skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree. I think there's a legacy of UI design over the past decades that many software houses still cling to. File/folder, menu bars and so on. I'm not really an iPhone/iPad fan, but I think they have and will continue to contribute a lot towards getting people to rethink UI design.

Also, the article you're thinking of is probably either this book:

http://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Donald-Norman/d...

Or an article about it. (The push/pull door things is a classic example out of that book.)
If your home moves constantly, it's only going to be so long before you can't remember where you live and you take a wrong way home.

Bee colonies are fragile. If the bees so much as 'sense' a disease, seeing the bodies doesn't matter specificly because an infected bee generally leaves the colony to die, there can become a mass exodus as they may believe there's disease in the actual colony. This presents a problem if you're continually losing your bees due to moving your colony, because if you get unlucky you could trigger an exodus.

What's more bee's follow a small oligarchy, each of which hold the ability to trigger a swarm. Let's call these 'Simon's' because they're the ones who relay the queen's orders. So what happens when the bee's believe Simon says 'leave' because he went missing? These oligarchs have the ability to trigger a swarm to found a new colony, so losing these few key bees is truly dangerous for a colony.

It sounds rather trivial, but these few bees can control a huge portion of a hive's population. These are the bees a hive needs to retain, just as much as the queen, but they cannot be contained like a queen (IE regular size not fat and need to leave the hive to trigger natural behaviours like gathering). The even bigger problem is that these bees cannot found a new colony, as all the females aren't sexually mature.

Another problem is that a new queen has a mating flight, often multiples. These queens are born to replace the existing queen, which if this queen gets lost (because some moron human moved the hive 50km) it will found a new hive instead of taking over the existing hive. This means if there isn't enough time to prepare, the hive can literally die off because it's incapable of preparing a new queen in time (it takes ~3 weeks from the egg being laid to the mating flights).

Bees are an agrarian society, and if the towns keep moving the farmers will never find it. The problems are really as complex as the questions as to why a town becomes abandoned, so really it's amazingly complicated and we as humans are screwing around with it.

Solution: The best solution is likely to maintain static hives on farmland instead of relying on mobile hives. It may be less cost-effective, however it is likely much more sustainable. I know if I was a farmer, I'd be trying to provide support for my own bee hives to form.
Robot towel folder (freeform, previously unseen towels)
Depends on your latency needs, how expensive your data is to compute from its source, how big it is, etc. In some cases it'll be cheaper to pay the cost to exit EC2, hit the big memcache box and re-enter EC2 than it would be to rent a few Quad-Mem boxes.

FWIW, our fleet is 100% EC2 - this tradeoff didn't work for us.
Oh, my bad, I guess he just reduced scope until it worked.
This makes it sound easy!

I'm not surprised AngelList played a key role... Venture Hacks is an awesome resource. Nivi and Naval do genuinely care about helping startups: http://venturehacks.com/intro

I wouldn't pitch them until you have an amazing demo and your shit together though.
It's literally just blank files being requested 10s of millions of times a day, they serve no data which makes a caching layer unnecessary. I just need the log files generated by the requests.
you really have your biology wrong, shit even in microscopic amounts can carry parasites and bacteria that can kill you Why do you think dysentery is such a problem in the third world?
I don't use Ruby, but the name is really cool. "Padrino" means "godfather".

Among Godfather fans the connection to "Sinatra" is well known:

http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/gangsters_outlaws/mob_bos...
Haha yeah you got us! Our original tagline was that our framework was 'The Godfather of Sinatra'.
Nice. This has me laughing so hard I'm crying.

In all seriousness, I think having a wank at work is a bit more off-putting than putting your feet up. I definitely can see how you'd think this was nasty, being totally anal about other, similar things, but what can I say? I'm just not thinking too hard about how whether I'm pissing someone off. Don't do it in a meeting with someone you're really trying to impress.
Hmm,

Nautilus is my primary file browser only because I'm using Linux and KDE has all this horrible "transparent" stuff...

