skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What software do you install on a clean windows install
There probably are a lot of hackers that use linux and don't have the problem of reinstalling their operating system.
I am curious, what software do you install when you install windows (again)?
Get Advantage From Static Clings
dayformaseeyon professseeyonel
Ask HN:  Do you know of any time travel combinatorial puzzles?
I've been trying to think of an interesting time travel combinatorial (e.g., Rubik's Cube-like) puzzle, but with no luck so far.

Are there any interesting ones I could look at?
Windfall Profits
Tell HN: San Francisco Amazon Mechanical Turk Meetup
We are having a meetup for people using Amazon's Mechanical Turk at our office in San Francisco June 10th. People directly using Mechanical Turk for interesting applications are especially encouraged to come. We're going to have the Amazon VP of Mechanical Turk on hand for Q/A and we have a great lineup of interesting people talking about what they're up to.

Please RSVP here: http://www.meetup.com/Amazon-Mechanical-Turk-Crowdsourcing-Work-Meetup-Group. My company is Dolores Labs (blog.doloreslabs.com) and we've built an application on top of Turk to manage data quality.
Clojure's backquote syntax automatically resolves symbols into namespaces. `(if ~a ~b ~c) gives ('clojure.core/if a b c)
I like Evernote because it's free, and makes good use of tags and web publishing/sharing. Yet, it's got a long ways to go to catch up to OneNote in terms of the user interface behavior on Windows.

The interface for the EN native app on Windows feels a lot like (what I imagine the reality is) that they've got other priorities than to make it feel perfect. It's glitchy, the keyboard shortcuts aren't very good, it doesn't remember sorts, it doesn't sync with the share quite as cleanly as I'd like, etc.

Ctrl+Shift+B to start a bulleted list? Really? In a note taking app? What's wrong with detecting an asterisk?

They'll get there-- Evernote is great for adding neat features to it that OneNote will never have (e.g. "View in Google Earth"), but what I really want first is a smoother note-taking experience and I'd happily trade out some of the fun integration features.
It's Made of 100% Cotton; Its Sales Are 99% Ironic
Nope, the market is going to forgive AA because it didn't spend money on a new site and passed that $2.50 in savings per ticket on to the customer, which puts them $2.50 cheaper than the other guys, which nets them far more incremental sales than a better site would (at least so the theory goes).
This stuff:

http://www.welton.it/articles/windows_for_linux_users
I love your front page. One of the common criticisms on HN is that it's hard for us to tell what startups do. You make it quite clear (to me) from first glance what you offer.

We use/pay Clicky for stats, and I have to say they do a good job in displaying the metrics I care about.

It's hard to say whether I would pay more or less for something that integrated with all my analytics accounts. I think there's some appeal there, but I see more of these services now tracking some of the social aspects so your value will get eroded unless you keep working hard.

Looks good at first glance, though.
Because those huge corporations with their broken cultures are the ones handing out all the money!

There are not enough interesting mid-scale jobs out there to support all those talented designers/coders/etc to all do great/interesting things.

Or, as some people would put it, "90% of everything is crap".
This is not quite what you want, but there are quite a few 4D puzzles.

iirc, Scott Kim, who did many of the illustrations for Douglas Hofstadter, wrote a paper presenting an optical illusion only perceivable in 4 spatial dimensions ("The Impossible Skew Quadrilateral: A Four-Dimensional Optical Illusion").

http://www.superliminal.com/cube/cube.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-dimensional_sequential_move_p...

