skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
All of your complaints seem to be about the defaults. That's fine, but I don't see that it makes sense to switch distribution because you don't like the defaults, given that all the other options are available inside Debian and/or Ubuntu as well. There's Xubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu GNOME, Kubuntu etc. all of which have different desktop environment defaults, enthusiastic developers who look after it. Some intend to switch to Mir, and some do not. Switching distribution because you don't like the main Ubuntu flavour's defaults is just fragmentation when there's no need for it. There may be plenty of valid reasons, but not liking the defaults is not one of them.

> Millions is spent on Ubuntu but seems like little makes it upstream.

I don't think you appreciate how much work does go upstream. Thousands of patches go upstream (eg. http://udd.debian.org/cgi-bin/ubuntu_usertag.cgi; and that's just stuff that went directly Debian and was tagged as such). Driver work for new hardware enablements go to the upstream kernel so that Ubuntu developers don't have to maintain it. And Canonical is upstream for a number of projects (eg. they pioneered faster boot speeds with upstart, which went into RHEL). You just don't see this in action because the community works, and work done in one distribution ends up in all the others. So you don't realise how much of the other distribution you're using involves work originally done in Ubuntu.
Some friends and I built RingReminder over a few nights / weekends as a side project - the core problem we were trying to solve was "how can we improve the reliability of our friends/family, so they do the things they are supposed to?", like show up to social plans on time, take their medications, etc...

The solution we landed on was a telephone-based automated reminder service - controlled from your calendar app.

The hypothesis driving our solution was while many people may check their email every few seconds / view upcoming events in their calendars, everyone we know picks up calls to their phones. Therefore, if we could create a near-frictionless method of automatically calling our friends to remind them to leave early, maybe we could improve their reliability. The calendar seemed like a natural place to do this - Just invite a ringreminder.com email address to the calendar entry, and a telephone call reminder is set. Also, us organized folks already used our calendar apps to keep track of when we were meeting said friends.

On the back end, its built in Java (spring framework) - we basically poll a mail account at regular intervals checking for calendar invites (Google/iCal or Outlook format) - we then parse out the necessary information to schedule the reminder call from the invite, and call Twilio to make the outgoing call. Any changes to the event (including cancellation) are automatically processed, assuming that you let your calendar app notify all guests to the event of the change. There is also a web CRUD interface for manually managing reminders.

Let me know if you have any questions!
Is the Washington Post good enough?

They have a link to the slide deck of a Federal Reserve about what was lossed and what was gained. Sadly, it didn't display in my browser.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/02/28/h...
jesus christ. we are really in a tech bubble again. this is just ridiculous. the end is near!
I love Japan as a country so I hope you are wrong. The demographics suggest you are right. The powerful interest groups that Friedman mentioned also exist there too.

Two differences with Japan: First, their debt is domestically held so they can avoid bond vigilantes. Second, as a country and culture they have been able to come together and solve great problems when they get consensus. (They just haven't had that consensus in decades)
I gave it a shot for a day recently but found it way harder to use than InstallShield or NSIS. Part of it was probably the broken documentation where half the links just ended in nirvana. But I gave up when I learned you really have to add each single file one-by-one and the documentation even defended this as a feature.
Don't mean to sound like an ass, but oh really?

WiX is a thin wrapper around MSI (which sucks beyond belief) and as such it suffers full blast from all the "design" decisions of the latter, not even trying to remedy the situation.

I really could pour out a full-blown rant on MSI in general and WiX in particular, but that would be wildly offtopic and of no interest to fellow HNers.
And a somewhat taller order, year after year, with the ideologues pushing so hard to disenfranchise voters.
Do you have any evidence to support this? The data that I can find point to a more subtle conclusion that does not fit this oft-repeated statement (myth?).

"We find that the relationship between firm size and employment growth is sensitive to these issues. However, our main finding is that once we control for firm age there is no systematic relationship between firm size and growth."

http://econweb.umd.edu/~haltiwan/size_age_paper_R&R_Aug_16_2...

