skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My treehouse was a 4x4 sheet of plywood with 2 2' 2x4's cut for bracing stuck/nailed in the crotch of a tree.

no roof, no walls, no rails. random rope to help climb the tree to get on the platform... I guess it wasn't so much a house as a place to play up high.

I knew some guys with 2 tree houses in different trees, way way to high, connected via ropes. The guys were almost done with highschool, and didn't use them. If we'd been about the same size/age, would have been a blast. As it was, i got to climb up and across a dozen times or so.
ugh. As if. Check out this list: http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0001/msg0008....

These are the results from Nielsen research listing the 25 most-visited websites in 2000. Remember Looksmart? Excite (which, BTW, hasn't seemed to have changed it's website since 2000)? These websites were relics of the time when web portals were a big deal, much like how social networking is today. Most of them have gone the way of the dinosaurs.

The crowd always seem to believe that somehow "this time is different". This is a naive behavior that is ubiquitous in finance, business, work, friendships, etc. The fact of the matter is that human nature doesn't change. People get bored of things and move on. The same will happen with Facebook, Twitter, etc. Better things will be made because of it, too.
I think it's getting harder to defend the Linux Desktop, since Pulseaudio (which is finally working perfectly on my laptop).

But still I'll stay with my Ubuntu, I just don't like using Windows or OS X, every time I use my mac I miss Gnome Terminal, Banshee, X-Chat, F-Spot, even VIM (since the mac terminal doesn't support 256 colors :(), I miss my wobbly windows, the desktop cube (not that crap you get with OS X)... I would just use the mac if there is no other option.

And don't get me started with Windows and the un-resizable terminal ugh!
U.S. Senate to investigate 'aggressive' online sales tactics
This is actually a great Google Tech Talk on the language, definitely worth watching for anyone interested in Go.
I agree with you that there are wars I wish we had not fought. But at the same time, far more fought and died in wars where I believe our cause was just.
It's easy to be forgiving when you have $15.000 in the bank :)
My mom has a minimum viable anus.
I just went to Nokia's regional site for my country and the products page there lists - get this - 135 different phone models!! How does something like this happen? And I have absolutely no idea what the features on any of them are. How am I supposed to pick one?
Technically, that's more like actor-mode concurrency than imperative programming.

Anyway, it's dangerous to make generalizations about how people think, because people think different ways in different situations. For example, some people may think: I'll hand in my homework, and it'll come back with a grade on the top. If I get enough As, that results in passing grade for the course. If I pass 32 courses, I get a diploma. If I get a diploma, I get a job at Big Corp. All of these are essentially "functions", where you pass in an input and get back an output.

Honestly, I think the real reason functional programming didn't catch on is because when the computer industry was new, you needed the performance available through mutation. So programmers learned to depend upon it, and when new programmers entered the industry, they picked up the conventions and culture of old programmers, and so on. There's nothing intrinsic about functional or imperative programming that makes one better than the other: it's the network effects from imperative being the default in industry today.

In fact, I thought MIT released some research showing that among students with no previous programming experience, those who were taught in functional languages picked it up more quickly and easily than those in imperative languages. You could make a good case that functional programming is closer to how people actually think, but that programmers' brains have been warped by having to deal with imperative programs all these years.
In fact, most of the configurations are available in UI, but what makes *nix different is, it allows you to make it work the way you want(that's what /etc is for).
On the other hand, I'm not happy with Windows until some registry tweaks are done and some useless services are turned off.
On hardware compatibility, I don't think it's Linux' fault that some vendors don't publish hardware documentation. This should be considered before installing Linux at all.
Utilizing multi-core in “Go” programming language
To utilize multicore in "Go", you need to set runtime.GOMAXPROCS().
You might want to re-read your definition. It says that karma is "that which causes the entire cycle of cause and effect", not that it "is cause and effect". In much the same way, my causing a person to become dead and my being a dead person are two distinct concepts.

Unless I just misinterpreted you and that's what you were pointing out, in which case, apologies.
can you tell us the name of your app? it doesn't seem to be referenced here or in the original post.
You mention that "you can upgrade from personal account to business accoun", how can someone do that?
Same as if you said that Apple would have the largest profit share of any PC manufacturer. It's all about the margins, and now when someone says Apple's market share is marginal, we know what that word means.
The concern isn't that tens of millions of people will die. The concern is that enough of the population could get sick to ground society to a halt. If 10-20% of our hospital staffs and firefighters and police and teachers are sick (or missing work to care for sick relatives), that creates a major strain on the fabric of society. The deadliness of this flu isn't the concern, it's virulence is.

And that's ignoring the "it might mutate into something killer" issue.
Hacker News | The new Yahoo homepage
I know that it would be easy to label this with the following:

"Apple is only doing this because of the bad press and they are still bad guys just trying to mop up the bad PR."

