skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
they keep expanding in a way that doesn't generate positive revenue

Well, they are looking at $500 million in revenue this year. Sure, their costs are the same order of magnitude, but it's a far cry from not generating revenue.
I have to step in here to defend "non-trivial".

Perhaps it is abused as a term by the population at large, but I'm reasonably sure it has its roots in theoretical computer science and maths. It has a meaning that is distinct from "complex". It means that something requires something more than pure mechanical verification or straightforward inspection.

A painter could use "non-trivial" in a sensible way. How much effort is involved in X? Well, it's non-trivial, because it involves more than having a look. It isn't estimating the effort, it is instead a binary classification - trivial and non-trivial.

Finally, to answer your question, I don't dislike individual words. I only dislike them once they are combined into sentences.
No, and I don't aspire to be one. Nor a rockstar, ninja, pirate, robot, zombie, or anything similar.

I HAVE been programming in one form or another for about 15 years. I both enjoy doing it, and do it for a living. As long as I'm making something that is useful and/or profitable, I'm happy. I'm more interested in the end product than in the process, though.

I guess I'm a maker, not a hacker.
Yea I'm interested, always nice to meet new people in the community

My name is Elliot, I'm a rails guy and UI designer.
Nokia Plans to Start Making Netbooks
`sudo make install`

AFAIK if you enter `sudo checkinstall` instead, it installs into your package manager so you can remove it more easily later.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/CheckInstall
kludge
synergy/synergistic/synergize
proactive
xml
Its about time a mobile phone company gets into the netbook market. 3G broadband, WiFi, bluetooth, 12 hr battery etc etc. Sold! I can definately run my business from anywhere with that device, and not have to lug my current toshiba. Great laptop, but built to do it all like a desktop.
"Realtime"
Enterprise.
The Colley Matrix Method (for NCAA football ratings)
The assertion that people are built for steady long distance endurance is dubious considering the negative health consequences of endurance events.

People are clearly built for brisk walking very long distances. Running is not so clear. Marathon runners and cyclists have a lot of problems.

http://www.arthurdevany.com/2005/08/top_ten_reasons.html

The human body is multi-purpose. Most animals can't climb trees as well as humans. That doesn't mean it's necessarily a great idea to climb lots of trees.
I'll get it and pray that the Exchange integration makes using Mail and iCal a little smoother. Besides, I just like upgrading to new releases :-)
Ha ha, with talk like that it had to be a MBA.
Apple choosed speed, optimization and refinement over features. And I welcome this choice wholeheartedly, enough bloat already... make my OS faster, slimmer and more robust and I'll be happy.

Sadly the price point of Snow Leopard, and the sort of reaction that you have make me think that the big shops will continue to make ever more massive and bloated softwares...

After all, you get what you are ready to pay for : if you think features are worth more bucks than optimization, that's what you'll get.
All, presumably, very expensive, and mostly pretty bad.

Chicago's is the only one I like -- it's the only one that really tries to sell me the city in question. Looking at it reminds me directly of the best bits of Chicago: it's got a big blue lake and some big shiny buildings, and when looked at from the correct angles it's really pretty. The other logos look pretty much interchangeable (except maybe Rio's, which not having been to Rio I don't understand).
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=768931
Econophysicist Predicts Date of Chinese Stock Market Collapse--Part II
It’s true. McDonalds has a website for black people
Hosting your email on a server you don't control requires a high degree of trust. What if you were locked out of your Gmail account and couldn't get any support from Google to fix it?

The author had previously been able to dismiss such concerns due to his overall positive experience with Google. After experiencing this first hand proof that Google's support cannot be relied on, he no longer felt secure hosting his critical data with Google.

