skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Okay - here's where my mind went when presented with this problem: be like an ombudsman. When I call up the TIO (http://www.tio.com.au/) to complain about my mobile phone supplier, the first thing they do is give me a reference number and a phone number at the company that is reserved for "high level" customer service enquiries (ie. I get to speak to a "case manager" rather than having to navigate the layers of support from the ground-up).

So give the company that the review is about a chance to respond prior to publishing the bad review. If they don't respond, publish it. If they do respond, then you can still publish the bad review but the OP may edit it so that it's not quite so caustic.

This could be regulated quite easily by requiring the OP to provide a valid contact email address and URL for the company about which they're providing a review.

Or you could do like the TIO does and provide the customer with a reference number to contact the company they originally dealt with and allow the company to login and use that same reference number to tell their side of the story.

Your company is then like, OmniOmbudsman :) (.com ... take it, it's available)
I buy games on Steam because downloading and installing is a double-click. There are a lot of (admittedly easy) steps when you pirate things, like mounting the ISO and browsing to the crack folder, and re-mounting every time you want to play.
Did anyone copy it down?
Account that tweets DonorsChoose projects that are less than $20 from completion
I don't think disabling internet connection will help you focus. If you want to focus for some time, then you will.

Also, I made something similar just a week or two ago. It doesn't disable anything, it just shows you an icon in status bar.

http://zone.codingwithlove.com
Is the Google Web Store another half baked idea?
I have 'NEVER' had a good experience over phone for Cust service. Glad to know that there is some company out there that cares...
> every drawing operation is antialiased.

I'm hoping that's optional. It seems like there are a lot of things that you might not want to be auto-magically AA'd.
agreed, just asked a question, got a reply almost immediately.
love the idea. lots of fun. a few usability ideas:

-make hyperlinks clickable.

-the top menu bar is hard to click -- make the surrounding whitespace clickable as well.

-on http://metal.fluin.com/, if I click the black large font text on a list item, it should expand the thread all ajaxy.

-give anonymous users names like "user14232" or gravatars so we can see conversation threads/replies. no-register account! track them with cookies, it's ok. some people will get riled up, but not your users, because they'll think it's fun.
Now someone needs to write a script to compare the writing style in the posts to the writing style of hackernews commentors and reveal who is who. :)

[Also take into consideration any comments on gender, location, time, etc.]
That sounds like a paraphrase of a quote from Whistler: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Abbott_McNeill_Whistler#R...
Seems to be dominated by Mac OSX + Rails stacks... a little diversity would be nice.
I know! It's not a real operating system until you can make it do this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvfRpmqKRbs
Sample Mobile Device App. to Generate & Display Barcode Image
This technical tip shows how to create a sample mobile application in Netbeans IDE to generate a barcode image. We will provide a textbox for getting the codetext value, generate a Pdf417 2D barcode image and display it on the mobile screen.
Open Netbeans IDE and create a new mobile device application. Please refer to Setting the Environment for preparing the development environment and adding reference to Aspose.BarCode.J2ME.jar package.
reminds me this comic:
http://xkcd.com/742/
Killer is still on ipv4 :))
I've been using brandstack.com for ny side projects.
Tabs on the side?
I'm glad to see that I'm not the only person that uses the x10 LOC as a way of judging a programmer's skills. I generally think of it like this:

10 = Sam's Learn Java in 24 hours

100 = did some programming courses at highschool / university

1000 = baseline professional programmer. Has already understood the
basics of writing reasonable code at the function level

10000 = experienced programmer - will stand out in a corporate
environment, probably the minimum that you want working
on a startup. Understands architectural issues and mastering
the environment outside the application

100000 = star programmer. That said, I don't see a big difference
between the last two categories in terms of pure programming
skills. The difference is more in that the 100000 LOC
programmer is capable of directing a team, explaining the
system architecture to others, making the code more
modularisable and accessible to others (doing the necessary
makefile magic so that code will compile as C or C++ for
example, or providing a plugin architecture, or adding bindings
for a scripting language etc)

To go back to the original question, if you find that you are limited to 1000 LOC programs, looking at the list, you need to look a bit more at architectural issues - encapsulation, OO, functional style programming, that sort of stuff, to get you to a level where your code won't descend into an unholy mess when it starts getting bigger.

