skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> if only because their ambitions are fairly modest (they're seeking to build a better GA piston engine, not re-invent the industry) and because they're filling a fairly obvious gap.

The problem (IMHO) is that aircraft engines are safety of flight components. So, most engines are overdesigned by well reputed companies (definitely not start-up material). They may succeed and prove me wrong – I am not an expert in that area.

> it's important to understand that it was originally designed to fulfill a local need, not for export, and that not only was the project an engineering success which established

AFAIK, the whole idea of the rooivalk was to be a Soviet tankkiller (with obvious export potential). After 1990, there was no reason for continued funding of the project.

> which established companies like Aerosud and ATE (both doing quite well) but its development made sense under the circumstances at the time.

Maybe. But its development also established companies such as Denel (which is a continual drain of millions on the government budget).

> South Africa was one of the research leaders in Lithium-ion battery technology prior to '92, but has done very little research in the field since then.

A battery company will then make more sense than a car company (the market for Lithium Ion batteries are much larger).

My point is just that less grandiose schemes will probably have a larger payoff. The fairly high labour rate is an unfortunate effect of legislation (with 40% broad based unemployment, the cost of labour should be much lower). If the country wants to succeed it should become a lot more like china.
How Zulily, Startup Led by Ex-Blue Nilers, Could Change Online Retail
Miguel says "It is very unlikely that we will get PlayReady DRM on Linux."
FriendFeed's Tornado has a database.py on github, maybe it will get you started: http://github.com/facebook/tornado/tree/master/tornado/
In the United States, you can form a contract in pretty much any medium. Even oral contracts are respected, and certainly an email contract would be valid.

For certain types of contracts (especially regarding real property, like cars and houses) you need a written agreement.

France might have different rules.
The Science of Success
Haha. Well, there's always an element of marketing when you hear tiny sums like that - if you priced in all the time of the people who participated and long nights spent designing, compositing and rendering the graphics it would be $10,000 or so. But still, very very impressive.
I find it curious that anything to do with insurgents in Iraq is always blamed on Iran, even though the worst of the insurgents are Sunni extremists. This article is a classic case. This is apparently software that you can buy over the Internet for $26. but the spin is that it's evidence that groups are being "trained and funded" by Iran.
There is no page fold, there is only the gradient of relevance, starting at the top left and working downward and to the right.

http://browsersize.googlelabs.com/
...and on my 13" MacBook, actually..... Lots of two-fingered swiping!

But only because the font is so huge and there is so little text. Ironically, this page goes against the idea of no fold, because it makes it a pain. Scrolling fast == trouble.

But when there is normal-sized content and you're doing normal-paced scrolling, indeed, there is no fold.
Genetic Programming on General Purpose Graphics Processing Units
This is an alumni program for ycombinator Startups.

We will select 10 Startups, 10 Expert and 10 experienced Entrepreneurs for the program.

The goal is create a workflow learning relationship where people learn from one another based on their current needs.

All the interactions will be recorded, remixed and reused in order to develop a high quality curriculum for entrepreneurs of any age.

What do you think?
I read the following in wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega-3_fatty_acid):

> Flax, like chia, contains approximately three times as much n−3 as n−6.

> Oils from these fish have a profile of around seven times as much n−3 as n−6.

Obviously WP is not infaliable and needs to be corrected.

(I usually drink Flax seed oil because fish oil seems grouse).
you can clink on the above comment's "link" and then flag it
"professional skeptic" ... lol. as opposed to "professional gullibles"?
That was a really long list of credits at the end. I'm guessing all those people worked for free to make that short film happen. The soundtrack alone is worth much more than $300.
I can't have a real conversation at any restaurant that shows sports or the like. I find my eyes wander to the bright and active pictures too often. I usually try to position myself facing away, but it doesn't always work. I blame a huge part of it on not having a TV, so I'm not used to tuning it out.

