skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Someone brought this point up on proggit, and it was debunked by someone else who pointed out that many developers break their stylesheets up into multiple components for development purposes and then compile and compress them for production. This bug prevents them from testing on IE effectively.

Genghis Khan might have had far worse faults than picking his nose at the dinner table, but that still doesn't excuse the behavior.
Of Burj and Babel
I sincerely wished that every two bit project that I start would net me $100K.

How many > $100K exits have you had? What fields were they in?
AppMakr Makes iPhone App Creation a Snap
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1013748
How to Fix The Doctor Shortage
Would save even more energy if they were attached to a generator...
Whoops. Thanks for pointing that out. Funny it came up just recently. I just happened upon it randomly today.
HTC doesn't even release a SENSE UI emulator.
Neither does Motorola Motoblur.

It's just not reasonable to expect developers to have access to all real devices.

All the device manufactures need to stop customizing Android UI unless they are willing to release a emulator.
Repatriation
Repatriation is at the core of what RMSI does. They are a premium medical charter flight operator and work for United Nations and other great organizations. They offer remote medical services in isolated areas and areas of conflict where reliable and skilled doctors are needed and where the whole infrastructure with air evacuation is extremely important and necessary.
They could fix this by taking away control of update the OS from the phone maker to themselves.

They could have a certain specs (like 3 screen sizes). Do we really need so many different types. No.
That was easy....too easy. I am starting to think this was a hoax to get my info. So I did not submit my info....
I agree. I have the aforementioned qualification, but call myself a developer for several reasons.
“I Sleep Two Hours Per Day”- Week One
You might be interested in my visualisations of an IP geolocation database on the Hilbert Curve, also inspired by xkcd:

http://corte.si/posts/code/hilbert/explorer/index.html
All that's old is Numa Numa again
Freelance writing for content creation mills like Demand Media or TextBroker will work out to about $8 an hour for fluent speakers of American English who work efficiently. I do not think that full-time is in the cards for the overwhelming majority of users on those sites.

Additionally, the variation in income may be problematic.

(If $320 a week means you make your rent and $260 a week means you do not, then you will probably have crises caused by fairly frequent minor variations in results.)
Lack of alternatives to a provably failed business model does not justify the embrace of that model. There is always another alternative - do something else.

At least they could try to build in some mitigation ahead of time. Like fat binaries, run-time version detection, app store that is friendly to mulitple versions of the app/os etc. Not sure if it would have worked, but not doing anything about it is plain insanity.
News and resources for Minnesota high tech startup community.
Neostrata
Jan Marini, Neostrata and Skinceuticals products from Outline Skincare the skincare specialists. Buy a wide range of Jan Marini, Neostrata and Skinceuticals skin care products online at great prices.
They also forgot the part where no-one is making any money on it. I know two of the top developers personally, and we ourselves have a pretty successful app in there. But there is nowhere near enough sales to make a living, even for the top selling apps.

It's unclear why the Android market is so much worse in this respect, I suppose having 50x less users is part of it, but I suspect there is something about the Android user which makes them less likely to buy. Downloading and installing cracked versions of the apps (and they are all cracked) is also dead simple.

In summary, great platform for users, terrible, terrible platform to make money on.
Facebook tried this already. They called it Beacon. It was a colossal failure.
many families strongly encourage children to get a graduate degree.
I believe the metadata file could equally well be generated on the client side, as long as it's stored on the server.
Title made we wonder if there was such a think as lossy PNG - apparently yes: http://membled.com/work/apps/lossy_png/
Used my Christmas holiday converting my personal database library from MySQL to Postgres

Why?
Ask HN: Is AppStore getting better?
I joined iPhone app developers ranks few weeks ago and submitted my first app a week and a half ago.

It first, I was really worried. One day after submitting my app I got an email from Apple, saying that my app is waaaay too simple. I agree that it's simple, but I was sure it will help someone...

My first thought was "I am f*cked". But I wrote a nice reply telling them way I think my app is not too simple. ~ 24 hours later I got a response from what looks like a human being that they will reconsider my application. Few more days later I got a message saying that my app is ready.

So my app was processed in less than a week, including new year break and one big show-stopper.

Is it just a christmas gift from Apple or is AppStore really getting better?

P.S. My App is a push notifications service testing utility.

http://ipusher.idev.lt
itms://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ipusher/id348540958
The not-so-modern language that IE is written in (C++) has a similar construct (std::vector) in its standard library. It is possible that code was originally written prior to the widespread adoption of the STL and was never updated to use it.
If that desperate, one could also try:

for a in 0 128 192 256 512 1024 ; do pngout file.png -b$a ; done

(Or the equivalent for your favorite shell.)
Text fields on Mac OS X support basic Emacs keybindings for cursor movement natively.
But there are other ways to monetize, right? Have you tried anything else?