EDIT:

I should say that it's not that small businesses don't create jobs, it's just a particular type of small business (young ones) that create most of them.

Additional discussion - http://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/econ_focus/...
You say that Windows 8.1 is better than windows 7 while occasionally poking the user in the eye?

I'm not sure nicer file copying is worth being pokes in the eye by Metro. Faster boot and power management sound interesting, but I would really need independent benchmarks before I would trust any such claims. A 5 seconds or less decrease in boot time (like http://www.zdnet.com/windows-8-vs-windows-7-benchmarked_p2-7...) would not be worth it for me. A significant power boost (+10%) for a laptop might be worth being poked in the eye, if said 10% can be gained while I use the computer (ie, not while sleeping/idling/suspended). For desktop however, power management is not really a feature Im looking for.
Are you counting the turbopumps needed to fire the engines?
> pander to web monkeys

Really? How exactly does VS2012 pander to "web monkeys" at the expense of others?
I do remember Google Wave developers also mentioned crashes on this very site. Actually, according to them, it was one of the problem with Wave project. I cannot provide an exact citation but it is quite easy to crosscheck.

Another well-known story is when digg.com was switched to Cassandra. It keep crashing under load.

To be clear, when one gives it two times the size of workload of RAM, running only one JVM process on a whole server and has no fluctuation either in data flows or connection rate (they call it tuning), well it works.
Without reading the article I can unequivocally answer

> Did these guys just reinvent the Web?

with NO, you hyperbolic twit.
Could you define "The American Internet"?
That might be how it's being played - the NSA surveillance is a useful story to push individual countries agendas, but what they're really after is complete control of domestic communications. It's not countries "breaking free from the US", rather the beginning of the balkanization of the internet.
"Edit 2: I haven't figured out backups yet. Windows 7 backup was trivial with an external disk."

There is a CLI option but the GUI is gone.

But you don't need backup since you have SkyDrive now ;)
Or, a simpler explanation: they named it while they were high on cocaine.
I use it mostly naked. That way, if I end up on a machine with an stock version, I can deal with it.

Have whatever mode you need for your programming language. Turn off evil crap like inserting tabs.
Turn off the splash screen.

Swap your left capslock and ctrl keys (externally).

Learn the important key bindings and a few other tricks and you're good to go. That way you can focus on accomplishing something rather than spending oodles of time customizing your environment.
While that's obviously a solution, it's not quite the same y'know? There's a lot more skill overhead in learning that tool vs the comparative ease of the installer project.

Considering how thoroughly MS screwed the pooch on ClickOnce, I was genuinely surprised when they completely abandoned their working installer system.
Yeah, the "reason" being that Windows Installer was designed to support corporate deployment of applications to shared machines with install-on-demand and roaming profiles, and to support Windows 95 and up. This, and Microsoft's manic affection to backwards compatibility plus "architecture astronautery" (on-demand installs of COM objects, anyone) makes MSI a disaster.

The fault of WiX is that it's too thin of a wrapper.
I don't get it, having a few comments scattered about in the source code is better than having a separate document that fully and succinctly explains the application API?

And what's to stop you from putting the comment about race conditions in the Doxygen-style comment?
VS 2010 is the last one I got for personal use. Not enamored with the changes in VS 2012, Windows 8.* nor the cyclical abandonment of APIs. Add in the increased license cost we face on all Microsoft products at work and any announcement from Redmond gets a "meh" from me.
There are three questions that must be asked here.

1. Is the rate of creating new possibilities equal to or greater than the rate of killing jobs?

If yes:

2. Is the difficulty of retraining our workforce today equal to or less than the difficulty of retraining our workforce in the past?

