skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
On a related note, I think the HTML spec should explicitly define default styles for each type of input. Each input should also be fully customizable with CSS rules (I'm looking at you, radio, checkbox, and select). It's a pain in the ass to make a form look good, and using JS to replace the inputs is a hacky solution. All the major browser makers use custom input styles on their own websites — clearly, inheriting the styles of the operating system is nonsense. (if OS styles are to be inherited, at least make them easy to modify with CSS).
If You Love Something, Set It Sort-Of Free: Condé Nast Mulling Reddit Spin-Off
And why is this hard with virtualenv / pip ? I don't get it. Sure its not as simple as a single WAR file, but if you are unable to initialiaze a virtualenv bottle, perform a pip install with a dependency file, ensure that the python version is the same, you should not be a administrating a server.
Technology addiction
because having one rendering engine for most web users has worked so well previously

competition is good
In the first instance they are wrapping themselves in the righteousness of their claims which are at best questionable. In the second they are lamenting how wrong it is that a company has to defend itself against spurious claims.
Blog post: https://github.com/blog/817-behold-image-view-modes
"Please don't do things to make titles stand out, like using uppercase or exclamation points, or adding a parenthetical remark saying how great an article is. It's implicit in submitting something that you think it's important."

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Nice work guys, and thanks for posting the results and what you've learned.
True story. I worked on Hewlett Packard's first digital camera project around '97 or so. We were getting ready to freeze the firmware when the final legal review turned up a patent that another company (don't remember who, wanna say Samsung?) had been granted. The patent covered menus on the back of a digital camera where the cursor moved across menu items when you pressed up and down. We were asked to scramble and make the menu move underneath a static cursor to avoid exposure.

The best part was that the patent was granted sometime around 1980, if memory serves.
Have you ever known Microsoft to give away control over something as major as a Web browser... not to mention, but to one of its greatest competitors?

The overwhelming dominance of a single browser caused big problems on its own. We need healthy competition in this technology marketplace.
I admit it's an interesting idea at first thought. However, usually gift cards are perceived as lame gifts by me and my friends/family. The train of thought usually goes something like "I couldn't think of anything to get you because I don't really care enough about you to pay attention to the things you might actually want or need but I'm obligated to get you something soooo here you go." And in that case I think you're better off just giving an AmEx or Visa Gift/Check card. Among my circle this is usually acceptable for occurrences where you're just lost, like giving a gift card at a baby shower since I know nothing about babies, etc. But, my group could totally be outliers here. I think the tech is cool and could be interesting for pub crawls or the like where on each stop you get a discount. Any unclaimed discounts could be pocketed by the company or the group that setup the crawl. That's very niche but maybe that can scale to something else.
Github makes the best damn pickaxes in the industry.
I definitely agree that pricing should be simple, but it isn't everything. It's also important that the pricing reflects the value of the options.

I worked on a project for a large SW company, and even though they had a simple pricing plan, one of their products wasn't taking off. But when we did some shopping and called in to their reps, none of them could clearly articulate why I would want to buy the higher tier product compared to the middle tier, and they even seemed the same on the website. The pricing was simple, but I had no idea what I would be getting in addition if I spent more money.

Contrast this to the iPad example, where I know exactly what I'm paying for. Every $100 increases my storage, and another $130 gets me 3G. It's very clear. I think cell phone plans are a great example of pricing that's complex, but easy to understand because the value is clearly communicated (every $X gets me X minutes). It's easier to make these decisions if I know what I'm paying for.
That sounds kinda cool actually.
Behold: Image view modes
Hey, path dependence in another market! "The market tends to choose a dominant design before it’s optimal, and it tends to under-explore."

At least this article didn't cite the QWERTY keyboard, or "Windows" as an example. That would really have brought out the trolls.
but still no excuse for Amazon
There's also no way to get back to the "beginning" from one of these info pages. Neither "the current state of html5 forms" nor the "wufoo" wordmark at the top are links.
Google And China At It Again With Government Gmail Block
"The big problem with the iPad is that it is not an enjoyable multiuser experience yet. Nothing beats having friends over and playing Madden on a big TV."

