skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Talk to pet lovers and see what they need.
I have a dog and here are some of my issues... what is the best type of dog/pet insurance out there? What is the best type of dog food out there? Where can I get a toy my dog won't destroy in 2 hours? Where are some of the best places to take my dog around Boston? Am not looking - but is there a place for pet owners to meet other single pet owners? Joel Spolsky mentioned in his mixergy interview that he wanted to create versions of stackoverflow...
I expected Google to buy them up. StackOverflow really has become a destination for answers, especially after all the negative goodwill that Experts Exchange and to a smaller degree IT Toolbox have built up by creating barriers to viewing answers.
http://nsl.com/ (start with the "Tools" heading and go down).

A spreadsheet that works in 2 lines, and one that's significantly nontrivial in 20. A database that works in 14 lines. A chat server. a 15-puzzle game. Eliza. A simplifier for algebraic expressions.

All of them in extremely concise code, that you are going to ignore with a SEP field.

You're welcome.
Not a red flag, given Joel's history and experience. Now he can optimize for growth and opportunity cost as opposed to cash flow.
In general, you will find that a very small fraction of your user base constitutes a huge portion of support requests. A fraction of this fraction has entitlement issues and simultaneously believes you are trying to cheat them (dimestore psychology: because they know they'd cheat you if they could get away with it). Those are pathological users.

I have repeatedly found personally, and talked to other software developers, that increasing your price drives pathological users away and decreasing your price (particularly dramatically decreasing your price) draws them in like flies.

I do not think it is obviously true that selling 8 games for, e.g., $1 is better than not having that sale. If folks offered me the option of participating in a similar deal, I would decline. In addition to customers paying essentially nothing but requiring disproportionate support, I would be worried about auto-commoditizing my software offering. Why pay $30 when I've publicly demonstrated that I consider it to be worth less than a buck?

On a related topic: dangrover's comments about participating in Macheist are a great read, regardless of your feelings on the matter.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=945869
A Lost iPhone Shows Apple’s Churlish Side
Use kinetic energy to recharge your phone while you walk - $150
The thing is that by making the prices so low (as low as one feels comfortable paying for them), they increase their sales number by much thus helping counter the low price.

Without this event there would be close to no sales since some of these are pretty old games. 40$ * 10 sales is much worst than 2$ * 1000 sales.

The iPhone app store runs on the same idea.

Jeff Atwood also wrote an article about that : http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/08/software-pricing-ar...
Well I just purchased it for $10 and I already own 2 of the games. And the other's I never would have considered buying if it wasn't for this bundle.

And I'm pleasantly surprised with gish so far; already checking out the developer's site to see what else that have on offer.

Other people might be paying that average and are only interested in 1 or 2 of the games in the bundle.

You can't just say a blanket "5 games or $1.72 is disgusting".
Whoa, I praise your deep knowledge of cosmology, anyway, to my question:

> "So, however big the Universe actually is, it's bigger than the OU, which means that the stuff cosmologists are debating about is space that cannot, even in principle, ever be observed"

What if we learn how to make better neutrino telescopes, them how much of the Unobservable Universe could we see? Can you recommend a paper about this?
http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200608/light_text_on_d...

This or another post proposed the hypothesis low-contrast, small text etc may look better during the design stage. Remember, the designer is probably working with dummy "lorem ipsum" text. Low contrast will highlight the designers contributions (color scheme, placement of info) and [save him/her the pain of reading the dummy text :)].
Yes! And I liked it. I'm don't 100% agree with them, but I like people/companies capable of making strong statements like that.
Many of those apps are subject to the same licensing deals as music, movies, etc. For instance, if you're working on a licensed game, you have territory issues.

Furthermore, prices are set per-region.

Furthermore, sales tax etc. works differently in different countries. It's easy enough to flip a switch and sell the apps, but it does take time to get the legal infrastructure in place that actually enables you to do it.
Internet and network connectivity is achieved through the device's docking station (Ethernet 10/100 and 802.11b/g).

