skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sure, but that's the difference between you and Panic.

You'd probably knock something very similar to that out in two days, probably that functionally served the same purpose.

Panic and Co. would rather spend a LOT more time on it to make it beautiful and captivating to look at, then spend a chunk of change on a fantastic monitor to display it on.

This is why people pay for Panic apps.
What a greap app! Fantastic design of the homepage as well.

Interesting that they got that through the appstore. Didn't think they allowed barcode scanning apps, but maybe that was just amazon that didn't allow such apps. I think it's a good idea to build this app around fun, and then add the business aspects later.

I would not be surprised though if this app is pulled from the appstore because of some bogus claim and that apple launches a similar feature with a selected partner, but more shopping oriented.
No Credit Check Payday Loans &#8211; Easy Free Loan to Meet Your Needs
Dysfunctional relationships that push many projects toward failure
http://blogs.zdnet.com/projectfailures/?p=5676&tag=col1;post-8671
Totally agree. But a smaller, faster one is less predictable, so you can't bleed of small amounts of energy as easily / safely.

Which would you rather try to stop, with your bare hands, assuming identical energy? A 1-inch pipe spinning at 10,000 RPM, or a large tire spinning at 10?
Your question is biased. I'd say only this: if the GPL gets in your way, that's because you want to distribute proprietary software, right? But if you care about freedom, why on Earth would you take it away from your users?
Draggable directions with Google Maps APIs
U.S. Web retail sales to reach $249 bln by 2014: study
Analytic Philosophy
Like:

At work, at the gym, playing tennis, basketball, volleyball, at rehearsal, at a concert, at the opera, at a movie, at the bar, dancing at a club, snowboarding, making dinner, sharing dinner, studying, tutoring, coding, writing, painting, hiking, chatting, fucking. I have active friends.
I've generally found myself satisfied by looking at a price-performance graph and buying the processor just before the knee. Sure, I'd like more CPU, but up to now more memory and disk have been the better tradeoffs.

Especially memory: there are some things that just aren't practical when your working set gets too large (e.g. you start constantly paging), whereas a somewhat slower CPU just requires a bit of patience for what I do (which isn't number crunching or anything else that keeps my CPU pegged).

All that said, the next major machine I build should be in 2011-12 and I'm really looking forward to having bunch of cores with more cache than, say, the 16MB of RAM I bought in 1991 for my 486 Windows machine.

As it is now, wouldn't it be hard to buy "normal" CPU that doesn't have at least as much cache as the address space of a PDP-10 (18 bits of 36 bits words, or a megabyte of 9 bit bytes)? And cache has become the new RAM, RAM the new disk, and disk the new tape.

Wild times for someone who started out with punched card FORTRAN on an IBM 1130 (64KB max, more likely a lot less, 1-10 MB disk, probably closer to the former).
I got a Notepod+ (http://notepod.net/) for this very purpose - gives a sense of the size/basic feel of the thing and provides a nice place to sketch prototypes.

First thoughts:

- it's slightly smaller than I'd expected

- the screen, though, seems large because when you're wanting to look at something closely you naturally bring the "device" closer to your face... you don't do this nearly so much with a traditional notebook

- whoa, that's a lot of screen space to fill up... I need boundaries!

- I really wish this expensive notepad could surf the web, that'd be awesome.
Well, Microsoft, for example, had been working on (and demoing) multi-touch for years before the iPhone existed, including the pinch, expand, flipping photos/pages, and everything else. I love what Apple has done with it, but I think you're giving them too much credit in saying that others shouldn't be able to implement some of their refinements.
Battelle's take on the DB of Intentions that is Google
Low Tolerance for Pain May Be Genetic
Scroll to the botom, and:

11:44:33 AM Alex K: that makes it sound like it may not be worth huge optimization?

