skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hey! Look at me! I spend so much time working with computers that I prefer a highly technical solution to something with an easily comprehensible interface! Then, because I also has Asperger's syndrome and overeat, I spend my time dissing people that use other operating systems because obviously there's no reason people would use something that I don't use oh god im so lonely

One of my favorite things about my current university is that it made Macs mandatory. It utterly killed the OS debate among students. People who like Linux/Windows Boot Camp it, and everybody's happy, and I never have to listen to the smug superiority of the Windows/Linux people. (Last year, the smug was everywhere. Screw people my age.)
> Studies have found that 80% of users use only 20% of software features.

The problem is that it's not the same 20%.
Virtual Users/Domains With Postfix, Courier, MySQL, SquirrelMail (CentOS 4.8)
US Govt Refuses to Disclose Recovery.gov Contract Details
I don't usually link to stuff like this, but this particular article had some really great info in it (about CLEP exams, how much it'd all cost, etc.) that I thought some here might be interested in.
Google Flu Trends expands to 16 additional countries
Eckart Wintzen

http://extent.nl/about-eckart/

Unfortunately he's no longer.
Seriously, I'm not sure what the point of your comments are.

Based on the devices you stated and your presence here, it would seem you are astute enough to recognize that not every app is going to be applicable for all people. This app especially seems to target a niche of a niche (iPhone users reading HN), and is not even 100% necessary within that niche.

Most people would recognize that certain criteria must be met to be able to download and use an App from iTunes.

I don't mean to be harsh, your comments just sort of seemed like statements of the obvious.
Shooter, how did you find this Dr. House? You neglected to talk about this. And I think this is an important piece of information that can benefit us trying to get a resolution for our own mystery illnesses. How do you go about hunting a good doctor?
Twitter vs. Facebook vs. MySpace
Startup rental website takes on Craigslist
> If you are a member of the general public:

> The fact that you are seeing this page indicates that the website you just visited is either experiencing problems, or is undergoing routine maintenance.
I think this note deserves a posterous page - whether you add more stories or not. Just for it's online presence prominence.

imho, you putting your story on the web will help many who are at the initial misdiagnosed stage.

if you don't, I am going to do it (and put your email in the contact). I don't know if I am threatening you or pleading wit you. But please create a posterous - copy the content and email to post@posterous.com.

Edit: of course - i won't do it. it was just a push for Shooter to do it. I would email him if at all I decide.
Love GDB. It has saved my life many times, but who uses it anymore? Not trolling, just curious. Managed code has won, has it not?
Also, are you in touch with Dr. House- for unofficial updates and getting 'tips' from him?
Speaking from personal experience, it is the norm.

In the US you are completely on your own, and your insurance company is not your friend; no matter how dutiful you were in paying your premiums. If you have a chronic, treatable condition, expect to fight it out with your insurance company 2 to 3 times a year over whether or not they will live up to their contractual obligations.

It is my considered opinion that if Obama wanted to lever the healthcare debate around to actual change, the only tool he would need are the RICO statutes. And I don't think his prosecutors would find it difficult to bring cases.
Deal Terms and Their Impact on Returns
There's plenty of C/C++ work. A lot of legacy but a good chunk of new stuff too.
Bill Meeks' "Fundamental Concepts of Math" course, also at UMass, was what got me excited about math as an undergrad. I'd suggest reading his book if anyone is looking for a good introduction to topics such as set theory, logic, group theory, topology and metric spaces, etc:

http://www.math.umass.edu/~bill/m300/nm300.pdf
Have You Visited Recovery.gov Lately?
"But has Nielsen ever addressed this?"

Since the point of a substantial number of his articles is that quick and dirty usability testing is the only reliable way to make usability decisions I don't think you can reasonably fault him here.

