skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is an important article. It isn't about what it is on the surface, though, which is Apple and Google fighting over the <video> tag. It is really about strategic and tactical decisions and where technology infrastructure belongs in those decisions.

As a technologist I often get caught up in those decisions, thinking a lot about the infrastructure involved. What Horace is saying is that those decisions are not as critical to winning the big fights, not as important as partners, marketing and distribution are. This is an old story, right? We usually hear it something like "the best products don't always win." He is putting a slightly different spin on it.

Horace writes some great stuff and knows the mobile market inside and out. Well worth following if you are in the space.
I wrote a small mail notifier a while ago, it displayed fine on Linux with minimal changes. I don't have any other examples handy, though, sorry...
Qt supports different native styles, Qt looks - and behaves - native in Windows, OS X, GNOME, KDE, ... Try QtCreator for example, or VLC, or VirtualBox, or any other application made in Qt.

Check out their whitepaper "Qt Cross-Platform Application Framework": http://qt.nokia.com/files/pdf/qt-4.4-whitepaper
Yes, generally speaking, who has more backlinks wins. But take into your consideration the following:

- PR of the page of the backlink. A backlink from a page with PR 5 is better than 20 backlinks from pages with PR 0

- However, PR is not the only matter. There is also domain authority. A page with PR0 on a site with high domain authority (like NYT) could still outrank a PR3 page.

- Anchor text of the backlink. Links like "Click here" or just a plain URL don't say a lot, in compare to "Security Camera" for example.

- Where the link is placed on the page also matters. A link at the top or in the article beats links in the comment areas or at the footer.
How to Get Started in Android App Design
Opera has been native for a while...
You've got to go to http://www.mozilla.org for it.
Thunderbird is still there:
http://www.mozillamessaging.com/en-US/thunderbird/

Perhaps your browser shortened the URL?

Your link lands here: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/
We have used Node.js at my company to build a few small web apps. The decision to try node.js was most likely based on the fact that everyone in the office knows javascript already. The experience has been a little love/hate (at least for me).

Personally, I like the idea of asynchronous IO for writing server applications but I would probably go with a slightly more robust language (for me it would be Haskell).
I think developers frequently suffer from "This doesn't flatter my sensibilities, so it must be crap. There is a sense of cosmic justice, so this will hurt the business."

I was told, repeatedly, that Mac owners are Jobs-loving HIG fascists who look down on Java apps. Separately, their conversion rate was double PC owners. Who am I supposed to believe, the experts or my lying eyes?
It worked for me. The only thing I did differently was including the contents of the previous zip file (the image and the step21.txt) in the shared folder.
It's a good point you make about alcohol, but I think the difference is that the "pure/regulated" alcoholic being sold can be consumed in a safe manner without any physical harm. I don't think a "pure" version of hardcore drugs are safe under any scenario. It's not simply a matter of them being laced with something that makes them dangerous.
For European Startups, New €6 Million Seed Fund Is A Step In the Right Direction
I said "any attempt at prevention", not "making succesful suicide a crime".

IANAL, but, in the UK at least, it's possible for somebody who is suicidal to be locked up for their own safety. That goes against the parent comment's logic that we have the right to do whatever we wish to our own bodies... so I'm not sure the what the issue is with my question.
Tech Investing Trends For 2011
Control the Look & Feel of Form Elements with Uniform jQuery Plugin
Uniform is jQuery plugin that could control the look and feel of form elements (checkboxes, drop down menus, radio buttons, file upload inputs and etc..) between all browsers. It works in sync with your real form elements to ensure accessibility and compatibility.
Kinect hackers take control of the action
No. randomwalker's point is that every branch must be proved to be a win.

>> "it would require devoting more computing resources than the planet has for a pretty significant amount of time"

This is also incorrect. As mentioned in other comments, the branching factor of chess implies that it is not brute force solvable using the entire universe as a computer--let alone just Earth.
Of course he would! It's a killer marketing term :)

Apple's marketing copy on the term specifically says: "the Retina display’s pixel density is so high, your eye is unable to distinguish individual pixels."

