skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hey James,

A few things:

- Heavy use of text shadow and box shadow makes my browser chug to a halt. Latest Chrome build on a 2.53GHz Core 2 Duo with 8GB of RAM.

- Get rid of "What is splinch?" The paragraph there is enough, and there's no need to guide the user's eye to that.

- Header/logo are huge... I'd consider making that section 50% of it's current height.

- I'd get rid of social stuff for now: Your target audience is savvy enough to share in a smart way.

- I'd change the button text to [ Join our mailing list and get your first month free ] and make the color of the button distinct from your background color. Your button should be in the foreground, and using a similar palette as the background is visually confusing.

- The items at the bottom look more like a footer -- typically where you'd look for things like menu, about, etc.. -- and less like features/important information. I'd consider bringing them up into the lighter background so that they are visually grouped with the product

- I'd try a little bit of a different layout. Typically the top left of the screen is the most valuable real estate. I took a couple minutes and did this: http://cl.ly/3l0y1w2G2p2y1P2M1p3u

- The container is a bit weird.. Unfortunately chrome developer tools is super slow with all the text, so I'm not sure quite what's going on. What I would do is have a container with a fixed width (880px-960px) with a margin:0 auto; to center the entire page.

Great idea, and while I'm not your target audience, I think that a lot of people will get value out of what you're building.
I love starcraft...but honestly this is stupid. I mean seriously...you could waste your time in so many better ways .
There is always a balance. I do too little to document, and often find myself wishing I had something to remember an event by.
Which software packages could HN install and use for this purpose?
I'm at the beginning of a (non software) project that $40 MM would likely return 25X (will need about 3x that before it's done).
That is why it is a theory and I am opening it up to peer review. Otherwise I would have stated it as a fact.

Also, "free" as in choice, not "free" as in cost.
Jeeze this is awful. If you're Blizzard and an ISP starts throttling your game, at least you have a little muscle to fight back (and even so their response is "oops, sorry, we'll try to have it fixed by June"). But if you're Random Web Startup that is dependent on P2P and your users have to deal with this I can't imagine there's much you can do. What a horrible barrier to entry.
Can you explain why you think the BBB is evil? Don't they simply supply a center point for raising and addressing business issues?
StartUpBritain.org is weak. Here's a better version.
Out of interest (and as a freelance developer), could you explain what the differences between positions are?
Mac Genius Slams His Google Job
I've used NHibernate (which is the .NET port of Hibernate) and Rails ActiveRecord.

The biggest difference to me is that Rails ActiveRecord encourages you to work from the database first. That is, you define your database tables and columns which are then used to generate your classes. In contrast, NHibernate (and I'm assuming Hibernate as well) encourages you to design your classes first and worry about persistence later.

There are merits to both approaches. In general, I'd say that Rails ActiveRecord is much easier to use and get started with while NHibernate allows for more flexibility in your domain model.
It is risky to put design second.
I once got, from a finance guy, in all seriousness: "So, you're the CTO...I guess you must have a lot of gadgets at home...?"

My response was along the lines of "Actually, when I was in grad school I spent most of my time on theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence." A little obnoxious, sure, but he deserved it.
I'm thinking it has something to do with the fact that they have been the next revolution since Karel Čapek gave us the term in 1920. If you haven't read R.U.R. you should. It feels like it belongs in last weeks Wired.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karel_Čapek
The site says it works well with Sencha Touch. What would you gain there? It seems many of these features are built in to Sencha Touch and it's limited to iOS, Android and Blackberry 6, anyway.

Are you suggesting using Boilerplate as a complement where Sencha Touch doesn't work? I can see how this might work well. Any suggestions on how one might take this route?

Perhaps you could build around Boilerplate and conditionally include the js/css for Sencha on iOS, Android and Blackberry 6.
Nit: Halfway to somewhere, but that somewhere ain't Lisp.

