skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is actually a really, really well put-together platformer! Fast, just enough of a challenge, cute and fun, and brilliant music too.

Fantastic!
>> if someone can't spell your name after hearing it, it's a fail.

>Practically speaking - why is it a fail? Who are the prospective users that I am going to loose over this?

I'd modify this slightly - I can't say it after reading it. "B-vuck up"? Sounds ugly and is not consistent with other English word forms. It's not only that it's hard for people to communicate but also it may be hard for people to internalise. How do you read it's name - I simply skip over the name, it makes reading copy with the name in it disjointed.

Now, this could work for you if your product is strong enough - if the product has a global brand behind it then I can see people going "sheesh ACME Corp's new product, have you heard the name ..." and this actually gaining you some mindshare. You'd simply pronounce it "backup" and people would know that ACME Corp spell backup with a funny A.

Other than that I personally go with this as a name fail.
I agree. People of the future who are truly going to change the world as we know it have insights and points of view that would not really make sense to us people of today. Some times today's crack-pots are tomorrow's visionaries.
Australia's new dot com boom – and why it’s different
Yes, some are harmful in that promotion disguised as objectivity is misleading.

That's a whole separate issue from notability, though. On this and many other issues I think the notability bar is set too high. I'm much rather see a wikipedia page on an obscure language than not, and I have read a few in the past.
The saying "In a hurricane even turkeys fly" comes to mind.

KONAMI CORPORATION = $2.70B
NINTENDO CO LTD = $41.21B
ACTIVISION BLIZZARD = $13.21B
TAKE-TWO INTERACTIVE = $1.37B
ELECTRONIC ARTS = $6.15B

If this were 1998, you would dump all your money into these stocks in the anticipation that the bubble would continue to expand for several years, and spill over into related areas. You get your money in, call up your Goldman Sachs buddies, and flip them to Mutual Funds after they're overvalued. Rinse and repeat until the bubble blows.
Ask HN: Taking the next 6 months off, advice?
Hey everyone.

You guys might remember me from a post I made about a year ago, asking if there as a point in continuing school: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1182512

I've been at the university for two quarters now, and I'm beginning to wonder what I'm doing here. The course loads are ridiculous, they leave me very little time to do much else let alone code. It's not that the courses are too difficult, I just can't find a good reason to devote that much time to school.

So I have decided to take the next quarter off which gives me, including summer, 6 months of total off time. During this time I want to do is build my skill set and launch a product (I have a few things in mind).

What advice would you give someone in my position,, and what would be the best way to spend my time during these next 6 months?
That's an absolutely hilarious website xD Very nicely implemented too!

After a minute of poking around: when you "hide chat" or "hide info", they lose their mouse-over which would probably be "show chat".
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2084732

(the last pardox thread)
It’s the Data Plan, Stupid
Man gets idea, builds motorcycle from scratch, beats Ducati.
There's a saying in Vietnamese culture that goes along the line of "Compatible husband and wife can empty the Pacific." I live by that.
I disagree. I would downvote any opinion I thought was 'bad for the world' (or whatever), even if it was stated politely, providing it wasn't already in minus karma (that's just mean). If something has 69 upvotes, but just as many people think its wrong, then downvoting lets readers know more accurately how the HN community feels about a certain topic.

Btw I think there is an old pg post sanctioning downvoting for disagreement.

Edit: wouldn't downvote a comment to zero either
I actually looked into nanowrimo before beginning development on neovella, and it seemed like a great idea. Neovella is a bit different in many many ways, though. Nano even says they want "quantity, not quality". I don't see why you really have to make a compromise. People will write if it's social and fun--my goal is to make it just that, but I do have a long way to go. As an externality of multiple authors, the potential for creativity is hypothetically very high, possibility for writer's block very low, and the capacity for quality work (by a different definition of 'quality') seems to be there too. Why keep writing as a monthly thing? It can be fun!
None of these are Rails specific. Don't stick session data in a relational db if you can put it in memcache or someplace similar. Also, MySQL's query optimizer and execution engine suck (SQL server, DB2, Oracle, and PostgreSQL all handle in() queries with select statements just fine).

