skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Switching to Linux from Windows as a developer can work most of the time, but there are always subtle things and expectations that don't work, and in general, the experience is quite frustrating.

I know, I occasionally am forced to because some client is Windows only.
Years and years ago (In the quake3 era) John Carmack talked about voxels being the future of 3d because of exactly thaty.

Ray-traced voxel based worlds. Personally, I think voxels will be hard to manage for objects/characters. Someone smarter than me will have to solve that problem.
Canvas Wall art for Kids
Kids art and art for children needs plenty of colour and excitement!
That last statement a key benefit of an app market. Tangentially, I've seen developers driven nuts by downvotes for bugs they fix in no time, but that can take days to get approved with native apps. Or on android, by fragmentation issues in which apps don't work well on certain phones.
The Dubai Job
27c3: Wideband GSM Sniffing [video]
Anyone looking at their situation is probably saying "with all the resources they have, they should be able to build a system that could stay up." This is true. Its likely that if they could start from scratch, their team could put together a system that would be able to handle the traffic they are seeing and expect to see in the future. The problem is getting the legacy systems to the point where they can scale. It's one thing to have a platform that handles 10s of thousands requests per day. Now convert that system into one that handles 100s of millions of requests daily. Thats a tall order.

Developers which are involved with a product early are typically more interested in building a viable product, not getting it to "web-scale," and rightfully so.
Linux security: Review of one year
I did not mean to steal it dude. I just searched icon finder for css and picked a free icon from it. I am going to change it. I just made this app for developers and css beginners. Css experts wont need an app like this.
I don't use FB either (although I do have an account).

However, my kids use it all the time and it's a vital part of their social life. I can sort of understand the valuation of FB - the people who use it regularly really depend on it and in a way that is much stickier than things like Google search.

The only thing that I can see that might hurt FB is if it becomes too popular and there is a mass switch by the "cool" people to use some other service - given that it is based on socializing rather than hard features this could well happen. However, I don't see any risk of this at the moment.
The tree style tabs extension for Firefox is what kept me from (eventually) switching to Chrome. Chrome is superior in a lot of ways but I do wish they'd make the layout a bit more customizable/extensible.
I've used the Tree Style Tab extension ( https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5890/ ) for more than a year now and I have a very hard time browsing without it. Makes a lot of sense with today's widescreen displays. Only thing that bugs me with it is that I can only use the default Firefox theme on OS X. If I change theme it breaks really bad.
How would you rate the relative proportions of same-class bribery such as that and 'downwards' bribery?
Android has several issues and I agree that the market app sucks, so I use appbrain. Give a try if you haven't already. It gives decent recommendations and you can filter apps by hotness among other things.
INVOLVE HN: Razor Technology - Scraping the Web Differently
The best part is the code review. I hate the current anything goes/permission slip method.
OK fine, if you're going to push it...

The point is that in order to be credible to a wide audience, as this article was intended, you need to convey the correct 'tone' so to say. This a part of what is called in classical dialectic the 'ethos' of an argument. (to pre-empt, no, just 'logos' is not enough, and neither should it be - but that's a different argument).

So, in order to build up 'ethos', one needs to present oneself as a mature, mainstream person in the context of the subject under discussion. (yes, some people make a career out of breaking out of this, in order to appeal to a niche audience; see e.g. that ruby webserver blogger guy that gets linked here quite a lot, but that's not what the author in the article does or should be try to do, as far as I can tell).

Like it or not, rap and hip hop music are not mainstream to the traditional Forbes crowd. Partly because (most) rap artists build their careers on their anti-mainstream views, violent and promiscuous images, and cater specifically to an audience who finds one of the draws to the music in that anti-mainstream aspect of it.

So that's what makes it inappropriate in this context. For this author, in this context, to convey his message to as large an audience as possible, he should stick to 'accepted' style figures. And rap lyrics aren't part of that. It was a gamble I guess, and he lost, imo.