It isn't tied to a specific PPI number.

And besides, depending on how good your eyesight is, the iPhone 4 'Retina display' moniker can be bogus, anyway (http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/06/10/re...)
When dealing with other people's money, it's worth taking the time to get it right.

As for hype, this is a college magazine doing a little boosterism for one of its graduates. Just like every other college magazine on the planet.
I can't help but wonder how expensive a screen like this would be? I'm not a hardware guy. Would this screen even be reasonable at $500 retail price?

Also, this could be interesting for Apple to use iPad 1 as a $300 product and iPad 2 as the cutting edge $500-800 product.
what was the DPI?
Open-domain question-answering machines are becoming better than humans
Does SpiderOak only provide backup service? Erasure encoding is efficient for cold data. Do you use erasure encoding to distribute the hot data across clusters?
That retina display threshold would be dependent on how far the device is commonly held from the eyes. In my experience, iPad users tend to put them in their laps whereas iPhone users tend to hold them closer.
http://www.mozillamessaging.com/en-US/thunderbird/
Nice! Screenshot for the lazy: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/186198/Screenshots/foyz.png
If I were Steve Jobs, I'd be getting my engineers to slip stuff like this in to drive the rumour sites into a nutty frenzy.

Imagine the fun if there'd been @3x images.
At the same time desktop monitors hover at 100 PPI resolution indefinitely. There has been only minimal improvement on desktop monitor resolution since the good old CRT days.
So, who here is hacking on a Kinect?

I've started some stuff using JRuby, Mirah, and Monkeybars.
I guess I don't see how BankSimple can be truly better. First, there are already no-branch banks like ING-Direct. Second, Credit Unions exist.

BankSimple seems to be a no-branch bank like ING-Direct. They're presenting themselves as being better. How are they different? Well, they're pushing the idea of no-fees, better customer service, and better mobile banking. In order to achieve that, they'll have to be more efficient or accept a lower profit margin. Banks have healthy margins so there is some room there, but there are other industries with higher margins.

The second piece is that there are already not-for-profit banks. They're called Credit Unions. They exist to give their customers (who are their owners) the best deal they can. In order to be better than credit unions, they'll have to be significantly more efficient rather than simply relying on lower margins.

Part of what makes me skeptical is that they aren't creating a bank. They're partnering with currently chartered banks. This is probably because it's very difficult to create a bank and there's a lot of regulation to deal with. However, this somewhat limits what they can do to give me a better deal than a bank (since they're just reselling the product of another bank). Now, banks vary in how good of a deal they give you so part of their product might simply be getting you a good account under their brand. But part of this means that BankSimple won't be doing what banks normally do with deposits. Banks normally lend it out or invest it. BankSimple will be parking it in another account. So, if they aren't charging fees, how will they make their money? Maybe they've found an account that will give them 1% interest and they'll pass on 0.5% interest to me. However, why shouldn't I just bypass them? If they're doing things like refunding ATM fees, covering overdraft fees, etc. will the interest difference cover that?

I'm not saying that it can't be done. They stress no-fees and earning more interest. If they aren't lending the money out themselves, that will be hard to do - especially considering that they're claiming the best customer service, best software, etc. Where are they making their money? Not off fees and they aren't lending it out, but rather relying on other banks.

I'd really love to see their business plan since I assume they've addressed these things. Maybe wholesale banking exists and offers them a lot more. Maybe credit unions are woefully inefficient. I'm excited for their launch, but I'm not unhappy with my credit union.
Who's Pooping on Twitter?
Why is it so surprising/impressive that the worm was tested on centrifuges similar to those it was targeting? More than once, the article emphasizes that this is unusual and interesting...am I missing something?
No, mostly I just had a whole bunch of vaguely related ideas to do with analyzing the graphs of games, but I really need to find some time to hammer out the details to get something I could actually publish.

