skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's a hard question, because it is hard to remember everything we need to remember to judge older releases in their context.

For instance, at the Cupertino Apple Store opening event that happened to be around the launch of Mac OS X 10.2 ('Jaguar') I remember saying to Steve Jobs, rather snarkily, 'It's finally really good.'[1] That's because it felt like we had finally turned a corner and gotten an OS that wasn't this shiny, 'lickable' half-finished proof-of-concept draft of an operating system. It proved we weren't insane for buying into Apple's lofty promised and developing for Mac OS X. So I probably loved that release the most. But of course, wouldn't run it today even if it ran on modern hardware.

But 10.6 is also well-loved, as the numbers above show. It is rock-solid stable, and I still run my OS X-based servers on 10.6 (in VMWare VMs). Company git servers, non-public facing IMAP archive servers, customer support systems, whatnot... all run 10.6.8, and have for years.

As an end user (by which I mean software developer, mostly Mac, with some iOS and web stuff) I run 10.8, but I still find it really irritating and like 10.7 better. There's so much annoying crap in 10.8, both showstopping bugs and UI changes aimed at the lower-knowledge average-Walmart-shopper tier of computer user, that it gets in my way more than it helps me.

But we've already discussed that stuff on this forum many times[2], so I won't rehash it here. I'll just say that so far, 10.8 has made me love it less, not more, than 10.7, so that is what I picked above. (And currently, it looks like I am the only one to have done so.)

Also, a real lion would kick a mountain lion's ass.

[1]: Jobs handled my snarky comment the same impressive way he used to handle irate shareholders at the annual meeting: he acknlowedged but implicit criticism but didn't validate it, he accepted and accentuated the praise, and then he invited the people listening to him to join him in feeling good about all the awesome things Apple was doing.

He looked at me and said, 'You know what? You're right, it is finally really good.' He glanced around to include the other people standing around us in the conversation. 'Maybe we should use that in the ads. Mac OS X 10.2: it's FINALLY really good.' Polite laughter ensued, and then he went on to describe a couple of his favorite new features and how they were going to change the world.

[2]: e.g, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5346808
Is the Centralized Hospital Obsolete?
> Just like Gandhi say - first they ignore you, then they fight you, then you win. We are currently at step #2. I expect the heat against bitcoin to raise in the next weeks. It's a big threat for the current establishment cash cow.

Wow. Talk about the delusions of being persecuted. It is important to have a discussion about whether or not bitcoin is based on a sound system. Just stuffing hands in your ears and calling the critics names solves nothing. Having a decent conversation may help the system in the long run.
Hmm interesting.

Tesla mentions that he would apply a small pressure to his eyes, which would then cause geometric shapes to appear and strange patterns to develop. The patterns put him in a different mindset whenever he saw them.

Reading that truly hit me hard, since I did that while I was a kid. I didn't use it for any purpose though... I just thought it looked badass.

Thanks for the tips.
Dell: Little momentum in ARM servers until 64-bit processors
I agree that we can't infer their true beliefs (to the extent it even makes sense to talk about a corporation's beliefs), but I think the position that APIs should be subject to copyright is actually reasonable (though IANAL).
"In what possible reality can someone receive a million dollars and feel as though they got fucked?"

The reality where if you play for the Yankees you do not care if you beat the Jamestown Little League Allstars.
Note that Sarbanes-Oxley was passed after a major scandal, and Dodd-Frank was passed after a financial meltdown that spanned the globe.

What this shows is that Wall Street has America by the balls, and as long as they don't squeeze too tightly, there aren't going to be any restrictions on their behavior.
Last time I checked, Pandora's catalog was far too limited to be valuable to me for discovery. It was easy to come up with a half a dozen artists I like that Pandora had no clue about.

To me the word "discovery" means finding unknown works, not simply another way to listen to an artist who is already well established.

Pandora for discovery is a nonstarter, at least for me.
If you want to convince someone who doubts the existence of the "cat food factory", these examples suck. Okay, the assuming the woman is from HR but that the guy is from Eng, yeah, we all believe that one. It hasn't happened to us guys, maybe we can imagine making that mistake (and regretting it), etc. But the other two stories? That shit happens to guys all the time.

Yeah, sometimes people won't believe you. And then they'll ask someone else. And eventually they'll believe someone else, maybe. And that someone else will probably be a guy.... because almost everyone in tech is a guy. I'm constantly getting ignored, and then some guy gets listened to (I'm a guy). And as for the "crack pipes" story, we don't really have enough details, but it's VERY easy to read that story and think "damn right you screwed up". And I've been ignored and talked over (I'm a loud guy). So, yeah, that stuff happens to men.