There is a 4D variant of tetris, such as http://illusions.hu/4dtris/
Not to mention that a lot of grads may never have worked a day in their lives. I knew a lot of people who had tons of extracurriculars but never actually worked at a real job. Having previous work experience, even if it's a part time menial job, is necessary in finding a job straight out of school.
I copied this exact sentence out while reading, intending to post it here. Something about this and the notion of a fundamental thoughtfulness tied to real perception and physical habit struck me as the most interesting and compelling aspect of the article. I grew up in a DIY household, and now that I've lived on my own for 10+ years, I still do all of my own mechanical work: cars, bikes, guitars, electrical, plumbing, you name it; I'll fix it until it's really broke and then fix it until it's fixed. I don't do yard work or menial manual labor, though, as I find that tedious and soul-sucking. Anyway, I've always assumed my slow, and careful, habits and thought process were merely genetic. But now I wonder if maybe having gotten a few crushed fingers over the years, and had a few jobs that ended up taking far longer than they should have been due to early mistakes in the process, don't have some share of the responsibility for the way I think.
I would estimate the probability that the defense knew about the bias before the trial as >90%. That was why they called it a spectrial. It was conducted only for the sake of spectacle as it was not legally binding. Definitely one of the more deeply funny tricks TPB has ever pulled.
Lots, but for I'd go for Patrick McKenzie for someone I could realistically emulate. Because 1) He hasn't achieved the oh-my-god millions and millions kind of success, but something more realistic and reachable, 2) He's constantly trying to help everyone else to do it, too, and 3) He is continuing to build upon his earlier success and continues to improve. Oh, and 4) He's doing it on time constraints similar to my own. Thanks, Patrick--I hope to follow in your footsteps.
Moreover, the legal standing of privacy for e-mails is very interesting and I doubt I am the only one crious to see where this line of argument goes. For example, it speaks to the question "If I have consented for my employer to scan my email, does that mean my employer has the right to make my emails public"?
You got it exactly. I'm not arguing that the Arduino is going to be sitting on office desks or pants pockets everywhere, but that whoever invents the thing that is will have cut their teeth and learned what works on an Arduino.
Usually just vim, putty and Cygwin. But I never do any real work under Windows (putty means I don't have to), so I'm probably missing some things.

When I worked with Python I installed the Enthought Python distribution (which I also happened to be the maintainer of, at the time): http://www.enthought.com/products/epd.php

Now that I work with Perl, I'd probably install Strawberry Perl.
Comments and discussion over at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=621520
None of the remarks you list seem snide to me.
That last graph is one of those "holy shit" types of revelations. MS should be scared spitless.
'My bad' may have come to the US via basketball player Manute Bol, from the Sudan, whose native language is Dinka. (Though, 'my bad' could mainly be an artifact of broken English.) See:

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002693.h...
- I'd use this if it were free.
- Show me a list of my newest non-search referrers
Three Rules for Success
From what I have seen (not much, but probably more than most programmers), they don't. I suspect the reason is because everybody has at least one native spoken language, but programming languages are not native in the same way; they are acquired, and so are not perceived as a necessity.

And as such, for most people it is much harder to have a "favorite spoken language" that they can use as a platform to bash other languages. The way that programmers, text editor users, and coffee drinkers bash each other is bashing someone for an acquired taste. Bashing other languages is almost like bashing someone's physical appearance, and the immaturity becomes very obvious a lot quicker.

Also, regarding compactness of the spoken language, on average, English is longer than, say, Chinese. But brevity is NOT the goal. The tradeoff is redundancy, which English has much more of (e.g. parallelism and verb/plurality agreement). Old Chinese, with all its homophones, has plenty of texts written so compactly that if you don't read the text you will not understand it (at least for modern pupils).
I often get jumped on for my views, but S-W is true, and untrue. Untrue in that absence of a direct expression implies absence of concept; true in that absence of a direct expression impedes such an expression, such that it is less likely to get used, and hence, less efficient, and less likely to be conceived.

And I certainly agree that S-W applies for human and computer languages alike.
Google Maps Now Suggests Alternate Routes
> How many elementary school kids or design students or Ruby programmers ever hacked the Basic Stamp?

I think the answer across the three categories is probably above 10,000. The Arduino is sweet and the development environment is better than what Parallax supplied, but I think you're overstating the case. I think it would be fair to say that Basic, as typically used on a Basic Stamp, is substantially less complicated than Ruby.
I believe rcoder is saying the 4GB database limit is a property of the implementation rather than the cdb format.
I think people shouldn't use "topline stats" like # Twitter followers. You should be tracking the value that Twitter drives to your product (preferably dollars-in-hand) and optimize that -- whether that means getting more followers, getting more followers of a certain type, getting more people to retweet your stuff, or whatever.

