skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I sold my sleds last year, but we've got about 6000 miles of trails out here (NH). If you still need testers around the December/January time frame, email me and I'll pass the info on to some local clubs. There won't be ridable snow before then, so it would be hard for anyone to really test it now.
Same as with many mainstream manufacturers' (Sony, Samsung, Acer) older and even not so old Android phones.

But that doesn't mean anything. Community should be fully able to maintain Android updates if manufacturer doesn't will (and haven't installed proprietary virtual brick walls to prevent rooting).

I don't think there are any real hardware limitations.
The rules are different when you have the vast majority of traffic. And you can prevent someone from trying to build a better product just because their product is popular - ask Microsoft about its experience with the EU.
Time traveller in Charlie Chaplin footage?
Java is dead, long live....Erlang?
I develop exclusively in Firefox, and test on other browsers, so I use Firebug all the time. How well do other built-in tools compare to it?
Not really. Java is going to stick around for a long time, but I think it would be prudent to take stock of what realistic alternatives there are.
No you wouldn't. You'd have to buy the 3G version to get the GPS censor, but there are plenty of apps available that store your maps on the iPad. I'm pretty sure the GPS censor works fine without a 3G plan...
Yes. I played around with one of these in the Pearl Market in Beijing last week. All in all, I guess it's good for the price.

I like the size, it's okay for video and access to the Android store is great. The touch screen takes a very heavy touch, though. It was annoying after just 10 minutes.
Off-topic, but news to me: Linux support too! http://notifo.com/desktop#linux

I thought Notifo were iPhone-only - clearly I should pay them more attention!
Ah, but in the earliest part of the big bang, time didn't exist. Now what?
Http://www.gsmegypt.com/vb/showthread.php?t=45999
I was going to take a look at this article until I saw it was on smashingmagazine.com.
Was wondering how I missed seeing an address on that profile.. then I saw who wrote the comment :-)
Thanks for the clarification, Pg!
Just couldn't help wondering about it- seemed weird to notice that many first-names account not posting/commenting, but just existing.
I think that supports their argument.
Every GUI is a descendent of the Xerox Star
Back to screens full of icons for applications.

Since Win95's Start Menu (I'm sure there are perhaps earlier examples in other desktop environments, but Windows is what I'm familiar with), users have been encouraged to keep documents on the desktop, and keep application shortcuts filed away in the Start menu or on the Quick Launch bar or other similar launcher. OSX and various Linux desktops are organized in the same way: you can put application shortcuts on the desktop, but the desktop is better for documents.

Why did this happen? A)Even for non-tech-savvy people, the idea of a "file" makes perfect sense if you think about a document, B)Someone realized that opening a document in an application made for that kind of document should be a first class action, and shouldn't necessarily require you to first open the application and then use the application to open the document, and C)When you start putting documents on a desktop, putting "applications" alongside them using the same visual representation (a clickable icon) can be confusing. The result was a more literal "desktop," complete with your click-to-open documents laying around. Tools (applications) were put away in the desk drawers, so to speak.

The widespread usage of iOS has put apps front and center again, both figuratively and literally - users have again become accustomed to seeing grids of icons for their applications instead of their documents. This is reflected in the Ubuntu and OSX screenshots.
> then why does it matter if it pivots or not?

You've lost me. I never said anything about this. Maybe your confusing me with someone else?
How Google could Revolutionize the Music Industry
And how do you point it out to them? As discreetly as possible, or by shouting it to all their friends?
It's also important to know that the original question was "People are treating Google like their most trusted friend. Should they?"

I read Eric's answer along the lines of "Look, as CEO of the company, I think it's important to know that treating Google as your best friend would have limitations, specifically (the whole Patriot Act stuff)."
I think it's pretty hard to break into this market as most of the big players are already over-saturated with photographs in most standard categories. It might make more sense to focus on a specific subset of the market that's under-represented (shots of people doing activities, etc.) or local news events.

