skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
we've reached a point in desktop OS development where the average user simply does not care anymore.

It's very true. Even the browser is not a matter anymore. That is because computers became mainstream long ago, and an average user of internet nowadays is hardly able to read English (think about all development countries). So, simplicity with minimalism and some visual effects (Chrome, iPhone) is all what they needed.

Ask people around the world what is computer and internet? The answers would be - email (gmail, hotmail, yahoo) and google and facebook, hi5, and regional (Chinese, Japanese, Russian) social networks. What OS you're talking about?!
Do you care about cloud computing?
Why does that surprise you ?

I've had a fair argument with my sons school when he was between the ripe old ages of 7 and 10 about teaching him arithmetic using a calculator instead of learning how to do it by himself.

After the third school issued calculator came back to school nicely chopped in half they stopped trying and I managed to teach him what he needed to know, but the really interesting bit here is that once, during all this I quizzed the teacher on his arithmetic skills, hard stuff like 76 and 72/9 and he instantly whipped out his* calculator.

It completely floored me, here was someone with a teaching certificate for all the 'basics' not knowing the basics.

And I was being accused of being a 'Luddite' for not allowing my child to use modern tools.
I just found out that the old macbook pros can take 6GB of ram. The late 2007 and 2008 pre unibody models. So if you're going to order some, might as well order the best.

Here's a link about it - http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=573906
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And if your bottleneck is I/O?
Not just elementary school teachers. I got laughed at in an undergraduate maths class once for asking 'what about zero' in an example that was suppose to be for all even numbers. I actually assumed I was wrong until this submission.
http://www.amazon.com/Dive-Into-Python-Mark-Pilgrim/dp/14414...
Nook E-what?

Do people who name these things try the names out on less somber people?
When I was in school I heard something similar about math definitions. I didn't hear "Mathematicians are always right" or "because it is defined to be even"; Rather, in response to questions of "why is [this] defined to be [that]" one professor simply said "because it is useful." Usually this meant "because it means this property of this system holds true if [this] is defined to be [that]." For example, the first two Fibonacci numbers, fib(0) and fib(1), are defined as 0 and 1 because it makes the Fibonacci sequence work. They are 0 and 1 because it is useful as far as calculation of the sequence. I am pretty sure that in practical applications (por ejemplo, examining the fib sequence in nature) fib(0) has no use.
That's all from previous age. What configuration? What drivers?! Computer should be as simple as mobile phone (almost everyone on the planet are familiar with). Apple got the point, while Microsoft still trying to impress people with variety of "cool features". Just consider IE's and Safaris's UI.
Actually such "interaction" metrics are only useful if it is proven that they ultimately lead to increase in site objectives (notice I didn't say sales). Increase in interaction will be much stronger data point if you analyze the historical data and found that correlation of interaction per user and site goals (sales) per user is positive and high.

No point enjoying the increase in pageviews if it in no way affects the bottom line. This is generally what happens with sudden bursts of traffic from Digg, Reddit, etc. While traffic increases tremendously, the conversions (not conversion rate) remain the same.
While http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fed is regulating the Cash Reserve Requirements why isn't http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEC regulating the Market Capitalization to 2 times the Company's Quarterly Sales?

"If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, REGULATE it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it." --Reagan
I think they do still publish stuff like that regularly, I just never find the time to read it.
Sometimes I wish educators studied some Machine Learning and similar things.

Not to detract from the interesting finding, but it sounds to me like someone discovered that in supervised learning it is advisable to use a negative corpus as well :)
That is the deal Xerxes offered Leonidas, who turned it down :-)
For a guy complaining about iphone and palm, he sure fails at a good argument against the G1--it's probably what he actually wants.
Whoah! I was actually kept inside for recess in grade school if I tried to use a calculator for arithmetic, and here, your son is being issued a calculator by his teacher.

That doesn't mean that using a calculator at his age is necessarily a bad thing, but with the current math curricula worldwide being what they are, I can't think of anything more pedagogically unsound than what you're describing.

EDIT: (See also: "A Mathematician's Lament" by Paul Lockhart http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf)
Learning by mistakes is a good way to learn im sure of it.
But this article on page 1 covers more about learning where you have a teacher who already knows the material, it would be far harder to use this failing technique if you are creating the material to begin with.

Minus the above I can relate to learning by failing.

For those who use the command line in unix. I hardly can ever remember the command if I grabbed it off google. When I attempt, fail, look it up knowing what I am after I always find myself more often than not still with the correct knowledge.

I do feel this knowledge is sort of common knowledge or more like "yes, that is what i would have said if i ever put it in words". Needless to say it is good to read these types of obvious thoughts as it just aids the life learning process.
The limit of 1/x as x approaches infinity is 0.