I actually use the size of codebases written entirely by the candidate as an indicator in job interviews - it gives a good feeling of where the person is at.
spot on! small world...
http://www.dribbble.com/ is the best source of designers. Browse through it, searching keywords, etc, and then click on the profiles of 10-15 that interest you.

Contact them. Easy!

If not, shoot me an email and I'll hook you up with a designer (emails in profile). I've connected about 20-30 HN'ers with designers.
Frankly, 0xdeadbeef is a rather bad value for a pointer poison: It doesn't have enough leading zeros to be caught in unmapped area used to catch null pointer access (it has a high change of being a valid kernel address on linux if you have about 700mb of ram). And there are not enough zeros at the end to still recognize it if the access is to a offset within the array/structure (as it usually happens).

Not catching the usage of a poisoned pointer on first access creates enormous amounts of fun - normally preventing any meaningful analysis of dumps.
Having loved BeOS when the free demo version 5 came out (I was very late to the game), and also being an OS junkie, I was eager to try out Haiku.

The interface certainly looks 1997, but it feels reasonably smooth. It is lightweight and fast, just that one has to click a lot. So, it feels 1997, when GUIs were a ittle more responsive. (I do really wish the WM would do some more things for me, like SloppyFocus) ...and don't ask about the file manager.

As far as boot speed goes, on my laptop it's a couple of seconds. I'd use it more if not for the below-mentioned issues. (Booting from a disk; the live CD is as slow as you might expect.)

The software support is not bad at all. There's a nice browser (webkit-based), bash, and I didn't have trouble getting a couple of mainstream interpreters running. I believe they're using a slightly older gcc, but I had no trouble getting a couple of my personal projects to build (rsync'd from somewhere or copied from my /home, since Haiku can mount ext3), or a few other programs that I wanted. If something is POSIXy, it'll probably run. Ruby and Python worked for me, as well as a small language I'd put together.

The only thing that keeps me from running it as the main OS for my laptop is drivers. The wireless support is still in development, and the version I have doesn't know when I've plugged in my headphones; my laptop is mostly used to play music, ssh to a larger computer, and browse the web. So, without headphones, I would definitely disturb coworkers, and need an ethernet cable to use besides.

Still I recommend trying it out. It's still under development, but it's solid and fast already. (Just need the danged sound/wifi drivers to work...)
Kona, an open-source implementation of the K language
There's a revision history available under the File menu. I went back to the 700s and it was still trashed. If you can find the last good version, you can revert.
It looks excellent. I like the fact that you can specify an arbitrary time, whereas SelfControl restricts you to 15 minute intervals.

It would be nice if it were scriptable (which SelfControl is).

http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/AppleSc...
Now I'm curious. How did plan9 'fix' root?
Watch let me in online review
Essay Writing- The Art to be Learnt
Essay writing is a common academic assignment. As a significant grade is given to the writing of essays, students are advised to have a good understanding of how it is done. With proper understanding of the requirements, submitting a well written essay is an easier task.
1. You can still use transactions with Django-nonrel. Just use App Engine's run_in_transaction() function in combination with Django models. No problem.

2. The slow startup problem doesn't really matter, anymore, because App Engine provides reserved instances and warmup requests. It only matters to those who don't want to pay a few $ for reserved instances (but even without reserved instances there are ways around that ;).
Concepts Based on Time Value of Money in Accounting and Business Applications
There is a lot of cool stuff in here:
* A complete rewritten database layer with dynamic query building capabilities. This allows for queries to built in a way that are DB agnostic. Also makes it very easy for other to modify them.