Also given your audience you might need to be extra careful with model releases, because if the people in the photographs are minors their parents will have to sign a model release and not the subjects themselves.

The pricing seems off as well, if someones going to pay for a photo they'll probably be willing to pay more than $1. Also if the photographers are only earning $0.50/cents and only a tiny fraction of photos are actually sold, I'm guessing your photographers will get frustrated with not earning money quickly and leave your service.
The Return of Pay
You haven't mentioned any of the crowd-sourced design sites:

http://99designs.com
http://crowdspring.com
Ask HN: Web app dev advice
I need some advice on developing a web app. My domain is Java, with little to no web app experience. So I'm really stuck on where to start. I've seen that AWS EC2 is offering free for a year, which would be good to get things off the ground, but have no idea as how to use it or what it can do for me.

All in all I'm just darn confused.

The basic idea is that I want to develop a PAYG web app for SME's.

I also like the idea of Joomla and wonder if this could be used in conjunction with AWS?

The basic idea of the site would be to have the ability to:

- user login - pay for service - use service - user log back out

All in all a simple web app. Although the technology that I have developed is in the domain of Java and it would have to stay that way.

Any thoughts or advice would be greatly appreciated.

TIA
TCP/IP fixes all that.
Basho moves Riak to GitHub
Okay sir, you've raked in 166 points on HN (33.2/hour), we expect a full emblogification on what happens next with this/you.

I'm going to be curious mainly about what kind of spikes you get in your traffic, paid accounts, and leads to other publicity.
Google doesn't "have" the vast majority of traffic. The vast majority of people go there voluntarily when competitors are a click away. There's a big difference. All Google has is their brand and the quality of their product, and how long do you think their brand will last if Microsoft starts offering a better product?

What are we going to say to Google if Google is legally prevented from innovating, Bing isn't, and Bing wins?
The WikiLeaks Iraq Logs: A Protocol of Barbarity
How the King Cobra Maintains Its Reign (and high-risk lifestyle)
Still, its a short step to Google putting their own travel results at the top of every travel-related search. Its got to improve Google ticket-sales conversions and hurt others.

Its a bit (a lot) anticompetitive, for sure. But the alternative is, nationalize Google like the post office, and regulate them.
When I started this blog I used that picture b/c I really liked it. You are right... this is an Austin related blog so I should use a picture from an Austin street... Thanks for the observation - you have won my admiration :) and an up vote!
I look at universities for design students (graduated). I had general good experiences with that way.
Another possibility might be to look in eastern europe for offshore design agencies.
Judge blocks North Carolina attempt to get Amazon sales data
I suppose it's "donation-based", but you fill in the donation with the actual subscription.

NCG doesn't sound like a non-profit. I wonder what Paypal's stance is on this.
Chrome's developer tools are quite nice. They provide a lot of information in a pleasing fashion - both functionally because it gets you access to everything you needed when you decided to install Firebug, and aesthetically, because it all looks good. I also found that Chrome's tools excel in one area especially, that is, locating errors in a document and quickly getting to the root cause. I recently picked up someone else's pile of HTML and javascript and was able to quickly make sense of what was wrong and fix it.

I still use Firebug at work because I don't have Chrome there, but for home projects I've pretty much switched entirely.
Welcome HN Refugees.
I haven't tried it recently. How hard is it to put a gnumeric spreadsheet in an abiword document? Can you update the gnumeric spreadsheet and see it in abiword? How well does abiword read and write complex word docs?
Your software will time out long before a packet arrives. You could make your (custom) software never timeout, but your software is likely to become unusable due to pauses whose durations are unknown - what if it takes 5 minutes for a small operation to complete?
Heroku is down for the third time today
I saw that, but I can't find the link to download notifo_agent.py, unfortunately. However, it might be possible to throw a python script together using their API. https://api.notifo.com/