But let's not jump to conclusions. After all, they could be altruistically fixing stuff like this right and left. They could be fixing stuff where there was no negative press. And we would never know because we need the negative press to find out in the first place.
Not relevant. I'm not doing this for PR.
Effect is a noun, affect is a verb? What rubbish is this?!
The other problem with valuing ideas is that you can't talk about them without giving them up -- which means you have to say "my idea," "my great idea," "my best idea ever," etc. Teams you can talk about make a better story than startups you can't.
Is this language significant for any reason other than sharing a name with Google's new language?
I'm okay with that, I just don't like the affect they effect.
You can put the comment in your next tweet and use a simple acronym at the beginning to reference what you are talking about... RTLRT (regarding that last retweet).
In my own way it was supposed to be. It translates as:

* I think this idea is risky (building on another startup with no clear business model)

* I don't see the value add (already exists)

I expected a reply saying why it's not as risky as it seems, and how they're doing something fundamentally different from all the other video sharing sites out there.

Sometimes we all take shortcuts when giving feedback. Sorry if it was taken as a snipe, insulting or a trollish comment.
That's how it seems to be these days. Something is always not working quite right. I got a new Macbook Air a while ago and decided to install Linux. After messing with it for a few hours I realized I didn't have time to hunt down all the bugs and Google the various solutions. So I'm back in OS X.

For my desktops I'm used to Linux. It works perfectly and I'm so used to the way I do things there that doing them on any other operating system or in a different window manager is annoying.
Damned is really only common in North America, so we used the more common damn.
Restructuring IT: Organizing for Results
Previous Go language author requests Google change the name of Go
Then buy a decent keyboard.

It's not like you're driving your Dell PC to work everyday. It just sits on the desk.
I think this is a problem with perspective. Linux on the desktop is not a homogeneous collection controlled by a single entity. It is a collection of individual pieces. Software vendors have little incentive to make their software work 100% with those individual pieces on the Linux desktop, unlike they do on platforms where they sell other software and services. You get what you pay for, on the Linux desktop, your payment will be in time and effort to get the (usually substandard) free offerings from these software vendors to work properly.
You don't buy a Mac because of its sex appeal. You buy it because it's a damn good computer. A part of that just happens to be that it's sexy.

There are such things as sexy suits and sexy dresses. They're inanimate, but there are ugly dresses and sexy dresses. Similarly, computers exist that have blinking lights and bulges and edges where they don't need them, and they are perceived to be ugly; when you have a computer that doesn't have a line it doesn't need to have, then it's sexy.

But that's not what you're saying, Matt. We know what you're saying; you've been saying it for years, occasionally with an attempt at subtlety, as now. What you're saying is that you don't like the Mac or Mac users. You and I have had this argument before, only instead of sexy you didn't understand people who were willing to pay two thousand dollars for a computer, or who couldn't tinker with certain settings. But your arguments are shallow every time and it's tiring talking to somebody who won't say what he's actually thinking.
Social Medicine: How smoking, obesity, etc. spread through social networks
There probably aren't that many of them, but they seem to have a lot of money.

We work hard for it, thanks, and at the end of the day we'll spend it how we choose.
I use OS X secondary to Linux. There are just a few things that start to bug me every time. Why can't I change the slide time and have a non-standard shortcut for Spaces? Why can't I auto-hide the menu bar? Why can't I use a different window manager?

But things work. I don't have to worry about any hardware configuration, not even installing restricted drivers. It's a trade off I'm still evaluating.
Online Ads Are Booming, if They’re Attached to a Video
I wonder if op can give a representative example (I am not a computer scientist). For instance, superficially, Fibonacci in C and in Haskell, look identical:

Fibonacci C

<<fib>>=

unsigned int fib(unsigned int n)
{
return n < 2 ? n : fib(n-1) + fib(n-2);
}

Fibonacci Haskell

<<fibonacci_recursive.hs>>=
fib :: Integer -> Integer
fib n
| n == 0 = 0
| n == 1 = 1
| n > 1 = fib (n-1) + fib (n-2)

From here: http://en.literateprograms.org/Fibonacci_numbers_(Haskell)
Well, consider that they've probably been using it for the better part of a decade.
"He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, senseless brutality, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be part of so base an action! It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder."

- Albert Einstein
Their use is more widespread than that. They apparently have 3000 users and 100Gb of data on one primary server [1]

Although they have a source license so lord knows what they've done to the system to scale to their levels.

