skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're right, it's what they advertise officially, but now that we're talking to engineers, we get the gritty details, a story I accept:

D2D is a layer that doesn't exist in Windows XP. Where it does exist (Vista and 7), you can use it to switch between hardware- and software-accelerated rendering. Where it does not exist, they would have to rewrite entire libraries or APIs to interact with the XP kernel. According to the answerer, rewriting these libraries would amount to rewriting IE9 as IE8 with a GUI upgrade.

(That the graphics rendering sits inside the kernel is another problem, but not likely one these guys can fix.)
Airbnb - UI Designer
Airbnb - Visual Designer
I think the point was that if the US mandated 6 weeks of vacation, and wages went down as a result, so would prices, no?
Customers buy outcomes, not attributes & they certainly don't pay a premium
I love Dwarf Fortress to death, but it will never have the success or mass market appeal that Minecraft does. Minecraft I managed to get a complete non-gamer playing in about 15 minutes. Dwarf Fortress has hardcore gamers shying away from its brick wall learning curve and obtuse interface. Toady One could be a marketing genius, and DF still would never sell like Minecraft.

Not that there's anything wrong with that; he's making a game he loves and he's lucky that enough people agree with him to donate to him that he can survive on just those earnings. It's a great and fascinating game, but it's one that most people won't like.
I bet this trend follows a logistic curve, not an exponential. So, sadly, I'm sure the limit would be some smaller-than-fuck-you-money amount.
Some applications seem to restart themselves automatically in the background. Even when you kill them (via jailbreak tools), they restart themselves. I had that problem with Skype. Those jailbreak tools also seem to be the only way to see what really is running right now in the background. Deleting Skype seemed the only solution so far (without much further hacking).
Inspiring. I am going to work harder on my current personal project.
Banks still like them, for some reason. Merchant accounts always ask for chargeback rebuttals by fax.
Absolutely, please do contact me. Email's in my user profile. I'd love nothing more than to get a few of my clients off of their horrible POS.

Being solely web-based might be an issue, though maybe you've already figured this out. In all of the restaurants I work with (just a few, and they're all independent), orders from their point-of-sale systems get automatically printed in their food prep areas. It's kind of a must-have.

I'm not trying to raise problems for you, I'd really love to see some new tech in this industry. :-)
I mostly fly Delta and Frontier and telling jokes is a common occurrence on both. Are there airlines where this is forbidden?
Or you could amend 'reckless driving' laws to specifically include things like texting, etc.
Pay attention to the article if you're commenting on it. Healthcare is done away with because of where he lives.
Afaict, mawk's maintenance seems to be a bit up in the air--- the original maintainer basically disappeared years ago and hasn't blessed any successor, so the Debian-patched version became the de-facto current version, since at least it staved off bitrot. Recently someone (Thomas Dickey) picked up maintenance of a new upstream version unilaterally, starting from the Debian-patched version, but he hasn't managed to convince the Debian mawk maintainer to accept his new version as a new upstream (somewhat testy thread here: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=554167). I'm personally a little more comfortable with something actively maintained like gawk, despite the speed differences.
The graphics are fine. I'd rather see improvement made in speed of rendering (even on a decent machine, setting "fancy graphics" and a "far" viewplane is a recipe for low framerates and lag) before trying to change the look.
Maybe, but like I say, it doesn't tell the whole story. Would the average American take a 2% cut in wages for an extra week's vacation a year?

The purpose of earning money is to enable you to live the lifestyle of your choice, that's axiomatic. If you can get everything you want for less money, are you more or less wealthy than someone who can't get what they want, for more?

Also, productivity is not linear with time. 30 hours of actual work beats 50 if half of those 50 is meetings and goofing off. That's the German and French secret, if any.
If he's already sold hundreds of thousands of copies, it seems like he's made significant inroads into the market. Not sure how much more the marketing faucet could do.
>you get tons of 5-stars and tons of 1-stars.

This is entirely explained by game theory. If you think the final star rating for something should be something other than what the average currently is, you maximize your power over the rating by using only 1 or 5 star ratings.
Even if they did sell, there's a chance that they wouldn't be as successful as today. Perhaps them NOT being locked down by some control-freak VC firm is what lead to increased success ?

Back then, if I'm not mistaken, VC firms (like the one in the story) were much more "controlling" than they are today. So, in my opinion I don't think that Google would have been as successful as they are today.
I'm not adverse to creative spellings, but it just looked like a typo as opposed to being intentional (which I realized after seeing it in a few places). Just my gut reaction.

