skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's nice to see MS trying new (or old) things. The lack of back-to-basics simpler approach to doing web development has been a major misstep for them the last decade.

As Rob mentions, ASP.NET WebForms needs to go. It's always a bad choice and it makes it confusing to a lot of developers which of the 3 official MS frameworks they should pick. Dump WebForms and adopt 1 framework for simple stuff (WebMatrix) and 1 for more complex stuff (ASP.NET MVC).

They are also behind by half a decade when it comes to hosting. ec2 is the only thing keeping them in it, and that's at a cost. Even some of the recent hosting initiatives (AppHarbor, EpicWinHosting) are, at best, going to take years to catch up. This is especially true when you take SQL Server into account (SQL Express sucks, deal with it).

WebMatrix is a step in the right direction, but they need to address their messaging, increase their focus, and resolve the hosting gap.
I've noticed that I can sniff out pretty quickly who is actually interested in what's going on and is willing to learn things so they can fix it the next time. (Hint: these people also tend to appreciate your services).

It's the remainder - the Idontfuckingcarejustgetitfixed crowd - that ends up with my disdain and condescending feelings after a time. You know they'll never learn, they'll never care to learn, and you're just an obstacle to whatever is waiting on the other end of that Powerpoint or Farmville run.
This isn't that new... I've always been told glass is already a liquid. :)
I used to think that I never click on ads, and it's true in that I never click on Internet ads, but I've found that ads I receive on Steam are vastly more effective for me.

If you don't know how Steam ads work, when you first log in to Steam, it will pop up a window with several pages of ads for different deals and promotions going on. Given how low some games on Steam cost, I find that I very frequently will click through and buy the games advertised (things like $5 for an otherwise $50 game can be so attractive!)

I guess the criteria I use for ads is relevance. The only thing I really ever buy over the internet is games, so advertising on the internet for anything that ISN'T a game just won't get my attention, no matter how well you write it.
What is a functional programming language?
It said in the article that they tested this on plants.. what happens when the fruit grow does the coating expand?
Look Around You - Maths
Actually it came out in March 2009. So it's two years between major browser releases. In that 22 months they've dropped 7 tech previews and beta. So at about a clip of every 3 months they've released a new build.

But I do agree that it's too slow. They really do need a Chrome like schedule.
Though these products/ projects are certainly doing very well and look promising, I'll call them "massive successes" when they start to make significant contributions to Google's profit or even at least revenue.
Many of the changes in the new version bring it closer to Instagram's design.
No. Sorry to reply so late, I posted so early this morning I forgot about it during the day.

|
|
/|\
/ | \
/ / \ \
// \\
/---------\
/ \
/ \

Argh, that's ugly. In case it's not clear, 3 matches in an upward-pointing triangle, 3 making an upside-down Y shape, the former on top of the latter so there's one large triangle trisected into 3 smaller internal triangles. Or it's the 3d tetrahedron solution squashed flat if you want to think about it that way. The cheat is that you've abandoned consistent shape and area for all triangles, plus there's the 'legs' sticking out if you're concerned about geometric efficiency.
If you think maintainability is obvious I suspect we're talking about different things when we're using that term.
I don't think they can force people to upgrade. Like I think there would be a legitimate threat from the EU or US that they'd be sued if they did so.
Deployment requires a Microsoft OS running IIS, is that correct? A 100% show stopper if so...
I agree with the author that WB/Razor is a more pragmatic approach to web development on the .NET platform. The author calls it the "git er done" approach and I couldn't agree more. My biggest problem with ASP.NET and WebForms is that it's really difficult to create simple projects with it. Using Visual Studio as a text editor for web development makes me want to shoot myself. I use ASP.NET at work, but I never use it for personal projects. There's just too much overhead and lead time. The Edit-Compile-Test cycle doesn't belong on the web. That's where PHP excels and continues to excel despite being universally ridiculed.
Not from where I'm typing
Your most recent submission:

Ask HN: How can I quit talking myself out of my own ideas?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2080239

My inference: This is probably another bullshit excuse. Get on with it already. :-)
Sorry to deviate from the topic at hand, but in what ways do you think WPF is a "dead-end"? I've been mucking about with it in preparation for my first desktop app in a few years. It seems to work well enough but maybe I'm not deep enough yet.
lol awesome...nicely done
If it attacks your nerve cells, and you can get it by consuming it, why wouldn't you expect to be able to get it by sniffing it?
I loaded the site in FF4b8, and was wondering why the demo was so unimpressive, and then decided to try it in Safari, where I saw how it was supposed to work. Seems nice and easy to implement, but unless it can work on other browsers without having me do two completely different implementations, I doubt I'd use this instead of drawing my own overlays and positioning my modal windows the old-fashioned way.

