skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Good point. Does the standard insist on the specified fonts, or are clients allowed to overrule them according to user prefs? If the latter, a fix is just an additional "book default" entry in the fonts menu.

(If the former, that's a lousy standard, right there)
I'm guessing they are not interested in selling to small businesses and professionals; they probably want to sell a high-priced "enterprise version" to corporates and keep it free for the masses. They may possibly make money off the free blogs with some ad network (perhaps they have something cooking there and that's why they don't allow google ads).

</speculation>
For once I agree with Apple's big-brother…ing. iBooks lets you choose a font for the content you're reading, and it'd be an absolute nightmare having content that isn't consistent.
Techniques for non-technical founder to judge quality of contractor programmers
I've been working with a RoR shop for the past 7 months and have been happy so far with the products they have developed for me; I have done all the wire framing and product descriptions and they have done a good job executing in a timely fashion. We use github for all projects. To date we have had a contract relationship. I have been approached by potential investors and I am starting to think about forming a company and hiring this team on a more permanent basis. At this time, I'm trying to get a better sense for the "quality" of their development work and am wondering about techniques that could be effective.

As I know most of the audience here is technical, i'd really appreciate your input.
Wow! nice flash-troll site.

One thing they forgot to mention, that their high-tech troll-site can't handle scrolling with mouse wheel(invented in 1995) when mouse cursor is on the flash content.

One question to these wise-guys: If flash is so damn ubercool and HTML(web) is so obsolete, then why didn't flash replace HTML(web) long ago?
So you want another IE6? That's why we were stuck with an incorrect box model implementation. When they implementation that standard before it was finalized, we got years of broken layouts.
Exactly... People should vote with their wallet. Why should Apple be forced to conform to what the EFF thinks is right? If enough people cared about these issues and stopped buying Apple would take notice, but until that happens this is all noise few will hear.
Why did I read that like a Yakov Smirnoff joke?
middle-click, waited, nothing happened :(

Now how can I open all those demos in new tabs?
I know there is a unity plugin for browser, but the one being used at Google IO was running on NaCl (unless they lied about it), I don't know if it's already available or not to the general public. NaCl is not HTML5 but it's possible that the piss of bytecode is stored into the browser using HTML5 local storage so that you don't need to redownload the whole game every time you use it, just a guess though.
You should try Whatsup. Based on contact list phone numbers - no login exchange required. Very SMS like in nature. The gf and I use it as a SMS replacement and it works well.
In my opinion this is just Microsoft doing some hand waiving to confuse people. IE9 wont work on XP which means a majority of users won't have IE9 with in the next 5 years.

BY doing this Microsoft is able to say "Hey, we are standards compliant, we are the good guys now" and still actually be not standards compliant and prevent inovation on the web. To me this seems like normal Microsoft FUD[1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty_and_doubt
I know there is a unity plugin for browser, but they said at Google IO that it would run on NaCl, I don't know if it's already available or not to the general public. NaCl is not HTML5 but it's possible that the peace of bytecode is stored into the browser using HTML5 local storage so that you don't need to redownload the whole game every time you use it, just a guess though.
Gotta give them some respect for including the Opera 10.60 beta, which lowers their position and which they could have been excused for not doing.

I am really happy that MSFT is finally taking IE seriously.
I think the point is not "Hey, let's replace HTML with Flash!"

It's more of a "stop trying to make this canvas stuff done in HTML sound like it's better than Flash yet."
If that's what people think, then by all means, get all flushing urinals out of our society.

I would readily give the gallon of water from my urinal to my "standard" toilet flush for when I need it.

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Has Apple started suing people for jailbreaking or unlocking their iPhones? The people experimenting with running Android on them?

No?

They don't have to make it _easy_ for you to do anything you want. They can choose what functionality they put in. But they're hardly stopping you from doing whatever you want with the device.
Interestingly, if you add:

Rule 5: Allow them to quit or pause at any time
Rule 6: Allow them to set their own input costs (to "place their own bets")

you have the basic tenets of game design.
I learned long ago to never do family tech support over the phone. Use screensharing -- TeamViewer FTW. Even the most non-technical person can open up a teamviewer session and you can take it from there.
Some notes on how to build a Linux cluster
But surely, someday, there will be a non-phone-carrier wireless networking technology with far greater range than Wi-Fi.

This technology already exists. Here in Japan, emobile sells a "pocket wifi router" that has a 3G data connection built in. They advertise it in conjunction with an iPod touch.

WiMAX is another such technology.
Exactly. It's an increasingly easy choice. I've said all along I think the controversies around the iPhone exist because it challenges so many assumptions people have always made about technology products. The EFF and others seem to be trying to make Apple conform with their views. Is that really choice? Why can't consumers have the choice of a curated/managed platform? There's a fine line here between consumer protection/advocacy and trying to subject ones personal choices onto others.
> "had a torrid time trying to configure"

Was that a hot, parched time or an avid, passionate one? I don't know what fits this context.
Ask HN: App Numbers for a Free App iPhone
I'm trying to evaluate what the worst and best case for a future app could be (knowing where to go is probably best...)

