skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Buttons left or right, whatever.* What annoys me is that, so far, we have heard no reasoning as to why the close button is the third from the left instead of the most outer one. It makes no sense other than covering their asses for Apple repercussions.

*Except, you know, having the menu bar and window control options 5px apart isn't the smartest thing you can do.
For people with a strong bias towards "pay as you go", it's not a sad future at all. The headache of managing bought content in terms of backups, syncing to various devices, changing formats, essentially making everyone a expert in storage management is one that could use some creative destruction.

I already got rid of my collection of music videos in favour of youtube playlists, movie collection in favour of a netflix subscription, document store for Google docs and would dearly love to get rid of my mp3 collection in favour of a streaming service. Spotify et al cant get here soon enough for me. Once that happens I wont be in perpetual fear of my laptop breaking down (just replace with another netbook) or losing my various cd/dvd/flash-drive backups.
If one day I'm not able to afford these services or a net connection, I have bigger issues to worry about than being able to enjoy the movies/music.

This stuff is not rare enough to make it worth me owning a copy (unlike in the 90s or before)
Youtube is getting there in terms of content and is already there for music videos.
"The future of media consumption (well, at least music consumption) is from streaming services, which don't make you deal with syncing."

Wow, that would certainly stop me from listening to my music on the subway. Or anywhere that data roaming charges would apply (without Wifi).

Some people may go for streaming instead of buying music, but I'll keep purchasing unencumbered tracks from iTunes and Amazon thank you very much.
yes, that's the only way it could help (encrypting the whole thing), and then not only do you have the problem of not being able to see the data, you also have an efficiency issue (which, even in some future state where this is improved enough to be usable, is still going to be a real drag).

i was thinking that somehow encrypting each piece of data individually would help, but the kind of processing netflix requires (and the kind that make it possible to extract data based on statistical properties) isn't doing calculations with the values, but doing statistical processing of the tokens (which is why only equality is needed, really). so encryption of individual items doesn't change much.
I was just about to suggest that if Google wanted to shaft Apple then one good way would be to introduce a royalty-free video format for HTML5 <video> that Apple doesn't support in its OS, its browser or its iPods and iPhones. Suddenly 130 million dollars for On2 doesn't seem that bad an investment.

(Obviously Apple could adopt a royalty free format, but would they unless forced to?)
I think it's hilarious. Tomayto, tomahto.
Possibility 2: Zits & Giggles' creators also kept raising the price of their game — as an experiment — up to $400 as of last week.

What we have here is a textbook case of "burying the lede". The headline on this article is ridiculous linkbait.

Here's are some simple UX design rules:

There should be no point on a phone's screen which costs $400 to touch.

If you absolutely must have a button which costs $400 to touch, it should have a UI that works hard to communicate this to the user and to make it very difficult to do so by accident. Think: Confirmation dialog with RED warning message containing words like "$400". Or whatever. Given the stakes, you should probably do some user testing on your interface to ensure that your customers understand it.

Moreover, you must not embed your button that costs $400 to touch in an environment where everything else costs $1.99 or $2.99 or, at most, perhaps $9.99. If you're making an app for writing checks, that's okay, but it should look like an app for writing checks and be installed in the "check-writing apps" section of the store, so that people have plenty of environmental signals warning what they're getting into. You should not embed your "empty my bank account" button in a screenful of silly games that appeal to drunk people in bars.

Finally, a button that costs $400 to touch should have an undo option if at all possible. The undo option should not force people to read their credit card bills and institute a chargeback, which is a depressing pain in the neck.

If you casually disobey these design rules because you're conducting an "experiment", you are a sociopath and nobody should do business with you. Apple is no longer doing business with this person. Smart move.
Or instead it could be a case of warring Greek states growing strong enough that they were able to take on Persia. Asimov had a great sci-fi short story based on this premise called "In a good cause"
For windows users:

I've installed over cygwin with no problems.
Make sure have all the "dev" packages installed and then type "make", you are ready to go.
All good code has the property of clear specification. The place where BDD really shines is that it forces you to use your own abstraction in practice, which often uncovers where it is unwieldy to use.

Another way to get lean code is to use a proper, powerful, static type system. It enforces you to think about the code "skeleton" and the "tests" are done automatically by the type checker at each compile/load of the code. It also reduces the amount of testing needed: There is no way something different from an integer can be passed as a parameter, so you do not need to account for that.

My code does not use many Unit tests per se. But it does autogenerate a lot of test cases to check certain properties. Autogeneration is excellent at producing corner-cases, so if that is what you are after... I generally find this is a better use of my time as a programmer: Better spend some time developing the autogenerator than writing boring tests which my code for most part will pass in first attempt.
And yet http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/the-missing-e...
When a freelancer changes the game
We'll have to agree to disagree, I think.