I don't think your account correctly characterizes his approach to usability. I think it correctly characterizes the perception of his approach to usability in many who dismiss him.
Just wanted to mention that I am a happy Freckle user. Good work. Just add in the ability to mark items paid or unpaid, and Freckle would be just about all I want out of a time tracker. (With paid/unpaid, I would be able to see what I can or want to invoice next, considering various subprojects proceed on different timelines.)
It might be amazing, but I had to turn it off when he said the web was better than the desktop, which is patently not true. The desktop still gives a vastly superior user experience, while the web is still trying to ape it.
This post is both personal and medical in nature...

Posting this story elsewhere is something only Shooter should do.
Indeed. This is the crux of our news organizations' current crisis. They create and organize the content, yet everybody else is using the content for profit. I choose to reward those who create and organize the content.

The delivery of content is extremely easy, especially for me since I'm a developer myself.
They also want online music stores to cough up fees for 30-second song previews.

Surely such previews fall under "fair use"? They are excerpts of a larger work, unusable except to give an idea of how the whole piece sounds. And they don't decrease the value of the author's work -- if anything, they increase it.

It sounds like the publishers are trying to make a short-term gain while crippling their industry in the long run.
Explorations in Language, Logic, and Machines
the answer is lawyers.

Not really.

My uncle was a farmer, which in these days involves mostly machinery, which all have bolts. Back then, there was talk of converting to the metric system, and he said that he hoped that he would be able to retire before that came into being. But then he bought a New Holland combine, which was all metric.

At that time, I think there was a proposal to allow mechanics to get a tax deduction for replacing all there tools with metric tools, but this was denied.

Similarly the cost of conversion is huge for NASA and many other industries.

Property boundaries are, except for Texas, I hear, are all based off of reference points that are precisely described.

So I don't think the answer is lawyers.
I use Yahoo Pipes to filter feeds from reddit. Works pretty well for me.
GPars is Groovy Parallelism
You missed the part where he has to keep on fighting to keep the coverage and says that he expects to lose his coverage eventually. And it sounds like you don't have enough experience of being on the wrong end of an insurance companies attempts to kill you to be less credulous about their nature.

The problem is that in the US at this time, health insurance companies are structurally evil. Evil in that they are the source of unnecessary pain, suffering and death. That they cause this suffering in the name of their 'fiduciary responsibility' to their shareholders only compounds the evil.
Better calendar federation in Exchange 2010
I've been doing demo's for years, and have performed hundreds and maybe I have been lucky, but have had no major issues.

Our demos are also usually performed with trunk code or 1-2 days old at most.

How do you handle it when you get a question about a particular aspect and can't show it?
4 years since Pakistan's 8th October Earthquake
There are a few problems with this.

1. No one will do it.

2. Even people who do know how to program have a special aversion to JavaScript, especially.

3. Almost no one is equipped (or willing to invest the time/effort) to analyze their work and come up with a process that is best for them.

A typical person is about as self-aware as a box of rocks. Even particularly smart, savvy, successful people. It takes a lot of work to get real insight out of them in terms of work processes. And impossible to get them to generate novel ideas for solving those problems.

More importantly, to design great software you have to understand not just business processes, but software itself, and the human animal (psychology, sociology).

That is an extraordinary amount of extra crap to expect somebody to do, when they just want to get their work done.

This is born out wherever you see "lay people" creating their own solutions. Ever worked in an organization that powers itself on Excel? It's not only not pretty in a technical sense, but they never, ever, ever do a good job, even within the constraints of what is possible with Excel. And they also never think to question if there could be a better way.

So, that's what people like me are FOR.

All this crap happens to be my passion.
Textbook Revolution:  364 modern free texts
The hiring committees don't meet every week, so it can take a while to hear back after each interview. They're very courteous and they like to collect data about their own performance, so you should expect to hear back from them either way.
I've used Linux for a long time and it used to be crap in this way. It's something that certain distributions took it upon themselves to produce. And it works well - when the software you want is in the repository.