The select for update thing, though, sounds like a table type selection issue. Doesn't innodb handle locking at roughly row level (maybe db page)? Seems like that one is for people who stick with MyISAM. If you're doing concurrency sensitive stuff, pick a better storage engine (or more robust db).
Think 1997
Apart from the fact that Android is the most popular smart phone OS and WP7 is thus far not a success.
> Can't differentiate in that space.

That's complete BS.

Android phones offer very different experiences, from fairly standard Android, to the completely alien Sony-Ericsson:

http://www.expansys.com/zoompic.aspx?i=207496
http://www.expansys.com/zoompic.aspx?i=207852
http://www.expansys.com/zoompic.aspx?i=203457
http://www.expansys.com/zoompic.aspx?i=204827
http://www.expansys.com/zoompic.aspx?i=185317
Upfront I want to be very clear that I'm not hating on any of the languages that he mentions in the article. okay, maybe secretly hoping that Ruby will go die in a fire somewhere, but let's put that aside.

What grieves me as I read that article is that it seems like he had a perfectly good way of doing it simply and easily, but then decided to go for a much more complex and risky solution (with what _he_ describes as poor tooling) ... for what? Simply to increase the difficulty level?

Take the analogy of a backyard pool. Instead of just running up to the pool and doing a bomb (or even a belly flop), he has to climb up on the roof of neighbours rickety garage, where he is going to attempt to do a triple twist half pike helicopter/superman maneuver in order to score higher from the judges. Problem is, he's got a real risk of either missing the pool entirely or cracking his head open on the concrete.

I'm not saying we should never use new languages or techniques or tools. What annoys me is that given the choice of doing something simple, or doing something complex, he chose the complex way, and then piled on the risk, with a side order of complexity.

From the article:

"Shortly after working this out and drawing my architecture diagram (a pretty insane-looking tangle of boxes and arrows on a sheet of paper)"

Shouldn't that have been a pretty big red flag? Sure he found some superstar programmer to pull it off for him, but I can't help but think that a little bit of darwinian natural selection would have been in order here.

The annoying thing is that you see this all the time in the Enterprise. Time and time again someone with architect in their title goes and makes an appalling horrible mess of the design, leaving the poor bastards at the coal face to sort it out and try to make the abominable crime against nature, reason and common sense actually work.
Matt do you think this will be abused at all? I.e. organized blocking of sites on mass to push it down rankings?

Is your block list something that will be synced so that it is available everywhere you use Chrome and eventually just synced with your Google account?
Increase the lifespan of Symbian to a minimum of 5 years

Glad you're not going to any shareholder meetings of companies I own shares in...
This seems like a great community and venture -- though I doubt an online community to develop skills, knowledge, and projects will ever compare to a brick and mortar one.

Developers who are really serious about these goals should join a real community where they can sit in a room and collaborate -- like Noisebridge in San Francisco or Hacker Dojo in the Valley. That said, obviously these institutions don't exist everywhere, so this is a great "next-best" option!
We need a common layer over the top of the various hardware (GPS, accelerometer) access API. I am sure something like jQuery can do that.
I just wish Mac OS was making similar inroads against Windows. Although I guess that's not the be-all-and-end-all it used to be. And I was astonished to see in the library the other day, over 50% of the laptops people had were Macs, plus other folk there with iPads.
That might be, but I don't see the logic in that. Everything Apple does is not open source. The closed source or patented stuff can't be used regardless if someone is part of the open source community. No one gets sued for using the open-source stuff, if I got this right.

I don't take any sides here, just pointing out, that as far as I can see open source has nothing to do with this.
Honestly, doing this backend work is pretty trivial. Aside from Windows Phone that is, where everything must be in managed code (doh). But iPhone / Android is trivial, like literally a couple of days for a moderately complex app with storage, threading, background downloading, and so on. Even input isn't too bad for simple gestures.