11:44:46 AM Alex M: no, not really
Google Summer of Code: Applications Now Open for Mentoring Organizations
http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2010/03/google-summer-of-code-applications-now.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+GoogleOpenSourceBlog+%28Google+Open+Source+Blog%29
Yes, so far I did not want to use GMail.
Mark's Blog: Pushing the Limits of Windows: USER and GDI Objects
All of the Sun consultants I've worked with work from home primarily, except when they're on client sites.
A quality team is necessary but not sufficient. Practices like waterfall development can hobble them. Or worse, the people who could become a "quality team" don't, and don't even know what they are missing out on.
They don't have to. They just shouldn't use them offensively, as they do right now with HTC android phones.
And, in my personal experience, in every case (excepting video cards) where I've had a choice between native OS support and a vendor provided driver, the vendor software is far worse - buggy, ugly, obtrusive, and usually stuffed with multiple "value-added" programs I don't want.
(from the header:)

The Two Alexs

Alexes? Alex's? Alexi? Alexim?

In hackanonical form, Alexen. As in oxen, vaxen, boxen.
The examples are a bit laughable..

"Attach your resume to your business card" - You could just add a web link instead and everyone would understand instead of limiting yourself to a very specific subset of users that know what to do with the barcode. (Same with "attach photos of what you're selling to a flyer")

Plus, is there any type of control on these barcodes? Can I claim a barcode and not allow anyone to add anything else? That would be quite important if you're going to put it on a business card..
The GPL depends on copyright.
Rogue waves
"not A implies not B" does not mean "A implies B".
One of the most esoterically challenging writer on the Professional Elements of Managing Web ecosystems today.
The Most Amazing PC mod
The interview: http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/03/08/valve_apple_wo...
Can anyone point to where this is required by the css specification? Or is this an implementation detail? The reality may be that all the browsers do it this way, but why couldn't someone add some more smarts to choose selectors based on selectivity, just as a SQL query planner would?
Why go to Vegas, when Casino is everywhere?
Oxford
Dalhousie
The "Two Alexes" are just discovering (Feb 2010) what Steve Souders explained in detail at http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2009/06/18/simplifying-css-... [which is probably the site you want to visit on "How CSS strategies affect site performance"] (June 2009).
"Alices", by analogy with "codex".
When is Android not Android? When it's on AT&T
I have just discovered Fatman and Circuit Girl. Latter is a total nerd heartthrob!
It matters if the "stuff" they want to do is listen to their favorite music app (e.g. Pandora) while playing their favorite game. Or let a passenger in the car look up travel info on the web while the GPS navigation app continues to give directions.
New Guitar Game with Real Six String Controller
It’s quicker to walk up a DOM tree than it is to walk down - that’s the root reason why browsers have all implemented it this way.
I recognize the point of the blog post, but I think that's it's more dismissive of interfaces than is warranted - the title outright says to mostly stop using them, and the 3rd paragraph suggests their use is split between over-engineering and mocking. It's not until the end that you start talking about what else interfaces are good for, and even then there's a sense that you think they should be used with care.

I just disagree with that; I think it's far better to have an interface you don't really need lying around than to be caught without one when you do need it.
Their profit is irrelevant to me. The important number is their medical loss ration: how much of my premiums go into actually paying for healthcare. In the U.S., shareholders get antsy if insurers pay more than 80% of their premiums on healthcare, and some insurers pay less than that. In France, Germany, and Japan, private non-profit insurers spend over 95% of premiums on healthcare. (Source: The Healing of America by T.R. Reid)

One expense for U.S. insurers is medical underwriting - the army of people they employ to find reasons to deny you coverage. The reason they have to do this is that their competitors are doing it. Anyone who provides better coverage at a good price will be swarmed by sick people and go out of business, so they are in an arms race to provide the worst coverage they can get away with.

