skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Awesome job. I've been eagerly awaiting the arrival of this since it was announced. I have spent the morning porting our app from using our internal mobile framework to jQuery Mobile.

First thoughts, this is really really well done. Each page is taking next to no time to change.

Secondly, is anyone noticing crashes on chromium (ubuntu)? The browser seems to crash every few minutes..

Edit: also noticed a major part of the header doc missing: http://github.com/jquery/jquery-mobile/issues/issue/197
Look for 'mine spec', at least that's what it's called in Australia. E.g. http://www.google.com/search?q=mine+spec+hilux
I have thought about this too. It would be bizarre if all of us thinking "they're working on that" had some kind of society-wide placebo effect to actually cause people to live longer and healthier.

Now that's a self-reinforced feedback-cycle I can get behind!

I think this way of thinking is rather new, especially considering how many more people believe this than 100 years ago. Back then modernity was in full rising force, so there certainly was a social notion of progress happening to everything on a wide scale, and expectations of Western civilization's eventual achievement of some kind of utopia. But back then they were so limited by what they didn't even know about, so their vision of what modernity would become pales in comparison to what post-modernity actually has been.
>I didn't know any technical guys well enough to be a technical co-founder, so I decided I was going to be the technical co-founder.

The world needs more people like you.
CS students that haven't taken graph theory yet probably don't know the number of links in a mesh grid. Have you considered that?

And honestly, are you telling me that nobody answered in "however long it takes", ie. nobody just counted them on paper?
One of the big benefits off jquery or similar libraries is that they isolate you from the browser DOM differences. I happen to like getting IE6 support for free and I hope they don't stop supporting it for at least a few years.
What's the surprising, counterintuitive notion that reveals this point as a miconception? The point of extending the tax breaks is to juice the US economy; we, as a society, are agreeing (via our government) to spend money to attempt to create US jobs.
This sounds great in theory, but can also be a big time waster for your top dev talent. Especially so considering you usually start hiring when you're especially crunched for developer resources.

The interview process should be extensive, yes, but it should also be spread out in a way that allows you to fail candidates early. Blocking out a day of interview time at once can be inefficient - rarely will that person be sent home early (for various reasons) and they are now just wasting a bunch of peoples time, and their own.
Why can't Mexico have somebody as talented as Warren Buffet? It is because Americans are prejudiced. (note this may not be true of HN readers, I'm speaking of the broader american culture.)

They don't believe they are prejudiced, they don't know they are prejudiced, but they believe what they are taught to believe. And they believe that mexican is full of corrupt people with little motivation. this isn't racism... it is the image of mexico we are sold by politicians ("all drugs come from mexico" "mexican immigrants just want to use our welfare programs") and the media.

I'm not sure if they view all spanish speaking countries as corrupt and full of people who need to be "Saved" by american imperialist "enlightened socialism" or if mexico is a special case.

They talk fondly of Venezuela, because Venezuela has a strong leader who is a clear leftist and has done photo ops with Oliver Stone and other prominant leftists. (nevermind that he appears to be the most corrupt leader in the western hemisphere.)

Americans' world perceptions are shaped by media. And media doesn't allow for the possibility that people everywhere are essentially the same, with cultural differences. So, americans think that the Nazis had to come to power in Germany because germans are genetically fascist people, for instance.

I say this, not as an outsider criticizing americans. But as an american who has studied how the nazis came to power, and how ideology is used to shape americans perceptions of other people, as an academic subject.
That's an interesting point, could it extend to 'employment' too?

What I mean is, how do you set up employment that is self sustaining without wealth invested from outside? Is an industry that exists solely to support itself a house of cards, ready to collapse at the first sign of instability?

It almost looks like any investment is also "throwing money at the problem".
Just for clarity, we are not forcing the NYTimes to do anything, we're trying to show them an alternative (and we think better) plan _before_ they put the paywall in place. You're absolutely correct that the final decision is in their hands.
Yeah I was going to comment to that effect. While the syntax is the same for rounded corners for gradients even though they use -moz and -webkit prefixes the actual syntax for the gradient is different.
You should be more liberal in accepting misspellings of his name...
Does this have a flash dependency?
No thank you, if I would want to develop for OS X I would stick to C++ and Qt. I'm to young to get sued.
I'm not one of the (clearly many) people who automatically believes e-books should cost less than paperbacks. E-books are more useful to me than paper books, not less. Pricing and cost are unrelated except for sorghum and gypsum.
I called myself and I could talk on my phone and hear it in the browser, but there was no audio picked up on my laptop mic to go back to the phone. I'm assuming it's still being worked on - interesting execution though!
This is something I thought about back in the 90s. Here is a simple thought experiment. Suppose that there was a computer selling for $1,000,000 that was equivalent to a human. With a 5 year amortization schedule, said computer would be equivalent to paying someone $200,000/year. Not really a threat to humans.

