skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm going to guess that surprising users with a buggy, incomplete, and arguably poorly designed rewrite of the desktop experience they've been using for years is the fiasco he's talking about.

And yes, only geeks keep up with Ubuntu news--everyone else just clicked upgrade and then stared blankly at their weird new desktop. He's not going to keep regular users around for long if he keeps pulling that kind of crap--and he's done it twice already, with window buttons in the past.
An example search http://projects.latimes.com/value-added/teacher/barbara-a-br...
I use Ubuntu as my work OS everyday. There's no competition for Ubuntu with apt, vim and xmonad - even osx feels annoyingly hard compared to my work setup.
Correct. There's specs on the short-range transmitter here: http://xemics.com/docs/xe1200/xe1201evk_userguide.pdf

Now this is an old device, and they very well might be using cell phone transmitters now.
Show HN: my weekend project Html5Snippets.com
A place to learn and share html5/css3/js snippets. Its on a alpha/mvp stage right now. Let me know what you think.

Http://html5snippets.com
Are you one of those people who believes that the damage done by intellectual property "piracy" exceeds its benefits?

How is the Pirate Bay screwing anyone over more than draconian copyright laws which have been extended decades and decades beyond what the law originally intended while criminal enforcement is provided by free thanks to taxpayers?
That was probably Kuma\War and/or Kuma\War 2, who have also announced their own Osama raid map [1]

1. http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2385051,00.asp
Google: 'We're Using Compatibility as a Club to Make Them Do Things We Want.'
You are missing his point.

He could have replaced guitar with model airplane building, riding bikes, making friendship bracelets, or training a giraffe.

The point is, good time management makes time for the things you need to make time for - and in this person's case, TV happened to be his vice.
If I had been asked, my reply would have been "It can't be done. If you want help from me or someone like me, you'll need to make a loose ranking of the qualities of the ideal solution, and we can try some approximations".

I might even have left the latter sentence out, since it's clearly implicit. Maybe whoever they found left it out or maybe they didn't even consider it, but the artist could have made the addition too. I suspect the first few people just weren't interested.
Late nighties was the sweet spot for the FPS: CS, Q3, UT, etc.
I don't know the answer to either of these questions. It appeared to be a standard GPS receiver, but some investigation would reveal whether the manufacturer supports military mode.
http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:7hhk_GsNmTQJ:w...

I never saw it on the car, but the antenna mount had a hinge that would allow it to stick out from the side of the car. But that would be rather conspicuous—I think that's why the antenna is so large.
Then I guess I don't really understand your point. You said:

One of my least favorite words is “impossible”:
it simply has no real value and just goes against
everything I believe in,

I'm trying to demonstrate that it does have real value. There are some things that genuinely are impossible, and knowing that can save you a great deal of wasted time.

Now, notice how I don’t say that I hate the word.
Why not? Simply because it is an awesome motivator!

I know people who, once told that something is impossible, immediately go to work trying to make it happen. In some cases they are just wasting time, and not only theirs. Sometimes they pester others, endlessly, with work that is provably wrong, but they are unwilling to take the time to understand that.

What should you do when someone tells you something's
impossible? I say "keep calm and carry on"

I disagree so much with this. Don't dismiss someone's advice or opinion because they claim something is impossible. Instead, try to understand their point of view, and if you are inclined, try to find an error in their argument, a chink in their armour. If you can't, perhaps you aren't really cut out to work in that area and you are better advised to work on something else.

They might be right.
I think the real irony is that the guy who started this giant time-suck for startups can be considered the "face" of startups in America :)
I have admit - I have a cousin that's been through Cambridge (went through a nanotechnology track, now taking a doctoral at Max Planck, will always feel inferior to him) and I do agree with you: he's barely poked his head out and reconnected with the extended family in ages. I'm interpreting this as "complete devotion to work" because complete disconnection is rather unheard of in the Asian family he comes from. So my observations line up with yours to some extent. I can't prove the existence of lack of of the opposite, annoyingly enough.
http://danielsolisblog.blogspot.com/2011/05/thousand-year-ga...

I found a tag too:

http://danielsolisblog.blogspot.com/search/label/1000%20Year...
GE and EADS to Print Parts for Airplanes
Nah, how long will smartphones remain below 700MHz?

QT5 is planned for the future, it's not like it is released now. By the time it is ready, I don't think speed and OpenGL ES 2 support is still an issue on devices by then.
The interesting legal answer is... apparently iFixIt.
Anyone else trying to read lifehacker without JS?
Sure, just transmit stronger white noise on 433.92 MHz. I haven't looked up who owns that frequency and whether there are restrictions.