Gnome and Nautilus is nicer looking but Nautilus horribly unfunctional - a swear at it at least once per use (which is as little possible, I try to use Gnome-Do for most things). I don't know where it's more spatial than Microsoft's file explorer.

I think Gnome wins over KDE only by virtue of doing a few less awful things but

The idea of the articles are intriguing. I just can't with the details...
>> In fact, SF streets are some of the cleanest of any big city I've ever seen.

False. SF is a cesspit in any part of downtown, tenderloin, SOMA, the Mission, and pretty bad in many of the other parts. Every day for the past week I've watched a mountain sized pile of shit slowly grind down (by being kicked, stepped on, and rained on) into nothingness outside of our office. It's quite frankly repellent.

Now that I think of it, one time a (presumably) homeless man took a shit on the wall of our office building. It was there for weeks.

*Further SF horror stories: I've also witnessed a homeless man take a dump on the fence down the street from us in broad daylight. Also a coworker has seen a pile of dump propped up against a neighbor's door, and witnessed the shock of said neighbor as they came home to discover it.
You (possibly) don't agree with me, therefore you and the majority of men are pigs.

Nice.
Right, just put up with it like a REAL MAN! I'll shrug it off, and like a real man, bust out that masculine hand sanitizer just like mommy uses.

It's not about just the cleanliness, it's about going out of your way to rudely put your damn feet where other people have to put their hands. It's offensive and it's doubly stupid because it takes effort to do.

So, if your lazy ass has to do this, then rock on manly man. You hardly earned it.
Upgraded! Unfortunately, some of my rake tasks stopped working (the ones that create databases). I had to change my database.yml to use the postgres user instead of the user I usually use to create the database. :(
This is hardly a play by play on how you did it; more like a gossip rag. It is entertaining to read but hardly constructive for anyone else.

PS: good luck.
come to think of it, I don't either. But I came to realize it just now. Funny how ignorant you can be. To list the things I have bought in last 5 years is just a samsung corby. I accept I bought it because it looked good.
You (possibly) think rhetoric should always be a cohesive proof and therefore fail at logic.
>> #9. Method And Device For Recognition of a Collision With a Pedestrian (pop the hood)

> Sounds like a pretty smart system to us. With that in mind, here's a little suggestion for the inventors: When you guys roll out the next version of this thing, maybe it'd be better if it actually PREVENTED the collision.

The point of this system is to mitigate harm to the pedestrian after the point at which a collision was impossible to avoid (which is easy to detect). It sounds like avoiding the collision is great idea, but a system that can do that can cause harm. The idea with the hood popping is that it can only help.

FWIW, this was designed for is for BMWs whose hoods pop in the appropriate direction.
I can think of all sorts of things to describe this that I don't want anyone to google tomorrow, next week, 2 months from now or three years down the road. Read into it from there.
Beginner’s Guide to Corporate Entities
Altair (The First PC) Inventor and inspiration for Microsoft Passes Away
Eh, it's still a comparative advantage, in macroeconomic terms. It isn't such a hypernarrow specialization that they'll be particularly vulnerable to market changes.
What I would like to know is what kind of Analytics are YC and PG running to avoid making this same mistake again.
I don't know why, but I always seem to count backward from 2000, so that I end up thinking of 1996 as being roughly four years ago. Gets me every time.
Incredible that Fox News is doing so well even when so many companies have joined a boycott on the channel. The market is definitely sending signals to CNN.
Are those first 2 paragraphs accurate? I haven't been to the bay area (save for the airport) in a couple years.
I second that, people need the fresh air
They are all pretty good but "Avoid unnecessary branches."
and "avoiding goto" are top of my list. Usually is a red flag to me that the programmer has conceptualized the program
but not taken the second step to split the program into smaller workable parts before starting the project.
I've built it, and played the level included. The sound is still a little bit sketchy, but my mind is blown. Wow, just wow.
A Warning: Facebook dating apps see massive user drop after FB policy change.
A new chapter consisting of a high-level overview of webapp development is in the works.

