skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't because I always turn off all system sounds on my computers, and others' computers at work rarely have speakers anyway.

That might be the specifics of being a power user: you may not understand problems of common users because you do things very differently anyway.
I must admit, when I set up Ubuntu for friends and family, I make sure to place Firefox, Thunderbird and Open Office as icons on the Desktop. I also remove the top bar (I think the two status bars of Gnome are silly).

The only difficult thing is scanning, but that is complicated on Windows, too.
I'd pay $5 for gmail, but not for crappy webmail.
"Let me demonstrate how the back and forward buttons should work. You can do this at home.

Click this link.

That should have opened in a new window (or tab) for you. And if you’re back here now, you’ve switched windows or tabs, correct?"

Fail. It opened a new window with a page I had never visited before.

Of all the interpretations of the back button, I'm pretty sure that's not one of them.
I was forced to buy my netbook with windows ("it is the only one we have in stock right now") and I wasn't willing to go through the hassle of getting a $10 refund. I installed the very latest version of Ubuntu and I couldn't be happier. Everything is fast. Really fast. With the 20 some odd terminal commands I know I can install nearly anything I need (except MS Excel :{) and there is no 30 day trial period that I have to be reminded of constantly, no spyware (not that I ever got it anyways), built in programming stuff like compilers. I'm by no means a serious programmer, just a quant that likes to spend his weekends learning about polymorphism.

I've had such a good experience that I told my computer illiterate friend that I will build his new computer for him for free, provided that he use Ubuntu for 1 month. This guy doesn't know the difference between the terms "URL" and "Web Browser" but I think that for what he does - movies, chatting, email, surfing - he will have a far better experience. Why? No spyware and a much easier UI.
The writer double spaces too in his post, which does make it more readable. Ironically, he mainly argues against hitting the shift key too many times.

I don't really see how double-spacing's any different from capitalizing + single-spacing, except the second is much more readable to me.
How long ago was this? What was the Masters in? I know CS and Comp Ling Masters courses are taught mostly to entirely in English, and it's not hard to find physical science Masters through English in German speaking countries. The Nordic countries ditto, but for humanities degrees as well.
See which twitter users don't follow you back in 1000 lines of Brainfuck
>++++++++[<++++++++>-]<++++++++++++++++.[-]>++++++++++[<++++++++++>-]<++++++++++++++.[-]>++++++++++>-]<+++++++++.[-]>++++++++++[<++++++++++>-]<+.[-]>++++++++++[<++++++++++>-]<+++++++++++++++.[-]>+++++[<+++++>-]<+++++++.[-]>++++++++++[<++++++++++++[<++++++++++>-]<+++++.[-]>++++++++++[<++++++++>-]<+++++++++++++++++.[-]>++++++++++[<++++++++++>-]<++++++++++++.[-]>+++++[<+++++>-]<+++++++.[-]>++++++++++[<++++++++++>-]<++++++++++++++++.[-]>++++++++++[<++++++++++++>-]<+++++++++.[-]>++++++++++[<++++++++++>-]<+.[-]>++++++++++[<++++++++++>-]<+++++++++++++++.[-]
If any of those services charged $5, they'd instantly have a dozen competitors started by the kind of people that read HN.
The fact that this article doesn't even mention Drizzle (https://launchpad.net/drizzle) makes me question if the writer understands that "forks" is plural.
None.

If a service of the same quality can be offered for less, it will tend to be free as competition increases.
It sounds like she might have fixed mindset rather than a growth mindset:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindset_(book)

"Those with a fixed mindset believe their talents and abilities cannot be improved through any means. They feel that they are born with a certain amount of talent and typically do not wish to challenge their abilities due to the possibility of failure. Individuals with a fixed mindset frequently guard themselves against situations in which they feel they need to prove their personal worth. Challenges are frequently viewed negatively, instead of as an opportunity for personal growth."