When what you want isn't in a repository or you want a newer version than the repository has is where you hit problems. The Mac and Windows tend to get around this problem by having a decently stable set of libraries that programs work with. With Linux, because everyone is free to have or not have anything, programs can't count on what may or may not be installed or what version it might be. And if one were to upgrade one library, it might cause incompatibilities with certain programs and if one were to install a newer version of a program it might depend on that newer version of that library. Many Linux distros get around this by not upgrading packages in repositories beyond critical fixes for a released version. And that does bug a lot of people. It's one of the reasons new Linux distros are released so frequently - an upgrade of the OS is also an upgrade of the programs you're running on it.

And part of this is that Linux is progressing rapidly. We don't want a stable set of stuff because we couldn't improve as quickly that way.

But it's a little bit brusk to say that Linux is just superior because it has centralized application management. It's both a positive and a negative. And, to an extent, it's a solution to a problem that the Mac and Windows don't have - that programs can't count on what's going to be on a given system or what version.

It's cool. It makes some things easy and nice. It isn't some magically amazing thing that always works in your favor.
Hi! Yay! :)

Don't worry, we're working on our invoicing attack plan. And marking reports as invoiced is step #1.

Our #1 feature request has been a timer, and we built one. (Have you tried it yet?)

#2 is invoicing. We're building that next :)

It's just a little bit slow because A) I am a perfectionist when it comes to defining the initial approach (and it serves me well), and B) we're doing the part-time 37signals thing.

But we will get there... soon, hopefully!
Ouch, I cant believe such a basic right is being so abused in your country!

Well I did because I was over there a few weeks ago visiting my cousin and she ranted about it - but she is a super-hardline liberal so I obviously took her comments with care (bit of truth, bit of OTT). Sounds like she might have been spot on!
Apple's Xcode uses GDB.
> Aaron is an insider. He belongs to the club.

How is he an insider? Because he went to Princeton? Is he related somehow to Larry, Serge, Bill, or one of the Steves?
Not sure why they don't simply compile to Java bytecode to start with. It doesn't seem like they're making use of runtime type profiles here a la Self.

It still seems to me that JIT compilation is needless, unless your compiler is as smart as Self's. One should simply compile to the desired target language and avoid warmup costs.
I'd be interested in seeing similar research on Google's page, with their distinct take on ad selection, format and placement.

It appears that people unconsciously set an "attention getting threshold", things that are designed to attract attention go above that threshold and are simply ignored. This seems to be well known hence the various forms of pop-up and pop-over ads that are showing up on sites again now even though they were proven to annoy users to the point of having to derive engineering solutions to the problem.
Incidentally, I already had eight of these books in my reading list. Of those eight, I have read three cover to cover. They were really good. One percent is not a sufficient sample size, but I have high hopes for the remaining 361 titles.
I wonder why only a particular part of the scroll bar appears to have attracted long gaze patterns? In my own case, I'm typically looking at the slider as a metric of page length, not a particular spot on the bar itself.
Your not a nobody for certain. I'd say you were an Everyman. :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everyman

Nobodies dont speak up about their experiences.
Forced Coding
Wheels as user interface mechanisms
i installed it. i think it's pretty nice but still needs some work. for example, i don't like that it opens the links in safari. i'd rather stay within the application (like the reddit app). if i'm going to end up in safari every time i want to read something, i'll probably just use http://www.icombinator.net/ instead:(
Slides are here (PG warning in effect lol)
http://carsonified.com/blog/web-apps/start-up-metrics-that-m...

11 & 12 explain the AARRR / pirate model...
Great references (slide 20) too - thx
Venture Model Makeover & Diet Plan--Step Two
Repositories are a wonderful sexy and brilliant thing with lots going for them. But I always like to counter effusive praise like that with some caveats. Like that they do have flaws; often dependencies aren't worked out correctly, many of the interfaces are a little confusing/inaccessible for a noob, the ratio of signal/noise in terms of quality software is sometimes annoyingly low, I've yet to see a really good GUI search interface for one, often you get an older version of the software.