I suspect Apple have plans for iPads, iPhones, AppleTV's, and your big plasma that'll make the Wii/PlayStation/XBox look positively primitive.
All Blog Links To The New York Times Will Be Freebies. This Could Get Ugly.
Then you discover that pharma spends 4 time as much in marketing than research. Kill patents, crush this evil, ugly beast!
> Not on the analogue phone.

And not on a consumer cell phone, either.

> But you can easily get a TLS-enabled or ZRTP-enabled hardware or software VoIP phone.

In theory, arbitrarily strong/usable encryption products can be marketed within the USA.

In practice, from this list:

A) Usable by non-experts (requires no software fiddling, hardware mix-and-match, or other wastes of time)

B) Based on uncrackable/de-facto uncrackable cryptosystem (One-time pad, Public Key - respectively)

C) Affordable by / marketed to ordinary people

We are permitted to choose only TWO.

>...the analogue phone PSTN interface is pretty trivial to handle, there are multitude of analogue encryption boxes which work as an adapter to the line.

Analog "scramblers" are a joke. Any seriously-interested party can crack any and all of them without breaking a sweat.

>...use a pc to compress the voice on one side, encrypt, send over an established modem connection...

Sure, you can use a PC. But if you package this up as a pure-hardware solution usable by anyone who already knows how to use a telephone, certain people will take steps to ensure that your product does not stay on the market.

I do not know what the penalty is for violating the "gentleman's agreement" between the NSA and the electronics industry. But I would not care to find out.
how much traffic did you get before the new landing page?
Trust busting is an anti-free-market position. The freemarket consists of individuals voluntarily interacting. Any position that advocates coercion, i.e. government interference, is anti-free-market.
I'm curious why you're limiting it to a single city. That seems kind of silly for a website.
Microsoft Continues Android Legal Assault, Sues Barnes & Noble Over Nook
Mobile social network Motribe growing by 10,000 users a day
Thanks Sponsors
This could be very useful for designers...
The people at github really get the social aspects of version control. This is one of those things that can make the designers get on board with version control for your project and make it useful for everyone and not just a chore for them. Great job!
No significant traffic before the new landing page.
Learn about Design Patterns, they will force you to really use Java's features such as Interfaces and Abstract Classes, accessibility modifiers (public, private, protected) and others. That is the method I use when tutoring individuals in similar situations as yours that want to get back into Java specifically.

I recommend the Head First Design Patterns book if you're not turned off by the less-than serious nature of it. I really did not like the book at first glance, but after actually working through some of it as instructed I enjoyed it and really developed a solid understanding. Simple examples like Vending Machines and Washers really helped me, I still use them in my head when thinking about problems.
Design Patterns are not always the best solution and forcing them on problems can make things worse, but as far as teaching Java I really recommend it.
http://www.amazon.com/First-Design-Patterns-Elisabeth-Freema...

I also recommend learning about Test Driven Development as previously suggested, we use JUnit4 to teach our undergrads at my university. There are also other methods of testing besides TDD, but I feel it was the easiest to help students.
When I tried it awhile ago, the Kindle app had a page turning experience that can only be described as maddening. Tap in the wrong spot, boom, page has turned. The iBooks app, for all its over-done skeuomorphism, makes interacting with the book pretty easy. Simple things like page edges make clear what will happen when you tap in a particular place. iBooks just feels really nice.

More than that, the Kindle app is just ugly. It has this janky animation when you jump to another section of the book that's painful to watch. It's a shame – the Kindle v3 hardware is a pretty badass product. The Kindle iPad app feels barebones, insipid and unpolished. Does a disservice to the brand.
Entirely relevant: It's way easier to threaten an opponent with an extremely long legal war that would be quite damaging to them (and then come up with a cross-licensing deal) than it is to engage in a long legal war to invalidate patents.

