skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Quote of the day: "This is where you stop looking at your startup as a self-masturbatory piece of UX genius and start looking at it as a business"

There was an article on HN the other day about expedia increasing revenue by removing a confusing form field on their booking process. I think the lesson is that users find different things confusing / annoying than UX experts (or web designers). UX experts ramble on about 'clutter' and simplification, however, in my experience, everyday people have a high tolerance to clutter as long as its the right clutter and that clutter is easy to understand (or is a really great deal). At the end of the day, put your faith in data driven split testing, not UX zealots.
This looks like the start of a journey that ends with something like:

http://amforth.sourceforge.net/

or:

http://krue.net/avrforth/
Future of applied game design
Habits Calendar
I don't know. A lot of the smart PHP developers are still there. Maybe people using PHP moved on, but PHP devs are still strong.

As for PHP code, pear is still widely used for code distribution. Combined with pecl, and you have two resources for code distribution depending on how the code is integrated (PHP or C). And don't confuse pear as a library. It's a distribution method. For example, PHPUnit is installed via pear.
Interesting. I wonder if this kind of system will make a comeback as RFIDs, QR codes, digital payment systems, and smartphones get more ubiquitous.
As sister comment suggested, it's increasing the contrast. Normally, it would not make things look 'less blurry', but due to the way the image is being captured, the screen likely has higher dot pitch than recording medium their using, so low contrast areas blur together. As you increase the contrast, then they start to appear 'discrete'.
Burma DDoS'd just before election?
At first I was all "they can't do that, there isn't enough bandwidth and the latency is terrible"! But, oh well, it's just a boring article on how NASA rented cloud servers to do number crunching for the Mars rover. I really hate sensationalistic misleading headlines.
In computer science academia, I have not heard of someone refusing to release their code. This seems quite bizarre to me. Of course it is not usually very polished code, but still there is no justification for hiding it.
If my PHP connects to a mysql database on the same host, and I sell that host as a product, I need to release that php code?
I don't use shoes at all when I run.

However, I would be willing to buy shoes like the vibram 5 fingers to protect me from the occasional pebbles and the dangerous glasses but not modify how I run barefoot.
The idea was that their network protocol was an original copyrighted work, and that any clean-room implementation of it would be a derived work.

That does indeed sound crazy, but they also had piles of cash to throw at lawyers to go after anyone who challenged them, and (maybe as a result of that) nobody ever made e.g. a clean-room BSD or LGPL licensed version of the mysql library. So it never made it to court AFAIK.
"XBLIG can not connect to the Internet

...

XBLIG can not be played offline"

Well... damn.
Nice graphic, but seriously top score for ui for flash? Cannot agree on that.
I'll just pipe in for Milwaukee's tech scene. We've been holding BarCampMilwaukee every year since 2006. We also have Web414, a monthly meetup of web nerds, as well as more specific meetups for Drupal, Ruby, .NET, PHP, as well as Web Design Meetups. There are occasional DevHouses and Hacker House events, as well as co-working space and Milwaukee Makerspace is opening this month. I'm not as familiar with Madison but there's a scene there as well. They just had their 3rd BarCamp in August, and Web608 is a sister group to Web414. There's Ignite Madison and probably more, but I don't even live there.

If you want a tech scene to happen, you need to WORK to make it happen. Or just complain about it and move to a city where someone else has already done all the work.
Implanted Retinal Chip Allows Blind People To See
True. Or companies that came back from the total brink (Apple, most famously, but also IBM, to some extent HP, and others).

What's interesting to me is that you rarely hear about software companies that come back from near-irrelevance after a prolonged bout with it. I'm sure there are some obvious examples I'm not thinking of right now. In some respects you could almost even make the argument for Microsoft, assuming its E&D business continues to flourish and become more important to the company overall.
One thing that has amazed me about London is how quickly it changes and develops. An area can go from being being run down to 'gentrified' within a decade. It will eventually happen in Clapton as well.
That would be Python!
This. Why does it have to be evil to be interested in providing for your own family first? For example, I want my children to be able to go to a nice school and get a good education, before I can worry about other children. This means getting paid something higher than a teacher's salary.