Google search is different because there is no lock in.
http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=reasonattlm
One outcome that is highly likely is that the processors will be highly integrated, with the whole system on a chip: CPU, GPU, memory controller, network/storage/pci/usb/etc controllers.
Time machine alone was worth the price of admission. There were also some good unix upgrades in there if that sort of thing carries any weight with you.
Sports Obsessed: a Site Tries to Please Every Fan
http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=insomniamedia
5 Ways Sentiment Analysis is Ramping Up in 2009
I'd say because Google is clearly not interested in customer service. If they were, you'd not see all the stories of people unable to contact them to resolve issues with so many of their services.

So, why trust them with something as important as your email when they fail at other things?

Personally, I use a gmail account for non-important communication, and my primary remains a Yahoo account. I've never had a problem contacting a live person with any Yahoo service, or getting back a response that actually shows they read what I wrote.

Customer service is an area where Google could learn from yahoo, but I doubt they care to implement such an infrastructure.
How social media can hurt your career
Dan Pink on the surprising science of motivation [video]
I think this often results from people not understanding what you do at all, so when they see you do something unfamiliar at a computer, you seem like a hacker to them. This seems to happen a lot when I pop open a shell and start working at the command line: it just seems like voodoo to certain people (like my parents or girlfriend). If you can get the same affect by showing something off to the folks who read hacker news though, you're probably a hacker in the sense it's used around here.

Oh, and I don't know Clojure either, and I'm not losing any sleep over it :)
I'm a big fan of "non-trivial" myself, especially after reading http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/2007/07/17/understanding_engine...
I'm running through this myself. Up to Chapter 11 so far, but it is a great book to both learn on and reference. Fair warning, it's a well sought after book. I think my Amazon order was "backordered" a few times before I canceled and paid the "in-store tax".

One great thing with this book is that the foot-notes reference the changes needed to get everything to play nice with 2.3 (the book was written for 2.2).
I switched to 1.9 for several greenfields projects. The postgresql gem builds cleanly, as does thin, which can be used in place of mongrel.

The biggest gotcha was having to modify my application to explicitly open text files in UTF8 mode. But the more than 100% execution speedup was a nice upside.
There's a joke that when an engineer says 'nontrivial,' he means 'impossible.'
Note that the range of integer values to consider is not specified. We don't know if they are signed and 32 or 64bit values.

The histogram is indeed the best algorithm and the one I would use. I call it the hash select. Note that it may be applied recursively, by narrowing the bins. Quick select is then in fact the hash select with only two bins.

Note also that since histogram filling is distributed, one needs to add up the histograms to find the one containing the median value. This is a good reason for not using histograms with 2^32 or 2^64 bins.

A 1024 bin histogram, would allow to find the median value of 32 bit integers in at most 4 iterations, and 64bit integers in at most 7 iterations.

The algorithm to identify the bin containing the median value is then very similar. One adds up the number of all lower values, until the bin containing the n/2 th value is found. This bin contains the median value.

Instead of adding up all histogram, which may be done pairwise (OlogN), one could do this for each bin, progressively, until the bin containing the median value is found. I guess there is a nice optimal and distributed algorithm to find out there. But we get the general picture.

Another optimization would be to adjust the histogram boundaries to fit the biggest and lowest value in the value set.
It will also make them even bigger a company, with even lower talent density.

They have, already, for example, turned into the kind of company where the recruiters are asked to bring in technical candidates with fresh ideas but where the technical interviewers make it clear that conformity is key.
Requires: Mac computer with an Intel processor. No upgrade for my 12" powerbook. :-(

http://www.apple.com/macosx/specs.html
Google Opens Video Chat Directly From iGoogle Homepage
As a non Mac OS user, that link just reinforces to me that it looks like just a service pack. But at $29, I don't think it matters. If it were $129, that would be ridiculous.
Well I spend silly amounts of time on learning, reading, thinking, dreaming about and actually coding. So I guess I classify as a hacker. As someone else said, a good one, probably not compared to the "stars", although I feel I do have my moments.
Mostly just enjoy coding and learning about software development that its quite a treat.
> your fist model will stink. you'll refine it and try again. and you'll keep doing that. unfotunatly, this mean your model ends up being dependent on all the data.

this is exactly what the scientific community as a whole is always doing.
"The word "hacker" means many things to many people."