I was wondering what type of numbers a free app should expect after launch.

For instance, what would be the worst numbers (never entering the top 100 of its category?), the average numbers (reaching the top 25 of its category) and the awesome numbers reaching the top 100 of the app store.

No idea if these suggestions are sensible or completely off but I find it very hard to get a sensible estimate (I tried looking around for numbers but most of them are for paid apps)

Thanks for your feedback!
Nobody's suggesting they should perform due diligence on every codec in the world. WebM is the only codec that has any chance of actually becoming universal — that's why they should support it. The next two biggest browsers in the market are already supporting it zealously. If Microsoft really supports Web standards, they need to support WebM.
Apple and Adobe have started a strange comparison war. Too much focus on what you can "make", not enough focus on "why" one direction might be better than the other. I really don't care about HTML5 checkers vs. Flash checkers vs. Java checkers; which is going to make my online experience better today, and more importantly, in the future?
Facebook to become first social networking site to connect 1bn people
Coming from any other source, I'd consider this news. Seeing how it's from Gizmodo though, I'll wait until other people corroborate the story before believing it.
Well, here's one clue from Google Finance's weekly price data: in the three weeks before he sent the memo the price had dropped from $29.407 to $21.063 - a 28% drop. Oddly enough, the 3/23 Friday close of $17 (just after the memo went public) marked the bottom of that stock decline. A month later the stock closed up at $21.55.

Generally speaking, warm fuzzy bosses don't mean spit to a stock's price, while layoffs can sometimes improve it. The perception that a division's managers are ineffectual, however, could hurt a lot. The story that a CEO was starting to kick managerial ass could improve investor's assessment of the company's chances. Certainly the price data supports the argument that the CEO's actions stopped the price erosion.
Velocity 2010: Mobile Web Performance
The scrolling works just fine for me in Firefox. Each browser implements scroll events a bit differently though, so you have to implement some hacks to get around that.

I think you're forgetting that Flash has replaced HTML for many things that it does better.
> Interesting ... can you find technical details on that? ...

Unfortunately not; mostly comments in passing on IRC or in videos.

That DLR (and invokedynamic) stuff sounds really clever, if you've got any related links i'd be interested in reading more.
I hate Apple, but this is full of lies. All those things can be done with HTML5. Even Quake was ported to HTML5!
The fact that one of the most famous artistic minds in history was a composer who couldn't hear (for me) somewhat reduces the impact of the title.

Not to downplay his accomplishment in combating the condition- he is, to me, a very impressive man.
Time-Warner DOCSIS 3 in NYC?
This app has always made me feel a little stupid -- what's the use case? I get the SDK use cases (e.g., for a dieting app or a library cataloger), but is the main app a marketing vehicle for the SDK and a "check this out, gee whiz!" kind of thing? Those are valid purposes, I'm just wondering if I'm missing something.

Don't get me wrong -- the technology is super cool, but I remain confused. (Congrats to the team on the acquisition.)
Please focus on expanding your website's information. What is Taskforce, exactly? What are some of specific features that make it better than every other task manager out there? These are key questions that should be addressed right off the bat. Right now users are forced to go through a registration and evaluation process just to learn the answers, and most people (including me) won't bother.

Also, please be careful with hyperbole: it's unlikely that Taskforce will actually save "hours per day" on something that most people perceive as taking only minutes per day.

This criticism is well intended, and I wish you the best of success.
And consumers get screwed. People doing the building should have the option and should get to choose themselves.
The memo's almost ten years old. Maybe he learned from the reaction he provoked?
If Google indemnifies all users on all browsers (and also pick up any losses due to injunctions and such that may occur in the process of a lawsuit), that would be a good first step to having more web vendors pick it up. Until then, I think most companies are more comfortable not shipping it. Putting it in the box puts a lot more legal repsonsibility on you.
Nobody's arguing that you should ditch Flash today, but the use cases for it will diminish over time.

Right now if you want cross browser 3D, video or animation then Flash is the way to go. But in 10 years time when all major browsers have consistent implementations of <video>, canvas, <audio>, webGL etc, etc then, sure use an alternative ;)

I love web standards but they move at glacial speeds, and user adoption is even slower.
I agree with the point you're making, but unfortunately almost all the particular statements above are wrong :-).

n!+1 is not always prime. For instance, 4!+1 = 25 = 5^2, 5!+1 = 121 = 11^2, 6!+1 = 721 = 7.103.