The same goes for the other "top line" metrics like that: pageviews, uniques, # friends, # fans, whatever.

"# friends"-type metrics are particularly bad because they're virtually monotonic.

Just my thoughts -- your product might not be designed for my needs.
I've heard Air as the most common drawback for Tweetdeck - the low-quality text rendering, non-standard widgets, etc. scream "non-native app" and the install process is certainly a lot harder if you don't already have Air installed. Granted, I tend to hang out with geeks and Mac-using designers but I'm not sure that the general public is more likely to install a runtime before installing the application they wanted to try.
amazing language. hope it takes off.
Presumably, the point behind college is to do more than drink, party, and have a sheet of paper that shows some baseline amount was learned through the drunken haze. What that baseline is, and how much the person is toeing it, isn't really obvious with just a official sheet of paper.

I do hope, however, that the market is not overzealous in what it dismisses. The degree itself might be nearly worthless; however, the path to the degree can yield surprisingly different results depending on the person and whether they cared more about the journey or the destination, be that a degree or a job. For my part, I couldn't care less about the sheet of paper I was given. The knowledge I gained, and the interesting and insightful conversations I had, made the process of getting the degree far from worthless.
Leave my object types alone: Hibernate vs Datanucleus
Hibernate proxies alter core functionality of your mapped entities, affecting equals, hashcode, and instanceof. Nasty...
surely all these things and more can be accomplished with straight javascript. look at jquery! and extjs, prototype, ...

jquery has gone so far that it is starting to smell like a DSL. all in js.

thanks for the feedback.
Will Twitter kill RSS?
High IQ Is No Help for Those With ADHD
I find it practical, personally. I've always used WinXP with the Win98 'classic' theme, and Opera with the Opera6 theme. Not particularly beautiful but very responsive and easy to navigate.
Which systems allocate human capital better?
Capitalism has yet to find an efficient way to reallocate human capital

Has something else found that efficient way?
Challenges for the Next Wave of Innovation
Thanks for the clarification.

I suspect that my G1 has a bad GPS module because I find that when I have it disabled, I can get a somewhat accurate measurement of my current location via cell towers or whatever, however if I have it enabled, it can't figure out where I am at all (at least not within the amount of time that I am willing to wait for it-- 1 minute or so). So I leave it disabled pretty much all the time in an attempt to keep the battery life long.

If it were up to me (and I must admit I have not looked at how the location API works), I would have location services return an imprecise value quickly (via cell towers or wifi or whatever) and refine it as the GPS came online. Sensor fusion is still an active research topic, but there are at least some simple heuristics that could be used if it was inefficient to make a full Bayesian inference.
> scared spitless

If the infamous 2007 Missouri School of Journalism lecture hall photo has not already:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/psiko/1473644932/

http://blogs.eweek.com/applewatch/content/macbook/is_apples_...
> Kid did a dumb thing, but from what I know of the facts (no malicious intent)

How do you know that there was no malicious intent? (I'm not saying you don't - I'm asking how you gained access to this information.)

Putting on my "what if it had happened to {someone else}" hat, I'll ask if folks would be so forgiving if it had been Biden or Obama?
I've just tried this. Weird choices. Main route was about 200 miles, 3 hours 50. Alternates were significantly longer in both distance and time. By hand with one point I got a route that was 180 miles and only 3 minutes longer.

I know about the TSP, complexity theory, and the difficulties in doing this sort of thing, but I admit to being confused as to the choice of alternatives. I'd be interested to know something of the criteria being used.
Maybe above 10,000 if you aggregate over the entire multi-decade period that the Basic Stamp has been around. Maybe. Also, BASIC the programming language may be simpler than Ruby, it may even be simpler that C/C++ that you program the Arduino in. But it's still much harder to get starter programming a Basic Stamp and much harder to get it to do anything useful. How long would it take an intermediate PHP programmer with no previous electronics experience to build a device that posted a tweet whenever they pressed a button using a Basic Stamp? With an Arduino and the right shields, that project would take less than an hour including downloading the IDE and getting everything configured.
That looks right. It's worth noting that the "a" sound in the first word is pronounced like the vowel in the word "spa" rather than the vowel in "mass" or "maim".
I have a lot of experience with Arc, Scheme, and Common Lisp, and I find Arc significantly more pleasant to program in. When I have to shift into Scheme (some parts of Arc are written in Scheme), it feels like there is a lot of extra drag.

