skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Agreed - and both Sun and Oracle have no cultural tradition of taking toolchain usability seriously. Installing updates is a complete trainwreck for almost every product they've ever released and that's one of the most basic tasks for a software vendor.

Fundamentally, I think the problem is arrogance – companies like Oracle or Sun historically assumed that their products are so important that it's someone's full-time job to deal with the rough edges, they've invested in training or reading massive doc dumps, etc. – familiar to anyone who's heard tales of mainframe operators with run books of canned solutions for each problem. Those HN commentators have the same blindspot.

In addition to usually being flat-out wrong, as the more common user is someone who just needs to do what should be a simple task which is blocking their actual real job, this ignores how profligately that mindset wastes other peoples' time and how it sets a dangerous long-term precedent where alternatives look attractive because everyone simply assumes e.g. Java, Solaris, Oracle's database etc. is hard to use and expensive.
the sender can do that.
Puppet Labs raises $40 million in funding round
Stock Footage – Bag The Web
Next time you are out, check out what most people are doing on their phones. SMS dominates usage so much. Most people don't use desktop chat outside of tech
The flip side is that when you don't have parents to fall back the risk level of all your actions become higher, and that will limit you in other ways.

For example, I emigrated in another country. Knowing that if I failed, I could go back home for a few months was a key factor ( as was the possibility to be there for a few months before, to manage the transition ). Maybe the extra-motivation of having my back against the wall would have pushed me in another successful adventure, but I would not have risked my career the way I did.

So well, that's really not black and white. And depends a lot on the type of parent you have.
We all can probably stand to use more remedial training at typing, even if we think that we're already pretty fast. Every once in a while I'll dust off [GNU Typist][0] and bash it at for ten-minutes. Unfortunately, its been nearly impossible to change kinetic memory for alternative layouts like [Workman][1], there hasn't been enough time to unlearn and learn it without suffering a huge productivity hit.

[0]: https://www.gnu.org/software/gtypist/

[1]: http://www.workmanlayout.com/blog/
Squarer, an art experiment in need of some direction
> That blows my mind.

Really? I don't find it that shocking at all that most people might type at a tenth of the speed a programmer can type. I'm sure a chef could express the same awe at my inefficiency when making Kraft Dinner.
Realistically, who's going to tell their somewhat lazy underachieving child to get out and go to a homeless shelter or park bench?
I get the 'I can't find a job opening in the area I'm trained/passionate about' but what I would like to understand is whether or not that includes "I can't create a job in the area I am trained/passionate about."

I have coached a number of folks who seemed to feel strangely disempowered, which is to say that the world had to change (job opening appears, company moves to their area, etc) in order for them to make progress on their goals.

I've had some success at simplifying the question using the common trick of assuming solutions to the presumptive problems. So for example starting with "Ok lets stipulate that there is a million dollars in a bank vault that is paying you $1,200 a month in 'free' money. And you're living in an area where that pays all your food, rent, and gas. Now, what do you want to do with your time?"

That gets us past blaming "the economy" and taking ownership of what they want to do. It is a different way of thinking, but it gets out of the rut of 'answer' based thinking.

Life is like riding a train that you know is on a track with a bridge out over a 1000' chasm. When the train gets there, it will fall into the chasm, and everyone on board will die. Given that every train you could take from a station has this same "feature" what train do you pick? Who do you pick to ride with you? What places does the train need to go through before it gets to the missing bridge?