I spent a lot of time while writing my thesis on machine learning thinking about the different approaches that have been taken to board games and most tend to involve some sort of analysis of the board, and it occurred to me that rather than studying the board it might make sense to study the graph that shows how those different board states are connected.

After all you could have two games that superficially from their boards and rules look completely different but have identical graphs. Now what if we could solve one of the games easily but the other game was hard, if the graphs are identical you could covert any game state between the two games, thus using the easy game to solve the hard game.

So then you can look at things at how to create an easy game which has the same graph as a hard game, obviously for something like chess this is hard, but you don't have to replicate the whole game graph, you can do it in chunks breaking the big graph into a series of smaller graphs and then attacking them.

There's all sort of other interesting things you can do with game graphs, for example you can start enumerating all games with a certain complexity (in terms of node and vertices) and ask questions like "are some game graphs fundamentally more difficult than others" and perhaps more importantly "why?". I think the area has a big potential for deepening our understanding of board games and also raising some interesting complexity and information theory problems.
It is also possible that both moving to a native app and achieving five nines of uptime (from four nines) will do less for the business than changing the call to action on the pricing page. Luckily, God gave us AB testing.
I have built some pretty impressive AIR apps for our customers (5 apps, 40 KSLOC or so total). It takes a good level of software discipline to make apps that perform, can be reused and are maintainable (like any good desktop app). We chose AIR because of Linux / Window cross compatibility and its beautiful appearance.
Probably. The resolution at which you can't distinguish individual pixels depends on your distance from the screen, so they could spin it by saying you use the iPad a bit further back from your face than a phone. (If they even bother to spin it.)

Edit: Whoa, a popular point to make -- I should reload before commenting :)
They also can't write a job posting, even though they seem to be tasked often with doing so.
...but why? Free checking/current accounts are par de course. You can use any cash machine/ATM you want. You can actually speak to a bank manager.

One of things things I miss in the US from the UK was a banking system that wasn't entirely set out to screw you. It wasn't your friend, but it didn't wish you as ill will as the national banks here.
(disclosure: I work for Mozilla)

I've never found the argument you're making very compelling. It's "open" in the same way that golf course with a $500 greens fee is open.

What it really constitutes is a way for existing market players to collude, and thereby exclude future participants. Some of those future participants might be quite disruptive, and benefit consumers.

It's really pretty funny that some terribly corrupt standards organizations arrived at a totally unsatisfactory definition of "open", and then tried to claim that better definitons of "open" somehow infringed(!) on their early, bad definition.
Potential readers can make snap decisions in just 50 milliseconds
The machine may or may not win Jeopardy against human champions next month (I bet it will). But this sort of machines will only improve over time (see computer chess where $19.99 PC software can now beat human champions of all time). If machines can beat humans in answering open-domain questions formed as wordplay, it will be even better in smaller, specialist domains like medicine, law, and business.

Imagine the world where any person have easy access to world experts with latest information in any important domains. Long-term implications in development, education, economics, social policies will be dramatic and opportunities are huge.
The goal could be CSRF instead of actually reading the cookies. If there's a SessionID cookie for example, you can use JS to GET/POST the request to the server without needing to know the value of SessioID because the browser will send it as part of the request anyway.

The HTTP Response Splitting vulnerability can have many implications, XSS and CSRF attacks are just some examples.
jade: a node.js template engine
Could this be a move to get the H.264 patent holders to release their patent hold on the standard?
From where are you getting the large images of the book covers?
The graph is designed to convey comparative information and so units are not really important (if the method is sound).
Sure, perhaps with a huge handicap or on a 9x9 board. There exists no computer that could ever beat any professional go player in an even 19x19 game, even if you gave the professional as many beers as he could drink.
Culture still doesn’t explain poverty
Google Translate for Android Offers Conversation Mode
From the HN Guidelines page (http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html): "If you want to say something to us, please send it to info@ycombinator.com."
Something interesting to note is that this would've been extremely much harder to do in 2000. Small companies and one-man teams would have a hard time publishing games and gain enough ground to stand a chance against the giants at that time.

