skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think if it is not a top-level comment it should include whatever it is responding to for context.

I hear you, but what I have done whenever I browse the top-scoring comments view of HN shared here is simply follow the "parent" link that appears on each comment when I want to know what prompted the comment. Sometimes I can tell well enough what the context is just from quoted text in the comment (when participants who comment remember to quote text from comments to which they are replying) or from the title of the submission thread.
Your optimism would be touching, if it wasn't coming in the defense of such flagrantly hostile behavior.

Even if this clause did apply only to Android recompilations and not to ports, I trust you'll concede it is not status quo ante with Apple's already-appalling pricing terms.
By the way- I don't think you can assume ancient man was unhappy.

I don't think ancient people were unhappy in the modern sense of the word. Their lives were probably a lot more stressful and certainly extremely violent, but depression was probably nonexistent (a death sentence). I would argue that most modern people would consider their lifestyles undesirable.

I think people tend to look at pre-agrarian society with rose-colored glasses. Did people have better nutrition, in 10000 BC, if they were hunter-gatherers rather than farmers? Yes; that's not even debated. I don't know how much should be taken out of that. For example, there's the often made and almost certainly false claim that agriculture led to gender inequality. From a gender-equality perspective, I don't think that pre-agrarian society was the utopia some people make it out to be. Pre-monogamous societies pretty much invariably treated women as property, because access to women was the signal (and primary benefit) of a man's social status. "Alphas" had many wives, "gammas" had none and were sent off to war as soldiers (to either "take" wives or die). It was better to be a woman than a low-status man, but that doesn't mean gender equality was there. It's hard to have gender equality in that sort of morally debased culture. Monogamous marriage (which came much, much later than agriculture) was the very first wave of feminism.
"The reasons for writing C over asm are very different to writing CS over JS."

I didn't say they weren't--I just said that generated or compiled standards-compliant code is still standards compliant.
Xerox shows Steve Jobs 3 things (1979)
The moon is an excellent source of raw materials for orbital work: silicon, oxygen, aluminum, and potentially the rare earths also needed to turn these into communication satellites and solar power satellites. We're on the cusp of being able to do these things entirely through automation and occasional remote operation, but it would have likely been profitable to do it with on-site humans in the 80s if political fear hadn't gotten in the way.
To be fair, the A2024 had a refresh rate of 60hz, but due to the way it "multiplexed" 4 screens, it had an effective refresh rate of ~15hz (60/4). A much different, and less interesting reality.
I agree. We're pretty sure who are customers are, but there is a chance the unknowns could slip through. We might do another A/B test simply adding "brands" as one option since that's a customer persona, but very generic.

I like how Foursquare appeal to their customer personas, "merchants", "brands", "developers", without making it too obvious but still very findable.
Yes but the problem is when markets hijack business models. Like what apple did with in-app sales.
This recent slew aren't technically voxel games. At least not in the sense of NovaLogic's tech - see: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2447057.

(To add to the confusion, this particular game, Ace of Spades, actually is voxel-rendered.)

It is however thought that John Carmack's next engine after the Rage engine may include honest-to-goodness voxel rendering: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Id_Tech_6

Historically, Carmack has had quite a lot of influence on both the hardware and API vendors, so it will be interesting to see if he can spearhead more mainstream movement towards sparse voxel octree rendering: http://youtu.be/THaam5mwIR8
2011 Corvette
I wish I had this ages ago, great job!
Intuition Isn't Just about Trusting your Gut
I was almost amazed at the correct math. A "200% improvement" is definitely "three times what it was previously." But I'm not entirely convinced +200% is a "threefold increase" (I'm a math guy, not a 'human language is fuzzy and ambiguous' guy.)

</offtopicrambling>
Three words people: In App Purchases! If you have a free app, and then use In App Purchasing for your real revenue stream, you won't be affected by these Orwellian terms and Amazon's whims.

