skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm a Brit, so take my token apology for calling you out on this [1], but the way you frame your comment is actually the thing that frustrates me the most about a lot of HN comments.
So much negativity, which is often based on some extremely esoteric fact, that actually takes away from the original point of the article, and is just counter to any continuing discussion. Branching off is great. We get some really great discussions on HN that side-step the original point of an article, but when it's just for the sake of bashing, I can't ever support such comments.

[1] : We like to apologise for things
Maybe I'm different and strange but I found learning Objective-C and the CocoaTouch/iOS libraries pretty easy.

I think it makes a huge difference getting a formal education and just screwing around/googleing your way. When I tried to teach myself just using Google searches progress was slow and frustrating. But the second I switched to learning via Stanford's online courses in iTunes U, I was able to pick it up after just a few lessons. It really is a pretty simple framework after you get the core concepts down.
Sometimes I feel a bit strange using i3 on Ubuntu (which has put so much work into Unity). I believe i3 was written to solve the use cases of developers, and so maybe that's why I often feel the choices the creators made just seem to make so much sense.
I sometimes wonder if that's a clever joke on his part -- put out this crazy-sounding sci-fi idea by name only and never tell anyone what it is.
Reddit got a bunch of its initial users via a link or two from PG essays. Indeed, there are some of the early users there who I recognize as early users here, too. It was pretty good at that stage. And then reddit started growing, and linking to all kinds of stuff like Ron Paul, and lots of "outrage" stories, and other flamewar topics, and promptly went to hell in a handbasket.
Also, KDE has kickass support for multi-monitor setups and works and looks the best on big resolutions. This, and the possibility to configure the DE the way I want are the two most important reasons why I love KDE.
I use WMFS².

it is a lightweight tiling window manager, easily customizable due to its configuration being a simple text file and it has a status bar where you can pipe all sorts of information into it with a bash script.

http://wmfs.info/
Sometimes even in a room made of wood no large metal objects nearby and then moving a CRT monitor 90 degrees is enough to mess it up requiring it be degaussed.

I'd say the metal frame had ferrous metal in it which is magnetic your monitor was affected by it, I can't see if fixing it. Once removed the source caused your monitor to require degaussing because a large source of nearby magnetism was removed.

As to why it wasn't affected right away when it was new my guess is a lot of monitors have built-in degaussing each time it is powered on, so gradually the metal nearby was affected by the degausing coil in the CRT monitor. When metal bed frame was removed the loss of such a large piece of nearby magnetism was too much for the normal start-up automatic degaussing to handle.
The difference between sticker price and net tuition (I don't understand what you mean by "net sticker price", that seems to conflate both metrics) is usually the result of price discrimination by the colleges. They raise sticker price so they can charge wealthy applicants more, and then offer generous financial aid so they can charge poor applicants less. It is a subsidy, but it's a subsidy within the organization.

Similarly, many of these financial aid grants at elite institutions are often funded through alumni donations and investment income off the endowment. This is also a voluntary transfer payment from rich to poor.

If you want to measure the incoming tuition flows into college, the metric you probably want is net tuition + government funding. That excludes transfer payments within the organization from rich to poor and donations to non-profit scholarship corporations, but includes funding from tax revenues.
I have done consulting for the fed and what you describe is exactly accurate. It also describes the situation in many huge corporations, since as corporation size approaches infinity its internal political reality approaches government.

It'd be a good place to get a job if you wanted to cool your heels for a bit, but long-term I think I'd get really cynical and depressed. The thing that really hurts is that people who do go above and beyond don't get more than a token reward, and usually don't end up making more than the paycheck-suckers. Like you said it's all seniority. You'll see one or a handful of people busting their butts and doing really good work, and dozens or hundreds of people coasting, and the former are not given raises.

"Pure" meritocracy is a pipe dream. It's an idea that sounds good in rhetoric but is near-impossible to even define, let alone achieve, in reality. In the real world attempts at pure meritocracy often devolve into stress-inducing 80s Wall St. films. But absolutely flat anti-meritocracy sucks worse. The optimum is probably somewhere... hmm... maybe 2/3 of the way to an attempt at pure meritocracy? Enough incentive and accountability to motivate and reward, but enough flex and forgiveness to not burn people out.
I get the feeling that at the very top of every Hacker News comment thread, there's someone who claims that the author of the article is an incompetent idiot because they found a factual error somewhere in the article. Often this leads to a pedantic discussion of some insignificant details.

With all these extremely knowledgeable people from different fields, I wish I found more big picture insights in the comments here.
I'm using Gnome 3. I quite like it, and prefer it to Gnome 2 and Unity. I'm not sure why people dislike it so much.
Why can't Google just grow a pair and go to full-on open allocation?