Society needs to stop chastising the individual for "not being altruistic enough" and look in the mirror. If we are not willing to pay qualified teachers enough, what does that say about our society as a whole? What does that say about the legacy we leave for our children?
I was using a Scitex imaging workstation before Photoshop 1.0 was released. There were others available too, like Barco and Paintbox.

The big advantage of Photoshop is that it could run on cheap hardware (Mac IIcx and IIfx) with decent performance.
Ask HN: How to see a piece of hackage through from start to finish?
Hi there like-minded souls,

I taught myself to code in C at a young age. I am very much an auto-didact and everything I know about software development comes from learning on the job and through my own curiosity (I have Compilers ... by Aho et al. staring at from the bookshelf as we speak), not from a comp-sci higher level education. In fact, I have a degree in philosophy and mathematics.

I have a ton of ideas that I'd love to pursue. Ideas in electronic poetry, and idea for a wysiwig live web-page builder, an idea for a syntactically extensible functional programming language. An idea for an anti-social networking site. But I never get anywhere with them. I'm always tinkering but never crafting. I always find some excuse to drop one thing and start another. I've taught myself Ruby on Rails a few years ago because PHP was getting me down and though I've been keeping myself up to date with jQuery and now Rails 3 I have never completed a website in it!

I would love some advice. But moreover I think I just need to get this off my chest so thanks for listening.

How do I choose one set of technologies (and stick with them) and learn them inside and out? How do I choose a project that will reward me intellectually and financially? and most importantly how do I get myself to stick at one thing from start to finish?

Now where was that Haskell tutorial ...
Not really. Most high quality apps are optimized for small touch screens, not 17" monitors with a mouse. And anyways, UIKit and AppKit aren't that similar, you'd end up rewriting almost everything.
Tech4000: Microsoft tempts antitrust lawyers with expanded antivirus offering
I think "Each and every time Apple decided to innovate, they were laughed at" is a bit of an exaggeration, from what I recall the iPod,iPhone, iBook, MacBook and probably other products all were innovative and highly appreciated by about everyone.
I mean, even the latest macbook airs are receiving raving reviews and have quite a bit of innovation in them.
I like the dollar prefix for variables. But each to their own.
You sort your contacts in gmail? I honestly would never bother, really don't see the point.

I very much doubt Google are, but Facebook might be in a good position to figure this out themselves now anyway. If I'm friends with Em, Bob, Barry and Jill, and Em and Bob are friends and Barry and Jill are friends, the friendship groups are fairly obvious aren't they?

Obviously I've never seen their data so don't know, but I wouldn't be surprised that they do have the information. Just looking at 'Mutual Friends' of people I know on Facebook it seems to be fairly well defined.
Thanks for the rec. I'm sure there's already a burgeoning microgenre for what I guess I'd call PhysPunk (physics punk). I'm torn between wanting to delve into it and wanting to keep it at arm's length, lest it influence me too much in my own work.
If you stopped watching the movies, would you miss them? That is basically how I feel about the few remaining shows I do watch - they have been selected for awesomeness, and I consider the time I spend on them worthwhile.
Yes, but just to make sure everybody understands it's only the lawyers (and dubious privacy organizations) who get paid, they sent out an email to every Google Mail user stating (quote):

"Just to be clear, this is not a settlement in which people who use Gmail can file to receive compensation. Everyone in the U.S. who uses Gmail is included in the settlement, unless you personally decide to opt out before December 6, 2010. The Court will consider final approval of the agreement on January 31, 2011."
The Power of Less by Leo Babauta

It is essentially a guide on how to reduce complexity in your life so you can have more success with the essential things. I like it so far but I'm only half way through it.
$language is better depending on the circumstances. PHP is very good for building small websites, I'd say almost ideal in some ways. Whether or not it works well in other fields is debatable. (Note: large companies using it successfully is not a good measure of something working well.)

