skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Actually, I think he means more than that.

For example, Scoble's new UI has more of an Apple/BMW/Pixar look; less of a DrudgeReport look. Although simple, Scoble's blog has a high-end 'sheen' to it that the DrudgeReport lacks completely.

Although both are simple, the DruegeReport has more of a bargain-basement look and the author is recommending this sort of look.
I'm a coder and I have an iPad.

I haven't yet used my iPad for coding. I don't think I will. I do have a really great ssh/vpn app for the iPhone/iPad, so in a pinch, I can get to my servers and make a fix or check a log file. But other than that, I don't expect to use my iPad for coding. I'm just too bound to emacs and a keyboard to see it being a reasonable use of the iPad.

However, for almost everything else, I've been using and preferring the iPad. I had already relegated all RSS feed reading, Twitter and Facebook (anything that could distract me from coding) to my iPhone. Now using the iPad, I'm even more efficient with my time and the experience is more enjoyable. And as a general entertainment device, the iPad wins across my entire family: my wife and 5 year old daughter both love it.

All that said, there are definitely some areas in which I feel the iPad is deficient. I expect these to be resolved over time, but it's something to consider:

- Google Docs just doesn't work on the iPad. Considering how much I use Google Docs, this is a major blow to the usefulness of the iPad.

- The email client is weak. If you get a large amount of email or are on several mailing lists, then you'll still fallback on using some other web or desktop email client. I really wish I could use the iPad as my main email device, but its just not suitable yet.

- GMail for the iPad is actually decent except for one bug: you can't properly scroll when composing long emails that span one vertical screen space. Again, this just makes GMail useless on occasion.

- Some multitasking would be great. Honestly, I like the focus you get when you're dealing with one app at a time. But I would really like to be always signed into Skype and GTalk. I would like to be able to load more than one web page at a time and switch between them without requiring them to reload (ok, that's more a memory problem than a multitasking problem).

Also, I got the wifi-only version thinking I wouldn't really want or need the 3G version. Now I would strongly recommend the 3G version if you can afford it. The iPad is just so much more mobile than a laptop that I take it everywhere if I can. The battery life is amazingly great for a device like this. So having access everywhere would make the iPad even better.
Yeah, whether or not you agree with Hayek, he is obviously a smart guy who has no problem articulating where he stands on an issue. I wonder if it's a generational difference. My grand parents for example have no problem telling you what they think and their reasoning on why.
Martin Fowler's paper on Continuous Integration
Maybe they're taking the emacs approach to version numbers.
Another Groupon experience -- Groupon overwhelms Boston helicopter training school: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2010/03/19/groupon-market...

EDIT: I should add that this is a blog post written by someone heavily involved in their operations, so there's a reasonable amount of detail.
Ah, those were the days. I remember "Talking Moose" as well. Having a computer that insults you is an underrated pleasure these days. =)
Google exec: Microsoft too far behind in cloud apps
A quick peak at 25% as soon as I hover and that’s it (three year old 15" MBP). Seems kinda tolerable.
Do you have a way to shorten that link up some?

I'm using Joomla, so I don't have much control over the content of the activation emails. I could go and probe to see which part of the code sends these emails and change it to something shorter.

Or maybe, I'll see if I can stop requiring activation altogether. Maybe this will open me up to spambots, but for now, since I'm just getting started, I think I should remove all barriers to adoption.
Maybe; I can't help thinking, though, that the underwhelming response to Wave compared to that of Etherpad (which was a brilliant idea) is telling.

Obviously I'm eager to see what they've been working on - but Im not sure they can save Wave.
Many python libraries have a C component which makes them a no go when it comes to app engine. Two big examples are image manipulation and numeric and scientific computation. The pure java libraries in these categories are much faster and more complete than the pure python libraries.
This quote,

"Reason: Is Britain irrevocably on the road to serfdom?