* A generic entity system. In practice this allows data fields to be attached to objects dynamically. A cool thing about this system is that field storage is completely configurable on a per field basis so you could have your data stored in a bunch of different system (Mongo, Cassandra, S3, etc.)

* There is a really nice URL routing system. Drupal 6 had some really irritating problems, but there is a lot of cool stuff in here now.

* jQuery UI has been integrated so it's available for use on every Drupal 7 installation.

There are a lot of other things too. If you're looking to develop an application in PHP Drupal definitely isn't a bad choice.

(Disclosure: I work for a Drupal shop and am a core contributor)
Transactions via run_in_transaction() do work (it's even mentioned in the docs).
ya I know. the biggest problem seems to be C based gems
Widespread adoption doesn't seem to be a goal, but really as long as the POSIX APIs are supported in a reasonable manner (...or you are Windows), it doesn't matter much. It's nice to use, and it gets to take advantage of portable open-source software which gives it a larger community of developers than (say) Plan 9 and Amiga enjoy, so market percentage doesn't matter much.

(Edit: changed "it" to "widespread adoption".)
OK, plan B. First, we quantum-entangle a few million pairs of particles...
Code a lot on things just outside of your comfort zone.
World of Warcraft has 12 million subscribers.

Any idiot can clone Facebook, getting users to use Facebook was the hard part.

Scaling is vastly overrated. Yes it requires knowledge, but (a) you don't have to do it from the start (unless you're Blizzard and everything you do is an instant hit) and (b) users don't fucking care about your infrastructure that scales (that's not why they are playing your game).
Actually, Hacker News should be the first place to criticize (or at least examine) investments are made in music and tech.

The way VCs and angel investors fund startups is changing and it is interesting to see the ways that an industry with some parallels is also changing.

Just like I can now start a band in my basement and gain a following with Protools + Facebook, I can now bootstrap a company in my basement with Rails + Heroku. (or your tech / provider of choice)
Amazon’s Disruptive Android App Store Now Open To Developers — Full Details
That may have almost happened; Palm bought the rights to the old BeOS code.
"I guess a simple way of explaining it is that without the DMCA, grooveshark could not exist."

But it does exist.

I don't see the difference in saying "without law X grooveshark couldn't exist" and "without law Y the RIAA lawsuits wouldn't exist", where law Y is current copyright law.

The copyright laws are what they are; there's nothing magical or sacred about them, so I'm failing to see how adhering to the DMCA is somehow crafty or slick or manipulative. (At least not any more so than current application of copyright law.)
StumbleUpon Sent 700M Pageviews To Other Websites In Dec, Is Growing 20% Monthly
What you are looking for is called the attach-rate. Basically how much other stuff in the ecosystem are people buying once they have the console. I believe the XBOX is leading the pack for attach rate with both games and accessories, which is huge as that's where the big money is.
There is nothing in the gaming future that excites me more than good old voxels. That game/engine looks amazing.
On Q2, "copyright", quite literally, means having the right to control the making of copies. In other words, the person who holds copyright dictates how and when new copies of the work can be created.

However, the first sale doctrine essentially says that once any copies leave the control of the copyright holder (ie they are sold or given away), then ownership -of those copies- becomes a legally protected property right that can be further transferred without consulting with the copyright holder (by transferring the physical object holding the data).

What makes a given copy of the CD legitimate is that it was made with permission of the copyright holder. Any future owners can buy, sell or give away that CD as they desire, but they can't make further copies without express permission.

This is, in part, why the EFF and others get so worked up over EULA's, because they are an attempt by content creators to keep all of their rights under copyright while not being subject to first sale.
I do not have a FB account. You do not need FB to simply take benefit of the web at large. But you do need a good search engine.

For me, FB is the future Second Life. Making money now and hyped, but at the end, it will just be a simple good business, but not a stratospheric one.
I love Drupal but it's not a great testament to the technology when the announcement site is broken:

http://screencast.com/t/RE6gn0gIZL
I'll check it in detail but we're allowed to have our friends connect to our Wireless Access Point if they visit our house under our ToS, this idea just extends on that.