"People that practice a growth mindset believe intelligence, talents, and abilities can be developed over time. They believe abilities, such as athleticism and mathematical capacity, can be improved through hard work and persistence. When presented with an obstacle, those practicing a growth mindset tend to rise to the challenge. Often, people of the growth mindset do not fear failure; instead, they view it as a chance to improve themselves."

"anyone can change their mindset at any age or at any stage in life. She also provides steps or ideas that the reader can follow to achieve the growth mindset."
I think you missed the point.

He said "click here (insert random link)" then knowing that we would all ctrl-tab back to the original article he was showing how backing up SHOULD work. I.E., bringing you to right where you were previously and doing it fast, without reloading the page.
> The reason tabbed browsing is so popular, is because you can work on several apps and websites at the same time.

Close, but not quite... Before tabs, you could still have multiple pages open, but they each took up a window. Tabs are simply a streamlining of the multi-window process. (And Chrome actually makes efforts to blur this distinction.)
PCjr: March 1984

Amiga: July 1985

Four years, eh? :)
My surprise was at the aggregate tone of the posts being about the interviewee and almost nothing questioning why the interviewee kept hammering away at the pre-conceived point of the question.

But I don't have any issue with any one individual person's conclusion.
How to catch a microscopic black hole
Scratch Helps Kids Get With the Program
Except you probably pay for home broadband, a mobile and possibly mobile broadband.
Mail is too much of a commodity for me to pay for.

Hulu would get my money.
There's a great picture of him from around the time of the first production run holding his guitar with two broken arms. I spent a few minutes looking for it but I couldn't find it.
If I read the article correctly, you can issue new stock and sell it to investors, and those investors would get the benefit of the new law.
Microsoft NAP: NAC for the rest of us?
I picked Gmail (backup email = worth it) and Last.fm (useful - im considering a Spotify subscription).

Other stuff:
Chatterous (the second most useful tool in my arsenal)
Jing (you can actually pay for this :D)

Posterous: no because hosting my own blog is about the same and gives me more control (i.e. I can have a personal front page etc.).
FriendFeed, Facebook, Twitter: no because for me they have little actual value. They connect me with interesting people but I could live without it :D
What if we have a search inside HN?
Hy guys, just have this idea stick in my head. Sometimes i just want to read notices about Rails, is that possible for you to provide a filter or a search mode inside the site to bring us only news about our interest? Thank you.
I'm surprised more hasn't been said about the absurdity of ads talking about how expensive a competitor is that then end with the protagonist being handed cash on camera. It's almost frighteningly postmodern but it gets lost in the Mac vs Win gang fights.
People further down the income scale are going to save less of their marginal income. If someone is working but for so little money that they're constantly thinking "this week, should I buy food, or try to catch up with the rent?", and their take-home pay suddenly goes up by $20 a week, they are not likely to put that $20 in a savings account.
I find it a little disturbing that "hack" was one of the censor words, especially since it has a very specific meaning when appearing in source code (and many commenting tools even do special processing when it sees this word.)
This made me try to calculate something. If you're a radio station and want to allow your listeners to choose each song (in effect what you're saying), what would be the cost per song listened? In the classic model it's very small, but this is only because the radio station pays per song bought, not per song listened. In the new model, the number of used songs would be much greater. How much exactly? This would probably depend on how many songs are chosen from the long tail.

Anyways, what is clear is that the difference between a bought song (20-100c) and a listened song (0.0???c) is only a difference in freedom to choose. Sooner or later the two must come to a compromise.
Sigh.

One problem with futurism is that the size of the subject requires you to pass over all the little throwaway projects (like the ARPAnet in the late 1960s) that are two or three incarnations away from being world-shaking.