If people actually get together in conference rooms to conspire against their employees and wreck peoples' careers, as you've admitted they do, that's not only wrong but a sign that lots of time is being wasted.
Almost anyone can create a Google Glass app thanks to this template code
CSS only full page transitions
This is great. For some reason, I read it as the point to this was the third kind of laziness, and how to overcome that. It seemed like the least obvious of the three, and also once I read it, how to overcome it was also the least obvious.

And it's a very good thing to bring up. I for one, am always working on something, attending to something, and it's all as a lead-up to the 'something big'. What my co-founder tends to do is realize when we're in this mode and declare it's time to 'step it up a notch'. We do things if we realize we're scared or nervous to do them, purely to get past that and move forward.
dwm

In the beginning I used DE's like xfce and then lxde. My window manager evolution went something like:

openbox -> awesome -> dwm -> my fork of dwm

My evolution of terminal use went:

urxvt -> xterm -> st -> my fork of st (adding tabs/keyboard-selection)

I think I'm really becoming a suckless fan.
...said everyone since at least the N64, and they've been doing quite well since then.

The 3DS is doing fantastically right now, and the Wii U's getting some heavy hitters very soon. They're not going down for a while.
I use ubuntustudio on my laptop. Nice XFCE implementation.
This simplistic 'snap out of it' ideology belies and belittles the very real issues of fear, discouragement and depression that underly much of what people berate themselves over as 'laziness'.
Another subtle feature addition: a flame-war detector. Graham has been consistently deploying and updating proprietary software that determines whether there is a flame war, where people argue heatedly. When these flame wars take place (which Graham says can often get ugly and personal), the story in which the commenting is taking place is moved further down the page.

Remember the above the next time someone claims that a rogue contingent must be flagging stories on a particular topic because it is further down the page than other stories submitted at a similar time and with a similar number of points.
You're right that I overreacted to him.

Sorry. I think I need a break from HN. Trying to be the savior of the tech industry is an exhausting job, and that was a case where my anger spilled over inappropriately.
Tinkercad Acquired by Autodesk
I've said this before here, but Apple have really concentrated on the laptop experience at the expense of the desktop experience. Which is understandable if you look at their sales figures. I was using a Mac Mini when I first upgraded to Mountain Lion, and really wasn't a big fan. Then I got a Macbook Air, and all of a sudden all of the modifications made sense. Things like the fact that they have optimised the OS for SSDs - which you find in laptops, not desktops. But that optimisation makes hard-drive based Macs much much slower than they were before. Or the fullscreen interface which works really well when you can do a three finger swipe to swap between screens, but not so well if you have a mouse.
@molecule obvious to you and I. I wrote this to inform those who think it is a good idea to use S3 as a CDN, that it isn't. If we can educate a few developers then we (this awesome community of hackers) are making the web faster.
Microsoft has the luxury of failure also, but when they tried to compete with Google they failed. Microsoft are in the same markets that Google makes a huge amount of money from and yet they failed on most fronts.

I think the safest way for Google to make money would be to not innovate or create any off the wall projects, and then just return the money the money to shareholders through dividends or share buybacks.

Just looking at the current stock price of Google $909 and Earnings per share of $33, this means that IF Google returned the entire earnings to shareholders it would take 27 years for the shareholders to get their money back and THEN after this 27 years they would start to get a return on their investment. This assumes no growth, and Google has grown significantly but there is no guarantee they will grow in the future. Even if they do grow significantly it will still take a very long time to get your investment back.

There are unknowns that could completely disrupt Google's business models for example what if all search became voice based (siri-like) with better AI. Or what if a competitor develops much better AI capabilities into their search.
Because it's not in his or his company's best interest? I bet that Cloudfront's performance isn't too different from MaxCDN's.
Funny, I picked today to re-evaluate my use of XMonad. I'm currently trying Gnome 3, and I'm really impressed.

I love how they cribbed some great small details from OS X and iOS but the final product feels fresh. If I end up going back to XMonad my config will definitely change.
It's already public knowledge: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperloop
I was hoping for a mention of the useful programmer's type of laziness. The laziness that leads to DRY and building tools that build your tools. I feel like more could be said on that topic, how that sort of laziness relates to the others.
You're not the only one - pg has called these posts "the middlebrow dismissal": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4693920
Does anyone actually use Epiphany these days, though? I can see people not complaining about changes to it if it isn't really being used by anyone at all.
"Personally i never understood the hatred towards change."

i assume if something changes for the worst you enjoy it? your phone can no longer auto dial. do you celebrate? your word processor no longer has spell check. do you pat the developers on the back?

