skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ah, another missive from a software developer who regards users as a mere annoyance, just discovered Machiavelli, and favors intuition over feedback from those users (because intuition always trumps evidence, unless you're A/B testing the color of your "sign up now!" button, in which case evidence always trumps intuition). Never seen anything like this before.

If you like Gnome, great. If you don't like Gnome, you should use something else. Arguing this old subject hasn't yet accomplished anything, and there are plenty of alternatives available now. (I really like KDE4.)

If project developers are genuinely screwing their pooch, then a stampede to alternatives will convince them far more thoroughly than even the most well-crafted internet argument. If there's no stampede, then people are just arguing personal preferences in the face of popular preferences, and they'd still be better off switching to something else.

Save passionate arguing for situations in which it can do some good.
I've given 3 oral pitches to my local Awesome Foundation over the years and wasn't selected each time. Not sure if that says something about my ideas, pitch skills, or what, but it's a bit of a bummer. FYI: The ideas were a completely solar/bike-powered LAN party, an electronics recycling drive where you get to smash computers with sledgehammers, and a student conference where all the research posters are wheatpasted onto the walls of a graffiti-filled alleyway and presented with paint markers.
The part of the article that alarmed me the most was that the state of Arizona has reduced state funding for the university by 50% over the past 5 years....

Wow. The baby boomers really are gutting the system that gave they benefited from.
Or, they could have used electromagnets for the stator and the rotor. The stator would reverse polarity at the same moment the rotor reversed polarity (modulo differences the transfer functions), so the force would still be in the same direction, despite the alternating current. One could make A/C motors this way, it's just that A/C induction motors are much more efficient.
Totally agree. It feels like author just doesn't want me to to read that...

On the same note, I don't understand why in some countries signs on highways use all-capital letters. Words written that way are actually harder and slower to read [1] than ones written with proper capitalization.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_caps#Readability
Georgia Tech ECE alumni here. I think the ECE department students would be on board, and be successful, too. There's lots of opportunity for hardware startups, in my opinion. Little single purpose PCBs seem like they've done just as well lately as clever code.
It's good that Gnome developers recognize that users do get unhappy when Gnome removes features or makes non-backwards compatible changes.

Next step is of course to find understanding that users' reactions are based on numerous reasons, rather than originating from one source. Losing access to features previously found is one cause, but so is the lack of rational and balanced discussions explaining why the features were removed, and missing instructions on how to get similar functionality in Gnome 3, or the lack of tools to migrate old Gnome 2 applications to Gnome 3. To take a comparing example of Gnome2->Gnome3, lets look at Python 2->Python 3 and see what the Python Software Foundation did right.

#1: Features removed were announced years before they were removed, with clear instructions on how to migrate to better and improved features.

#2: 2to3 was invented, an automatic translator for source code from Python 2 to Python 3, to make it easy for developers to migrate over to new version.

#3: Any feature that was removed had clear documentation and discussion that explained why it was removed, and what users could do to move forward.

#4: New features were back-ported from Python 3 and made available in Python 2. This allowed users to test out things from the security and familiarity of Python 2, without getting tangled in all the changes at once in Python 3.

#5: Python 2 and Python 3 was/is developed in parallel, giving people plenty of glimpses (and warnings) of the future, and insight over what would be future safe activities.

Gnome 3 did none of these things. One could argue that there were practical reasons why, but not doing any of those things will hurt a project. At any rate, I have not seen Gnome 3 give any practical reasons why they did such an abrupt move from Gnome 2 to Gnome 3, beyond that they "had to".

(Written by a Gnome 3 user, on Gnome 3)
Portuguese speaker? "Current" version is the English word I believe you meant to use.
He owns a phone

No, he does not own the phone.
And if the Australians don't like the price discrimination, they can facilitate arbitrage - which is exactly what is proposed. In a free market, nobody should have the right to an artificial protection from arbitrage.
I don't have high hopes.

1) He's not working in the open, he just says "I will free it, honest." Maybe he'll go through with it, but as of now he's distributing proprietary software.

2) He says that some of the plugins will be nonfree. We know that through Emacs that the plugins are essentially everything. Nonfree plugins means a nonfree editor.

I'll be sticking with Emacs. Emacs is still improving. There is a project to replace the existing ELisp VM with GNU Guile, which will improve performance and bring many new features, such as an FFI and threading.
I noticed last night that the forms have been cleaned up a bit and outfitted with new class names
I'm really surprised Scribd seems to have had little public trouble with copyright.

I used to find myself there all the time for various hard to find and not for public consumption automotive docs. The site was full of obviously infringing content.
FWIW, if Netflix agrees to install one of their appliances in your network, they do it completely free of charge.

If you don't meet their requirements (which are based upon average aggregate traffic levels), you can't even pay them to get one.