It was noticing this difference that made me decide Arc was ready to release. If it (a) felt significantly better to me, who (b) am experienced with existing Lisp dialects, and (c) writing a type of application (HN) that's not wildly specialized, then it had the "quantum of utility" I usually use as the test for releasing a version 1.
I thought the insight about the relative costs of labor and energy spurring the Industrial Revolution made it worth throwing in the pot here ...
You can just talk to BDB (running in a separate process) over an RPC server. Yes, you have to write that server... but it would be trivial to do, and certainly less costly than licensing BDB.
If by convoluted, you mean "half the source code is detailed comments", then sure...
Arduino is the Python of dev boards in that Python has an explicit goal of "batteries included" -- to include everything you need to be productive right away. Ironically, in the case of Arduino, batteries are technically not included, but that's because you get power directly from USB. :-) But metaphorically, Arduino is as "batteries included" as Python.
I take offense! I follow no "strategy". That's what I read daily outside of research and coding. I post the most interesting stuff because:

a) I follow a lot of great links and discussions here.

b) I've learned a ton in doing so.

c) I'm trying to give back in some way.

d) To me, that's karma but it has nothing to do with points.

Now, I do feel bad about not contributing to many discussions here. In general, I don't have much patience for that kind of back and forth. Furthermore I don't think I have much to add. But I'm certainly not worried about the "cost".

I'd love to know how many stories I've had killed as compared to other people and some site average and standard deviation. I see 7 out of my last 120 submissions (one was self-killed) or 6%. That seems okay and certainly not an outlier. Still, even those fall within my primary interests: brains, education, business and technology with some cultural stuff. Those interests may be overly broad to you, but they're simply who I am. If my failure rate here is only 6% then I have to conclude plenty are interesting (as in the guidelines) to folks here.
Marketing Talks@Google: Fred Wilson [Video]
The state of Open Source in the .NET ecosystem: A five year summary
IPhone Mind Mapping Courtesy of iBlueSky
Pharmaceuticals if you did chemistry. And I'm sure EE people don't have a hard time finding work.

Or do you mean people who major in things like classics and French? I guess they can be...teachers. Of people who study classics and French and will be able to go on and become...teachers.

I think it's important for techies to get a little exposure to humanities during their undergrad degrees, but I don't really see the point of spending four years studying only humanities.
>I believe Opera has the best dev team out there. Their pages render correctly more often than any other browser. If ever I wonder if something is working correctly, I check it in Opera. If IE looks like Opera, then IE is right. If Firefox looks like Opera, then Firefox is right. That's how it goes.

I wish that were true, but my experience has often been otherwise. There are some sites that I just know won't work in Opera, either in stable or 10 alpha (which passes Acid3) or both. I'm still a die-hard Opera fan, though. It feels so much cleaner and faster than Firefox.
I think techcrunch is misunderstanding the purpose of alternate routes -- the point is to allow people to say "hmm, the radio traffic report says there's an accident on bridge X... what good routes are there which avoid that bridge?"

As such, it's not useful to provide "the best N routes" -- instead, the point is to find N good routes which do not overlap more than necessary. In your case, Google probably decided that the best route was 200 miles and 3h50m, and then ignored the route you found because it was "too similar" to the route it had already found.
Involuntary Military Service Under the Radar
why? the only use for java on my PC right now is that one of my banks' website requires it for login.
Hi Paul,

Any chance of releasing a book or spec alongside Arc at some point? Or are you encouraging people to just play around with it for now? I'm just wondering whether the idea here is to encourage exploration through scarcity, or that there's insufficient resources to produce the documentation, or if it's just too early on at this stage.
What JSON parser supports non-string object keys? I've used several for various languages, and even written a few, and never encountered one that allowed such a drastic deviation from the spec. Remember that JSON is only vaguely related to JavaScript -- just because some feature is possible in JavaScript (non-string keys, Infinity, etc) doesn't mean it's valid JSON. The only valid JSON is that which matches the grammar in RFC 4627[1].