Sure, it's not the best thing to do, but it's better for all concerned.
Sorry, it was meant to tongue in cheek.

s/new kitchen, a new bathroom, new wardrobe and\/or appliances/New truck, new Stereo and\/or 17" MacBook Pro/g

Or maybe:
s/wife/husband/g

My little joke was meant to be a play on the old adage: "Beware of Geeks baring gifts"

I was going to write "Greeks", but that would be racist.
Ok, I'll stop now before Godwin's law gets invoked.
I'm not saying they don't; Especially on the upside, tax rates matter a lot, and the potential upside effects how much investment a startup gets, at all stages.

I'm just saying, when you are still trying to scramble up to profitability, complex tax laws are a big deal. Certainly under $10K/year profit (and probably for a while further) you are going to be spending more on tax related accounting and planning than you will pay in taxes. You can't just ignore it because you aren't making any money.

It's not just paying the accountant at the end of the year; Especially in lower-margin businesses, how something is taxed can make the difference between profit and loss. You've got to run all your ideas by the tax expert. This is expensive, as both I and the tax expert have deep domain specific experience that needs to be at least partially shared to figure out if a particular idea can work or not.

Yeah, once you've got two million in profit a year, the cost of that tax person is probably a good bit less than what you are paying in taxes, and I imagine you care a lot more about the rate. I'm talking about those of us who are still in the red or only a little in the black.
View of Earth from Mercury
good post, re spending $1k to test out the hypothesis....the challenge for me as a first time entrepreneur has been exactly where to place that first (or only) $1k. do i get some mockup work done to show potential partners/investors how it will look? ...build some foundations of the initial code (paying someone to do that)? agreed to invest a little and test the idea, i think the challenge for me is what is the most productive first step in doing so.
Very interesting page, too bad the take away for me is... that I won't be able to use any of those nifty new features for the foreseeable future since a sizable chunk of the audience will have IE.
If you're just looking at the screenshots, be sure to look at the Swipe, Onion Skin, and Difference options. I missed them at first.
CDC Radiation Emergencies |
> I'm a serious Kindle user -- I have dozens of books.

As you've pretty much concluded yourself: no you don't.

Which isn't just semantics, it's pretty much the essence of DRM'ed content.
"I'm sure you also like hip hop lyrics."

What does that mean?
Out of curiosity, what's the biggest software project you've worked on? (maybe measured by something stupid like KLOC or possibly "total time to compile")

I doubt Linus thinks "compile while you type" is a good idea, I'm not sure how much further down you need to scale until it does become a useful feature.
> As for the GIL, the author didn't even consider multiple processes ...

I really hate this argument for its disingenuity. Some things (including message passing) are naturally fastest with shared memory. Multiple processes are not an equivalent substitute.

Clojure, for instance, leverages shared memory to implement its excellent, lightweight STM and related high-level threading constructs, and shared memory is what allows Clojure to easily implement cheap, MVCC functional data structures.

Multiple processes aren't an answer, here. To implement the same high-level constructs efficiently requires re-introducing shared memory through more complex, less efficient mechanisms, and often leaves the problem of sharing access to higher-level constructs (objects, instead of data) unsolved.

Multiple processes are a poor work-around for a lack of support for concurrency, not a solution. They make sense if you're sandboxing, but make little sense for implementing a high-performance concurrent server.

To pre-empt the erlang discussion -- erlang's message passing model does scale, but Erlang's runtime does require support for real shared memory concurrency in order to maximize single-machine performance.
Github is now about social designing too. This could help designers get feedback on designs and other designers could possibly fork and improve on the designs.
Are there legal problems with this? Don't you need to pay at least minimum wage? Or is that implied?
wow thats cool. can you put your email in your profile? i have a couple extra questions if you don't mind
You're generalizing a little too much for me, but I think you are spot on where it counts. Developing for a walled garden is a fool's game. It might make you a lot of money short-term, but long term you're always going to be sucking up to somebody who can cut off your lights just because they had a bad morning.

