skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've ranted in the past about the move for TVs. It doesn't make sense for people (like me) who are space-constrained. I need to replace a 32" 4:3 TV, and could only fit a 27" 16:9 in its place. The "upgrade" forced me to have significantly less screen space.

I've seen the same thing is digital picture frames, which makes no sense whatsoever. Every real camera in the universe takes pictures in the 4:3 neighborhood, or even square in the case of larger format cameras. With a 16:9 frame, you're never, ever, going to use the left and right edges.
I think it's similar reasons for the oddness in labeling HDD sizes at odds with how memory is labeled: widescreen lets manufacturers advertise higher diagonals without increasing screen area. Throw in a bunch of influential purchasers who buy based on spec / price tradeoff, and mix in desktop monitor trends (16:10->16:9) following flatscreen TV trends for economies of scale reasons, and you get a very hard to turn around trend.

If it were simple market forces at work, I would have found it easier to avoid buying widescreen monitors and laptops. I couldn't; there wasn't an alternative choice.
I've installed KDE, gnome, and a bunch of other junk through MacPorts, and it hasn't failed me. Maybe you should give it another shot.

Homebrew is the cool kid on the block now, though: https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew
Lunar eclipse, Christopher Columbus and the Teredo worm
One of the nicest things about my Virgin Media box (IMO) is the "on demand" service which basically integrates the content from all the free on-demand services (iPlayer, 4OD, etc) and the premium on demand content all into one interface. Pity it's dog slow, though.
video:

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-january-6-2011/the-ant...
I guess you've never heard of MailChimp?

Primates rock at marketing!
Apps that enhance the TV viewing experience will be absolutely huge. As mentioned in the article, the functionality to find out more about what you're watching will be popular. Watching an advert and being able to click to be sent info/find out more will become widespread very quickly. Instant polling on news programs ("Tax cuts good or bad? Click your remote now!") or entertainment programs ("Do you like Biebers new haircut?") will be fun.

"Social" TV services will emerge, allowing you to share with your friends what you're currently watching, and for interested friends to tune in to the same channel. People will publish lists of recommended shows, and you'll be able to automatically follow their recommendations and have your PVR record those shows, or your set top box will go find the on-demand versions of those shows...

I was working for interactive TV companies in the late 90's/early 00's - we were about 15 years too early it would seem. A lot of concepts have been really well fleshed out and are ready to go. I'm excited that it seems as though it is finally the right time for this stuff to go mainstream.

(And go look at the UK and their 'red button' services. They're a lot further ahead than the US with this stuff.)
"3 years later the situation is even worse."

It's even worse even worse. 2007 you probably could still get a higher-quality LCD than TN, though it was becoming a significant challenge. Now it's flat-out impossible, as near as I can tell. If you care about display quality just about your only choice is WLED or Dell's BGR-LCD, which tends to be only intermittently available from them anyhow. These are better than a standard TN display, in that there at least exist angles you can view a 15" or 17" screen without being able to see glaringly-obvious color fade on the top and bottom of the screen, but they're still not perfect.

I just got a Studio 17 with that; 15 is your only other choice but for some reason it was much more expensive and I couldn't justify it. (I am a fairly large man, 6'4"-ish, so a 17" laptop is much more comfortable for me than most, I actually sort of like it but I very much believe I'm the exception. Seeing this machine on my wife's lap is a bit comical looking, especially now that I'm used to seeing the little netbook.) On the bright side, 17" laptops are nowhere near as clunky as they were in 2007. They're still 17", of course.

Unfortunately, my first "real" laptop, I accidentally acquired an IPS-based laptop, and it has spoiled me. All I wanted was the higher res, got the higher quality without even knowing there were quality grades at the time.