I'm in the UK though, possibly in other countries they are more restrictive about sharing your connection?
I challenge you to write a functional irc client based solely on the rfc. IRC is a fractured protocol where the real spec is in the source code of the implementations out there.
Note to self: If I ever start a company that secures significant VC funding, immediately buy domains related to my company in all major markets and begin securing trademarks as well.
Making hyperlinks easily clickable will overrun the site with spam.
They don't have to move to support EBS with SSD and mix and match. They could have RDS instances with SSD only option and EBS based on SSD. They can charge significant amount for those options, some might even pay for it.
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/innodb-parameters.htm...

``If the value of innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit is 0, the log buffer is written out to the log file once per second and the flush to disk operation is performed on the log file, but nothing is done at a transaction commit.''
Nice implementation!
But I am sure there is much more to their ranking than no. of followers that they won't reveal for obvious reasons.
Sony VGP-BPS13/B battery
Sony VGP-BPS13/B battery
Type:	Li-ion
Capacity:	5200 mAh,7800mAh,10400mAh
Volt:	11.1 V
Size:	209.90 x 47.50 x 20.40 mm
Color:	Black &White
$ 95.33
http://www.daily-battery.com/sony-vgp-bps13-b.htm
My first impression from Drupal 7 is that it's much easier to use and get started with. Great work from the community! Now it's time to move in to the larger corporations where expensive licenseware still rules.
Thank you for your remark in the second paragraph. I was beginning to think that I'm the only person on this planet concerned by all these "cute" baby pictures being posted publicly.

Pictures which the person on it will likely be really ashamed of in a few years.

Even though babies might look cute and you kinda might have "created" them, they are real people, not pets or lifeless objects.

The same as you can't post pictures of a random person without their consent, you really shouldn't post pictures of your child. Leave the posting of their baby pictures to them, once they are old enough.
A gift giving puzzle (Secret Santa math)
That's what minecraft should look like.
The question is. Do they see the future or make the future. Somedays I'm convinced computers react to my moods.
You really think people are stupid and everything should be sold in heart shaped plush pillows, right?
Pretty much no. Quoting from the opinion:

"We have recognized, however, that not every transfer of possession of a copy transfers title. Particularly with regard to computer software, we have recognized that copyright owners may create licensing arrangements so that users acquire only a license to use the particular copy of software and do not acquire title that permits further transfer or sale of that copy without the permission of the copyright owner."

Essentially, the judges argue that, because these CD's are mailed to DJ's and music critics without any reasonable attempt to establish a contract, then the recipients are free to do whatever they want with the copies. They explicitly contrast that with software licensing, where the consumer obtained the license through a voluntary transaction.
I totally agree. The main reason I play with Haiku is that the UI is really responsive. OSX seems to be optimized for screenshots, looking pretty in a manner that often gets in the way. I get beach-balled a lot on the Macbook I have at work, and most things are sluggish. When it's not loaded down, you still have to wait for animations to change desktops and minimize windows. This is even true of my iPhone (again, issued by work) which, even if it's not overburdened, it does make you wait for animations.

Not to single out Apple; most UIs are like that nowadays, including my personal phone (N900, flashy/slow animations and everything, but tolerable). Responsiveness and speed in GUIs seem to be relegated to semi-obscure X11 window managers. It would be nice if "usable" got a higher priority than "flashy", without neglecting flashy, but it seems to be one or the other for now.

Some people clearly want that, though, so it's hard to blame anyone for selling it to them.
Grooveshark is trying to build a business. To build a business on music you have to let people listen to music. Once they have working business-model (if they ever get there) they can get to paying the artists.
I agree it's somewhat twisted, but I think that's what is necessary.

I disagree completely. Grooveshark is trying to build a business, and to do so without paying the artists is unconscionable. They need to have that in place before launching, and if they can't do that, they shouldn't have a business.

