skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I disagree to a point, I think you need to appreciate that the term simple is not at all simple in itself and is totally relative to the observer.

For example, my parents bought all the gadgets and gizmos a kid could ever want, and I though growing up with them and pressing and getting myself out of awkward situations (like trying to figure out what "change language" would be in mandarin after changing the languate on the DVD player just to see what would happen) I would consider something like a Sky box, a pre-amp or a DVD player simple no matter what the interface (tactile and digital) looked like a simple tool to use.

My parents, who bought all these things and used them a little are consistently lost whenever they have to replace their digital radio, or DVD player. All the functions are the same, but the experience is different, and for them that means everything is different and unknown. Their understanding of simple is from way before we even had our fist microwave.

Simplicity is not a myth, it's just not a constant. This is pretty much addressed, but not argued, explicitly in the article: the measure if simple you use for your product must be appropriate to your target demographic and not the definition of the engineering team or a think-tank.

It is possible for simple to not be simple.
Do you have some data to back this up?

One of the primary examples he used was a (German) Siemens washing machine.

Are the dashboards of German-made automobiles significantly less cluttered than those of Japanese-made?
Apple enters the social networking realm with Ping, iTune 10
See also: http://bellard.org/tcc/ a compiler, but small and #!tcc can be put at the top of .c files to make them scripts.

Also see: http://root.cern.ch/drupal/content/cint — an interpretor, but large.
Considering what you otherwise pay for to defense spending, payment to banks and blowing people in the middle east up, the price of a mission to Mars would be very little.
How refreshing to see something that only has 'readline' as a dependency and otherwise just requires a working C compiler and 'make'.
Worth nothing that even MS gives away its compilers these days. You pay for the layered products.
How long does your N1 battery last while on hotspot mode?
Ask HN: Some questions from an aspiring hacker about learning html
After talking about startups, I got my brother very interested in the whole scene, and now one of the things that he wants to do is to learn html, to start off his programming experience.

I was wondering the best guide suitable for a beginner in programming who has never touched html, but ideally it would cover some elements of html5 and when they can be used. Currently, the main focus is on the coding aspect rather than the graphical aspect.

This would assist not only him, but hopefully others too who are looking for an introduction into the world of web programming, where quality of early resources and teaching often has a lasting impact.
Yeah. Why reuse something when you can write it yourself!
To make your application appear complex is just going to increase the barrier to entry.

That depends on the customer segment you are targeting.

Over-complex design does not drive sales unless you're trying to send all your competitors down a dead end street.

Or, if you're selling "Enterprise Software". I've had to re-design things to be less simple, in order to make them more attractive to customers, and had my staff spend countless hours developing bells and whistles that impressed purchasing VPs in demos, but then were never used by the actual users.

Some customers will take "more features, and a busier looking interface" over "a simple, elegant design that actually does everything you need it to" every time. In my experience, these tend to be the customers who are not users themselves-- but, they often have the purchasing power over thousands of users.
Why not try those who started the projects you are interested in? Perhaps some or all of them will contract their time, especially if it is really such a short duration, but don't expect it to be cheap.

Via searching github forks of these projects or searching in Google for related blog posts, etc. you might find others who are actively involved that you could contact.

If you are that unsure of your code though, perhaps you should contract/hire someone a little more surefooted to work longer than a few hours? There are a number of Ruby/Rails contracting agencies, which is where I'd start. Maybe places like:

http://www.mirrorplacement.com/

Or find someone in:
http://workingwithrails.com/

Just search- you should find a number of them.
That's quite different. Sandboxing in an interpreter is actually fairly easy.
Social Networking From Apple
Sounds great, and I would love to try it, so as others have stated, please do open up the sign in process!
I have been thinking about creating and selling a programming language + development environment, but I'm not sure if anyone is really willing to pay for such a thing. For a better IDE for an existing language yes, but for a new language? Any thoughts?
well it certainly might explain the "overpriced toy" reaction to their products from some people
http://www.w3schools.com always helped me and I still continue to use it as a reference.
BEGIN-DICTIONARY-UPDATE-PACKET