And when we look at the quality from that time period - A little over a decade ago - games like Diablo, Starcraft, Quake (2) and Unreal were the ones with the best quality. With a bit of effort, indie developers and startups these days can easily beat the quality they had.

If this continues, what will we see in 2020? As the quality a game can achieve converges towards some limit (At least I'm assuming so), will indie games be more and more common and actually manage to make games that will challenge big-budget franchises?
Physical dimension is a very large factor in LCD panel pricing, and a 10" panel is only 10-15% the size of a 30" panel. I wouldn't be surprised if Apple could get hi-res 10" panels for cheap, especially since they'll be ordering millions of those.
Ask HN: Anyone in Sydney want to collaborate?
I'm a long time lurker looking to collaborate on a commercial side project with someone from Sydney, Australia.

I'm aware of meetups like www.meetup.com/open-coffee-sydney -- but I trust the Hacker News community more.

I'm open on the actual project. I have some good ideas, but unfortunately (fortunately?), I'm not Single Founder material. I have a technical background and some marketing savvy.

If you're interested, please reply or contact me via my bio. Thanks.
Lots of workplaces have anonymous co-worker feedback and ratings. I actually think that's GOOD-- people have fairly little sense of what their peers think of them.

That aside, I'll address your specific concerns with cubeduel (though from your comment, I'm not sure you actually understand how the system works). Votes are anonymous. And because people are voting between two people, a "down vote" isn't really damning-- it just means that someone out there would rather work with a person more than you.

We also suppress duel data for anyone who has lost 60% or more of their duels (they show exactly like folks who don't have enough votes to calculate). So the worst that someone could experience is a feeling that, when set next to some number of random co-workers, people choose the "someone else" 60% of the time. If someone initiated violence based on that (against who? All their coworkers?), they'd have a 40% chance of hurting someone who voted FOR them at least once. I'd be sad if such a thing happened-- but not guilty.

And, of course, people can nuke their account at any time-- no harm, no foul.

I don't really grok your viewpoint at all (seems like most people don't either), but we've done our best to minimize the "mean" aspects and call attention to the stars. For what it's worth, it's growing and folks seem to like it ( http://twitter.com/#!/search/cubeduel).
PhoneGap apps feel very off because they're simply HTML/JS wrapped in a WebKit component, but Titanium is far different. Titanium makes native controls. Its virtually impossible to tell the difference between an app created in Titanium versus some JS crap wrapped in PhoneGap.
if you click on the "visit mozilla" link at the right top, it will land you at http://www.mozilla.org/ which shows all their projects including thunderbird.
“We really needed to learn how to prevent and discourage the use of drugs, especially in adolescent years. But you should use tools appropriate to the purpose, and criminal sanctions carried a lot of costs that really weren’t appropriate.”

I've always thought that the war on drugs was fought on the wrong side. That instead of working towards punishing people after the fact, we should have figured out why people use drugs and how to fix that problem. As with most things though, the easy way (prosecution) is the most traveled.
I think the point he's making is that a lot of the UI elements don't quite look or feel right, kind of like how a lot of Adobe CS apps have "native" dialogues full of weird mistakes.

Sometimes little look and feel things have a huge impact on how people react to apps: I remember (and I could be wrong, it's been a while) pretty much instantly not liking Opera on OS X when I first tried it since it had smooth scrolling turned on by default, something almost no Cocoa apps do.
"why * mothers are superior" -chinese -american -asian -asiatic -chineses
Did You Know It Costs More Than a Penny to Make a Penny?
> alcoholic being sold can be consumed in a safe manner without any physical harm

> I don't think a "pure" version of hardcore drugs are safe under any scenario.

