skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't know the grandparent's reasoning, but for me, having a small 0 there means I loose the peripheral vision effect of the icon. That little glowing "0" is hard to distinguish from another number in quick glance. If there were no icon then I could quickly determine the most important piece of information to me - do I have mail or not?

Screenshot of the "0" and "2" from two Gmail tabs I have open side by side:

http://img109.imageshack.us/img109/6883/20110126084559select...

I tend to keep my inbox fully read. It's my staging area - Unread = totally unprocessed, Read = TODO, Starred = Deferred TODO or important later. For me, a quick glance for unread (any amount) is more useful than exactly how many.
Debunking the pseudoscience behind the "3D can't work" myth
Michael, just some feedback on your blog. I stopped reading it after .0001 seconds. Why? Text is entirely too small to read. This is coming from a 26 yr old btw, can't imagine what someone older with poor eye sight would say. Not trying to be snarky, hopefully it helps.
Earlier this month I had an email from Google that was marked as spam in gmail.
Vulnerability in Sendmail Delivery Agent code in Mail, affects Rails
"An attacker could craft an email address used to send out an email and inject code that would be executed by the system shell.

All users who are using sendmail to deliver their system email and running a 2.2.14 or earlier release of Mail should upgrade immediately."
The How and Why of Tech
I would happily buy some apps if I could pay anonymously (like with "cash").
I had a quick browse through some of the content, something that caught my eye on page 7, is that the first sentence of each subsection contains the word 'paradigm': "A paradigm that is concerned with the investigation ...", "A paradigm that considers collective intelligence as a behavior that emerges through ...", "Neural Networks are a paradigm that is concerned with the investigation of ...", and "Fuzzy Intelligence is a paradigm that is concerned with the investigation of fuzzy logic". You might consider some rewording there.

Other than that it looks like a really nice introduction, I'll probably keep it on hand as a reference guide.
How to convert MOV files to MPEG/MPG on Mac
Great design, although I doubt anyone will seriously benefit from it. Why not just plug it in where the USB symbol is on top? How does this solve anything?
For a while there the persistent-but-closed state of pinned tabs was coming in and out randomly for me (based on updates on whichever repository I was on).

I agree, the old behavior of having a dual-state pinned tab was VERY nice. I pretty much always have three pinned tabs now (GMail, GMail, GReader), but it used to be a few more. Now if I close GReader, which I do if I'm focusing down on working and know I won't be hitting it, it disappears - instead of that little placeholder.

I've been hoping re-enabling that behavior it was an option I just missed somewhere. I guess not.
Internet providers are the new secret police, says report
Reporters and Parrots
Goes to http://www.ooyala.com/monetization for me.

Is this some sort of blackhat SEO attempt?
Have you considered selling it on the Kindle/iBooks/B&N etc?
Very handy feature to have, I had been keeping an eye on the pinned tabs - they flash/pulse when the page updates (new email comes in), now it's a lot easier.
Shopping for Anonymous Shell Companies
Didn't I imply that cars drive on the right side i.e. the left side of the road?
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Of course I didn't mean to impolite, apologies if I caused any offense. Hey - different cultural background, please no more down-votes, thanks!

From Wikipedia: James Joyce's novel Ulysses includes a character named Mulligan who brings 'Chrysostomos' into another character's mind because Mulligan's gold-stopped teeth and his gift of the gab earn him the title which St. John Chrysostom's preaching earned him, 'golden-mouthed':[45] Chrysostomos also refers to Stephen, the independent and exiled genius: "He peered sideways up and gave a long low whistle of call, then paused awhile in rapt attention, his even white teeth glistening here and there with gold points. Chrysostomos."

The original John Chrysostom died in 407 apparently. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Chrysostom
That's why you don't decide. It's called a mixed strategy. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategy_(game_theory)#Mixed_st...)
One thing that seems terribly broken in most IDEs/code-editors is that tiny spelling mistakes can ruin your program. Visual Studio helps out with AutoComplete, in that you can deliberately never fully type a variable/function yourself, always use intellisense to complete things and use the right letter case. Although it's still not completely immune.