It's relatively new on Android, but a number of iOS apps are raking it in this way and giving away the app for free...

http://mashable.com/2011/03/29/android-in-app-live/
As far as buffer switching, I never keep hundreds of files open because when I switch git branches it's hard to remember which buffers need to be reverted. Instead I usually close everything, change branches, and then open up files as needed. I find I can open files more quickly using IDO-mode than I could by switching buffers (plus I often forget the filenames).
Still amazing. Checkout this video of the three things steve jobs saw in Xerox http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdrKWArr3XY
Xerox Star 8010 came out before Apple's Lisa. In fact, Jobs had his team grab sneak peaks in Xerox PARC prior to the release of the Lisa.
Great post! However, do you have any sources to back your claim on religion? Not sure if you are saying, that religion is required 'as a motivating force' for building a stable society or for writing thoughts down. Both developments can be explained well without religion, no?
Actually the first GUIs from Xerox were on the Alto, which the Star is based on (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Alto). Although this is certainly from the first that was available commercially.

Nonetheless, these screenshots are amazing and show how groundbreaking the GUI concept was at the time.
Design is Product, Product is Design
Seriously, get a decent bug tracker for the project.
Apple has already closed this loophole, and if this becomes widespread others will too.
I'd do Merge Sort before Quicksort. There's less to say about it, and these days it seems to be edging out Quicksort in the behind-the-scenes-implementation-of-standard-library department.

And, yes, including some kind of self-balancing tree would seem to be a good idea. But how the heck does one discuss such things concisely and simply? I couldn't say.

In any case, nice site.
I'd like to hear more about this if its true ... I was under the impression that it was not.
There's no checkbox but it does use mouse events when visited on desktop browsers. Requires a webkit browser with support for CSS 3D transforms though.
From my limited experience (a friend's and my own app in the Amazon store from the first week) the exposure is pretty negligible anyway. I imagine the requirement to enable side loading (not possible with AT&T), downloading another store app, enabling 1 click, etc is really hindering adoption. So I don't think developers need to loose any sleep over this right now.
Oops, did you mean:
http://www.digibarn.com/collections/screenshots/xerox-star-8...
Where's the incentive to use the new adware-laden player that reports back to the RIAA? I think I'll just stick with what I'm using now, thanks.
Certainly; it could wind up being fantastic, and we could wind up fixing all our problems and turning civilization to the best thing to happen to humanity.

It's just that, at this point, we've got 5,000 years of rocky start compared to 195,000 years of what I would like you to imagine as 'smooth sailing'. At this point, which has proven itself? Which has not? That's all the author was talking about.
People think real compilers are complicated, but often writing a native code compiler is simpler than writing an interpreter or translator. Abdulaziz Ghuloum has a great paper called An Incremental Approach to Compiler Construction (http://scheme2006.cs.uchicago.edu/11-ghuloum.pdf), which shows how to build a Scheme native code x86 compiler in 10 pages. JVM bytecode isn't that far away from machine code.

Another great example of how straightforward compilers can be is the Tiny C Compiler (http://bellard.org/tcc/).
If something is severely downmodded, it will still appear light-gray, so you are still able to recognize those.
Basics of CSS3 Animation
Aggg. While I'm pro no-score, this might be one case in which score is nice to know.
Nokia will lay off up to 6,000 next week
I'm impressed by the utmost attention to details. I remember similar care when working with educational software for Apple IIs - we limited our 50% checkerboard pattern to 279x191 (instead of the 280x192 maximum) in order to be able to do exactly the same rounded corners on all four corners of the screen.

At times, the guy who came up with these ideas infuriated me, but, in hindsight, I am very glad I surrounded myself with such perfectionists.
There may be some confusion here, ra means "killing it" in the inverted slang sense. "Killing it" here means "laying waste to all before them," rather than "destroying their own business model."
If we take 'happiness' to be the fitness function of human evolution and a driver for adaption then I think it highly unlikey humans would ever change to become less happy. Infact, I might suggest that human happiness (amount of) is likely to be the one thing in common to modern civilizations as to those 200,000 years ago.