Overall it seems cool. I just got an iPad myself and think there is a ton of growth in store for tablet apps.
In some cases, yes. More frequently this sort of thing has been performance issues (comment reading something like "don't do X here, or else it interacts with Y in a way that kills performance of the whole application"). Testing for performance regressions can catch stuff like this, but since that's not typically done for every commit, you can end up having to do significant forensics or trawl through hundreds of commits to find the cause.
>Whoops. As of today, Google’s market cap stands at $167 billion.
I doubt that if Excite had acquired Google, the market value of a google-integrated Excite would be anywhere near what Google is worth today. I think Google has been so successful because it has been able to do things in it's own unconventional way, and under a more traditional company like Excite, this creative process would have been stifled.
That's a great idea and creates a win-win situation!

Sadly, NYC apartment hunting is a little different. Landlords and apartments have a huge incentive to use their limited advertising bandwidth on already vacant apartments.

Vacant apartments cause landlords to bleed more money than almost-vacant apartments, and brokers are all about selling quickly in volume, which is easier to do when the aparmtent is vacant (easy to photograph, easy to show)
Pirates, Parrots, and Info Snacking
Ultrafast laser pulse makes desktop black hole glow
5 of the Best Free Linux Comic Book Viewers
When we were looking for a house, we asked the people who would be living above us. We ended up living somewhere else (due to issues that we were previously aware of), but they were very friendly and informative.

But your idea is indeed less invasive.
I disagree. PPP-adjusted money is a measure of how much of the stuff you want that you can actually afford to have.

"Standard of living" rankings tend to measure how much of the stuff that the study creators want that you can afford to have. A nation might have a low rank due simply to the fact that the people living there prefer different things than what the study creators think they should prefer. Measuring PPP-adjusted money doesn't have this problem.
What would be really interesting would be to know why they wanted to sell. Did they not see much future in it? Were they simply tired of working on it, after several years in grad school?
Google Voice has done for my phone what TiVo did for my TV -- I no longer schedule around its whims.

It also helps that I can use voice to send SMS messages from my phone when I'm driving or whatever (I'll often use my computer or iPad to send and receive SMS messages when I'm working).
Do the Freakonomics people have any connection to the owners of badapartmentsnyc.com ?
Microsoft: How We Evaluate the Experiences We Engineer
Apparently not difficult

http://manicdigger.sourceforge.net/news/
The pigs made me laugh. I don't know much about minecraft, but I wonder if the pigs can foul up the circuitry. You don't get the right answer so you have to go clear the pigs out of the pathways. It's like the original legend about how software "bugs" are named so because a bug crawled into the circuitry and fried it out. In Minecraft computers, the bugs are called "pigs".
I wonder if this will get more people doing 3d games in Java. It certainly is a ringing endorsement. Java has some nice features over C and C++ and the performance is good enough as demonstrated by the game. Plus it has a very good collection of libraries.
My, how things have changed since the C10k problem...

http://www.kegel.com/c10k.html
I don't think distracted driving falls under the reckless driving laws - I think it is "driving without due care and attention."
What if having a law against murder didn't decrease the murder rate? Texting while driving is obviously a bad thing and it should be illegal.
I don't really see how you can "graphically improve" a game that is built around square voxel-like elements and pixel graphics.

He definitely nears market saturation quickly.
Had you read the article, you would've seen ``I have an iPhone'' which makes your math exercise pointless.

San Francisco is a particularly hostile environment for wireless devices. I've been to plenty of places where my bars are all lit up, but I can't get anything through.
The article has some facts not completely correct:
"The government provides citizens with free healthcare, free university education, and childcare."
Healthcare plans are mandatory for most but not paid by the government. University education at public universities costs between 0 and 500 EUR per semester, childcare is subsidized but not completely free.
Would the average American take a 2% cut in wages for an extra week's vacation a year?

From the article: "In 2008 it was estimated that three vacation days were left unused for most American workers."

Since the average American doesn't use all the vacation he has, the answer is probably no.
“Geoghegan believes Germans understate their work hours, and Americans overstate work hours. Yet both countries are getting roughly the same amount of work done. This means that Germans are actually doing more, while working less.”

Is it just me, or does the claim about over/understating work hours run exactly contrary to the subsequent claim? (To be explicit: Germans understate their hours ⇒ they work more hours than they say ⇒ statistics showing Germans with higher productivity are exaggerated. And similarly Americans understate hours ⇒ they work less than claimed ⇒ they are more productive than statistics would suggest.)
WebApp - Aaronsburg to Zwolle. Usefull Travel info for Safari
The suggestions seem absurd. Has anyone considered this being a hoax?
If supply of money went down, but the amount of goods and services produced remained the same, prices would go down.

If Americans worked less, it's likely that the amount of goods and services produced would also go down. In that case, prices would remain the same, and we would all just have less stuff.
Also you can crop the margins of pages so that they fit better without zooming in. It can convert pdf to text on the fly too, though of course there are formatting issues.
Tell HN: Crunchbase searches are public
I'm assuming most people aren't using crunchbase for confidential searches, but just in-case anyone is, it looks like crunchbase saves every search and assigns it a sequential id which can than be used by anyone to look up that search.