Of course, the real question is not "do these things happen to women and not men". That's like saying "[all] men are taller than [all] women", it's obviously false, because sometimes I meet women over 6' tall. But of course we know that both mean and median female heights are lower than male... the whole curve is offset by like 5" in the USA. It's totally plausible that the distribution of respect at technical skill discriminates in favour of males. It's plausible that it doesn't, or that the effect is pretty small. If you want to convince an unbeliever, a few examples of moderate disrespect are like pointing out a few examples of 5'6" guys (taller than the median US female). It's just not persuasive!

And, in fact, in my opinion, it's worse than non-persuasive. It gives the people who don't believe you (and don't want to) a straw man to fixate on. "That shit happened to me too [and it did!] and therefore her claim about privilege is wrong [wait, what]." If you want to advance a cause, you would do well to make sure you only emit Grade-A arguments.

I don't know whether there is a "cat food factory" chopping up "fish" in the tech industry. I would guess rachelbythebay knows better than me (she's closer to the issue, and IIRC she's logged more time in the industry), but I am skeptical about whether or not she really knows either. Maybe I'm wrong and she has attempted to do science on the subject. But if she has only her own experience (as I have only my own), then her interpretive bias will be a huge factor in her conclusions (as mine is in mine). Just as my ego benefits when I fool myself into believing that my privilege plays only a tiny role in my success (mock me here, please), her ego would benefit if she were to fool herself into overstating the benefits of the privilege that she does not have (and understating the benefits of the privileges she does have).
In principle you'd be right, although Google/Youtube have never(?) made any promise about data retention. I've started to notice a number of older inactive links (say 5-10 years) have become stale, so I'd suspect they started to clean-up their database on that side.
Good designers scoff at 99Designs because the expected payout is absurdly low for the amount of skill and effort usually required to win a "competition". The price structure undermines the pricing of struggling freelancers trying to break out in the low- to mid-tier end of the market. Bean-counting execs who don't care about design see no reason to pay $X000 or $XX000 to a pro designer with legitimate expenses when they can get several useable designs (I won't say "good") on spec for only $Y00. Nevermind that many of those crowdsourced designs come from kids and people overseas using pirated versions of Photoshop.

Besides the economic damage wrought by 99Designs, a lot of designers have gotten a sour taste in their mouth from the blatant copying/IP theft that often wins. If I come up with great idea A, and you do a nearly identical rendering of my idea but in what happens to be the buyer's favorite color.... who do you think will be selected as winner? Unfair outcomes are pretty common, especially because the people doing the choosing often wouldn't know a good design if it bit them in the face.
A quote: "I don’t believe guns are part of the kingdom of God."

Wow, all right, I think you need to read the history of Christianity and religion in general. The majority of wars have either been directly about religion or have had religion as a subtext.

As to "boys will be boys", the unspoken hope is that they will outgrow the "boyish" behavior you comment on, but without losing their sense of wonder and curiosity about the world.

Has it occurred to you that, every time someone says "boys will be boys," someone else says "Christians will be Christians"?
Security Notice: Linode Manager Password Reset
It feels like the author is disregarding non-first order effects. Direct Facebook ads/links are not all that constitute social media.
I have never been able to consciously visualize (meaning: think in visual mental images). All of my conscious thought is in the auditory mode, though I know what it would be like to visualize as it happens occasionally in a dream. I have always wished more than anything to have such experiences while fully conscious (to see my mother's face and so on).

There has been a fairly longstanding debate in philosophy and psychology about whether visual mental images even exist, yet when I discuss the issue with friends none of them can believe or understand that I lack imagery.

I've read a fair amount without encountering real evidence that the capacity can be developed. I've certainly spent time trying, but possibly in the wrong way.

A good place to start on the "mental imagery as simulation" literature is Kosslyn, e.g. http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic561942.files/2009...

For an accessible window on the debate: http://www.edge.org/video/what-shape-are-a-german-shepherds-... and http://www.edge.org/discourse/shepardears.html

Curious to lean whether HN harbors any non-visualizers.
I've had the same experience as Tesla, though not so extreme as to cause problems. For as long as I can remember I have enjoyed extremely detailed "daydreams" where I explore worlds and meet people inspired by the books I read. I suspect this is fairly common in children, but I did it right through high school, university, and several years in the workplace.

The real question is: how much benefit does having a strong and well exercised imagination have for a technical career? (I assume it's very useful for artists).

I've found that software development gets a large boost. The more of the design you can hold in your head on once, the better the coder is able to anticipate the consequences of their decisions. When debugging, the programmer is able to see the entire state of the application that must have predicated it, experiment with a range of fixes, all before writing any code.

I love this quote from The Tao of Programming[1]: "Sometimes there are difficult problems. I see them coming, I slow down, I watch silently. Then I change a single line of code and the difficulties vanish like puffs of idle smoke."