Additionally PHP is inherently slow not because of the interpreter but because of the design the language. Most websites aren't affected by this because many of the functions in the standard library are implemented in C and are very fast.
Every piece of "bloat" has two consequences: it annoys some users -- possibly to the point of scaring them away from the service -- and it convinces some other users to do something profitable.

The fact is, savvy users are much more likely to stick with a bloated system than we like to imagine. I still buy tickets from Orbitz, despite the pages of upsells I have to click through, because I have an account there and I know their quality of customer service.
> I couldn't tell from your page (or I just missed it), what does your start up do?

I'm developing an online, subscription-based game for PC and Mac.

> I used to be a consultant... if you've never done it I recommend all devs to spend some time doing it.

The problem I see with consulting is that to be really good, you need to care more about the client's project than your own stuff (or at least act that way). This is a problem for me, since (non-retirement) money is not a significant motivator.

This is also true of customers, of course, but there's a bit more leeway and leverage there.

> The listed salaries in ads are just for where to start negotiations at :-)

Very true.

> In any case, if your start up does well, but not so well that you can retire like Brin & Page (exit w/ say $3-5M) you'll find that higher paying offers tend to come a fair bit easier.

Interesting. When I reach that range, I won't be accepting offers -- I'll semi-retire. I'd probably work at building a personal submarine like Nautilus UC3 ($200k), doing AI research, building robots and making art.

You mention SF and Seattle. For comparison, in Toronto, you can get a beautiful house in an elite uptown neighbourhood on the subway line, starting at around $650k. If you move to the 'burbs, the size/price ratio just improves (but why would you want to live in the 'burbs :)
It's not Soviet , it's French ! It's a PERICOLOR-1000 system with a software translated to Russian. They used to buy hardware and software in the West and change it a bit(translate) and present it as one developed internally in some scientific institute.

Here is the discussion in Russian:
http://habrahabr.ru/blogs/history/107465/
Stop making excuses and ship something. Do arbitrary deadlines do it for you? A few of us are shooting for the end of November. Build a business this month, ship to customers at the end, support as required. Cut scope to the smallest thing worth money, but ship. Settle for a good implementation over a perfect one, but ship. Have regrets, but ship. Create technical debt, but ship.

(You have 28 days or so left, which is the original schedule for BCC plus twenty days.)
There's still some holdouts in the flats, but you're right, it's not really the 'punk neighborhood.'

I have a friend who bought a fixer-upper for $10k in Polish hill, and another who bought an abandoned house in Larimer (actually nicer than you'd think... both the house and the neighborhood, then again, I have a high tolerance for this) for $5k.
That's a music by a pioneer of Soviet electronic music - Eduard Artemyev.
P.S.
Personal opinion he is one of the greatest 20th century composers.
That also generated a couple parse errors in my brain until I think I figured it out.

I'm guessing what they mean is the user must be logged into Live in order to play the game (requiring the Xbox to be online), however the game itself cannot access the Internet in any way.
Not only, but even reverse engineering of proprietary protocols from packets in transit is legal, IIUC.
I can readily believe that they're (currently working as) programmers, but where do you get "not mathematicians" from? If you're spending 8 hours a day writing mathematical code and understand the mathematics, then in my book you're being both a programmer and a mathematician.

Incidentally, my experience is that plenty of people who are programmers are ashamed of a lot of their code too, at least in the sense that they wouldn't want anyone else reading it and judging them. Writing code that looks good as well as getting the job done is hard, whoever's doing it, and it's by no means always worth the effort.
This post brings up the connection between desire for achievement and mortality. The book "The Denial of Death" by Ernest Becker is an excellent perspective on this phenomenon. The central premise of the book is that, in order to feel comfortable about our own inevitable mortality, we seek achievements that make us feel "heroic" and offer the potential to outlive our physical bodies, thereby diminishing the impact of dying.