[1] http://www.versioncontrolblog.com/2006/12/03/perforce-as-the...
I didn't take that from this article. The key question was : “Is getting an office space going to help grow my business?”. Sure seems like David's saying that if you never answer a firm yes, you never need one.
'Just fine' is relative. The state of California still does all its financial transactions on a mainframe running COBOL; the cost of maintenance rises every year, but thanks to our budget deficit nobody wants to write the check for the cost of replacement.
I think it has more to do with hardware and history. The mapping of iterative concepts to standard microprocessor instructions is very straightforward. In the old days languages were imperative just because you couldn't get decent performance with high-level abstractions like FP.
It's not just the keyboard. It's all the hardware. It's the keyboard, the various buttons, the speaker grilles, the indicator light, the camera... everything on the Macbook Pro is gorgeous, and it works all sleeklike.
I think that Facebook chat is one of the more audacious software engienering projects of recent time, simply because of the technical difficulty and almost simultaneous rollout to hundreds of millions of users.
This is actually a surprisingly good way of getting the point across. If my teachers in school were able to describe it this way I probably would have grasped it even faster.

That being said, I don't think most grammar mistakes are made out of stupidity, rather carelessness. I've accidentally dropped a "they're" instead of a "their" knowing very well which one was correct, and when I go back to correct it, I often wonder how it even happened, or what I was thinking that allowed the wrong one to slip in.

... That's all I have to say, but I'd like to note that I don't think you're supposed to end a sentence with the preposition word "in" ...
To those apologists who said Apple couldn't fix this issue rapidly if they were sufficiently motivated by negative press or otherwise -- you were wrong.

It took many months, but something finally motived Apple to move.
> service men and women will be there fighting regardless of whether it was right or wrong because the cost of missing the right call is too high

Thank you, this is the first time I've seen it argued the people enlisting realize and accept the country is likely to squander their time and risk their lives over nothing worthy of them. I could never reconcile their somehow overlooking that with the dedication they bring to the work.
His complaint is about the entire system, which includes people who refuse to admit closed-source Linux apps aren't the best because they insist that closed-source is bad and should be done away with.
Good to know that behind the red tape, there is still human compassion and understanding at work!
It should be noted that in the original latin work, 'Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori ...' the phrase is also spoken with irony/satire, but then subsequently taken out of context and used to rally the troops. Or at least that is my understanding.
Of course it is clear that they are different, that was not the point of the argument...

The point is that you can't know which one was the one that was meant to be written there in the first place, and all that changed is some literally invisible characters are gone.

It's like with comments and code, if a comment says 'add two volumes' and I see that the code does not do that then I have a hint that something is not correct.

It could be the comment or it could be the code, but there is something smelly there.

Redundancy = good.
I've recently come to the same conclusion as the author.

I've long been an advocate of Linux, but a few years go I sort of gradually switched off Linux on the desktop back to Windows. It wasn't premeditated; I built a new box, made it Windows for gaming, and then one day realized I was using it exclusively for desktop stuff.

Well, I say desktop, but I think the real differentiator here is X Window... I use Linux command-line programs for much of my daily desktop productivity stuff -- email (sup+fetchmail), irc/aim (irssi, bitlbee), text editing (emacs), etc.

At work we recently rebuilt our boxes using Ubuntu. I was thrilled for about two weeks, and then all those little X annoyances started creeping back in. Frankly, I was kind of surprised; I had assumed that it would have come a lot farther in the few years since I had last used Linux for desktop.

Actually using X Window programs has become annoying. I can sort of feel that legion of disparate programmers all taking their own stab at desktop GUI programming and all arriving there somewhat differently.

Eventually a few of us broke down and hackintoshed our boxes, and I couldn't be happier.

Linux on the server? Absolutely.

But on the desktop? OS/X.
We use both in North America. "damn" as a verb (curse, reject, denounce) and "damned" as an adjective (hated, revolting).
How Tweetie's gestures were designed
It does seem that this is one of the problems, though surely not the only problem.

If you're a hardware vendor making a new USB device, you're going to alter your device and your drivers (if you have them) so that the item works well under Windows and maybe OS X. You're probably not going to try to tweak it to make it work with the Linux USB drivers.

Linux is in this odd position of having to try to copy all the functionality and interface of the Windows systems because that's what all the hardware has been written for. It makes for a buggy and error prone process.

I don't agree that you get what you pay for though. At this point it's all about market penetration. If Linux was 90% of the PC market, don't you think those USB webcams would be likely to work the first time? Don't you think that if a company wanted to enable new functionality they'd submit a driver to the kernel? It wouldn't take any more effort from them (less if you consider programming for Linux easier than programming for Windows) and the Linux users would get the benefit.
That sounds like fun. I know so many software developers who wouldn't find their way around a soldering iron, your analogy is very vivid.
This is all the more amazing since they have one super-high end product vs the balanced product portfolio of Nokia.