Hayek: No, not irrevocably. That's one of the misunderstandings. The Road to Selfdom was meant to be a warning: "Unless you mend your ways, you ll go to the devil." And you can always mend your ways.

Reason: What policy measures are currently possible to reverse the trend in Britain?

Hayek: So long as you give one body of organized interests, namely the trade unions, specific powers to use force to get a larger share of the market, then the market will not function. And this is supported by the public because of the historic belief that in past the trade unions have done so much to raise the standard of living of the poor that you must be kind to them. So long as this view is prevalent, I don't believe there is any hope. But you can induce change. We must now put our hope in a change of attitude.

I'm afraid many of my British friends still believe, as Keynes believed, that the existing moral convictions of the English would protect them against such a fate. This is non- sense. The character of a people is as much made by the institutions as the institutions are made by the character of the people. The present British institutions contribute everything to change the British character. You cannot rely on an inherent "British character" saving the British people from their fate. But you must create institutions in which the old kinds of attitudes will be revived which are rapidly disappearing under the present system.",

on the (historically) current effect of unions is priceless.
It's very much Adam Lisagor in this video. Funnily enough, Cameron Kenley Hunt designed Adam's website.

If you don't trust me, trust Gruber. http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/11/square
Now that... is hilarious!
I would wonder if you really need people to activate their account that early in the process

Yeah, I agree. I'll see if I can remove the requirement to activate.

EDIT: Done!
One important thing to consider before going down that route -- the font metrics in the Canvas API are extremely impoverished, so it will be very difficult to do much more than a simple text editor. In particular, there's no support for constraints, wrapping, etc. You can only ask for the width of a given string. This is particularly nasty if you want to do, e.g., asian languages that are hard to segment. The browser desperately needs real font metrics, segmentation, etc.
From the comments it says you should switch -webkit to -moz for Firefox, I believe.
I believe they're aiming for November 2010, but knowing Mozilla, this means June 2011.
Half?! That is huge, I don't understand how that could be a good deal for the people using Groupon, and a very good opportunity for a competitor.
All your repliers seem to forget that Jython exists and can be run on the app engine as well, putting Jython on par with Clojure in terms of available Java libraries.
That's a pretty cool idea. However, I don't have any designers following me on Twitter so how would the right people hear about this?
I didn't say sub-pixel rendering. I said sub-pixel positioning. Can characters be placed at sub-pixel boundaries instead of whole-pixel ones?
From http://beltzner.ca/mike/2010/05/10/firefox-4-fast-powerful-a...

Oct-Nov. Or if it slips, January. (Taking the past into account, January.)

Although lots of betas will be available in June. The nightlies are surprisingly stable now, so I plan to start using the beta once it's out.
16 of the Best Free Linux Game Engines (Part 2 of 2)
Please, the needs of a multi-lingual Asian government is vastly different from, what is popularly construed, the popular choice.

For e.g. Harfbuzz - the unified text layout engine for Linux. The competing technology is SIL-Graphite, which supports Smartfonts and compound alphabets. So what does Harfbuzz say ?

For established scripts though, there is not much reason to prefer Graphite over OpenType.

I am Indian and support this exercise - maybe 90% of it will be waste, maybe 10% wont be. Maybe finally we will have a Linux Desktop Summit in India, which is potentially the biggest market for open source software.
If Divvyshot had held out another couple months, I feel like there would have been a major opportunity to expand their services into a more private style FB. The opportunity would have been ripe in these past couple months of FB announcements/changes/infringements. I personally use FB mainly to see photos of my close friends. I might occasionally send a message or write a wall-post, but for the most part, I use gchat, email, texting, and phone as my main methods of communication. Granted, I'm not a FB power user, but I also think these last couple months have made even the power users reexamine how they use FB.
I found the beta to be precisely the opposite: it improved a number of functional factors, but aesthetically, the design is a step backwards.

For example, the functional separation of the content tabs (article, discussion) from the tabs representing what you're doing with that content (read, edit, view history) is a good improvement. But the design used to implement that is terrible.