No free-range internet? That's disappointing.
That's correct. And the iPad is just a tablet notebook like the one from Microsoft in 2000.

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2000/nov00/11-13...

And the iPhone is really just a cleaned up smart phone.

StackOverFlow took an old idea, cleaned it up and made a better product. Seems pretty simple after the fact.

Getting the small things right in a product really makes a big difference. StackOverFlow isn't perfect (and neither was the iPhone or iPad) but they got a good minimal viable product and now they're off to the races.
I'm also extremely happy that it will be released on OSX too. I hope this is part of a new trend now that Macs are selling better than a few years ago (and the Intel hardware can't hurt).
Argh, that's insidious!!! Editors should change out the actual link... can they do that?
Our society is built on the backs of the less fortunate. We live in a country we've taken from weaker humans, we feed animals in factories until we're ready to kill them because it's cheaper than treating them humanely. We get our energy from coal mines where hundreds of thousands of workers have died and we stand by as genocides and famines wipe out entire regions. We buy products made by children who work all day every day in factories.

Given the circumstances, cruel experiments on animals (or even humans) to speed up scientific progress (and therefore welfare) looks like a really good deal to me.

Victims of science are just another statistic.
I think you'd be justified in doing a refund-only support model here. Game doesn't work on your machine? Happy to give a refund!
I'm really curious about how CBR observations solved the question related to universe size.

Also, then, for me this makes me wonder: is then the big bang simply the origin of the null cone over whose event horizon we can't see? Clearly this is a Minkowski spacetime paradigm, and I have no idea where that stands in terms of general favor.

Also: further reading? I'm guessing "The large scale structure of space-time" is a bit dated ;)
Maybe they should combine the old Shareware model with this one. And make it all very easy. Like you download the full game and in the end of the first level, this payment stuff pops up where you can just pay whatever you want to proceed (whatever you think it is worth).

The point is, I really don't know what these games are about and how much they are worth.
Getting a 500... Cache is here: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:n5nvfo7...
If More Businesses Operated Like Goldman Sachs (comic)
You are arguing with a strawman. Nothing in the article mentioned the Sherman Act or said that Apple is a monopoly.
If you think that the FTC and DOJ exist solely to enforce that one law, you are incorrect.
...such as syntactic shortcuts for complicated side effects.

I can think of a couple of examples where I've done such things in lisp (mostly elisp, sometimes Clojure), but I don't see a good reason why I couldn't do them in Haskell. In fact, a function f: a -> M d (with M = IO, Writer or State if you want side effects) almost serves the same purpose: it turns a value into a set of actions to perform.

I'm really curious, could you give an example of such a task/macro?

(Note: I'm not trying to engage in a language war, I'm honestly curious. If I'm treating Haskell as Blub, I'd like to know about it.)
O'Reilly says he sometimes wonders what would have happened if he had raised venture capital and given his company a chance to get really big. But he sounds more amused by this question than truly troubled by it. "Money is like gasoline during a road trip," he says. "You don't want to run out of gas on your trip, but you're not doing a tour of gas stations. You have to pay attention to money, but it shouldn't be about the money."
That, or you could ensure that your blog is actually readable. I'd prefer the latter :)
PHP. The !== checks for equality and for type. For example, it is true in PHP that 0 == false, but it is also true that 0 !== false.
"Why pay $30 when I've publicly demonstrated that I consider it to be worth less than a buck?"

I think that's where the charity comes in. I see a generous indie developer giving to a good cause, not one admitting their goods are worthless.

In general I see what you're saying.
Yeah, that's the right answer. We just stepped out to grab lunch, were talking about your idea, and decided to basically build what you're suggesting here in this second message.