What's interesting to me is how much these small apps are functioning like slot machines at Las Vegas. 100 slot machines just eat money, and nobody notices. Then one kicks off and makes a big winner and everybody cheers -- thereby drawing more people over to play the slots.

The only thing a situation like that is good for is the house.
Can anyone see a github wrapper with some nice UI making version control for the average user more palatable?

Perhaps github are positioning themselves to take on dropbox in the near future.
This is really great!

But - another useful option would be mouse rollovers to switch between two images (which I think would work better than Onion Skin).
I have to agree with Danil. I like the page turning behavior in iBooks better, but not enough to crack my books.
I knew there were hundreds of clones but didnt know they were making cash hand over first. Any operating in a country that groupon operates in you can point me to? Just interested.

I chatted with some of the groupon guys a short while ago and was shocked by just how much cash they spend on aquiring business. I wonder how many groupon type companies a city can hold, and for how long?
Would you mind expanding on this? All of the responses to this comment so far seem to focus on the last paragraph and Viaweb in particular, which I would guess is not the main part of your argument.

You say: "...if you want your business to survive the departure of the founding team, you need to consider whether you can solve the problem with a mainstream environment." Could you go into more detail about what you mean by a mainstream environment and what advantages it would bring in this case?
Sorry, I was referring more to manufacturing,production, and logistics knowledge. Most of my experience revolves around combining software with physical products, working with partners around the world to get them to a stores shelves. Since there are only a hand full of people with the breath of knowledge to design, prototype, and manage every step combining both software and the physical I tend not to worry.
I'd rather not use Netflix.
I think that the Death Clock article is complementary, rather than an alternative.

The OP post is essentially a laundry list of expenses that startups can expect to face. This is useful because it is easy to overlook something that will blow a hole in your cash.

The Smart Bear post is a higher level look at tools for managing cashflow. Instead of checking the cashflow balance once per month, you can see almost immediately what's going on. Short feeback loops are the core of agility.

The only danger I can see with the SB approach is a risk of overcorrecting to noise. The use of least-squares fitting helps, but mindfulness pays.
done. jason@fab.com too if you don't find it there.
It has to do with the fact that the font is loaded from a remote server.
Micro PC player with AMD Fusion APU
Sometimes you just build a project because it's fun, you can and you're able to launch it quickly. It's also an opportunity to pick up some skills and experience and build up a reputation.

I don't think Lendle set out to be a long term, full time, paying gig.
The idea Microsoft will make Vista Phone 7 successful by suing every Android device maker is ludicrous at best.

But it seems they will get away with getting some money for every Android sold.

Sad, really.
One thing to keep in mind here: The Kindle only let's you lend each book you own once, mitigating the potential damage done. The site also prominently featured the option to buy the book before and after the lend.
A friend of mine bought the Verizon 3G model so that, between iPad and iPhone, he'd have a device on both of the major networks. After using it for a few days he found the Verizon coverage/speed to be noticeably slower at his home and office, so he's about to return it for a GSM 3G model.
It would seem the nuclear industry should be Least prone to this. Every power plant is a unique, huge invenstment leaving plenty of room in the budget to plan and test.
Citation? Examples?
That page might be the hardest webpage to load.
Well, I do prefer not to look cool, especially since its free.
Yes, a really slick client app geared towards design inclined folk and more storage space.
their main page doesn't look too usable to me..
I'd cut Microsoft's access to Google. Let them try to function with only Bing results ;-)
Sorry, OT, but this really makes me appreciate the readability of bitmapped Monaco. I find it unfortunate that Mac OS X has such crappy support for bitmapped fonts in general...
How are they going to identify if the referring site is a blog? Does any personal blog count? What if it's self hosted?
Mark Zuckerberg is Now Richer than Larry Page and Sergey Brin
Show HN: PearWords, pair your startup with some awesome words.
Some entrepreneurs can have a little trouble translating their ideas into, effectively, textual sound bites -- condensed yet exciting paragraphs that technology blogs, like The Startup Foundry, rely on to get quick overviews of what's being submitted to them. So we at PearWords do that for them (on the basis of a 100% refund policy).