There's no boundary between the top of each tab and the space above it, making it difficult to recognize the tabs as a tab interface at all - it looks like loose text in the middle of some whitespace. And there's no design element that represents the hierarchy of content - the read, edit, and history tabs are now on the right side of the screen, but how would a new user know they are subordinate to the article and discussion respectively?

I think Wikipedia misstepped here. They should have gradually introduced each new design element and proven that it could fit successfully into the structure of the site before building further on the innovations. Releasing an entire top-down redesign all at once is going to create a lot of unnecessary disruption.
Care to share a few of your credit card numbers?
NetBeans with Enclojure is probably the best option for those who do not already know Emacs (or Counterclockwise if you are already in the Eclipse ecosystem.) I use Emacs for Erlang and Python coding, but for some reason the swank-clojure setup never really clicked for me. I keep at it and I am sure at some point I will not think that my Clojure dev environment is not more of a hinderance than a help, but if you are not already using Emacs I would probably suggest you start off by looking at the list here: http://www.bestinclass.dk/index.php/2010/03/clojure-ides-the...
Been talking to people working with node.js and the general vibe is 'it rocks'. Although, there is a lot of breakage it's for the best.
Ask HN: Can we bold the original poster's username in comments?
I find I'm always scrolling to the top of a submission to see who the original poster is. It would be useful to bold (or italicize?) the original poster's username in the comments. This would be simple to implement, and give a bit more clarity to the comment digressions.
Blanket assertions about socialism and capitalism are fundamentally silly.

Nobody thinks it would be efficient to privatize the federal highway system and turn everything into a toll road.

I've been biking recently, but I used to take the subway. That's socialist. Taking a cab would be capitalist. Did I care? Not really.

Normal market goods are almost always better served by private markets. They may need to be regulated if the create significant externalities or pose risk to the economy at large.

The metric should be common sense, not -isms. When picking a software platform, I pick the one best suited to the job at hand. I'd like to see some of these so-called big policy thinkers apply the same principle.
First of all NoSQL isn't really that hard and the performance gains are indisputable.

For a bootstrapped startup nosql makes total sense b/c you get much more performance for your dollar.

Sure you can go the vanilla PHP/MySql or Django/Postgres route if you want to build your prototype but you will be in a bad position if your system can't scale with demand.

I would build the prototype first in your favorite framework/setup.. If it has market potential after some initial private beta testing I'd definitely go the nosql route.
I've wanted to start a business that does this but with nightclubs and SMS. Good vertical and clear exit (sell to groupon, of course!) Anyone game?
If I were in your shoes, I would leave the activation the way it is now.

Then I'd pick a few people who registered and never activated and send them a personal email asking if they had difficulties activating their account or if they decided they weren't interested in the system. If you decide to do this, be cautious in your phrasing or you may not get a response. You may get some good feedback from doing it though - and then you'll be able to make a fact-based decision instead of a bunch of guessing.
You're right, it does. But in fairness, it's a demo for webkit browsers. I'm guessing the author wasn't too concerned for IE.

If the demo page was something super simple like:

#links{
-webkit-transition-duration: 0.5s;
}
#links:hover {
color: red;
}

Super simple and it wouldn't break anything.

Basically, just because the author didn't consider IE users on a Webkit demo doesn't mean CSS3 is broken (or doesn't degrade properly.)
Yeah, Firefox 3.6 slipped a whole... two months.
Yeah, the connotation has certainly drifted from the technical source of the term, taking on the weight of a whole interaction style. Imho, OS's should put controls on applications like mixers have on channels: "mute" and "solo".

