Hacker News Reader

mojonixonon Desktop Linux: Ready for the mainstream

I use linux extensively, but no, no it's not.

mojonixonon Adobe software shamefully, frustratingly incompetent

That's all I have to say on this subject.

mojonixonon DuckDuckGo is top result for "new search engine"

You're not alone. I think it's the suggested search results. Almost never useful. I've switched over to yahoo in my toolbar. I think the top search engines are close enough in quality that their results are only distinguishable by interface (there's been research, though I can't remember where). When they change the presentation with that "did you mean" they do more damage to the brand than improvement to the results. It's Google's version of Clippy.

mojonixonon Autonomous Robots Invade Retail Warehouses

not new. I spent a couple weeks in a HallMark warehouse in the mid to late 90s. The actual warehouse was about 4 football fields with shelves about 60 feet high. Automatic pickers running on rails would go along the aisles and up the shelving to grab boxes, and deposit them on conveyors. The conveyors read the bar codes(they were talking about rfid at the time) and delivered them to the proper loading dock. No one was actually in the warehouse and they had to turn up the lights to give us a tour. All run off of two three crappy tower servers.

mojonixonon Some things need to change

a lesson in civility from MA? The guy's an asshole. If you can't take the consequences for talking shit about people, stop talking shit. He's done real damage to people with the crap he puts up. If he said the shit he publishes in a bar, he'd get his ass kicked. And he's surprised he got spit on?

mojonixonon Do Tags Work?

holy hell, get an editor.

mojonixonon Dude, Where's My Job?

wtf is a generation anyway? I'm gen-Y but my sister who's 4 years older is gen-x? Basically these articles are corporate HR people bitching about people realizing that they've become disposable--the corporate/employee contract has dissolved--and responding accordingly.

mojonixonon Microsoft is not a web company

They gave me an interstitial (not sure that's the right word) about downloading Silverlight before they let me get to the main page. wtf?

scroll bars in drop down menus? wtf? seldo pointed out a couple things wrong, but pretty much everything is wrong.

unrelated: I was checking out the skydrive and checked the sys requirements. They don't even support their own operating systems. "Windows Live programs do not support Windows XP Professional x64 Edition. Windows Live Family Safety does not support 64-bit editions of Windows."

mojonixonon Data Analysts Captivated by Power of R

"But R has also quickly found a following because statisticians, engineers and scientists without computer programming skills find it easy to use."

whaaaa?

mojonixonon Plenty Of Fish Advertising on NYTimes

PoF is ad supported right? as is nytimes. so this implies pof gets a higher ror from their advertisers than does nytimes?

mojonixonon Ask HN: What to do about a strike?

I used to work for a union. Now in grad school, live with the grad student union treasurer.

1. your pay is very pathetic even for TAs.

2. You can find how much your officers and staff are getting paid here: http://www.dol.gov/esa/olms/regs/compliance/rrlo/lmrda.htm At my school, officers get a $50 honorarium month, and staff get nonprofit compensation (low pay, decent benefits, and the thanks of thousands).

3. Some one described them as a "mob of idiots." A democratically run organization of graduate students is a "mob of idiots"? What does that make the United States?

4. Management gets the union they deserve. The big 3 have disfunctional management so they get a disfunctional union as well.

5. The Big 3 have been pissing away all their profits while ignoring their building obligations for decades. It's management's job to make sure the budget works. You don't get paid to make those decisions.

6. It's a matter of priorities. You aren't a priority (and a football stadium or refurbished admin offices are) unless you make yourself one.

7. The time to start worrying about this is way sooner in the bargaining process. Don't need to be on the negotiating team, but know who they are and tell them what you do and don't want. If you don't participate, don't expect to get what you want.

8. Union internationals typically have very little control over union locals. SEIU being the exception.

9. There are crap unions, though they are far rarer than the WSJ editorial page would have you believe. Unions with active membership are almost never corrupt, self-serving or mismanaged, just like any healthy democratic organization.