The real work for non-game apps is converting all of your UI and device interactions to the new OS. Linux compatibility might let you avoid rewriting your code that opens files, bit it's not going to let you make a UI element pulse for a few seconds then drop off the screen.
yeah see phonegap or titanium appcelerator (convert html5/javascript to a mobile app, with access to stuff like the camera, contacts, sensors)

also check out jquery mobile, sencha touch, cappuccino...
Rwandan Genocide Redux?
Normally I don't post this sort of thing (try to focus on valuable content) but dear god THANK YOU!

I'm cackling maniacally while I block expertsexchange, Mahalo, and several other sites. I'm so happy right now.
A few months ago they increased the # of karma required before you could downvote. I've noticed things have been much better since.
If I could downvote you I would.

It's my vote. I'll use it to mean what I want.
That's the first step in establishing a community curated subscription service. That's how AdBlock works and it works great.
>>
My point, anyway, is that the men in the WSJ article cheering this drivel on are often the same guys who don't want to assume the traditional provider role for men. They don't want a wife, they want a maid that "puts out".
<<

I could roll with "fuck it, let's neither of us clean". I want a wife, not a barracks inspector.
Try the book, "Seven Languages in Seven Weeks" which covers Clojure, Scala and a bunch of other languages. I've only just got it and it looks good so far.

http://www.amazon.com/Seven-Languages-Weeks-Programming-Prog...
The problem could have been that Jennings said "the twenties" which a computer may not have recognized as the same thing as "the nineteen twenties"
What would happen to apple stock if steve's health takes a turn for the worse? I think no other tech giant's leadership (since bill gates and microsoft in the late 80's and early 90's) has been perceived even by the general public as being so pivotal to a company's vision and dominance?
Feynman would have a better approximation for the resistance of a human. 1K is just way too low.
Because in order to answer a question Watson is really executing hundreds or thousands of different algorithms in parallel to attempt to find candidate answers, and then comparing and building confidence scores for each.
> litigation MS would inevitably bring and probably win

Unless they can convince a judge Elop acted on bad faith against the best interests of the company and favoring his previous corporate master. That could make the Microsoft executives who helped broker the deal accessories to this.

I am not sure the first part is that hard to sell to a judge.
I started TypeMotion a couple of years ago for that very purpose, but I never promoted it (even to friends / family) because I wanted to wait until 'before NaNoWriMo' to announce it, and completely forgot the next year.

Then, I decided to rip the guts out of it because I decided that the pinnacle of what I wanted it to do looked exactly like the comments on 'djangobook.com', where user-contributed edit suggestions sit right in the left margin, represented by little bubbles -- then something else came along and my pet project got discarded. :-\
Ouch, you're completely right. Nokia is jumping in with the #5 OS.
I don't believe that a downvoted comment more accurately reflects the feelings of HN than an upvoted rebuttal.

You're right that "bad for the world" opinions should likely be downvoted, but I often disagree with comments that are not so without feeling a desire to downvote them.
Actually, the Mac has "outgrown the PC (and hence has gained share) for 19 quarters straight, nearly five years." [1]

And that's not taking into account the iPad, which arguably has been cannibalizing sales of netbooks.

[1] http://www.asymco.com/2011/01/24/how-does-the-mac-gain-share...
Yea agreed. I think you can do what you're asking for by clicking the 'm' button on the bottom left hand corner.
The OP should double check the HN guidelines (http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). There is no requirement that downmodding not be for disagreement. HN is not Reddit (which I shouldn't have to tell him because his account is less than a year old ;)) and we do not follow Reddiquette.

FYI, here's PG's comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171
Ask HN: What's the Lorem Ipsum of programming languages?
I've seen professional videos that include clips of code scrolling on a computer screen. As I would be surprised if they actually used real code from their software, I was wondering if there were any reoccurring formats or types of code that people generate to act as "fake" code?
I have an idea, startups.