Resolutions I don't care about as much. My preferred layout is two emacs windows next to each other and I often chop those in half vertically anyhow. At 1920x1080 I can get three next to each other. Terminal off to the side (covering what usually ends up being the tertiary window anyhow), web browser and associated stuff on another virtual desktop one keystroke away. I don't mind the widescreen at all, but if your preferred editor has stronger ideas about screen layout I could see how it would be annoying.
Why debugging code in Lisp is different
I actually prefer 16:9 widescreens for development. The wider the display, the more likely I will be able to fit two windows side by side. Real estate at the bottom doesn't matter all that much, because modern systems make scrolling effortless.

I know that I'm getting ripped off in terms of pixel count, but I recently bought a 23" IPS display for about the same that a 19" IPS cost a few years back. They are the same height (both physically, and in pixel count), but I get more than 50% more horizontal area. Seems like a win to me...
I think that both HP and Dell offer 1920 wide 15" displays. But where I could get 24" display with similar DPI/PPI?
Isn't that the same problem though? Easier from them to do one calculation on the ground in advance rather than pilots having to worry about a conversion in the air.
That's the problem when a very niche and exclusive product gets mass adoption. Quality goes way down. That's how I felt about Yahoo answers. Their challenge is going to be how to drown/filter out the crap and keep it interesting or engaging.

There's a reason exclusivity works. That's one of the reasons I like Dribbble as a designer so much. The quality of the work is so high.

Maybe if Quora only let you invite people when enough people like your questions/answers that might work. I don't know how they could go back to that once they've opened the flood gates.
Mac App Store Tops 1 Million Downloads in Day One: Here's What's Hot
Agreed. I've found that for me, to have meaningful commit messages, you have to have a meaningful amount of work complete. Otherwise you end up with a bunch of "more work on feature x" messages.

This is counter to a lot of the "commit often" mantra that so many git people have, but it's working better for me.
I really want to do something like this when I (hopefully) head over there for a few months later in the year. I'm stuck in the UK and desperate to get over to Silicon Valley to experience the optimistic and fail-fast attitude, since I've been acting like that here in the UK (with some success) and it's not easy to find like-minded people.

Hope you're still looking for people in a few months!
I stopped following entrepreneurship and startups this week. I _might_ follow them again someday.
Good thing I got kicked off for running a script to follow every possible person and every possible question on the site.
Design-by-committee in action...
A fourth question that came up for me was "Will I enjoy doing it if it is a success?" I only focused on this aspect after I asked the question can I make money from it and realized that it was not something I wanted to sustain in the long run.

Once the will I enjoy it question is answered, then Swombat's three questions are definitely the way to go.
The CES Secret to a Happy Marriage
Two Traffic Squeezer versions are released simultaneously
Yet another version: Star wars coming to Bluray in September
High replication datastore. Beta coming out soon. Developers and Beta testers wanted.

http://github.com/scalien/scaliendb
This is a much more interesting story about Estonia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let%27s_Do_It_2008

They got 50,000 people to clean up 10,000 tons of dumped rubbish spread over the whole country with a year of buildup and planning and 5 hours of work on the day.
I don't either -- I run them in portrait. (But 16:9 is too narrow for even that. And it doesn't work on a laptop, of course, but that seems more constrained by keyboard shape, too.)
> As it stands, there are almost no laptops out there that are suitable for development.

Back in The Day, I got 80 columns and 25 rows on the VT100 terminal, and had no problems programming. Loved it, in fact. (Although anything less than 9600 baud was kind of painful) While I definitely agree about the 300 pixels at the bottom, and I miss my ThinkPad T42 even compared to my 17" MacBook Pro, life as a developer is great! Emacs still works, I can read documentation AND code AND the documentation is all prettified HTML with links you can click on. OpenGL hardware acceleration makes stuff so much easier now than what I had 10 years ago. On the Windows side, Intellisense is getting pretty good, as is Eclipse/NetBeans if you use Java. And while the widescreen misses some pixels, for UI work, it's almost like having two monitors, if you keep your code to about 80 characters and your app small. Plus, you can watch widescreen movies if you get tired of coding :)
JB the AppleTV and give groovy a try. It's not quite Spotify, but, unlike Spotify, Grooveshark works every place I've been.

