skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was a huge fan of the idea but the execution is really awful. An alarm clock that wakes you up with a horrendous siren (in the production version can you at last change the tone?) and then reads RSS feeds in a really bad TTS voice just makes me want to put a pillow over my head (or throw the phone at the wall). Besides this, though, the biggest problem I had was that it is completely unintelligent in deciding which headlines are important. I tried setting it up to read HN to my, or NYT, and since it just reads through the feed from top to bottom it gets frustrating very quickly. In order for this to be useful you need to do a lot of backend work to figure out 1) what the user cares about, and 2) reformulate text into short headlines. You also have the issue of content providers making stupid decisions about what to include on their sites. For example, if I chose CNN (god help me), I might want to know what Israel is doing in the West Bank but I sure as heck don't care about the latest celeb to enter rehab, and since this is the first thing I hear in the morning I'd be really peeved. This same basic criticism can be applied to my email inbox, too. If you start reading spam to me, or mailing list messages, I'm not a happy camper.

Calendar integration is critical and should be free. You should also add some "smart" alarm functionality so you can gradually wake your users over a course of several minutes with increasing light and sound. People want to wake up gently first, and only care about content secondarily.

If you add ads, you'll scare away users... unless maybe you partner with guys like Groupon or Ticketmaster so you can present deals, coupons, and events.

Regarding your Edit, I'd be interested to hear why you think anyone is looking to make important decisions at the "moment of alert", especially when that moment is when they wake.

To conclude, maybe I'm just not your target audience. I like my morning routine to be tranquil and calm, and I learned after trying Zazu that I prefer to be the one to engage my brain rather to have it forcibly engaged by my alarm clock.
We've been getting a lot of really great feedback from this site and twitter and we've been taking it all under consideration. Feel free to check out http://blog.desksnear.me for some updates.

And guys, if you love the idea and want to see the site around, please vote for us at http://railsrumble.com/teams/the-rad-warlike-annex when public voting opens on Oct 21! The prizes will keep us alive for a long type!
It's not really. Right now Flash can be used to deploy for iOS finally thanks to Jobs' recent change of heart so essentially "Flash vs. iOS" is a solved problem (although it needs and will get more work from Adobe).

Flash cops a bad rap but it is a massive platform for gaming with hundreds of millions of people choosing Flash games over every other form of entertainment and distraction all day, every day. Yesterday I tracked almost 6 million people that collectively spent 171 years playing Flash games.

There are a handful of technologies that promise we'll be able to make once, deploy everywhere - whoever does it best is going to win the developers. It's not Flash vs. iOS, it's "how do I get my game on n platforms". Adobe fancies themselves in the running, people are working on positioning Mono to solve that problem, Unity are a very likely contender, and of course there's HTML5.
Dude Im sorry about that, my bad. Used the HTML5 Boilerplate and didn't remove it before going live. I feel your pain. Iw anted to do a full mobile skin but time ran out.
Perfect Market's Study Isn't Telling the Whole Story
"Yes, that's correct. No merge commits. To submit a patch, extract it as a context diff and e-mail it. Committers are to apply the patch under their own names, without branch history. The project has decided, more-or-less, to use Git like it was CVS as far as commits to the main repository are concerned. Rather than adapt the PostgreSQL project's workflow to Git, Git would be adapted to the project's workflow."

I hope they fix that culture issue soon, one of the biggest strengths of Git is its merging.
Hackers for Charity gets certifications - less likely to be thrown out of Uganda
HTML5/JavaScript Drum Machine and Sequencer
This link points to a scraped copy of my post here - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/traffic-bait-and-ad-clicks-perfec...
Steve Jobs's Epic 5-Minute Anti-Google Rant
I should be clear, I've also heard he is very nice and the guy that you want to work for. But I've also heard that he's not afraid of replicating another groups work if he doesn't like how its done. Of course this is all second and third hand, and maybe "empire" was the wrong term. But my point was that with all of MS under him, he would push to consolidate redundant projects, rather than taking them head-on.
How has being a founder of such a successful service affected your personal life?
I agree. ScottGu both has the technical chops and the ability to ask hard questions. I had the opportunity to work directly with him (and his many-managers-ago lead, Mark) and have nothing but respect for him.