I wholeheartedly recommend the book to anyone, Mr. Crawford in particular. What he describes in this post is clearly in line with Becker's concept of an "immortality project."
Hey Tim, long time no talk! Have you been getting notifications when I close tickets? Ha...

Yeah, dingbat didn't fit into my story. But it is pretty cool, though I still have some issues to work out on OSX...
I disagree strongly about your definition of "great programmer". Your definition is of a "somebody who can program".
What kind of gigs do you usually have? web development, design, other?
> This is where you stop looking at your startup as a self-masturbatory piece of UX genius and start looking at it as a business.

What crap. User experience and business aren't mutually exclusive. You have a choice: make money as a result of making your users happy or make money at the expense of their happiness. It's as simple as that. As your decisions compound on one side of that balance or the other, the shape of your brand begins to emerge.

My preference, continually, is to work with companies who optimize their business on the side of making me happy. They are playing a long term game that I respect, and which respects me. On the other side, that's the kind of user experience I want to create myself.

It's a bit like arguing that you can be a successful organism by being an asshole. Its definitely true that you can. But I posit you can be a successful organism by being good to people, and that the upshot is that it's a lot more fun.

Edit: And, of course, this is an exhausting trope, but do I need to mention that one of the largest companies in America makes great user experience the acid test for their business decisions?
Well yes, it's just that it was on the list with other items supposedly illustrating a backwards/un-liberal voting pattern.

But sure, your point was clear.
I really, honestly, cannot wait to join the growing trend of ditching cable / satellite TV. I consume the vast majority of my content through Netflix, Hulu, and simply downloading episodes.

That said, until the NCAA and NFL are willing to provide a stand-alone service that lets me subscribe to Georgia Tech and Atlanta Falcons football games, the whole concept of ditching cable is a non-starter for me. Since I'm no longer local to Atlanta, I have to have an option for viewing. ESPN3 is great for NCAA games but requires a partner cable subscription. I still usually resort to finding illegal streams of falcons games online since I have literally no other option.

I recognize that HN might not be a bastion of football fans; but having grown up in Atlanta, GA, football is a part of fall that I'm just not willing to go without.

Live sports are really the last stronghold that cable & satellite have.
Dish exec: Hulu is killing TV industry
Extremely on-point re: design and packaging. Apple does not get enough credit for its innovations in packaging. It's not software; it's not hardware; it's not a sexy topic. But it's been a powerful, driving force behind Apple's revival and ascent. Extending ease-of-use and aesthetic simplicity into the unboxing experience was a stroke of genius.
Silicon Valley vision for east London
I regretted upgrading to 3.x when it came out too. iOS 4.x was even worse.

* I have had iTunes crash apparently from taking too long to load.

* Answering a phone call takes at least 10+ seconds I would estimate. I click answer or slide the bar and it sits there loading the actual phone application.

* Battery life is abysmal if I turn on 3G or Bluetooth. Maybe lucky to make it through the day.
Tech and Telecom Prep for Sea Change (US Election 2010)
Very well said - I find the current state of publishing in academia appalling. Don't forget that most research is behind a pay wall just for the damn PDF! I think you nailed it with "insecure". The little PhDs need to know their work isn't designed to just get them tenure...
Actually, I have heard one good argument against open-sourcing scientific code [1]. It's not bullet-proof, and it won't apply in all situations, but I think there's a nugget of truth in there.

If I write a paper describing an algorithm (or process, or simulation, etc) and open source my code, someone attempting to reproduce and confirm my work is likely to take my code, run it, and (obviously) find that it agrees with my published results. No confirmation has actually taken place - errors in the code will only confirm errors in the results. Further work may then be based on this code, which will result in compound errors.

