skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Marco (or rather Instapaper) is not the garden variety app. I have noticed that many apps, especially games, launch as free in order to garner reviews, and then switch to paid later. Some sites (eg. AppAdvice) will not promote free apps unless they have at least three stars, so I can see why the developers feel the need to beg for a rating.

That said, the chances that I will stop in the middle of doing something to exit the app in order to rate it are pretty low.

Conversely, there have been occasions when, having finished with a game, I have looked for a "rate this app" button and couldn't find it. Unless the app/game is exceptional, I may not take the time to go to the App store, search for the App, yada yada, in order to rate it. I suggest every app should have a "Rate this App" on its main menu.

Even better, I wish there was an API that would allow developers to ask me to rate an app in-app, without having to start up the App-Store.
I wish that they would simplify it and remove the social media prompts.
Personally, I'd say you just apologise for misunderstanding their intentions, politely inform them that the new feature is going to cost extra, and then suggest that, due to the misunderstanding, you're going to reduce your price for that implementation to $X, where $X is either the price you actually have in mind (if you don't mind being less than 100% truthful for the sake of fairness) or a slightly lower price (if you're willing to pay for their mistake so as to maintain more truthfulness). Yes, it can be hard to admit to mistakes you didn't actually make, but it's often necessary to not piss off some people.
In which case, are most captchas going to screw blind people anyway?
These are good, I am pondering how to add to them. I think I would like to start with a principles section. It is at least possible these days to get a "principles of CS" education. But the principles of front-end are somewhat different.

1. This is the web. Users will resize the window, copy and paste, click a button five times, turn off JavaScript, and arrive from every possible combination of browser, operating system, and language. You will maintain an appropriate fear of any trick so complicated that you don't know what it will do under all of those circumstances.

2. The user is always right. Even when they run unpatched IE7 with JavaScript and CSS on but images hidden.

Then a few pointers I would like to add:

- Think twice before binding to every instance of an event. Are you looking for a keydown, a mouse move, or a scroll? Throttle your function to make sure it runs only ten times a second, or whatever is appropriate. Ironically, the faster browsers and JS environments become, the slower your pages will be if you calculate something on all 1000 scroll events per second.

- For heaven's sake try to avoid absolutely positioning your whole interface. But if you do, you better try it in every browser and resize it real fast to see if it works.
For information here is one of these dialogs:
http://arashpayan.com/blog/2009/09/07/presenting-appirater/

This is quite configurable and you can decide to show the dialog only after a given amount of time and a number of uses. This makes sure that the user has used the app quite a bit.

Interestingly, users reacts quite well to this. If it annoys them they can discard this dialog and they would waste less time than by putting a 1-star review as a "punition".

This is especially helpful because updates reset the number of reviews displayed on the App Store. So you can drop for hundreds of 4-5* reviews to a few reviews just because you fixed a bug in an update.
Don't want to toot my own horn, but this is very similar to something I wrote a while ago and released on GitHub. For those who want to run their own copy see https://github.com/boyter/BATF
Yes. I really dislike those dialogs. I wouldn't mind something within the app that had a link to rate it, maybe on a menu, in the settings, possibly even a much more subtle reminder that showed up somewhere else while I was using the app, but interrupting me with a modal is like a waiter asking for a tip in the middle of a meal at a nice restaurant.
The video plays fine on my iPad. I'm pretty sure I don't have Silverlight on my iPad...
That's there in the WiFi dialog for a very specific reason: you're usually typing in someone else's password, which is often being dictated to you as you type, so mistakes are inevitable.

In every other case it's your password that you type all the time (or paste). In the rare instance that you fuck up it's easier to enter it again than it is to fix it.
After that point I decided it really was too long and didn't read it. I skimmed the rest, it seems to get a bit silly and suggests we should have different legal systems for different people.

He then goes into an extremely extended analogy about how having one legal system for everybody is just like having one shoe size for everybody, which seems like a fairly flawed analogy.