Cf Spotify, who did it the right (and difficult) way.
Good point. You can blacklist ips, perhaps.
PHP is not an easy language for someone just learning programming, it has tons of annoying quirks and is hard to debug. Visual Basic is better, I'd also reccommend Ruby. Not only is it a very easy language to learn, it also provides him with decent career prospects.
> I'm mainly talking morally and ethically

I think there's a huge moral difference between your right to your shoes and your right to some idea. Here are some things that make it hard to believe IP is a good fundamental right (in the sense of Locke):

* Bob and Joe on opposite sides of the world have no problem with each owning a pair of shoes. But if Bob invents a device on Tuesday, and Joe independently invents in on Wednesday, why should Bob get everything and Joe nothing? Yes, from a practical standpoint it's necessary to give patents solely to the first-mover; otherwise people would pretend to invent existing things. But why should time-of-invention matter morally...at all?

* Should Shakespeare's heirs (or, more realistically, a copyright-holding corporation) really be able to dictate how his plays are used today? And forever? If not, what moral principle would we use to choose a time limit?

* Why, if IP is a moral right, are mathematical theorems not ownable?

* It's not to hard to distinguish things which are physically ownable, but where does one draw the line with IP? How detailed must my graphic design be for it to be mine forever? Can I own all green squares, or only green squares inside of blue hexagons? Legally, the threshold for copyright is set to try to maximize societal benefit. But if copyrights are moral rights existing independent of any legal framework, on what moral principle could one decide what's copyright-able?
It's highly variable. Some classes have full video, which is great. Others, perhaps the majority, have much less material. That's part of why it's frustrating.

You see an interesting course listed. You go to the page for the course. Then you click around and it turns out that there isn't much content posted.
[1] Mozilla get's it's money from Google Search too.

[2] I wonder how many of us use Opera as their main borwser?
Ego vs. Soul
They are different kinds of markets.

On the one hand you have people who buy a console, buy several games a year, and play games often (several times a month).

On the other hand you have people who buy a console, buy a few games very rarely (maybe not even one per year), and only play games perhaps a few times a year.

If all things were equal then it would be vastly better to cater to the first variety of customer than the second. But things are not equal. There are more of the second kind of customer than the first, seemingly by a large margin. Also, the second kind of customer tends to buy games that are much cheaper to develop.

Overall that adds up to a huge, lucrative, ongoing market for casual gamers.

Wii Fit sold 22 million copies. That's a $90 game including a high markup peripheral. In contrast, Halo: Reach and Modern Warfare 2 have sold fewer than 10 million copies. How much do you think it cost to develop Wii Fit vs. Halo: Reach?

You can write off the casual gamer market all you like but the fact is that the people like Nintendo and the Kinect group who are catering to them will be laughing at you while they are doing backstrokes in their giant money bins.
Well hang on a sec, I'm sure the original composers also worked this out, they were working with 8 bit sounds for years and years.
20+ Fresh and High Quality Photoshop Web Layout Tutorials
Tutorials are always useful for beginner designers. Because beginner designers always find some free resources to polish his skills. Designers knows that designing any thing is not an easy job. Anyways today i posted 20+ high quality Photoshop tutorials for making weblayouts. Hope you will find this list useful!
> This major release is a long time coming (~3 years).

For some of us this is a blessing. Upgrading can be daunting if you've customised heavily or used modules that don't work in a newer version. Anything less than 3 years for an upgrade that is incompatible with older modules/themes is too short in my view. Looks like we'll have to start thinking about upgrading to version 6 now.
As an Australian all I want to say is... just use the .com address. Call the company 'groupon.com' Advertise the .com. It will work!
El País - 2010 in review (photos)
I wonder why they think a local domain is necessary for their business (and is it really). For example, Facebook doesn't use local domains - it uses .com for everything.
No it wasn't rich said something like it on the mailinglist befor that "Has Clojure development stalled?" Stuff witch was a big misunderstanding anyways.