[1] http://www.canonical.org/~kragen/tao-of-programming.html
Sounds very familiar like trusting the entity with the largest arsenal of weapons.
It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia has a great depiction of this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvSx7-CTTl4

One of the funniest moments in the whole series.
You and I will never agree on this stuff but I'm always glad to see you participating. Thanks again.
Jessica,

It's not really "self-service" when I'm paying $50/month for the service. If it's broken it needs to get fixed. Forgive me if you've made it free and I haven't noticed.

My concerns are the same. 5-6 days of lead-time required for a submitting Payroll seems a bit archaic. Sure I could do it, and yes I probably should be that organized, but things are supposed to be getting more flexible, not less flexible. If for whatever reason the person in charge of payroll ends up a couple days behind, so does your payroll, which leads to very unhappy employees very quickly. As I mentioned before, ADP can handle payroll in 24 hours, and I feel like they're a dinosaur of a company, you can still only use their web-portal in IE.

I understand all about focus, and if you feel relying on Intuit is the right decision, then that's fine, but that certainly makes me feel a bit uneasy knowing that a major part of your service offerings are built and rely those of another company. Especially since that company may have a conflict of interest in the future.

The pay dates and periods were a minor issue, it's really the lead-time for submitting payroll the bugs me.

My concerns are the same about Google docs and I consider hour logs and payroll crucial data. It's just too easy to make a mistake storing this information in a spreadsheet.

We do rely heavily on freshbooks for our billing and I'd love to see you integrate into freshbooks time tracking for payroll.
My point is that fiat money systems have costs associated with them. I'm not arguing that the costs change if there is Quantitative easing or not.
_why, to respond to your questions in SOLICIT, you don't have to play the _why character if you don't want to. Most of us are happy to see you, whether you act bizarre or not. We miss your insight and commentary and sense of humor. Experiment if you like, and ignore the jerks.

For everyone else, _why made some videos before, here is my favorite: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXZ_htL1rOI
I spent about two years dedicating my free time to experiments of this type. The most profoundly affecting exercise was training the left side of my body (I'm right-handed). I learned to write in left-handed mirrored script (Da Vinci style) and performed all sorts of everyday actions with my left hand. Amazingly, the more I trained my left hand the more my right-handed writing and drawing skills improved. Within a few months I found that I was able to switch back and forth between two very different modes of thought. My brain seemed wired differently. For a few months I could hardly put sentences together in speech, it was an odd sensation. Eventually though, I developed the ability to intentionally control which half of my brain was switched on. Science is all over the place when it comes to the left/right brain theory, but there is undoubtedly a level of truth to it. If you can learn to control it, it becomes a powerful problem-solving technique.
I somewhat agree, and the suggestions from others are good, but something that also is a big help with RSI: take more breaks. I have a script set up to remind me to take a break every hour, and it dims my monitor for 10 minutes each time. That has made the largest difference for me.
Don't mean to poo-poo. I love scrambling for models and methods. In the latest problem I worked on, I did the same thing. Implementing papers, trying to avail myself of semi-supervised or reduced-dimension representations, tweaking models and features every which way... it's illuminating work, and good things come out of it.

But, in the end, companies like Netflix or where I work are immediately looking for cheap ways to make X happen easier, better, and cheaper. But then hopefully the smart papers go on a shelf or are easily Googleable, and the rest of us get to learn from their efforts.

I can fit long-term and short-term goals in my brain, too, mister.
This seems like a terrible idea. Another potential failure point for no good reason.
Wow. My experience is drastically different than yours.

I've almost always thought of things through mental imagery. It comes naturally to me (which really helped in calculus 3, haha). I can say that with confidence.

Thanks for the link. I wonder how many non-visualizers are out there, too.
"as consensus among those who control a sufficient portion of the network can evolve the bitcoin protocol"

Does this refer to the 51% effect? Isn't the solution to that for other people to simply start mining?
so every time someone tries to make unauthorized attempts to access a single customer's account.. all customers are to be required to reset their passwords?
Now the question is who got hacked?
If they take actions like this.
10.4 - Easily, everything "just worked", UI was snappy finder didnt take 2 seconds to open a new Window. It seems with every major release things get slower (even with new hardware and fresh installs).
> We have been advised that law enforcement officials are aware of the intrusion into this customer’s systems.

I feel like this is probably more than just some dude's account.
Looks like the homework is to make an OCaml client for reading the spool files. Perhaps this is the start of a poignant guide to OCaml?
When I'm being interviewed I ask everyone involved where they are coming from. It's de rigueur for a number of reasons. First, one of the best ways to understand someone is to listen to their perspective. Second, it's good etiquette and people will like you more if you listen to them talking about themselves. Third, how am I supposed to sell to you if I don't know you?