A return to the CSA role could be just what the company needs. "Back in the day," BillG reviews meant something. Your product could be completely shelved, and even though you could argue it was a huge waste of time for the team, it forced much harder thinking about every area of your product because you just never knew what he was going to ask about and expect you to have in-depth, well-researched answers about.

I always thought Ray was too nice and too high-level-vision of a guy to be in the role he was titled with. There's a reason you don't make the nicest guy in the platoon the next drill sergeant, no matter how well they do on the procedural tests and describing the goals of the next version of your military.
I solved a similar problem in my teens:

I had seven siblings, and I kept my bedroom clean and quiet, as a sort of sanctuary. This made my siblings want to hang out there, which defeated the purpose. So I rearranged my furniture: I used my bed and dresser to make a narrow entry, I raised my bed just high enough that it was uncomfortable to sit on the edge for long periods of time, and I made sure my recliner had piles of school papers (which my siblings wouldn't dare move) tenuously balanced on both armrests.

As long as I was occupying my desk/computer chair, nobody else wanted to spend more than a few minutes in my room. If I wanted to hang out with a sibling, all I had to do was let them sit in the desk chair, and I could sit in the recliner. If I wanted to hang out with several siblings, I could push my bed aside so they could fit their own chairs through.
This is a because a professor of finance or accounting also has the credentials to be a CFO (or even CEO). They're in demand and that's the price that the market will bear. There is probably a similar effect in computer science, engineering, medicine and related fields.
The swipe fees (paid by the merchant) are composed of a switch fee (goes to the network), plus an interchange fee (which goes to the bank that issued the card). They can be quite substantial, ~1.9% on average.

Interchange fees in the US are some of the highest in the world, and rising. They are a lucrative revenue stream for banks (iirc, ~$40 billion annually). See this piece by Felix Salmon for more:
http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2010/01/05/the-interch...

Thanks to the passage of Frank-Dodd, they should be dropping soon.
Absolutely Flash still has a place - for some web games, HTML5 is a contender; but for most, Flash is still where it's at.

But if, say, a company were making a new website for the car they're selling (or their restaurant!), Flash was the obvious way a year ago: a case didn't generally need to be made for it. But now, an in-touch manager should demand that a strong case be made for it before going down that path.
I'd be curious if some of these would have had more success given slightly different operating models. For example, RungJump seemed interesting, but maybe the described commercial model and the long questionnaire killed the community before having a chance to develop into a place focused on great jobs and what makes them so.

I liked the idea and saw the domain expired, so I've put a wiki at http://www.rungjump.com focusing more on what makes a job great as opposed to charging money for ideal job profiles. I'd be curious if it gets some interest in this modified form.

(PS: let me know if you want to claim the domain back)
I think his point was the size of the human finger creates some hard limitations for multi-touch UI design. So at any resolution a 7" tablet isn't going to offer the physical space required to significantly increase the number of tap targets on screen. As a result you're probably going to end up with applications that look, feel and operate more like a SmartPhone app though with less scrolling & resizing. I believe this might be partly negated by the way Android hides so much functionality under the Menu button. You possibly don't need significantly more tap targets on-screen at any given time in Android to have a good workable tablet UI. It does water down the whole multi-touch experience by adding a layer of abstraction to the UI. Direct manipulation is the real magic of multi-touch and that's lost when we start working with multi-step procedural UI checklists to do common tasks.
Given that different OSes have different UI idioms and capabilities, it's not clear that "write once, deploy everywhere" is the right strategy.
Because it gives you insight into what your company believes matters and contributes value to the company.
GitHub's fandom is impressive considering how picky and opinionated developers are. How did you find an agnosticity balance that made such a diverse group of developers so happy?