For example, although heat dissipation and power requirements make it impractical to run whole processors faster than a few GHz, it's possible to get amazing analog performance out of 20-nm MOSFETs. Ubiquitous Millimeter-wave radar is one obvious application, but IR-frequency amplifiers and sampling aren't out of the question. As anybody who's taken an undergraduate organic chemistry course can tell you, an IR photon has roughly the same energy as a quantum of vibrational energy in an organic molecule.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrared_spectroscopy

In other words, imagine a camera that can tell you the chemical composition of anything it photographs...
Successful Site in 12 Months with Google Alone
I pay for Flickr Pro och MobileMe. Anything else we host for ourselves or use free services. I voted Twitter (but I doubt they will charge $5/month) as I have found it really useful.
The increased demand would come as businesses would be more willing to hire new employees- as without payroll tax, it would be cheaper for them. If this increases the employment by 5% (Or even 1%) it would put a lot of people back to work- and your your job much more secure.
I'd be much more comfortable with a yearly rate - $20 a year is a much easier price point for these types of services (look at flickr, I think it nailed the subscription service model).

I don't want to worry about monthly bills.
* New API functionality for allowing Prism-enabled web sites more desktop like power.

* Ability to set fonts, proxy settings and other application-speciﬁc settings.

* The ability to clear private data on demand.

* Applications are automatically updated when new Prism versions are available.

* Tray icon support, as well as submenus for dock and system tray menus.

* Full OS X 10.4 support, and further OS X specific enhancement.

* Support for SSL exceptions.
The Many Facets of Microchips
I would and I do pay for quality weekly newsmagazines. It's getting harder and harder to find decent, in depth articles written by real professionals. Unfortunately I've seen some good newspapers closing down or turning into crap full of ads and low quality products called "news".
I wish there would be more people like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryszard_Kapuściński
This and Google are serving two different purposes. Google is an interface to search the web. Wolfram Alpha is an interface to search their own database of facts and relationships. When you use Wolfram Alpha you are doing a fact search, not a web search.
I believe the scenario was whether we'd pay to use them as they are now, not to extrapolate how they'd be after and whether we'd use them then.
The change the system language things hardly seems fair. Ubuntu is available in most (all?) languages, and not very cryptic to understand either. In fact it tends to be more logical than Windows.

Internet/Email: I tend to solve these issues by putting big fat icons for Firefox and Thunderbird (+Open Office) on the desktop (and also in the "quick launch bar" of course).

Desktop background: touche. But people who can't change it on Ubuntu probably can't change it on Windows either?

Nephew: true - most people probably switch to Linux because their nephew tells them to do so... So if the nephew is still on Windows, bad luck.

Also, maybe a lot of people just buy the netbook with Windows and then install Linux anyway (bagging the free Windows license for later use).

Edit: one more thing that is easy to forget: make Open Office to use Microsoft formats by default.
Personally, I am a fan of the FairTax- it fits much better with a free Republic, as illustrated by many of the Founders(Like Thomas Jefferson) who greatly favored a consumption tax.
Black & Galvanized ERW Round Steel Pipes & Tubes, Steel Pipe Manufacturers India
The article has some good points, even if some are rather outdated. Published in 2002!
Blame baby monitors, not congestion, for your WiFi woes
How Roomba moves
Good point.

Also, the income of a service company is mostly going into the pockets of the service providers, and if those service providers are well-paid then they're more likely to save their marginal dollar instead of spending it. So from a Keynesian point of view, this is not the kind of business you want to throw money at during a recession.
Google as a black box
Well .. the two are inseparable in my mind, but fair enough.
See the HN Search button at the bottom of the frontpage.
Your argument is that you've started teaching a lot of people HTML by showing them something that has nothing to do with HTML, clap clap clap clap clap clap clap...
without some unforeseen technological problem (or solution, if you're so inclined) that makes it possible to control other people's computers with your software against their will

Actually, what you're talking about is Digital Rights Management. IF DRM worked, it could be used in the other direction, and your private information could be distributed in the form of software agents. Big if here, granted. However, I suspect that something like Vernor Vinge's "Trusted Computing Environment" will eventually exist. It's too useful not to.