1/inf != 0
Save for time-travel, they can't really do that when they decide to pick up and "publish" a book that's been freely available in electronic form for eight years.
That cuts to the heart of this: Mann took a piece that should be subjective, but was written to be artificially objective, and gave it its subjectivity back. From the perspective of some in this thread, this is bad, because it's impractical—the blurb can't get printed this way.

However, from a higher-up perspective (which I believe is the one Mann is implicitly taking), it's bad that it's getting printed either way. If a Journalist wouldn't print the bald-faced subjective version (even after editing to make it more "professional") then they shouldn't allow the "objectivized" derivative either. Assuming that [journalistic integrity], removing the words that dance around the subjectivity is an obvious win, for the reader and journalist both—it makes it immediately apparent who's talking, what they're selling, and whether you want [to buy it/to put it in your paper] or not.
"Although Apple now encourages developers to create applications for the iPhone, the company still doesn't let any outside application access background processes. That means you have to run a program actively to take advantage of it. If you switch to a different program, all activity on the first program will stop. Apple may support third party background applications in the future."

http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/iphone.htm/printable
A simple yet inspiring idea...
Microsoft hired 111 Psychologists since 2001 to improve its Software Usability http://www.myvisajobs.com/H1B-Visa-045-2009-SO.htm
"A number is even if it's twice some integer"

You could argue that is the mathematician's definition - I think this is covered in the article to an extent.

A layman's definition would be along the lines of that if you keep taking 2 objects from a collection of objects (e.g. apples), the smallest number you end up with is 2.

The number zero is a very handy mathematical trick that the Romans didn't grasp, I'm no surprised that concepts around it aren't easy to understand as I posit that it's =not= intuitive.

I'd also guess that there are maths teachers in schools who aren't mathematicians or aren't as well educated in maths as they could be.
Guide to getting started in Machine Learning
So do Apress pay royalties to Mark currently, on a per unit sold basis? If these new people can publish under the GFDL then presumably Apress can (are?) as well.
Cheating death via suspended animation
Hmm, I wouldn't say that defining a prime number as a number n with prime factors 1 and a with 1 and a not necessarily distinct instantly breaks the FTA, but it sure does make it a lot harder to state while still conveying the same idea otherwise.
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This is a good resource to start. Then it might be better resources (there are some other tutorials around) but as a beginner in R I found it very good.
JWZ isn't being dramatic. The slogan should be "Plam Pre: your life, just slower". I had a Pre for a month, returned it on day 30. It was like living in molasses.

Plus the hardware was way way too cheap (fragile plastic screen, sharp edges on the keytray, poor fit between the sliding halves). I was afraid to use the phone for fear of breaking it. You could hear the plastic crunching everytime you typed on the keyboard.
Isn't that a private trail?
I totaled it up to about ~$100k. Not bad for a few days. I wonder how much of their total revenue this is.

2dboy had a strong viral marketing campaign for this game. It's the only game I have downloaded over 6 years or so. They have exploited social networks pretty well, and now they got first dips on the Radiohead scheme in the game industry. If they made a mil they're doing ok (for 4-5 guys?) but this will be hard to repeat, imo.
Now the question is: apply to an MBA program or continue preparing for my startup?
Hmm. 37signals is in an interesting position that offering phone chats is actually a feature not a bugfix. Although the point is to ask the CEO stuff about 37signals, there's a big perspective factor going on here.

At my startup, Ramamia, we've always been offering phone support 24/7. Through our mobiles. It doesn't matter that half of our userbase is in India and the optimal time for them is snoozing time for us (well, okay, snoozing time for my co-founder, seeing that it is 4am and I'm writing this), but I always felt it would help our sales conversions.

Interestingly, 37signals posted about why they didn't offer phone support last year: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1161-why-would-you-want-to-ca...
It's no secret that banks use a fractional reserve. That's why it's not fraud--it can't be fraud if the way the system works is totally transparent to everyone involved.
I think that's the point he was making.
Hve you observed engineering departments, research departments, IT, Accounting, HR, Comms, legal... doing a bad job? Usually, most of these are not critical enough to "poison" a business, crappy HR or IT is annoying, but usually doesn't kill a company. Anything bad enough can, but if a department is far away from how the company makes money, good enough is usually good enough. Sometimes Marketing isn't important enough to kill a company either. Often it is though.

The types of companies that get discussed on HN are usually the kind where both marketing & engineering are important enough to do a lot of damage and important enough for everyone to have an opinion about them.

You can top that up with the fact that the stuff that usually gets praise or abuse (eg product development) can often be claimed or pawned off by both engineering and marketing.

Who is responsible for the ipod nano video camera thing? Engineers?

Sometimes things are obvious. Google has awesome marketing, but the original dynamite was creating the awesome search engine and the momentum caused by gmail & maps & such. Facebook is, as far as I can tell, a marketing achievement. In both cases it was important that the non dominant factor didn't mess things, but it was a hurdle.