If yes:

3. Is the rate of retraining our workforce equal to or greater than the rate of creating new possibilities?

If yes:

Then yes, we don't have a problem.
Mindie launches today. Vine for Music
People always mention Unity as a non-selling point of Ubuntu, but I have to say I quite like it. Granted, my background is strange--last time I personally used something other than OS X for daily use was WindowMaker on NetBSD ~2003. I've used various unixen for servers / clusters, and I've supported others using Ubuntu workstations for scientific work since I used a FOSS desktop myself, but even that was 4 years ago now. Maybe I qualify a a crotchety neophyte?

The set of applications I now use has changed quite a lot recently, and now I find myself reevaluating Ubuntu. And while I gather people didn't like the change over to Unity, I'm appreciating the thoughtful UI choices and find it to be a selling point (it's been a long time since I've needed to do anything like tweak an .fvwmrc file!)

Whether or not Canonical can execute on it, I also like the direction they're going with the convergence stuff in Unity. My phone actually is approaching the level of power that I need in a desktop computer. The ability to dock it and still have Emacs seems pretty powerful. MS and Apple will get there in some form, but I suspect their visions of convergence will be somewhat more restrictive in terms of what I can do.

Whether or not they need Mir for that vision, I've no idea. However, I remember people talking about X11 replacements clear back in the long ago, and being disappointed for years. Canonical seems pretty close to delivering something that they say will enable them to do something that I think will be cool. And, I believe they've said it will be open source. Thus, I really don't get what all the flap about Mir is. If someone wants to prove the viability / superiority of Wayland by building the Ubuntu convergence phone ahead of canonical, more power to them.
Site down, cached text version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
Ironically, the new dataset doesn't seem to contain any of the Pokémon introduced in X or Y (yet).
"MSDN Camp"[1] in its full glory.

[1]: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html
I think that, in Europe, that would be called a bike, not a bicycle.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_bicycle_laws#Europe:

"European Union directive 2002/24/EC exempts vehicles with the following definition from type approval: 'Cycles with pedal assistance which are equipped with an auxiliary electric motor having a maximum continuous rated power of 0.25 kW, of which the output is progressively reduced and finally cut off as the vehicle reaches a speed of 25 km/h or if the cyclist stops pedaling.'"

Being a bike means (depending on the country) that you have to use a helmet, insurance, drivers license, cannot ride on an optional cycle lane, etc.
I tried it on a new computer (Haswell desktop with SSD).
But Windows 8.1 is still slower than XP.

Even though I disabled all animations I can feel some lag between clicks and response. Probably it's because of this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ay-gqx18UTM ("Windows 7 GUI slowness")

I'm going back to XP, but I needed to buy a dedicated graphics card because Intel HD doesn't have drivers for XP. And there's also 3GB RAM limit.
I imagine there's hardware limitation of the maximum current flow from the batteries (above and beyond the natural limitation).

Perhaps less catastrophically but similarly you might attack the lock, engaging the lock would most likely produce a skid and loss of control. With a solenoid engaged by a control circuit might that be possible simply by blasting the circuit with radio waves to induce a current? Thus you'd bypass having to gain access to any software controls and such.

Much easier to just nudge the back wheel with your car or shove a stick in the spokes if you're in to knocking people of their bikes though?
Since the headline was "reinventing the web" (a pretty ambitious, even bombastic goal), it would be fair to expect the solution to be open-source and/or free. Of course had the headline been "improving the web" or "making a faster web" then our expectations might have been different.
Good article but I think the issue has deeper roots stemming back to the formation of this country. It's all about the state vs federal issue. If you think about it, conservatives got exactly what they wanted with the shutdown. A small government with no ability to pay its social debts. They are going to keep doing this until there is civil war, again, or until states have all the power, again.
Days later, congress voted to finance the government. They collectively decided it would be easier to build a better government on an economy that isn't in a nosedive.
I have the same problem with MBP, but anyways i usually sit with the light source in front of me, not behind. It's a good idea to do that anyway(although sometimes you may not have a choice i suppose)
Best part, find out healthy foods.
I'm not convinced by your dichotomy. There are many other distributions possible, and this binary appears to limit the argument to serve your needs. Data?
VS 2013 adds fix-and-continue to x64 builds. That right there is enough for me.