I think it's also a testament to how easy it is to develop on. Admittedly I've only developed one trivial app for the emulator, but I jumped on the bandwagon way early, and it's only gotten easier. It's a tight little platform and anyone with an idea, an email address, and a couple hundred bucks to send to the Philippines will come out with a useable marketable app.
okay, that's fair. but i thought billybob's presentation was pretty good! it struck me as ironic-slash-cheeky, which is a quality i see in a lot of the best technical people.
You should probably include the obligatory "Ask HN:" at the start of your title.
People often confuse "making a game easy" with "making a game rewarding". The worst thing you can do is make your game too easy

Maybe I misread, but what you wrote is exactly the opposite of the point Jeff makes. Jeff is respected in the indie games community, and has created shareware games since 1994, while you just graduated college this year. I bring that up because he wrote a whole article explaining his point, while you simply wrote a statement saying it is the worst thing. Why?

the best thing you can do is reinforce every single correct user action with positive feedback and a reward.

Rewarding as many user actions as possible is known to be an important tactic and is not something the author disagreed with (and is likely something he believes as well.) Why was it used as a counter point?

Also, why do you believe that reinforcing every "correct" user action is on the opposite end of the spectrum of making games easy?

Rewarding user actions with points and spiffy effects is actually a part of making the game very easy. People want to feel successful for doing anything at all in casual games, and giving rewards and accolades for easy-to-accomplish tasks (as seen in games like Peggle) is part of making the game easy.

And what you call "correct" user actions in casual games such as Peggle would be better called "rewarded" actions. As players click around the screen, they are rewarded for coming closer to a goal, often having no idea why they got those points. Additionally, many successful casual games are designed so that even user actions that are completely ineffective are rewarded with points to the point that this is an inside joke between casual game developers. That is what I mean when I say that making games easy is correlated, not the opposite of, rewarding players often, and also why games are not necessarily about rewarding user behaviors as much as keeping them feeling confident and playing. Finally, this is also what I believe Jeff is talking about.
My personal preferences are: Boost.python for C++[1], and Pyrex/Cython for C wrappers. Both make things pretty nice. I never really got into swig, so I'm not sure if there is noticable speedup betwen any of these. As for handwritten wrappers, I have not had any personal experience trying to eke the extra speed from not using a code generator type wrapper. hth
Getting The Best Out Of Social Marketing
One of the buzz words among the online marketing experts is social marketing or social media marketing. With the Web 2.0 technology, online marketing has taken a completely new shape and it has opened up a wide array of opportunities for the marketing specialists. Today we have hundreds of social networking websites and community websites that help people to share wide range of information online and to access loads of useful information.
What does PNGout do different? I tried optipng with -o9, which is an exhaustive search, and it didn't make the file as small as the PNGout one.

I though -o9 tried every possible method of encoding the png, but I guess it's missing something.

Edit: I found my answer: http://optipng.sourceforge.net/pngtech/optipng.html - apparently the png filter can be applied to each row independently. But I think optipng uses the same filter for the entire image, not each row.
They reportedly beefed up staffing over the holiday break. Approval times (for updates at least) were on the order of 1-3 days. Maybe new app approvals are faster too.
Interesting story a while back about Visa/Mastercard expanding their debit card business in Canada (which already had a quite efficient debit card system). It can basically be summarized as "giant monopolies colluding to increase their profits on the backs of small businesses, mostly with encouragement from governments."

http://www.nationalpost.com/m/story.html?id=2171251
Startup Idea: Grocery Store "Framework"
thanks for reminding!
You can watch the excellent companion Frontline TV documentary for this free online at:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/creditcards/view/?ut...
Scientists Use Bacteria to Power Microgears
Including the dollar amounts is what pushes it over the edge. The number of ways this is helpful is massively overwhelmed by the number of ways it could get you into trouble.
Authors of blogs and other posts that wonder why comments snark and worry about this take themselves much too serious.

Not everybody was born a writer and not everybody takes the whole blogging thing as serious as the bloggers themselves do.

If you put yourself up as a 'public figure' (which essentially every blogger seems to aspire to) then you're asking for getting some of the downsides that come with that as well.

Snark is nothing compared to what some of the really famous people have to go through in life.

Simple advice to those that blog or write for public consumption on the internet: grow a thick skin.

Learn how to read through the snark and get to the gems embedded in your comments and reply in measured tones to those who seek to raise their own profile at your expense.

Never ever let the snarkers pull you down to their level.
Wow, cool! Thanks! :)
BTW, Drizzle appears to be a very good database server. I am currently evaluating it under various workloads and it seems happy.