The same thing occurs on the web. I find it very hard to read text if there is something flashing right next to it. For this reason I install NoScript as one of my first add-ons on new systems. It blocks the worst offenders and adds a layer of security to boot.

Simply blocking unauthorized scripts is usually good enough for a while, but eventually I'll get to a few pages with non-flash, non-javascript ads that are so annoying I go out and install AdBlock anyway.

I'm happy to meet in the middle, but I don't intend to waste my time.
Check out the timelapse video in the gallery in this link. The telescopes are hard at work all night scanning all parts of the sky. Very cool.
it's also a shortcut to stressville. It's fine in school where semesters are short and assignments are shorter, but doesn't scale out to the workplace very well.
This shouldn't be blamed on the 'insurgents' but on the people that allowed this stuff to be shipped as military grade. I can hardly believe that anything other than gross incompetence is at play here. Since the roman times military communications have been encrypted, who got it in to their heads to start sending this video 'plain' ?
Make Firebug's JavaScript debugger break inside dynamic JavaScript
How to design a mobile application
If ad-blocking got popular and sites tried to get past it I believe those sites would likely lose some of the customer's respect as they would be disrespecting the customer.

Which site do you want to go to:, the annoying one that forces you to watch an ad, or the one that just has a few less-obtrusive ads that you might block? Which one is going to benefit more from network effects and draw in more users?
sure, but it also cripples small businesses who don't really know any better. not every small-time merchant will have the wits about them to present legal threats.
how is the cpu trade-off like in this type of setting? one more point is that i dont know ruby and i'm curious how can he add an index from that column?
Of course not—the potential downside from getting that wrong is getting eaten by a crocodile, and the potential upside is that I get to swim. I demand much more confidence from my decision making process because the risk-reward is so different. Further if I update my priors in a Bayesian manner the fact that of the sample size of 1 person going into the river, 1 person got eaten is somewhat worrying. But because you're not giving me any information, my prior is impossible to calculate. If this is a river in California I would be rather surprised to see a crocodile. If this was the Nile delta I would not. Etc.

Here the downside to getting things wrong is much smaller, so it's much easier to hold out for more precise data before making any claims.
I've turned a couple of 24" screens 'sideways', 90 degrees from normal, and indeed, on plenty of pages there no longer is an 'above the fold'. It's really convenient, for instance on a google result page I get all the results in one go, no scrolling at all. If you have a second monitor attached to your machine give it a shot, I'll bet that after a day you will not want to do without a 'rotated' screen.

That's not really what the article was getting at, but it definitely was the first thing I noticed when browsing around, the absence of the vertical scrollbar on most pages.

Another advantage is that it is much less 'wide' than a normally rotated screen, which means you're not occupying more space than a standard desk provides.
FWIW it's also a pain to read in a maximized browser on a 20" monitor.
Rally - Real Friends (new LBS for iPhone)
Spacebar and shift-spacebar are your friends.
Maybe I'll stop hating Internet Explorer quite so vehemently if they do these things:

1. Faster Javascript. This looks like the main point of IE 9, so apparently we won't be waiting much longer for this one.

2. SVG support. Every other browser does this; why not IE? There's so much cool stuff we could do with SVG if only IE didn't hold us back.

3. How about some HTML5 canvas support? Canvas is a nice, straightforward API, and it's all sorts of useful. But as usual, IE strangles progress.

As a user, I can just ignore IE. But as a web developer, I absolutely loathe it for making everybody jump through hoops to support it, and for holding back SVG and canvas.
The Somali pirates, who for some reason love to pillage French vessels, evolved out of fishermen, in the vacuum left by the absent government and coast guard, patrolling the shores where they fished for ships from Western (mainly European) countries dumping toxic and nuclear waste into the waters and killing the fish.

