu or vanilla LXDE, it's a really nice implementation of the screen or tmux idea.
Before the destruction of the Enlightenment by philosophers like Immanuel Kant.
Codecademy Now Teaches PHP
To be honest, retail is basically sticking around to service customers, and they aren't killing it completely, they are just requiring manager approval.
It's not a complex algorithm, it's a static website run from wordpress that could be faster by any of these: S3, CloudFront, memcache, APC, or even file caching.

Yes, you could spin up any number of AWS to throw ab / httperf traffic at it, but why? HN has demonstrated how inadequate their server solution is.
Just focus on what I write and not on who I am.

Excuse my harsh words, but HN is for tech founders, for real entrepreneurs. This is just the wrong place for someone who was once a founder but is now employed for years (and writing such confusing posts).

EDIT: I am not sure who is spreading the hate here. Instead of distracting with mentioning "unmarked edits" just try to comment on the content of my post (which is about non-founders sitting in the safe haven and teaching us how startups work).

EDIT2: your account is also kind of a throw away account (karma: 3 and just one submission in one year)
Your title is wrong, it's not what he said at all. Why would you write such a sensationalist title? The quote is "To me, the fragmentation of Linux as a platform, ..., were my Three Mile Island/Chernobyl"

What he's saying is as clear as day: these are the issues (catastrophes?) that caused me to leave and not come back.
Dow Hits Record High; Time to Buy Tech?
There is a way. The bottom of the page and the end of the video link you to rdar://problem/12801387 . However, that is not a public site.

I do not agree with your assessment of what "embarrassing" means. This could as easily be an irate developer as a PR stunt. I believe the latter interpretation is more likely.

Here are some other examples of how "embarrassing bug" is used, in a style which is similar to what is used here:

Cloud computing: Amazon suffered a highly
embarrassing bug last spring when part of its much vaunted cloud service went down. Client websites such as Quora and Reddit were temporarily forced offline because they relied on Amazon’s servers - The Independent.

Microsoft's command-line utility for copying files, 'copy', has an embarrassing bug. If you command it to copy a folder into a new location, it instead copies the contents of the folder, and ignores the folder itself. Therefore, it does what you didn't tell it to do, and doesn't do what you told it to do. Therefore, that is an egregious, unforgivable, and incredibly embarrassing bug for Microsoft. -- http://nicholas.rinard.us/2012/07/embarrassing-bug-for-micro...

Incrediblly embarrassing bug CS4 -- http://forums.creativecow.net/thread/2/945614 (with autosave on, it does not save modified work on exit or ask if the work should be saved)

MICROSOFT`s EMBARRASSING BUG -- http://www.cbronline.com/news/microsofts_embarrassing_bug (2.01 - 2.00 = 0.00 in pre-Win95 versions of the desktop calculator)

As you can see, these aren't all written as PR stunts.
Youtube clip with music longer than video
Watch till the end - the music continues way past the video!??
If a professional job pays $400k, there's absolutely no way you can keep it with less than about a $300k (pre-tax) lifestyle, and that's if you're really good.

That is some of the most bizarre logic I've ever read. In what reality do people spend $300k to keep a $400k job? People who live a $300k lifestyle do so because they want the lifestyle and stick with the job to maintain that lifestyle, not vice versa? This is true of lawyers, doctors, and accountants.

If you have kids, your bosses will ask where they go to school and it will affect your promotion chances.

You must have worked for some seriously messed up companies. That is definitely not the norm in any of the industries I have worked in; if any of those firms tried something like that they'd lose all of their best people.

In fact, the major reason why it pays so much is because that is the economic cost of doing what the job requires (living in an expensive area, hiring a maid so you aren't distracted by chores).

What? No. A job pays that much because if they don't pay that much the employee will go to someone who pays them more to do the same work.

What we'd expect based on our knowledge of markets is that people would have to spend $1/year to keep a $1/year job.

That is nonsensical. People only take a job that would require them to break-even at the end of the year due to job-related expenses if they have no other employment options. Even in the unlikely event that is happening right now, it is due to the unique circumstances of the Great Recession inflating unemployment rolls, and is definitely not affecting all industries equally.