A little ambiguity helps people find the common ground to relate, nothing wrong with that.
I really like the Apple Family pack pricing. I almost never buy a single copy anymore.
It's worth mentioning that the bid logo is generally different from the logo of the actual games. London's bid logo was a much more attractive (if less attention-grabbing): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:London_2012_Olympic_Games_...

I'm not sure why they change the logos, given that the final logo is almost always less attractive than the bid logo. In Sydney, frinstance, we had a nice neat bid logo (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sydney2000bid.png) which for the actual games they decided to unnecessarily complicate with a running man and some boomerangs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sydney_2000_Logo.svg

Nothing nearly as bad as London 2012, though.
Yes, http://store.apple.com/us/product/MAC_OS_X_SNGL?mco=NzgxMDc3...
"I hate to admit it, but I have never found a way to become comfortable with the name "Hacker News"."
My web filter in work is uncomfortable with the name "Hacker News" too. Thankfully, it has no problem with the URL http://news.ycombinator.com though :-)
The Game (Theory) within the Game
Good points, but I don't think I'm falling for a marketing trap to want something tangible for paying out $130. The OS works fine for me now. If Apple wants more money for me then I want more than just optimized code.

In the end I don't think there really is anything they can do to make me pay more money for the OS. I already bought iWork 08, I bought SuperDuper! for backup, and everything else I use is either open source or comes included with the machine. If Apple wants me to upgrade, then they need to discontinue security updates for 10.4 or some widget I badly need needs to be 10.5+. And honestly, it's not me that Apple has to contend with, it's my wife and her iron grip over the budget ;)
This actually sounds really neat.
I mean some people mind find it not to their taste and all of that, but I think its a step in the right direction for development on Linux(Ubuntu in this case) if similar projects pop up.
Are there many similar projects that aim at a quick deployment scenarios?
Survey Says: We Don't Know What Cloud Is but We're Doing It
"Trivial" itself can sound quite snotty, said in the right way.
Yeah, I commented right before bed. I thought of a bunch of problems with the average while trying to get to sleep.

I was thinking since the size of an outlier is constrained by fitting in 4 bytes, there must be a way to show the median is in some band of numbers around the average. I didn't think of a particularly useful algorithm though.

Thanks.
What Unix upgrades?
Joel can see the future, so can Inc. ;-)
So spend my money on friends, family, charities and experiences, not on cars or TVs. Sounds good to me.
I wish I could pay someone to maintain a backup of my gmail account.
Sure, but you'd have to lea$e $erver $pace on the exchange floor to minimize latency. Your best bet is to come up with algorithms, prove they work and sell them to people who are already there.
wow, for a post talking about how "polishing shit simply gives you polished shit" this page sure looked pretty but had no content.
I'm skeptical about this. The answer should be very obvious to any adult who has actually understood the question, so I'm thinking that any adult who doesn't answer "bucket" has just misunderstood the question (it's a little confusing to keep track of all these people and receptacles) and not that they lack a mental model of "other people's knowledge" the way that a three-year-old probably does.
Lonely Planet: Isolation Increases In US
There are other ways to express one's opinion besides a comment section on the blog post itself. Granted, he can choose to ignore those too, but it's harder. HN and e-mail are two examples of places feedback can go.
how much does google rely on python currently for products?
I thought http://www.ruby-doc.org has docs for the 1.9 library (also for the 1.8.7 and 1.8.6)
No, not kludge, please :)

It's one of the best tech words out there, it is very specific and there is no other good way of saying it without using a whole pile of words.
How High-Speed Broadband Can Fight Climate Change
The same applies to the iPhone Skype client.

Where I live (Norway) I know no operator which actively blocks applications on phones. You pay for data, you get data. A simple and fair deal. But because AT&T in the US doesn't like it, I can't use Skype here unless I have I am connected to some wifi network.