If your ISP meets the requirements and is refusing, well, it's their own damn fault -- they're simply wasting money.

Personally, I am happy to peer with anyone with whom I share a presence, even if they're an "eyeball network" like me and we'd only be passing a few megabits of traffic.
Medium.com, Your Second Home.
Not sure if that last part will work. I can definitely see Comcast allowing speed test to work to it's fullest and then buffering youtube and other sites where performance matters.
This is so bizarre. He's not even taking the Machiavellian advice, which would be to actually _not_ take stuff away from your users (assuming he wants happy users, which, I guess, doesn't actually concern him).

Instead he's satisfied having de-constructed users' reactions, and just leaves it at that. It's like saying I figured out _why_ punching you in the face will make you upset, so I'm just going to sit back and enjoy the show.
Happy to take one for the team.
Apple's Mansfield assigned to special projects
When fluid dynamics mimic quantum mechanics
Indeed, I went shopping at a "Going out of business" sale for a high end children's toy store this weekend. They said, "We're going online to compete with Amazon, can't afford retail space any more."

Their so called clearance price for a toy car was the same every day price at Duane Reade.
Exactly. Technology and especially things like cryptography and hacking, can potentially get you thrown in jail again, after a decade of peace. Does anyone even remember the immense legal problems that Phil Zimmermann had with releasing PGP? What about Kevin Mitnick? They put Mitnick in solitary confinement for years because the US government convinced a judge that "he had the ability to start a nuclear war by whistling into a pay phone" (as per Wikipedia). Guys, this is what we're dealing with, except now we have Guantanomo Bay where US citizens can be thrown into indefinitely with no due process for potentially being a terrorist.

Are we bound to repeat the same mistakes again, because a generation of "hackers" don't want to educate themselves on the importance of politics and concepts like "freedom"? Or is all you want to do is sit back, and fantasize that you will create the next Facebook, and you won't have to care about things like freedom, the Constitution, etc?
While simple, I believe Panel and Listgroup are new components; nice to have those nicely implemented and styled in the framework. Will be handy for me. In many ways I think Bootstrap helps the most with the little things like this. I am very appreciative of this terrific framework being made available for us to use.
Removing features that people use makes them unhappy because they can no longer use them. That goes for hiding features, like (for example) hiding icons on the desktop, een when in classic mode.

Or the up button in Nautilus. Or any one of the dozens of useful things they removed. I was quite a fan of Gnome 2.x, but the "remove features people use because we are right and they are wrong" mentality means I switched back to Windows, and run VirtualBix for my coding, debugging, etc.
Can I plug it into an LCD projector and then wirelessly stream my presentation (keynote, PowerPoint, PDF) or even screen mirror, from my laptop? Would be great for presentations.
Can't that argument be applied to most produces that are now produced in places like China? We aren't saying that Australia shouldn't have engineering and development skills in these areas. Manufacturing and assembly absolutely makes economic sense not to be done here, unless you are in favor of lowering the minimum wage.
wow. My childhood dissected into something I can (to a marginal extent) comprehend. It's quite the fascinating reality check. It isn't really magic after all.
I enjoyed this article right up until the end, when I expected the author to use his new-found knowledge to suggest a method for removing features that caused less friction. Instead, his response was more "Now that I know why people behave this way, I don't need to care about it." Doesn't seem at all constructive to me.
In many companies, being assigned to special projects means you're going to executive limbo. But at Apple, it might really mean what it says.
Hastings died in a fiery one-car crash one recent morning in Los Angeles.

FWIW, My personal worldview is very much aligned with Taibbi's but I can never get more than a handful of paragraphs into anything he writes because the invective is so overwhelming.
No. There is a process that occurs when piloting a new surgical technique. This often involves animal models initially, eg inducing duodenal perforation in pigs and trying the surgery there. Then it might be practiced on human cadavers to work out more of the technical aspects. Then a feasibility study is performed on a small number of patients using a trial protocol ie. patients have to opt in after giving informed consent. As you can imagine, for sick patients coming in during the middle of the night, this can be tricky. Then if it seems feasible and successful, and you think that there is reasonable doubt that the new procedure could be better than the old (equipoise), you do a randomised trial.
The engineering side produces entrepreneurs as well, but with a somewhat different culture, with more of a focus on R&D inputs. The style is less of the Silicon Valley one of: go to a hackathon, brainstorm ideas that can be built with <48 hours of R&D, built an MVP over the weekend. There's a bigger focus on finding a nice chunk of uncommercialized but commercial-potential research that could be spun off into a company.

The other common non-big-company route is independent consultant. Lots of engineering alumni run profitable small consulting firms, which seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do. However it's usually easier to do that if you work somewhere "in the trenches" for a few years first to build up credibility.
This is over 94,000 Rupees. That is a huge amount of money in India. I'm not sure most people realize the cost of living difference between the two countries.