its a bit of fud and tone deaf to say people have hatred for change because gnome3 sucks. this is the same fud that the gnome PR machine keeps trying to spin. no one is that stupid. it's a slap in the face of gnome2 users. it comes off as snobbish and condescending. like a crappy pop band that never makes it and blames the audience because there just not ready for the profound brilliance of there music. honestly the gnome project and its hobby lobby need to get over themselves and learn how to take criticism and learn from there mistakes if they ever want to put the project back on track.

people use gnome2 because it's a quality desktop with the efficiency needed for professional workstation users. that was the goal of the gnome project. they radically changed direction to chase the tablet market and fell flat on there face. if gnome on tables was a success i doubt that we would hear one word from them about the desktop anymore. the desktop was thrown out with the bath water. now that they have failed, the only users they have left are an angry group of desktop users who just want some improvements to gonme2. will the gnome project ever care enough to shift back to the desktop in a serious way and make a quality desktop for these users? i think the answer is no. as long as RedHat keeps paying the bills they will keep dancing. gnome3 has zero chance of taking the place of gnome2 and most organizations have shifted to a new desktop or are in the process of doing so. the gnome project is essentially dead, with no vision for the desktop market they still have and no penetration into the tablet market.
He worries that Hacker News will become what he calls “an old crumbling building.”

I hope not. This is one of the best & brightest online communities I've ever seen.

I learn so much every single day from the content & insights posted on this site, I'm not sure where I'd be without it :)
Shrinking Universe: The Loneliness of Endless Digital Worlds
I got the Fitbit One. You have to manually tell it you're about to sleep and you just woke up, then it tells you how long you stayed in bed, how many times you woke up, and how much deep sleep you had.

Based on that, I averaged that I needed 8 hours of in-bed time to get 7 hours of deep sleep, and then I had no need for the device anymore. Until my sleep patterns change.
I genuinely appreciate HN. I'm a convicted hacker and am nowhere as bright as some of you guys on here (I have my moments).

Being accepted by you guys really does help me get back into tech and do what I know best. THANK YOU!
I think the labour cost of university teaching has increased in the US:

1. I think (I haven't tried to dredge up numbers) that in the US, face-to-face time with professors has reduced for each student on average, but face-to-face time with more junior academic staff has increased greatly. To make a comparison between countries, rather than across time, certainly the number of supervised teaching hours per week I have seen in US universities has been much higher than even in the highest-rated universities in the UK and Germany.

2. The labour costs are not just in-class teaching time, but also all work that is attached to teaching activity. Much more effort is put into "compliance" issues than before (e.g., dealing with legal challenges to grades, and I think that admissions is a much more expensive process than before).

3. The most sought-after faculty (star professors) do earn much more than before, and for at least some faculties, the pay for star professors is proportionally high.

4. Faculty turnover is higher.

I'm sure concrete figures exist - I'd certainly like to see a solid analysis of labour cost trends in the US and elsewhere.
It might just be me, but this seems like the kind of feature you wouldn't want automated. How do you algorithmically tell the difference between a flamewar and a spirited debate?
In general, I found that the first reply to the first comment (which is more often than not a counter-dismissal) is an excellent indicator of the quality of the rest of the comments.
I feel like people complain about this too much. Yeah, there are some bad/exaggerated comments, but overall I find mostly intelligent tech related conversation here. There will always be people who want to put down others for some selfish reason, but I don't think that defines HN. I've certainly learned a lot from the comments.
Insightful review! What about HN? It seems you've spent about 10 minutes here. That should qualify you to review it, right?
There was no "Custom Color" button in Snow Leopard, the first (and last) version of OS X I ran.
Case studies written about services that the customers don't use?
Looking at cloud services like Okta and amag pharma is quoted as a case study on Okta.com, networkworld.com and citeworld.com and yet when I go to https://mail.google.com/a/amagpharma.com I'm not brought to any Okta identity portal? Why are companies quoted as case studies when they don't use the product to get single sign on to the services?
A lot of this is simply that life is risky, and completely unforeseen circumstances can drastically change life outcomes.

I went to an expensive private college. My parents racked up over $100K in debt between my sister and I. Neither of us had any idea what we wanted to do when we went. Our parents were just like "Go to the best college you get into, and we will figure out the money."

The debt was paid off in full 4 years after graduation.

And the real reason it worked out were a variety of circumstances that could totally not have been foreseen when we matriculated. I flunked out of physics twice, and in my scramble to pick a new major and graduate, picked...computer science. And used a lot of the time I spent avoiding my physics homework to learn a bunch of cool programming languages, make contacts with real programmers on the Internet, and pick up internships. So when I barely-graduated, I already had a job lined up at a financial software startup that I'd interned with twice. If I had not flunked out of the physics major, I would likely be just barely finishing my Physics Ph.D now, having lived on $20K/year for the past 7 years, and would be coming into an uncertain job market with few marketable skills, no work experience, and a lot of debt.