I'm under-rested and under-caffeinated, but the only thing I can think of that I'd call an intentional similarity between the two languages is the fact they're both garbage collected.
Using R and snow on Ohio Supercomputer Center’s Glenn
OK fair enough but it's Hacker NEWS not Hacker-good-videos-people-should-watch-but-haven't-yet.

I mean, the video is on the front page of google results if you search for "git". It's plenty well known, don't make some straw man argument that I'm "hipster-early" because I've seen it in the nearly four years this has been out.
The phenomenon that the articles title refers to is caused by something simple.

The tech world got into media, and since then media related technologies get a sizable chunk of the attention.
Wanna undo spilled mayonnaise? Here is how.
I honestly don't know why the judge has entertained this for so long. They've tried to bury him in discovery from the outset and they have far more resources than he does as a private citizen. They've not been able to show any California links beyond what a normal person might have from merely using the internet.

Frankly, letting them fight over discovery is only magnifying the harm. This is a legal DoS attack of sorts, you don't solve those by adding more complex rules, you solve DoS attacks by nullrouteing the crap.

In other words, I wonder what would happen if a judge was brave enough to say right from the outset that they're not even going to listen to all these motions, they're just going to transfer the case.
Clickable: http://splinch.it
That's nice if you never repurpose a machine - so it makes plenty of sense for naming VMs. I've found it better to use arbitrary names for physical machines, though. Thanks to the prevalence of pop-culture fandoms on the internet it's pretty easy to find a list of names related to just about any theme you might desire, then when you get a machine you can just pop the next name from the list.
You've done a good job of outlining your product, what it does, why it's needed etc. But I'd recommend some design tweaks.

I think you should get rid of the shadows. They make it difficult to read, and it doesn't look very professional, crisp or clean.

The white on brown isn't super easy to read. Maybe go for more contrast in that section on the bottom.

Why is the socialize at the bottom so HUGE?? What is that? Why is it there? Why is it detracting from the opportunity to say more important stuff about splinch?

Your page content should have a set width. You're resizing your 'splinch provides' text which is making it too long to read.

Give yourself a limit of 980px or something like that, and squeeze all your content into that box. Take a look at the homepage for http://basecamp.hq - you can get some ideas for layout from sites like this.

Makes it very difficult to read.
I found this whole subthread and the lack of comment tree collapsing more disruptive and annoying than the submission.
It seems to me the problem is that there is so much variation in the underlying robotics hardware that it will be difficult to come up with a 'one-size-fits-all' OS.
FANPERV - someone who Fails to Appreciate the Newbie's PERspectiVe.
"The Human Cloud"? Wow... This cloud buzzword is really out of control now. As far as I can tell the startup cloud is a bundle of stuff... Not a cloud. What am I missing?
> And how much money do the authors of orphan works make now? Zero dollars.

Just because you know a way of making money from something, it doesn't mean you need to have that thing... For example, I know how to make money with developers that might be doing nothing important while working for Google or some other company. Should I sue them to have access to these developers?

Even if a book is making zero dollars, it doesn't mean that somebody else should be allowed to make money out of it.
Granted, I haven't read all of the critiques of Color, but here's my issue with camera apps: For any given moment, people are going to choose one app to document that moment. Are people going to start with Instagram, take a photo, switch to Color, take the same photo, then perhaps go to Path, and take it again? No. Apple et al needs to create a photography pipeline that apps can tap into and users can choose which apps are in that pipeline. Not an easy problem to solve given all of the capabilities, but worth trying.
I have a somewhat jaundiced view of anything to do with the Tories, and with the current administration in particular. I get the overwhelming impression of underwhelming talent, little attention to detail and no originality from either the Conservative or Liberal Democrat camps of the coalition.

This scheme feels particularly slipshod in its execution. I'd welcome a £1500 bursary to start up a business - who wouldn't? - but looking at this, I discovered that an entrepreneur looking to set up any business through this site would, in fact, not actually get any sort of money to help them whatsoever.