One of these statements is wrong, and one is right. Which is which?
Thunderbird has never been on mozilla.com. Mozilla.com is Mozilla Corporation, which is dedicated solely to Firefox. Similarly, Mozilla Messaging is dedicated solely to Thunderbird, so you can get Thunderbird from their site, or the Mozilla Foundation site, which lists both (and several others).
PHP has a reputation for insecurity, but it also has a lot of built-in features that help you build secure web apps if used correctly. Some of PHP's earlier experiments were disasterous, (I'm talking about you, magic quotes!) but recent fixes like this actually seem to be pretty well thought out. PHP itself can be seen almost a lightweight web framework, albeit a particularly ugly one.

Other languages, such as Python, were not designed specifically with web apps in mind. So a web developer using such a language must make sure he's doing all the web-specific stuff properly. Which is tedious and error-prone, and that's one reason why nobody should use Python on the web without a decent framework.
Oh, yes, I'm just pointing out that they changed that because people who have seen opera recently might be confused by the comment.
Not true. Thunderbird has been on mozilla.com for a long time. Right side of screen, big huge icon, above the fold. It is where I have gone to download Thunderbird for the last few years.
I don't mean to be crass but I think I could figure this out on my own.
Agreed. Doukutsu Monogatari is, rivaled only by Braid, the most beautiful, fun, and moving video game I have ever played. It is astonishingly creative and innovative. The gameplay is challenging, but fun. And there’s not even a hint of repetition.

It is a masterpiece. I wish that I could play it again for the first time.
Indeed. These group chat businesses should support open standards like XMPP or IRC. Yes, XMPP and IRC suck, but there are tons of clients available that work with each. If you support one of these, the user can use your "beautiful" web or AIR client, or they can bring their own real client. You get happy users without having to write any code.

I've worked at several jobs with distributed teams, and the one that used IRC was the easiest. (I've also used Outlook Communicator, which is, as you'd guess, the worst fucking software product of all time. Except for Windows and Outlook, of course.)
djb's "critbit" trees are much more interesting, I think: They are basically binary patricia trees (like nedtries, if I understand correctly). However, djb's observation is that in order to locate a specific string, you only have to look at the "critical" bits - the bits that are different between different entries in the database.

So, for example, if key 1 differs from key 2 (top two keys in the tree) in bit 317, you check bit 317, and you know which one of them it is NOT (and also, which branch of the tree it is not). Proceed recursively -- most keys will, in practice, be identified by log2(n) bits where n is the number of keys in the table, NOT the length of the key.
Speeds Up, Simplifies and Modernizes Your Site with Head JS
Head JS is 2.3 kb script that speeds up, simplifies and modernizes your site. It easy to asynchronously load your JavaScript files to prevent blocking.
Thunderbird used to have a direct link from the home page on mozilla.com, right side of the screen, big icon. Didn't even have to scroll down to see it. I used that link for years.

Now, since the "We're building a better internet" campaign started, it is no longer on mozilla.com. You have to click through to mozilla.org, or go to mozillamessaging.com, which has no direct link from mozilla.com.
Yes it was -- http://web.archive.org/web/20091027042710/www.mozilla.com/en...
Mental illness is a major factor leading to the use of drugs, either by prescription or not. Lots of people have mental illnesses, therefore lots of people use drugs. Here's the trick: prescription drugs may be sanctioned, but they are not definitely safer, either for the individual or for society.

I tend to agree with you about the "wrong side" argument, but where I disagree is: sometimes, drugs are the fix for the problem. For one individual, maybe meth isn't the answer, but perhaps adderall is (i.e. still an amphetamine, but less acutely active)
Actually a lot of drugs can be full of other toxic substances that are cheaper than the drug itself. One that you tend to hear a lot about is Ecstasy. I don't know how common it is, but I remember hearing that sometimes it could be full of stuff like rat poison, so if you wanted to score some you wanted to have a dealer you trusted, not just some random guy at a rave.