Linux - 1. a free Unix-type operating system. 2. (technical) the kernel of that operating system. See also GNU+Linux, GNU/Linux, Stallman R., bikeshedding, pedantry

END-PACKET

Ubuntu is a distribution of the Linux OS, so there is likely to be a large overlap in the questions - e.g. "How do I do X in bash (BTW, I'm on Ubuntu Randy Racoon)?" Many users may not want to ask a question outside the home forum of the distro they installed; conversly, most questions will apply to more than one distro. Merging these makes sense, except for community effects.
I'm not going to argue semantics here; if you happen to have noticed, the Unix/Linux, Ubuntu and SuperUser sites all have overlapping areas of interest. Does that mean they should all be one? The StackExchange people seem to think not, and when it comes to justification on appropriate and on-topic questions, the meta sites and the opinions of the moderators are good enough for me.
Repository to server deployment platform for Git & Subversion - Deploy
Because it's inefficient unnecessary overhead for static requests.

The place to block application specific hacky looking requests isn't in the general HTTP request parser. It's in the 'application specific' stuff.
Ask HN: has anyone coined the meme (b), for bragging right?
Ask HN: has anyone coined the meme (b), for bragging rights? Like for example:

"I'm 10th/215 on the NodeKO Leaderboard (b)"
TCC has two even more cool things:

1) a library that lets you compile C code within a process, relocate it and execute it. This is rather faster than shelling out to run gcc to create a shared object and open it using dlopen.

2) an awesome 2004 demonstration where TCC was used as a boot loader. Take the Linux kernel source (slightly modified to remove some of the gccisms), add TCCBOOT and reboot the machine: as part of the boot process TCC recompiles the kernel and the continue to execute the freshly compiled kernel -- all in 15 seconds: http://bellard.org/tcc/tccboot.html
And nobody's buying iPads.
On some project mailing lists, you are allowed to post jobs like this. Some project sponsors even support this behavior with a dedicated job board website.

But: each project has different policies, and may even not have a policy if it's that new and no one has asked your question before. So write a polite email to the list asking if it is OK to post a help wanted job ad, and if yes, what are the guidelines. Do NOT include your job ad in this question email. If you get the all clear, fire away.
Twitter for iPad Goes Live
It is a good day. We got some Facetiming iPod Touches and some pretty sweet iPod Nanos, not to mention an Apple TV I would actually buy. However, for me, that is not the biggest Apple news of the day, Twitter for iPad is.
I don't believe this is the case for rotation.
Presumably, it wouldn't be that hard to create some Lua functions to interface with memory addresses, I would think.
I always felt that the hashtags were a good idea, but that everybody was using them wrong.

If, for example, my tweet looks like this:
"I had a great time posting on Hacker News #hackernews, #great_time"

then I am doing it all wrong. I thought the smarter implementation would be to do something more like:
"I had a #great_time posting on #hackernews"

It doesn't eat up as much space, but the inclusion of the hash allows for content grouping and all the other nonsense it provides.

The first time I saw it used in the first way, I was kind of sad for the author, as I believe that the intent was for them to replace words, and the author just didn't get it... but I've seen it misused more than I haven't, so either the world at large is doing it wrong, or I am misunderstanding something.
Ask HN: What payment model should I adopt for my new site?
Hi guys,

I am setting up a payment model for my new site.

The first question is do users prefer to pay a one off fee (even though that fee could be quite large) or do they prefer to pay a set of smaller monthly fees?

With regard to the payment model - I was unsure as to whether to give the user the account for free for 3 months and then once out of Beta to charge a fee for that account. Or the other option - when the user signs up they are asked what account they want - a basic account, with limited benefits, with no cost to the user or a premium account with a fee with the whole range of benefits.

Which model have you found to work better for both customer and owner?