(Just to pre-empt another 'hey look at this country boy hating black music!', I bought hip hop LP's (yes, LP's) before Cypress Hill had put out 'Black Sunday' and mixed them on my sl 1200's when many of the readers here were still in diapers. I bought The Chronic a few days after it came out and once hitch hiked 400 kilometers to go to a concert of what was at the time the only crew rapping in Dutch. I'm no stranger to hip hop and rap, and yes I realize that people like Jay-Z have build big businesses on it. Still doesn't make the quote in this article appropriate.)
Sulle strade di San Francisco la capitale californiana - Blog Top Sites
> So we're basically betting on how much more money Facebook can squeeze out of each active user.

While I share your scepticism on a general basis, consider the possibilities of selling data to other companies. Yes, it doesn't help that FB has the company culture it has, but I can see the possibility of an array of businesses based on the FB data.
Baltimore Geek Goes Political - Endorses Mayorial Candidate
Japan wants Apple to put content filter in iPhone
> This doesn't rank high on the "cruel" factor

Really? You wouldn't mind messaging a bunch of profiles, receiving no responses, only to later find out that they weren't even real people? That no matter how much time you spent carefully composing your messages, you might as well have directed them to /dev/null?

Seems pretty cruel to me. And once other people start adopting the same strategy, it'll render dating sites useless for everyone. Ultimately the sites will be forced to ask for some kind of proof of identity.
The article neither says, nor offers any reason to believe, that Twitter can predict any of those things.

(Predicting earthquakes is a very difficult problem and any system that could do it well enough would be tremendously valuable. What Twitter can do is to detect earthquakes after they happen, by watching for people tweeting about them. That's got some value too, but it's not remotely at the same level of impressiveness and importance that an earthquake predictor would have.)
Naturally the question I was left with at the end of the post was "Does this impact user conversion and retention in a positive way?" thus leading to "Does this impact revenue and thus profit in a positive way?"
Atomonontage still uses polygon-based rendering for some objects (the vehicle in that video is poly-based).

I believe the appropriate expression is 'Horses for courses'.
They are cruel because they hurt (and it's beside the point to know whether that's a rational reaction) and you know it. When you do on purpose something to hurt someone, and unless there's some greater usefulness to it and no other way to do or put it, that's cruelty.
Worked what out exactly? 8-bit sounds were very much tied to the idea of translating music and sound effects, and not of developing novel music or techniques. Though some degree of innovation did occur, as technology advanced the gaming industry left behind 8-bit sounds, moving to more advanced wave-table MIDI synthesis, CD-ROM audio, etc, abandoning the 8-bit sounds as outdated and limited.

How many games on the SNES or on CD-ROM used 8-bit soundtracks? It was only later when 8-bit sound was sought after as a musical form on its own, for its own aesthetics and nature, that it flourished as an art independent of the need to imitate.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zK4Hdy9wWl4
its easier to just go into an apple store.
/troll
Ys, lt's do this. Whil w'r at it, can w stop using th lttr 'e'? I'v nvr rally trustd thm, and it would vastly improv my lif if I didn't hav to s thm as oftn. Thank you all for your futur coopration on this mattr.
Facebook account reactivated?
I am not a user of facebook, however I did sign up a long time ago, never used it and deactivated my account.

I received an email today welcoming me back to Facebook, stating that my account had been reactivated, and if I was not the one who had requested this then I should check out the help center.

After finding nothing of use in the help center, I did a password reset to ensure I had control of the account and then requested account deletion (which apparently takes 14 days!).

Has anybody else had anything similar? I'm wondering if it's a ploy by Facebook to get people to come back to the site, but also worried that it's potentially malicious. I did not request reactivation so if somebody else did; how did they? Do they not need my password?
I prefer Costco to Best buy any day. What matters far more is reputation and the quality of the product than the barrier to entry to join/utilize the product.

Facebook could add a ten page signup form and I doubt it'd substantially impact their legitimate signup rate.
The mailing list gets around 1100 messages a month, there are several books about it, and a few big websites have been done in it, for example m.walmart.com.