Case in point: I was in India (Chennai) for a week on business a couple of months ago. During that time (M-F), I had a driver who was dedicated to me. He took me to the office and back, and took me anywhere else I wanted to go. This wasn't a taxi service, he had nobody else to shuttle around. When I was working, he just waited around for me to call. The cost for all of this? US $25, for the entire week. That's what I paid the car service, so he's getting some amount less than that.

All this to say: These sorts of comparisons are not as dramatic as they seem.
Excellent summary. The lack of quality couple with the large number of essentially rehashed discussions is what makes things particularly bad. I've started using the "new" tab a lot more than before as good submissions aren't making it to the front page.
Yeah, I would agree that head, as it is, looks like a mistake.
Instead of:

head :: [a] -> a

I would code it as:

head :: [a] -> Maybe a

returning Nothing for empty lists. Same applies to tail.

But others have very good reasons to disagree: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6364409/why-does-haskells...
I've really been wanting to get into GBA programming. I really would like to buy a cart to be able to develop directly on my DS ( I thought I would be able to find one in Akiba, but they seem a bit impossible to find in person, and all the online stores I've seen seem mega shady)
I've been thinking about getting an "loyalty card" untied to my person but I haven't figured out a way to do this other than getting somebody to sign up and give me his card. This is because (at least here) they will send you your card in the mail, you can't really lie about any contact information.
Internet shopping from overseas is massive here now. The days of price discrimination are fast coming to an end if business wants to stay competitive.
Bang on target there. Plasma is cool, but KDE doesn't float my boat :)
> The idea that a single ISP is in a position to charge both YouTube and its customers is bizarre.

Some even go a step further, inspecting unencrypted HTTP traffic and replacing referrer IDs and such on advertisement links (e.g. links to Amazon).
What the Ashcroft “Hospital Showdown” on NSA spying was all about
Depends on where and who you ask. There are definitely people who will take your body parts in sale. (Think iPhone craze + China and remember back to people selling kidneys.)
Imagining the ultimate UX design starter kit
People loved Gnome 2. I don't know if they loved it enough to pay for all the devs needed to keep it going.

I really don't understand the "do not let people customise anything" attitude. I agree that supporting users who have made customisations is annoying and hard; just force people to return to a default config before they make any support requests. I agree that sane defaults are nice, and that option screens are ugly; offer sane defaults, and hide all the config stuff in a text file.
My uncaffeinated early-morning mind read the headline as why removing feautes makes people HAPPY. I think that would be a much more interesting article.
Oh, I missed the forms. I haven't had much call to use them in my current project, so I missed those.
I don't understand why people are so buttburt about Google Reader.

Google's business is to make money, directly or in-directly.
G-Reader didn't make much money, they tried advertising, it didn't work. Turns out people who use RSS, also tends to be tech savvy (a very small portion of overall internet users), people who are tech savvy are less likely to click on ads.

So they don't make any money from it directly, and I can't think of many indirect ways they could make a sizeable amount of money from tech-savvy users. They could start charging small amount per month, and as much as everyone said AFTER google decided to shut it down that they would be willing to pay for a paid service; I suspect in reality most would have just moved to another free service.

Another reason why it makes sense that google decided to shut it down, because now they have Social Site, Google+, from a business point of view it makes more sense for them if rss readers just subscribe to those site on G+. Less fragmentation and all that. I don't necessarily like it, but it makes sense from their point of view.

As to their delivery service. IF it actually turns out to be a serious business venture beyond testing the waters. I suspect, this would start making them money from very early days, if it really picks up that is. It has also the added bonus of knowing name, address, shopping habits of individuals. I would suspect, even if they don't make much money from delivery, those alone would be immensely valuable for Google and their advertisers.

Compare to that, an RSS reader seems like minor inconvenience for google. There is no comparison at all.
Then define "great mind", define "better things"; put your mouth where your downvotes are.
Flat is in this year.
Atlanta's startup community was already pretty strong. But it is growing fast: http://atlantatechvillage.com/ and http://atlantaventures.com/accelerator/
Would definitely take them out of the 'dick move' category.

Thinking I would pay 2/3 the cost of my vps for a status page is a bit crazy.
Your Guide to Becoming a Freelance Web Designer
I think the trend will be differentiated by goals... There are core classes with known material that people don't look to for inspiration: entry level math, accounting, etc. In the right circumstance, this should free up the teachers to inspire for courses that do require more intense discussion and guidance. For example: philosophy, political science, lab science, etc.
In my perfect world, municipalities would only fiber that ran to every home and to a central facility but they would not manage any logical devices or infrastructure. Any carrier who wanted to have a presence in the facility could, for the same exact cost.