I'm eagerly awaiting the release of Notifo for Android. Any word on when that will be released jazzychad?
I love HN, I really do, but I like scoped discussions sometimes and I think it'd be great to have a place where we could focus in on that.
That's such a good article from Sipegel.
I submitted it as a separate article on HN:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1835767
If this ever takes off, you might be able to feature other blogs' feed on the demo page for a fee.
I filter my e-mail inbox pretty aggressively, and also use it as a to-do list. I have found that having a reminder from OhLife in the evening when doing a daily review has dramatically reduced the friction from posting into a blog or even a word file. Both of those journaling methods I tried which were abandoned a month later. The way an OhLife reminder e-mail shows you what you have written seems to model our natural way of learning by making arbitrary connections between entries.
and because ITA itself is not important for them. Losing control of the information that goes from ITA to consumers is why they make a fuss out of this.
Ergonomic chairs can be quite expensive. I just bought a desk at IKEA for $200 canadian.

http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/60111123

move the shelves down, raise the 'desk' up and voila!
a proper nerd-station. :)

http://sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc4/hs906.snc4/71913...

Before that I was using stacks of phone books and stuff. I love working while standing up.

-- edit --
I guess that's probably not useful for you ... but lifehacker had a great series of articles on stand-desking which inspired me :)

http://lifehacker.com/search/stand%20desk/
Free PSD Templates
Perhaps these very neat and professional 11 free PSD templates can be your best options to choose which one is the right one to inspire your imagination or select some of the uniqueness
3 Reasons Why Most Advice Is BAD Advice
Ultimately, do you think more harm or good has been done by revealing these search histories under court order?

Good: some criminals have presumably been convicted, some innocent people have probably been exonerated. Some crimes have probably been prevented.

Harm: jaded FBI agents have got an occasional giggle from looking through the search history of folks under suspicion.
"5. You don't have to take notes"

I agree with that one, I love taking notes at events and conferences. After a one-day conference I'll end up with a few pages of notes, and when I get home I type those into a few actionable items, bam!
Apple price points don't tend to change (this is by design). I would expect the next version of the iPad to have additional features (a front-facing camera is guaranteed) and more memory and probably a slightly better processor, but I wouldn't count on spending any less money.
Ok, I am a holdout on the "its vs it's" issue. One is not superior to the other; they are a compromise due to 'battling syntax rules', posessive vs contraction. Following convention would be useful for the reader, yes, but I bet you weren't confused by my text.

And not knowing you live on a planet is not a "technical definition" problem - its a fundamental ignorance. I didn't go into it, but I'm thinking another sentence from me may have sorted out the flat-vs-round issue in their mind as well.
It would seem like the default option to me. Why would it show you who voted up and down? What would you do with that information?
I can only speak for the Chrome/Safari WebInspector, and they're good, but I find myself going back to Firebug if I have to do any serious debugging - personally I find there to be a big step up in usability with Firebug meaning I can work faster.

It'll be interesting to see what happens to development tools when Firebug goes cross-browser.
>> 2. The returns on angel investing are bimodal

You're misinterpreting PG's stance here. This only applies this to VCs and super-angels, not to regular angel investors like yourself. VCs and SAs are obligated to have a much larger return on their investments in order to make the funds they raise a success. This is done via one or two big winners, so they're hoping for 1000x.

>> 3. Valuations don't matter

Similarly, this is aimed at VCs and SAs, not you. And of course you have to interpret the phrase as "Valuations don't matter [within reason]." Clearly you can think of a high enough number where the valuations should begin to matter to these people, but the point is that they're not at those levels right now.

>> I have a net negative return because of one spectacular failure (from which I have learned a lot but that's another story).

I'd love to read a blog post on that experience, and what made it different from your other successful investments.
Both the Win 3.x example and the Ubuntu example suffer from the same (presumed) failure: application organization imposed by the OS vendor.

I can find things on my messy desk because I made the mess. If someone else arranged my desk for me, suddenly I have to understand their mental model before I can locate anything.