Sometimes it isn't as complicated as what do you want to do with your life, it is simply what can you do today that is fulfilling to you?
Speaking of versions of Super Mario, one of my favorites...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcKurvm_0oE
what does its visualization offer that gitk --all doesn't?
Good luck! And as cliche as it sounds get started, things have a way of working out eventually.
Timehop hacks "Yo" app
Sure, I'd be happy try to quantify my views. What question would you like a quantifiable answer to?
I meant that for those who do invest, hopefully those investments create opportunities for those unemployed by creating new business etc.
I'm curious, are there growing initiatives to make every career gender/race balanced? Because it seems like we're fixated on getting female representation in computer/mathematical occupations from 26.1% to 50%. Yet there are lot other occupations which have pretty low representations, i.e. only 1.6% of architects are black, 0.1% of judges/magistrates are Asian, only 1.8% of automotive repairers are women, only 5.2% of truck drivers are women, 19.7% of social workers are men, 5.2% of childcare workers are men, 3.8% of physicians/surgeons are Hispanic, etc.
Again, let's talk about a point of fact here, rather than a myth that it's humanities students who are worse off.

Since the 70s, the percentage of students with bachelor's degrees in the humanities has not increased. It's always been around 16-17% of total degrees earned.

Social science has been dropping as a percentage of students with earned degrees in those fields, but not by much.

Math and science has always hovered around 8% of total degrees earned.

Computer science (amazingly) has not grown as a percentage of total degrees earned since the 70s.

Business majors haven't grown as a percentage since the 80s.

Education majors have fallen dramatically each decade, taken up primarily by other fields.

http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_318.20.as...

And yet, here we are across the board, with low wages (comparatively to previous generations, comparatively to older workers, comparatively in almost every way measurable), massively increasing education costs and a really, really poor job outlook for young workers.

It's a canard, plain and simple.
I think Balzac was on to something. :-) I like how he quotes Brillat-Savarin. Others are here. [0] My favorite is the one that kicks off Iron Chef, "Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are."

http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/j/jean_anthelme_br...
If you're familiar with most unix tools, you'd expect that to be --classpath.

If you need more than one addition, do you use a colon separated list (Unix), semicolon (Windows), or repeat it once per option? Does it expand ~ or do you need to

None of this is that hard but if you don't use this all the time it's easy for everyone's soup of almost-but-not-quite similar conventions to blur together and you waste time figuring it out.

In the Java world you have the added problem that the JVM has a legacy convention which doesn't follow any platform standard and the problem that many projects use different conventions so you probably also have a different set of rules for JVM options and the actual program options.
Did you know that you can type the word
"typewriter" on top row of your QWERTY keyboard?
It was part of sales demonstrations.
Show HN: Nabaroo, discover and collect media from social networks
This country was founded on open courts and due process, neither of which this "useful tool" falls under. My point is you can't "save the village by destroying it," not that things derive their value from their legal status.

The wonderful thing we mostly have going in the USA is destroyed by these individuals who pretend to be protecting it. The ends do not justify the means.
3 Reasons Mozilla’s Firefox Phones Will Fail
Using SaaS at a startup: EnvyLabs
The most reasonable explanation is that this is developed by (an) Apple user(s) and adding support for Apple's languages is simply easier and more valuable than adding languages for a platform they don't use. If it's worth it to you or other C# users, I'm sure they wouldn't mind you submitting a pull request.
If you live at home you can afford to take more chances. You can start a business with less worries of having to cover extortionate rent every month which is something that keeps many people in their 9-5.
Perhaps Steve Yegge's post is germane, http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/09/programmings-dirties...

I'm not sold on typing per se, but mastering an appropriate output method for your domain seems key. For programming, that is typing. For math, it could be either manuscript or TeX. For the humanities it could be either manuscript or typing. Typing always removes a transcription step, but that is unlikely to be the limiting factor for any deep knowledge work.

As a homeschool dad, I think it is important to get kids to a relative level of proficiency as quickly as possible. Difficulty writing or typing or whatever certainly limits output. Different kids will prefer different options and thats fine.

PS. Even if typing is faster, writing allows more free form expression(maps/diagrams/etc) and that may mitigate the speed issue.
Everyone knows in theory that an actual command line is being run, and somewhere a main() method has kicked it all off, but the Java world is really dominated by enterprise tooling concerns, many levels of abstraction away from such things. Since people in the community don't spend much time thinking about it, it doesn't get the attention and polish it needs.
I'm not suggesting they should have said, "Resubmit this to the International Journal of Experimental Sociology." Just "Hey, this is more of a question for sociologists; maybe try that kind of journal."