It's not up there in popularity with the few big frameworks, but I wouldn't worry about its death.
Interview with iconic hacker Captain Crunch Blogs
There are ways around such problems, especially in terms of bridging the gap between convex smooth surfaced solid objects and collections of cubes. As the technology gets more mature more sophisticated approaches will be fielded.

A classic way of solving the voxel vs. smooth object problem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marching_cubes
Ten years ago Amazon was burned by price testing. This seems an appropriate time to try again.

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/51392/Amazon_apologiz...
Well then, if that is the case, he still technically didn't lie, his friends did. And what isn't a friend if he won't be your wingman?
Awesome article. No bullshit, no advertising... just plain win.
SSL is just the wire protocol, it does not protect your data when it is stored. So it's advisable to do your own encryption anyway, before sending it to the backup server.
TFA is plagued with technical inconsistencies, and generally looks like a classic copy-paste job.

Either address a technical crowd, and use proper technical terms, or use plain language anyone can understand.

"GET protocol"?

"adding a “-ffloat-store” flag to CFLAGS"??? Do they even know what this means?
FWIW, my girlfriend doesn't like playing Wii and absolutely dislikes hardcore games, but she was blown away by kinect's demo videos--especially the dancing ones and said she'd definitely get a kinect if within her budget at some point.

Anecdote aside, Microsoft really has to open up the platform as much as possible and embrace developer inovations. If they do this, they'll finally take over the living room. I have a feeling the media center division needs to get out of the way almost entirely for this to happen, also.
There are multiple Groupon "clones" on the ground in Australia, a few doing some fairly big numbers. Groupon have acquired one of the biggest (if my sources are correct) in JumpOnIt.com.au.

Scoopons behaviour is pretty low IMHO. Registering not only the domain name groupon.com.au but also the company name and the trademark?
How is the codebase? OOP? MVC? Do they still use those weird file extensions (it was ".include" or ".module" maybe, don't remember now)?
It says you are guaranteed 20% of the list price, even if Amazon give it away for free.
No, you wouldn't be able to operate your business under the name Groupon in Australia.
Did you make your employer aware of the changes openly?

You should always make the employeer aware of the changes. You can't just sneak some clause in there and hope they don't notice. In theory everyone should read everything before they sign anything. However you have a much stronger case if the employeer initials the changed section to show they are aware of it.
Visio to release Phone/Remote and Tablet and TV
Apparently Visio folks has been busy last summer. They are set to launch tablets , phones and HDTV in VIA Plus ecosystem.
what would happen is such a system was sabotaged by someone who decides to raise false alarms? doesn't it then mean that the best this can do is spread the word of something already occurred, like gjm11 said already?

am not a seismology expert, but maybe attaching enabling seismic sensors that actually detect S and P waves or other stuff, and then automatically tweet about a possible earthquake.

This i think would be a more trustworthy prediction, and would even have more value.
Re: [2]

Since Opera got extensions, it doesn't make less sense to me (as a browser "power user") than Chrome or Safari. Fact remains though, Firefox extensions can do a lot more low level changes to the browser than the Chrome/Opera extensions. The level of configurability has its pros, and cons (stability). Tree Style Tab extension ( https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5890/ ) is one extension I don't want/can't to be without. It would not be possible to achieve the Tree Style tab user experience in Opera/Chrome. At least not today, most likely never.
I would assume that Amazon would release an app in the default Google Android appstore which would then let the user access the Amazon Android appstore.
The perspective and general look remember me of Battalion, the old IRIX game, see http://www.evl.uic.edu/aej/AndyBattalion.html .

Couldn't find a video, alas. I could power up my Octane ... :)
I did open this up ready to criticize, but err... I love it. I don't have much to say other than the YouTube video ought to be a bit bigger. (Perhaps not in the center but before the left and right boxes so it's more 'widescreen').