Edit - I guess the '-webkit' tags everywhere should have clued me in... They mention that it should work for Firefox, but I'm not feeling like putting in the work to see if that's true. It would be nice if FF support could be added to the demo code.

The animated version is pretty sweet, but again, I'm not sure how FF does with those CSS transitions and transforms. I've been using jquery animations which seem to have a fairly wide browser support, though they rely on javascript rather than these slick CSS implementations. It's just not clear how much I'd be shooting myself in the foot with regards to browser compatibility trying to go this route instead of tried-and-true javascript.
The nonstick coating wore off your pan? Nonstick coat your food!
Attracting, Hiring and Retaining the Best People
I'm happy to see a fresh take on the desktop, but I was surprised that Unity is the default in Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook Edition. From my experience, Unity requires pretty fast 3D hardware to run acceptably. My wife's netbook has slow graphics hardware (because it's a netbook!), so back to the standard GNOME desktop, hiding panels to win some vertical space.
"With whom would you rather work"

:-)
Tag this one with a "questions that contain assertions"
Great way to build some links!
System requirements:
- Supported Operating Systems are Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows Vista SP1, Windows XP SP2+, Windows Server 2003 SP1+, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2.

http://www.microsoft.com/web/gallery/install.aspx?appid=webm...
It won't work. With a finite number of ads you can just store all the answers in a database. Captchas only work because they can be generated on the fly and don't need to be re-used.

Reusing a captcha is like reusing a one-time pad or a condom. Just asking to be broken.
I had a lot of fun with this.

That being said, I do wonder if LinkedIn is the right venue. The premise is very similar to something like "hot-or-not," and I'm just not sure that the "professional" crowd on LinkedIn is going to take to it.

Maybe you can consume another social network's API with a younger audience though.
I think - supposing that Mrs. Chua was grossly misrepresented, which seems a bit likely - that the WSJ owes her a public apology and the opportunity for a rebuttal piece.
Dropbox is a folder dropbox, it's not MobileMe, or WhateverCompanyComprehensiveDataCloudSolution. (Although doesn't Google already do everything but files pretty well?)
What about video support for existing Android devices? AFAIK WebM is only available for Gingerbread, which means the large majority of Android devices would have to fall back on Flash for Android. And that's not fully-baked yet.

I can't see why this won't be turned into a lawsuit w.r.t. intentional degradation of performance/battery life.
I am having an issue where CubeDuel thinks that I only have 2 connections, and keeps bringing them back. Not sure why this is happening, or if you've seen this before.
That's...a very good question. So much for my vaunted Ph.D. I'm going to Google Scholar to figure out how the hell a consumed protein can get into a nerve cell...
Thanks for the release date correction. I even did my research and checked Wikipedia first! Turns out I read the wrong date. Oh well, thanks. :)
I'll assess for usability, and give you some feedback. Super-fast skipping ability sounds like a great feature.

The absence of unwanted, unasked for "live chat" window pop-up's would certainly be appreciated, particularly the ubiquitous "Live Jasmine" screen....
Unless he meant the stock - it did go down a bit in the afternoon today. =p
I agree, I would say that what we need, to your point, is a single site which all manufacturers upload product details for side by side comparison.

I worked at a startup in 1999 that did this: decide.com

The idea was to show side-by-side phone and plan features from all the carriers and then you get to pick what best suits you - we even had a feature where you could put in your commute route and it would show you the best carrier coverage for that route.
Why FaceBook hasn't solved inbox spam issues.
Place your bets on why FaceBook, with all of its top Social Media Engineers and Top-Level developers, has been negligent about solving issues of inbox spam...

If a user creates a FaceBook message, they can send it to other members with numerous FaceBook accounts listed in the distribution list. All subsequent FaceBook messages, from everyone in the original distribution list go out to EVERYONE in the original distribution list (friend or not), and there's no way to turn it off, even if you block the original message sender's profile.

This has been happening for ages, and there's no end in sight. In the wake of MySpace's downfall, you'd think thy would pay a minor amount of attention to spam controls, (Which led to MySpace's downfall)

Why is this happening?

1. Because FaceBook wants to retain their rank on Alexa by causing users to generate clicks (by keeping users constantly "engaged" in the process of deleting spam)?

2. Because FaceBook is legally blind, and doesn't know about this issue?

3. Because FaceBook thinks that the flow of useless information like "Listen to my demo" or "Join this group I'll forget about after a month of failure" should be upheld because its what the Internet is about.