http://groovy.weasel-project.com/
Man arrested for software glitch in slot machines
So true... even worse for stuff that is named "SIMPLE" in capital letters. SIMPLE -> "Session Initiation Protocol for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions". And no, it's not. It's based on ~100 of very long RFCs that make up SIP itself. Also it includes XML... and namespaces... and schemas... and some custom phone-specific values to make it less compatible with anything and more (and references HTTP and privileges model).
Could never happen. Disney has a $75B market cap - it would take at least $100B to take them over (roughly 1/3 of Apple's market cap).
Neither P/E, nor PEG are useful metrics when dealing with a young growth company.

Consider this: There was a time when Yahoo! had many potential customers and a substantial business and technological lead over the competition, but no positive earnings. The same was true more recently of Genzyme, currently a multi-billion dollar biotech company. Would it be reasonable to assign zero or negative values to such companies? Of course not.

And what happens when a high-tech growth company climbs up from a small negative earnings to a small positive earnings? Suddenly instead of having an undefined P/E, they have a very high P/E. This is reasonable. A solar power company with 500m in sales and 1m in earnings that had 200m in sales and hugely negative earnings in the previous year could very well be worth over a billion. If the market gave it such a valuation, gawking at its P/E of 1000, and then applying the same P/E to an established company like Kraft would just be a waste of breath.
Some previous similar incidents:

http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_14795166
http://www.onlinecasinosphere.com/news/reports/world-casinos...
http://www.luxurylaunches.com/other_stuff/two_men_denied_slo...
What We Learned Upgrading To Rails 3 at Harvest
Skype Is Killing It on Long Distance
Steve,

Thanks for the comment. See my comments above for my discussion of the PEG ratio in this situation.
Yes, especially if those apps give them free TV shows. I maintain that BitTorrent or a Grooveshark for video would be Google TV's killer app. The would be freely available on the Google TV Market, but not on Apple TV's app store (both of which are coming)
New hack to exploit high-frequency trading
Johnson & Johnson Leads 9M Investment In Personal Genetics Startup 23andMe
It's a shame that DPI hasn't benefited from Moore's law. Developers shouldn't need to worry about pixels, but there still aren't enough to spare. Unfortunately, netbooks and tablets have taken us a step backwards (most web developers had already abandoned support for 800x600 screens, and even some native apps can't accommodate such short vertical resolutions). I'd much rather target precise measurements or percentages and let the OS adapt the output to a very high resolution display.
On my Lexus it's both active and passive RFID. If you start the car and the key is 'active', you have to keep it in the cabin, or the car starts complaining (I've not been brave enough to drive with it not in there...).

If you start the car with the key as passive (ie: dead battery - you have to hold it on the ignition button to be detected), it recognizes the difference and doesn't complain.
I do a lot of Salesforce.com development and the use of SOAP has been the bane of my existence. They have recently introduced a new REST API that will be going GA in the spring.

"Dev: What happens if I GET the endpoint’s URL?

SG: Don’t know. Using GET is undefined.

Dev: Hrrm. And what happens if I move the service to a different endpoint? Do I get a 301 back?

SG: No. SOAP doesn’t really use HTTP response codes.

Dev: So, when you said SOAP uses HTTP, what you meant to say is SOAP tunnels over HTTP."

The beauty of REST is that it is representative of how the web works. With SOAP you're almost always limited to the use of POST methods and when I go to read another developer's code, I see their own defined nouns and verbs for resources they are sending/receiving like "getUsers", "getContacts", and "createPerson". These often are ambiguous or don't match up with the actual resource they are trying to work with.

Endpoints in REST are self documenting, you can read what it is that you're trying to do based on the endpoint and the HTTP verb (put, post, delete, et al)
I find it unnatural to write commit messages in the present tense. To me, it seems like commit messages are a log of what work has been done, which would naturally be described in past tense. Nonetheless, I do write my commit logs in present tense for the sake of consistency.