I consider it a tutorial on how to develop a web app more than a rails tutorial.

I consider this a compliment. :-)
Whatever works for you.
For the MUD either light your lamp and go south twice or go south then...

javascript:Adventure.status.alive = true;Adventure.rooms['666'].exits = {'south': 11};void(0);

then go south again. Your choice :).
except you don't have X-Forwarded-For with ELB, which can be a problem, since if you need SSL, there's a good chance you probably also need to be logging IPs for security purposes.

Of course, you can just setup your own load balancer on EC2 with HAProxy and stunnel, but that's a PITA.
Vitiligo, vitiligo guide
I don't understand why we're apparently only ever allowed to have one article on any given subject. Two publications with different target audiences can cover the same thing without plagiarizing each other, after all.
Why isn't there a link to play?
Lighten up. You got any proof that people in offices where they are allowed to relax get sick more?
> When you point your feet right at someone's face whereby you only see half their face, it doesn't need the acceptance of that gesture in a culture to tell you it's offensive. It should be common sense and decency.

But that is where you are wrong. It's only "common sense" to you because it's offensive to you. It isn't considered offensive at all in the American culture--there's just no sense of indecency to the gesture. I've had many people do that to me (in corporate settings) and it's something I don't even notice.

I agree it's generally not really something to do in formal situations, but that's not because of the feet but because of the casualness of slouching...
Lol, wow, I totally forgot about server side image maps.
Ask HN: Do you see sales jump on the 1st of every month?
We have been noticing, for our service (www.peoplelex.com), that sales jump up disproportionately on the 1st of every month.

Anybody else, running direct consumer monetization services, seeing similar trends?
Same thing goes for http://tinygrab.com/. I browsed through some screenshots once and I saw a scanned cheque...
Why is this getting upvoted? It is exemplary ad hominem.

I prefer Zed when he isn't ranting.
So preventing the sell of a useful tool that might or might not be used legally while under the control of someone who is informed of the distinction and able to take that responsibility themselves.... how paternal of them.
Every 1st of April, the net goes completely shit. :(
If you can tolerate a few dropped records here and there, use an S3 bucket + logging:

http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AmazonS3/latest/index.html...
calm down -- it's not the end of the world
Who cares? I know my blog is down.

After Zed's stream of hate here and on Twitter, I'm a little ashamed to admit that I enjoy his writing. So in addition to putting my feet on the table, I guess I will have to pretend I don't like "Zed's fucking blog" too now.

Sigh. The internets...
You'll notice that most of the technologies used is this, such as <canvas>, WebSockets and WebGL, were all created quite recently. A lot has changed with the web in the last few years.
heh s3 works out to $50 a day on my current, in-beta load and that's just for the requests.
The porn sites I frequent only showed all clad models today. It was not entertaining, I agree.
Apple Highlights Sites That Deliver HTML5 Video
If you're business is incorporated in Europe then you personally have zero liability. Similarly, if your business assets are solely outside of the US governments hands then they cannot do anything to you. You can readily sell your software to the US without any risk of personal liability or corporate liability.

It's not a question of doing business in the US, it's a question of the US' ability to access your companies assets.

Of course if you're an American citizen operating a sole-trader in Europe it is you violating the patent, no company officially exists. You would be fully liable in the US for everything from your house to the current pair of underwear you have on. If a court decided you were liable, you're screwed. If you're incorporated in a foreign country, you'd never be liable and the courts would never be able to argue jurisdiction.
The IPv6 Mess
I actually wish that Google keeps their O3D plugin alive. While WebGL is nice, O3D has certain feature that make it much better for complex projects such as games and in my case visualization apps.
Verizon cuts prices on Palm Pre & Pixi, offers free mobile hotspot
That's in theory. In practice, MySQL has different syntax for different engines when you get into more esoteric queries.
Not because they walk to work and put their feet on conference tables.
Male Sexual Health, Sexual Therapy, Male Enhancement, Male Impotence, Enhancer
Perhaps, if you consider the gesture to never be appropriate. But I think it is fine. I do think it is very casual and probably not appropriate in certain formal situations. And so perhaps it is "bad manners" merely by being overly casual in certain settings...
I recall Bernard Shaw in a blacked out hotel room in Baghdad during the initial aerial assault of the Persian Gulf War. At the time, it felt new, immediate, and fresh.