Sorry to be so cynical, but I've had to log out of the application fro the last 2 days due to an annoying discussion in my inbox that I have no interest in, nor control over. #NoOffense, but these days I prefer Twitter.
You need to make one for kittens and puppies. That's where the real money is.
Ask HN: Free Web Based Project Management
Can anyone make any recommendations? Thanks!
Is that the wrong link, or are you threadjacking?
How to win with an online store (hint: don't sell things available on Amazon)
It's not too hard to see why this works if you think about it as a mathematical optimization. You have a very bumpy fitness function in parameter space. When you apply arbitrary constraints on the parameters you are selecting a subspace to examine for local maxima of the fitness function. This is an easier problem to solve than the original global maximization problem.
Link unrelated
There are lots of problems with the global composite operations in browsers.

Try your browser: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Canvas_tutorial/Compositing WebKit still doesn't have all the -in or -atop working, despite bug reports going back very nearly a year now: https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=34027
Nothing compares to this scene on "Enigma of Kaspar Hauser": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAnOi0fnxuE
it's built modularly/would be easy to switch the content. just need a feed of FLV's with tags and we're all set.
Refer the 10,000th Hipster user, win a Hipster T-Shirt and private site demo
We need more polls like this at hacker news. Not only that, we also need some visual representation of information from previous polls. I am interested in statistics regarding my fellow HN participants.
What specifically are you looking for?

Github has a free plan for open source projects: https://github.com/plans

bitbucket is also fairly popular these days: https://bitbucket.org/plans
TI Releases TI-84+ OS version 2.55MP
It looks like you project just made TechCrunch, what kind of traffic did that drive?
This should work fine. A couple folks on my team split out some of the VS backend to run on a server and do the editor in JS inside of a browser back in 2003/2004 and the intellisense, etc. was totally reasonable. All tests were done with co-loc'd servers, though, thinking back :-)
Yes, if it did that we would be able to modify it (and have those modifications reflected outside function scope). It doesn't, so we aren't. Primitives add complexity to many aspects of Java, calling semantics being one of them.

I'd rather they'd went the route of forcing you to always use wrapped primitive types, but it's hard to fault the Java designers on that decision, especially when you consider the context of the time when it was made.
get back to work @ Engadget
Ask HN: Do you still support IE7?
And how did you make that decision? We don't, and occasionally that means turning down an enterprisey customer. Sometimes I wonder if we should put a little effort into IE7, since it's not the pure hell that IE6 is.
I think IDEs will be one of the last classes of applications to move from the desktop to the Web. In addition to the usability challenges of running a highly complex application in a browser, there are also a ton of security/access issues that will need to be addressed to make a Web-based IDE useful.

We often need full, unrestricted access to the machines we're coding on, as well as the ability to obtain and use a ton of different tools alongside an IDE. Bringing this kind of freedom and flexibility to a browser is going to be tough.
No, what do you mean?
>a small portion has fragmented off

I think the question was specifically about this - what has happened to that small portion?
how do i kill people? or level up? do i get additional powers at the next level?
For those of you following the Hipster story here at Hacker News, we've almost picked up 10,000 early invites in 48 hours! http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2093662

To speed things up, I thought it would be fun to have a little prize for the person who refers the 10,000th user.
Going rate for iPhone Icon?
I've done some iOS development and have some niche apps already in the app store, but this latest app that i'm working on I think will appeal to a larger audience and could be useful to people. In the past I've worked with a friend who does some design on the side, but this really isnt their main focus. I would like to get an idea of what to expect if I were to work with some of the amazingly talented designers on here. I'm just a single indie developer so budget is tight...
Music For Productivity: January 13th, 2011
There are some people who need constant audio companionship to keep us sane/motivated. Music is the soundtrack to our creativity. It makes work possible, helps define who we are and adds just enough fuel to our day to get us over most major hurdles.
oh, forgot to mention. one of the cool things it does is preload the next videos in the queue once the current one is finished downloading.
Greatest logic film scene
The really-real problem that Node.js has is that once they admit that this is a good idea, huge swathes of the Node.js value proposition go flying out the window. If Javascript is not up to the task and you need a source rewriter or a really fancy, convoluted library to make non-trivial Node.js apps actually feasible to build, then... why are we in Javascript at all? Why not use a language and runtime where the support for this was baked in from day one and the compiler is the one doing all the hard work, as it should be?

This is why the Node.js hype was such a bad idea. (Don't miss the word "hype". Node.js was not a bad idea, except inasmuch as it encourages one into dangerous areas.) A useful, if limited, project built its community around a foundation of unkeepable promises. Truth is, the need to deal with this problem, and indeed far worse, the email in question should be considered an exemplar of the problem, just wait until you have three sequences of twice the size interacting with each other, is the inevitable outcome of any serious large project written in the manually-decomposed-cooperative-multiprocessing style, not an anomaly. Human brains are not meant to deal with this. It ceases to be a significant advantage over conventional threading pretty quickly.