There is another mechanism that already can "control other people's computers with your software against their will" using legal means. Namely the GPL.

Something like the GPL combined with simple protocols can protect private information, say, like a number. Using one-time proxy-numbers, I can already shop with my credit card, but without revealing my account number. Craigslist also has a similar mechanism to protect emails. If this were built into email clients, then it would be easy for users to register, and always know exactly who sold their email address to spammers.

Better yet, why not build registration protocols into browsers in the same way RSS reading and SSL session key negotiation is?

This sort of thing will not completely prevent the aggregation and inference of private data. But combine these mechanisms with legal protections of privacy, and it will make it very hard for corporations to use the data they aggregate illegally.

only a matter of time until societal mores catch up and recognize the de facto situation

There was a time when the US was very cavalier about copyright, and we just up and published our own editions of books without paying royalties. Societal mores were fine with this. (Dickens had to go on tour and do readings of _A Christmas Carol_ to make money from it in the US!) Somehow, the situation shifted the other direction in this case.
I'd pay $5/month for unlimited access to books and journals, but it would have to be a very big library, quick, reliable, and allow for some form of offline access.

I'm not interested in most of the other options, free or not.

Although at one time I considered buying good usenet access, there just aren't that many interesting and vibrant newsgroups left.
H1N1 Swine Flu - Google Maps
I turned my daughter on to this at age 4 and within an hour she had figured out loops, variable and collision detection. I'm particularly impressed with the way they modeled loops, which is always a hard thing to explain to new developers.

The only problem we had to do with the amount of screen real estate needed, she had a 12" iBook with a 1024x768 display and it was almost unusably cramped. On modern machines, I'm sure it would be no problem.

The great thing about Squeak is it lets you do some cool stuff first and learn the hard stuff later, once you've built up some momentum without throwing away the principles common to almost all software development platforms.
The Rainbowed Web
The same whitespace that's also after each word. That doesn't make it easier to find at all.
He seems somewhat excited by the prospect of linux failing on notebooks, yet I'm sure I read a rash of these articles a while ago when the Q1 numbers got released, then another bunch when the numbers got disputed. What's he adding to the debate now?

Nothing that I can see, though it appears he's got some axe to grind about linux on smartphones being better than linux on netbooks.
Twitter’s Spectacularly Awful 24 Hours
I pay $36 annually for SDF membership (freeshell.org)
What's Holding Back Google Apps?
GotAPI.com: documentation search engine
Schneier on Security: Software Problems with a Breath Alcohol Detector
Pretty basic stuff. None of it newsworthy. I notice that right now it's #8, but in the classic view it's not even on the home page. This might be one indication of lower quality on the site.
The goal is not to get you (or any other particular individual) to spend more, but to increase aggregate demand.

I'm assuming that the form of savings that you pursue is not "stuffing money under the mattress", but to put the money in the bank, or invest in equities or bonds or commodities.

If you invest in commodities, that is of course spending on commodities.

If you invest in stocks or bonds, you're providing capital to other companies, who will then spend it. This is good, but since some of their spending will be on facilities, it may not be the kind of spending we want (i.e., consumer good). On the other hand, some of it may go to paying for employees, which is obviously a very good thing, and goes to decreasing the uncertainty that you're concerned about.

And if you put it in the bank, it's going to be loaned out to either consumers for their own spending, or to business as discussed above. (caveat: so far this year, banks have tended to increase their reserves rather than increase lending. I think that phase is done, though)
Haven't you ever been surprised by how Hard a simple-looking problem turned out to be?

I find computing problems tend to become hard based on the constraints not the bassic problem. A friend of mine needed to create a simple counting program that sent the results back over the network. The problem was he needed to do it in less than 340 bytes of ram, on a 8khz chip with 2kbites of permanate storage. AND he needed to validate the memory so the program could sit on a chip in the field for 10 years without problems even as the memory got randomly fliped.

