skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Using language like "obtuse" isn't really conducive to conversation. They are different. Yes, there can be facts in a fiction book and fiction in a nonfiction book, but they are categorized differently. Humans need groups to put things in and we put books into groups based on fact and based on imagination.

I'm actually doing about 5 things right now. Playing a poker tournament, chatting with my wife, commenting here, watching an animal documentary on tv, and designing a new feature for my web application.

If I was reading, I'd only be doing one thing.
What I am saying is that as China grows in affluence, Chinese students are able to go to university in rapidly growing numbers. Many both want to and can afford foreign schools, and the USA is one of their top choices. This is a rapidly evolving trend. If I remember correctly enrollments grew about 6% in 2006, 20% in 2007, and the preliminary numbers I saw suggested that 2008 saw substantially faster growth than that. I've also heard suggestions that 2009 is seeing about a doubling in applications going abroad.

Absolute numbers are currently fairly small and the final market size is hard to estimate. But the addition of large numbers of highly motivated students who are willing to pay top dollar should increase selectivity at good universities.
Truly, my heart bleeds for the M.D. aspirants of the world. Point taken for real doctorates though.
and the grave should be an acute.
Yes very far off the mark.
I actually have Windows XP at home for which I didn't pay any money (work license), a Macbook at work, and a Linux Machine (Ubuntu 9.04) at work.

Used mostly Windows, + Linux (for some server side).
Tried to use Ubuntu for day to day work, and it was like death from 1000s cuts. There was not just a major thing not working, most things worked fine, but there were so many little anoyances that at the end it made the whole experience very frustrating.

I am actually new to Mac Os, but I find it pretty decent. I switched to it, and just use the Linux machine to get some parts of my project compiling.

And I still use XP at home.

So, I have used all of three of them with an open minded, and I find that Linux is the worst to use on day to day basis.
Earning Money at Home – Legit Online Jobs Review
the possibility exists that :
1) its impossible to annihilate everything without also recreating a universe in the process
2) that logic itself [as the refinement of inter-cusp physical experience] is not applicable to the start and end of universes.
IPhone Tech Talk Seattle
The open source is heaven and closed source is hell propaganda is getting really tired. The irrationality of many members of the open source community hurt its image in the larger world outside.

When you say things as wrong as those said in the blog post, it makes people skeptical of other arguments in support of open source.
Neat. Kind of reminds me of Stellarium, a free open-source digital planetarium ( http://www.stellarium.org/ ). Great way to spend a few hours zooming in and out on all of the various stars in the heavens.
I do not agree with this. I dual boot linux and windows and I have had much better experience with Linux and groan when I have to boot up into Windows because I need some silly windows only software.

This is a minor issue that is probably due to a faulty flash installation provided by Adobe and is easily handled. Oh and by the way we are talking about running flash on a 64 bit platform which has been problematic for all OSs including OSX and Windows.

You tend to hear more about the Linux issues just because Linux has been far ahead of Windows and OSX in 64 bit support so Linux users ran up against the Adobe foot-dragging much earlier.
SILVER ALERT: MISSING 84-YR-OLD ARTHUR MULKEY IN DANGER
i, for one, would love a version for startup related questions, from logistical, strategic and financial to technical implementation suggestions. something like a more powerful Ask HN. users can respond to questions based on their opinions or (hopefully) experiences, others can vote on the relevance and usefulness of the response
The most important thing is missing. Drink a tasty beverage.
As a toddler I lived in a clean house with a television and was allowed to touch many things. His statement of how he thinks most people live and the reality just don't match.
We know the NSA told AT&T and the telcos to give them access to tap the Internet backbones many years ago, so how do we know the NSA or even the CIA hasn't had a similar secret agreement in place with Google? In-Q-Tel, the CIA's Silicon Valley venture fund, has had a few business relationships with Google, going back to Google's origin—just google it. Perhaps a little quid pro quo here and there?

Given that Google is the de facto entry point to the web, imagine how valuable it would be watch any of the few million names on the terrorist watch list, and log their search queries and all their user activity across Google's major products? In this day and age, how could any terrorist cells even form a TV worthy plot without using a tool like Google to gather information?

I think this kind of surveillance is child play however, since terrorism is really about something else entirely. Imagine being able to watch the queries and traffic of dissidents from enemy nations? If you're a spy agency, you have two goals: recruit human assets, and fake out enemy intel agencies. Since you want to find well placed people who will assist you in secret, what better way to find them than to wait for them to reveal themselves via their Google searches?