Basically what this style comes down to is that instead of letting the runtime schedule your threads, and potentially create nondeterminism that kills your program, you manually schedule your threads instead, and instead choke the programmer on the geometric complexity of the scheduling problem. It makes beautiful small examples and demos, and makes easy things easy, but it makes hard things effectively impossible.
Talk about overpromising and underdelivering. I remember people speculating that he'd designed a compact, powerful hydrogen fuel cell, hoverboard or something similar.
The correct answer is to use a client that does threaded conversations and hidden quotes properly, like Gmail, and then not care about top or bottom posting at all. Seems like an argument only for old fogies who used email in the dark ages.

(Disclaimer: I only started using email for real stuff when Gmail came out.)
I suspect they don't care. There are a TON of usability issues dating back years that people have created groups and pages around, asking them to fix. And these appear to have gone largely ignored by FB. So that's my take on it
Research into slow diseases always seem to get funding slowly.
Firefox fixes were merged in the repo, never really had the time to update the Demo.
In my defense, Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and Safari did an amazing job of coding to the HTML5 spec. I don’t know why Microsoft couldn’t as well.

I feel like this has been, and is, said about a lot of things that Microsoft should be kicking ass on. Why is Microsoft either unwilling or unable to lead the charge on these kinds of things? Can they say that it's not in their best marketing interest to have a crappy, slowly developed product?
I agree. Finding out more about the Hacker News community is very interesting to me, and it'd be great if pg could implement some way for everyone to visually view the data.
It could very well be beneficial to you. But it doesn't make your life less complex. The more social interactions you have, the more complicated your life becomes.
I wonder if there's an easy way you could allow tags to be "blocked." For example, if there are certain things you don't particularly want to see, it'd be useful to click those out. A similar thing for YouTube would be very interesting, TBH (the slick, heavily produced "snippet" type of porn categorized by your site isn't up my alley at all, alas).

Anyway, interesting idea. No idea how you'd monetize it at all but porn has always seemed a bit weird to me like that. There's something a bit ChatRoulette-like about the skipping.. perhaps this is where CR could send all the idiots jerking off on there(!)
Try "usually misguided". Several reports have come out that airborne asbestos is usually worse after asbestos removal than before. Going over it with a sprayed on sealer would be safer and more effective.
How Bradford Cross plans to save the media industry
We’ve Got the Wrong Idea About UX
In need of a marketing idea? Look to Your Customers | Franchise Note
From the article it seems that he's made no payment on his loan at all, even though he had a job and no substantial outgoings, but rather defaulted. He tried to declare bankruptcy to clear his loan rather than trying to pay it off.

That is an attempt to abuse the legal system.
It is interesting to see the HTML 5 compatibility charts (including for canvas) according to w3.org here:

http://test.w3.org/html/tests/reporting/report.htm

According to this no browser is currently following 100% the canvas
spec.
Only Mozilla supports JavaScript (which is a mix of JavaScript-only features and ECMAScript; it's a little complicated), and everyone else implements ECMAScript. Some JavaScript features are in discussion of being added to ECMAScript, but no current ECMAScript engines (e.g. V8) have implemented them yet, barring the partial destructuring assignment implementation supported by Opera's Futhark ECMAScript engine.
There's only one SA borders that I know of; one got closed down within the past year. Huebner/I-10 is the open one.

I know several datacenters are in San Antonio. MSFT, Rackspace, etc. Also, the NW side has a medical center, a university, and several banks (USAA's HQ is a mile away from it).

In short, the NW side is an affluent area.
The first thing that jumps to mind is that while your tags UI is nice, they're appearing on top of the content.
I couldn't find an easy way to close, hide or otherwise move those tags.
[Edit - Whoops, I was completely wrong about that.]

Also, clicking on the actual video should probably do something - my suggestion is to have it pause the video. I can think of lots of good reasons to be able to stop watching couch mode porn very quickly.

I presume you're trying to make money on affiliate links with this? I'd be curious to hear more about that side of things.
My account is about six months old, but I'm gonna have to get out the habit of just reading/lurking and contribute a little more I think. I was planning on submitting a rate my startup post next week but now having read pg's comment I'm not so sure whether that's a good idea. I really don't want to miss the opportunity to get invaluable feedback from the HN community. My app is aimed at HN users to some extent and so it's really important to me to get this right.

I had considered that it might be a little rude for one of my first posts to be an ask type post. So I had already started to outline some articles to post around the same time, e.g. I've got a bunch of notes detailing which methods have helped me increased my productivity recently, I think some would find useful. I guess for anyone in the same position as me it can't hurt to try and submit helpful posts first. I guess that's the right thing to do anyway and so that'll be my plan going forward.
THIS is how you know you need to stop coding and find a girlfriend.

Good luck with your more, uh, redeeming ventures.
IE7, lulz, we still support IE6 in enterprise-land.
Nearly every phone gets updated to newer Androids, just often not by the manufacturer. http://www.xda-developers.com/ is your friend.