For what it's worth, the corner cases in JavaScript make non-string keys very difficult to reasonably parse. For example, if {foo:"bar"} should parse to {"foo":"bar"}, then what should {1:"bar"} or {::"bar"} parse to?

[1] http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4627.txt
We're releasing a new version quite soon. So once again, if there's anything you want fixed, now is the time to tell us.

http://arclanguage.org/item?id=9257

One of the things I want to add next is graphics libraries. Does anyone have any recommendations for what to plug into to munge images?
I didn't mean any offense, just that posting a lot of interesting material with a broad scope is a successful strategy. I tend to take a narrow view of what's hacker news, but that doesn't make your links uninteresting. If I had to categorize them, I'd say some were definitely on topic, a lot of them are fuzzy, and some of them definitely aren't, centered around anything with politics in it.
I'm surprised by the operating systems graph, I didn't think Mac OS would have gone up that much and I especially thought "Other" would be much higher or at least increasing by any amount.

I wonder how that relates to what type of school University of Virginia is as I know nothing about it. It would be interesting to see how that compares to Stanford, MIT and the like.
It looks nice, and dashboards are cool, but I'd be hesitant to give you any passwords. So hopefully all these services have some sort of API key/oauth/other authentication mechanism.

I'd pay $3/mo.
That's one of the things I'm going to do next.
I'm pretty sure that the SF Chronicle isn't facing bankruptcy because they occasionally make mistakes.

After all, everyone knows that the internet is a 100% factual replacement for newspapers.
No. Twitter will not kill RSS. Some end users will have their needs me by Twitter, but there are lots more uses for RSS.

If twitter was going to kill RSS, twitter would not provide RSS.
Multiple focus x windows system allows more than one user on a single display
For embedded programming (twiddling digital I/O, motor control, and the like), I think the Arduino and the Basic Stamp are comparable in ease of use, or at least in the same ballpark. I've used both; I'm not just making this up.

On the other hand, you're entirely right about Ethernet connectivity. Making a Basic Stamp tweet is somewhere between nontrivial and impossible.

Still, I don't think that the Arduino is miles ahead of its competitors. It's definitely sweet for small projects with limited I/O, storage, and bandwidth requirements. There are lots of embedded Ethernet boards that offer comparable performance/price ratios. To me, the Arduino seems slightly ahead in ease of use for beginners, but that's about it.

(Edit:)
As competitors, I'd offer:

http://makezine.com/controller/
http://www.rabbit.com/products/
http://www.gumstix.com/store/catalog/index.php
http://www.embeddedarm.com/products/index.php

They're all harder to use than an Arduino, but I think they win on performance/price. And they're not that hard to use. The Make controller, in particular, is quite easy.
twitter will end up promoting RSS, keep in mind that RSS is primarily a machine-to-machine communications protocol and Twitter is an end user application.
In the documentary film "Objectified", Dieter Rams (former chief designer for Braun) specifically calls out Apple as one of the only companies around today that takes design seriously.
The default skin is kind of ugly. I used Christian Kreb's m 7 for a while, which is very clean, and lately I've been using c00.

m 7: http://my.cn.opera.com/community/customize/skins/info/?id=45... (doesn't seem to be on the US site anymore, no idea why)

c00: http://my.opera.com/community/customize/skins/info/?id=8692
Would be interesting to see the results of the same tests with a group of 120+ IQ ADHDers on Ritalin/Adderall/etc. I would think the impairment would go down significantly.
Well done Oleg but where's the Russian language on the side? =) I don't know if it's in the works or what, because wordoid just generated veter.com for me (which is still available). Would definitely be fun.