You might now say "hey wait a sec, this could turn into tinfoil hat crazy talk!" But there's an even further spin to Google espionage to consider. If our gov't doesn't do it, certainly foreign gov't intel agents will try it. How many Chinese software engineers does Google employ for instance? Russian? Israeli? Our national security cannot afford to have double agents working within Google to pass this data to foreign nations. Hence we must to do it ourselves, in order to dis-incentivize other nations from doing it. Which ironically forces the arms-race. You've got to love Prisoner's Dilemmas and the logic of destroying the village to save it.
Believe it or not!
I can provide another anecdotal evidence. I lost around 20 pounds with calorie (and fat) counting and stood there for the recent 4 years. Last 2 months I switched to counting carbs, too. At all I lost more than I gained during my CS studies. :)

p.s.: I frequently work out and bicycle. That certainly adds to it.
The only thing that turns people off from using Linux as a desktop OS is preconceived notions and behaviour from years of using Windows.
I'm not excited about it at all. I don't need more companies interrupting my brainwaves trying to convince me to part with my money.
The "winnowing process" is all about limiting participation (and competition).

Dr. Menand is effectively arguing that Ph.D. candidates are not putting up a huge investement to learn more (that happens in the first 3 years) or to contribute more (a single good research paper takes about a year), but simply wasting time on a larger dissertation. (If he thought that Ph.D. students were learning lots, and making a useful contribution, then he wouldn't have written the article).

This huge investement is there to protect the cushy status of academics. To fortify the ivory tower against the contributions of dilettantes. Menand seems to think this is a good thing, but that it has been taken too far - being more selective of Ph.D. students would be more effective than making the Ph.D. a real grind.
As with most other things, it depends on the person.

I have a suspicion, for instance, that your definition of "day to day basis" is very different than mine. The majority of my time on my computers is spent in a screen session in a terminal. In such a setting, Linux passes both Windows[1] and OS X[2] fairly easily (in my eyes).

I'm not going to pretend that this is anything like what most people would do with their computers. But it's what I do with mine, and it's plenty for me. It's also why I don't understand debates about "the year of Linux on the desktop" - I don't really care if it is accessible to or useful for people other than me, so long as it meets my needs, and it meets my needs quite nicely.

[1] I know there's Cygwin, but even after that you still don't have a package manager.

[2] I know it's a Unix, but even after that you still don't have a package manager. It has, e.g. Macports and Fink, but I've never had much success with either (although I'll concede I haven't made much of an effort).
I believe it.

Scientists at least have the advantage that, even if they can't see any practical application of their research, other people can (and do!).
The Zombie Game Experiment - Where You Design a Zombie Game
Think of it as a forced, interest-free loan: You'll be repaid any extra withholding in April.

Yeah, sure. They are already paying their debts with IOU's. They didn't pay people's refunds last year, was it? This seems pretty wrong to me.

Are they going to repay it with another loan? Who is going to loan them money? The only way out of the debt spiral is to stop spending, not taking on more debt.
Sony Ericsson Jalou
One might be able to defend the proposition that proprietary money-free software gets worse and worse over time, and open source money-free software gets better and better, as does commercial not-free software. That pattern seems to hold much better, though there are still some exceptions. The apps that give software a bad name are the stupid "free" antivirus apps and Adobe PDF reader and other things that eventually turn into everything but rootkits in a desperate attempt to monetize by any means necessary.

(I'm only covering the end-user experience, not the question of whether you have a problem with updating your own apps written against free software.)
Very handy. I've wanted this for ages.
Really? What about Red Hat, Canonical, SpringSource, Xen, Cloudera, Github etc.?
Deploying a PHP-GTK application with NSIS
Well, not as reliable as the Kalashnikovs. But literally no other autoloading small arm ever created is.

The Kalashnikov is a masterful design. It is simple, easy and cheap to manufacture by any of a number of processes (stamping, milling, forging), and literally can be buried in mud for days and remain operational. Sure, it's not as accurate as the AR platform (e.g., M-4, M-16), but what good does that do you when your gun doesn't work?

In fairness to the AR, it is a highly advanced, very reliable weapon when properly maintained. Its early reputation for failures can really be blamed on the Army's failure to properly train the cleaning processes or issue appropriate cleaning tools. With good cleaning, it's a marvellous design. The Kalashnikov, on the other hand, can be thrown at a raw conscript and will remain operational basically no matter what.

Interestingly, this dichotomy goes back much further. Prior to the AK there was a short run of the SKS (mostly adopted by China later, and also designed by Kalashnikov), and before that the (in)famous workhorse of both the Czar and the Glorious Revolution, the Mosin-Nagant. Compare this to the weapons used by the US over this period, viz., the Krag, Springfield, and M1 Garand---especially the latter!