I just skimmed it again in a bit more depth, and in the end he really doesn't seem to come up with any ideas about what it would actually mean to "end the monopoly" of the single legal system which currently prevails, and certainly not with any ideas about how to overcome the huge inherent problems which you'd get if you implemented something like that (the most obvious one being that if my legal system says I'm right and yours says you're right then we're legally screwed).
Why does it matter? You assume the best and help the good guy, and in the worst case you don't help the bad guy.

You shouldn't be thinking about security in your validation anyway.
I've tried many chairs but none of the expensive ones (except for briefly sitting in an Aeron, which I liked). The last chair I bought was a $99 chair from Office Max, similar to this one: http://www.officemax.com/office-furniture/chairs/product-pro...

It is the best chair I've ever used even though it is low-backed and doesn't tilt. It forces me into a good posture and is comfortable for many hours.
Certainly interesting, and I'm having trouble, as the author suggests I might, imagining what he proposes.

It seems to me, though, that the state he describes--free market law--predates (as he sort of points out) currently prevalent systems. So doesn't the fact that all current major systems are ones of centralized legal authority suggest that that actually works better?
مسلسل وادي الذئاب الجزء 5 الحلقة 62
مسلسل وادي الذئاب الجزء 5 الحلقة 62
مسلسل وادي الذئاب الجزء 5 الحلقة 62
http://www.x7ob.com/vb/showthread.php?t=16392
http://www.x7ob.com/vb/showthread.php?t=16392
http://www.x7ob.com/vb/showthread.php?t=16392
Why don't they do a Kickstarter for this? Or do they already have the funding lined up?
URLs if it helps: http://www.gitalytics.com/repo/detail/jakewins/olwidget is the repo it got first, http://www.gitalytics.com/repo/detail/yourcelf/olwidget is the more central that it eventually found.
Clickable http://poundwire.com
The proper name should be the Union of Motherland Securities (it might be a better fit for them to be a part of old Soviet Union)
Raspberry Pi: A $25 Bare-Bones PC That Fits On Your Keychain
I like it a lot! I use Omniwriter on my Mac, but there are lots of computers I need to work on that aren't Macs and where I can't install desktop software.

@richcollins there are tons of good minimalist writing apps out there, but they are all downloads - this solves the problem where you aren't at your main computer but need to write...

@nametoremember are you serious? Google Docs has many great features, but for the simple task of writing it is actually pretty clunky and definitely NOT minimalistic.
And do you really think that's a feasible expectation for the typical shared hosting client -- a business owner with little tech experience who doesn't have the money to hire an actual good developer? The person who doesn't even know that they don't know good developers from bad developers?

>"The proper approach is to use context-sensitive whitelists for all client input, not add on layers of what is essentially protocol grep."
It's regex for HTTP requests / responses. Literally, that's all it does.

>"WAFs are usually viewed as relatively useless as they waste time on dumb attacks (specifically blacklisting) that harms more than it helps. "
By who? References? As I mentioned above, we use WAFs and they help a lot with stupid attacks, because stupid attacks are what most of the attacks are; automated attack crap running on botnets to put up phishing pages on easy targets.
From what I've heard these Rate My App dialogs help drive a lot of ratings (which, in turn, helps sales). Most of the people who like an app won't go to the trouble of rating it otherwise.
<grumpy opinion>
A single color scheme is the second-most immature form of branding, just behind combining initials into a logo.
</grumpy opinion>
Hm, that's interesting.

I submitted the Register article the other day and it only got 1 upvote:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2512559

I can't remember what time I submitted it though.
1) Yes I read your previous comment, that's why I'm telling you that you should be more civil.

2) You asked for an explanation, so I gave you an honest one. If you don't want to hear it, don't ask next time.
I'd be guessing a USB network adaptor?