10. I have noticed a pattern of common but very short strikes in academia. I suspect Presidents feel they have to demonstrate fiscal restraint, but the vast majority would much rather move on and get back to education. Except corrupt self-serving bastards: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Joel_Trachtenberg

Hilarious and sad note: your strike pay is equal to your TA pay. This is very uncommon.

mojonixonon A percentage of Google traffic is stripped of identifying information. Why?

"'Google is the only company we've seen that does this,'" Vizzacarro says. Google employees not using the secret OS are employing various versions of Unix, such as Linux or Ubuntu, and some older operating systems, like X11, he says."

X11? Linux and Ubuntu versions of Unix? Wtf? This shit is embarrassing.

mojonixonon Why this tech recession will be different than 2001-2003

crap. Forrester is always wrong.

Although it will be different. 2001-2003 was a tech bubble, dumb tech "companies" died. The pop was in the context of a relatively strong economy. This time we have a strong tech industry, but a crashing economy. Dumb tech will die, but so will some quality companies that would have done well in a hospitable economic environment. Most tech companies produce real goods with real benefits (no more dog food by mail companies out there), but when people and companies start worrying about just getting to next month a lot of tech products will get filed into want not need.

mojonixonon How Will We Live in 2015? The future is now for sustainable cities.

That's true to some degree. However, much of our infrastructure are designed for 1000 year timescales but rely on technologies with far shorter timescales.

There are plenty of alternatives to powering our cars, but none currently (and none on the horizon either) that are as good (cost effective) as petroleum. The cost-benefit analysis will be changing, but we won't be able to adapt because our communities rely on cheap fuel. People will have the unenviable choice of paying an arm and a leg commuting, or letting their exurban communities (and the massive investment they represent) fall back into farm land.

mojonixonon Post-scarcity Software

Painful to read. I have spent years with my head buried in code and I clearly never understood what it was that I was doing. Go RTFA if you haven't already. tl;dr is not an excuse.

mojonixonon What's Really Killing Newspapers

Most still have big profit margins, which is one of the reasons they are getting their ass kicked. For the first time in decades they are faced with a strategic threat, and instead of cutting margins a bit and investing their way into better position they've been cutting full time beat reporters, their only advantage over the talking heads. (I used to be a Newspaper Guild member, but never worked for a paper per se. It's complicated.)

mojonixonon Ask YC: What do you think about Startuply?

Doesn't work for me (ff3, ubuntu). The next page and page numbers don't do anything. I have to hit reload, and then it moves to the next page. Very strange.

mojonixonon Why are some of the greatest thinkers being expelled from their disciplines?

Bad example. Fortran and Pascal aren't required knowledge for Java or Python. How can one understand contemporary philosophy, economics, or psychology without being familiar with Hegel, Marx and Freud? A liberal arts education is about context.

I read all three in political science classes. I think philosophy might be a dead academic discipline, at least in the US. Most of the big names seem to have moved to more focused disciplines; e.g political science and women's studies.

mojonixonon Ask YC: Why the degree?

A degree signifies that someone knows what they don't know. I am quite competent in many technical areas, but my formal education pushed me into areas where I'm not comfortable and would have avoided if it was up to me.

mojonixonon The tragedy of suburbia

He's an awful speaker but I agree with his essential theses. I spent the first 18 years of my life in an awful suburb. Saturday night for the high school kids is getting drunk in a corn field or behind one of the strip mall. 1) Suburbia is a misallocation of resources, fully dependent on cheap energy. 2) Suburbia is a cultural failure, unable to create and nurture community and creativity. Cities have the economic, infrastructure and cultural efficiencies made possible by scale.

Now in Ann Arbor (semi-suburbia) by way of DC (kick ass mass transit, great neighborhoods, huge parks).

mojonixonon The Bipolar Lisp Programmer

is there any other kind?