You'd have to imagine this makes Apple's position a bit tenuous.
Thank you for posting good news! Too many sites post only the bad news and then hide the clarifications/corrections.
Let me say it this way, if I really ever wanted this TV set then I wouldn't mind. The same is with Linux: if you want free, open-source OS then you should know that there's no Photoshop, IE and all those games you can have on Windows. Also, before installing Linux you should be aware that not every piece of hardware can work in Linux. I agree, these are big disadvantages for normal user - the choice depends on users' priorities.
Tell HN: Can we stop commenting on troll comments?
We're definitely seeing more overt troll comments lately. I'm not talking about baiting the Apple fanboys or spouting political talking points; I'm talking about comments with Slashdot "first-post" type nonsense.

That's not a big deal. The problem is, people here seem to feel compelled to point out to the troll that this is the "wrong site" to post to. They don't care. Who does care? The rest of us, who have to page through comment threads of people slapping each other on the back for telling off a troll.

We have moderation for a reason. Just let the troll comments drop to the bottom of the page. Can that be the new plan? And can we politely (and preferably out-of-band) ask people who do respond to troll comments to delete their comments to keep the threads clean?
"""if you read through the comments you'll find out that he's not alone in this sentiment."""

I suggest one would have to willfully ignore massive amounts of evidence over the past many, many years if you really thought he was alone with this sentiment and were genuinely surprised to see someone feels this way.
Geez, simple solution. Keep another box around, a Mac Mini or a cheap Windows box, for the stuff Linux doesn't do. If you try to get by with a single desktop environment, you'll get fed up with any of the choices out there. It isn't worth the pain. You'll get tired of the Mac when you realize that nice interface is the only... environment... you'll... ever... have. Everything that takes three clicks will always take three clicks. You'll never be able to switch to a tiling window manager for the afternoon. I won't bother listing Windows' shortcomings. And under Linux you will always run into things like Skype that are broken and not worth the trouble of fixing, because you aren't in college anymore and you have real work to do.

If I had to do a lot of work on the road, I think I would have to get a Windows or Mac laptop and set up a Linux VM for doing real work. Otherwise I'd go crazy and start carrying two laptops (and forget about ever getting another date.)
I'm rather the other way around; I've never really understood why some people see them as being meaningfully distinct.

For example: would we make the same distinction between the bureaucrats and policymakers in China, and the programmers who make the Great Firewall actually work? From my perspective, the person who actually carries out the action, not the one who tells them to, is the one who is responsible for it, good or bad. We don't praise politicians when a firefighter does their job; why should we blame the politicians when a soldier does theirs?

Not that I pretend to understand any of it, mind you. God knows I have no bloody clue what it's like to be in a war, so perhaps I'm entirely off-base.
FYI: right click to configure windows terminal. You can set any width/height you'd like.

OSX is far superior still ;)
I did some UI work with the guys who made Qunu. They used similar techniques for in-browser chat: Erlang, "binding" via AJAX long polling. It was pretty advanced stuff at the time (3-4 years ago) - I believe other in-browser chat services like Meebo used polling.
Right. I used both in the original copy. But elsewhere, damn is used as both.
I agree with the point that you don't need office space early on. The key is being in constant contact with the other team members. Some developers love to chat/IM on skype all day long from home. It depends on your team dynamics.

But once in a while, you need serious face-to-face brainstorming. That's where your coffee shop probably saves you. No one has designed a tool yet that allows several people to really have a brainstorming session remotely (hint for a future YC startup: if you have a solution to this problem, go for it).
Hacked Roombas Play Pac-Man
The only example that I can think of here is "damn yankees", which suggests that "damn" is fine here instead of "damned".
I appreciate the thoughtful responses, especially from raganwald (my original comment was directed primarily at this discussion thread rather than his post).

The common thread in your responses seems to be that politicians, not soldiers, are responsible for wars. My response to this idea is that one must not conflate "dying for freedom" with "killing for freedom". We should certainly oppose the enemies of liberty, but not by glorifying violence. It has always been, and will forever be, possible to oppose something without killing your fellow human beings. For this to succeed, however, you must have the courage to enter the fray with your arms at your sides.
Fibonacci in C would more often be written like this:

unsigned int fib(unsigned int n) {
int a = 1, b = 1, temp;
for (int i = 2; i <= n; ++i) {
temp = a + b;
a = b;
b = temp;
}
return b;
}

This also happens to be significantly more space and time efficient.
comparing the user experience of Skype in Ubuntu on a Thinkpad to Skype in Mac OS X.

But isn't that an issue with Skype? It's a massive nuisance that Linux still doesn't have the hardware and application support of MasOS/OSX and Windows, but there's not much that can be done about that without the cooperation of proprietary vendors, many of whom still treat Linux as a second class citizen.