Does anyone have a good explanation of why commit messages should be in the present tense? (Beyond what the article says: "This convention matches up with commit messages generated by commands like git merge and git revert.") Why do commands like git merge and git revert generate commit messages in the present tense? The best explanation that I can think of is an analogy to literature: literary analysis is written in the present tense, because any time you open a book, the story is happening now, in the present tense. I don't quite buy that, but it's the best explanation I've come up with.
Perhaps safety issues[1]?

[1]http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=309413
When you say higher-end, do you mean larger or something else? I would really like to see replacement options for my Sony laptop, which is a 13.3" with a 1600x900 resolution, but from what I can find, only Sony has a nice resolution (1080p now) in that size. Does Lenovo have something that I've been missing?
I don't think it's the wheel and axle design that limits the flywheel efficiency, it's more likely the electric<->mechanical energy conversion.
We have the misfortune of dealing with a third party SOAP API at my office. My coworker did it the "correct" way, autogenerating thousands of lines of C# from the WSDL and trying to get the objects transparently serialized and deserialized. That turned out to be a multi-week effort, so finally I got fed up and spent 4 hours writing code to directly extract the values we needed from the raw XML.
Trains' Dynamic Breaking tech explained by dropping bowling balls on Jello molds
This is all fine and dandy until the next geomagnetic reversal, at which point we suddenly find everything 180 degrees out of phase.
GM invests $5 million in Powermat, expects wireless charging in Volt by 2012
It's my understanding that if you specify the URL of javascript with "//" at the beginning instead of "http:// or "https:// that the browser will choose whichever it used to fetch the original page. I'm not sure if it's supported by most browsers or not. Searching google for this kind of information has proven most difficult because I don't know any reasonable keywords to use. Anyone have good experience using this method?
It should be "else's".
Sorry, no, I didn't - I stopped somewhere between the lemonade stand and the story about some guy you knew.
Not only did he drive there, but he watched with no more protection than the glass of the car windshield.
HTML5 canvas element: how to move, resize, and rotate photos
HTTPRiot - Easily Consume REST Resources on the iPhone and OS X
Steve Jobs already owns 7.3% of Disney - I don't think Steve will go for Disney anytime soon but who knows.
The Visual 6502 in JavaScript
I thought the slide show was designed very well. Simple and informative. It was a great way to get to know these companies and their business models.
I have developed an interest in health and longevity and I read this book.
Full of many interesting ideas, but I was left a bit lost.
I'm going to try his Occam mass gaining protocol, which is entirely taken from Doug McGuff 'Body by Science'.

I'm still a bit skeptical because I think that if something really works,sooner or later it will be adopted by the professional in the field.

But bodybuilder (even natural ones) are still trainig in the classical way...
Seems like an easy way to compromise... get rid of the penny and make a new zinc based coin with abraham lincoln on it that is a 20 cent piece
The new oral tradition
The deaths aren't worthy of concern and investigation only if they're linked.

They're worthy of concern and investigation in each instance because history has shown they tend to happen for one of two reasons: severe weather shock or human activity.

Thus we need to carefully consider and investigate each occurrence, lest we ignore the metaphoric canary in the coalmine on the grounds that 'canaries die all the time'.

Truly the news cycle has latched onto an easy-to-sell trend and narrative. But their behavior, and the laughable connections they imply, don't speak to whether or not any given mass animal death truly is a non-issue.
Who's panicking? I've only seen reports of alarm.
Thankfully, runways are numbered with _both_ numbers. So 18/36 or 9/27. Total reversal would leave the numbers the same...
Having ~$50B in liquid assets and Steve Jobs owning ~7% of the target company are good arguments to finance a hypothetical deal of that scope.
Flywheel safety isn't such a big deal if you can bury the flywheel chamber in your backyard. Decades ago, there were fiberglass flywheels whose fibers simply unraveled when they failed, becoming a mass of very hot fuzz.
Microsoft might not have bought rim, but they did buy Danger.
Until TechCrunch (or someone?) posted an article pointing this flaw out last week the bug was not marked as critical. I think the drama is the way a lot of people feel about seeing what seems like an obviously critical bug as something google is ignoring.