Any advice you can give would be much appreciated.

Thanks
Downvoters: why?
Nerd.
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How Steve Jobs Will Destroy Civilization
thank you, i do my best (b)
Email, Web browsing, reading technical books, games, photo storage, photo editing, slideshows, watching TV, Twitter, Facebook (even though theres no native iPad app annoyingly), reading (particular technical books where the extra screen real estate really shines), reading my RSS feeds, etc.

I have n iPhone 4 too and will certainly pull that out of my pocket and use it but at home I just prefer the larger screen.
"It's probably your Apple bias which seems to be at play here."

Yes, because obviously Apple is not considered by their dominating market share of both the MP3[1] and Phone[2] sectors. Apple is also obviously a company that puts tons of knobs, dials and switches on their products to sell them like the toaster in the article and my pointing them out had nothing to do with this.

Silly me, and my Apple Fangirlism.

[1] http://www.businessweek.com/technology/tech_stats/mp3s060209...
[2] http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/06/06/apples_iphone_...
Web Proxies and NetBIOS Targeted by Hackers
Walkman Outsold iPod in Japan During August 2010 (since iPod arrived in 2001)
Ask HN: Does domain name affect success?
English is not my native language, and suffered from this issue when picking domain names in the past. One was almost meaning "a gay hookup central" instead of poker fans community site...

Anyway. Finding a domain name for my latest "next big things" is the hardest part of the projects.

Looking at monster.com, omegle.com, amazon.com i.e. names are not related to the content.

So i wonder if i chose some bogus or completely irrelevant name for my -say- joblisting site, would it affect the success in any way? Of course the shorter/the sweeter/the nicer/the easier the better, but they don't exist out in the wild anymore :)

thanks
I certainly agree with article that complex looking appliances subconsciously make us think that the said appliance is more powerful and has more features. I also agree that this would be a selling point to many people. OTH I also know many people (i would say less technical inclined people), that see a complex looking appliance and think "omg i will never figure out how to use that. It probably does all sorts of advanced stuff, but all I want do is make toast".

Now, whether you can convince these people that they also should pay more for their simple looking appliance, or even convince them that the simple looking one can actually do all that 'advanced stuff' as well, is another question. I would guess it depends on how sleek and high-quality you manage to make it look. There is a thin line between "looks simple because it probably is very cheap and basic" and "looks simple but also seems to be high quality and professional"
Lua can and is used in robotics, embedded system and alike.
Take a look at:
* pbLua, for Lego Mindstorm (http://www.hempeldesigngroup.com/lego/pblua/)
* eLua for small MCU (http://www.eluaproject.net/)
The headers and such for even the most static requests still get used all over — dispatch, caches, logging, etc. The overhead is minuscule, especially compared to a hand-rolled parser that's literate enough to be maintainable.

And the purpose isn't to "block application specific hacky looking requests", it only does that as a side-effect — this isn't some inane IDS bullshit sold to PHBs. It's not looking for exploit signatures, it just sanitizes all input as a consequence of correctness.
One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer
I appreciate the concept but it's too readable. If you're going to do something like this as an actual test, why not funkify it a little bit to challenge the candidates?

Still, great idea! Coming up next -- Job Description as an infographic!
The Best WordPress Templates for iPhone & iPad Related Sites
“Niche WordPress themes” is one of our favorite topics – you know that by now.
Car Community
Autodriver is presenting a brand new social community for auto enthusiasts. Show off your pride and joy, and socialize with your fellow up.
Again your fanboiism at play:

1: you disregard my statement about evolution of ipod from a simple to a complex interface. Your link shows 3 different types of iPod, which shows that simplicity didn't work and design had to evolve, to incorporate different needs.

2: In regards to iPhone, Blackberry dominates the market share and guess why? Because they provide a much needed functionality "QWERTY keypad", which proves the point of the linked article.
Heh, job teasers are getting simpler and simpler. I remember in the late 90s they were "compile with GNU/Sun/SGI/HP toolchain, call the phone number that gets printed when you build on a big/small-endian machine".