With the iPhone being sold worldwide I find it odd that Apple are willing to limit it (and hence its appeal) globally by forcing application developers to cripple their applications.
As a user, yes, but as a developer, there's some really awesome stuff in this release (both from the perspectives of the apps being developed and from the tools used to build them). Can't wait.
While it works well enough for Rails and maybe now also Ubuntu, in general I am wary of generators. Seems to me if there is a need for a generator, it could be a sign that the framework is unnecessarily complex. Since the required configurations and whatnot can apparently be generated automatically, why expose them to the user at all?
synergy

(Go watch 'In good company')
You aren't supposed to use the national flag with the olympic logo.
Whoops--I didn't realize that all the changes weren't under that one link. You have to look at all four:

http://www.apple.com/macosx/refinements/

http://www.apple.com/macosx/technology/

http://www.apple.com/macosx/universal-access/

http://www.apple.com/macosx/exchange/
You can invent something in the UK and run a bunch of trials there, then make your profits by selling it in the US market.
Yeah, ruby-doc.org is pretty annoying in this regard, especially since they do actually have the stdlib documentation available, they just don't link to it. Have a look at this search, for example:

http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aruby-doc.org%2Fcore-1....

There's the documentation for the Array class, but you can't get to it from the 1.9 core documentation:

http://ruby-doc.org/core-1.9/index.html
What's new in Mac OS X Snow Leopard: For all users
I agree, and Google's investment in Unladen Swallow is further evidence that Python has truly earned its place. Once complete, the project should allow Python to supplant C in several areas.
Lingpipe is also a possible alternative
TimmyOnTime Beta period has started
"Configurable"
Idempotent.

But non-trivial does have a specific meaning: it means that we don't have any code already written or proven technique that we can simply reuse for or apply to this problem, and some new knowledge will have to be synthesized, and there's a risk in making any estimates of time/cost until more is known.
Note: Exchange 2007 only
Does it get compiled to all targets, or is there some sort of intermediate code that gets compiled at the end point?
In the interest of not writing a 3,000-word essay all at once, I wrote Part 1 about what I see as the first step: analyzing the problem and setting the goals for a redesign.

What would you like more detail on, so I can improve Part 2?
Exactly. Where's the control group?
Introducing Typedia - shared encyclopedia of typefaces
Can someone give a quick non-marketing-speak version of what Grand Central Dispatch really does?
Overseas, strict cost controls actually drive innovation. In the
United States, an MRI scan of the neck region costs about $1,500. In
Japan, the identical scan costs $98. Under the pressure of cost
controls, Japanese researchers found ways to perform the same
diagnostic technique for one-fifteenth the American price. (And
Japanese labs still make a profit.).

This seems highly suspect. Even if the Japanese labs invented this technique, why aren't American labs using it? There are few organizations that won't adopt an obvious, proven way to save 93% in costs.
Folding Plug System
Dude, he's a single guy writing a blog, and it's still a personal blog by most standards. That is, most of his posts are just him linking to things he thinks is cool, whether or not it's Mac-related. When he blogs about things sources have told him, it's still one guy saying "Hey, my friend told me this." He's very frequently right, but he's not an Apple employee and he has to rely on people.

Approaching TechCrunch-style speculation? Seriously? He wrote two small blurbs about this Apple/AT&T thing, and beyond that left it completely alone, except to admit when he was wrong. Meanwhile, the rest of his articles/links have been as good as they were since I started reading him two years ago.
I think the parent knows that the number of starts on the American flag is not arbitrary. He is, however, talking about icons and pictures where someone deliberately invokes the American flag. In that case, a few stars is enough to get the idea across.
I can't remember the last time I used the paper.

Wait, no, I cut out a few articles to put up on a board to help add some office ambiance to a movie set.
Blog spam-here's a link to the much better source material: http://atlasobscura.com/places/root-bridges-cherrapungee
I have a friend who works on the sales team, and he loves it there. Says the energy and culture in the company is amazing (I specifically asked him about it a while ago, since it was when there was a lot of talent moving back and forth between Facebook and Google)

Looking at their hiring practices, it appears they are trying to get serious hackers there. Unfortunately I haven't heard great things about the engineering team from other folks, but none directly from an engineer, so treat that as Valleywag level gossip.
There's Glade which allows you to create your interface and callbacks to be saved in a file. Using the library GladeXML, you can essentially generate all the required code at runtime without all the maintainability woes of actual code being written to disk.