Apple or MSFT? You could argue both or neither. If you wanted to teach how to be like them, the classes would probably be called things like 'strategy' or 'leadership.' I'm not sure that any department has a monopoly here.
Not sure how common that is outside of the US. In Sweden it's available on all carriers, I think. (It was exclusive to one carrier for the first year or so.)
1) Good idea. Tangent: a token would NOT prevent a dictionary attack. It is pretty simple to mimic the functionality of a web browser using server side code including grabbing whatever token the web browser should be passing back. Doesn't mean you should not persist data though.

2) ...that dotted line is so ugly...but fine

5) html maxlength attribute? maybe this is too web 1.0 for some people

8) ...ut if you do not prefix your title with, por ejemplo, BBC then BBC bookmarks will be mixed with others. At least this way when sorted alphabetically bookmarks from the same domain will be grouped together and even sorted correctly amongst themselves.
The N900 is full of cool hardware but it's 2cm thick, will cost $700+, and is unlikely to ever be available subsidized in the US.

Edit: http://gigaom.com/2009/10/19/nokia-n900/ - An early review

Nokia is doing a full rewrite of Maemo for the upteenth time after buying Qt — the software platform is constantly going in different directions. They're so proud of shipping a Mozilla browser, but how the fuck are they going to integrate that with Qt? Don't they also maintain multiple Webkit ports for their other platforms? The mind boggles...
"Highlights" of Technologizer's Worst PC in America contest
I don't entirely understand his explanation though. All I understand is that Mark approves of what happened. I do not understand why it is a good thing and why he wants the world to work like this. He didn't explain that.

The whole logic of what and how you are allowed to charge for in the free software/content world seems completely arbitrary to me, even though I have read so much about it.
As someone who'd previously been on the business end of subpoenas for data and legal discovery during the Netscape lawsuits, he's paranoid about giving any of his data to Google.

That's why he was trying to get his Pre to sync solely to his local computer, despite that really not being what its makers intended.
It's never been about elitism for Apple, that's just the way the people who don't buy Apple perceive it.

Apple has used a slogan like the following for several of their products: "X for the rest of us", where X is some product or service that they deemed were previously too difficult to use. That's not elitism, it's the opposite of it.

The elitism charge doesn't really vibe with the other general charges that Apple products are toys, either, nor that their users are stupid and need dumbed-down devices.
Lukas Mathis has written a great critique of it:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=879798
4-5? "2D Boy is a core team of two guys, Ron Carmel and Kyle Gabler. Their swanky San Francisco office is whichever free wi-fi coffee shop they wander into on a given day."
I didn't see much of any backlash here in Taiwan. You have to consider that models are present at pretty much any tech related exhibition, be it Acer, Sony or whoever. There are also still regular religious festivals based on the Chinese calendar that involve naked women dancing on floats. You don't see them in Taipei city, but in the southern part of Taiwan they aren't uncommon.

This article has two parts-- someone flipping out about something that's normal in Taiwan, and then a list of dire statistics about the US. It doesn't make much sense.

Throwing in the ".69 cents on the dollar claim" that ignores hours worked, experience and profession eliminated what little credibility remained from the rant at the top of the article.
Altruism (i.e. wanting to support the model) is given as the reason for 1 in 5 payments, and comes up as a factor in a lot of the 'other' responses.
> "If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, REGULATE it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it." --Reagan

Note that this is a description of govt from a criticism of govt by Reagan.
I love my Pre. It's not perfect, and I've given up writing an app for it because of Palm's crippling of the O/S, but as a phone it's cute and works.

Sure load times suck. I just keep frequently-used apps open all of the time, then I don't have to worry about it.
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They're so proud of shipping a Mozilla browser, but how the fuck are they going to integrate that with Qt?

I don't see the contradiction there. Mozilla and Qt are at different levels in the GUI stack. (KDE is a Qt-based desktop, yet it runs Firefox just fine.)
I wonder what indexing method the brain uses to index all the events by time. I wouldn't be surprised if binary search trees were somehow involved...
> sex pales in comparison to the feeling I get from being an entrepreneur.

Ha, and they suggest that software developers are naturally weird.

http://ask.slashdot.org/story/09/10/18/1557210/Are-Software-...

Kidding.. sorta. ;)
> I agree, though as a matter of policy you have to ask - how do you actually "break them up"? On what basis? You can't just have the government ordering companies to break up.

It's not clear that govt can't break them up now. Govt is technically the controlling entity for a large number of them. It can bring the question to the board and if the board votes for breakup....