When you run a script in Coda, say, first instinct is to look for functional problems, and usually there will be some, so you'll change stuff. But additionally there will be these tiny spelling errors, and failing to fix them right away leads to all sorts of trouble.

How do most folk deal with this? Just get 'better' at not making small mistakes?
That should be a independent service with plugins for all Major IDEs (VS, XCode, Eclipse, Emacs, VIM, maybe even TextMate) and a healthy online-community where people can brag with their achievements (the positive ones, that is). I suppose nowadays Facebook-Integration would be useful too.

That'd probably gain lots of traction.
Learn to Code Part II: Working With Variables
"I suspect that Linux users, as a community, are closer to the software-development community, so when good software is made (without a bunch of insulting DRM) at a reasonable price, they're more than happy to pay for it."

Well the utter and complete non-existence of any commercial software on Linux (yes I know about Oracle...), and the spectacular failure of anyone trying to make any (who here remembers Corel's ill-faited WordPerfect for Linux attempt, or Loki games?) are devastating proof that the exact opposite is true.

(I guess one could argue that 2$ is the 'reasonable price' for any and all software, but that's just closing one's eyes to the economic realities of the software industry).

I mean let's not beat around the bush: Linux users don't pay for software in any sizable amount. Plunking down a few bucks for some games once every decade doesn't count. I like Linux as much as the next guy and I've used it since 1998, but the extremists (at the FSF and elsewhere) that have managed to somehow convince a large enough portion of Linux users that paying for software is somehow a moral issue (I mean, seriously?) have killed 90% of the market in that area. Yes I know that a few companies left and right make a few cents on 'support' and other such frolicking in the margin, but Red Hat is the only one who has managed to make any serious money from Linux itself (as opposed to some others who have found a sound and cheap platform on it to build their product offerings on, those seem to do OK with it)..
The Food Lab: A Better Way to Caramelize Onions
I thought the same, too.

This would also require you to factor in exchange rates, but I guess that's not much of a problem when done as a snapshot view.
It just goes to show you that puns are the worst form of humour. Please see my comment near here to nkurz!
My problem with /. was that the stories were not voted in on by the community but rather by a select few curators who added editorial content in the headlines.

And they're still using the Bill Gates Borg icon?
I think you meant to reply on that 'generic smart phone whinges' thread.
You get better at not making them - but much more importantly, you get better at realizing what mistakes you're likely to make, so when you make them and something doesn't work as expected, you find and fix the small mistakes very quickly.

You also generally get better at testing and at diagnosis.

It does get better.
Want to add this superb link I found. http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html
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Verizon Bundles Broadband Services With Google Apps To Small Business Customers
Deploying agents in your area now, I wasn't sure your transport was a threat until now.
That depends entirely on whether you married a woman who demanded vacations, jewelry, expensive dinners( e.g. saw you as a walking wallet ), or a woman who actually likes you for who you are.
I scan the RSS feed, ignore the dupes from HN, reject the political stuff, and glance over the remaining tech headlines.

Of the three that might appeal to me, I read the abstracts, and occasionally follow the links to the original articles. I ignore the comments because I never log in anymore. The only ad I might see is in the upper right.

The new design seems to confirm that I'm not alone.
Samsung European TV Application Contest Voting Underway - €500,000 Up For Grabs
The Mother Of All Internet Wars
Facebook Brings Back (Part Of) Beacon, and No One Blinks
Not only that, but the threat of a non-backwards compatible upgrade being just around the corner is a major point against picking up Perl at this time, and the uncertain release time frame of Perl 6 makes that not exactly an attractive choice for a language to learn.
Where do you find them for that money?
It isn't like its hard to reach out to YC startups, they are generally, almost by definition, easy to contact.
This is a really insightful writeup. Thanks.