Now we get Anderson Cooper grandstanding in Haiti...now it feels somehow "staged" - news in the background, anchors in the foreground.

CNN's best days are long behind them.
My commute involves walking three blocks to the Caltrain station on 4th & King. I pass by human-sized turds on the sidewalk every day.
Small Influence, Big Difference
Poker tactics that apply to startups
There are two phases of acceptance, the application and interviews. The first phase is where most mistakes occur, because written applications are so much lower bandwidth than face to face conversations. So if we were going to insert randomness, we should randomly invite people to interviews, not randomly fund them. But the trouble with that is that, unlike funding, interview slots are constrained. There is a physical limit to the number of interviews we can do. So to invite someone randomly we'd have to not invite someone who was (as far as we could tell) more deserving, and we are very reluctant to do that.
Law School Where Every Student's GPA Just Increased
It shouldn't even be possible to segfault an interpreted language like Ruby, let alone the "current stable" version. Sounds like it's Ruby-core's problem, not Rails-core's.

That said, I agree with you, it's strange. But I do think it's good they're pushing so hard for 1.9.2.
I like drinking coffee, I do that at work. A nice big stretch from time to time is great, I do at least one each day at my desk. Several times each week I'll take off my glasses and rub my eyes a bit, I don't care who's around!

Sure, there are things you like to do that shouldn't be done at work, but the two are not correlated--or at least not as correlated as you suggest. While you've found some very amusing examples, they're tangentially relevant at best and used more for hyperbole, just like most of the article.
Nah, I bet it refers to the May issue of the magazine. My understanding is that the cover date on magazines actually refers to when supermarkets and bookstores are supposed to remove them from the shelves.

Of course, this results in all sorts of weirdness, like this article being from the 'mysterious future.'
Stuffpit.com Login
Facebook To Launch ‘Relationships’ At f8
We don't do much formal analysis, but I do regularly look up the applications of people we rejected who later succeed in order to figure out how we missed them.
I'm getting the same thing. Tried redownloading/reinstalling and no love. Had to 'killall Cloud' to even get the thing out of my menubar...
ThinkGeek: Real-Life iCade is “A Possibility.”
I quoted 16 cores because that's the biggest hardware the FreeBSD project had available when those benchmarks were being run -- I suspect that it scales linearly quite a bit further than that.
The Greatest Marketing Headlines Ever Written
The free mobile hotspot feature makes Verizon my favorite carrier by far. That and the much better 3G coverage than AT&T make this a great deal even without considering how good the device is. If Palm could just increase the number of useful apps in their app store I think the Pre Plus could be good competition for the iPhone. It has a more open app store, a better notification system, and multitasking. The only thing it doesn't have until it's release for AT&T is data and voice at the same time, but so far I don't think I've ever used both simultaneously on my iPhone so I don't think I'll miss it.
That's very interesting, living in New York I really don't see much shit on the ground, even when commuting into the office. Though, when I visit San Francisco I don't remember that much shit, but I do remember lots of homeless people. I suppose the weather makes it the homeless mecca. Not too hot, not too cold.
The flip side is that you wouldn't have a company to begin with without Facebook and you probably made some money in the initial gold rush.

Facebook is also partnering with Zynga for some dating thing. So the lesson here is that you don't want to build on a platform that isn't making money and can only make money by competing directly with platform adopters.
"Please open your window to the width of this line of text."
The file explorer on windows vista is a mess. You can customize the icon layout or what details are shown, but it has a persistent habit of switching back to exactly the view you didn't want (list vs icons or vice versa). Don't know if they fixed that in 7 or not.
Also,

It occurs to me that the approach of having meaning be tied to a fixed position in space is rather limited.