Tangentially, it's quite impressive to consider that, in an era of bolt action infantry rifles (the Brits, Germans, French, Russians, and Italians had the Enfield, K98K, MAS-36, Mosin-Nagant, and Carcano, respectively), the US led the way towards modern rifles with the Garand. Helluva gun, and fun as hell to shoot.
Are clueless politicians holding IT back?
I think he's deluding himself. The way he lives off of thrown-out food, secondhand clothes, and couch-surfing his friends and family means he's just as dependent on the system he despises as any "wage slave". He's not living free from the influence of money; he's just found ways to use other people's money to his advantage.

I would love to see his reaction to a society that had collapsed in the way he predicts. What would he do without "wage slaves" around to throw away food, give away clothes, and let bums sleep in their houses?
A VC coming to a school is not looking for plans so much as people. Unless he has specifically asked for formal presentations, you're better off just talking informally and intelligently about possible startup ideas, rather than making the conversation be about stuff you're probably bad at, like business plans and slide decks. Just seem smart and energetic.
You are right that some crappy software is highly profitable, but to say that Microsoft's software products have gotten worse with each release is to have a very non-standard definition of "worse". You still might not like Windows or Office, but on the basis of stability and usability, two attributes that most people would correlate with quality, there is really no question that relative quality improved from one release to the next.
Shoddy Journalism. And I'm tired of it. Really Shoddy Journalism.

Zynga was actively recruiting on top tier campuses for product managers before this story came out. The job is still on their website. The Job is on their website, but like any company, they want to have a good applicant pool.
Google music search gets boost
Why Skype fears Open Source
Keyword Tools- Googles Wonder Wheel
Your point can be strengthened, by noting that profit need not be monetary, but can also occur in trade. If one person is skilled at fishing (talented, practiced, and invested in equipment), and another is skilled at pottery, they can trade fish-for-cup, and both have profited, because they each have got something that would have cost them more time and effort if they can done it themselves. Division of labour, Adam Smith, etc.

Of course, that fundamental is often obscured in today's mass market, and can in fact be lost, when people are don't purchase in their best interest, and are encouraged in this by advertising etc. And Adam Smith is often misapplied to justify it.

You can even have a kind of profit without trade, as in when you invest by practicing skills, creating equipment and so on which leverages your many subsequent efforts. Even a cave man can do it (and did).
Feature-creep is definitely something to be careful of but I absolutely love the features that were slowly added to apps like Excel over time. Same with MS Project and even Windows. Why do so many people in the OSS and startup world think that good apps must be minimalist? For web-apps, it makes sense to keep things simple but I would rather have a dedicated icon and keyboard shortcut for the tons of different tasks that I regularly do in Office apps.

It seems to me that a lot of the developers have never seen real users use commercial software on a day to day basis and I don't even mean real power-users. The customer service manager at my work breezes through Excel, Outlook, and Dynamics Nav while on the phone with a customer to give them estimates on product lead-times and changes the sales orders on the fly. She uses tons of shortcuts and keyboard shortcuts in all the apps but in no way would be considered a geek or techie. She's a user who has been doing this for a long time and while she doesn't care about DB2, she is glad to have a toolbar that can refresh external data in an Excel sheet with a single click. It makes her life easy and enables her to take orders worth tens of thousands of dolalrs daily. Commercial software exist not to win design or elegance awards but to increase productivity. Also they tend to support integration with Active Directory/LDAP, Terminal Server, Office, Outlook, and tons of Microsoft apps that makes my life as an IT admin really easy and thus productive.

Honestly, I think us developers/designers have it wrong when it comes to UI. We think there is only one kind of right interface and it must be a clean-cut page with a big green call-to-action button that says "Sign Up". Anything other than this is a mess and confuses users. Maybe this is true for webpages visited by grandmas but I think in typical business environment, it's quite the contrary. Users are accustomed to words and icons and expect them to work in a similar way in every application. So if there is a Print icon in Firefox or Excel, it must do only one thing and that is print the current document. However, while we developers think that the 100 other icons in the same window confuse the user, I've noticed that users don't even notice the icons they don't immediately recognize. What does that mean? It means Office and such feature-rich apps aren't mess but rather have a lot more functional icons that users recognize and can immediately access. The extra icons i.e. the feature-bloat is invisible to the user.

Also his point about not having to be bullied by management makes no difference to anyone other than him. The users and junior developers are still at the whim and mercy of someone who says "no" based on their own personal opinion, no matter how technically correct it might be. I'm not saying commercial software is superior to OSS or vice versa. I'm just saying I find it hard to believe that OSS is getting better while closed-source software is getting worse based on these arguments.
Clean USB autorun viruses with USB Virus Scan | Tricks Machine
Using the ReCaptcha library with PHP
You can always run a 32-bit browser and sidestep the whole issue. I don't think many web apps need 64-bit for anything.
I read through this thread thinking the same thing (re: the arguing).

It was a fairly intimate article providing an insight into the habits and life of JF and I found it slightly disconcerting that people were so quick to criticise what seems to be a personal choice.
It's fascinating to see how even a nation with a free media can still have total buy-in to an entirely delusional self-image.