Great work.
10 million overspend on mobiles
Looks very cool but are there particular advantages over, say, Scribe over FreePastry (http://www.freepastry.org/SCRIBE/default.htm)? How does routing efficiency compare?
I find "Information is dependent on where it comes from" more depressing. It is far too easy to go from there to "your arguments don't matter because I've already made up my mind."
It really sounds like someone needed something to write so they come to HN and write a article based off what everyone in the thread has said without adding anything of value.
This is what happens when you hotlink an iframe
9MSN and Microsoft are partnering to launch Cudo:

http://cudo.com.au/ConfirmUser
> a) The ARM architecture is intrinsically slower than x86

Current ARM processors are not designed for speed. I doubt they will be able to outrun x86s in single-thread performance anytime soon. Without faster threads, the machine doesn't feel fast. OTOH, more cores make a machine feel smoother under load, which is very nice.

> b) .NET is intrinsically slow

This is the Java vs. native discussion. JIT and optimization and native libraries go a long way, but I don't see Office being rewritten in C# to run on the CLR. The last massive rewrite to the CLR was during the development of Longhorn and that part was cancelled, resulting in Vista and, IIRC, a two-year launch delay and the retirement of the project lead. .NET and Java (and Python, which is what I use most of the time) are good enough, but I just don't see a major OS rewrite in that direction until writing portable C/C++ and recompiling for each target becomes impractical.

> c) Microsoft wants the same applications that run on the desktop to run on the mobile

This is no mobile platform. If it runs "full" Windows, people will want it to run IE with plugin support. At the very least. People will want Office, games and Photoshop. If it doesn't offer an easy migration (data, programs, skills) they may as well go with iPad or Android that were designed to be that way since the beginning. If it doesn't run Windows software, why build the Windows legacy in?

Also, on your initial post you made the assumption WP7 is runs on .NET, which is mostly incorrect. Microsoft software shipped in WP7 is moslty (if not all) native. What runs under the CLR is 3rd-party software.
Whilst I agree with your main point, I have to nitpick your aside about running iOS on older devices. When I tried iOS 4.0 on my 3G (and the reason I'm now running 3.1.3 again) the UI would frequently completely freeze for several seconds. That can't be explained away as poorly-tuned animations.
In some areas "public good" can override things aswell
Web automation using Cucumber + Capybara
is demo day open to the public?
Im eager to try this out, I hope they fixed the cache system as before the only way to get a fast website was installing and configuring properly the boost module (drupal had a lot of database load, and shared hostings cut mysql connections at a limit that drupal exceded easily).

Ill give it a try!
Good comment! I couldn't have said it better myself. This is the way I learn new stuff. If coding wasn't "scary" every now and then, I wouldn't have learned anything!

Most of all, I'd say MOTIVATION is an important factor. I'm guessing very few programmers, experienced or not, sit all their time off from work/school programming and/or always have that "oooh-I-want-to-go-home-and-start-up-a-long-session-of-<insert programming language>" all the time. At least _I_ need some motivation and inspiration every now and then. I go to a lot of live programming forums and also watch a lot of youtube programming/presentation videos just to get inspiration and to get my motivation up. Often these events are way out of my field of programming, but I still go, because I always feel good and full of spirit when leaving.
This goes for me personally, of course, but may be a good advice for you too.

Having put this from my point of view, I would love to get some advice on where to get started on open source projects or the like, where I can get smaller tasks to complete. (I think that that Chrome thing that was mentioned in the start of this thread might be out of my league, but I'll give it a try.)
I see quite often people talk about 'good practices' in web-programming but generally say "don't worry about scale issues... if it becomes an issue, you've just beaten 90% of other startups" umm, isn't this a bad practice? Because when you do start worrying, it's gonna be a bitch to fix...
That is when joining a OS project makes same. Then you will have a whole mailing list reviewing your patches, and discussing all kind of architecture decisions.
It's not clear in my original post, but I was talking explicitly about what a programmer can achieve by themself, without any aid from peers/mentors. I don't think your example contradicts that. How many of your classmates actually did the project by themself, without getting aid from tutors/lecturers, discussing ideas with classmates, etc? And even if they did, the problem still isn't directly comparable, because you've presumably been discussing the ideas that you are using in your projects during the course. The ideas are fresh in people's heads. This is not true in the real world, where you can be assigned to working on a project that uses skills that you haven't touched for years.