And so forth.
Whenever I read "like by magic", I mentally have to add "when it works".
Dear friends: Please stop falling for phishing attacks
You're not the right duracell battery unit
open source evidently:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/01/21/open_source_projects...
"But it's a little bit brusk to say that Linux is just superior because it has centralized application management"

I know. I tend to exaggerate a little from time to time (and that not everyone likes it), but I always try to make it engaging or, at least, entertaining. When I saw two different important software vendors embracing the idea of software package repositories, it came to me the idea is taking hold. My iPod self-updates apps installed in it. It is not as sophisticated as APT or YUM, but it's an idea whose time has come.
why the downvotes? I don't understand. laktek is making a suggestion.

As someone who has gone thru the whole onslaught of visiting several doctors for my sciatica plus degenerating lumbar discs - I was told by many doctors in the US that I am at the risk of being paralyzed . To put it mildly, I was scared. I then went for 2 months to India(kerala) where they diagnosed my problem as something that was the result of digestive problems. I had no faith in the daily treatment; I questioned the rationale of what they were doing(eg- enema with herbs and medical oil) to morning-medical-castor-oil treatments. But after 2 weeks, I was not limping.After 3 months, I was walking normal as anyone. At the end, I was told by the ayurvedic doctors that any more chemicals(by that they meant allopathic medicine) and my body would have made slower progress.

I also went thru the insurance drama- doctor 'adviced' me to take an x-ray so not to get into insurance troubles. So a whole 2 weeks later - I get my mri to know which of my discs have problem. There was this pain specialist who was so eager to take me 'once more' to the operation theatre to chip out a part around the disc(which he did twice). The nerve specialist was another story - interested in my occupation and annual salary over my pain.
Thanks for the reply. I wanted to get an idea how long I should wait before signing a contract with another company.

I applied with several companies about a week ago an it's really interesting to see the differences between small and large ones. The smallest company is really quick and I'm meeting their engineers tomorrow. In the case of the somewhat larger one (50+ employees) it took several email exchanges with two separate people to set up a phone interview with their recruiter. And I haven't heard back anything yet from any of the large companies.
Looks like the 'Holy Scrollers' have won, while the 'Sharks' (everything in one bite) are left to chew on their hypercard metaphor.
Here's the thing that I find tragically hilarious about this conversation: you can't get people this riled up about their local school superintendent embezzling money.
85 percent of Mac owners 'fess up' to owning a Windowns box
Looks like Apple is really putting a lot of dynamic language hopes into this project.

When I talked with Ted Goldstein, then head of Apple developer tools, at WWDC a few years back (he happened to sit at my lunch table), he said their eventual goal for Objective-C was a full, Smalltalk-like runtime IDE. (Ted was at PARC for many years, working on Smalltalk.) And they're clearly getting there, slowly but surely. (LLVM is key to those plans.)

But MacRuby promises a shorter path to a dynamic language completely integrated with the Objective-C runtime environment.

Quite interesting to watch.

Another good point he made was that MS still isn't using C# for any of their built-in or system applications, while Apple is using Objective-C/Cocoa for all of their major apps. (Well, except for a few Carbon laggards like their audio/video high-end apps.) That told him Apple was doing something right.

In that vein, he also noted that people looking in from the outside would never "get" the power of Objective-C/Cocoa (which is just "Smalltalk in C" with a fantastic runtime library)--the language is just off-putting enough at first glance that people don't understand--, and that made it a good secret weapon.
Or you get a hacked up version that does not behave as you'd expect it to. E.g.: if you install gems using apt on ubuntu or debian, you'll get a modified version that tries to install rubygems from one of their own repositories. Also, it wasn't correctly symlinking gems after i'd install them either.