Fast forward 3 years. After two generations of Moore's Law, said computer now costs $250,000, and can profitably replace people worth $50,000/year. Previous generations of technology always had the result that there are other things humans can be trained to do more easily than you can build machines to do it, so humans move. But there is nothing you can train displaced people to do that the computer can't do as well. What happens?

Fast forward another 3 years. Most people are unemployed because they can't do anything that those with money can't get done with machines. In theory there is enough excess capacity for everyone. In practice investors will demand returns and efficiency, and attempts at economic redistribution have never succeeded.

There are a lot of arguments against this.

A common one is based on the concept of competitive advantage and the benefits of free trade. Adding robots is therefore good. However that argument has a major flaw. It is true that with 2 parties, if you open up free trade then both benefit. It is true that with 3 parties, opening up free trade leaves everyone better off. However it is also possible (and fairly common) that free trade with 3 parties works to the advantage of two, and the disadvantage of the third. (For a real world example, look at the long-term economic decline along the silk road after Europe began trading directly with Asia via ships.)

A second one is based on history. It is true that every advance in technology has left people better off. But that is because there was always something that people had a comparative advantage over machines at that people really wanted. And the cause of our comparative advantage is our intelligence. If machines can supply that, then we cannot demand a salary that is greater than the value of the resources needed to do the same job with machines. Once that happens, Moore's Law is _not_ our friend any more.
> It was beautiful, but people didn't want it, they didn't understand it. Because people are stupid.

I watched his video explaining Dapper and could only loosely follow what he was doing. It was clear that he was making an RSS feed of changes to a web page, but the process of selecting the dynamic elements of the target page was unclear to me. And several times he had to say things like, "Oh, it's confused now. We'll just fix that..."

So maybe you came to the right conclusion that the rest of the world is stupid. Or maybe Dapper was a little difficult to use, and the value proposition was a little vague, and it never really took off. Thousands of cool projects have met the same fate. That's just it goes.

Keep your chin up. At least you got a cool sweatshirt.
The Social Network, Elo Rating System
I disagree that the two are mutually exclusive, yes.
I think it would be constructive if one of you downvoters left some sort of comment on why you've downvoted poor nozepas into graydom. :(

I, for one, think if you were persistent and started with a ruby tutorial, you could indeed make an MVP in a few weeks effort!
80% of net sales. There is a per-copy e-book fee(!) of $1.49, which is a lot considering e-book pricing.
"When he told me his primary uses of the tablet will be Google Docs, Gmail, and Google Calendar, I told him he'll be better off with Android."

Or Chrome OS, if it ever ships.
Without CIA's backing it's almost certain the PDPA would have remained in power and Afghanistan wouldn't be the mess it is today, but saying the Taliban was around in the 80s is also misleading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_war_in_Afghanistan_(1992–...
http://www.greenteapress.com/thinkpython/

This will get you a very good understanding of basic programming. After that, try http://railstutorial.org/ if you want to learn rails. (while ruby is a different language, Think Python teaches concepts that apply is all languages. Python is just the transport.)

Good luck
Maybe my advice was too short. I was just willing to encourage him to try. Obviously it takes very long to feel really comfortable with a language, but it should not take very long to be able to develop some simple application as he is asking for. Sure that app won't be programatically and algorithmically perfect but it may work as a first start.
This says it much better than I can: How to Build a Web Site from Scratch with No Experience (http://lifehacker.com/5336113/how-to-build-a-web-site-from-s...)

It details how the author built mixtape.me starting with basically zero experience, and is quite worth your while.

The advice below uses Rails as the framework, but will work whichever one you choose. The steps stay the same: build a basic app with help (from a book, tutorial, etc.) to understand the framework/language, start building what you want to create and learn at the same time.

What I'd suggest is to obtain a copy of "Agile Web Development with Rails (4th edition)" (http://pragprog.com/titles/rails4/agile-web-development-with...). Side note: it's not published yet, so make sure you get the beta version (an e-book version, and you'll be notified of updates as content is modified/added).

Then read through the book while building the example application in the book (a basic shopping website). This approach is great, because you learn by doing and you also get to glance at agile methodologies.

Once you've gone through the toy app and understood it, you'll be quite proud of yourself and will be able to build simple things already.

At this point, you should start to work on your own idea, it's much more motivating and you'll always learn the most when working on a "real" project.