So any time I hear about how the French have their act together nuclear-wise, I have to wonder where that waste goes, and if some of it ends up off the coast of Somalia.
Do a view source on that page -- they're collecting screen dimensions of visitors to the site via an Ajax POST call.
I believe this other article was posted about a month ago and may be very germane: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArtic...

In brief: only 32% of Internet users clicked on at least one ad in a month, and 8% of users accounted for 85% of ad clicks.

The people using ad blocking software are not the people often clicking on these ads, and most of the clicks come from people who click on a lot of ads and are (I'm guessing by this behavior) unlikely to install an ad blocker. In other words, ad blocking is not a threat.
The Five Distros That Changed Linux
I didn't know about shift-spacebar. I love you!
Apart from using your finger as the 'pointer' (which is only really true on touch screen enabled devices, which is definitely not all of them) how is this any different from developing any other application ?
With an all volunteer cast and crew, most any CG based movie could be made for "free". Sort of how I can make an application for myself without any money but would charge someone else $20,000 for it. No funny accounting needed.
The guy runs a visual effects company. So.
"I want my two dollars!"
This is probably true, but I fear it will encourage sites to have nothing but junk above the (nonexistent) fold so you have to scroll to see anything.
I almost stopped reading at that point...

A very wise and extremely successful businessman I know has as one of the core values of his businesses that we DO NOT BAD MOUTH THE COMPETITION!.

Employees caught spreading rumors about competitors are reprimanded.

Why?

Because it makes the business look insecure. Your goal should be to be so much better than your competitors that there is no need to even address the issue. Trash talking your competition might net you some really short-term users/customers...but if you're not actually better, this bump will be very short lived.
What about best alternatives for merchants outside of the US/Europe?
Why your boss is incompetent
I've heard people say this about Acid 3 before, but without justification. To me, it appears that the tests for Acid 3 were neither chosen at random, nor arbitrarily. They were specifically selected so that every major browser failed at the time of its release. Moreover, tests were specifically selected to emphasize modern, DHTML (a.k.a "web 2.0") apps: with the bulk of the tests being in DOM, DOM2, and EcmaScript. Only one out of the 6 "buckets" do not - and those were chosen from a competition designed to include things the web community wanted.

It's not like hixie threw darts at a board to get the tests.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid_3#Standards_tested
vxsbill.com

They're pretty good. You need a dutch presence though, I hope that's not a problem.

I'm working on a large posting about e-commerce, I hope to have it ready by Christmas.
The main difference I see, is that when you design a web or desktop application on a computer screen, the designer is seeing, more or less, the pixels at the same size than the end user. When you design a mobile app, if you design it on a desktop, and that's where you mostly look at it, you end up having a built-in 2x magnification, and when you finally put it on the device, things are much more scrunched up and less usable than you thought.

The idea in the post is to play with the design, in the device, for a while, and get design feedback much earlier than when you give the app to a developer.
This is referenced as part of the motivation for Incanter http://incanter.org the Clojure based, R-like statistical environment.
Wouldn't it be best to take your mock-ups directly to a mobile screen for verification ? That seems to be the most natural thing to me, to wait until it's 'built' before you see it on the device seems to be a bit late.

I'd try to get it displayed on the actual device as early as possible on way or another.
JQuery Enlightenment ($5 off today)
I don't buy this.

Well, to be more accurate, I believe what you're saying, but I don't believe that it is a valid excuse.

Most of the functionality of these drones could be duplicated with nearly off-the-shelf hardware. (at least off-the-shelf for Boeing/Lockheed/General Dynamics/Raytheon/etc).
Please stop capitalizing "art". Please stop assuming that I think what I do about copyright selfishly; I'm an artist, but I'm an Internet brethren through-and-through. My complaints are not for me but for more traditional artists, whose beliefs I sympathize with. Please stop pretending like the taxes on art are the taxes you ought to be complaining about in this country; it's like a man shot in the face complaining about a gnat on his corpse.