Level the playing field by, eg., requiring coverage of pre-existing conditions (as the countries I mentioned do) and this arms race goes away.
Free Download Games-Cute Knight Kingdom
Does this give you anything that a pre-calculation of output during blog post upload doesn't give you?
Alexes is the best of the bunch.
It's a Greek name, so I'd go with that for plurals, rather than German or Latin templates.
Anyone think this will be a real game-changer?
At least now my friends can't complain that the game is easy because there's no actual strings/chords to play.
Unfortunately, this is really up to the publisher of Dragon Age, EA/Bioware. Steam is just a distribution channel, like the App Store is for iPhone. They take a cut of each purchase and handle electronic downloads and DRM.

In order to get a copy for Mac for free, EA/Bioware would have to agree to allow their PC Steam customers to do this. Edit: I'm an idiot, they did release a Mac version

This isn't a magic bullet, but it's a great first step. Now that publishers have a known and trusted distribution channel on Mac, we may see more Mac versions of AAA titles.
First Mention - Defibrillators, 1948
The main use-case I see for this is physical objects which already have a barcode. If you were going to go to the trouble of barcoding something yourself (e.g., business card), you'd be better off using a URL, where you'd be able to control what gets associated with the barcode, to say nothing of avoiding the chicken-egg issues with something like this.
University of San Francisco
They couldn't even do that. I can link to any page in their website without actually visiting their website.

Via Google: My Deep Link https://www.royalmail.com/portal/pw/postcodefinder
.xxx Internet domain name plan resurrected
University of Toledo College of Engineering
Being "scooped" by a mere 6 months, on a 10 year old technology doesn't really make their realization dated.

It's new to me, and I bet it's new to most news.yc-ers.
If the hours are made up in the other four days, it makes sense to me.
The paragraph that hooked me has not been addressed in other comments. That is:

Most programmers I know seem to respond to job searches
by learning new programming languages. The logic there is
pretty weak. "I can't get a job with a language I know, so
why don't I see instead if I can get a job with a language
I don't know." Learning new languages is a good thing, but
there's a time and a place for everything. It's never a
matter of your skills being stale; there are still COBOL
jobs out there. If you're good at programming, and you
can't get a job, the skill to improve is not your
programming skill but your job-getting skill. If you've got
a task that requires two skills, and you have one of those
skills down solid, but you suck at the other skill, the
thing to do is not spend even more time perfecting the
skill you already have down solid.

As someone looking into programming jobs after a long period of not doing too much programming, I'm interested in what people think about this sentiment.
I think apple has alot to do with the decision, cause the rumor is that Apple buy Yahoo (or Yahoo search).
The net generation, unplugged
University of Central Florida
Apple rumor: Will Apple buy Yahoo (or Yahoo search)?
http://devdaily.com/news/2010/02/01/apple-rumor-apple-buys-yahoo-search
If that's the point, it would have been made far better by posting the above sentence, rather than delivering a tutorial for retarded six year olds on how to use the 'man' command.
Duke
Ohio State University
Ask HN: Looking for suggestions for a desktop rich GUI
I'm working on a kiosk-like application which will run off a desktop/workstation level PC, and am looking for suggestions of what might be the best platform for something like that. At the moment I'm considering things like Flex, WxPython and WPF, but I'd like to hear opinions of the HNizens.

I am personally a great supporter of the approach that you should use the technology your team is familiar with, but we're just building the team and could use some pointers about the direction where to look at. Thanks!

Clarification: I'm not looking for a quick GUI prototyping tool, I'm looking for something that will run the final product. The concept if the GUI will most likely be similar to many Flash apps we can see around the Web, with many zooming in and out, animated menu items etc. And the backed should be able to connect to the network and the Internet, yes.
Google describes this and a bunch of other great stuff about how to optimize page rendering: http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/docs/rendering.html#...
I believe this is simply to protect them from unauthorized radio broadcasts of their games.
Google Buzz could have dominated location
Can you elaborate what you mean? :)
Hawaii is already doing this: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/oct/21/hawaii-schools-f...

It's been very problematic for parents who have to find childcare on Fridays -- it basically just shifts that cost back on to the taxpayer.
I'd highly recommend wxPython or pygame, depending on the nature of the user interface. It's very pleasant for rapid prototyping/iteration.
I've heard this argument before that it requires a certain type or caliber of employee to offer a flexible, results-based work environment. When trying to implement these policies in another company I was always told that "we don't have those kinds of people."