I just wanted to mention that a lot of things that you did bad, look so only in hindsight. Not that they are not bad, in the sense that you could have done better, but the very same things that now look bad could be construed to be actually 'good' had your startup gone right. Even the startups which do end up successfull do not become so by doing everything right.

For example:

1. Your co-founder was not committed due to mortgage or family, however he was a great tech guy. And there is a chance that hte startup might have done better, without him spending as much time, in which case you would have duly thanked his technical chops which contributed to startup success.

2. If you would have been stricter with the goals your co-founder might have bailed early. Had the startup done better, being less strict could have been construed as a good management decision which helped accomodate your co-founders competing personal commitments.

3. Similarly for setting a deadline - sometimes things just take longer, and your startup might have turned over a good leaf by just trying hard enough. There is really no easy way to know when you have to stop.

Essentially, the point that I am trying to make is that it is extremely hard to figure out what is the real reason for failure, and most such analysis misses the woods for the trees.

However, being able to distinguish correlation from causation is extremely critical as it is the basis on which startups should pivot (or shut down).
Anonymous attacks websites in Egypt
>Your left hand is where thumb and index finger form an L.

This would work except that young kids get letters wrong too and a common mistake is to mirror L.
The bigger reason to seal classes is to limit API surface area that needs to be tested for and preserved from one version to the next. The reasoning is closely related to why virtual methods should almost always be avoided.

Inheritance is one of the closest couplings you can have between two pieces of code in an OO language. When you inherit, you're depending very deeply on the behaviour of the base class. If you're a platform vendor, having third parties deeply reliant on very specific behaviour is a nightmare. It greatly increases your testing burden and limits future flexibility, as you'll likely have to maintain buggy invariants into the future, possibly to the point of having to introduce redundant parallel functionality merely to avoid third-party breakage when trying to expand the feature set.

If any source code outside your control is going to be using your code, and you have some kind of obligation or incentive not to break their code, then I strongly recommend that you seal your classes (final in Java, etc.), or saving that, make very few methods virtual, and ensure that they have been tested and documented appropriately.
It's a jitterbug for hipsters.
"Typically such items get lost pretty quickly, so you'll end up carrying one along."

Different strokes for different folks, I guess. I have at least 5 spare styluses somewhere that I bought with various devices because I was afraid I'd lose the original ones, yet never did once in 10+ years of use.
If you're looking for places to share your work and get feedback, then http://dribbble.com and http://forrst.com are your best bet, although both are currently invite only.

If you're looking for more of a link dump type thing, then http://www.designfloat.com and http://www.uberlook.com (my site) might have what you need.
Reminds me of Microsoft's Instaload design for batteries:
"The two batteries can be inserted in any of the four possible orientations as shown above and the device works."

Source: http://www.microsoft.com/hardware/mouseandkeyboard/licensing...

HN Discussion http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1480059
Well I can fill 14 hours a day with client work too. But when working for your startup you calculate the minimal income you need and only spend the amount of hours on a client to earn it.

The rest of the time is spent on working for your startup. When I was co-owner of a isv our main income in the beginning was consultancy for clients. In addition we developed our product and used the spare money to hire additional developers. The consultancy work made sure we had a minimal paycheck at the end of the month which would pay our mortage and the bills.

Maybe this model is not sustainable anymore with being quick to the market and bead competitors on speed. But it worked in that period of time.
So, how do you identify the hole orientation? Does it have a mark too? What possible use is identifying the plug orientation without that?

USB plugs are a giant step backward.
The Most Lucrative Business: Repeated Purchases
Curious as to what kind of profit you're getting seeing as this is through Lulu... would like to support your efforts, is purchasing through Lulu the ideal way?