For example a search I did:

http://www.crunchbase.com/search/advanced/companies/506276

By incrementing/decrementing the counter on the end you can see the searches other people were doing at the same time.
iOS basically is Apple's standard OS at this point. I wouldn't be surprised if Mac OS X was renamed to "iOS Development Environment" at the next WWDC.

It seems pretty clear that at some point iOS (and a desktop version of its touch paradigm) will be the future on Mac desktops.
Right. I usually use (n)awk because it's the default on OpenBSD, but have to admit gawk's artificial-filesystem-based networking support is pretty cool.
I'm pretty sure it's Sharepoint
Yeah, but try

| perl -nae 'print $F[1], "\n"'
| ruby -nae 'puts $F[1]'

Your local python oil vendor may have a one liner for that language as well.
see: http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=3379012&page=1

I'm all for you doing whatever you want in private, but when you're controlling something that could kill you, your passengers, and anyone else that just happens to be around you then you are behaving in public behavior.

I appreciate this law, although I imagine it won't take hold until the next generation or so of drivers take the road. Like seatbelt laws, I automatically put my seatbelt on everytime I get in a car. My parents still forget sometimes... difference is, I grew up with that law. They grew up not even having seatbelts in cars.
I'm a buxfer user looking for a alternative for this service, recently the quality of the service isn't the best, i can't use Mint because my bank is not supported (i'm, living in spain) and they don't allow manual transaction management like Buxfer do. Anybody knows other service with manual transaction handling?
You're ahead of Seattle. I came here from DC, and wow what a step backward.

As it turns out, we had a trolley-based mass transit system until GM and Ford (and Exxon?) bought it up and dismantled it. (No joke.)

When I lived in Sterling, it was a 15-minute drive to Dulles. When I moved to Silver Spring, it was a 45-minute drive.

From Sterling, there were no mass transit options whatsoever, AFAIK. Of course, with a 15-minute trip, there's really not much incentive to look for alternatives.

From Silver Spring, you CAN get to Dulles via mass transit... I had to walk to a bus stop, take the red line downtown, change to the orange line out to West Falls Church, and take a Washington Flyer to the airport: 2.5 hours.

So I agree... worthless.

I also found that biking from Silver Spring to Crystal City took approximately the same amount of time as the bus/metro combination, and had fewer delays.

Would you believe, btw, that Seattle's equivalent to the Metropass has a 24-hour latency? So if you put money on it, you have to wait for 24 hours before you can use it?
Forget Valve or Bungie, pretty soon Oracle will come knockin' on his door. ;-)
Gmail conversations & "You morons, cilantro is delicious" syndrome.
The poop leaves my bottom and goes into the toilet. I never touch it. Do you?
Murder isn't a very good analogy in this case. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying I think texting should be legal, but they make a fair point: if texting is illegal, people still do it, but in a way that takes their eyes even further off the road. The same can't be said of murder - a law against murder doesn't increase the risk of someone getting murdered. Drugs might be a better analogy - making a drug illegal doesn't eradicate the use of the drug. Even if it decreases use, it will just push a lot of people underground, which might make the situation even less controllable. It sounds ridiculous to say drugs should be legal, but the consequences of specific laws against them do need to be carefully considered if the end goal really is to improve society as a whole.

Ultimately, I think the only real solution is their last point: as a whole, we really need people to start realizing how dangerous it is to text while driving, and how severe the consequences are.
Man up and talk to him about it if it's interrupting your productivity. I'm sure he cares about your productivity.
Everytime somebody says this is a good enough reason to support IE6 my only thought is "screw enterprise users".
As a recent HS grad, these suggestions disgust me. I would have learned absolutely nothing all four years if these guidelines were followed.

As it is, I could make it through a multiple choice/free response test (with 4 or 5 choices, and open-ended questions) in many subjects knowing less than half the material going in. Getting an A, mind you. Granted, I'm not the typical case, but the point is not to have everyone getting easy A's. That's not why we have school.

School is supposed to be a place to learn to challenge yourself continuously. It should teach the value of persistence and hard work, because those are skills that can be learned and will seriously affect the life potential of an individual [1]. This is a separate consideration than intelligence, which according to some studies (that happen to agree with my point... don't you love selection bias?) has a fixed, unchangeable component [2]. The effect of these suggestions would be to lower the effort bar - more students will be like me, and have to put very little effort into their schoolwork to get the grades they want. I did not learn how to work hard (at least from school), and neither will they.