Proposed remedies to the existing patent system - from the economic to the temporal - fail to recognize the basic issue: the inability to scale the grant process. Your solution, for example, merely injects more capital. Besides massively significantly disadvantaging individual inventors (developers in this context) vs larger entities, itself a potentially fatal limitation, it is guaranteed to do little to solve that problem. Even an $85K filing fee would be insufficient to throttle the process such that it would become workable.

Of the types of inventions likely to be patented under your revamped system, there will still be - even throttled by a higher patent fee - an extremely small number of individuals worldwide capable of accurately determining whether a given invention is legitimately innovative or merely derivative.

The problem is not merely, as implied, supply and demand. It is a multi-dimensional problem that involves, yes, a deficit in talent that is not practically solvable, but also real issues in terms of the vetting process for individual patents themselves.

Many "solutions" to the patent system have been proposed over the years; none have found widespread traction. As is to be expected, because the system is fundamentally misaligned with the rate and pace of innovation in this industry.
One of the common exceptions to "nearly nothing" is establishing a legal business quickly and cheaply.

How about the need for cheap and reliable electricity? In plenty of places you have to budget for a serious UPS plus generator setup.

Rule of law, in a reasonable time frame?

Heck, until very recently it was impractical for a foreign VC firm to invest in Canada.

Anyway, the existence of Silicon Valley, it's much smaller brother in the Boston area, and the pale shadows of those two in the rest of the country suggests that while one "can do" a startup elsewhere there seem to be location specific competitive advances.
"Idiotic" and "hilarious" are not necessarily disjoint. Putting "hilarious" clauses in a software license is not usually a productive policy.
I eagerly await the time when those frameworks will be able to do what Adobe Flex can do. I'm itching to try my hand at rewriting our app in javascript, but so far they all seem too immature and generally broken (and cross-browser incompatible) to be worth considering.

At the moment, for an RIA that's going to be used by enterprises, Flex still appears to win hands down, unfortunately. I'd love to be proved wrong, though! However, based on the comments in this thread, it appears that Sproutcore is not there yet, by far.
Ask HN: System administrator (to be or not to be)
well I dont mean to sound sad or disoriented but this is what the situation is.
I have been doing my masters in computer science but never interested in programming or rather never taken it seriously. Recently though I have been playing around with unix(solaris file system, veritas file system and veritas volume manager) that is mostly system administration stuff. and the materials I have gathered or learned when i say stuff like veritas (which is a licensed product) hence I cannot use it. So how do i prove my worth when i look for a job and are there any entry level system admin jobs with these. Any fellow Hackers who started off this way ?
And why can't other browsers integrate an Ogg codec? It would cost them nothing. The img tag supports several formats, so why should browser developers decide which video codec web companies should use? Especially if their choice is one that costs millions per year. Mozilla is right to promote the free option for us all. They should add Matroska/Dirac/Vorbis in the future, just like they support both JPEG and PNG.
Even though Python is a very easy to learn language, I give this two thumbs up for google. Python is really a great amazing language, however I feel sometimes that's very underrated for most of IT people I know, it's not perfect but is powerful and beautiful.
True, I've been following this one http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-and-Compute... , very basic the first chapters but it really makes you understand how some of the most common things in computer languages works.
If someone wants my organs, they can pay for them (that is, pay my kids assuming I'm dead).

Why does everyone involved in the organ donation make money (surgeon taking out organ, surgeon transplanting organ, etc.) except the supplier of the raw materials (donor)?
Stairway to Heaven: Great or Overrated?
I like the concept of Flex but I've tried to create some apps and the UI designing was a pain, plus you have to deal with the fact the most users don't have the flex runtime app.

However flex uses AS which bring a nice belt of libraries to play with.

I don't know how it's now, I played with it a year ago.
Yes. I got unceremoniously dumped out of my college path by finances after my freshman year and started out with a sysadmin job that eventually had some serious programming.

Can't advise on the "how do i prove my worth", I found the job by networking and by virtue of being one of the very few at the time (1980) who knew UNIX well (at least at the user level) and was mentored/apprenticed for what I was lacking.
It was a fun read but nothing more than that. On the one hand he was intentionally playing a bit of cat and mouse for the drama of the contest. On the other hand, he didn't have to actually earn money or do anything that might require providing identification. So it was a pretty artificial set of conditions.
Because any question on SO about using or configuring software is downvoted, complained about and sent to superuser.
Raising Capital: Eyes Wide Shut... Welcome to the Masked Ball
Over the years it’s been real privilege for me to mentor friends and acquaintances of mine who at one point or another in their careers have decided to make the leap into the start-up game. I happened to have had the particular advantage of starting early and so carry with me the proverbial scars on my back and psychic black-and-blue marks so reminiscent of the trade. It’s these same lumps that I always hope to help first-time entrepreneurs avoid.
Apple's Mobile Me service is built on this. It has its problems, but it's a pretty impressive web app. Amazing things can be done with this.