My sister happened to go to school in Houston, at a school where her geology department had close ties to local oil majors, and so ended up with a bunch of oil industry internships before graduation. She had two of the majors bidding against each other for her after graduation, and got a lucrative job that way.

The interesting thing is that we both went into college knowing very little other than "Go to the best college you get into", and came out of it with that being the right choice but for reasons completely different than what we thought they'd be. A degree helps, but skills and contacts help more. Maybe the right move for entering students these days is to go to the best college you get into, but think carefully about what you want to do afterwards and put yourself in situations where you can rack up advantages for getting there afterwards.
India 2.0
It was never about "hatred towards change". I don't think that people have a problem with change itself, as long as it leaves them better off, or where they already were, at worst. People do dislike change that leaves them worse off, however.

Basically every change imposed by the GNOME team has left many, many users much worse off than they were before. Furthermore, it's very doubtful that these changes have actually made any other users better off.

Taking away useful functionality doesn't make a system "simpler" to use. It just makes it impractical at best, but more often than not it makes it outright useless. That's what GNOME has become to a lot of us, and that's why we no longer bother with it.

We want to use software that makes us more efficient, rather than software that's "simple", yet forces us to put in much more effort to do basic and essential tasks.
If a flamewar in the comments can be detected, why not demote the comment thread, rather than (or in addition to[1]) the article?

[1]In addition to because presumably the logic is that the article content is flame-bait.
My original title was "Bill Gates has transcended Silicon Valley". Its just amazing what he is achieving in his second act, hopefully we can get more successful valley ceo's stepping out of their bubble and tackling real world issues as well.
As a matter of fact I switched from gnome3 to KDE just yesterday (still voting only for KDE) because of all the bad decisions gnome3 developers have made recently. Gnome Shell is not all bad, it is innovative in some way but they should add features instead of taking them away. I am hardcore vim user and tend to remap Caps-Lock to ESC for easier manipulation. When I found out they removed the option from Gnome Shell I was, well, pissed off. The removal of terminal transparency added a little bit of oil to the fire, even though I don't use that feature.
Odd words coming from a massively reviled developer with leadership and financial issues...

(Have a look at their long term stock price especially since 2008.. ouch!)
sigh closes Sublime Text ...
The next big milestone for Tesla is reaching 25% gross margin (which is rarely had in the auto industry). Elon Musk is promising they'll reach this milestone 4th quarter this year. If they reach it this year, it is nothing short of miraculous.

I would say so, considering they're at 5% now.

Edit: Strike that. It's actually 2%. Musk had this to say:

"I am highly confident that we will have a gross margin of at least 25%, and — I mean, the emphasis on at least. I think we will do better than those numbers. So, I want to be very clear about that."

The man is all in. I'll give him that.
If you see this as actionable information you could probably get a good deal out of perusing information on the eightfold path, particularly Right Effort (http://www.accesstoinsight.org/ptf/dhamma/sacca/sacca4/samma...).
I take it that this is just a specific example of the 3rd kind.
It's similar, yes. Here's the Wikipedia article: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)
I'm curious about the degree to which decreasing quality is a consequence of dilution in which "less desirable" individuals lower the mean quality (or some other holistic measure), versus the social effects due purely to size.

I'm curious because a large community will probably change the behavior of all individuals, regardless of quality. One such effect is they way discussions happen. In a village, town halls can have discussions with every member. An idea is brought forth, multiple people make changes, it gets amended, reworked, changed. In short, topics have some amount of "persistence", and opinions have more dynamism.

In a city, discussions are more like a broadcast: any member might be able to speak, but they're not sparking discussion, they're broadcasting a point of view, and with so many points of view broadcast at any given moment, it's hard to have a discussion that lasts more than a few hours before the next topic of interest is brought forth. In short, topics seem to have little persistence, and opinions have far less dynamism.

It seems much more rewarding in a city to make comments designed to convince the audience of how intelligent I am, because I only have the city's attention for a moment. Perhaps this leads to the preponderance of middlebrow dismissals or other "how can I look smart here?" comments. In a village, by contrast, these comments are much less lucrative. If I walk around and the only comment I can give to others is that their new crop idea might not work, I'm probably not going to be very valued, because people will notice over time that those are the only comments I give.

It's difficult for me to articulate quite what I mean, perhaps someone could help.
>If everyone felt accepted and loved, would it be life?

YES.
Well, there goes the neighbourhood.
Paul Graham wrote an essay in 2002 advocating the use of Bayesian classification for detecting spam (http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html, http://www.paulgraham.com/better.html). I bet he's doing something similar to detect flame wars, but with more modern techniques and more CPU power.
I'm not sure what you're getting at. Are you saying every operating system Microsoft released after Win98SE and before Windows 7 was on the same level as ME? Have you forgotten about 2000 and XP?