In addition, be careful to use the word 'evolution' with timeframes as miniscule as 200,000 years - the author correctly uses the word 'adoption'.
I'm new to this stuff, and trying to learn fast. This is hands down the best explanation of these concepts I've seen. I suspect you'd do just fine Karl. Keep up the great work.
More Americans leaving workforce - Only 45.4% of Americans had jobs
No one will probably read this, but please, please, please bring back the points score. I've been working on a hacker news crawler that rolls up facts about comments (user centric trends, etc) and without the points it will be very much limited.
US Department of Justice and FBI Foil Botnet Operation
I don't think the mistake was agriculture per se so much as breeding. The biggest prisoner's dilemma in human history.
I don't think ancient people were unhappy in the modern sense of the word. Their lives were probably a lot more stressful and certainly extremely violent, but depression was probably nonexistent (a death sentence). I would argue that most modern people would consider their lifestyles undesirable.

I think people tend to look at pre-agrarian society with rose-colored glasses.

I agree with the rose-colored glasses. However, the post I replied to was hinting they believed it was obvious modern societies would win when compared based on happiness, and I thought it prudent to point out we can't assume that.
It is awesome... They did make a lot of changes (like 12 or so new versions since then) so you should fetch the latest when you are ready to give it a try. The whole gameplay is different, basically they released a "pretty good" game for the bundle #2, then iterated with feedback to get to "awesome". Got to admire this attitude.

Also played their Droid Assault, sell it on their site in a bundle as well. It's an instant hit, could hardly stop playing, just love it :)
http://www.puppygames.net/droid-assault/
Yeah, and if there is one particular segment that you want to click, but aren't clicking; you can experiment with the phrasing, accentuate the button, or write content aimed at that particular audience.
I had this same idea the other day. Glad to see someone made this. I hope you add more content in the future.

From a teaching perspective I think it would be great to see the math behind this as well to get the worst case scenerio.
it is probably more interesting to ask how one forces severy player to implement this. By making players without this "feature" somehow illegal? Illegal to sell or distribute? Illegal to make? How one would enforce that. Also obtaining content by legally questionable means is essentialy same thing as using "illegal" player. Also it seems to me that it is easier to go after file sharers (there is somebody whose rights are violated) than after users/distributors/makers of some software (who exactly is victim of that?).
Why can't these media outlets name names? Who were the people writing these awful emails and making these decisions? Seems no one is willing to call them out in the article.
Just to clarify, 'evolution' is the process of change that takes many, many millions of years - time frames of 15,000 years are not evolution.

As Ricky Gervais once desribed, in evolutionary terms, modern man is still equviliant to a shaved chimp!
A lot of people here seemed to have missed the fact that this was indeed one of the points brought up in this interesting read.
As for the claim that agriculture encouraged the flowering of art by providing us with leisure time, modern hunter-gatherers have at least as much free time as do farmers.

I think this is actually true, in a weird way. We work, including commuting, personal errands, and house chores, about 2700 hours per year. Most pre-agrarian people did not work as many hours. Their "work" was a lot more dangerous (throwing spears at angry, large animals) and probably more intense. The stakes were also a lot higher: if they fail, they die. That said, they probably only worked about 1600-2400 hours per year because there wasn't all that much work for them to do. During the off-season (hunting-wise) and during the winter (for gatherers) it's also likely that they slept 10-18 hours per day due to low metabolism/semi-hibernation. (Many medieval people in the Alps went into semi-hibernation in the winter, sleeping 16-20 hours per day.) Whether this is to be considered "free time" is uncertain and probably somewhat subjective. It's unclear what they did. It's likely that their lives were very boring by our standards, exciting only on account of the extreme danger.
I agree with the citations from the 1970s here:
http://www.bitlaw.com/software-patent/history.html

I disagree with their description of the 1981 Diehr opinion as saying "the only new feature of this invention was the timing process controlled by the computer". The dissent said this, not the majority. The dissent was based on the facts of the case, not law. Diehr was not a departure from earlier precedent.