Which is why I can never, ever find what I'm looking for in Windows' Start menu. Even if the categories seem obvious, they never map 100% to my way of thinking.

(If those categories in the Ubuntu example are user-defined, then they're OK by me.)

…and let's please not even get into how confusing and redundant the Dock looks in the otherwise nice Lion example.
Perhaps a little intemperate, for which I apologise.
You see the same thing happening with interface AddOns for World Of Warcraft: the functionality of a few very popular AddOns is eventually incorporated into the game itself.
Doc, here. I don't think the article is sensationalist at all. Here's a quick list of basic steps I recommend

* standing desk: I love mine. 2x6 legs, 2x4 connecters, $50 at Home Depot, and 4 hours of work -- http://www.flickr.com/photos/niels_olson/5097452401/lightbox...

* live close enough to work to walk or ride. Ride to the train or ferry if necessary. (I ride 17 miles, take a train, then another 4 miles)

* Move to Southern California. I'm not kidding.

* Strength:

50 low crunches, 5n pushups, m half-down pullups

50 side crunches, 5(n-1) pushups, m-2 half-down pullups

50 crunches, 5(n-2) pushups, m-4 half-down pullups

50 opposite side crunches, 5(n-3) pushups, m-6 half-down pullups

50 crunches

Vary n and m to ability

* Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.

Michael Pollan, Unhappy Meals (Food, Inc; King Corn, and Omnivore's Dilemma condensed into one essay) --http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/magazine/28nutritionism.t....

Join the Slow Food movement: http://www.slowfood.com/about_us/eng/manifesto.lasso

Four books I'd like to see in every kitchen:

* Deborah Madison, Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone (number one among vegetarians, but also the vegetable cookbook everyone should have) -- http://www.amazon.com/Vegetarian-Cooking-Everyone-Deborah-Ma...

* Mark Bittman, Fish (If you can't cook fish after this, kill yourself) -- http://www.amazon.com/Fish-Complete-Guide-Buying-Cooking/dp/...

* Harold McGee, On Food and Cooking (unrivaled, in depth, the go-to resource for food hackers) -- http://www.amazon.com/Food-Cooking-Science-Lore-Kitchen/dp/0...

* Julia Child, Mastering the Art of French Cooking (the original food hacker) -- http://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Art-French-Cooking-Vol/dp/03...
its not. They just copied the look. (Check out the epad, and the apad and other versions of this pad)
Like http://www.honestly.com/profile?id=466217 ?
Creating Customized Packages in SAS Software
More like an unprovoked incident. eBay and PayPal were involved in a serious war back then.
Thanks. Below is the version I'm trying. It allows multiple-argument commands, doesn't stomp on atchange if inotifywait isn't installed and I wanted it to fire when touching files as well as modifying them.

if which inotifywait > /dev/null ; then
function atchange(){
FILE="$1"
shift
while inotifywait -qq -e modify -e attrib "$FILE"; do
"$@";
done;}
fi

Looking again at atchange it deliberately waits after first noticing the file has been modified, in case something is still modifying it. It fires once writing has stopped for at least a second. I'm not sure if I need that in my use cases, but its authors clearly did so I'm pointing out that the above shell function does not provide a true like-for-like replacement. (Also atchange allows a single argument to be a command_file, functionality I never use.)

EDIT changed the "while true" so that the function stops on an error rather than infinitely looping when something goes wrong, like FILE ceasing to exist. A file temporarily disappearing would scupper the script though, whereas the perl script deals quietly with that.
I believe Orbitz is no longer owned by the airlines. It started off that way, though.
+1 not because I agree with everything but we have to have some dissenting voices (event when they're a little simplistic, like this one) to make progress.
Flight searching/booking services are such a circlejerk already; some of them even provide ways to comparison-shop with other search services, a meta-meta-economy of sorts.