It hasn't shown any advantage over MySQL in the tests done so far beyond not belonging to Oracle.

And for new projects, I do prefer PostgreSQL.
Curiousity question: What is the rationale behind the name WageMachine?
Order of magnitude, what's a top app make in a month?
4 Simple Design Elements Behind a Good Call to Action
Designing and creating a strong call to action is easier said then done. Take a look at these 4 design elements then reevaluate your call to action to see if it could be dramatically improved.
Ping.fm acquired by Seesmic
Seven Hotel website - Transylvania
I used to do that too (and I think I was a kid much earlier than you). There was no seal, iirc, they moved much much faster. Somebody along the way figured out the energy saving potential.
Would you really call it "provably failed," (especially considering that it's from the perspective of 2006-7) or are you just being provocative?

I agree that this seems like a problem, but surely Android has a decent chance of success under this model. Consider that people who need to run all the latest apps don't use 3 year old phones. In many places (like Australia where I live) you're not paying any extra to upgrade every two years. Google could introduce an Android X with no backwards compatibility without all that much fuss if necessary.
Yeah. But every once in a while I have to put something in a webform that would be made so much easier if I could use macros or rectangles.
I love credit cards and think they are one of the wonders of the modern world.

Picture this: you operate a Quiznos selling fatty subs of goodness at the Detroit Metropolitan airport. A lanky twenty-something comes up to you and says "Hey, I'd like some meats and cheeses, but I don't actually have money to pay for them. Don't worry though, I'm good for it." Now, traditionally you might rely on social capital (sort of hard when he grew up in Chicago and is flying from Washington to his home in central Japan) or cheap discriminatory heuristics like "He's a white guy wearing a business suit, which means he'll probably pay me if he says he's going to pay me. That black kid with the sagging pants behind him, though..." Or you just don't make the sale, and then he goes hungry and you lose revenue.

But it is the modern era and we have plastic. Plastic which certifies that a bank in Michigan trusts a company trusts a bank in Japan trusts a software consultancy trusts a university to pay their invoice to pay his paycheck to cover his debts to make their transfer to make their wire to pay for his $10 worth of artery blocking goodness.

And we can do this instantly. For fifty cents. So reliably that fraud is rounding error.

We are living in the freaking future.
Start-Ups Still Seen Struggling In 2010
60 imagens da CES (Consumer Eletronics Show)
Você conhece a feira de tecnologia CES? Não? Em que planeta você vive? A CES – Consumer Electronics Show ou em bom português Mostra de Eletrônicos para Consumo é a maior e mais influente feira de tecnologia do mundo.
Saying "it's just a matter of time" is not speculating whether it could be simulated. It's assuming that it can, and saying that it's inevitable.

Consciousness is probably an emergent phenomenon of some kind. But until we know exactly what physical processes cause the emergence, then we have no way of knowing if our simulation will encompass it. Without that knowledge it's just a guessing game if our simulation is sufficient. My own personal guess is that attaining that knowledge will require an upheaval somewhere in science orthodoxy - much like solving the black body radiation problem required an upheaval in physics in the form of quantum mechanics. Such disruptive discoveries are inherently unpredictable.

Hence, I think it's naive to claim that simulating consciousness is inevitable since we can't predict when we'll even understand it.
Developers on the Facebook Platform ran into this problem a few years ago. Facebook had a bunch of style tags in their source already -- it seems like they put them in different pieces all over the place.

When you would write an application (your FBML is put into their layout) and use even more, you'd eventually run into this limit.

I think they fixed it by combining all style tags in applications into one, since they had to parse them for security reasons anyway.
I've got thick skin. My readers may not though. As the post points out, the goal is to get people to post comments that make for a better reader experience.
Balsamiq Roadmap for 2010
It's true that more than 30 style tags on a production application is a big problem; however, in development mode it can be useful for debugging and maintainability to break out your stylesheets into granular modules that get concatenated at deploy time.

I've personally bumped into this limit in IE in development mode. My solution was to build a dynamic method that concatenated all the stylesheets on the fly if the IE user agent was detected.
That's a very rosy view of credit cards.

There is a big downside to them as well. Because credit cards are essentially unsecured lines of credit that are being extended to people that often really shouldn't have them and because credit card companies are powerful enough to push through legislation that favors them lots of people are in serious financial trouble.

You can run in to debt, you can only crawl out.

And credit cards make running in to debt so unbelievably easy that plenty of people find themselves in very deep water.

And the interest rates they charge border on usury in some cases.