That's what it looks like if you look at the pic on http://www.raspberrypi.org/
Why is this so inspiring? I'm not trying to put down his career, I just don't see why his selflessness is something to be admired. Is it because it's not something you would choose? Does that fact alone make that lifestyle profound?
They probably did, but PCI-DSS is mostly a joke and only ensures that you have the stupidest of stupid fixed.
Based on the principle of charging the maximum price the market is willing to bear, would you consider it ethical for a company like Amazon to charge more or less based on the affluence of the billing zipcode for each customer? /honest question
I roll my own running Nagios on a cheap Linux VPS.
They don't need official channels... they can just take the domain name for providing a plug-in that links to pirated content. The Mozilla domain might pull up a DHS graphic any day now! (it would be interesting if the DHS would go so far as to take down a site used by millions... but you never know as it appears DHS is above the law)
Be sure to include the cost of the extra time it takes to accomplish this when you calculate your savings.
Yeah it's IT rather than being on a desk, maintaining back office systems largely.

I have been working on my skill set, I know C# pretty damn well, I have taught myself aspects of software engineering + computer science I didn't have, etc. etc. - it's just that there are gaps, lots of gaps and more than that, a complete lack of confidence. This stuff grinds you down so much that it becomes very hard to resurface, that's part of the problem.

I am working hard on filling those gaps, but I think it'll probably take a year before I've sorted it. I went for a bunch of interviews at other finance places recently and the gaps were exposed very clearly there, so this is based on evidence.

Anyway, I don't want to talk much more about this unless stuff starts becoming toooo identifiable.

Just grit my teeth time really, but it's hard.
> I'm going to guess that, on average, it'll download faster from Google CDN than from my server.

Not really a safe assumption, it turns out.

http://zoompf.com/blog/2010/01/should-you-use-javascript-lib... has one of the best discussions of the topic.

> I see a chicken and egg thing here, to be on Google CDN you need millions of hits, yet being on Google CDN might help you reach that goal.

I don't think that's legit.. If one of your primary criteria on whether to use a given javascript library is it's CDN availability.. you're probably not choosing your tools well.

At the same time, I know I prefer to grab a CDN hosted script when starting a project then the downloading rigamarole. But that is like just general development momentum issue rather than a tooling decision.
At a guess, this is because may not be immediately obvious who committed perjury. Not everyone on the government side is necessarily on the same page, and over the 5-year lifetime of this case several of the people involved may have changed jobs.

The US attorney representing the FBI in court might have been acting in good faith, for example, because someone within the FBI had decided that neither the court nor the attorney had a 'need to know' about the existence of other documents. Establishing exactly who made that decision and how many other people knew about it and when they knew etc. etc. will require a separate investigation. (I have only read the opinion so far, and not looked at the procedural history of the case which might answer some of those questions.)

My understanding is that there are a few costs to the government when this happens. There's an investigation as mentioned above, which can take years. In the short term, the government may have to pay some or all of the plaintiff's legal costs - that can also take years, but it has an immediate effect on agencies' budget planning. Lastly, either the government appeals or the decision will be cited in existing or future litigation about similar issues.

I have a hunch that there will be a huge amount of information- and security-related litigation against the government for the next 5-10 years. Now that Osama bin Laden is gone there will be increasing domestic pressure to reassess foreign policy, military commitments, and the role of security in public life. People are tired of the war on terror and the security theater that goes with it, and bin Laden's death is a sufficiently large milestone that legal and legislative debates will broaden considerably. 'But al qaeda' will no longer substitute for an actual argument as it has for most of the last 10 years.
A neat device. I can use this in my spare time instead of much bigger Arduino boards
How many man-minutes of inconvenience are you willing to create for random strangers for every dollar you can save for yourself?

Come to think of it, this question is about as close to an objective measure of an individual's level of morality as we can get. Screw all theories of moral relativism; I can tell whether you're a good person or not by knowing how much money it would take to tempt you to leave an entire planeload of people sitting on the tarmac for an extra ten minutes.
Sounds like you only got into the 1st step of the interview process, not sure it's very responsible to deem their process as sucking when you haven't actually been through it.