(Also curious as to the quality of their prints, I've heard in the past that code samples can be fuzzy, but I suppose that would be on a per book basis, and have not directly observed this myself)
Cloud Security Startup Emerges from Stealth Mode
Making one's services affordable isn't being a sucker in my book...I've done work pro bono at times. The issue I see is that they are not valuing your time - meeting to negotiate your rate is disrespectful of your time. If they have a budget, then they should tell you what it is so you're not playing twenty questions. If they don't have a budget to share with you, then again they are being disrespectful of your time.

After a bit of sleep, I would recommend offering migration to a compatible sever as the only option and provide an hourly-not-to-exceed proposal with a healthy retainer. The retainer should be the minimum due under the contract (in other words, it's a flat rate if you wrap the project up in a few hours). Hourly-not-to-exceed work is helpful because it provides meaningful feedback on one's estimating skills.

Rewriting the application will almost inevitably entail feature creep (which may be an actual goal). Providing an initial proposal which migrates to a new server allows you to negotiate if a rewrite and new features are really what they really want.
What I found strange though is to see that it's from an Amsterdam-based company. Maybe it's different Out There In The West but in most of the Netherlands, iPhones aren't a big deal, and we don't have US-style hipsters at all.
Plugged a device backward into my Dell monitor; got the "current limit" dialog popup; port was fried.
At least it is used a lot in financial institutions.
It's back up now - and definitely an insightful read. Thanks for sharing.
Finding Things on Linux and Understanding Regular Expressions
Here is a nokia for 30:

http://azerty.nl/producten/product_detail/1058/302405/nokia-...

and here a samsung:

http://www.pixmania.nl/nl/nl/3598464/art/samsung/e1080.html?...

for a little less
The page background color is different as well. It was white before, now its #F2F2F2.

The new top-level menu looks nice, too, but somehow it just doesn't look "Apple" to me. Maybe I'm just too used to the old site...
"Then the company will actually pay some 20000 more euros in other salary charges."

What are these other salary charges?
OK, I clicked on Site Map. I get this zero-pixel border/gutter on the left side (on Safari), which I find incredibly annoying. Does anyone else see this ?
InstaLoad: Battery Installation Technology Overview
The Ethics of Publishing Cease-and-Desist Letters
Theres just to much spam on the store , I tired searching for a game I saw on some website called mr runner there were 5-6 clones of the game from different publishers with slight changes to the title I couldn't figure out which one was what I was looking for and just gave up...i mean hell search for "plants vs zombies" which popcap hasn't released for android...

for every good app there are about 30 horrible ones that really shouldn't have been released (there are still a lot of good apps)

also I find the lack of a AppStore-eque "new and noteworthy" list for each category really lame and it makes it hard to find quality/new/interesting apps, the "just released" section is really high on the spam factor and a pain to filter
Joe Stump, founder of SimpleGeo, speaks on "Location, Scaling, and Herding Cats"
The 15 minute return policy is displayed very prominently after you buy an app.

But you're right, since a majority have never purchased an app, they may not be aware of it.
How (not) to write Factorial in Java
Codility launches free coding skills certification - new challenge every month
Nice to see some independent investigation going on in a University, instead of more dry research.
IMO, 24 hours is too long, and 15 minutes is too short. What's a good time? I would think that 60-120 minutes would be about right.
My company sends nearly 3MM messages a month through SG. We're largely happy, but I concur on each one of these pain points.
Canada wages YouTube war against metered Internet billing
Does Facebook Makes You A Commodity?
Pixmania and Amazon.de, for example, have a Samsung E1080 for 25 euros and a nokia 1616 for for 30. However I've seen big box electronic retailers selling off old stock for less than that.
I could really see this taking off in London if you could use it as an Oyster Card:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oyster_card