Here lies the hamartia, the fatal flaw, of this site: it is not what it seems. Your article just confirms all of my fears.

I'm sharing this with some people I know, who have an interest in the scheme. This article will have a marked effect on their decisions. Thanks for bringing it here.
News of tourism in Egypt
Not wanting to go off-topic but we're a long way away from NFC taking off in any time you could reasonably describe as "soon".

It's available on one semi-beta phone and that's it.
For those who want to have some choice in how they write their source content and have the option of pretty math via eg mathjax, the haskell tool hakyll http://hackage.haskell.org/package/hakyll is worth checking out.

you get the full power of pandoc and some other awesome tools in the toolchain, such as (if you like) syntax highlighting for any language, several different ways
of doing templates, a fairly permissive range of input formats coupled with a easy to modify tool for how to take your organizational schema of documents to put together the static site.

It recently had an api rewrite and its become quite nice (i'm in the midst of rewriting my tool chain for its v3 api)
When you say that you keep this temporary data around for 3-6 months, do you have a requirement that it be kept in the database for 3-6 months or can you keep backups and fill requests for old data from them? That can reduce the size of your tables so your cleaner has less data to process.

If you know that certain tables are subject to this record-keeping requirement, why not add a created_timestamp field to each table you need to keep around? That way, your "cleaner" logic is as simple as "delete * from table where created_timestamp before (six months ago)" with the database-specific date functions and appropriate table name.
It's still the most useful language but you do get the feeling that everytime some new paradigm is claimed for another language C++ goes "I can do that - and I will do that in a way that doesn't break C code from 1979 - however weird that makes the language"
I think the point made in the answer was that the kind of passive social networking that Color is going to provide is a step beyond seeing a friend's facebook wall or twitter upload in the situation of a 'fire alarm' emergency.

These are going to be, for the most part, uploads by people unknown to you that will inform quickly and completely on a situation you cannot grasp as well alone.

In his September 11th example, perhaps you would see pictures from nearby of smoke and people moving away from it and gather enough information that you yourself will react as you will with a better sense of the world around you.

There was no skyscraper evasion skill mentioned in the answer. Really.
FTA: "Buzzing you in when you get locked out, signing for a package, taking that frozen chicken out of the freezer while you’re at work, feeding your pet, and of course the veritable classic of robo-problems: getting you a beer." - imho these are terrible examples of what a robot could do... there are much simpler solutions for most of these problems than buying this: http://www.willowgarage.com/pages/pr2/overview
I dunno, maybe that's the way those people enjoy Niagara Falls.
This only happens in the movies.
Two xeon server class machines in the robot? 16 cores?! That's a lot of horsepower to carry around.

Amazon Robot Brain anyone? $0.25 per robot hour.

Or cheat the system with Mechturk?
Um, things have really jumped the shark on HN if we're getting bible passages offered as startup advice - and someone upvoted it.
Stunning Illustrations by Tiago Hoisel
The way for Google to solve this issue is to just do like any other company out there and sign agreements with authors and publishers. They will never get the "orphan" works, but who cares? There are many more books that "will" be published then what "has been" published.
"It's actually not all that fast in a lot of cases. Boost's matrix manipulation support is particularly slow"

You've picked a benchmark of the most highly optimized matrix algebra libraries, and found that uBLAS is mid-pack, even though a) it isn't particularly optimized for any platform, and b) its goal is to result in the clearest possible syntax without sacrificing adequate performance. Talk about picking nits.

"Also a lot of the template aerobatics generate a ginormous number of symbols which massively increase the binary size and cache pressure."

When it really matters (which it rarely ever does): man strip

"I've always seen Boost (and to a large extent the STL) as a demo library to show off what's possible with templates rather than something to be used in everyday code"

I worked on shipping commercial products that used boost and the STL, and I did nearly all of my speed-sensitive code with it in grad school. It's far more than a demo library. Like I said before, you don't have to use all of it to use some of it.
Lisp is not functional
Keys to a supersonic fighter jet for 10 bucks? My Startup.
> can solve up to 200 numbers of Pi

What does that mean? It must be pretty hard to compute 200 digits... But generally that's computed once and memoized :)
The obsession with beautiful code, the refactor syndrome.
I know it's older than this, since it was up when I was at Purdue almost 10 years ago.