EDIT: Not only did the Court majority not say what bitlaw says in the Diehr opnion, they contradict it: "According to the respondents, the continuous measuring of the temperature inside the mold cavity, the feeding of this information to a digital computer which constantly recalculates the cure time, and the signaling by the computer to open the press, are all new in the art."

http://brlewis.com/y/2004/diehr.htm
The report itself: http://levin.senate.gov/newsroom/supporting/2011/PSI_WallStr...
YC reject and experienced hacker looking for CTO/VP of engineering roles in SV
I am a technology consultant with 15 years of experience mainly in the Microsoft application stack. I have been working on an app called Skillendar (http://www.skillendar.com) for the last six months and applied for the YC in March 2011. But unfortunately our application has got rejected.

I am a British citizen currently living in the UK and am planning to move to the Silicon Valley/ San Francisco. If you are looking for a Senior Architect/CTO/VP Engineering, please contact me via linked-in http://www.linkedin.com/in/sunsai

I would also appreciate if someone could recommend a person/company from whom I can get some help with this.
I see this sort of thing a lot on sites for products trying to sell to large businesses, sometimes to the point that it's hard to find an actual product description or list of features. I have, several times wanted to yell "but what does your product actually do?" at the person responsible.

I am obviously not the target market here, but why do you think this works?
Heroku has a couple of ways to get more granular process frequency. You can use Resque on top of the RedisToGo addon to get scheduleable processes. It's also possible to use the SimpleWorker addon to accomplish the same thing in a very cost-effective manner (i.e. not bound to workers).
Early Macintosh Division Org Chart
Long distance running has it's place in human history. Check out "persistence hunting". The Tarahumara tribe, which is now pretty well-known among laymen, were practitioners of this. Their story has been covered in quite a few books, Born To Run being the most popular.

Applicable Wikipedia links:

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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_hunting
They're really speeding up their release schedule. Not really related to the topic, but I'm curious why is the Mac build twice the size of the Windows one?
OSS Training Video: Train Derailment (turns out it's quite difficult)
The Geek’s Guide to Finding the Best Startups
Clickable:

http://www.skillendar.com

http://www.linkedin.com/in/sunsai
Biological evolution takes place over millions of years: actually, it's a bit faster than that and can be observed quite quickly in simpler organisms, but I agree with what you are saying. At present, cultural and technological evolution are so fast that biological evolution seems to be glacial in comparison.

I would argue that the occlusion of hunter-gatherer lifestyles by agriculture is an "evolutionary" process, even though one in the cultural rather than biological sphere (since it's unlikely that there were substantial genetic differences between the two types of people). As with biological evolution, what survives is what is most fit and not what is "best".
The defining feature of capitalism is enforcement of private property rights. Patents and copyrights ("intellectual property") are a type of enforced private property right.
Was just about to post this myself. I was quite frustrated that not only did writer not provide a link to the source, but didn't even mention the report by name.
So true. As I read the article, I couldn't help thinking of the latest Less Wrong post about "Levels of Action." In particular:

Studies have shown that there is a significant positive correlation between alcohol use, and income in life. Why would that be? Drinking alcohol doesn't make you smarter. Nor does it make you work harder, or become more skilled, or gain additional knowledge. I think the reason is that alcohol is disinhibitory.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/58g/levels_of_action/#more
Go ahead and use full URLs. HN will shorten its display if it's too long, and we prefer to see where we're going.
Closed it how? Can you provide a link?
Great advice. People who negotiate for the sake of negotiating, without that give are highly annoying and soon will get themselves on the "avoid" list.
DoJ, FBI set up command-and-control servers, take down botnet
My guess is it's a universal binary.
I'd agree with Andrew's general characterization of graph database advantages. Graphs are "whiteboard friendly" in as much as you can store data exactly as you would likely sketch it up when thinking purely in your domain. Because the graph structure is generic, you can even happily use it as a key-value or document storage. And, multiple intersecting domains can co-exist within the same graph. A graph could be a simple list, a map, a tree, or a complex network of data. With Neo4j, you'd get that expressiveness with the confidence of ACID behavior.