If RH is true, then the number of primes < x differs from the naive prediction you get from saying n is prime with probability 1/log(n) by at most something like sqrt(x) log(x). That's entirely comparable to the accuracy you'd get if the primes really were randomly distributed. (More precisely: the variance of something that's 1 with probability p, else 0, is p(1-p), which is roughly equal to p when p is small, and variances of independent things are additive, so on the random-distribution hypothesis the variance of pi(x) would be comparable to the sum of 1/log(n), which is to say n/log(n). I haven't actually done the calculations, but I think this means that with probability 1 some bound of the same type that you get from RH should hold. So the bound you get from RH doesn't show that the primes are any more regularly distributed than the simple random model suggests.

Similarly, "primes" generated according to the simple random model would, with probability 1, obey theorems of the sort that we know how to prove about the distribution of primes. (And some that we don't know how to prove.)

It is possible to define mathematical functions that recognize primes, or that take on all the primes (and nothing else) as values. But they're generally contrived and inefficient to evaluate.
Designing for size limited mechanical strength
Happened to me regularly when returning from summer holidays.
And that is why TK isn't the CEO. The whole campaign is really smart and well executed.

On the PR front it is generating huge buzz. On the business side it makes perfect sense - expand the market from people who want to start a new blog to also include people who already have blogs.
From what I can tell there's no revenue model around FaceTime so I doubt Apple cares about competing with Skype. Probably just didn't want to rely on a third party to provide the essential software that makes an important hardware feature work.
sure it can be done as long as you are using Chromium nightlies along with the --enable-webgl switch.

Now when can I use it with assurance that I can target every browser and the 90%+ of my visitors will be able to see it?

I love web standards, I want them to win, but we're just at the start of this race and web standards have a loooong way to go.
I tried telling my wife that I have to do nothing in order to be creative. She told me to turn off the TV and go find a job.
Wow.. MS just can't win with some people.

IE6 and Windows XP are essentially the same age... Just as people need to upgrade their browser, they should be upgrading their OS.
Obama Administration Announces Massive Piracy Crackdown
It's indeed a personal choice (hence why I built the product for myself first). See more discussion in the original post:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1451576
This looks incredibly useful. (I wonder if I can get clients to use it.)

(Skip past the blog to the test drive: http://www.bounceapp.com)
Fun demos. However they made my laptop's fan louder than it's ever been before.
Given that the memo was a rant aimed at managers over problems that dated back a year, I took it to mean "You guys are working hard on things and leading by example, right?"

I've had a couple of bosses who worked hard and expected the managers to work hard too. They were also bosses who believed in sharing the wealth when the company succeeded. Which makes me wonder how many pieces of the puzzle (like his apology/clarification memo) we're not privy to.
Everything in Snow Crash was better. :)
Beautiful. This type of thing makes me actually _want_ to learn web design, which hasn't happened in a loooong time.
A New Photo Experience: Your Photos, Happier
Why not allow custom stylesheets? Because the vast majority of Apple's customers can't write them, is why.

As I said below, perhaps the specified fonts should be a default with alternatives in a menu, but until then, it's vastly preferable that they use the reader's font and not the book's.

This isn't a printed book, as the woeful justification should prove. Designers don't get nearly as much control.

(Ultimately, I think they will offer an option to use the specified fonts. There's so much wrong with iBooks it feels like the most unfinished 1.0 product out of Apple since Aperture)

As for putting them in the browser: a vanilla browser is possibly the worst way to display seriously large amounts of plain text. By the time you've added all the custom elements needed for good reading, you're at a full app anyway. It could be a web app, sure, but that's a different discussion.
The phone prices are heavily subsidized. To compare, the Archos 7 Home Tablet has much less and is $199. This for allegedly ~$360 is impressive.
My startup is working really closely with comp sci grad students in a lab at a local university. I wish I could get their advisor to encourage this behavior. ;)
Twilio is.
http://www.twilio.com/jobs
Opera supports the exact same set of codecs as Firefox. You're the one being different. ;)
>>>If Mike got what he wanted

Do you mean me? I'm not the author of the post.
I'm now imagining a future breed of sophisticated would-be rapists: men who bring roofies with them on a date AND a carrot. Just in case.
This is actually a _very_ complicated issue, and while I frown disapprovingly at this, I don't completely agree that what Apple is doing isn't right. At least for now.

Understand this, it isn't a _technical_ issue. It's a user experience issue and a "what is a book" issue.

The web is a horror show for a _good_ designer, especially one that values good typography. The things that bad designers do online, even for major, big dollar sites give me nightmares. I'm not talking about "pretty" or "arty" or even elegance. I'm talking about basic readability stuff.