If you want us to let you know when we have something together (probably less than a week), my email is in my profile, shoot me a note, if you'd like.
Yes, I am. 5.0.342.9 beta for windows

edit: Actually now I'm using 5.0.375.29 beta (I just upgraded)

and it's still pretty much working the same way
I upvoted you, but I'm not entirely convinced. The creators of this site seem to know what they are doing: they told the "retail" price of the bundle in the second paragraph, then subtly suggested reasonable price points (the lowest being $10) in the form. Maybe they are expecting the $1 to $5 crowd to pay something closer to the average?
I can think of at least one very important use case for 3G enabled iPads - business travelers.

Maybe it's different in the US, but here in Europe I often find myself in hotels without wifi - or with wifi available only in the lobby. The fact that I have my iPhone with me at these times has been very useful, to say the least! I would pay over the monthly fee without hesitating when I find myself in that situation, even though when I'm in my normal routine I can see the OP's point that wifi is normally enough. The 3G option is for when it isn't enough, which is why it's so handy to have as a pay-as-you-use option.
They have one of those tamper seals over the case screws, so just by opening the case to your Xbox you are voiding your warranty.

The way I understand it is this: Softmodding might not void your warranty, but it might as well, because if your hardware ever breaks and needs repair, you're not going to be able to "put it back the way it was" before taking it into the shop. So, you take it in, they fix your Xbox, boot it, see a hacked dashboard, and say "you modded it so we're going to bill you for the repair."
It's a little better for the developers than that... like $1.23 per game:

"By default, the amount is split equally between the seven participants (including Child's Play and EFF), but you can tweak the split any way you'd like."
I always see this as a sign of how rich we are. How else could we have the opportunity to be so self-indulgent?

Things we take for granted such as paved streets or cars are tremendously expensive. San Jose (Costa Rica) has one 4-lane US-style highway that goes through town for a few miles, then it turns into a 2-lane concrete and eventually dirt road. And that's a healthy country with a decent-sized middle class.

I actually like to see these kinds of experiments since the fact that they exist means our society still has wealth and opportunity. Just don't confuse them with actual sacrifice.
Sounds like a very pessimistic view geared towards drones working in cube-farms for Corporation, Inc.
The guy forgot to caveat his article.

I would suggest that anyone on the cusp of resigning consult their actual employment contract before resigning without notice.

Most employment contracts have a clause related to employee notice.
Ah, you do get it, I apologize for suggesting otherwise. Statistically, my odds were good, because you're right, and virtually nobody does it right. (I claim a Bayesian defense!)

Unfortunately, I don't know how to do any better. There's a leap to even abstractly understanding 4+ dimensions and a lot of people simply won't make it. Without that you've "already lost" regardless of how clever your metaphor is.
Can anyone comment on technical requirements (at least of the beta, which should give a good idea for the final game)?

Any idea how it would run on a 2008 Mac Pro with the base ATI GPU (2600 HD iirc)?
Lugaru is reminiscent (at least to me) of the Redwall books. It has awesome combat and you shouldn't miss it.

Aquaria is an amazing adventure game that is somewhat reminiscent of Metroid in how you explore the environments. The environments are beautiful and the game play is fun.

Penumbra Overture is a horror game that has scared me more than any other horror game I have played. It has an incredible atmosphere and is definitely worth the play through. The game ends on a cliffhanger, but the sequel is even better than the original, so I would recommend getting both.
Review: Balsamiq Mockups
From Zero to a Million Users - Dropbox and Xobni Lessons Learned
Absolutely, I agree with you 100%.

It is not the counter-offer which counts, that in my book is too late. It is the end-of-year reward which should be AUTOMATICALLY adjusted per inflation plus at least a 5% increase if you overperformed. So I always expect a 10% incease WITHOUT asking for it, or else I'll move on.

On my side, I always overperform more than 10% so I deserve what I expect. The employer? not much, they don't care. They will never care. Their book forbids 10% increase for every employee.