Or get a GPS blocker. Which I think are illegal to operate.
UK Information Commissioner’s Office changes law to require opt-in for cookies
"Works for me" isn't the right response to this kind of complaint, because though it might work for you, the fact it is that it doesn't on many other people's computers--including mine. For example when upgrading to 11.04, hibernate broke on my laptop, I have crazy Compiz problems (title bars don't change titles, invisible windows blocking mouse clicks, window previews not disappearing), and other stuff going wrong.

Thank God I purposely chose an Intel wifi card in my laptop, because the poor people stuck with Broadcoms (the standard install on Dell laptops at least, and that's not an insignificant market share) were horribly buggy in every past release I've tried--and even if they did work, wifi was noticeably slower than Intel or other cards. I certainly wouldn't sit back with my Intel wifi card and tell the Broadcom users that it "works for me!"
I would be interested in knowing why you chose this submission title. It seems very dishonest considering 1. the selection bias, 2. the fact that multitasking would not be practical or useful for all of those apps, and 3. it could have just as easily been worded to stress that 69% of apps do have multitasking.

Surely you considered these points when you wrote that title. Surely there was something else in the statistics that was more worthy of note, but it wouldn't have awarded you the same degree of attention.
Now if only PSN wasn't still down... sigh
6 Successful Founders Share Their Advice for New Entrepreneurs
Applying the Unix Process Model to Web Apps
How to check your car for a GPS tracker
For the manufacturer, maybe. But then you have to factor in bribes to the federal procurement officers and junkets to Atlantic City to land the contract, and then medical payments for the workers who burned themselves hand-soldering resistors on that board. That's gotta up the price to at least $3K/unit or so! :-)
I'm with the poster. I play reruns of TV shows in iTunes throughout my day. The white noise from meaningless TV is one of the only ways I stay productive.

I find it 100% impossible to work with Music on. I just can't handle it.

Every 3 minutes there is a completely different sound playing.

Each song has a completely different story.

Each song triggers an entirely different set of emotions.

Every 6 to 10 minutes I have to stop and start skipping through tracks to find something suitable for the moment.

If I just play the same band over and over, I find it leads to a trance like state, or I feel like I'm being punished and forced to listen to the same music.

Then there's the music I would have to play in order to stay focused, say instrumental music only, and in this case I get frustrated. Tired of the loop, of the sound, it turns into a "tick" instead of a sound.

Anyway, I have a real hate-hate relationship with listening to music while I work. Very few people are with me on this.

I prefer to turn on white-noise TV just so there's ambiance in the room that has no rhythm :)
> patching new vulnerabilities that allow jailbreaking has become a moot point.

I'm not sure how moot. A few iPhone jailbreaks have exploited vulnerabilities that would allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code on a user's device. So, while pretty handy for delivering a jailbreak payload, equally devastating were someone to decide they wanted to pilfer some address book content or damage system files.

I'd say patching such vulnerabilities is important, though the short-term jailbreak opportunities are nice. Apple also verifies a checksum of your OS installation to prevent you rolling back to old, vulnerable OS versions. So, legal or not, Apple isn't taking a nap on jailbreaking.
I figured it was COD4 because more recent variants don't have any mooding or map making tools, an unfortunate trend in recent years.

Besides, has the COD engine changed since COD4? I'm not sure it has.
Would you say that books are a mind-suck? Would you say HN is a mind-suck? Would you say listening to music or going to a play is a mind-suck?

Even if you think all those other forms of entertainment are "bad", I'd still ask what's so wrong about being "unproductive" some of the time? I don't think you should seek to be 100% "productive". I think being a cultured person is a perfectly good goal as well.
We have not—I had limited time with the device at Wired's office. We powered it on and used a frequency analyzer on it, but that was the extent of our investigation. We were concerned that black helicopters might show up if we left it on too long. But I hope someone else does!
In the portrait orientation, however, the inbox menu appears as an overlay that partly obscures the message content, making it impossible to work with the two panes simultaneously. Why show two panes, when you can't use both?

That was rather shallow. Apple might have had their reason, and it would be worthwhile to explore what those could be. My expert opinion is that (some) users freak out when "earth moves under them" i.e. when entire screen is redrawn. Redraw of the screen, even when animated with slide effects, adds to the user's mental overhead, whereas Apple-style pop-overs are less disruptive.
Does everyone who practices guitar ends up a great musician? And if they don't, but only practice guitar to relax, would you consider the time "wasted"?
Invaluable information for a UI designer. As I'm a bit of a novice in the field, I can say it is a struggle at times to pick out the right iconography and dictate what you want the user to accomplish. This article definitely helps to clarify that process. It also mentions a book worth reading which seems quite interesting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Understanding_Comics
If someone creates content it is their choice whether or not it's given away for free or if people must pay for it. If you create a song you can give it away for free, sell it for $0.99 or sell it for $900, that's your choice. I agree some of the copyright laws that exist are silly, but it should still be the content creators choice what happens with that content (or if they sell the rights then the new rights holder etc etc). Your desire, my desire or anyone else's desire for that content (be it music, video, game, program, image) is not more important than the wants of the person who created it.