That said, I just use ITA + southwest.com because all the other aggregators are too marketing-driven, and Southwest doesn't "do" aggregators but I like them.
Could we not use "terrorist style" to describe things like this? I don't think anybody is going to get killed over this.
Well, this particular "fad" has been around for a couple million years or more ... compare that with "eat whole grains" fad for example ...
Ha! Sorry about the confusion. I meant to type Minion, not Myriad.

I definitely agree that you should be designing with the majority in mind. But if you set up good fallbacks then you can get 30% with fantastic type and 70% with quite decent type.

I don't tend to do "pixel perfect" design. I prefer designing in the browser, but can see how the traditional approach would make things difficult.
> The fighting and tinkering is your problem. You are fighting the wrong enemy.

Yes of course, it is my fault that the software I installed did not "just work" and reported the issues when someone claimed "it just works". Using one of the most popular open source VMs is just wrong!

> Quick googling shows, that VBoxLinuxAdditions provides custom display driver.

The first thing I do is install the custom drivers. It still does not update the available set of resolutions. And using xrandr etc too has been a hit or miss until recent updates. Infact the last set of helpful information about dealing with this issue is a Ubuntu forum discussion from 2006.

> these guest tools do not support dkms

So, it cannot be disputed that "Linux just works". Linux does not have built-in drivers for widespread hardware such as Virtualbox. And why do we need to rebuild kernel modules after every incremental monthly kernel revison. Certainly does not sound like "it just works".

>Regarding VirtualPC, it is broken in it's own, special ways.

The keyboard driver error was reported by users on real hardware. Not just VirtualPC. I just happened to run into the error on VirtualPC. Ubuntu did not pick up a fix for this for 6 months, when the Linux kernel mainline already had the fix 6 months ago.

> Sometimes I wonder that it works at all. Microsoft does not support other guest systems than Windows.

You are wrong. You seemed to have missed the entire fiasco around the Novell-Microsoft "partnership" around Virtualization.

Saying that Ubuntu/Linux just works and if it doesn't it is the users fault, is plain misleading and completely misses the point of "it just works". Every piece of software "just works" if all non-working situations can be conveniently blamed on the user. I don't get the defensiveness around some particular piece of software.
Not a snowball's chance in hell. And I like Erlang.

It's not even competing against node.js - I mean, Erlang has been able to do what node.js does for years, and still does it better, yet Node.js is getting an order of magnitude more traction than Erlang got in its dreams.

I think Javascript has a shot at being the 'next big language', maybe. I'm not sure it's any good for organizing really big systems though.
not all people in jail are terrorists.
I didn't read past the first point because it's dead wrong. Paul is talking about abstracting efficiency away into the compiler and presenting the programmer with a more elegant interface. As an example, Paul notes that strings and lists really should just be represented as lists and the compiler should efficiently handle lists of characters as a special case. Not only in the author completely missing Paul's point (efficiently is unimportant at the axiomatic level), the author is incorrectly applying the essay to business operations instead of programming languages. In most businesses, programming language speed is NOT the bottleneck of the operation.
Ask HN: Companies and source control
So recently, I've been checking out a lot of companies, speaking with their engineering teams and interviewing. The general stuff a CS senior would do.

As far as the older companies go, they use a wide array of revision control software.

Most of the newer startups I've spoken to use Mercurial though. Anybody know why? It seems like git is the more popular public choice, and I've heard engineers say "we use hg here, but if I had a choice, I'd use git." Why then are most startups using Mercurial?
If half of their friends also have their fly open, shouting it might be a better option.
The Linux script is not quite available yet. It's very hacky and python is not my strong suit. That said, we will probably release it soon and let the community help improve it.

We have a very alpha Android version in testing with hopes of a public beta before the end of the year. I'm having to retrain my brain in Java after massive Objective-C injections.
I know that in Korea, IE / Windows is basically the only choice, no one really registers the existence of anything else, so I presume it would be pretty similar in the rest of east Asia.