This conversation is over.
Dup: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126102247889095011.html

Currently both are next to each other on the front page, too.
It's as the author says:

IE glady rides the backseat in standards, and it’s making my life terrible.

In the inverse of your problem, I often have to interface with enterprise web applications and help some of our other staff with them. They are only approved to work on Windows XP with Internet Explorer 6 (though I think many have finally moved to IE7 as a supported platform). This causes all sorts of headaches for my Linux users when we have to access the financial system or report time and leave.

There was a period of about 6 months where I was logging into the one Windows computer in my group to report vacation because it was the only one with the right version of Java and IE to get it to work.
No mention in the news of the fact that he is a commercial director and fx artist and has access to equipment (and the know-how to use it) worth 10s of thousands of dollars?
A-re yo-u nu-ts?
A huge part of making the web easy to develop for is having things fail in predictable ways. There is very little that is more frustrating than making a few changes to your website and having it suddenly break in one of the major browsers and spending a day figuring out that it's because of a small edge case that doesn't follow the standard model.
Chasing the Hippo From the Room – with A/B Testing
This is cute, but at the company I work for, our conversion data demonstrates a statistically significant difference in conversion rates when the action is above the fold rather than below.

It might be true that we don't need to design tiny websites that fit into 640x480, but you DO need to make sure that you make your call to action clear. A big button, prominently placed (read: above the "fold" and visible) will do wonders for your conversion rates.
I used to do that with my 30-inch. That was ridiculous... http://www.flickr.com/photos/pauls/2199101488/
Intel to Launch Core i3, i5 Lines at CES
Dunno, a legal threat is the first thing that came to my mind. I don't see a situation where someone collects money from your customers and refuses to give it to you any different from someone walking into your home, smashing your piggy bank, and taking your money. The second case is obviously a crime, so it follows that the first is too. When you are a victim of a crime, negotiating with the criminal seems like a bad idea. Getting a lawyer (or the cops) involved seems like a good idea.

So if I lost my "appeal" at PayPal, I would involve the real legal system, instead of their made up one.

(OTOH, if the OP got all his money back, then he was not necessarily wronged. Banks can refuse to do business with companies they are unsure about.)
I agree with that. That's step 4 in the article. It's probably not enough, in the sense that just looking at the mock screens doesn't tell you much about navigation and widget selection.

What came as a breakthrough for me was to actually mix screenshots and statically implemented screens in a real mobile app, then play a lot with that.
The worse case is dire.:

"We have the example of the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum event 55 million years ago. About the same amount of CO2 was put into the atmosphere as we are putting in and temperatures rocketed by about 5 °C over about 20,000 years. The world became largely desert. The polar regions were tropical and most life on the planet had the time to move north and survive." http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126921.500-one-last-...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palaeocene-Eocene_Thermal_Maxim...
Insisting on FOSS Doesn't Mean Annoying Others
$39.95 to make your own. Not bad.
Yes, what is to stop PayPal from requesting all the funds back from your linked account? Can you ask your bank to prevent this?
Even if it cost 30k, he still owned them pretty hard, but its the volunteer thing that they should actually be afraid of. The technology is at hand for people to start making decent films for the fun of it. Open source movies are coming. They'll be short and laughable at first, but it will only take one breakaway to change people's minds.
Bing Unveils iPhone App with Maps
Shwayzes Let it Beat Release Party
There is a lot more to the Chrome tab interface than that - the way they don't resize while you're closing them en masse is particularly slick.

FWIW, TabMixPlus https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1122 can do what Tabs Open Relative does, and much more.
HOBI BISNIS
quit these goading, troll tactics please

there is no contradiction: yes "real" hackers, yes spend money, no don't say "just another million"

sheesh
While your caveat is true for people using this on the client side, what about people using javascript on the server side ?