But the _fucking_ documentation!

I've 'dived in' to SproutCore a couple of times (spending about 2 days each time) and beyond the initial tutorials and a few random blog posts on third party sites there is almost no useful documentation. A lot of the info on the wiki is out of date or irrelevant to anyone but the developers. (I've been advised to visit the IRC channel numerous times, and it's great that it's there, but that's support not documentation.)

You pretty quickly end up reading the source code, and wasting time on trial & error approaches.

Look at the user guide for Code Igniter, a PHP framework, http://codeigniter.com/user_guide/ — SproutCore desperately needs one of these.
"Rooted" is a common colloquialism here in Australia :-)
Someone should start a business that breeds/sells those 'immortial beings.'
Pretty accurate except for the pronoun "she" (unfortunately).
Yet another article about the parity breaking at rhic, i work in this field and while this would be very exciting it's not a cut and dry result. Running the numbers for the proposed theoretical cause of the parity violation leads to something a lot smaller than what is observed. While making simpler, non parity violating, arguments based on geometry and the elliptic flow in the fireball can get you near the right numbers.

See this paper for another explanation of the observed charge correlations http://arxiv.org/abs/1002.1758

edit clarification
I posted a book review about a guy with a similar story, except he dealt cocaine, and got a 25 year sentence. His book, however, focuses mostly on life behind bars; it doesn't detail any of the glory days.

http://www.zacharyburt.com/2010/03/book-review-inside-life-b...
hga, well networking I am sure would play a very important role. I would certainly do my part in that. The thing is like most of the people or jobs I come across in my search is all programming oriented. Even my friends who are working suggest something like ...take c++ up ull get a job...dude do .NET its microsoft technology ...so u knw wat i mean....but the thing is when one isnt much of a programmer or rather isnt build for that but still wants to stick to IT is pursuing a career in system administration as an entry level too much to ask....and whenever I ask this question all i get is a response like...you could only make a technical support kind of job so that is kind of disheartening ....but if push comes to shove and thats what it takes to get into it I'll do that too
Koffeshop!
I ran across play a couple of months ago and I love it (wrote article on my initial thoughts back in Feb - http://www.agentcurry.com/2010/02/15/the-power-of-play).

Like a couple other commenters, I come from the J2EE world and always found the MVC frameworks overkill for most non-enterprise apps (even some enterprise apps for that matter). I really like all the niceties they have integrated into Play. It's intuitive, easy to use and you can get something up and running fast (very fast). To get my feet wet I've created a URL shortener app. It's a pretty simple app, but has allowed me to explore and familiarize myself with the features of Play! It's been a great experience using Play! thus far; I've just started a more "robust" application using Play! and hope it continues to exceed expectations.
You could market that as a Yelp for people, if only Yelp wasn't having so much bad press lately.
Those are solvable problems, and it's not like you can never be in SF just because you're based elsewhere in the world ... it's only a plane or two when you're physically needed there.

There are negatives to being in SF or the states as well ... you can hire a team in some parts of the world for less than you'll rent space in SF.

What are the things you and your startup needs on a daily basis that you can only get in SF / the USA?
Marketcetera - Open Source Trading Platform
Now Share Advice with Google Site Clinic
That's a nice SO clone, What is it built upon? Obviously it isn't a SO site.
How I Ran An Ad on Fox News via Google TV Ads
I used to have a watch from the future.

You could synchronize the data on your computer and your watch by facing the watch's screen toward your monitor's, starting some epilepsy program, then witnessing your invisible data fly into the watch. I thought it was pretty high-tech back then. And only through the power of pointing something at something else was this possible.
StackExchange is the whitelabel SO clone service Joel and Jeff are hoping to grow with VC funds.
This is more of a curiosity than anything, but one can always use Michael Spivak's gender-neutral pronouns.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spivak_pronoun
I think so. Along with billiard and table tennis tables.

I interned at Sun (R.I.P.) back in 2003 and their game tables were always full. I could challenge anyone, from fellow interns to managers to senior engineers, and get a game going.

No matter what our positions were in the company, on the game tables, we were equals. And shit talking was spat pretty heavily as well :-D

It was a great environment and I personally felt that it helped build the level of trust (for me) and bring everyone together.
I decided ahead of time that my book would be exactly 300 pages. I submitted an exactly 300 page manuscript, but I think my copyeditor shaved two pages of extraneous words :-/

Anyway, point being, I was pretty obsessive about not letting the book balloon. It forced me to put the knife to a lot of good content that wasn't quite great.
I had a play with LINQ in C# to see how similar I could make it:

After adding a couple of extension methods (to make the syntax more similar) I can write:

from methodName in "".MethodNames()
where methodName.Grep("index",RegexOptions.IgnoreCase)
orderby methodName select methodName;

in C#
Sounds pretty awesome. I could get behind this.
Has anyone come to play from Rails (as I have)? Is there anything you miss from Rails?
I'm a libertarian, so I have systemic/ideological objections to taxes in general, but from a pragmatic point of view: taxes on voluntarily consumed luxuries are better than involuntary taxes. especially if the consumers of those luxuries are imposing negative externalities via scialized medicine.
Are you insinuating that Ogg Theora is a better format than h.264?
We have historical evidence that there can exist a "good" dictator for an iron-age society. I don't think such a thing can exist for a silicon-age society; it's too complex to run, and inefficiencies you can ignore in the iron age make you grotesquely uncompetitive in the silicon age.