As I recall, when the first actual human beings evolved, they invent this thing called language, in which the relative position of a symbol determined it's meaning rather it's fixed position. Using fixed position anyway is all well and good but it seems that when an app runs out of fixed screen space, it has to start using relative position in a variety of effective ways, taking some clues from the human facility for language.

I suspect that is why the author can't find that many recent examples for his theory - though it is an interesting theory.
Well I'm glad that it isn't a race to the bottom for ratings by everybody. Of course the cure for CNN is a couple of reality shows.
the graph is a bit misleading, If you look at the daily count there is a massive drop and then it stays fairly consistent afterwards.
To make this work somewhat seamlessly, check out DropZone. It's a pretty cool mac app that allows all sorts of stuff to happen around drag and drop.

http://aptonic.com/

(It has a Dropbox extension as well)
On xkcd.com, it flashed the screen white and made everything uppercase.
I think that the claim is misleading. If adopters on a platform can make money, you can always make money from that platform, whether from charging the end user, charging the application developer or driving by advertisement.
Canonical is using The Theory of "Oh Thank God"
You don't think that when you decide to live in another country, it might be wise to make some effort to adjust to the culture of that country?

Here's a tip: Before you let anything offend you, try to see if the other person might not have meant to offend you. Really try hard and give them the benefit of the doubt. At the end, if you think "they didn't mean to, but I'm still offended" then you should talk to the person.
Our web nodes use 6mb of memory for all the web serving each. This frees up gigabytes compared to apache which we can use for more processes ( web and app notes are combined in shopify's case ). The speedup lies there. Added benefit is that nginx somehow manages to terminate SSL with a lot lower CPU load which makes the web/app configuration very appealing. We experimented with terminating SSL in the Ciscos but it seems to be impossible for Cisco that ships a firmware that has this and weighted load balancing working both.

Tremendous, in this case, is because the extremely low resource usage of nginx allowed us to remove an entire layer in our serverfarm flowchart and now we can use our machines much more efficient.
Had I seen the sidebar before I read the article I would have stopped reading after the first paragraph.

Let me add that after reading the article I found it to be lacking in any real valuable content that would have made this a hacker news story. It seems like he is rambling on about something, that yes I agree it is rude, it is not that big of a deal and is part of the American culture.

Also, swear words were thrown in not because they added anything to the piece, but rather because he could. Shame really.
Checking that functions are constant time with Valgrind
Am I the only one who reads "I'll never own another server" and thinks about all the folks who said "I'll never hire another programmer" back when sites like Elance first started getting popular?

Outsourcing is great and all, but it's hardly the panacea people make it out to be.
Fixed, thank you for pointing it out.
FYI, that Zynga/FB dating thing was a joke ;-). I'm sure many of you frown on April Fools day, but I enjoy getting the chance to show off my sense of humor (or lack thereof) once in a while: http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/01/facebook-to-launch-relation...
I much prefer a filesystem where I can actually delete things (including shredding it).
As a consumer, I typically blow my 'toy' money on a project that will keep me busy for a week at the beginning of the month. This gives me 3 weeks to search for my next adventure and wish that I had more money. When the first of the month rolls around and as soon as that check clears... I'm going to hit up that .txt filled with things I wanted to do with money. (Today, I bought a shirt, rented a logo designer, ordered new headlights (last month's project gone bad), donated to my favorite site, and bought an ebook!)

Also, I noticed CTR->conversions on the first few days of the month(or holidays) on my Adwords campaigns was phenomenally higher. Almost to the point where I dumped my whole budget in the first 3 days of the month just to see if it would pay off.
This was particularly annoying as there is a replacement on the horizon, but not yet available. There is theoretically going to be application -> inbox which will be more useful in many cases, but its got this amorphous release date that they won't pin down.
50 Enlightening Graduate-Level Open Courseware Classes
The following courses were gathered from colleges and universities that offer Open Courseware. The list is categorized and each link leads straight to the course. The university connection is added to each course description.