I'm curious if the answer is being selective in features. You guys had a Gem builder for a while. Was it closed to help foster that idea that GitHub wasn't only a Ruby community site? And, did you consider creating similar tools for other languages?
You certainly note some fair examples for your point. However, I was referring to Apple's choosing of HTML5 instead of Flash. The easy choice that probably benefits mostly in the short-term is to play nice with Flash. Ultimately, Jobs and his team felt the best customer experience was to ditch Flash much to the malign of developers. Would Microsoft made such a decision? And who at Microsoft makes those decisions? Where does the buck stop?
Deported Russian Spies Honored in Moscow
Hi Tom,

I've been waiting two months for a minor ticket (#8991) to get pushed to production. I totally understand development priorities, and especially the challenge of high-volume production environments.

I've heard the development environment of Github described as extremely agile: being driven by individual desires rather than being directed by management, as is typical of a top-down organization.

My question is this:

Does that impact your support decisions? Or, am I seeing an effect from your recent success and growth, being unable to keep up with support requests?

Thanks!
I just want to be a lone voice for PayPal here. I expect downvotes but want to show a different point of view.

- PayPal is not a bank, you don't get the same level of customer service or regulations. However, you don't pay anything like the sorts of fees that you would with a bank for sending/receiving money, especially as a merchant. Try applying for a merchant, online only, account with a bank as a startup and see how far you get.

- PayPal processes a lot of transactions daily, globally, all with accounts that they know very little about. As such, their fraud detection is turned up a lot higher than a regular bank. They're obviously paranoid about any difference in patterns or strange occurences, and the usual response is to stop everything until it can be sorted out. In most cases it does get sorted out but that's after the anger has died down.

-Banks and credit card companies make mistakes all the time. My credit card issuer is always sneaking unjustified interest charges. I have to call and reverse them all the time. I've had banks bounce checks for no reason, charge me fees which cause the balance to go below zero, then charge more fees for it. That's stealing as well, but everyone shrugs their shoulders and says 'banks, what can you do'.

So my summary is : yes, dancing with PayPal is holding a Tiger by the tail, but there aren't really any alternatives. They can suck, but they're a cheap and reliable service.

But don't think that any amount of bank regulation would fix things. If they had the customer service of a bank, they'd have to charge higher fees. With the low fees, you should have low service expectations.
Redis' internal design typically trades off memory for speed. For some workloads, there can be an order of magnitude difference between the raw number of bytes handed off to Redis to store, and the amount of memory that Redis uses.

What are the circumstances that make this kind of tradeoff worthwhile?

A generic Key-Value store, say Kyoto Cabinet, is pretty fast and you can configure its cache to be huge if you need it. Does reconstructing and using a list/set/hash take that much time?

Edit: Is the "order of magnitude" here greater or less than the extra space that keeping a b-tree index in memory would take? Is it doing something akin to that or a completely different thing?
Matt Cutts often tells us this - but he talks specifically from a search web spam perspective, I suspect the Adsense team have different rules and probably can (and do) "play Whack a mole" when appropriate.
Ah, I meant let humans summarize articles instead of relying on libots.
Dup: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1804277
And knowing what files were touched for the various commits is a big advantage as well.
I think part of the reason is not just the whole Android culture of free, but the poor Market experience. Once Google cleans up the Market, I think sales will increase. Perhaps not to iOS levels, but I would be surprised if there isn't a significant improvement.
Texting is the future
I only use PayPal to deposite into my bank.

I only allow them to access funds through a credit card, that way I can contest the charges.

Come to think of it, I never give any organization access to my bank account - ever!