Much like how Sokal criticized Social Text for not recognizing when something was a question for physicists.
> 60 words a minute is still very slow, when it comes to thinking speed.

Well, undoubtedly... Although I don't think you can apply a 'word per minute' count to thought in any accurate manner.

After all, words are just a medium; an abstraction that we're using to convey an underlying meaning, even if we internally represent those ideas with a series of other words/abstractions/ideas I don't think you could necessarily measure 'thought speed' by attempting to enumerate those 'words'.
Realistically I don't think programmers type prose all that much more frequently than college students. Programming tends to involve lots of symbols, and most of the typing is in small edits rather than paragraphs. College students write long essays and term papers, whereas I rarely write anything longer than an in-depth comment on Hacker News. I agree that it makes sense that programmers type faster due to the general correlation with technology usage, but I'm still quite surprised by the magnitude of the difference.
Because competition in the browser market is vital to keep the web platform progressing and to prevent a single party from controlling web standards. Do you remember the dark ages when IE ruled the web and things like HTML5, canvas, webgl, etc... couldn't happen?
> "As a general discussion forum it's quite bad"

I'd be curious to hear what makes it so bad.
I think Tech is decoupling education, rather than disrupting it. Tech is taking one part of the experience (the classroom learning) and moving it out of the classroom. It doesn't replace the networking, research, parties, football games and other aspects.

Will this decoupling be disruptive? I hope so! School is too expensive. And so is ignorance.
It's quite possible we're at the cusp of the plateau already. For many years planes kept getting faster and faster, until one day they didn't. It may be the same with processors. For years they'll keep getting smaller and smaller, until one day they don't. In fact, this already happened with clock speed 10 years ago. The top Pentium 4s, while certainly worse than the Haswell i7s of today, have about the same clock speed (3.8 GHz or so).
Yo hack
I think I could only do like 30WPM until I sat down and trained myself to actually type correctly and promptly could type 2-3x that

http://www.gnu.org/software/gtypist/
| you should know the limits of your skill so you don't cause others harm

Which is funny how the 'hacker' mentality is to build things fast and cheap. Along with Zuckerberg's "Most fast and break things" mantra.
I think I have found the absolute worst typing test[1] on the Internet thanks to this article. It keeps a timer running until you "hit tab and click stop". You're telling me that I need to stop tying, move my hand over to my mouse, dragm the mouse button to that "stop" button and click the button? That'll lose me typing time...

[1]: http://www.calculatorcat.com/typing_test/
I have to agree, 60 WPM is pretty slow. Even at 130 WPM I still struggle to keep up with my thoughts sometimes. I don't use any special technique/layout because I find 130 to be pretty proficient, but I'm sure using dvorak or some other odd layout would improve speed after the initial learning curve.
60 wpm? The monks who taught us to type in Catholic school would have beat us for having that kind of sorry-ass typing speed.
>We are heading back to the days of 640k barrier or the old C-64 days

I disagree (though I hate inefficient code and design). Hardware has improved massively over the last 30 years. It doesn't quite seem like it sometimes because with the advent of the internet, usage/consumption has gone up just as much. Back in the day a mainframe app on the world's fastest server would only be limited to maybe 1000 concurrent users. Now there could me millions of internet users concurrently using a web app with an actual UI. Having said that, scalability can now be maintained in many ways aside from smaller nm die fabrication. Server farms or cloud distributive scenarios will take over (this is already where we are in many cases) if there is ever a limitation of a single machine. There are only so many people on the planet and consumption rises with us. Hardware improvement may be slowing, but so is consumption inertia (as we reach a saturation plateau).
Or in the process accidentally invent limited time travel and find that you have better things to do.