I think if you treat people like they're "those kind of people" they may just start acting and producing like "those kind of people".

Excessive accountability and other policies designed to maximize productivity often have the undesired effect of making people feel mistrusted. It is employees that feel like a part of something, whose efforts matter that do the best work.

I love this quote from Cristóbal Conde, president and C.E.O. of SunGard:

"If you start micromanaging people, then the very best ones leave.

If the very best people leave, then the people you’ve got left actually require more micromanagement. Eventually, they get chased away, and then you’ve got to invest in a whole apparatus of micromanagement. Pretty soon, you’re running a police state. So micromanagement doesn’t scale because it spirals down, and you end up with below-average employees in terms of motivation and ability."

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/17/business/17corner.html?pag...
"I wonder how much the ability to persevere in the face of difficulty is affected by a persons genes?"

That's character, and based on lingual evidence alone (which I'll take to be a summation of collective knowledge) "the development of character" is very much an individual endeavor.
To target this use-case they would need to limit the number of wide-eyed, open mouthed monkeys they use on their sales page.
It depends on what you're doing and what kind of application you need to build. Will it be hooked up to the internet? Do you expect to try and update it often?

Tcl and Tk are definitely "not what the cool kids are using", but are still fine tools for whipping up a quick GUI, and, despite that everyone "knows" they "look awful", have been updated to look modern, especially in the hands of someone who knows what they're doing in terms of design (which was one of the reasons Tcl and Tk got a bad reputation - they never emphasized that in the culture around the language).
$ man dma
No manual entry for dma
Mozilla borrows from WebKit to build fast new JS engine
Please have a look at http://www.gistdoit.com/ as a Ideone+Gist mashup example.
Startup Thinking
Yeah, but if we do something like this:

#alert > p { background: yellow }

Surely the intelligent thing for the CSS engine is to look for the one-and-only #alert, rather than work backwards from all the <p>'s? (I am assuming that nodes with ids have their own fast index.)
Most of the games are wasd-based by default, but many can be configured to use a controller, if desired -- especially the games that are also released on the PS3/360.

Whether a game is particularly suited to a controller is another matter, but this is in part a function of popularity; if more people played using controllers (as they might with a media center setup), companies will make more games that cater to them. Valve in particular is especially aware of the hardware hooked up to a player's machine, through their regular Steam hardware surveys and fanatical in-game tracking.

And while I agree that I can't see the appeal of playing a competitive multiplayer FPS with a controller against opponents with keyboards/mice, that doesn't stop a lot of people from trying: http://www.google.com/search?q=pc+counterstrike+controller&#...
So you're saying that László and Klara were poor genetic material?

Where do you see me say anything of the kind?

No, what I would say is the myth of genius being a special constellation of traits that the gods bestow upon that rare soul, which can only be seen ex post facto, is false. High G is quite common. What isn't is a specially tuned E.

If someone known to be a mediocre chess player can thrice create chess grandmasters, then that is a strong argument, and frankly, anecdotal is about as good as you can get with this stuff.

I suppose if you're arguing for "genius" in the ex post facto sense, you could say "wow, what a coincidence that he had 3 children with that amazing chess grandmaster gene." To me, saying anyone with high G could be Einstein given the correct E says something very different about genius than the idea that Einstein was one of a kind and had some innate, unique genetic gift.
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI)
For most of you here, this will likely be pretty old-hat; nevertheless, there's likely something useful there. Alternately, you can share it with your "non-startup" friends. ;-)
University of Waterloo
Happiness is a Warm Cloud
This is exactly the reason I love Pylons as well, I think you summed it up quite well.