I'm on several Android bugs that seem pretty bad, and they are either marked as not being fixed or being low priority, and sure enough i'll get a "WTF" update from a new person discovering them once or twice a week.
PHP 5.3.5 / 5.2.17: Floating Point Bug Fixed
Not all systems, not if you're doing server authentication (itunes account?) / code download every time the app starts (e.g. webapps).

That's why DRM is broken by design.

All it takes is one skilled individual to develop an easy-to-use method for cracking the thing, start a torrent and that's it, millions of people have access to it instantly.
I had a 17" powerbook for years with a width of 1440 and it drove me mad because I couldn't quite get 3 80-column terminals to fit comfortably (I think I settled on 2 79-column and one 80). Today my minimum width is 1600 pixels, precisely because the way I develop involves having multiple files open, each in their own terminal, all side-by-side. I can never understand people who only have one file visible at a time, but I guess they'd probably think I'm mad too...

As for height, how many lines of code do people put in a function? In the languages I tend to use, functions of more than fifteen or twenty lines are a bit excessive, and probably need to be refactored. Why is there so much demand for vertical real-estate?
maybe not you and me but lots of people:

Technology to blame for animal die-off panic [1].

Mass Animal Deaths Leading To End Times Panic [2].

Dead Bird Panic [3].

----

[1]: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40961721/ns/us_news-environment/

[2]: http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1974746/mass_animal_dea...

[3]: http://metabunk.org/content/137-Dead-Bird-Panic-How-Media-Fo...
It wasn't anything bad, but it makes me very paranoid to text anything I wouldn't want public.
Are you sure, It seems like RFID without batteries would run into range problems. I know mine has a battery.
This isn't really an issue. Contrary to what a lot of people will tell you, it is fine to change the history of a pushed branch -- especially for the most recent commit -- so long as other developers adopt a policy of rebasing after fetch. Here is a concrete example:

(bare repo): # Make sure receive.denyDeleteCurrent = ignore

(Dev A): git push

(Dev B): git pull --rebase # you can make this the default for a particular tracking branch so it is just "git pull"

(Dev B): # do some work

(Dev B): git commit

(Dev A): git commit --amend

(Dev A): git push origin :master # Deletes remote master. Not required for shared branches -- those can simply be replaced -- but "master" is usually the "current branch" for a repo, so it bears knowing.

(Dev A): git push origin master:master # And now we replace the remote's version with our local version.

(Dev B): git pull --rebase # Updates pointers and applies the new commit on top.

Yes, if you do even more devastating history changes than this, Dev B needs to dig a little further on why his rebase is going haywire. THIS is why people fear the history change; it is sometimes extra work for downstream developers to handle the rearrangements (and we developers like to be lazy and for everything to work smoothly the first time). Thankfully, downstream developers can solve these problems with a few git tools, including "rebase --onto" and cherry-picking. But in the case of a quick and simple commit amend, all is well.

Alternatively, you can code review, but sometimes people are in a rush, and you run into this situation. In most environments, I wager it will be okay, especially if there is communication on the changes and reasonable education on version control theory.
Well with a bit of luck it won't be 2.3 only, so yeah but not as likely. And I'm guessing carriers are getting bitched at as well, so they're probably looking into getting this one fixed soon-ish on the phones they "manage".
Car and Driver's hilarious pulled review of the Cadillac Escalade EXT
Those stuff are very common in former communist nations. The whole country does "trash collection day" for one day, then liters for 364.
Interview: Jeremy Ashkenas Talks About CoffeeScript
Flywheel technology were an area of research over a decade ago when battery research was still in its infancy. IIRC, GM had an electric car concept that had a huge fly wheel behind the cabin. But your options were slow, heavy (thus inefficient) flywheels or light, fast flywheels. And by fast I mean 100,000 RPM. At those speeds they were using Kevlar to keep it from flying apart, making it impractical because of the price of kevlar.