Also, the next person who thinks about interviewing you is going to find this post, see that you write as though you were posting to your facebook wall (with all the lols) and never even give you a phone interview.
What about the decision to use Java?
I just bought Ikea's Verksam Swivel Chair a couple days ago:

http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/S59817085

and so far I'm loving it. Significant improvement in posture. Back (especially lower back) feels great.

What I like about it is that it isn't a deep or wide chair.

While I still take breaks, I wanted a chair that I didn't want to get up out of. One that I could just get lost in sitting for long periods of time.

So far, this one has provided that.
thank you for this excellent submission and write up - you've now given me some great suggestions to tackle this week on my Web app.

THIS is why I hang out here. :) Kudos..
Patents are meant to reward original innovator not the guys who buy them in bulk and profit out of it.

I would disagree that non-practicing entities are fundamentally evil. If I have a legitimate patent on a useful and non-obvious invention that is unlikely to be independently created, I should be able to take my "reward" in a lump sum by selling the rights to it. Paul Allen isn't a patent troll because he owns an IP company; he's a troll because he's trying to enforce ridiculous patents that never should have been granted in the first place.

Of course, if the USPTO were actually competent the "buy patents and sue" business model would be much less viable.
Ironic that the NYT cracks down on people evading its paywall but is selling content on doing the same for air travel.

{citation needed}

The NYT has done no such thing. They have gone after people for trademark violation. Big diffence :)
I bought a Steelcase Think about 3 years ago. It's been amazing up until recently, where I feel I am sitting too long in the day and I feel pressure behind my knees. When I move into a new place in the coming months, I'll be using a standing desk to work.

What concerns me is when I am lounging around with my legs crossed or sitting indian-style, my legs go a little numb. I work out rigorously and play soccer often, so being healthy during long workdays isn't enough; I think standing will help with my legs and help maintain my good posture.
Forget it, he's trolling.
I disagree on the usage of double quotes over single quotes for strings. Single quotes are useful when the string contains HTML.

The Google JavaScript Style guide recommends single quotes over double quotes for this reason:

http://google-styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/javascript...
This piece is devoid of actual reasoning and data (some will say content). It does however state Marco’s philosophy towards how he treats users.
ooo im so scared please dont see my posts, come on who cares, speak your mind and forget about the corporate junk.
What service are you using?
Its called a blog, not a research paper. 2011 :)
I know I shouldn't query downvotes but can the downvoter(s) explain how this will address the problem he outlined (ie schools teaching people how to use MS Office rather than teaching computer science)
That world did exist. In the 1980s my password to the campus timeshare unix system was ]]. The system required at least two characters, and these were the closest to the return key.

Many people's passwords were known. I trusted nobody to rm everything, and nobody ever did.

The internet changed that.
reCaptcha has highly-accessible captchas, including audio versions.
Show HN: Quotica - A beautiful way to collect quotes.
I know quotes and code might not mix, but I'd love HN to check out our latest project that three of us code to collect quotes :).

The idea is simple: to have a beautiful place to collect and share quotes. It will be fully plugged into twitter and facebook yet all the noises are filtered away.

Since all three of us are doing this for the first time, any comments would be appreciated. Thanks HN!

http://quoti.ca/?invite_key=showhn
Clickable: http://quoti.ca/?invite_key=showhn
Really?? Who cares. Come on webster :)
So when you are just starting out with app development, like me, you have almost 0 network. Maybe I can get a friend to install an app, that's it. So you've got to bootstrap yourself up (I'm learning this as I go).

So far I've found that at $0.99 I am lucky to get 1-2 sales a day. However, on my first app that was kind of experimental, I made it free and immediately got 255 downloads that day, and it leveled off to about 25 a day after a week. Still not great, but at least 25x install base.

So the next step is figuring out how to make an app start to build a network. One big part of this is ratings. I can't make a free app purchase-only until it has word of mouth. This needs ratings.