To be noted: the Rails book does assume you have passing familiarity with Ruby (or at least a programing language), HTML, etc. If you need/want to learn programming first, you should probably also get an appropriate book on the subject, such as "Learn to Program (2nd edition)" (http://pragprog.com/titles/ltp2/learn-to-program) or, if you're more advanced, the Pickaxe (http://pragprog.com/titles/ruby3/programming-ruby-1-9).

Oh, and the reason I mention PragProg books isn't because I'm affiliated with them (I'm not), but because I have yet to get one of their books that doesn't live up to my expectations.
Chart of the Day: Google is still a one-trick pony
At a university.

I can't tell you how sick I am of laypeople thinking they can just pick up one or two programming languages in a couple hours a week and get a job. These people end up with a very small skillset and no knowledge of what things they don't know or where they might learn those things, and therefore they're of negative worth to a programming team. You need the experience and breadth of at least topical expertise before you'll be of any use to anyone.
The manufacturing cost for an ebook clearly should be much less and near-zero per book. Bits are cheaper than paper. However that's just a portion of the cost; there are still distribution and royalty costs and I'd bet those make up the bulk of the price.
I've said it before, and I've said it again: the entire "War on Terror" is an anaphylactic reaction to the bee sting of 3000 deaths.
One thing I'd like to see is Android have more of a presence in universities. It'd give CS students useful exposure to mobile development and allow them to put all of the Java that gets crammed down their throats to good use.
... true, but the story poster should have been strict in what he emitted.
What's the alternative? For clients to refresh their copy of the "parent" resource [there may be a better term for this... I mean the resource used to access the resource that is to be gotten] often? For a commonly interactively accessed thing, it would introduce a lot of latency for clients to get it every time, so I suppose it must be cached... and then the cache of the parent resource be refreshed regularly and in case of failure? How far up the tree should that go?

In other words, if I want to get the Twitter feed for Joe's "ABC" group and I don't want to hardcode the URL for that resource, how often should I download (and cache), parse, and traverse the resources for Twitter's users then Joe's feed then Joe's ABC group, etc.? Or am I misunderstanding this?
Even granting that some kind of intangible "power" over others is more valuable to most people than being warm at night and cool during the day, getting fresh and 100% clean meat and vegetables all year round, enriched flour and iodized salt and fluoridated water not even starting to mention antibiotics -- which I remain highly skeptical of -- the prevalence of social media and blogging and increased specialization means that it is now even easier than ever for someone to become known and respected millions of people (especially in the abstract and mostly irrelevant way their subjects used to "know" and "respect" the kings of yore).
If you generalize this logic one step more, you'll be in a happy place where you can make money from PDF e-books:

"There are always exceptions. XXX. If you're not XXX, it's hard to charge a lot for an e-book."

"There are always exceptions. I'm the world expert on home tarantula care. If you're not the world expert on home tarantula care, it's hard to charge a lot for an e-book."

"There are always exceptions. I'm a talented marketer. If you're not a talented marketer, it's hard to charge a lot for an e-book."

"There are always exceptions. I'm a former HFT project team lead writing about trading strategies. If you're not selling a book that can potentially make people thousands of dollars, it's hard to charge money for an e-book."
The really sad thing is that he had something incredibly valuable - the ability to translate between geek-speak and manager-speak - and chose the dark side. If he worked as a collaborating liaison instead of a back-stabbing asshat, he probably would have climbed faster and definitely farther.
I haven't seen the Android docs, but for building an app with a GUI I genuinely can't think of anything better than the WinPhone7 SDK.
A fair concept, but it's a problem that even the creators find it necessary to use text to tell users that they have to click on the images to use them.

It implies a UI problem they haven't figured out - and it's one of the reasons I wouldn't use it.
You're talking about benefits to the progression of the browser. I'm talking about [perceived, at least] benefits to the user (large corporations) of the browser.
In a non-commodity market, price is determined by value, not cost. Cost is irrelevant.

There are e-books worth $100. Harris' _Trading and Exchanges_ is a great example (although it's stupidly priced at roughly half that). It is clearly worth more in Kindle format than it is in giant-ass hardcover format. And yet it costs them $0 marginal dollars to make a new copy.
Ask HN: Email marketing management app?
Is there a good app to manage an email marketing campaign for a startup? I have found myself compiling a list of blogs and news sites to contact and it would be great to track which sites have been contacted and what respective messages were used.
It's too bad they didn't include anything to get around the positioning issues when on a mobile browser and zoomed in.
>> Why the split was never declared before you started working together?

> We've gone back and forth many times. It's hard to decide on equity when circumstances change.

No it's not, it's easy.

I've always felt that two or more people involved in a business like this should share equity in relation to the number of hours they have actually worked, adjusted for any cash they have invested in the business.