Simply the fact that it's a minimalistic framework (not another abstraction layer on top Python)
The software apparently lets your computer tell you how much charge the batteries have.
What if senators represented people by income or race, not by state?
Customers, Product, and then VC
Please, using more CSS selectors than DOMs isn't going to kill a site. In fact, it isn't even close to being a bottleneck. We are talking milliseconds. If you want speed gains, properly compress your images!
Did a stint at FSU but I was too immature and irresponsible to follow through with it, pissed a 200% scholarship down the drain.

Enlisted in the USAF, grew up a bit and attempted University of Phoenix Online (a joke), American Military University (part of the American Public University System, another joke), gave up on online school for a bit.

After separating I gave Troy University a try (their entire CS department is online) but they use Blackboard and I've grown to hate Blackboard.

I'll be giving Franklin University a try in the next few months - their interface is appealing, the program looks solid and they've received solid reviews.

I really enjoyed my little time at FSU - it seemed as if I was really learning something and I loved the "feel" of being on campus, hanging out between classes in breezeways with other students - it just felt like happy (if that makes any sense).

A lot has changed in the last 8 years though, family/life/work and going full-time on-campus just isn't feasible any longer. The majority of online schools disappoint me because the average student is a complete idiot with no concern for spelling/grammar.

I guess I'm a unique target for the online schools, since I actually want to learn something - not just earn a piece of paper.
Compared to publications like Washington Times, CSM is a paragon of virtue in the world of journalism.

Seems whenever I come upon an article from CSM it is well written and does not show an open bias.

Admittedly, I've never read their religious editorials.
The secret origin of Windows, by the product manager who shipped Windows 1.0
Lessons from eastern Europe's flat tax
The Builder and the Salesman
The international war over exit signs
To get power out of a usb port, you don't need to install
any software. And that's what blows my mind, why would
you even want to install some software to run a battery
charger??

You are right. The 5V and GND are right there. You don't need to enumerate the device at all. Just tap the power and be on your way. A lot of cheap products to that..

However, there are two reasons that you shouldn't do that, and why you need your device to actually enumerate itself on the users system.

The important reason, is to insure that the 500mA you think you have coming to you, is actually delivered. Technically, a motherboard can choose to assume you are broken, and disable the USB port, if you draw more than 100mA and haven't identified yourself as a high current device. Almost nobody actually does this, but the risk is there.

The 2nd reason is so you can place the little USB-IF logo on your product, reassuring people that your product complies with the USB specs. This logo, in the early days of USB, was very important. It's less so now. If you want it, you need to enumerate within $time (I forget the number of milliseconds) after you begin drawing power. If you don't, USB-IF doesn't like you and you can't put the logo on your product.

Both items 1 and 2 could be accomplished using just the USB controller in the USB device, with no driver needed ... But only if the USB controller lied about who it was. It would have to say, "I'm a hard disk", or "I'm a speaker". As soon as you lie, you're also not USB-IF compliant. Plus, it will look pretty unprofessional to have your battery charger show up on the hardware manifest as a hard drive. It would have been better to not enumerate at all, then to do that.

So, you need to supply a driver, if you're doing something that every OS doesn't have drivers for already, even if technically, it's not required.

So, really, this was Bill Gates fault. I knew we could lay this one on him if we dug deep enough. Windows should ship with OS drivers for USB battery chargers. Curse you Bill Gates, curse you.
Yeah, you're right. And the number lost some of its luster after the hack. Eventually we stopped using it. So lesson learned. Don't undermine your own tracking system.

We had two problems. One, the developer who wrote the algorithm was the sort of guy who needed to constantly tweak the system. He was a great coder, but he also couldn't produce unless he played a few tricks or hid an easter eggs. So, he kept screwing with the score, making it blink red or suddenly drop and return to normal. We joked that he needed to sell his algorithm to Google. It was fun, but doomed.

The second problem was that marketing started taking the number seriously. They love the numbers, don't they? We were a web shop and at constant war over real estate and advertising. The unwritten law was, anything that marketing took seriously, needed to be screwed with.
Charles P Thacker (MSR) wins 2009 ACM Turing Award