Have some former Nokia lead engineers and managers, start working on that plan.

Have some other managers and engineers work on the Android plan.

Have some others compete with Nokia to make better WP7 phones.

Gets rid of 100 layers of management, etc.
I don't particularly object to the idea that we hold some of our intelligence in our environment. I think it's true, and actually forms the basis for my objection. What I object to is that we should naively allow that environment to be changed from one which offers manifold possibilities for a full range of embodied engagement (the natural world and man-made things which relate to our bodies in a way which does not significantly restrict our possibilities, e.g. clothes or hand tools) into one which encourages superficial stimulus-response behavior and instant gratification according to pre-fabricated programs.

It sounded to me like Don Norman had already accepted that idea to the point that he didn't even realize it was a choice. He worries about a future of greedy carriers controlling our phone-brains. I worry about the fact that our minds could become so beholden to devices that, regardless of whether those devices are open or privately controlled, we diminish the depth of our experience and our tendencies towards reflective thought.

If drugs were available that increased our abilities but made us less thoughtful, would you accept that without deliberation? Would it really be better if those drugs were easy to make at home or handed out for free rather than sold in stores? This is already happening with Ritalin and "smart drugs". They improve our ability to carry out mental work but diminish our ability to reflect on what we are doing.

"Smart" drugs and phones are only so in terms of instrumental reason, not in terms of creativity or contemplation of ends.
I'm with henrikschroder and call bullshit on semantic web being a big thing, let alone the next big thing. It's an attractive idea, but flawed. There are some niches where structured semantic data will flourish (see examples in other comments), but it will be a vast subset of the web.

A better idea is extracting latent semantic information from the existing messy web. However, "meaning" is extremely difficult to characterize, and attempting to encode it in an interoperable manner inevitably leads to a lowest common denominator approach. That will probably still provide tons of value and be much more ubiquitous than structured data, but will ultimately be shallow and fall far short of the vision most semantic web proponents evangelize.
Defying Gravity: just like "Firefly" this show was cancelled way too soon
I disagree with you, and therefore upvoting. ;)

The voting mechanism means whatever the end user wants it to mean. I use a simple metric: did the comment improve, or detract from, the conversation?
If you have a wordpress blog, you can try out Disqus and it will keep your comments even if you disable it.

I used Intense Debate for my Wordpress blog. After some annoyances, I disabled it and switched back to Wordpress' own comments. I'll probably try out Disqus when I have time... It will irk visitors, but you can switch between commenting systems if you want to test.
I’ve never played an NES game. Is this a spoof of NES games based off of movies and books – do those games have about as much connection to their original work as this one does to The Great Gatsby? (Which is to say, do those old NES games have cutscenes that make no sense without already having read the book, a style of gameplay that is inappropriate for the setting, and setting-appropriate art and music?)
Sorry, your original comment seemed to be about men in general, not the old fashioned type.
I feel that the downvoting privilege should be based off of both total karma and average karma per post. I delete ~40% of what I write after I determine that it's not really adding something, and that's really a habit that most people would benefit from.

I've found that most of the people with high karma and low averages just say snarky one-liners all of the time and some of that happens to land with people (for better or worse) giving them a decent amount of karma despite a lack of contribution.
The inevitable conclusion is that Microsoft is not playing to win. It's playing to create confusion in the mobile market so that its disruption of the PC market - and of its most profitable product lines - takes longer to happen.
It is a little clunky, and you can see some stitching errors (or possibly lighting errors if they lit it in sections), but wow.
Plan B? Not Really. More like a wish-list.
Yes. It was raised to 500, 3.5 months back. [ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1853529 ]
And it also runs on WebOS.
Be extremely frugal (move in with parents if possible), try lots of things, iterate quickly, work your face off.

Good luck!
That is a bold statement, but I think MeeGo would be a better bet for Nokia.