How could you not ask this question of your interviewer and expect it to go well?

edit: looking back on how many interviews where I've done this. I hope I've not offended anyone by not assuming they were a certain <status_jobtitle>. Frankly, I just don't know enough about them to guess. So I have to ask. If they're the type that gets bent out of shape because I couldn't tell job title from their halo then perhaps we aren't a good fit anyway.
what part
The "computers make the dollar deflationary" argument is terrible.

Deflation is bad because it shifts investment into savings.

Computers are mostly immune to this effect because until a company has enough computer equipment, it's one of the highest ROI things they can spend funds on, and once the need is filled, there is very little additional benefit from buying more. This gigantic cliff in the demand curve overwhelms any marginal benefit to altering the number of computers you buy.

Most of the targets of investment are not like that, and you see a small return on incremental investment after accounting for things like risk. Deflation makes these productive investments impractical because they lose out to just holding the currency.
Holy crap that's beautiful. Thanks for showing this off.
What are you babbling about? The dodgy investments were done during the boom, not after it.
That's the part that makes me wonder. The email that I received said, "We have found no evidence that any Linode data of any other customer was accessed."

I suspect that they aren't 100% sure, and that this is a precaution. I can live with it, but I hope that they keep their customers in the loop on things, where possible.
That is extremely interesting. I'm also wondering if it was maybe some type of placebo effect. Maybe the modes were a mental manifestation...
While I'm sure they'd love for Android to die, I don't think that explains this brief. In what percentage of the cases involving Android has Microsoft filed an amicus brief? It's much more likely that they care about the actual issue in this case (whether APIs are subject to copyright).
I wonder if this is another attempt at hacking an account containing bitcoins? Last time the thieves made out with close to 50k BTC if I recall correctly.
I have a well developed spatial sense, but am very weak visually. When I try to visualize, the best I get is impressions of abstract glow-y lines that fade away quickly. I also tried to develop mental visualization but to little effect (I did have a vivid dream once. Only once, though.)

obligatory LW link: http://lesswrong.com/lw/dr/generalizing_from_one_example/
Anonymous P2P social network for Android in Clojure using I2P and BitTorrent
What are you talking about? Launchers are just alternate home screens, the degree to which they alter functionality varies greatly.

For example, I use Nova Launcher, and when you first install it, it's entirely identical to the default launcher. Most people using my phone don't even know that it's not the default.
That's horribly ugly, riddled with ads (some broken) and it's at least four hours out of date. It's a metaphor for ... something.
Mou for iPad, the physical version.
I am a 'Kaggler', I have done well (prize winner) in some past competitions and I could not agree more.

In the last week of a competition, you go into kitchen sink mode trying anything and everything to squeeze the last few points out of your models. The objective of the competition from the competitors standpoint is to win, not create a solution that could be deployed into the sponsor's production environment. On going maintenance of the model is not a consideration.

As far as the netflix competition goes though, the final solutions did help publicize the potential of ensembling and RBMs - I am grateful for that. My personal approach to the competitions is to use them as an opportunity to try out new modeling techniques (i.e. RMBs, deep beliefs etc...) on real world data. It has the added bonus of potentially paying off with prize money (as long as you don't get screwed[1]).

I would like to hear from past Kaggle sponsors and see what they have done with the winning models.

[1] http://www.gequest.com/c/flight/forums/t/4284/acknowledging-...
Sorry- my mistake.
In the US, the Sponsored apps were marked as sponsored. They could have been more clear about it, but you can see that. The others were just regular content for consumers to discover.
It really is like that though. Most people genuinely do have quite different brains from each other, regardless of whether or not they fall within the autistic spectrum; but that's not reason enough to label them based on some common ground so that people who happen to fall within the majority can have some way to differentiate themselves and explicitly think, "That guy is abnormal because his brain doesn't focus on the all same things mine does."

And I chose the word abnormal because it sometimes has negative connotations and probably best represents the way most people think, i.e., afraid of what they're unfamiliar with. But imagine if the Asperger brain was actually the norm. Would that mean we should label people whose brains focus more on social interaction and reproduction than rules and solving problems?

Maybe I'm just uneducated and the label already exists, but sometimes I feel like we should put some specific label on "normal brained" people (other than the word normal or "neurotypical") to kind of even out the stigma. Perhaps my point of view is distorted but when I see people categorized like they are with Asperger Syndrome, I always get the sense that "normal" people look and treat them like they're aliens or like they're retarded or it's almost as if they're lab rats in some scientific study, all because of the "Asperger Syndrome" label... or even worse now, "Autistic Spectrum Disorder".
Sounds wonderful. The odd thing is that I can imagine what it would be like to have the sort of visual imagination that would be helpful in calculus.

Unfortunately it turns out that imagined imagination is worthless for calculus.