Beyond that, the Not-Only SQL options are a reminder to pick the storage that fits your application, rather than fit your application to the storage you have. Be domain appropriate.

I usually think in terms of:
RDBMS - when aggregating data is important
Graphs - when relationships between records matters
KV - when you have really simple data, but gazillions of records
Document - when you have complex, but unrelated and possibly non-uniform data

Cheers,
Andreas
I think the Mac version is a 32/64 bit universal binary. That might be an explanation, anyway.
Absolutely.

The hard part about teaching is recognizing when you've introduced a large leap for a good percentage of the class.

There's a famous math story that goes:

"A professor was at the chalkboard writing up a proof for his class. At one point he comes to a portion of the proof and says, 'And it's obvious this must be X'. At which point he pauses, the class waiting. Stares at the board for a minute. Then leaves the class without saying a word. He returns fifteen minutes later, continuing, 'Yes, it's obvious this must be X'."
This is not such a good essay.

I understand where the author is trying to go and I was rooting for him, but it looked like he lacked the depth to do the analysis, so he kind of meandered around. Some parts were better, some parts were worse. This kind of counter-factual discussion (what would the world be like if Hitler had won? How about if the Neanderthals hadn't died out?) has a tendency to get fluffy pretty quickly. Fun for a paragaph or two, or a tweet, but very tough to pull off in essay or longer format.
Show HN: My application for finding shortest walking paths on campus
I voted for with points, but I think there really should have been a third option.

The main reason I like points is it helps tell me what comments are worthy of me spending time to read when a story has 50+ comments.

So without points, I think you still need a way to show what is valuable and worth reading for the most popular stories. There are a couple ways to do this.

One option would be to personalize what comments are deemed important to me. For instance if I go and up vote pg comments, then when I go to another story and theres a pg comment it should give me a mark to let me know this comment will probably be of value to me. Another user might visit the same story and down-rate your comment because they don't like it. Thats fine, in the future, your comments probably won't be displayed prominently for them in this case.

This moves away from the group-think mentality of what is valuable to an individuals preference, which I think is more valuable and provides a less contentious exchange platform.
Likewise. The way the document icon evolved (http://www.digibarn.com/collections/screenshots/xerox-star-8...) is impressive. Seven iterations and the result is so good we're still using that icon today.

And, as a designer colleague pointed out, look how they thought out how the corners of things would interact with 50% dot fill: http://www.digibarn.com/collections/screenshots/xerox-star-8...
I wonder if they still package both PPC and Intel binaries together. This is usually the reason why OS X apps seem to be larger than their Windows counterparts.
Show HN: Quick project workspaces
Whenever I start a project with a freelance client I thought it would be cool if I could create a workspace for the project management side of things super quickly (no signups, etc). Also as a college student a tool to help manage simple todo's and organize email better would help wonders with our large class projects.

Anywho I've been coding this bad boy up called Ready, Takeoff! that gives the ability to do both of these things, college projects and freelance-to-client management.

Check out the screenshot demo and let me know your thoughts.
http://readytakeoff.com
what happened to 5.0?
Are they doing 6.0 and 5.0 in parallel?
Significance testing and Congress
You can't make this work unless you control the distribution channel (like Youtube). These guys have no shot in hell unless they get someone like Apple to sign on (which is a non-starter).
HN:fixed or really low price voice api provider
I am looking for a cheap voice & messaging API for a startup gig.
But seeing pricing of Twilio & Tropo, price that I will have to pass on to customer is way too high for startup to take off.
Is there any fixed or really low price voice api provider?
BlackBerry PlayBook review roundup
Starting out with x and ending up with 3x is is a 200% improvement. You think "threefold increase" should mean x+3x=4x?