For example if neither of you have invested cash but your partner has worked 400 hours and you've worked 1200 hours then the split is 25/75 in your favor. Simple!

The split changes as the ratio of hours changes or as the partner's cash investment changes, but the basic agreement here is that each partner's time and/or money is equally as valuable as that of the other partners. If one partner stops working completely his share will continue to shrink as the other partners continue to increase their relative shares by working more and more hours.

This IMO is "fair" because no matter what, it's the hours the two of you have worked that determines who gets the most, with cash investment considered too of course.

I told my brother this years ago when I had already invested 700 hours in a new business, as well as five thousand dollars in cash. He saw the potential of my venture and he wanted to jump in with a 50/50 deal immediately. I said no, I've invested 700 X $50 = $35,000 in labor and $5000 in cash so I'm ahead of you by $40,000 -- so here's how we will do it:

My share right now is 100% and yours is 0% but you have the right to invest cash or time (valued at $50 per hour) in order to catch up to me. When you've caught up by investing as much time and/or money as me then we will be equal partners, but until then we will use this sharing ratio to determine who owns how much of the business.

It's a good system that rewards partners for their actual contributions instead of some pre-conceived notion of how much each one might be worth relative to the others.
I've heard the "fit and finish" argument frequently, both in print and in person as the owner of an HTC Incredible. I don't really see it myself, though. Sure there are a lot of junky looking 3rd party apps, but this is true of iPhone as well. Unlike early Windows vs Mac, I don't have this reaction to the base system.

What are people reacting to when they say this? Or is it just a canned response?
An Onslaught of Mobile HTML Games
I use a Nexus One as my daily phone since it came out in January, and it's hard to say whether Android software/hardware experience will ever catch up to Apple's standard.

The touchscreen on the iPhone is state of the art, with my N1, I need to touch something once or twice, which never happens with iPhone.

Same for keyboard on the iPhone, it's light years better than any of the dozens implementations for Android. I don't care for predictive text so much as just a great spell checker.

Also compare the Facebook app on both phones. Android's is not there yet.
John Resig stated that IE6 at this point is not causing any major pain points in developing jQuery. In fact he said he'd rather drop support for IE7 since that browser actually introduced two bugs that were not there in IE6. To me the performance gap between the IE family and the other browsers is what's driving the adoption of the alternative better browsers at this point. I'd rather be able to tell people that if they upgrade they'll have a better experience, than to have to tell them that they have no choice but to ditch IE.
How to Look at Mondrian
It would be nice if they were even half the cost but more went to the authors so that it would encourage people to take the time to write. The bad stuff will get weeded out by opinion sharing.
this post is strikingly similar to one a few days ago, but as a reversal with citizenship. The article talked about bit.ly being a website that was technically on the domain for the country of libya (.ly) meaning that the libyan government could possibly remove it like they had other sites in the recent past, I would feel confident that the same is possible for the US, if it caught enough attention of the proper people it could possibly get shut down. Otherwise i would imagine it rolls freely without much fuss.
I'm in my second year of a CS degree. We have a required module titled "Mobile Application Development" which from what I've heard is purely Android development. There is also an optional iPhone development module which is less popular due to the £120 Apple developer fee (I expect the people who take this module will be the ones who bring their shiny Macbooks to every lecture and complain loudly when asked to put them away).

We had an email last year asking for input on which platform to develop on this year so it's also the students' decision to learn Android.
What Android tablet is he talking about? I don't know any comparable to the iPad.
University will teach you the underlying principles of computing and give you the foundation and knowledge to be a better programmer, but it won't necessarily teach you how to be a programmer.

It doesn't teach you a variety of languages or the language that you hope to work with professionally. It doesn't teach you about version control or how to work with legacy code.

I decided to get a degree because it would make be a better programmer and hopefully that has happened. But it wasn't going to a university that taught me how to get stuff done in a language I like.

For reference: I have been in the programming industry for seven years and only this year will I finish my degree (been studying part time).
I have been debating fiddling wither win7 or android.

What is a good android phone to test/develop with? Is the nexus still the best choice?
Instead of a click, why not make it a roll over?
Just a completely bogus story by someone who must not be a Mac user.

I put my MacBook to sleep and it wakes up instantly. I shut down my MacBook and it takes a min to boot.

I put my iPad to sleep and it wakes up instantly. I shut down my iPad and it takes a min to boot.

It's the exact same interaction. My MacBook will sleep for a day or more with no problem, come back and it's instant on. If it sleeps to the point of killing the battery it hibernates instead where the RAM is written to disk.

I think this guy doesn't understand how well Macs perform with sleep/hibernate/shutdown and he's imagining it works like his generic PC.