As a side note, Comer is the type that once he's decided you aren't worth talking to, he will do whatever necessary to ensure conversations with you are short, including applying the contents of this essay in spectacular fashion.
Proposed passport application questions alarm privacy advocates
Anyone care to explain how a subject that is either applied maths or engineering claims to be a science?

Not meant to be disparaging - science involves a theory, prediction, experiment to verify the theory - repeat.
On a bad day debugging could be an experimental science but I don't see how "theoretical computer science" is one.

PS generally tacking "... Science" onto the end of your subject is defacto proof that it isn't one!
Well, butter my biscuits.
Ask HN: What development processes do you use / recommend?
Reggie Fils-Aime on the competition and what it means to be a 'garage' developer
> I think in America "lease" is more correct, but in many other English speaking countries, "lease" is the name of the legal contract, and "you rent apartments" is perfectly OK.

In America, there are both rental agreements and lease agreements. Rental agreements are open-ended while lease agreements are for a fixed period of time.

One of the most common forms is actually a hybrid - it's a one year lease that then becomes a month-to-month rental agreement.

FWIW, many "apartment/house for rent" advertisements are actually solicitations for the hybrid agreement.
The primary reason for using 01 vs 1 etc. is because it sorts better without having to use fiddly sort options.
There's no talent in the labour party either, it's as if we're going through a derth of political talent.

Having had a dig through the site myself too I was very disappointed at the total lack of meaningful support.

A bunch of recycled business link articles and useless vouchers worth nothing like £1500, most of which could be acquired elsewhere (the google one is especially crap compared to what you get elsewhere).
Check the slides -- that's not what he's talking about.
The author, Mark Hughes, is correct in his write-up and comes up with a few suggested scenarios where it would be "ideal". Unfortunately for Color those ideal situations where a critical mass makes the app useful are few and far between. How could Color have demonstrated themselves better? Maybe by launching a SXSW where a tech savvy and experimental crowd would give it a go, see the benefit, and continue on using it. Come to think about it, that is exactly what Twitter did. Now, imagine if twitter launched like Color did. You are posting with no followers, no one you knows sees any reason to use it so your feed is empty. Now add that you are anonymous, can't "follow" anyone, and wait until some random stranger in your vicinity post something but meanwhile your stream is empty. That's Color.

Oh, and as for the group event image sharing thing... didn't Posterous launch Events at SXSW? Yes they did (and for $41m less). http://blog.posterous.com/introducing-posterous-for-events-a...
Interesting story. There seems to be a big overlap between poker and hackers/developers. I considered going pro a few years back but couldn't justify it considering the lifestyle (I spent a month in vegas for the WSOP two years ago, it was insane) and the swings involved. Not worth it and you have better opportunities in startup land.

The poker community is also crowded with degenerate gamblers, guys who pretend to be your friends one minute and then would kill your parents for $100 the next. They are difficult to avoid and their bad habits have a tendency to rub off onto otherwise good people.

I don't mind playing semi-frequently, even on the live circuit, but I would never make it more than a passing interest and hobby.
Speaking as a technical guy, this looks like a conflation of "idea person" with "biz person". I absolutely think biz people are critical, but I'd be looking for someone who can sell, network, and make deals - not someone with a good idea. It's not that good ideas are worthless, it's that having a good idea doesn't make you yourself particularly valuable. The reason is that tons of people have lots of good ideas, any of which would probably succeed with good technical AND business execution. I wouldn't team up with an idea person just because they had a great idea, but I would team up with a great salesperson who could do actual business development. Business is selling the ideas to customers, investors, and partners - not just having the ideas.
Awesome IRC Client for Mac OS X
The management chair swapping occurred when Ev pushed Jack out, and then later realized he was burned out and faded out as Dick stepped in.