Customers would then be able to pick and choose their carrier and carriers would be forced to compete based upon service. Not happy with ISP A? Call up ISP B, sign up, and they'll put in a ticket to a tech at the facility to patch you over from ISP A to ISP B instead.

I realize, of course, that this a fantasy that will never happen.
What are the best paying java dev roles in London?
What industry/subject/project-types?
Aside from GNOME, one can also look at the Opera Browser community. Many of us were skeptical of the switch to being based on Chromium not because of browser, but because of the fear Opera would throw out many of the powerful features its user base has relied on for years.

Heck, Opera wasn't even going to add in normal bookmarking until they received a huge community backlash against it. Many of us have hundreds of bookmarks and the alternative they were providing[1] would have made it a burden to find anything useful when one has more than a few dozen bookmarks.

In short, removing features makes people unhappy when they rely on them being there in order to be productive. Adding new features or dramatically altering the way long time ones work, sure go ahead, as long as current users are given the option to keep using those long time features (ones more than a few years old) the same way they expect by undoing some option in settings. Some might scoff at this as being impossible, but that was how Opera actually functioned from the beginning up until the switchover to Chromium in Opera 15.

[1] http://my.opera.com/chooseopera/blog/2013/07/08/shop-smarter...
> I don't understand why people are so buttburt about Google Reader.

Could Google have open-sourced it, and allowed other people to run the server side stuff on non-google servers?
So expecting someone else to take 10 minutes of their time to explain something to you, when you could have just spent 5 minutes of your own makes the other guy a douche? Really?

Anyone emotionally fragile enough to turn away over someone telling them to try to find answers on their own before pestering others probably isn't cut out to be part of the community in the first place, at least not a technical one, seeing as how they're too lazy to do it, and selfish enough to think that their own time is more valuable than that of the person helping them.

If people followed your advice, aside from the more experienced people shooting themselves in the face, they'd waste all their time answering questions for those too self-entitled to put in any efforts of their own where their expertise isn't even utilized, while the other neophytes who have a genuine interest and a willingness to put in their own efforts wouldn't have a resource to turn to.

Maybe it's toxic behavior to you, but it's human nature and the modus operandi because the set of technical experts is small to begin with, the set of technical experts who have enough patience to answer beginners' questions on a regular basis is much smaller still, and the set of technical experts willing to endlessly put up with the self-entitled and intellectually indolent is as rare as unicorns.

Be more realistic and open-minded to other perspectives.
You probably won't read this, but:

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/animal_fore...

It's not enough that an asteroid hit the Earth, but it's such a simple theory that everyone can remember, it has been popularized by everyone.
It isn't the filters most of you are dishonest about.

It is about the teaching euphemism: students are rather used as cheap labor for exploitation to be disposed of, when "too old" (read expensive: family etc.). I guess there is also a legal reason why trainees and interns are on the rise as opposed to students and initial probation periods.
Complexity is path dependent
Streaming video competes with Comcast's original and probably much higher profit product.
Man, I feel weird. I used BS2 temporarily, but then stripped it out for a straight reset and grid system. Old habits die hard, I guess, and what I Want from a UI doesn't always match Bootstraps ideas... I'll give this another shot for my startup prototype, but I have a feeling the same will happen.

Is anyone else like that, or am I now old-school at the ripe age of 22?
I think he was saying that their math-fu was weak, too weak for comp sci :)
When I was at Georgia Tech (2004-07) nearly everyone had heard of startups in the CS department, and grad students being involved in machine-learning / data-mining startups was a common summer job, so I'm not sure where this is coming from. Here's one big one cofounded by a professor: http://www.skytree.net/
> Politics are way more important than most of what we talk about

Talking is cheap, I'd hope to see more execution and implementations, especially, code.
This growth affects more than just Silicon Valley and California. Take any area that's boomed in the last 4 decades and you will find something similar. I'm sitting in a office building on what used to be some of the most productive farm land in Texas. Now Collin County is exburbia and corporate headquarters. Most of the residents are originally from other states, countries or 1st generation Texans.
An election just rearranges the people who are in various pre-determined positions. It doesn't change the structure of the government. If there is a "chief surveillance officer", an election might change who is in that position but you will still be spied on. In fact, what is more likely is that you won't get to vote for that person directly, but the president you elect will appoint a candidate and the congress you elect will approve that candidate. This means you are even more removed from actually making any changes.

Even if a market is hard to enter, it's better than having armed officers show up and charge you with treason for trying to overthrow the government. Reflect on the political situation leading up to the American Civil War. Even with that many people who felt that strongly about the issue of states' rights, they were not able to change the structure of the government.
Barnaby Jack (1977-2013): Farewell to a Daring Wunderkind