Scary stuff.
I believe that Loopt's aggressive integration with other related sites is a prescient move, as the services that integrate into more external sites in general will increase their relevance and reach. I can't wait to see the list of sites they have integrated with, and I wonder what sites will be next?

Introducing this feature signals of a shift in focus, either toward opening up their platform, and allowing third party services to make their own service more useful, or establishing a foothold in event listing market with ambitions to later directly compete with them.

I believe that the former would align with their business interests, while the latter would align with improving the user's experience as well as allow loopt to focus on its core product. I'm curious as to how they define their core product, and how that might evolve.

Any ideas?
Ask HN: A subscription/recurring billing service that just works. Any ideas?
I have been considering using a service that exposes a simple-to-use API for doing recurrent billing to users of my startup's products. Have explored Paypal API and Chargify. Any other players in this market? What do you you use and recommend? Any help is appreciated.
Thanks for the reply! I see what you mean, but at the same time, it isn't recommended to talk about our own idea? (versus other possible startup ideas) In my mind, this doesn't make too much sense, since we have already committed ourselves to one idea.

And, not sure if you meant it this way, but I wouldn't say business plans and slide decks are something I'm bad at. I actually prefer business over CS, but figured CS was a more worthwhile degree to pursue. I know in general CS majors are probably viewed as just coders that lack business acumen, but there are always exceptions! =]

And yes, thinking about it some more, I agree a slide deck is probably overkill to this type of meeting. Writing the business plan has allowed me to really know my idea in depth, so hopefully this will come through in conversation. Thanks again.
This is absolutely unacceptable. I'll be adjusting our withholding allowances to account for the change.

California needs to spend less, not quietly raid my bank account.
Different guns for different folks. The reliability of an AK is desired in armies that don't or can't invest in as much training as the United States. "Guerilla" soldiers may actually have to hide their weapon in mud for a few days, I doubt this is the case for American soldiers who clean their weapons regularly. I'd also wager that accuracy is less important for soldiers who "spray and pray" than American soldiers who need to pick someone off a roof.

Since it's HN, I thought I'd make a plug for understanding your customer.
I believe minimalist approach is wrong and right at the same time. Wrong in it's incarnation, right in it's philosophy.

1) Do one thing, do it REALLY REALLY well.

being open source, other projects can take parts of your project and build on top of it to create a different projects (say you create a widget, and widgets have utility functions which are useful for creating sprockets, so the sprocket project depends on the widget project, but still remains it's own thing.)

Often the mentioned above fact can go overlooked "I can do it better" vs "what can I take away from that project to make a better one for my needs"

2) We still need the overarching giant featureful project. So if you create a bunch of tools which when working together can make a web framework, why not put some effort to make a good web framework that borrows from multiple projects?

As a response to the article: Create the Django Complete project. In it you integrate Django, migration, DB2 support (say a new project that gets started), The Django bar, but in the end you don't actually get the feature creep going into Django EVER to incorporate everything period. Instead you have multiple specialized independent projects, all meeting together in one project to make it better for the community.
You win some, you lose some: a review of Apple's Magic Mouse
Its not about open source vs closed source, its about corporate development in which you are a developer with non-developers deciding what is important VS the developer has the last say.

There are times UI suffers from this, this is why we need some non-developers involved in these projects, we need to reach out to them.

However this is not just about "open source r0x0rs, close source s0x0rs" argument.
C-level executive does mean something to people executives at large corporations, but calling yourself a CEO on your webpage/business card won't actually make you a CEO for anyone who understands that. If your resume doesn't say P&L responsibility for >X millions in revenue, don't throw around the term CEO because you will come across as a braggart. President or founder are much more accurate descriptions for what most startup founders call the "CEO" position.
It's valuable because people are, and have always been, interested in discussing and analyzing literature in order to gain a better understanding of it. ... Music and art don't obviously contribute anything either, but presumably you don't think these are without value.

But people can discus and analyze literature without there being a formal discipline for it. In fact arguable your average person could do it better without the formal discipline because they would not have be concerned about if they were doing it "right"

The analogy to music and art appears false, they do contribute things other than themselves. They contribute first entertainment, second the ties that bind culture together, and third (at least in some cases) they provide an introspection on society. Art and music add all of those things, but at least as I understand it now, literary criticism as an academic discipline provides none of them. As I have very limited knowledge of literary criticism please let me know if I am missing something.

* Some things are valuable in and of themselves.*

An interesting possibility, but it is not obvious that it is true. (I am not claiming it is false, merely that it demands justification). At least one argument is that things are valuable precisely in proportion to their utility to mankind. Excluding those people who make their living at it directly, I am unclear as to what value literary criticism provides to anyone else.