[1] [pdf] duende.uoregon.edu/~hsu/blogfiles/sat.pdf
according to University of Oregon researchers, high college GPAs are not correlated with high SAT scores. If we assume the SAT tests what it intends to, the implication of this study is that hard work can lead to mastery at least as well as intelligence, in most fields.

[2] http://www.scienceagogo.com/news/20020017191357data_trunc_sy...
Neural plasticity implies that you can learn new things, and the rate at which connections can change determines a "general intelligence factor" commonly called G.
This looks like it might be awesome work.

My only complaint is that, once again, physicists have been unable to resist the sexy-but-misleading metaphors when coining popular names. Calling this refractive index perturbation a "desktop black hole" is perhaps even worse than the previous grand champion of popular confusion, "quantum teleportation". Thousands of hours are going to be wasted explaining to laypeople that, no, these things are not tiny black holes and they will not pull in increasing amounts of matter, Katamari style, until they consume your local college campus and begin to threaten your entire state.

I miss Murray Gell-Mann's naming schemes. The beauty of the word quark is that it wasn't already taken by some other thing. Or could we go back to acronyms? MACHOs and WIMPs were hilarious.
Amazing stuff. Honestly, when I saw this post I thought man I should have been a games programmer (and the desire to learn how to create games started to surface). Then, I went searching on Google and it seems that this guy has found his luck after working hard as a games programmer for around 10 years (http://www.mojang.com/notch/). After reading this, I smiled & felt happy for the programmer and went back working ;)
I can vouch for this, the graduate programmers in the US in a company I worked for were taking in around double what we were in Scotland. That said, our wages were a damn sight higher than our counterparts in China and India but at least everyone else got to live somewhere interesting :)
The article does mention the iPhone; it says he has one. A quick search also shows that (a) when the iPad was introduced, he thought it was a useless in-between product; (b) he now owns one, and loves it. So, maybe not a follower, but definitely a repeat customer.

http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/the_amazingness_of_instant/
Infographic Timeline of Google Company Purchases
Apple warns App Store name squatters (has this happened to anyone else?)
I reserved a name 90 days ago for a game I was going to do. I've delayed in actually finishing it, and now I'm up against the wall. Anyone else get one of these emails from Apple?
The problem with this, at least in NYC, is that apartments go so quickly. There's no way a good apartment will be available long enough for this to get back to you.
At the time building search engines wasn't seen as sexy or profitable. I also don't think they had much interest in running as business.
I just returned from Berlin a couple of nights ago, and met an English guy (I'm a New Zealander living in London) who'd worked there for a few years. He is an aerospace engineer working for a very famous English engineering firm in their German office.

He was of the opinion that German productivity, at least when compared with other European countries, was a myth. He told exactly the same anecdotes about German individuality as this article mentions, but gave it quite a negative spin.

When handing out bits of work to fellow engineers, the Germans would tend to put their heads down and start work immediately, instead of consulting with colleagues about previous solutions to the same problem, etc. Basically he said they did quite a lot of very efficient, very correct, very over-engineered re-inventing of the wheel.

Particularly he pointed out that to a German engineer, every part of the solution was equally important, where as to an English engineer, it was obvious some parts where more important than others. Focusing on those gave a better quality end-result when faced with a limited budget, but a German with a unlimited budget would give you an absolutely fantastic end-result.
I reserved a name 90 days ago for a game I was going to do. I've delayed in actually finishing it, and now I'm up against the wall. Anyone else get one of these emails from Apple?
Bummer. When I first saw the graphic I assumed it was a really clever architectural trick designed to heat the pool efficiently... So yeah, let's do that.
I think you can do both in static and dynamic languages, but in dynamic language everything is just practically easier.

Another thing I forgot to mention, and it is more important than my first example, -- in Erlang, during the upgrade procedure, you can have two versions of the same module loaded simultaneously and their code can execute at the same time until all the code starts using functions from the second module. Basically, when you call a function, you can specify explicitly to call it the current module or from the new module. I can hardly imagine how you can get away with it in statically-typed language.

If you are interested in the topic I recommend reading Joe Armstrong's PhD thesis. It describes this and many other advanced topics in detail. Actually, it changed the way I think about concurrent and fault-tolerant systems and languages.
Places that have $1000 littering fines are usually pretty clean.

Changes will start when states issue $1000 citations for phone/keyboard use. Maybe 2x that if you cause an accident.
For these sites, when I refer to ideas I mean investment ideas. These are straight up write ups on why you should invest in Company X or Y.

VIC recently added a discussion forum which leads to a bit of discussion on things that are maybe more conceptual, where you can ask questions and get advice.

SumZero has a private messaging system and I think it leads to a lot of contact between members privately, which enables people to find peers to seek advice from as well. Each member has a profile, so the profiles will tell you how long people have been in the business, who they previously worked for, what their areas of expertise are - that sort of thing.