For the 2nd app I just released, I have baked in a "Please review me" that only fires after 3 days, Facebook and Twitter sharing. I launched it free. I'm working on a Twitter campaign to get people to know about it.

I agree with Marco that with an expensive app, it might be annoying. But its really not that annoying (as long as you only ask once), and its a critical tool for developers trying to bootstrap.

(Shameless self-plug, here's a link to the app. Its iOS only. http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/wolfpack-hangover-part-ii/id4...)
Get over it lol, its a blog not a research paper being published.
This might have something to do with the title:

"Woz snubs Paul Allen, praises pea soup"

Although this is the original title of the article, this kind of title doesn't attract lots of HN readers. It suggests that this article is solely about personal issues between two people.
I suggest that your client's apparent anger is nothing more than a negotiation tactic - whether they are consciously aware of this or not.

If you have agreed a list of requirements and a price, and you have this written down and signed off by both parties, then you should stick to your guns. Giving in to your client's demands will most likely lead to them asking for more and more things not in the original list. They will simply stomp all over you.

When I worked freelance I included a clause that said something along the lines of: "Any additional work required that is not included in this document will be quoted for on a new project basis."

I made sure I charged at quite a higher rate than I had done for the original quote, due to the extra effort involved in ensuring that the new request(s) didn't break functionality elsewhere or result in me having to refactor significant portions of code.
Instead of dismissing one idea or the other, it would be more interesting to ask why someone with Pieczenik's credentials and connections would say that when he did.
>I chose False because the executive branch's job is to enforce the law, and the President cannot issue an order to enforce a law that does not exist.

While correct, your choice is not based on "your personal understanding of [that] sentence's meaning", but on "your knowledge of constitutional law". The restriction of scope is critical to the point being made.
You're not an out-lier actually. I think you're among the hundreds of freelancers who're just quietly doing their jobs. Some good, some not so good. Their rates tend to separate the chaff from the wheat pretty quickly, even if they're from a third world country(like myself).

This article is mainly to satisfy the authors whim, that what he's doing is what everyone else is doing, based on reading so many freelance/productivity blogs.

All that matter is how communicative he is, in clarifying things and what he delivers with each iteration. Even good freelancers, won't satisfy you sometimes, depending on how their workload is.
Very cool, but i'm not sure how he can get it to an actual cost of $25 unless it's heavily supported by donations, grants, "give one get one" etc. For small runs (<10K?) the cost of production has to be a large multiplier on that.

Other options in this space (far more expensive! but similar ARM on a board style)

http://gumstix.com/store/catalog/index.php (although sadly they don't seem to carry the basix/connex, which are the same kind of power class as this)

http://beagleboard.org/
Seems to, for the most part, break the Go convention of return an os.Error when something unexpected happens.
Really? "Girl" is considered sexist these days?
For Canadians you can add government fees, regulations and lesser competition to the reasons this occurs.

I once bought a ticket from Vancouver to London (UK) on Air Canada. Turns out I could have saved over $200 by flying via the same airline out of Seattle and connecting back in Vancouver to the exact same flight going on to London. Absurd.
It's interesting that Google and jQuery seem to disagree on this as per: http://docs.jquery.com/JQuery_Core_Style_Guidelines#Strings

I'm yet to see a compelling argument for either. My original paragraph for string creation forgave C style strings, as they do seem very clean cut and easy to identify. I think this is an area that needs some debate.
Anyone can write a blog post as "anonymous". Anyone can sign their action as "anonymous". This theoretical group has no known boundaries or members, so is any "Press Release" from them really worth distributing?
Third attack against Sony planned
I have a Steelcase Leap at work and a Humanscale Freedom at home, and both are far superior to the Aeron for me. (I'm 6'3" and 225 pounds; the Aeron B and C models don't fit right: there should be a cross between a B and C. I had bought an Aeron but I sold it to buy the Humanscale Freedom.)