Though its probably best to use C wrappers to established crypto libraries on the server side, we shouldn't underestimate the ease of use which comes with using pure javascript libraries.
The original District 9 short was better.
OT, but why do people keep saying "Google have too much power," "Google have 60 billion dollars", etc. ? It's a singular noun. The circle is round. Google is powerful. It is turning evil. We are hungry. etc.

This is not meant to flame, I'm really curious why/when the usage shifted.
I don't get it, I went to that page but all I saw was "Welcome to the world wide" and what looks like half of "web". Am I missing something?
Qooxdoo 1.0 released
Facebook Gamesmakers Survive "ScamVille" Brouhaha Entirely Unscathed
I had a similar encounter of false accusation on Sedo.com trying to sell a domain. They apparently had "definitive" evidence of shilling and closed the sale. When I asked what that evidence was, they said the buyer had the same name as I did. Maybe it was bad luck, but who'd be dumb enough to shill with his own name anyways. It's not so much that I lost the sale that bothers me, but that the lady in Germany still thinks I was trying to shill. Perhaps I should have threatened to pursue legal action?
Real-world real-time web apps with Python equals Django + Orbited + Twisted
Which ones? I only know SVG, but I suspect it doesn't really cover everything that flash does.
Video Calling Comes to the iPhone
The page indicates that Moonlight contains 125,000 LOC (of roughly 500k) from open source Silverlight controls put out by Microsoft.
For the record, I just want to support this developer by encouraging people to buy his awesome book. $10 seems way too cheap for what it is.
Actually, friendly definitely "beat me to market", but I did start building this on top of sqlite3 a few weeks ago. My purpose was just for play--I was going to naively compare its performance to something like Tokyo Cabinet to see if matched at all. I can throw the code up somewhere, but it's neither complete, nor well thought out, merely a hack.
Roundabout for jQuery
No longer available, I just tried but couldn't get the discount!
database.py isn't really in the same realm, but it could certainly be modified and enhanced to support this abstraction.
I think your post got caught in some sort of time dilation field from the 80s or something...

Radioshacks only sell cellphones (mostly) now. :(
[caret] and [bang] in the shell
New YCombinator Alumni Program—Feedback wanted from YC Companies

(Correction for the title — it was somehow automatically retitled, but I can't repost)
Scientists create synthetic blood cells
I'm not sure that I understand the point of contention. By "fold", don't we mean any part of a page that is not by default viewable upon first loading it? Does anyone not believe that click-thru rates on a call-to-action button in an area initially visible will be significantly higher than if the button was located on an area of the page that required use of the scroll bar? Even most grandparents understand that they can scroll to see more of a page, but they might not deem it worthwhile.

At least implicitly, I bet people think, "What's the probability of something good existing down/over there, and does that probability coupled with the value of that thing to me make it worthwhile to scroll?" If this is true, it creates a feedback loop which exacerbates the "problem". The more that web designers take this thought process into account, the more they'll put the good stuff in the initially viewable area. Then, because there will be less good stuff found by scrolling, users will lower their estimates of the probability of its existence. Then, designers will have even more incentive... This has probably already happened.

I'm not even sure if I think that requiring scrolling is a good UI approach for many sites. I don't like it when I have to scroll back up to reach navigation UI. For Wikipedia, it's great, but the en.m.wikipedia.org seems to be designed with additional subpages to avoid lots of thumb action.

tl;dr - What's the controversy? If I want to make a site that people actually use/buy from/etc., then I'd be a damned fool if I didn't take into account their behaviors.
It's been working for me. I sell a little Mac shareware app that pulls in about 3k per year (not very much). Paypal was nice to interface too (especially with CPAN's Business::PayPal::IPN). I set the whole automated registration thing up in a few hours.

I've had a couple of charge backs and those irk me to no end. Paypal always sides with the purchaser because software is intangible. I've been tempted to mail out postcards with the license code on them so that I can claim I sent something tangible out, but it seems like too much of a hassle to be worth it (it really only happens about once per year). I ended up solving the charge back problem in a technical way anyway.