Anyway my point was just that TPB is not a good voice against this, it would be like having Hitler being against anti-freespeech laws, it would make it much easier to justify those laws because of Hitler.
Yeah I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. Like what if the spammer was Calacanis and immediately put the kabosh on all the OA's fundraising efforts and speaking engagements? Now that would have been a story.
It's always surprising to me that smart people end up learning this lesson the hard way. Users want stability and slow evolutionary change the vast majority of the time.

But, I think the motivation here was a bit different, canonical had less control and influence over the desktop than they felt they needed.
This will be a trend worth watching. There is evidence [1] that some of the educational techniques in China do not foster the creativity that is the hallmark of a thriving tech economy. That is however only half the story since if you read HN you know that execution is at least, if not more important than creativity. So if the Chinese create a system where new ideas can be executed into products quickly and efficiently then they will create a formidable force of innvoation.

[1] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pits.10072/abstra...
Angry Birds icon set for iphone , ipad and android apps
The problem is that they sold you "all the water you could carry" and then reneged when you pulled in with your truck (with the bucket they gave you duct-taped to the inlet with a hole in punched in the bottom).

Its a case of "wait! I didn't really mean all". Its the classic fat man at the buffet problem.
I'm with you, but piracy can be more troublesome to certain industries than to others.
I believe that's them, yes.
Awesome! Weinre http://pmuellr.github.com/weinre/ provides similar but more limited functionality and has saved me in so many mobile-specific WTFs I've lost track.
Preacher converts to Islam
In terms of the "cold sterility of their design," I only have this to say:

In industrial design, minimal is a synonym for good.
Ah, I forgot about Skype. Anecdotally though, most people I know only use the free parts of Skype.
I'd love to see how much those devices cost. And the TCO.
"If anything occupies a lot of your time, of course eliminating it will free up time for other things."

I'm looking at YOU HackerNews :-)
This game is fun. As a side note, I got it running on Linux through Wine rather easily, so it's possible to play on other platforms than just Windows.
Checking under my car with a mirror after work.
Default search engine provider + app store = tons of $$$ with first world users.
While not related specifically to security, I've always been fascinated with the fact that Japan recognizes their 'dishonesty minority' the yakuza as legitimate organizations. While most countries run around declaring war on their black market parasites, Japan has allowed them to slice of their piece of the pie and avoid the nastiness.
Don't mean to put words in his mouth, but I believe he's saying the laws are draconian. Few argue for the outright abolition of IP, and the content you talk about should be protected to encourage the producer to prosper. Its just the "Life + 70 Years" that is draconian.
No strong patterns, but some characteristics.

Situations where you're more likely to get by with a block quote: Established trust, where you have high credibility with the prospect, when you have been referred to them from a trusted source, or where they are already a client of yours.

Where you probably will require a more granular quote:
If your proposal/quote will be passed on to other people in the company, needs to be approved by a board or higher management, and if the prospect is known to be tight with their money. Also quotes above a certain amount usually need to be granulated, for me this was anything over $5K.
Show HN: MetaGamify - Game Mechanics Q&A
Not with FPS (never really my thing) but after biking around Germany for 6mo, looking at war memorials, mass graves, and other WWII sites I lost all interest for several years in playing wargames (computer and chit and hex paper). Every roll of dice and flipping unit to "damage" side I couldn't get out of my mind how that represented a bunch of sacrifice and suffering by actual humans.

Games are not fun when they get humanized.
Adam Curtis may be right. Note the "tl;dr" by evangineer which suggests that at least one reader did not have the attention span to read the short article. Of course, it is not a given that comment is due to a computer reshaped view of reality, but that's my working null-hypothesis. (cf. recent xkcd panel (#892) and the TX BOE statements on evolution)
Lo-Fi Prototyping: Paper in Screen Prototyping
Javascript Pointers
It's just my anecdotal experience. It's pretty easy to prove the IPO market lately hasn't been like it was in the 90's and that's the reason the big tech companies have been staying private.
Pass a karma threshold, which raises over time due to karma inflation.
From the sound of it, the original request was probably stated as something massive and NP hard, he asked for the 'best' placement and was told it would take more time than seconds since the big bang to locate the best placement.

Then somebody actually talked to him and took the time to realize he didn't need the optimal solution.
Congress to ICANN: No You Can’t
I don't know, but perhaps an RF engineer could weigh in given the frequency and transmission power.
Similar story from Ars Technica when their page was recently banned, with some similar steps you might be able to take:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/04/facebook-tak...
Dijkstra kind of tried to be a prophet in this sense, though I guess he wasn't writing for a general audience.
Fairly random note: I played CoD4 (for moneys) for tek9. We (the people winning moneys / dealing headshots) hated CoD4 for the gameplay, CoD2 was much better.
I actually built this, so if you have any questions, shoot.