A bit off topic, the application of such technical terms to other things, like people, has a bit of fascination to me. Mostly because so much of how we get along in the world and our perceptions/reasoning in general are shaped by the vocabulary we adopt to describe. Anger as heat, a person builds a head of steam, blows their top. Did the experience of anger change when that metaphor took hold? Now people might multitask whereas before they might have thought of it as juggling tasks. The first seems so much more astute; the second not like something to be done with anything important. Ok, I'm seriously procrastinating, now... sorry.
Ronaldo Girls list of 28 girlfriend’s sexy pics
It's a little hacky but you can search for the username + "highlight all" in Firefox and Chrome as a workaround.
No. It hurts the advertiser. Send an email to the website saying how much you appreciate what they do. That's worth a lot more than $0.30.
As I said before, the Lunar Module [1] is awesome. It can dock. It can land two people on the moon. It can support them on the surface of the freaking Moon for longer than three days. It’s a moon rock transporter and impromptu TV studio. It can freaking ascend again. And in this case the descent engine could be used for necessary course corrections [2]. Is there anything this truly marvelous piece of technology can’t do? :)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Lunar_Module

[2] http://www.universetoday.com/2010/04/13/13-things-that-saved...
That's the official title, but I would rather have entered "How Google views the news industry". There's very little in this piece about saving it, and in my opinion Google (as described in the article) is missing a few important points on the monetization picture:

1) Relatively few local businesses are savvy enough or sufficiently interested in online display advertising, even though Google (and Facebook, ESPN, etc.) have tried their darndest to make it easy for them. The only way most newspapers and other local publications have been able to sign up local businesses for local print campaigns is by employing boots on the ground to cold call and visit in person these companies, and pressure them into buying ads.

2) There is a huge oversupply of online information sources for people to turn to, including news sources from all over the world, company websites, social networks, forums, etc. The increase in the amount of available pages on which to serve ads, combined with the decreased amount of time that people will spend on news sites, will greatly reduce the price of news pages that contain display advertising. The article did not address this fundamental problem with the online news industry going forward.

One other thing: Eric Schmidt was quoted as saying, In the future model, you’ll have subscriptions to information sources that will have advertisements embedded in them, like a newspaper. You’ll just leave out the print part. I am quite sure that this will happen.

To me, this seems like a 1990s vision of the future of news -- basically duplicate online what newspapers are doing in print. While this is already happening, it's not working. Considering the two points listed above and the many other online trends working against the news industry, I don't think the industry will shift to a successful version of the vision described by Schmidt.
You're right. Though I could do what Google is doing. They're not doing direct font-on-Canvas, which would be pretty cool actually. They're creating/editing divs/spans on the fly. I already do that with textareas but the problem is textareas work differently on different browsers where different events get fired for similar actions. So technically, I'm doing almost the same thing they're doing at a basic level (pressing enter in middle of a sentence creates a new textarea below the current one and move the text after the cursor into the new textarea).

What I was wondering if I should do or not is create my own cursor management. The benefit of that will be better control over copy-paste, drag-drop etc. I am trying to build an undo system for Bulletxt and in some browsers, you can just drag-drop text in the same text-area without firing any keypress/up/down events. Then I have to hook on to the onupdated/onchanged events which may not offer enough granularity if you make multiple drag-drop actions. Additionally if you drag text from one textarea and drop it into the other, I can't always tell what the source was in all the browsers. Writing my own layout-engine would definitely solve that issue. Plus undo would be very easy because every mouse-click/keyboard would be an event that can be undone.
A new direction for homebrew console hackers?
Wow, cool. That was fast. Hopefully you'll get an increase in activity.
Sort of.

If you were cognizant enough to "sniff out bargains," and you placed an order to buy, odds are you didn't get filled. In fact, I call BS on anyone that said they "bought on the dip" because it happened so quickly even if you put a market order in on your Etrade platform (nearly all retail brokerages locked up BTW) you wouldn't get the price you wanted. The structural flaw existed on both sides of the market.