That's a hard problem that took a few months but hey it works just fine. I expect Twitter to have a few anoying problems to track down, but they are long past the point where they have no budget and no time to solve them. Worst case they change some of their constraints and move on.

PS: My problem is not that twitter is trying to fix somthing dificult and limping by my problem is they have been doing it for as long as they have.
Google SERPs Redirections Turn to Bots
Embedding flash movies made easy
What is your current development project?
> Incidentally, I think most people wouldn't take you seriously without the might of the shift key after every sentence ending period.

And rightly so. Somebody who doesn't take any effort whatsoever to convey their message clearly shouldn't be taken seriously. Their reasoning and thinking is likely to be as sloppy as their writing.

Something illustrated quite well by the article :-)
Mines a mobile blackjack game... whats yours?
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+1 for Drupal

(or do we not do +1's on HN?)
I would pay upto $100/year for HackerNews.
Last I checed a few years ago seting up a radio station to play songs over the radio costs 7c per user per song. So ~ 8 * 60 / 5 * 7 * 30 / 100 = 201$ / month for 8 hours a day.

However, change that to 0.7c per song and it's reasonable.

But, that's just a point of negotiation nobody actually pays that much. So finding the actual costs is rather hard.
not facebook, and soon not twitter
I'd pay $5/month for Linkedin
If social networks aren't able to find ways to successfully bring in revenue using advertising they deserve to go out of business. One of the big challenges in advertising is not knowing whose eyeballs are seeing your ads. For TV they may have a crude demographic of who's watching ... but it's not very granular. Social networks are the exact opposite of that. No only do the users of these networks willingly provide details about themselves down to the most granular level, but they also provide a linkage to their friends that are doing the very same thing. It's the perfect combination of information for advertisers to use in order to serve relevant advertising.
Thriving Norway provides an Economics Lesson
Almost clicked on this. SFW? I'm guessing not.
It might be worth doing one more version considering the ratings only from people who have contributed significantly to the culture (their karma along with age should reflect reasonably well i guess)
No nudity on that page. Unless Ayn Rand's portrait is considered porn, this should be SFW. On the other hand, the IT guys in the company you work for might find it "amusing" that you're accessing stuff on the playboy.com domain. You decide if it's NSFW or not.
And don't forget the spirit. The spirit is more important than the product.
That has been disproven many times. SmugMug is a good example. Sure there's free ones but they have a little extra and people love the feel of the more exclusive community.
Capitalization is the difference between "I helped my uncle Jack off a horse" and "i helped my uncle jack off a horse".
There's a nice idea there. We could pay a monthly fee(that goes to the artists) for a high quality bittorrent tracker. Sort of like the radios pay. I'd pay 40%/year there.

Who wants to make a legal oink?
Definitely not intuitive given all the old timers are feeling the quality is gone down and yet they continue to contribute for the front page articles to stay on.

Does this mean the problem at core could be with submissions and the moment it floats up to page 1 - which it would with just > 4 points in 3-4 hrs it gets reassuring votes even from old-timers.

PG, You should dig out the data on how lazy old-timers are getting in digging out material for HN front page :)
This argument (don't re-write) sounds great to laymen and managers because they see "the code" as the sole artifact of the development effort. The flaw here (known to almost any developer) is that the code itself, the physical files and such represents the work of developing an application as completely as a photograph of a boxing match represents boxing itself.

Evidence of this can be seen in the many examples of companies "buying out" an application by taking only the source and attempting to run with it. The results are rarely, if ever, spectacular.

Most of the application is in the minds of the developers. Take away his source and ask a developer to re-write an application and you are guaranteed to get a better program. Why? Because by the end of the project you know more than you did at the beginning, and when you re-write the code from scratch you can leverage this knowledge on all of the code, not just the code you wrote after you learned these lessons.

In this way it is impossible to re-write something (unless you are starting with new developers as well), just like if you asked Stephen King to re-write (as in, re-type) The Shining...