A few interesting links:

* A teacher with a few more observations http://projects.latimes.com/value-added/teacher/miguel-angel...

* A page where you can see the same teacher under multiple statistical models: http://projects.latimes.com/value-added/value-added-comparis...

* A page for a school, where you can compare how API and value-added ratings match up: http://projects.latimes.com/value-added/school/pacoima/hille...

* And here is the page of teacher response: http://projects.latimes.com/value-added/responses/page/1/
Microsoft Decries 'Hidden Cost' of Google Apps
Why not? You think 5pm local time is just before evening due to convention. Your "internal clock" doesn't care what the clock on wall says. Here, 17:00 would just become lunch hour.
The Unwisdom of Elites
Thanks for the pointer. Are there any known open-source implementations of the same?
Definitely the two martinis talking. Entertaining, though :-)
Linkedin CEO's Roadshow Presentation & Deck [video]
Will be taken down when trading starts, so watch it asap if you're interested.
Microsoft Should Bye Skype
Can someone explain why I'm STILL "hellbanned?"
A week or two ago I realized my comments/submissions no longer counted. Everything I was submitting immediately went "dead." I posted a few topics on the matter, e-mailed pg, and received a snarky reply from naner. As far as the response I received from the community here, people basically told me to shut up and create a new account. So I did. And it turns out that account was immediately "hellbanned" too - I'm assuming because I'm using the same IP address. Everything on HN still loads painfully slow unless I'm using a proxy or I'm not logged in as my original or new account.

This is all absurd because I did nothing to deserve the "hellban." I simply defended the PHP programming language and revealed obvious truths about certain haters of the language... and a user clicked the "flag" link because he didn't agree. From then on, my account and any posts from my IP have been rendered useless. And I continued posting for 20 days afterward because I had no clue. Granted, once in a blue moon when I've had a bad day and I'm in a bad mood I may be politically incorrect and speak exactly what's on my mind, but surely nothing that constitutes a ban. And I'm sure a number of you will try to nitpick at my posts and convince yourself that "hellbanning" me was just, because surely this elite community you're a part of can do no wrong! You must defend its honor! But in all seriousness, you won't feel that way when someone "hellbans" you by flagging a comment of yours they don't agree with.

I would very much appreciate it if I could have my original account back to working status.
No, it's actually not their choice.

Society has long recognized that there is a tradeoff between benefits to the creator and benefits to society. As evidenced by e.g. the US copyright clause which says that Congress can (not must) extend copyrights to further the progress of the sciences and the useful arts (not to reward content creators, that's a means, not an end).
If what you're selling is just a long string of bits, securing it against copy (not theft) is your problem, not the state's.

IP is just a way for established players to be lazy and avoid finding business models that acknowledge reality. Unfortunately, their laziness and greed also cost us civil liberties since freedom to copy a string of bits is indistinguishable from free speech.
Fair enough. I like that you have a strong sense of Readable's goal(s) and know what features would be overextension. As for sites that publish articles spread across multiple pages, I should really vote with my feet (eyes?). Looking forward to hanging quotes!
Win2k to Ubuntu 10 is a huge leap forward. I'm not a huge fan of Windows, but Windows 7 is night and day compared to what came before. I enjoy Ubuntu, but I think OS X is a more likely OS replacement for me.

Software compatibility is the real issue. However, I think that the move towards web based platforms over the next decade will pretty much eliminate this issue. For the average computer user, Windows is unnecessary. If you are doing something that requires demanding tools -- be it photography, 3D animation, CAD, etc, then the OS means a lot more and probably will for a while.

I would place my money on Google and Apple dominating the OS's of the future. Something is going to replace Windows short of Microsoft undergoing a radical transformation and Windows being free. Seeing the direction of Windows Mobile I am guessing that Microsoft will try something radical and it won't be something that works.
does this mean that i should get one of those friar tuck cloaks, a copy of PoEAA, and start preaching about martin fowler on street corners?
On personal brand, transparency and social contract in venture capital.
this in mobilesafari would be a godsend
Do I detect a small amount of sarcasm about the democratic structure of the EU?
Draft schedule of Ruby 1.9.3
Russia's search giant, Yandex, files for $1.2 billion dollar IPO
AFAIK 433MHz can be used for any short-range application, similar to 27/49MHz for R/C cars. There are plenty off-the-shelf 433MHz transceivers for hobbyists, and I think car remote-unlockers use that band as well. And this doesn't appear to have a particularly powerful transmitter, so you'd have to bring the transmitter relatively close to the receiver (like <100ft, usually) in order to download...whatever.

If they're able to put this thing on your car in the first place, I guess it's not infeasible for them to drive by to download updates.
http://html5snippets.com
Urgency is inversely proportional to duration