Beyond that, though, I'd encourage you to at least look at VS 2012, get past the superficial changes, and look underneath. There were a lot of performance improvements in the GUI rendering that added up, and there were a lot of tweaks to project search and management that became indispensable to me shortly after launch.
The D Language is Really Practical (2011)
"Let me start with some tips on what not to do. Beware of advice about successful people and their methods. For starters, no two situations are alike."

Is there a potential "mise en abyme" here?
:-)

great article, best I've read is while though, cheers.
F
I have repeated it numerous times to a variety of people across the political spectrum -- cooperation is not capitulation. Few people (especially elected representatives) realize this.

Our elected representatives are supposed to be pragmatists, and what does a pragmatist do when faced with a difficult problem? Compromise. Instead we're left with ideologues that shout from the highest mountaintops about "bipartisanship" however it's just bluster and posturing.
Here's the letter the poster above was talking about: http://www.cs.jhu.edu/~ccb/publications/letter-to-the-presid...
Bootstrap 3 PSD bundle
TypeScript and the Road to 1.0
And "spelt" is spelled "spelled".
What's wrong with ClickOnce? I've not used it from a developer's perspective, but Chrome's installation (which uses it) always seems smooth as butter.
I was wondering about having a trike with both back wheels motorised (or a wheelchair?). Weight at the front does make it easier to fall off though I feel.
Documents are public key encrypted and you view them on an airgapped laptop. Submission server is on TOR to provide obfuscation of the transmission source.

IMHO the system is over complicated. There should just be a client side HTML5 drag and drop that encrypts files pre-transmission. Should be symmetric so both source and journalist are reading messages on an airgapped laptop.
What is obvious is that "Adi Shamir" is a name of someone living in a country dominated by Islam, and further that person is known to work in cryptography, so he is obviously a terrorist trying to send secret orders to other terrorists. In any case, he's a PITA for the NSA and other good guys like that. What they should have done, is to give him a visa, and redirect his flight direct to Guantanamo for further interrogation.</sarcasm level=big>

A tad more seriously: it's because of all those scientists of all the ages, that they have this situation where mere peasants can travel all around the globe, and make bombs or pilot planes into buildings. In the good old time, if a peasant tried to escape, he was eaten by the wolfs in the hoods, or killed by the highwaymen, so they stayed put, and the most they could try to do was to bump the armor of the lord with their wooden forks.

So it seems only natural to try to restrict them like that (perhaps it's a little too late).
For me, Start8 (paid software, costs $5) has been great. I get the core improvements from Windows 8, and get to have a real start menu.
Or just spur research outside of the USA, this is not the center of the world.
> ps: Personally I'd love to see a rewrite of emacs main packages, it's not lispy/functional enough for my tastes.

There's a project underway to create a Guile base for emacs, which will include an elisp interpreter for compatibility. Scheme is more lispy than lisp, and lexical scoping is an obvious win. Hopefully this project will be a huge cleanup and simplify things.

There's also a Guile project called Emacsy, which is an attempt to create an embeddable library for the kind of core, non text-editing functionality emacs has, to be used in other apps (eg, minibuffers, keybindings, runtime configuration etc).
OP is a bit extreme in his conclusions, but not entirely incorrect either.

Insofar as I've experienced, there's a mostly finite amount of goodwill that will go into commenting. Extra comments once that limit is reached tend to be sloppy or useless.