With ordinary shareholders, there are laws protecting the minority on a fiduciary basis, but they don't apply to govts. Besides, one can reasonably argue that a breakup would increase shareholder value.
Why Airtel Twitter deal is not a big deal?
Because using a simple trick anyone can tweet via sms at even cost lower than what Airtel is providing.
What current generation are you a member of?
Ubuntu One Rocking The House
^^ That quote is from this page: http://2dboy.com/about.php
Interesting graph - http://2dboy.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/histogram.p...

Observe skews at multiples of $5 - 5, 10, 15, 20

These tell you how people look for easy anchors to decide pricing. When there is no guidance, easy to think of $5 than $6.21
Was Perl backed by a major vendor? MySQL? FreeBSD?

If it's already backed by a major version, you're already late. So slow.
yay! I had mentioned in the survey that I wanted to see how their "experiment" had fared, but it would've been nice to see how well the game sold pre-birthday sale.

I'm reading the "Other" section for why people chose their amount to donate.

There was a couple that I thought was interesting:
"to support Linux games"
"iPhone apps are 99 cents"
"it's what was left in my PayPal account" and
"I plan to more later if I like it/runs on my computer"

I wonder how many of those who planned to donate more later actually did.
Died to what?

IM? IM is dying on its own.
Whatever Facebook this week? Spare me.
Wave? It's too hard.
Twitter? How would I fit information in 140 chars and why?

Email has no successor technology.
This seems to reflect the advice often given by hackers to roll your own framework as a learning experience.
It's so cheap that the UK wants to increase taxes to give it to the energy producers, so that they are motivated to built nuclear power plants, which they are not.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/oct/19/nuclear-ta...
Sure, it is a matter of degree - we could ask, how much extra crud is needed? I think lisp like languages have less crud, and so the idea is clearer.

This is partly because lisps can act on their own expressions, transform them. This follows from extremely uniform or consistent grammar.

Now you could say C++ can do that, but look at the amount of machinery needed in Boost to add something like a lambda or an accumulator 'pattern' to the language.

Its a matter of degree - sure you can write a DSL in C++ [recursive descent, lex/yac, boost, macros etc] but in lisp this really is just a natural part of the language - syntactic sugar can be manufactured.

Lets take the idea of a callback - this is an excellent design pattern that gives you a great deal of power. You could implement using function pointers in C, or say functor objects with operator() in C++... either way, I contend there is a lot more crud and boilerplate than there is in lisp where a lambda is a fundamental construct of the language.

The more surrounding crud or machinery, the less clear the concept.

In other words, patterns in lisp can be _more_ clearly distinguished as such, because there is less cruft.

Often the name of the concept or pattern actually occurs in the code as a function name, for example.
A layman's definition would be along the lines of that if you keep taking 2 objects from a collection of objects (e.g. apples), the smallest number you end up with is 2.

Ummm I get 0. It surely depends on whether the layman makes a logic choice about his ability to remove the final 2 apples.

EDIT: by the way the other flaw in that example is you need a definition of "even" to start with; otherwise you could begin with 9 apples. :D
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I remember seeing a urinal with a miniature propeller-like device attached to the grill at the bottom. Using a suitable jet of water, a visitor could make the propeller spin at great speed.

Apparently, these things almost eliminate spillage. The Urinal Fly is a similar concept, much simpler, but not so much fun imo.

I think there's no end to the amount of fun humans can invent. One day, every large company will have a VP of Fun.

"Our aim is to keep this bathroom clean. Your aim would be appreciated"
- notice in my grandmother's bathroom.
I'm not a lawyer, but my layman's understanding is something like this:

* If you wrote/created/designed it, you get to pick the license. You can give it to some people under the GPL, you can give it to other people under the BSD license, you can negotiate all kinds of crazy licenses for arbitrary recompense you dream up - it's up to you.
* If you received a copy of some GPL'd code, freely or in exchange for money, you have the right to give copies to other people - freely, or in exchange for money. If you paid $1000 for some GPL'd code, you're allowed to burn it to a stack of CD-Rs and hand them out on the street corner. If you got it for free off the Internet, you can copy it to your own website and charge people $29.95 per download (whether these actions are moral is another question, but they're legal).
* If you give somebody some binary executables whose source was under the GPL, whether you gave them in exchange for money or for free, you must give them the source too, or give them the right to ask for the source later. If they ask for a copy of the source later on, you're only allowed to charge the cost of blank media - regardless of what you charged for the binary executables in the first place.

I think that about covers it. How's that?
Good luck suggesting that 2 is prime and 1 isn't...
Not sure why suddenly jwz is considered to be a consumer electronics guru?

You're right, it's shameful that we listen to a guy who might not even have filled in all the application forms to become an officially recognised certified consumer electronics guru :-)
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Preparing in what way?

(Saving up seed capital? Cutting down expenditures? Courting co-founders? Market research? Product development?)