The early ones were funky C compiler weirdnesses that exploited word size, endianness, binary format and other machine quirks. This one is practically readable.
> for the same sensor size MP count is better

That's very wrong. The number of photons is limited, the effective light-sensitive area drops with more MP, and with small sensors with more MP you then get more noise than a signal. It's hidden by post-processing but that also drops the real information. So less MP is better in a lot of common circumstances.
In Vegas where at check-in, if you slide a 20$ bill with your CC & passport and ask for "any complementary upgrades", you can get a free room upgrade. If you do a quick search you'll notice how common this trick is, and the success rate for most hotels is in the 80-90% region.
I stand corrected & honor you with a tasty upvote snack, Sir. Thanks for making re-read the Wikipedia entry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Mallory
Sure, but still. It's rare to see a program that does not require at least another 10 fold its own size in super structure. And the fact that it is targeted to embedded use means that in its destined environment there is none of that stuff available anyway.
NodeKnockout winners to be announced today
Tell him to read everything here:
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/

There are many great designers out there and unfortunately not many of them working for companies with large websites, so just going out and seeing the norm these days is not going to put him ahead of the curve.

He should get familiar with Photoshop, etc. You could try Gimp, but that might scare him away. Photo/image editing is a critical piece to almost any web design at a higher level.

He needs to understand CSS in and out and understand the ins and outs of when to use certain elements. Yes we're not in 1999, and you shouldn't use tables for layout unless you need a table (grid), but understand why, and understand how you wish you were using tables sometimes because CSS can be a pain.

Check sites like this out:
http://matthewjamestaylor.com/blog/perfect-3-column.htm
and get familiar with the various kinds of layouts that can be used.

Understand lists, etc. Do a navigation bar with CSS hover effects, etc. Don't get caught up with dropdown and fly-out menus.

Open up pages in Lynx. Think about accessibility (the deaf, the blind, the partially blind that up their font sizes, etc.), but don't get tied down to overly-accessible sites either. Know your audience.

Javascript. JQuery. Love it. Learn it.

Prototype. Understand it, get used to it being out there. YUI- same thing.

Flash. Yes, you should learn about it along with HTML 5.

Then also get into User Experience. Best practices, etc. Maybe try out a Ruby on Rails app and get used to designing and working with forms.

Get familiar with the golden ratio.

Park a domain for him and have him write a site to market his skills. Even if he is younger, it wouldn't hurt.
Yeah, truth in that. I'm needing to write a couple more like this, this is the first one. Next one will be an job description for a DB guy with interest in databases in the broadest sense. Not sure how to go about that one yet.

I like the infographic idea, any other suggestions?
If we were to consider any coffee shop chain - the complexity in some of the coffee that is displayed is extremely apparent.

We can go from £1.50 for an espresso all the way up to £3.60 for something that may resemble a coffee but probably only costs a few pence more to produce!
The problem is you are not considering the timescale - which is over millions of years. There is no "obvious flaw" in mutation, not if you understand how it works.

It is easy to describe how a complex system works once you discover it

The same can equally be said of the intelligent design theory.
I was talking purely of Scotches I can afford :)
Colonization, or simply shoot for drastic population reduction in the next century. Given the evidence of previous extinction events, I'm betting on the latter 'solution' for now.
Chrome table release hits v6, Firefox 4 loses features
That's kind of the point right? When end users do not drive sales you are likely right, as your experience indicates. But when end users do drive sales (and for most of us here that's day to day life) then a clean interface is key.

B2B is different in this respect than B2C, and conspicuous consumption is different from both of those still.
true, blame Python :)
Redis 2.0.0 is out
As a side note, wings worked so well for survival that most current insect species have them.
Yeah that's not really comparable.

HTTP requests come from millions of different browsers. Some with bugs, some with idiot creators, etc etc.