Sure we're all adults and we can all read the fine print, but it probably would be a better world if people would save first and spend later and regular banks would be as nimble in processing charges against regular accounts as credit card companies are with charging your card.
This is closely related to my field of work, so I feel the need to be pedantic.

Please note my criticisms should not be taken to knock the thrust of the work itself. The research question had to do with social effects, while I am criticizing the modeling behind the infiltration estimates.

First of all, the "stack effect" is not the most important driver of flow in modern buildings (especially not ones that have revolving doors). Mechanical systems are designed to dominate stack and wind-driven flows, precisely because engineers want to control the flows in the building. The analysis presented on the web page and in the research report discussed only stack and wind effects.

Second, the equations shown in the figure on the web page are from a steady-state "multizone" modeling approach. Steady-state models don't represent swinging doors well, because of several important transient effects: (1) momentum effects associated with the intermittent nature of the flow (makes airflow smaller than a steady-state model would suggest; and (2) active pumping by the door (makes airflow larger than a passive transient model would suggest).

Third, I think the blanket statement that "heating is less efficient than cooling" is just flat-out wrong. Heating is pretty easy-- just plug in a lightbulb, and 100% of the electricity it burns gets converted to heat. For this reason, many buildings have core zones that require cooling year-round.

Fortunately, I don't think any of these criticisms affect the broad validity of the work. Their modeling seems to have been driven largely by experimental studies, not by the material described on their web page and in their paper. Therefore one can assume they got the right order of magnitude (one might also note that the cited papers are from 1958 and 1961-- in other words, the basic technical part here is not new, and it's unlikely they botched it too badly).

One final criticism. MIT has a very good faculty that specializes in building energy issues. Any of them could have pointed out these problems, and helped guide a much stronger technical analysis. Unfortunately, none of that faculty seems to have been consulted for this study (the acknowledgments list a bunch of urban studies and management faculty, plus people from the facilities department). I know this was just a class exercise, but it seems to me representative of the sorts of analyses that can result when management people start mucking about in technical matters...
My app, submitted January 1st, was approved a few hours ago. In developer connection, there was a note saying that approval could take around 2 hours, so this was a nice surprise.
Also it should be noted that devices like FPGAs allow for directly altering certain hardware structures via software.

In these cases it can actually be possible to fix a hardware bug (or add a hardware feature) via software, where the hardware itself actually gets fixed (ie its not just firmware working around an ongoing hardware constraint).
“What we witnessed was truly a perverse form of competition,” said Ronald Congemi, the former chief executive of Star Systems, one of the regional PIN-based networks that has struggled to compete with Visa. “They competed on the basis of raising prices. What other industry do you know that gets away with that?”
Found out the hard way that MySQL not only runs fast, but also fails just as fast.
Two words:

development mode
Most of the tips here seem to be based on "do stuff in such a way that less Python C API calls making lookups get involved". Python API is the same Python API more or less so I'd assume most of the tips are current.
Looks neat, certainly something to watch.
The clue flat out tells you which letter it is. Actually solving the puzzle is easier than looking at the js.
The typical reader of a blog will either read it to the end and leave, make a comment to say they thought it was a great article or they'll find a single sentence halfway through reading and they'll pick on that.

The whole format is set up for that, rarely do you see a blog where the majority of the comments are civil, constructive and to the point.

For that you need a different format, more like a mailing list. And even there the 'top posting one liner' is a very common response.

A true forum is much more work to maintain because it gives equal standing to authors and comment writers alike, they change roles from time to time, which puts the comment writers of yesterday in the position of the author of tomorrow. Like that they learn more about how it feels to be on both sides and that in turn will - hopefully - guide them to be better participants.

Then there's a demographic issue, people that are a bit older more likely than not will think about their response for a bit, the younger the commenter the bigger the chance it's going to be shorter and / or rude.

I know of one or two teenagers that are active on fora where I am a member as well, they're the exceptions in that they are excellent contributors, most of the other ones that I know of are in one word disruptive.
What's Up With The Beep Driver In Windows 7
1. the article is about debit cards, not credit cards

2. if we are "living in the freaking future" based on what you've described, we've been living it in for a long time
Gladwell's Stickiness Problem - More Compelling than Accurate
I wasn't very clear in my question or its context. What I meant was, people with average ability have been able to sustain themselves for thousands of years doing subsistence tasks. Until sometime in the 19th century, most Americans dug holes in the ground and dropped seeds in them, hung around, and then dug out the result later.

In the 20th century an American of average ability could sustain themselves doing office work or industrial labor.

Beginning sometime in the late 20th century, the average American seems (to me at least) to be less and less needed in the modern American economy. Jobs are automated or off-shored.

What do we as a society do about/with those "useless" people? It's a lot of people.

Or am I too pessimistic?