Everyone's focusing on the lack of bids on the way down, but there were lack of offers on the way up as well. I would've expected more volume on a capitulative move like that.
Wait, people who get paid to make iPad apps like the iPad? No way! Next you're going to tell me that Senators who get campaign funding from Con Agra generally vote in favor of agricultural subsidies.
Thanks for the feedback - you're right, the TOS prohibition was overly restrictive, we've removed the deep-linking clause.
As far as attribute comparison, we are constantly trying to add more attribute data into our system, but we're still lacking in that department. We do have some data on sample rates for adcs though:
http://octopart.com/partbrowser#search/requestData&start...

(this link is to our new partbrowser interface - we've been working on designing a new interface specifically with engineers in mind)

If you have any other suggestions or ideas, definitely let us know.
Android Rising - ESR
Tell HN: take a moment and check your backups today
do yourself a favor and take some time out today to check your backups. make sure they've been running properly, try doing a test restore of some crucial piece of data to a test machine. time it, see how long it takes and whether you have all of the proper recovery steps documented.

i fat-fingered a database change and had to restore a full table of data from a recent backup. if i didn't have working daily, redundant backups (that is, doing a full table dump of each table in each database on each server, not just backing up the raw mysql binary files) i would have really been screwed.
Scholarships.
> Maybe the best example are the gloves that Downey wore--which were no thicker than a dime, and could be worn for hours without getting so hot that the dude needed some Colombian Marching Powder to take the edge off

Really?
This has happened to me on more occasions that I can count:

- click on something

- oh, I have to register. Grumble.

- register

- confirmation email isn't in my inbox when I check

- refresh a few times. Nope, still not there

- forget about the site
Mozilla Rallies Fans with Firefox 4 Plans
Yeah, but not with PayPal's "Website Payments Pro". It does usually take 2-3 days, but it's really quite painless. It certainly doesn't require a credit check.

PayPal probably already has an App too, so all they need is to give you is a reader.
Pre-Columbian Americas enjoyed water pressure
No, no, no. I don't, and you shouldn't.

A significant fraction of my income comes from Google Adsense, so this behavior would benefit me. However, I'm far more interested in the long-term health of the online advertising ecosystem, and I don't want it distorted by "click-tipping" at the advertiser's expense.

When I check my stats, I want to be confident that I've earned my money by delivering value to my advertisers -- not because a handful of well-meaning visitors decided to arbitrarily divert a few pennies from the advertiser's bank account to my own.

On the other hand, if an ad on my site is genuinely interesting to you, go ahead. After all, that's the whole point.
I actually thought about dropping my AMEX number just for giggles, but intentionally exposing it would probably invalidate their guarantee.
Old age/metabolic dmg reseach: benefits 99% of all humans on earth.
8 websites you need to stop building
This Space Almost Intentionally Left Blank.
Udemy Launches Virtual Learning Academy
The takeaway from the email study is not that ugliness converts.

Versions A and C have other navigation/messaging in the spotlight. Version B has the fewest distractions.

Poor illustration of the point, if you ask me.

This is like assuming your users are stupid. Strive for accessibility and ease of use, not ugliness.
Let's not forget JRuby. Java might be stalled but the JVM is really starting to show a lot more value.
the odds are pretty similar though
See also Phil Greenspun's experience: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2010/03/19/groupon-market...

"Starting just after 6 am, Groupon sent out emails to its roughly 200,000 Boston subscribers. I knew that there might be a problem when I checked a few minutes after receiving my email (I am a subscriber). They'd already sold 30. By 11:00 am, they'd sold more than 2000. We finally had to beg them to shut it down at 2600 (we could have set a limit initially but didn’t think to)."
Cleaning iPhone screens, 62 Chinese workers poisoned
Indeed. That was quite a non-sequitur in the middle of what was a pretty cool tech article.
I've contacted about 10 people off Sortflio. Of course the ones I like are probably the same ones that most other people like and therefore they are super busy.

Good idea on the mockup though, I should do that.
All you need are 1,000 true fans
I did! Let me know what you think.