My point was that an HTTP request parser is trivial to write correctly. What you do with the headers and request later on are where sometimes you need to be careful.

TBH Though I think I'm just in a different world to all of this mongrel stuff.
Show me any CL library that is competitive with numpy+scipy. Similarly, I do a lot of distributed memory work, for which MPI is necessary. For CL bindings, all I know of is CL-MPI and mpi4py trumps it in every way. I need parallel linear and nonlinear solvers, petsc4py fills that role well, but there is nothing similar for CL. It's also crucial that it work reliably in unconventional environments such as BlueGene, this is rare for proprietary implementations. I don't really like Python, but these libraries and it's portability make it a functional environment. I don't think any proprietary implementation is prepared to step in.
I think before the advent of personal computing, a bit of extra complexity was ok. Life was pretty simple. You had a car, a stereo, a tv with a button for each channel, a stove/oven, and a calculator. You actually had room in your mind and time in your weekend to read the manual and figure out your new VCR. It was fun!

Making complex things was actually expensive to do, so a microwave with lots of functions cost more than one with a single button that said "heat up my food". This made it a bit of a status symbol. It was also the start of everything becoming digital, so it was cool for everything to have lots of buttons and a fancy readout.

Now we have several TVs, all with several boxes, incorporating our audio system, and connected to several services. We have smartphones, computers, tablets, printers and routers. Then there's all the software on and off the web to figure out, configure, and get working together. And you have to deal with all that at work, too. It's tough just to stay afloat.

So, the last thing you want is a digital toaster. They can make it look as complex as they want, but it won't make it look any more expensive. Today something looks expensive if it is simple, heavy, and looks like it was handcrafted by a German man. People still lapse into 1980s thinking and make the association that complicated means better, but that will wear off.

I'm not saying that extra features aren't sometimes important, but features are so easy to add to things today. You just have to type a few lines of code. Making someting look complex is easy and inexpensive. Making something complex look simple takes much for time, effort, money, and talent. Increasingly, people will pay for that.
How would you like to have a REPL for kernel development, like on the Lisp Machines? (Yes, that's a rhetorical question!)

Take TCC with your point 1 above. Mix it with the ideas from Schemix ( http://abstractnonsense.com/schemix/ ). Now you can iteratively development a kernel driver!

I hacked on Schemix a while back, updating it to 2.6 module system (unfortunately lost the source code before it got uploaded). It's a seemingly great idea but what good is scheme code if you have to rewrite in a different language for the final version?
but then were never used by the actual users

That's fine, The last thing VP's or management want is an employees coming to them and telling how they "can't" do something due to lack of a feature.

Cost of not getting a job done due to lack of a feature is very high compared to cost of adding that feature. And cost of adding a new feature only when a need arises is even higher.

It is hard to predict which feature you will actually need over course of time, thus the safest bet is to have as many reasonable features as possible.
> Today the screen is 132 ppi - taking that up to 326 ppi would make it somewhere in the vicinity of 2528x1896.

They wouldn't actually do that. They'd "just" double the resolution so the applications can easily be scaled up losslessly, as with the iPhone 4. So you'd get a 2048x1536 screen at 264dpi (one thing to consider is that you'd probably hold your iPad further from your eyes than your iPhone, so the you can have slightly bigger pixels).

Modern hardware absolutely isn't able to provide such pixel densities on such a small surface at an affordable price, and even less able to drive those things using mobile CPUs and GPUs (we're talking about the resolution of your average 30" screen, which still kicks modern GPUs in the teeth)
Scientists unearth more evidence of superfast changes in magnetic polarity
10 ways to write the equation of a line
I am sure eitally was being sarcastic.

Also, why are you attempting to recruit people who are interested in a subject "in the broadest sense", as opposed to people who live and breath the damn thing?

Recruiting people of marginal interest and passing familiarity sounds like a recipe for mediocrity, imo.
Mobile Internet in emerging markets: The next billion geeks