Maintain ownership and control of the software layer of the Nokia products. Software is where innovation, differentiation and shareholder value can most easily be created.

This IMHO is undeniable.
We changed it six months ago- once we were able to afford the design talent to make a good go of it.

http://cl.ly/3O3H300K3C3p423G2i2Z

It's another bookshelf icon, but the colors and style make it stand out in the app store listings.

Key is to stand out relative to competition, in the common ways users find your app.

Downloads and sales have more than doubled since the change, though we also redesigned the app interface itself in the same update.
I made this screencast to help newer Rails programmers get their first patch in Rails.

Documentation improvements are a great place to start when you're new, and Rails makes in particularly easy to contribute in this way.
When Is Less More?
You should see how badly Android users react to not being given the latest Android updates (e.g. XPeria X10). In the end, when people buy smartphones they care more about the OS than hardware alone.
> I don't believe that a downvoted comment more accurately reflects the feelings of HN than an upvoted rebuttal.

People has many times suggested to force a reply when you down vote to counter the emptiness that a lone down vote leaves.
Experts exchange answers aren't nearly as bad as things like yahoo answers, etc. (PS - you know the answers are available at the very bottom of the page, right? I thought this was common knowledge, but just wanted to make sure the content was the reason behind the animosity and not that the information used to be inaccessible....)

Perfect example of this extension in action: search for "how to remove ear pads from HD555", and I get a link to this page as the third result: http://www.fixya.com/support/p516634-sennheiser_hd_555_consu...

Totally useless!
Qawker: an open source Gawker theme clone for WordPress
Perhaps you were being sarcastic and trying to illustrate situations in which someone downvoting is useful. :)

If not: Just because you have the freedom to do as you like, that does not mean that your decision is automatically correct. There are good decisions and bad decisions. If no one was allowed to comment on other people's decisions, sites like HN would have no comments at all. In fact, all discussions would be discouraged.
This is an utter minefield for any startup. While the big companies find themselves in a state of mutually assured destruction, new companies can be attacked by a billion dollars worth of lawyers if they start to compete.
Flagged, try http://www.reddit.com/r/television
Look how they test the brakes (http://www.wired.com/autopia/2011/02/looking-inside-boeings-...):

>One of the final tests still on the agenda for the 747-8 test pilots is a maximum braking tests. The pilots will abort a take off at approximately 184 knots (212 mph) and come to a stop by standing on the brakes without using thrust reverse devices. The brakes must be at their maximum allowable wear at the time of the test. The brakes are 'pre-worn' a bit in the shop, but most of the work comes down to the pilots to get them ready for the big day.
>"We do repeated, abusive landings to wear down the brakes," says test pilot Mark Feuerstein.

They slow down from over two hundred miles an hour by standing on the brakes.
> and let it continue be open source...

If they didn't, people would fork it. And Apple would have to maintain it by themselves.
The uni department I worked at once had a student called "Daniel". He was on a engineering scholarship from somewhere in remote Africa and had never needed another name. He was rather rueful that nobody had told him to make one up when he applied for his passport, because it caused him all kinds of difficulty. He was all kinds of things on different bits of paper: "Daniel Daniel", "Daniel -" and, memorably, "Daniel Dash".
There's nothing on this page except a login form, without a button. Am I missing something?
Yeah, those and WiseGeek for me. I keep on getting WiseGeek in searches (especially if I search for a question, which I occasionally do) and the content is complete and utter crap.
Anyone managed a no-death game? Does it do anything differently?
email mmmurf at gmail
I think downvoting brings mean-spiritedness to the community, and is one of the main reasons i ran away from digg and reddit and came here.
I think Tycho would agree. If the comment improved the discussion, it couldn't have been "bad for the world."
Jsfx – Javascript Sound Effect Generator
Profiling Questionnaire and Pitching Instructions
Richest? Not since May of 2010: http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/14/apple-eats-microsoft/