Anyhow, our discussion is a little theoretical. In practice, I can say that what I described is really truly what you find when you work in a large corporation writing code. I know it's hard to believe, but have a look around at the horror recruiting stories on this site, or stories talking about how enterprises do software development. It's not a pretty picture. It's not just that your baseline programmer can only write a project of about 1000 LOC, but also that there are a significant number of "developers" that can't even do that. Hard to believe, until you've seen it for yourself, but true nonetheless.
Careful making overly sweeping conclusions though.

What works to grow and establish a market may not be best later. Right now app stores and e-books are still up and coming, it's more important to get them accepted and popular than to maximize efficiency or revenue. Once they are more mature, things may change.
Tolkien is dead and gone and made a comfortable existence on his work I'm sure.

I wanted to check up on that, and found this:

So far from losing money [as expected], sales so exceeded the break-even point as to make Tolkien regret that he had not taken early retirement. However, this was still based only upon hardback sales.

The really amazing moment was when The Lord of the Rings went into a pirated paperback version in 1965. Firstly, this put the book into the impulse-buying category; and secondly, the publicity generated by the copyright dispute alerted millions of American readers to the existence of something outside their previous experience, but which appeared to speak to their condition. By 1968 The Lord of the Rings had almost become the Bible of the "Alternative Society".

This development produced mixed feelings in the author. On the one hand, he was extremely flattered, and to his amazement, became rather rich. On the other, he could only deplore those whose idea of a great trip was to ingest The Lord of the Rings and LSD simultaneously.

source: http://www.tolkiensociety.org/tolkien/biography.html
I moved the Windows start bar to the left, and I moved my firefox tabs to the left.

It just makes a lot more sense, seeing that most other apps (Outlook, Explorer) I use also have their hierarchy on the left...
> They are both encouraging very low prices like $.99 for "apps"

Please do explain how. Apple at least (I don't know about the Marketplace, apart from it not being available to a number of developers) has a wide range of available prices, there are GPS software for far north of $100 apiece, and a number of other applications which definitely aren't $.99.

Even in games, "big hits" are generally closer to $10 (when not on sale) than $1 (and outlining this kind of stuff is very much why Apple introduced a third "tops" list in the appstore). And please also explain how Microsoft would solve a race to the bottom which is the combination of users being cheap fucks and developers still wanting those users.

> Max Klein wrote about this at one point, but he apparently deleted it. The post is cached here:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:_6hkDvC...

Doesn't say anything about iOS, and completely handwaves away the problem for Microsoft (apparently, microsoft "cares that he's making money" and will moneyhat him or something). Garbage.
Without caste/corruption India will disintegrate like USSR in no time.
> ARM chiops are soon at desktop speeds

Frequencies, not speeds.
And yet, the most popular Windows version couldn't do anything with the dual and quad-processor boxes being sold. Clock number marketing had its share, but the lack of an OS that could run most games or support a lot of the hardware already out (I had a couple gizmos that didn't work under NT) certainly didn't help the evolution of multi-processor x86s. As late as XP-time, most of my friends who were serious about gaming dual booted their boxes between 2000/XP for work and 98 for gaming. For them, a multi-processor workstation would be useless half the time.

For most of 1999/2000, I worked on an IBM PC Server 320 with two Pentium 200 processors and found it was wonderfully "smoother" than the 400MHz P2 (or 3, can't remember that) users who didn't run NT had. I cannot picture myself being happy on a single threaded machine anymore.
Contribute to complete the unfinished projects in Sourceforge.
I have already changed that icon.