[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0390384/
"This coffee falls into your stomach, which, as you know from Brillat-Savarin, is a sack whose velvety interior is lined with tapestries of suckers and papillae. The coffee finds nothing else in the sack, and so it attacks these delicate and voluptuous linings; it acts like a food and demands digestive juices; it wrings and twists the stomach for these juices, appealing as a pythoness appeals to her god; it brutalizes these beautiful stomach linings as a wagon master abuses ponies; the plexus becomes inflamed; sparks shoot all the way up to the brain."

That is some damn fine writing there.
> It's pretty important to control your equity, and I think the day-trading mentality is toxic.

Equity is compensation. You can't tell your employees what to spend paychecks on, and you shouldn't be trying to block them from gaining liquidity. Maybe a doctor just told them they have a year to live, and won't be around for your planned 2019 IPO.

Unless you are granting them voting shares it is unfair to lock them into your vision of the company going forward, especially if they have departed.
Your username, which I assume is a re-spelling of xyzzy, is itself a cultural reference. I don't know how obscure.
Mario Maker: Create Your Own Super Mario Levels
This is definite check-your-privilege/assumptions territory for me. Reading the headline alone, I assumed this was going to be some sort of "you should slow down, zen out, and think more clearly, by not typing so fast" post. The idea of 60 wpm as being fast took me a while to grasp.
I can certainly type sixty words a minute, but when it comes to retention there's no comparison between typing and handwriting for me and I don't find myself transcribing.

I have a notion that the permanence and chunkiness of writing keeps thoughts 'whole' whereas the ease of backspacing allows the same words to become abstracted. I'll have to try typing with backspace mapped to newline or something to see how the idea plays out.
"They refuse to explain why they feel it unacceptable."

I read the paper. It's unacceptable because it's LITERALLY a "here are some things we Googled, and there weren't any time travelers" with a bibliography attached: there's no detailed explanation of experimental procedure, no detailed data. It's roughly equivalent to sending a middle-school book report to a literary journal.
I average 140wpm without any "advanced typing techniques", so I don't think they're really necessary. I can't speak to whether or not they would be helpful, though. I do think it's very worthwhile to be able to type this fast - people speak somewhere around 150wpm on average, and being able to type as fast as you speak is useful for instant messaging, etc.
Transfer restrictions need to buy the stock at the offered price. If I have a good faith buyer willing to pay $200 per share, the company should offer $200.

I was a start-up where the board just decided to be as difficult as possible, just to be difficult, and said, "you will need to hire an auditor to review the books to come up with an accurate market value, and we will not cooperate with the auditor", not in those exact words. Which of course completely breaks the books of a minority shareholder in a moderately successful company.
R / Finance 2014: Packaged Takeaways
I'm surprised he thinks the core platform should offer that, the JDK is large enough as it is thank you. Any number of countless application generators and libs make it easy. Even a quick glance at maven central would've answered his question.

In other words, Java wont search the internet for you.
>Realistically, who's going to tell their somewhat lazy underachieving child to get out and go to a homeless shelter or park bench?

Please don't strawman me. At no point did I say we should kick kids out of the house with nothing, nor not allow them back under their parents' wing when they fail. It's absolutely silly (in normal circumstances) to force your kid to live at a homeless shelter when you have the resources to help them back on their feet. But I feel it's important to do so in a manner than encourages independence, rather than encouraging dependance. After all, the parents won't be around forever- sooner or later the kid(s) will need to be self-sufficient enough to survive without that safety net.

What I said was in response to the parent's question of "is there anything wrong with letting kids stay at home longer". That's all.
> if we could ship an alternative browser engine implementation with competitive JIT'ing JavaScript engine

Which is not possible on FirefoxOS. So I don't see how 'open' wins here (I'm using 'open' as the GP used it: a marketing buzzword synonymous with Mozilla).
What if the sender is offline when the receiver signs back on? Does the message not get sent?
Unmanned Aircraft to be Prohibited in America’s National Parks
The people at Knight Capital would disagree with your statement [1][2].