If that is paranoide so be it.
Ahh I understand. I generally don't use threading (I rather threat emails as a standalone items), but I can see why you'd find subject threading annoying. I tend to filter emails and reroute different types of emails that don't belong in my inbox to other systems, so I don't see a need to be as stringent on the requirements for threading. That being said, I don't know if any clients that would fulfill your expectations. I guess you're stuck with Thunderbird!
Exactly! Jobs picked BSD (1977), the NeXT GUI (1985/1988), and an object oriented version of C (1986) that came before C++ (1983)! (OK, BSD had been around a little while by that time, and C++ predated Objective C.) They are mature technologies now, but were all picked relatively early in their life.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Software_Distribution

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%2B%2B
Tell the truth: You are currently not set up to have him/her help, and further, you aren't sure yet what (s)he would be able to do to help out. Should the situation change, you will gratefully contact that person.
Eye Tracking vs. Mouse Tracking
Sinatra, Datamapper and Rspec 2
Visionary is a retrospective label. It's also pop-culture meaningless. You can't, in the present, be "visionary". That's just silly (unless you're from the future).

I was only last week listening to Cory Doctorow interviewing William Gibson, and the GreatDismal was mocking himself being labelled "visionary".

Hindsight is, well, hindsight in retrospect.
There's only one person I've dated who knew my salary, and vice versa.
Why are you leaving me? Learning from an unsubscribe exit survey
Given Ray Ozzie was the mastermind behind Windows Azure (launched in 2010), Microsoft's cloud computing offering that competes with Amazon's Web Services and Google's App Engine (and Google Docs), this can't be a good sign.

In fact, this is a further indication of Microsoft's struggles in each key market that represents the future of computing: cloud computing, thin devices, and online media.

First consider cloud computing, with Windows Azure. I found it difficult to find any concrete data on how Azure is performing in the market, but I suspect it’s not performing well. Put simply, it’s hard to imagine that Microsoft is aggressively developing or marketing Azure, since cloud computing offerings directly threaten Microsoft’s revenues and profitability in the PC market, especially its Windows and Office products.

Next, consider Microsoft’s performance in thin devices, especially smartphones, video game consoles, and portable media players. With a current global market share of just 4.7% (Gartner, 2010), Microsoft is behind every other major mobile OS developer, including Symbian, Android, iOS, and Blackberry. In video game consoles, the Xbox 360 is trailing far behind the Nintendo Wii in market share, despite the fact that the Wii is using older generation technology (VGChartz, 2010). The Zune portable media player has a paltry 2% market share, compared to the iPod’s 70% (NPD, 2010). And Microsoft hasn’t revealed a clear strategy to compete in important and emerging thin device categories, such as tablets and connected televisions.

Moving on to online media, consider Microsoft’s performance in search or in online music or video. According to comScore (2010) Google has a 66.1% share of the search market, compared to 11.2% for Microsoft. And while Google generated $23.65 billion in revenues and $6.5 billion in income from search related advertising in 2009, Bing generated just $2.2 billion, with a $2.35 billion operating loss in its most recent fiscal year. Meanwhile, Microsoft is well behind Google and Apple in the online music and video markets (e.g., Microsoft’s Zune marketplace versus Apple’s iTunes or Google’s YouTube versus Bing video).

In closing, Microsoft’s financial performance since its initial public offering in 1986 has been nothing short of phenomenal. But if Microsoft wants to remain a leader in the future of computing, it must quickly and aggressively shift its focus and investments away from desktops and packaged applications to a combination of cloud computing, thin devices, and cloud computing. Given a bulk of Microsoft’s financial performance ($4.5 billion in quarterly profits!) and its core capabilities rest with Windows and Office, I am pessimistic that it has the interest or ability to make this fundamental transition.

I just posted this to my blog and submitted the post to HN. If you enjoyed the read, I'd appreciate an upvote (the article title is "Is Microsoft in trouble?"). Thanks!
I'm not too familiar with either company, but wouldn't it have been better to bring this up privately with the involved companies before posting about it on HN?