Edit: link: http://glade.gnome.org/
Finally, it's about time. I've been working with Rails for several years now and it's an absolute joy to use. It made me wonder whether it's possible to make something similar for desktop apps.

It's good that this is built in Python. I used to use C to write desktop apps, but developing in C is very, very slow. Using Python not only allows quick development, but it also allows you make "binary" packages that run on all Linux variants irregardless of ABI differences.

However, Quickly is doing something wrong compared to Rails: marketing and polish. The Quickly website is just a Launchpad page, and their documentation is just a wiki. They should have a proper website with documentation in an easy-to-read format that doesn't feel messy, maybe a few screencasts too. The current "website" looks to amateurish and doesn't exactly invite me to use it.
Leopard was the first version of OSX (actually, first BSD based OS) to receive UNIX 03 certification

http://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3555.htm
If you're up for it, you can also Jailbreak your iPhone and install a Cydia app named 3G Unrestrictor from Kim Streich. This allows the phone to get around any network limitations imposed by Apple/AT&T such as making a Skype call over the cell network.

I haven't installed it, but it appears to have a decent following.
Sure, my name is Steve I'm a .NET developer currently working for a company that specializes in developing large data websites, and CMS implementations. I also have experience with PHP, and a little bit of ROR. I'm leaning towards ASP.NET for the ease of creating web services, and my own familiarity with it.
If it generates a lot of code, then yes. But it may also just generate 2-3 lines of boilerplate code that's very annoying to keep typing over and over.
A Gentle Introduction to Static Analysis and Logic Programming
You actually get more resources for the same cost. Also, there is this: http://blog.linode.com/category/upgrades/
"irregarldess" burns my ears, too.
I also want to fight when I hear someone say "often times" (redundant) or "I don't disagree with you" (passive-aggressive double negative)
something to do with phonecalls I think...

Actually (and I'll hide my lack of knowledge by being vague) it's a means of making it easier for developers to create robust multicore capable software. I think.
What's hacker but have a life too supposed to mean? Does the fact that I work full time on extremely non-trivial software automatically imply I must not have a life?
Really? Because I've "eaten" it for quite a while, and it's been pretty effective. I tell myself that people being rude or jerks have a reason for what they're doing, and while I show a backbone when things get too harsh, for the most part I give them room to breathe. Result: Far fewer pointless fights, far less negativity.
I don't think thought is all that uniform across humanity. I don't walk around with a little voice yammering about all of life’s petty annoyances.

Back in school I was diagnosed as exceptionally gifted / learning disabled. So I am probably an extreme outlier, but I don't think of myself as the voice in my head. The voice is stuck with language which is this huge, unwieldy instrument, that's far too slow to be interesting. If feels like there are separate machines that can preplan how to move my body, solve math problems, play a video game, etc. Still composing this sentence feels more like remembering the words that best fit the idea, while scrabbling to find the next word to fill out the logical sequence.

Anyway, the best analogy for who I am might be the entity that decides which ideas are terrible and which ones are reasonable enough to keep. But, I don’t hear other people talking about themselves like this, so I wonder if there is all that much commonality. When there are so many ways solve a programming problem why assume that everyone is wired up the same way. Considering all the crazy people out there and how people can function with significant brain damage, there is probably a wide range of internal landscapes even among normal seeming people.

PS: Consider how many different ways people you know react to alcohol a simple drug and then consider love as a huge cascade of chemical responses. Do you really think all of humanity reacts the same way internally?
:...ABECS...:
Apple Afraid Google is Taking Over the iPhone?
A $45.13 Amazon Kindle story with a happy ending