Having Jack back involved in the company - assuming he is fully committed - is perhaps the best thing that can happen to Twitter right now. New ideas, stability and founder support.

I think it's great news for everyone, including us users.
Thought I should point out MS also has quite a concentration of languages folks that were famous before joining MS:

Butler Lampson, Erik Meijer, Herb Sutter, Burton Smith, Anders Hejlsberg
Thanks! I've already made a few of your suggested changes to the site.
> Even if a book is making zero dollars, it doesn't mean that somebody else should be allowed to make money out of it.

They're note making money from the book, but from making the book available. In other words, they're actually doing work on it while the original author apparently just doesn't care any more.

If the author treats their own work like garbage and abandons it, I see no reason why they should be able to complain when someone recycles it into something useful and makes a profit.
Passion Capital Emerges In London With $60 million To Seed Startups
It's only $4.99 on the AppStore. http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/linkinus/id402390998?mt=12
It feels a little silly to be arguing/explaining this now - won't we know whether Color has a "point" over the next few months/years as it either succeeds/fails in the marketplace?
I always just assumed that evolutionarily, pain=bad for me and happy=good for me. It makes sense that emotional strife elicits actual pain, or it wouldn't help condition our minds to avoid sadness.
Seems to me that until we have robots that collect energy and resources and build other robots - or alternatively, some kind of programmably reconfigurable substratum like a low-tech T-1000 (Terminator 2) - the capital costs are hard to overcome.
With 5,000 owners, it seems like it would be difficult to schedule enough time on it to become type certified.

On the other hand, it might be worth it to be able to go through your keychain and say, "... and these are my MiG keys".
Sure there is. If you love photography, you obviously have to geek out, but I imagine that good photographers are also capable of turning photographer mode on and off.

And Mom needs to get a digital postcard at some point.
Well, it's not "my" community, and never has been - I've just hung around and tried to add value in accordance with the guidelines. It's been that way since PG suggested I submit something. I'm just continuing to see how much value there is, how much I can add, and gauging when it's time to move on ...
If you were thinking multipurpose C3P0 style robots, then the revolution has been 5 years in the future for the last 30 years.

However single-purpose robots have become part of the fabric of most industries. Heck, most people don't even think of them as robots. So the revolution happened, it is now the new normal.
This paper fills a much needed gap in the literature.
I'm sure CloudFlare uses "boring" names internally, but I was kind of nicely surprised that their DNS nameservers are named amy.cloudflare.com, paul.cloudflare.com, etc.

For some reason it just gave me a little tiny bit of excitement to get started on their service that wouldn't have been there if they were named the standard ns1., ns2., etc., and when you're just choosing from a random pool of DNS servers it doesn't really matter what the names are from an organization standpoint.
To me the biggest benefit of ActiveRecord is the database introspection to dynamically create the objects attributes based on the columns in the database.

This doesn't do that in Java, it parses rails migrations to generate the java classes for objects with these attributes.

Why is this a problem?

We have a similar setup up where I work, but rails migrations doesn't manage the database schema, that is managed on the java side. Rails still gets all changes to the DB in its objects, but using this setup wouldn't work. I was all excited by the title too, still it's a good solution to their particular problem.
I was convinced while I read it that it was a parody, something similar to the BIC ballpoint pen review on Amazon or the previous piece on quora, where someone explained the practical limitations of becoming Batman in real life. Then I look at the comments here and I see people discuss it as if it was serious. Now I am really confused.

As an outsider, both the Color product descriptions and the various reviews I've seen are indistinguishable from something produced by a random buzzword generator.
Nook Color ships 3 Million units; sells nearly 2 million last 4 months
Cheezburger Can Has Know Your Meme [Acquired]
Show HN: My 4-hour project, why it failed