Key point, not EVERY employee deserves 10% increase. Only overperformers. HR guys need to understand that and learn to differentiate and reward accordingly, which they don't. They are also collecting their winnings every month.

ps. I am not talking about food a la carte, or gym towels. I am talking about money and vacation time. Everything else is a welcomed addition to the perks.
> without first making reasonable and just efforts to find the owner and to restore the property to him

See, the problem is that according to the law you quoted simply picking up and taking the lost phone home is itself not equivalent to theft. You must prove that no "reasonable and just efforts" were made. That paragraph doesn't even say all reasonable and just efforts or even that the most reasonable and just efforts (such as returning it to the beer garden) must be made. Only that some reasonable and just effort must be made. It doesn't even define success as a test for determining if an effort was reasonable and just. Calling and contacting Apple when you realize you have a prototype that has been deactivated remotely so you cannot identify the user is reasonable. The law does not support the blanket assertion that all lost property is stolen. It's just more nuanced than you want to believe. Sorry your absolutism doesn't jive with reality.

You seem to think that language is there to protect owners of lost property. In reality it's there to protect finders of lost property i.e. business owners so that they can dispose of abandoned junk.
This is free advertisement for indie developers, who have a very hard time getting publicity. Not only does it pay off in the short term (many of these are users who I can promise you would never have bought these games for anything more), it also pays off for the companies in the future. Wolfire, the creator of Lugaru, is currently working on the sequel, Overgrowth, which they have been funding exclusively by using preorders of the game. If someone buys Lugaru here and enjoys it, they may just preorder Overgrowth, which will net them more money.

It's the same with Frictional Games (creators of Penumbra) and the game that they're funding through preorders, Amnesia.
What is so wrong about body odour? I'm sure there must have been a time, not too long ago, when people smelled like people.

Sometimes, I don't shower for 3-4 days. You don't sweat that much if you are hacking away at a keyboard for 12 hours a day.

I don't see how showering ever day is hygienic. You are stripping your skin and hair of natural oils,bacteria and whatnot. Then you have to use more substances to fight the negative effects of the above. On top of that, you spray yourself with long-lasting synthetic smells or things that stop your armpits from sweating.

I shower every other day, more or less. I don't use deodorants. I don't use colognes, except on rare occasions. Haven't had any complaints from other people.
Embed individual Tweets on your blog
I dont know what you count as evidence but here are two eminent authorities speaking about related topics -
Turing award winner Barbara Liskov -
http://www.infoq.com/presentations/liskov-power-of-abstracti... (Syntactic abstraction related talk starts at minute 17).

Heres what Dijkstra has to say about something that is tangentially related (he is talking about the importance of read time comprehensibility of code).
"My second remark is that our intellectual powers are rather geared to master static relations and that our
powers to visualize processes evolving in time are relatively poorly developed. For that reason we
should do (as wise programmers aware of our limitations) our utmost to shorten the conceptual gap
between the static program and the dynamic process, to make the correspondence between the program
(spread out in text space) and the process (spread out in time) as trivial as possible."
This is from the influential GOTO considered harmful paper.
Sounds like an interesting side project. How can I contact you about it? I work with a number of independent musicians who might be interested in exactly that. Shoot me an email if you'd like--address is in my profile.
Replace OpenOffice.org with Zoho Webapps in Ubuntu 10.04
"You may want to give two week's notice, but from a security standpoint, you are out the door that day. Locks are changed. Passwords and IDs are terminated so you should have no access to files or other confidential information. That is the reality of today's workplace."

This policy always mystified me. If you've decided to leave and have decided to do something malicious, you would have done it before telling your employer. By the time you tell them, it's too late.
The FCC approval is based on lab-testing of a specific hardware and firmware configuration. They test it in the lab to make sure it doesn't step on other licensee's frequencies.

Sometimes, just by putting a different antenna and hardware configuration on the same radio, you can cause interference, harmonics, etc, that were not present on a past model. This is why every new model of iPhone/iPad needs FCC approval before it can be sold to the public.