[1] http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/08/02/knight-capital-says-t...

[2] http://money.cnn.com/2012/08/09/technology/knight-expensive-...
The cert issues are a packaging and Apple issue. Explicitly. I don't think it's fair to make the claim "java suxors" because Apple packages bad certs.
I went to a conference* in 1994 in which Kip Thorne gave a talk on time travel. He made an offhand comment about evidence that backwards time-travel does not occur that was along similar lines. 2 points: 1) Not inconsistent for 'real' physicists to think about these issues. 2) I don't think this work is as novel in concept as the author thinks.

* Was for Carl Sagan's 60th birthday... was intended for serious audience of big time scientists but was intended to entertain.
> I think the methodology of the paper is flawed. Why would a time traveller from the future be discussing "Comet ISON" or "Pope Francis"? According to Wikipedia, comet ISON wasn't ever bright enough to spot with the naked eye, and thus left no significant impact on humanity. It's obviously too early to decide if Pope Francis will leave a deep, significant impact, but odds are against it.

The problem is that they needed something to search for where we have a clear, well defined horizon before which people were extremely unlikely to mention the name at all.

Both of these meet the criteria because the names are now all over the historical record, but the names were new. In the case of Pope Francis, he was not only the first Pope Francis, but also the first pope in a millennium to pick an entirely new name (John Paul I was the first John Paul, but both John and Paul separately have a long history).

You are right that it might mean that they would miss time travellers. Who knows: If time travelling exists, all travellers might even be warned about this specific experiment.

But they in any case could not prove that we have not been visited by time travellers - all they could do was to pick terms that if they found them would give a strong indication that something odd was afoot.

They were also limited in that they were explicitly looking for something that could be researched cheaply, and by looking at the internet, and so an example like Hitler would not work.

> Identify "black swan" events (dot com crash, 2007 financial crash), and look at people who slowly offloaded their assets prior to it. Identify "underdogs" that became huge (eg. Apple in the 90s) and look at people who slowly brought into it during that period.

The problem is that you will likely find lots of people. People have all kinds of different reasons for investing, many of which leads to looking prescient after the fact.
>"I picked the wrong degree problem".

I would argue this point. Many people I know or worked at my college jobs just plain chose the wrong path. Creative writing degrees, Drama degrees, or even one poor girl with over 100K in debt from an Opera degree.

Working as a waiter I even encountered people how made more money waiting tables then with their social work or teaching degrees. Its crazy they still work their college job paying off student debt they never needed.

These people are not at all incompetent they were just told to follow their dreams when they were 17 18 and choose a degree to cater towards their dream, passion, or what have you.
But do androids dream of electric sheep?
I wish I remembered where the study was now, but I remember reading one which said that girls were naturally curious about STEM careers, up to around 12, when it starts to tail off dramatically. The theory was that societal issues begin to kick in that makes girls not want to: no role models, fellow students telling them it's for nerds and no girls do it, male jock stuff.

So the curiosity and talent is just drained out of them. That's the issue.

But as I don't have the study to hand, of course I could just be making this all up :/
Firefox for Android is very popular and highly rated in the Google play store.

The browsers that are in the Apple App store are handicapped by legal limitations, which are not present on other, more open operating systems.
Teaching college is no longer a middle-class job, and everyone should care
WiGLE.net has been collecting cell phone tower location data for a while. I wonder (a) if there are any Stingrays captured there and (b) if this with more data would be capable of building immediate alerting to Stringray use. I tend to think it could.
Silent Disco App: Lysn in
Simple, powerful "silent disco" app enabling a perfectly synchronized social listening experience across smartphones. Could also be used to synch audio between speakers.
Thanks for sharing. This is awesome!