If, however, I carefully describe my algorithm and its purpose in my paper, but don't open source the code, anyone who wishes to reproduce my results will have to re-implement my code, based on my description. This is vastly more likely to highlight any bugs in my implementation and will therefore be more effective in confirming or disconfirming my findings.

I'm not sure yet what I think about this argument. It seems to only apply in certain domains and within a limited scope (what if the bug exists in my operating system? Or my math library?) but in relatively simple simulation models, it may have some validity.

What do you think?

[1] From Adrian Thompson, if you're interested: http://www.informatics.sussex.ac.uk/users/adrianth/ade.html
I agree that code should be made public, but I couldn't disagree more with the last paragraph.

Even worse, I take offence to the sentiments expressed in it. It's time to set ethical standards?! Really? Are they so unethical? I would claim that scientists have, by and large, very high ethical standards. Considering that they themselves are being pushed more and more to market their research to get funding, the highest standard for our work remains truth, and nothing but the truth.

Elimination of scientists as activists is a non-statement. Assuming that scientists believe in their own work --a very common affliction-- what does it mean to be an activist? Just that they try to convince others of the validity of their work? Isn't it unethical _not_ to warn the world of the impeding doom your research has uncovered? And to be somewhat insistent if people do not want to hear it?

Don't confuse politicians, crooks and businessmen in the climate change debate with the scientists. While all pretend to use scientific arguments, very few do.
The political question should be: does the risk of climate change justify the costs that might prevent it.
If your engineering problems are solved with a little phonetic consistency, you might as well rename a real database "Mostgres" and be done with.
Any version from 1.5, which was released in June 2008, has merge tracking. If you're using svn and don't understand how mergeinfo works, then you're not in a position to make a fair comparison on merging. A lot of the comparisons between svn and git/hg/etc. are made by people who don't seem to understand recent versions of svn well.

Yes, old versions of svn "suck at merging", but the workflows with merges between multiple branches you describe work well in modern versions of svn with merge tracking. Your "remembering the revision number of the last 'rebase'" is unnecessary in modern svn.

I grant you that switch can take a while on a large code base, as can a checkout of a new working copy. Creating a new branch is contrary to what you say instantaneous in svn due to the cheap copies, however getting that new branch in a new working copy to work on I admit might take a while. A large part of this problem is mitigated if you just have multiple working copies checked out, but not all.

The details on why branching is cheap in svn are described here:

http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/subversion/trunk/notes/subve...

Part of the problem with svn is that the model is too flexible compared to git: the merge tracking supports tracking partial merges between branches, which is arguably an unnecessary complexity - the svn developers have expressed concern about whether this feature is valuable given the complexity it adds.

For general merge scenarios if you're using mergeinfo correctly, follow the practices laid out in the svn book, you shouldn't find merging particularly difficult or expensive in svn, even if you're doing relatively complicated workflows.

I'm not saying this is easier or works better than svn than git, just that it's doable and not as bad as many people make out. The merging in svn is (too) complex, but once you figure out how it works then it works well. With your "I believe...there is mergeinfo" and loewenskind's "I've done it. Once." I get the impression that neither of you have put the time in to really figure out how it works, but are still arguing against it.

Personally I prefer the way git works. But as someone who uses it everyday, for scenarios like the ones you say are nightmares, I don't think svn is as bad as you make out. There is an argument to be made for using git, but neither you, loewenskind nor the article make it as well as you could.
Dupe - beaten by six minutes! http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1868588
Isn't that what I said?

"Selling software" is distinct from "preventing others from selling copies of [said] software", and confusing the two is the source of much fear, uncertainty, and doubt about the GPL, so some people get a little defensive when they're conflated. When I ran a small software shop, most of the work I sold to small business was built on libraries and other works that were GPL, but this didn't prevent me from charging money for it, it just meant that I couldn't prevent them from selling or giving away copies themselves. Of course, few small businesses are interested in paying for software and then providing it to their competitors, so in practice that never mattered.
Your movies are clogging up my WAN