Like it or not, for a while most eBooks are going to be churned out en masse by sullen, angry publishers that don't want to spend a dime on the tech that they are (correctly) afraid is going to eat their lunch. They are going to have a big auto-scripted sausage grinder cranking out pasty white tubes of text tied off at irregular intervals. I suspect that Apple is simply trying to make sure these tubes are boiled and sanitary, at least from a typographical point of view. (Sorry for the metaphor, I'm in a mood...)

Books with non-specific formatting, which includes most fiction, the primary market target for Apple in this endeavor, are going to be readable, if not elegant. Notice what they are doing with Safari and their new "Reader" feature? Maybe they are planning to train their users to throw the "kill switch" on stupid design, and after a while they'll add a similar feature to iBooks, and turn the fonts and formatting back on. Or maybe not. His Steveness is fairly inscrutable...

The good news is that if you are a control freak (and what designer isn't, another reason for the lock down) then you can simply design for PDF. Which, if you require actual layout control, and not just typographical control, is a world class standard (one with LOTS of design options.)

Having said all that, a well designed book is a beautiful thing and a joy to read. Not because you are marveling at the design, but because you probably don't even notice it.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1423269

This was submitted 12 days ago and made the front page then.
I believed so until recently, when I started to read about about action script (the stuff behind flash).

Action script is very close to javascript, close enough that it ought to be possible to write a crosscompiler so that you can give standards compliant HTML5 to chrome, safari and the mobile browsers and flash to IE and only editions of firefox y (since firefox stupidly does not include Chromes automatic update system).
Obligatory reference for our female geeks: "The Princess and the Pee" (http://www.ampnet.co.uk/femorabilia/pee_standing.html).
6 years of being the fastest growing photo sharing site while being terrible for actually looking at photos proves that social features can be far more important than domain features.

Flickr was originally explicitly an MMO MUD with a photo-sharing feature in the chat, and it never stopped being an MMO when after they removed the MUD stuff.
I'm surprised that Apple of all companies don't have people that really care about these details on the team

That's an extremely applicable point in many respects. I'm surprised that Apple of all companies don't have people -- senior ones at that -- that are on the verge of open revolt over the direction (http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/06/eff-nothing-new-about-i...) in which the company has been taking personal computing lately.
To prevent it, put a small amount of mineral oil (baby oil) in the trap.

It will float on top and prevent the water from evaporating.
This is true. My only bug with apple right now is the lack of transparency in the App Store Submission Process. The rest is really their decision, the hacking community is relatively free to do what they want, and apple knows it's good for them.
> If people start doing things like car pooling, this almost perfect way to avoid wasting several hours in an interview for a job I'm never going to accept anyway will be spoiled, and I'll have to find some other obvious prejudice to use! :-)

What do you do? Get to the parking lot, look at it, and then just call them and say, "I've decided not to interview with you"?
I think it's debatable whether colors and brush controls in a sketching app are "needless" even though they may be needless for 37signals very narrow internal use case.
I'd hope someone would test the WiFi reception too. The left-side antenna should be the one for WiFi.

This seems pretty serious design flaw. Usually antennas are placed in the way that normal holding position doesn't interfere with them too much. In addition, antennas should be insulated. Probably a thin layer of insulating material would help in this case too.
although i appreciate your attempt at libertarianism, your logic is non-nonsensical: you attack regulation without offering an alternative or re-defining the problem
> This part proves that this guy is the worst kind of douchebag: one that knows what he is doing is stupid and heavy handed, and yet does it anyway.

You're overlooking a really important nuance of his letter: "I am through with the debate." It sounds like he'd been pushing the managers for better performance out of their teams for some time and was getting no results. He's trying a different tactic; perhaps not the best tactic, but it's better than repeating the same thing that already hadn't been working for some time.
flashlab is stuck in time by seeming to oppose html5 and favoring the crappy technology that is flash.
Yeah, it has been something of a long wait with Nokia on these things.

Speaking of the N770, it is really weird to think that only recently have the popular pocket computers caught up to the old 770 in screen quality.

That Meego pre-alpha demo video in the other comment is looking very nice. And they have proven they can put out a nice little tablet a few times now. It feels like they only have a few details to fix, then scale to a few form factors. But it has felt like that for a while and meanwhile iPhones, iPads, and Androids have pulled ahead, and the full flock of Android tablets seem likely to beat a super dreamy N1000 or Nwhatever to market.
I have some work for you. Might lead to things later down the road, what's your email?
I can't believe that all these companies don't make it easier to import. A really (but really) great Wordpress importer must surely make your service attractive to the millions of WP'ers out there? Writing importers for similar services is a great idea if you want to grow.
A Life Well Wasted Episode 6: Big Ideas 
Robert Ashley edits listener-submitted game ideas into one big, crazy game, talks to the guy who owns the rights to Tetris about his plans to save the world, gets a lecture on the future of games from a New York University professor, and meets a struggling game blogger who happens to possess freakishly enormous genitalia.