That people in the 21st century still think centralizing everything is the answer to any problem is a testament to the continuing power of the Utopian Dream to override reason. (This is a parenthetical; I am not saying iuguy is advocating it.)
Definitely looks interesting...I'm going to dive deeper. They really, really need a site re-design however. :/
Oh man I wish these were in widespread use. It would simplify things greatly for everyone. I kinda wish HN just started using them and it spread out from here.
Designer notes: Fear and loathing in Farmville.
JQuery for Complete Beginners: Part 1
Many (though last time I checked not all) Kubuntu themes let you choose the order of the management widgets, right out of the box. A long time ago I set "close" on the left and everything else on the right.

I broadly agree with or am at least sympathetic to the idea that we shouldn't have 10,000 configuration choices for both technical and human reasons, but I question whether perhaps a config setting here might be a net gain vs. the community cohesion cost. When making cost/benefits decisions its important to consider all costs and all benefits.
syncing is only an issue because apple makes it an issue. itunes is invasive crapware that throws up artificial barriers to migration.
Stupid message sequencing discourtesy
greatest guitar solo st the very least. fun fact: Page had 3-4 differet solos worked up for the song originally. I'm somewhat curious about the ones that didn't make it but never looked into it seriously. do recordings exist?
Is telomere shortening the sole cause of DNA replication errors? (Besides radiation, which damages the DNA directly?)
Presumably, if we can apply this kind of immortality to humans, we would tweak it so that we become e.g. 18-year-olds instead of fetuses...
Hm. Interesting numbers:

* $1300 total outlay

* 7 times during Glenn Beck episodes (starting at 2:49am)

* 54 times total on 4 networks

* 1.3MM people reached

* 1000+ visitors to ad website

Not sure how it would play out for conversion but cost of acquisition seems high, of course, the branding you get out of a network TV ad probably has its own benefits (especially if your core audience is 18-35 males awake at 3am. uhh.)
Its true that we should look into the root causes of each of these so called "sins" but I don't think what you are saying is particularly likely.

I'll search around for studies, but I would bet its far more likely that these goods are being consumed to take the edge off life (as this article suggests).

Indeed, a recent field study in Sri Lanka reveals that more than 10 percent of poor male respondents regularly spend their entire incomes on alcohol.

Certainly the medicinal argument can't be made here. Even though alcohol kills germs, consuming it in large amounts produce a net harm on your health. If 10% of males are spending their entire income on alcohol, then its likely that a large portion of them are spending a large portion of their income on alcohol, so much that they are doing more harm to their bodies than good.

In addition, the fact that they spend money on festivals argues that they are doing things to take the edge off life and not doing this for medicinal purposes.

In part, I imagine this article is a reaction to a lot of people discussing how innovative the poor are and saying "if we could just give them a chance, they'll pull themselves out of poverty." This, really, is the basis of the microfinance industry. To some degree, its true. Poor villagers in India often are often engaged in a large number of (informal) financial transaction at any time. They have various loans with various money lenders, things they borrowed from neighbors, self help groups, etc... all of which they keep track of without a pen and paper (much less a computer). In addition, there are many instances of well-intentioned people getting things wrong. (One example is that many MFIs required that their loans be used on profit-making activities, and not refinancing loans to money lenders. This is foolish because the loans to money lenders are often at a higher rate and just refinancing that loan would help them immensely as well as almost guaranteeing the repayment of the micro loan). However, its not clear to me that this translates to the ability to quickly jump into the formal economy without protection. This projection is necessary and thats what the article is arguing for.

In the end though, I do agree with something you are saying. Its critical that the entire problem be approached, not just the lack of money. This approach is hard to sell because it is slower and doesn't produce a magic bullet/catch phrase to sell, but its probably the only way to make a proper dent in the problem. This is why government intervention is critical. Even if this is a profitable exercise, it would be a very long term investment with uncertain returns, something that a profit driven enterprise is unlikely to take on and something that NGOs aren't big or coordinated enough to solve[1].

[1] Since this website attracts a lot of entrepreneurs, I suggest that there is a startup idea hidden here. I don't know how this would work, but if anyone has ideas, I say we discuss them.