On a personal note I also use an RFID to unlock the front door to my apartment block and to set the alarm at work. If I could clone them onto my iPhone I could lose two of the three things in my wallet. If I could pay with it too I'd have no need for a wallet (I already keep photos of my kids and a PDF scan of my Driving License in my Dropbox).
Paypal is simpler in terms of implementation and simplicity. Also you could try spreedly, they have a wrappers to help you.
Oh wow, didn't realize phones had really gotten that cheap. I did do a quick vergelijk.nl search before posting but I guess they got buried under the bundles that I got.
Why Viewfinder.io Has Only Three Ratings
You have some very good points, which I'm in agreement with. It's impossible to analyse the defining points of failure and come out with the correct answers. But trying to understand what was not working well cumulatively, is a better way of understanding how one problem can stem into many more. Should I have broken the idea down soon enough and got something visible out there, potentially non of the other issues would have arisen or not been so relevant. The same goes for any of the other points I mention.
It's mostly the same, but the current Macbook Air page does have the new menu.
Social Wall Application required.
I am developing my personal website and I think it will be a nice idea if I can provide a "Social Wall" component on my homepage.

This social wall component should have following features:

1. Allow both Site Owner & Visitors to post short messages(like tweets) that should get posted on social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc.

2. Allow only site owner to post messages(not as limited as tweets) that gets posted to sites like Hacker News, Quora and Stack Overflow.

3. Show all public updates from all my social networking sites on the wall.

4. The interface should be like that of FB Wall.

I found an open source application that partially implements these features, only the first one -

http://thinkdiff.net/facebook/open-source-facebook-twitter-linkedin-status-update-application/

Do you know if any other applications like this already exist? If not I will develop & release it as open source. Also, what do you guys think about the idea and what social sites you would like to have in such application?
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Or a more dark plastic look based on the top menubar. Out with the metal, in with the plastic?
Sure it is.

Base case: In a one item list, the first element is selected with probability 1.

Induction: Assume we've picked an element uniformly at random from the first n elements. When we encounter the n+1'th element, we pick it with probability 1/(n+1). Thus, we now have a uniformly random sample from the first n+1 elements.
I can't. RJ11, RJ45, RS232 and PS2 plugs were already everywhere back then, and they were mounted every which-way. And they were all physically keyed at the connector such that you could figure it out blind. Bah and humbug, I say.
Hidden in plain sight
there are tons of awesome books on amazon - look for the bestsellers and highest reviews.

One that helped me with logos is: Logo Design Love

I also liked the Classical Effects in Photoshop. Foe websites: I liked CSS Mastery and on the cssgarden as well as reading alistpart.
Good point, bad example: your "KanyeAnalysis app" really does not need write access, so no need for checkboxes. It simply should not request write access, ever. Period.
they already do that, which is why affiliates link go to great lengths to hide the fact that they are linking to an affiliate site
What I meant - with tongue firmly in cheek - was that the symbols P, asterisk, S, S symbolise the word 'piss' as surely as the word 'piss'.
Aboard Entrepreneurship - Business essays to inspire and do social good.
It's a shame that Nokia doesn't make CDMA versions of simple phones like that for the US market. I'd buy one in an instant. Though I do admit I'll probably finally break down and get an iPhone this year now that they are available from Verizon.
edits:For creating awesome websites: I liked CSS Mastery and I like reading cssgarden.com and alistpart.com for ideas.

I also like to take existing websites and redo them to make them better just for my own pleasure. And if I really am pleased, I send them to the company in case they can use it.
In the startup context, I don't see it as having particularly negative connotations or referring directly to the criminal organization. After the "PayPal Mafia", it's become a fairly common term for just alumni of a particular startup/incubator/whatever. See e.g., this aggregator of Boston-area startup tweets: http://bostonstartupmafia.com/
Tooltips take about 2 seconds to show on mouse-over. If you had to do it all the time to figure out which account you're looking/peeking at, you'd go nuts.
Incorporating into US/UK wouldn't be possible without having some registered address there so I assume you meant having an US bank account as a person living in Romania -- I understand why they would ban that.

But I doubt they would ban your US entity from publishing -- it's just another company.
Entrepreneurs and Inventors Need Each Other