We're pretty new, but we've had some initial traction that we're super-happy with, so given that we've now "proven" its useful to ourselves and others, we thought some folks on Hacker News may be interested.

As a quick note: although not officially announced on the site yet, we're trialing writing copy in Arabic, Italian, French, Finnish, Norwegian and Swedish in addition to English and German, to further assist startups in getting in contact with foreign technology sites. If you're interested in that, please make a note of it in the "Notes" section of your request.

The site is online at: http://www.pearwords.com

Thanks. :)
VeriFone Keeps Up FUD Campaign Against Square With Pathetic Facebook Ads
You are absolutely right, and frankly we're wondering if we should do such a deal right now. I absolutely believe your point that such 'easy credit' will spur companies to spend more on lawyers than they should. We'd like to avoid that.
This was VERY helpful. Thanks for laying it out clearly for the non-techies.
This idea is going into OS X Lion as "Versions"

http://www.apple.com/macosx/lion/
Wow, truly awesome implementation. Way to nail it, Github!
I am quite sure pre-98 Netscape did that.
Good to hear Apple is still going the extra mile.

There are lots of stories of people going into an Apple store with a product broken after it's warranty and still walking out the door with a brand new replacement.

You just don't get that kind of service from any other company (especially in the computer hardware business).
I'm quite sure that somehow, there was a web server or email system that has transferred, stored, and otherwise "managed" a PDF with graphics in it in 1995 or before. How on earth is that not prior art?
I guess that's what I'm getting at... they weren't serious (enough) about it and their users suffer the consequences. Nowhere on their website does it say "beta" or "just for fun" or "this could go away at any time".
The filing was April '96, so it would have to be before that. Netscape may have. In which case, this will be easy to invalidate. If Netscape didn't, I think it will be a lot tougher as the current bar for invalidating patents in court is pretty high.
Not even in Reddit would that comment be welcomed.
Yes, I was part of Trolltech which was acquired by Nokia. Suffice it to say we were 'Nokia' and did code reviews.
Helloday.tv: I had to share this, simply awesome
Listen: Secret Libya Psyops, Caught by Online Sleuths
Reddit might be (mostly) released from Condé Nast
The swipe feature doesn't work for you? Onion skin is to gradually change the opacity of the new one while keeping the old one constant but below while swipe is a hard line difference that you can move.
Gap here in the UK lets you put your online order back in the bag, and stick it in the post with a checkbox question of why you're returning it. If all online clothes shopping worked like this I'd switch.
"But who is wurs shod, than the shoemakers wyfe, With shops full of newe shapen shoes all hir lyfe?"

http://www.answers.com/topic/the-shoemaker-s-son-always-goes...

:-) Thanks for your feedback!
Four lines of code for The New York Times’ paywall
Ya think? :p

I think the best part is that this will make it much easier to evangelize GitHub to designers. It's not like GitHub wasn't a great tool beforehand.
Complicated or not, about:blank has, and always will be, my default home page.
the font thing - http://paulirish.com/2009/fighting-the-font-face-fout/ is a good article on the subject - is it really that stroke-causing, honestly? to have a font change a bit after the page loads? in the article linked, paul irish seems to endorse the webkit view that the text should remain invisible until after the font loads, and then display - anyhoo,
tl;dr: yes, it has to do with using @font-face and firefox and opera displaying unstyled text before the font file is loaded.
My favorite PS moment:

Seller: "I want $850"

PS: "Not going to happen. $400"

Seller: (pauses, deadpan) "$850"

PS: "I hate it when people know what their stuff is worth. Let's write it up".
The visual cue that the size of the image was the change made is especially clever. Really good thinking.
> Why do Facebook app developers tolerate so much abuse from Facebook?

500 million registered users.