Essentially the same for unit tests.
I don't even disagree with you, I just think the comment is unproductive. You're stating an opinion as fact, and not even giving your supporting reasons. And it's not even on-topic.
It really depends on the structure of the business and market you're trying to crack.
Also, remember VC is the most expensive and controlling capital you will ever raise, and you should try to avoid it unless there is a compelling reason to use it (like network effects, fast growth and no profits for 10 years). Instead, the best money you can raise is from customers, which has the added benefit of not needing to be repaid, and providing perfect kinds of feedback data for your product.
This was advice from Nolan Bushnell, and worth considering.
Does that fact that you prefer a 12 year old OS to the latest from Microsoft not make you consider switching to Mac or Linux? There's bound to be security issues using such an old OS (have they not dropped support for it yet?).
Updating PHP is the issue.
I share your hate of unity, that is why I have switched to ubuntu-gnome. ubuntu-gnome is an official variant of ubuntu (not perfect, but reasonably easy to customized). As a result, it is already available here:
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-gnome/releases/13.10/releas...
The top pirated movies: available for legal digital streaming/rental/purchase?
I have been to the USA in the past. I would like to see more than I have seen and I would also like to participate in the wonderful US economy.

However upon the last visit I really took offence with the security theatre (that was in 2008 mind you and I am from a visa waiver country). Another factor is that USA chooses to not grant me a visa under which I start a business in the US under reasonable terms i.e. without constant fear of getting caught and deported and being put on lists.

It became a matter of pride. Now I will continue to avoid USA on principle.
Python: How to work with CSV like having a two-dimensional array?
I have not read the Washington Monthly much in many years. When I did, it seemed to me that they had a bad habit of picking one one aspect of a situation, explaining everything by it, and wrapping it all up with a QED at the end of five pages. It made for very satisfying reading, but eventually doubts would set in.
Wat. He's from Israel.

...
I cant open this link, the domain name cannot be resolved :(

$ nslookup thirdwaveberlin.com

> Non-authoritative answer:
* Can't find thirdwaveberlin.com: No answer
Will iPhone Overseas Release Kill Android and Windows Abroad?
Hiring your startup’s next great employee
ubuntu-gnome http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-gnome/releases/13.10/releas...
Or maybe try Shimmer?

https://github.com/github/Shimmer
easier to secede if there is a weak federal structure.
Raising Entrepreneurs
In some countries it is legal to have multiple passports. Other option is to have multiple citizenships.
There needs to be more information on now usable this is. That is key for adoption but particularly so at media organizations where many of the professionals can barely operate a spreadsheet. When security systems get cumbersome, they take shortcuts in security. Hence, the recent number of high profile Twitter phishing hacks among news orgs
I think it's the 5.5.5. If it was like 5.5.3 no one would up vote it.
I wouldn't agree. I haven't tried it recently, but I tried Windows 8 in a VM on a Mac Mini when it first came out as a preview release. I found it enjoyable even with just a keyboard and mouse. I could navigate the start screen extremely rapidly, not only via Win key-search, but using the arrow keys to traverse tiles. I came away thinking Metro struck the right balance between touch-only and traditional interfaces.

I used it in a pretty limited and less typical fashion, however. I did some development to port an AIR/AS application written on OSX to Windows. (We needed a native installer and creating a Windows installer required the Windows SDK, and WORA is always a lie, so extra dev was required. So instead of requisitioning a Windows box, I thought I'd try out Microsoft's latest and greatest for free.) Edit: Also had to do some Java development, same setup, different command-line SDK.

I used little more than TextPad and the command prompt (free version of SDK = no IDE), and didn't really use the Metro apps much. Except maybe IE to search for stuff. So I did spend more time in the desktop view. However, the time I spent on Metro was definitely enjoyable.

Another thing that impressed me was that it was still pretty smooth despite running in a VM on a pretty underpowered Mac Mini. It was nowhere as smooth as the Ubuntu VM I also had, but I expected W8 to be significantly more bloated.
You can use this Wix tool or command called Heat, which will automate the adding (and creating GUIDs) for a bunch of files. Really it's the underlying MSI target that's so painful, especially when you get into versioning. The OS wants to have detailed information on every file that is part of your installation. I think this is primarily for uninstallation purposes, but also for upgrades and who know what else. If I could get away with it, I'd just use NullSoft. It's like writing assembly, but it's so much simpler.

With Wix/MSI, there were certain executables that I could never get it to run as part of the install process. The XML would look the same as other execute commands that worked, but I could never figure out why they didn't run.