Telling the general public that they can load whatever firmware they want on their radio ignores the fact that these radios have highly complex software algorithms affecting frequency hopping, collision detection, etc. It would be like saying "anyone on our network can modify their Ethernet firmware" and then wondering why someone took down the entire LAN because their custom firmware did a broadcast storm.
They have some more small little artsy videos they did for Chrome's features, which I've never seen before:
http://www.google.com/chrome/intl/en/features_mac.html
I think there's one other important lisp feature that hasn't been widely adopted: compile-time metaprogramming. A lot of lisp macro use boils down "allow developer to generate lots of new code based on tiny fragments of code he writes." The Python community has adopted this to good effect, but the Java/C++ community really hasn't. The funny thing is, the need for good code generation doesn't go away simply because the language provides no facilities for it. That's why C++'s broken template system is so often abused to provide compile-time metaprogramming. And that's why Java added annotation factory support. The preferred use for annotation factories is to register a factory class that the compiler will call when compiling code that uses your annotation. Your factory can then access a special compile time API that allows it to create new Java source files based on the AST that the compiler feeds it. More sketchily, your factory can modify the AST in place. This is an insanely baroque way of getting compile time metaprogramming but it solves a real problem.
Did this guy just paraphrase the RFC? It's a lot of work, but if it gets you on HN...
I've bricked hardware devices by flashing them with a bad ROM BIOS. I've bricked PC motherboards by having a flash fail halfway through. I've overclocked graphics cards by loading custom firmware on them, which caused permanent damage due to overheating.

Software mistakes cannot always be fixed.

I love modding my computers, consoles, smartphones, and various electronic devices, but I do so full well knowing that if I fuck up, it's my fault and not Apple's.

Sure, an iPhone is usually recoverable, but if for some reason it isn't, I take full responsibility and don't expect Apple to provide me with another guinea pig free of charge.
No mention of non-ASCII characters at all? Punycode in the host name may still be uncommon, but passing non-ASCII in the query is important. There is also nothing about the encoding of space as + rather than %20 that happens a lot.
I have found that while I mostly understand C++ as a language and respect it for what it tries to accomplish, the development environments are absolutely atrocious in many ways, and I spend more time fighting them than writing code. This has made me conclude that even though I could in theory program in C++, it is waste of human resources to do so with the current generation of development tools.
10 Essential Tech Stories You Might Have Missed
Keeping up with what’s going on can be tough, especially in an industry that is changing rapidly. I know that’s it’s something I struggle with, so this little bit is my way of trying to keep myself abreast of the mobile space, and hopefully my wading through hundreds of articles every week can help you get perspective without putting in quite as much time. Here are the top 10 mobile industry news items from last week as I see them.
not sure what the base ATI GPU then was, but I know the GeForce 7300 GTs in mine have driver issues preventing compatibility.

Forum with mac beta system reqs listing is at http://forums.battle.net/thread.html?topicId=24630623195&...

In general, folks have been able to run much higher graphic settings on windows in bootcamp than on the mac itself.
Designers don't have to use the site, so they probably just try and make it look pretty.

But usability should trump aesthetics. If you're designing a blog, you should design it to be readable. That means a decent font size, no distracting graphics and definitely nothing that moves/blinks/flashes. (I'm biased, I've always preferred reading sites that are "plain." Just text and images only if they actually add value. Some color is ok too)
I find that whenever I'm coming down with some kind of illness or am overly tired my ability to cope with cold showers drops through the floor and my body lets me know this ain't acceptable. Maybe that was it? Or could just be you have lower cold tolerance? Uncontrollable shivering is probably best avoided though!
One thing this guy overlooks is the lack of gps on the wifi iPad. That is a bug omission if you plan to mifi enable your iPad mobile experience and use your iPad for travel.
Sharedy.com: Create Facebook's Status Timeline with Embedly, jQuery and GAE