This is a deeper problem than people think. It's not just about "discipline" or will. There are people out there who are just severely below average in financial sense and, while they can play the social gymnastics necessary to get the $500k+ jobs, they can't make $1.00 without spending $1.10 (at any income level).

People don't spend more than they make to keep their job. They spend more than they make to live a lifestyle. The job supports the lifestyle, not the other way around.
Silent subwoofer
Anything by Queen :)
Where in the world did you pull a $6 CPM value from?
Good, good. Now slap XBMC on this thing and we're done!
Love the Woz. A extraordinary combination of quiet genius, generosity and humility.
They already started
http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/08/hbo-cuts-the-cord-br...
Would love this feature on a standard universal remote.
Podcast #33 – 10 ways to know if your content is crap with Damian Thompson
I was going to say something sarcastic about how most of us still remember the order of the alphabet, but then I realized that there is probably another reason for their choice. Unless the software keyboard is going to have four wide rows, alphabetical order is probably better. In the video the keyboard is a 6x6 grid, which lets it fit alongside the search results better.
Such a premium domain and it's just hosting a blog. What a waste of money.
Hi Sean! Feels good, but not as good as reconnecting with an old friend I've been out of touch with that happened today. It's been a good day.
Those keyboards are the devil, they're the most infuriating part of modern technology.

The most sensible work around seems to be generating passwords based on the keyboard type, having passwords that don't require jumping up and down left and right for every new character reduces the experience to a mild inconvenience. Fortunately I've not had to use a device with such a keyboard in a while, since putting my Apple TV in a box... if I ever have to go near one again then investing an hour putting together a keypad friendly password generator may be in order.
Gotta love Woz. So humble, such a brilliant mind, a pure hacker at heart. Need more guys like him and less turds like Mark Pincus (first one that comes to mind).
Militaries are like any large bureaucracy--they stagnate in the absence of competition. It's been a long time since the US military got its ass kicked.
I hate it when plugins try to override my colorscheme, so I would highly discourage adding this to the plugin. To account for colorschemes that don't add colors for SignColumn without angering users, use the `default` keyword without the bang.

Some other things to consider: The sign column and line numbers are separated by the fold column. The default colorscheme has SignColumn and FoldColumn the same (Cyan or DarkBlue on Grey) and different from LineNr (Yellow or Brown).
Dennis Hong On Robot Evolution and The Darpa Robotics Challenge
Thank you, dalke, for pointing out this big flaw in my understanding. I read through that link and many relevant web pages. What my essay proposes is mandatory licensing and not really open source. My vision for this license is to let people freely redistribute both the source and the binary and use it for either commercial or non-commercial purposes. However, if it was used for a commercial purpose, then a part of the revenue should be donated to a non-profit org.
Obviously that's great for us hacker types, but I doubt my mom would want to build her own HTPC.
I work at a large, non-military government entity. We're in the middle of making some big changes that when complete will save taxpayers a significant chunk of change, and improve the efficiency of a number of things.

I feel like I should be proud of being involved in such a thing -- I'm confident that we will succeed. But I have this lingering doubt as well. Streamlining administration will save money, but it will also introduce the situation that the writer's unit faced -- centralized administration.

Its been my experience that more often than not senior leadership is uniquely unqualified to make effective decisions at a tactical level. Executives are supposed to drive vision, not fiddle with minutiae, right? Compounding this is the idea of taking authority away from the folks down the line -- where is the new generation of leaders going to come from?
What do each of these equal?

1) Just 1 >>= \_ -> Just 2

2) Just 1 >>= \_ -> Nothing

3) Just 1 >>= \_ -> Nothing >>= \_ -> Just 2

4) Just 1 >>= \x -> Just(x+1)

5) Nothing >>= \x -> Just(x+1)

6) Just 1 >>= \x -> Just(x+1) >>= \x -> Just(x+1)

7) Just 1 >>= \x -> Just(x+1) >>= \y -> Just(x)

If you can answer all of those correctly, you should have a decent understanding of monads.

answers:

1) Just 2

2) Nothing

3) Nothing

4) Just 2

5) Nothing

6) Just 3

7) Just 1
Mercifully, MS put out an update for the 360 that made that keyboard into a QWERTY keyboard.
So, anyone who has a job shouldn't be on HN? Dude, I think think the vast majority of the HN community is employed by someone else. You can be into hacking and technology without being an entrepreneur.
Who's to say? HBO is inking 10-year exclusive content deals just to lock Netflix out. These are huge deals, like Universal Pictures & Focus, that take away any chance of Netflix streaming many blockbuster titles all the way through 2023. At the same time, HBO has its own streaming platform ready to go head-to-head with Netflix the moment it makes sense to break away from cable (currently generating billions of their revenue, so not too soon). They have much more original content than Netflix, and are running trials of streaming-only subscriptions in other countries.