It'd be a shame if Headwall obtained permission from Pivotal to use their design and they were wrongly portrayed as thieves.
Am I a failure at a business person because my immediate (and obvious) conclusion was that if 1/2 people became miserable and other 1/2 weren't happier then the solution was to have everyone at or as close as possible to the median salary rather than being secret and under/over paying a bunch of money grubbing twerps.
Is Microsoft in trouble?
As per the article, 13-17 year olds are using more than twice as many texts per month (~3300/mo) as 18-24 year olds (~1600/mo). After seeing the recent surge in email-based startups, where are all the startups focusing on SMS?
Show HN: A/Bingo for PHP
I think you're just not using sites where this is a problem. Any site that currently pre-moderates comments is a potential customer to a service such as this. For instance, websites of dead tree media must defend their brand vigorously, as it's all they've got left. So the quality of their comments matters a lot.
A bank doesn't exist to safeguard your capital. That's what they tell you to convince you to deposit your funds there. The government promises to make good any bank failure in order to convince you to deposit your funds in a bank both because it helps the economy and because it makes it easier to keep track of you for tax purposes. Before this guarantee it was common enough for a bank to fail and depositors would lose all their funds.

A bank exists to take in deposits, pay interest and then loan that money out to other people at a higher interest rate. It's a completely different model to PayPal, which exists as a payment transfer company along the likes of Western Union. Yes, they avoid banking regulations, but the banking regulations exist to protect the banking industry, as widespread bank failures can seriously damage the economy. This is because banks use fractional reserve banking and actually don't have the funds to satisfy all depositors at the same time. There's no reason why a payments transfer company should be regulated like this, because PayPal should be able to make good all requests for funds at the same time, as they don't (well, I hope not) leverage the funds on deposit and lend them out again.

If any regulation should be applied to PayPal, it should be in the area of consumer protection by having an ombudsman or defined area of recourse for settling disputes. But because of the trans-national design of the business, this is never going to work. And any increase in regulation is going to cause an increase in fees, which is the reason everyone uses PayPal in the first place.
Of course. Most people just don't think you can earn that kind of income in academia.
That's pretty much what I said - it's a problem that Adobe, Mono, Unity etc. are hoping they can solve for us.

I don't think it'll ever be as simple as write once, deploy anywhere ... but write once, in one language, and deploy everywhere with minimal fuss is an admirable goal.
Serious question. Do you look? And how do you think having this information changes people's behaviour?
I don't think Github (or anyone really) could afford a drinkup at Nihon.
Cog is a little webdev framework of mine, a work-in-progress steal from spending couple of years in different companies.

Since A/B testing is considered pretty fundamental to most of my clients, I thought I'd share with the dear community of HN one possible implementation of it. You can see A/B testing in action on the sample page:

http://github.com/waverz/cog/blob/master/cog-guestbook/pages...

When used together with scriptor, an A/Btest is about 1 line in the design file (db rows, and counters are automagically set up on first page visiting). Stand-alone you might want to integrate it with a templating engine of your own :)

Code is PD, and review is more, than welcome.
Yes, Gates has nothing to gain by returning, but an awful lot to lose
Can't fault you on your points -- they're all solid, but I would say there's a glaring omission. Cutting edge user experience (and that includes usability) does underpin Apple's success.
In the same sense, would you say Bill G was prototypical CEO material? No, but look what he built. Ozzie is awkward too, but he founded and sold two software companies for a fortune. Zuckerberg is introverted and awkward too, but look what he has built. The notion that a CEO, especially in tech, should be a business degree toting, people-person, non-technical CEO like Ballmer is wrong.
How important is the video? I have a crappy laptop webcam, no video skills, and a lousy connection.
Agreed, I never really saw him as much more than a figurehead.

In many ways, Microsoft is such an immovable beast, you can't expect many people outside of a Bill Gates to have the gravitas to make things happen.