Apart from that though, yeah, repositories are pretty sexy indeed.
Well, of course, all companies do. Regardless of prevailing economic conditions there will still be staff turnover, it might slow in a recession, but people aren't going to stop living their lives.
What can you do with a web in your pocket?
I think the last time APT borked a system I used unexpectedly was in 2003 and I was running Debian testing with parts of Sid thrown in: I expected it to fail from time to time. The fact it did only a handful of times was remarkable by itself.

The other time I remember was a couple months back when I added a bleeding edge Intel GMA driver to solve a bug I was trying to help to fix and it completely fubar'ed my X. It was easier to dump a package list to a separate partition and reinstall from the CD.

I never saw APT misbehaving unless provoked.
The title is deceiving because the author of the article can only speculate on why, and his quote is from an analyst.

Anyway: This could all be just timing.

The international Kindle seems to be based on 3G/GSM of some sort. Up until this week, the only GSM provider in Canada has been Rogers. Just this week we've received news that both Telus and Bell will be offering the iPhone in Canada, on their shiny new GSM-compatible joint-built network.

Is it possible Amazon reached a deal with a 3G provider in Canada -- just not Rogers?
This is awesome. I think the title is misleading though; it's about reproducing digitized speech. This converts the already digitally represented sound to actual analog sound, audible by humans. The output device is a by cleverly (and mechanically) played classical piano.

The resulting voice sounds like a bad special effect, but is really cool since it isn't. :)
Super-Social Networking: Superhero Facebook Status Updates
Not really, but 3rd party software centralized update is starting to appear on non-Linux platforms like the iPhone. It's becoming an important feature.
Ask HN: Good books to learn Prolog?
I'm on a quest to if not actively programm in it but at least take a look at different programming paradigms.
One of the few things missing are logic programming languages.
There are quite a bunch of books about Prolog, which is good on the one hand but on the other it renders it difficult to pick one to read. :D

I'd prefer a book that doesn't start with very basic stuff, eg explaining loops, if-statements and what not, I know that already. ;)
"Programming Erlang" by Joe Armstrong was really perfect in that regard.

So, dear HN, do you have any recommendations?
Or maybe there is something better to check out than Prolog?
Ah, the power of a least-squares fit. :)
I am always weary of installing gems (actually, I use mostly Python, so I install eggs). It seems wrong to go against APT.
And a lot easier than going to a website, download, unzip copy manually to a folder, also the GUIs for apt are very good.
Bill Watterson had an ability to capture such emotion and life like expression with a small 2d comic strip like no other comic or graphic I've ever seen.

The guy was amazing, and I love that he lives as a recluse in a town that won't give him up to the media either. In fact, not many people even know what he looks like anymore from what I've read.

The never selling out part is also awesome. He refused to allow even one Hobbes stuffed tiger to be made because it would devalue his character...simply amazing, he really did it for the art.
In case you were wondering...

Sergey Brin, Rajeev Motwani, Lawrence Page, and Terry. Winograd. What can you do with a web in your pocket? Data Engineering Bulletin, 21:37–47, 1998.

[Hey Larry, who's Lawrence Page? :p]
Thank you, David, for this. It's a heart-breaking story but it's consoling that you're now on the road to at least a partial recovery. It makes me respect the fragility of it all: that it was potentially all due to a single tick. It's mind-boggling.
Definitely read what Joshua Bloch has to say about API design. I'd highly recommend this talk he gave: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/effective-api-design

Typically he talks about APIs more in the sense of library design than web service design, but he's very relevant nontheless.
My worst complaint was it uses an outdated version of Gnome. OpenSolaris could have a tiered repository structure analog to Debian's stable/testing/experimental/unstable.

If you want a life without surprises, you run "OpenSolaris boring". If you are a little more brave, you go with "OS risky" and if you like a life of adventures (and of fixing your computer) you could go with "OS adventurous".

You can also have a final version, "OpenSolaris bleeding" with all software rebuilt from the newest sources every other day with no assurances beyond "it compiles".

BTW, I used to call Debian testing "works, mostly" and unstable "should compile".
Yahoo Key Scientific Challenges Coverage I: Challenges in Search