HBO likely can become Netflix faster than Netflix can become HBO.
Interactive timeline of Java 0day vulnerabilities
I'm in the same boat but my plugin of choice is Tab Mix Plus. I can't function without multi-row tabs; my style of browsing is to open lots of tabs. Chrome becomes useless to me in 15-20 minutes of heavy work-related browsing due to too many tiny indistinguishable tabs.
Your point doesn't really make sense, though. As is often brought up in this discussion: see the example of Hushmail[1]. If you don't provide your own encryption mechanism, you cannot trust it, which is what Evbn is saying, I think. That's why it makes no sense as a Lab offering (and I'm not sure which is the worst option: encrypting the email in a browser via javascript or encrypting it after it's on the mail server and out of your control).

And of course you can use PGP with almost any email system right now. Just download thunderbird and enigmail (or whatever is the good one these days) and use gmail through IMAP.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hushmail#Compromises_to_email_p...
The idea of associating multiplication with the area of a rectangle seems to be very helpful. Commutativity falls directly out of that idea, and so does the basic algorithm for two-digit multiplication (I guess that is distributivity of + over *, explained by adding up areas).

Also, the idea of being able to mimic the calculator is fun for kids. They like to be able to find an answer, and then check with the calculator (or REPL).
I was thinking the person would click on the mailto link and it would open up in their default email client. From there they could add the contacts from their contact list.
Crawling with Mechanize
> so making every single person (99% who are unsubscribing on purpose) confirm, log in, enter their address or receive a confirmation is an infuriating waste of time.

If you are in the USA, it is also illegal. The CAN-SPAM Act[0] specifies that you can't ask the user for more than their email address[1]:

> "You can’t charge a fee, require the recipient to give you any personally identifying information beyond an email address, or make the recipient take any step other than sending a reply email or visiting a single page on an Internet website as a condition for honoring an opt-out request."

See also previous thread on HN[2]

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAN-SPAM_Act_of_2003

[1] Point 6: http://business.ftc.gov/documents/bus61-can-spam-act-complia...

[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4496688
The most bizarre part of this is coworkers ridiculing someone for using a completely modern browser that's just as up-to-date as Chrome, and possibly with better privacy. Completely bizarre to me. I'm glad I don't work there.
This is really worded funny. It's not embarrassing to Apple if you post it. It's only embarrassing if they determine it to be embarrassing and as far as I am concerned this is an extremely small use case.

Also can you PLEASE stop saying HTML5. It's soo annoying. HTML5 IS HTML. It could be HTML3 the bug would still appear :)
The 5% return rate for investments is taking inflation into account, actually.
> I think think the vast majority of the HN community is employed by someone else.

I don't think so. HN is YC is full of real entrepreneurs and risk takers. Most on HN are tech founders or at least employed but with having side projects and ambitions to get real founders. The OP is working at Facebook, proud of being an employee and having no side projects (otherwise he wouldn't blog about Gowalla years later).
This is neat, though I still prefer the Android-based Google TV boxes. It's had the same ability to search for shows, movies, actors and tell you what app or site to use to watch it now for years. The only reason I have both that and a Roku 2 is that someone's still holding a grudge against Google. It's practically the only STB completely locked out of Hulu Plus.
Personally I think this is just bad press for Linux by the Register and the article has an agenda.

I do not need to tinker with my Linux environment, my family has been using Linux on the desktop for years...

Just because some dev prefers a MAC and seems to be using a terribly broken system with bad package management and dependency issues does not mean the KDE, Gnome, Unity, Lxde, Fluxbox, E17, Openbox or Xfce... to name a few are failures on the desktop.

My E17 setup is vastly superior to any boring OSX environment... and yes it wakes up faster when I open the lid.
False, is it? I'm quoting the opening comment directly: "There are many libraries in Haskell which aren't even possible to write in Java". So that is the initial argument. It says nothing about computable functions and everything about possible libraries.

Or do you mean the argument itself is false? Well, a library providing new control structures certainly fits that! But yes, it's as false as my other claims--not false at all.

There are Turing-complete languages where you cannot add new control structures. (Or even ones where the concept of "control structure" does not apply.) So a library providing control structures would be impossible. And Haskell has a slew of libraries for control flow: everything in the Control.* namespace.

So both languages are Turing-complete and equally powerful, and yet certain libraries can only be written in one. This only makes sense for self-referential things, where the library somehow affects the language.

As far as self modifying code goes--it's not that the library modifies itself; rather, the library gives you tools for writing self-modifying code. If your language does not have this capability, such a library could not exist. But the language would still be Turing-complete!

The post seems to have cleared up nothing. Ah well, c'est la vie.
Kaspersky Labs: How scary can an old school programmer be?
is it a permanent install?
People used to ridiculing someone for not using IE6.

If you don't use the "norm" you are an outsider :) and frankly Chrome is the "norm" atm.
Yeah. Good grief. What kind of person ridicules a co-worker repeatedly for their browser choice? Even IE, maybe joke about it once and then move to something important like text editors.
Umm, you might want to check your math. Or perhaps your assumptions about buying power.

There's a reason retirement planning doesn't go down this path.
We just bought 2 XS but hey maybe we will upgrade in 3 or 4 years to what's out then, we enjoy Roku, with that and free HD over the air we dropped cable. The channels on Roku are great like NetFlix, CNET and IGN. The big news outlets are on there but usually just have clips. Still interesting to keep up to date. If only the History channel was on there, I miss at least two of their shows.
I think you hit the nail on the head. It's a PR stunt. It's an add that essentially says - look how smart we are, and this is our product. I mean no disrespect, but it smells.
I just sent a LinkedIn invite as well. If you connect with me, feel free to trawl through my list of connections and see if there's anyone you'd like to reach out to, through me. Even though I'm on the East Coast, I do have a few connections out in the Bay area. I'll email a couple of folks as well, and see if they might be able to help.
loving my carbon x1 touch after taking almost 2 months to get here. I even still have win8 on it!
I thought Gowalla was a beautiful app for the Palm Pre at the time. I was switching between that and Foursquare. In the end Foursquare won me over because of their dataset. I didn't have to constantly create new places to check in.

I think if they'd pivoted into something different where they focused on "seeing through your friends eyes" like the OP mentioned I think they would have been better off even if they'd failed. I did enjoy using the app but I could tell pretty quickly that playing the check-in game race was a losing one for them.
They also have a print hack which is kinda cool.

But most of their hacks are not 100%
Rich People Create Jobs (and other myths)
Competing vs Enabling
It's also not stated why this only happens after dragging the image into the document. The app renamed "Text edit" saved a text-only document without the error. But after he dragged the image in, it threw the error.

Why? This is a glaring omission from the presentation.

And then then comment, "I wish someone at Apple dogfooded..."

"DOGFOODED"?

Yes, this bug is amateur hour on Apple's part, and not the only time they've shown ignorance of paths with spaces. In 2013 that's pretty insufferable, in addition to the BS caused by sandboxing.

But be less douchey.
Orson Scott Card’s Controversial Superman Story Put on Hold
The problem is that the standard universal remote has one-way communication with the devices it controls. The Roku remote uses bluetooth to control the Roku, so adding audio was no big deal.
You do know that email clients send an email to the email sender that gets recorded correct? For example if you press Mark as Spam in hotmail. And AOL sent you the email using MailChimp, you will show up as "spam" in MailChimp.

That also gets dinged against the sender and an account can be suspended if its too high.

TLDR; you're not using it as it was intended.
I may have overstated this. It's not like they're giving me that much grief. We just all joke about it.
They're not ridiculing him. It's natural and desirable for developers to be curious about other developers' setup.

I agree Chrome has never made lots of tabs easy. Since I'm usually signing into multiple accounts, I have several windows open anyway, so don't feel the pain as much as I used to.

I find this point and the XHR annoyance not enough to sway me though. Devtools keeps getting insanely more powerful to the point where front-ends will probably be using it as a proper IDE in a couple of years.