skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I want to like Grooveshark, but the fractured state of their library is an ongoing pain. I like to queue up entire albums, but I usually have to spend a few minutes finding all the songs via search first, then I have to put them in the proper order.
> "What's the innovation here?"

I think you're getting hung up on the form-factor of the iPad and missing the novel part: the software.

It not only gives every merchant the advantage of loyalty-card-type data streams, but gives tools that leverage that data to the customers as well.

Cash register software is notoriously bad. Even the big shops that spend millions on it. It really wouldn't take much to upend that business.
It would be a kind of a waste of time when you're getting paid £130,000 per week to kick a ball around.
What's this xrange you speak of?
Cloud Computing more popular than Beiber
This is one of the reasons I love my technology work at a non-profit. Sure I make lots less, but they are extremely generous with paid time off. Our institutional culture encourages people taking vacations, and while we have serious tight deadlines, people still support a healthy life-work balance.
If you're looking at just SW, how's it compare to Quickbooks POS?
See that really isn't the main use case for dropbox

Of course, but the user was clearly taken by surprise.
Card processing for everyone, anywhere with internet access without the need for a commitment, a costly investment in hardware or a separate merchant account. The UX isn't just good from a hardware perspective – it's also awesome in how you get paid.

There's a solid chunk of people who could benefit from accepting credit cards for whom the setup you've described isn't really worth it.

Moreover, if you already have an iDevice, which isn't much of a stretch, you now have a credit card terminal for free.
In 90% of the jobs I've held, I don't even know the customers (as friends or even acquaintances), and have never even met them. How much caring do you really expect me to muster up for this faceless horde of people I'm supposed to be serving?

And even when I have met the people I'm serving, they very rarely even make it to the level of acquaintance. They're just a face, someone I talked business with, someone who wants to make money off me, or get me to fix their problem and nothing more. I'm just an expensive tool for them.

Why should I really care whether whether their stupid website is down or their connection to the stock exchange is broken and they're losing millions every hour?

Of course, if I get paid for it, I might stick around. And might even pretend that I love fixing their worthless crap or making their inane widgets. But if you really think that beyond this mask I'm putting up on for you, deep in my heart I really give a shit, you are deluded.

With the exception of a handful of very lucky individuals who actually enjoy their work and care about what they do, I think the work world is full of fake people, and to make it there you have to be fake as well (unless you really are soul-dead and don't mind that you are wasting your life doing meaningless crap).

Actually, thinking back on it, I did used to enjoy what I was doing, when I was young and the entire work world was new to me and the places I was going to and the things I did seemed glamorous and exciting. But that quickly wore off, and it became just another day at the office, for which I had to drag myself out of bed for, despite getting paid very well for the trouble.
Google the link you're thinking of submitting. Chances are, it's been submitted and discussed as least a half dozen times before you.

Also, you made no mention of http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Same for me with Lexulous on Facebook, and some Web sites.

If I load up a restaurant web site, chances are it'll be at least partly in Flash. Flash may not be perfect on my HTC Desire Z, but it gets the job done and I appreciate that.
It looks more like a trojan horse to me.

If they become the new merchant-interface, there's nothing stopping them from offering an alternate payment mechanism that doesn't rely on credit or debit cards.
>I agree in principle, but it's not always so simple. When you're young, have no kids, no mortgage, no car loan, etc, it's pretty easy to just say "fuck off, see ya" when your employer acts abusively.

Even if you have all those responsibilities and you're leveraged up to your eyeballs you can still quit your job. You just need to line up another one first. I've been doing technical work for almost 25. In that time I've quit two jobs because they weren't treating me the way I expect to be treated, but I've never been without a job.

Even if you can afford it you're really hurting yourself by screaming "fuck off, see ya" at your boss and stomping out to look for another job. It's a lot easier to find a job when you already have one, and your negotiating position for salary and benefits is much stronger.
BioShock Infinite team previews next big innovation in gaming
I run an annual used ski equipment sale. We rent credit card machines and have a merchant account set up just for that weekend. We pay $0.22 + 1.79% per transaction. Our average transaction is >$100 so this is cheaper than what Square offers. Am I getting an unheard-of deal? Or is Square's rate really not that great?
I totally don't agree with your assessment of what is simple and reliable. I've had the mag stripe fail on numerous hotel room keys and a few credit cards over the years. A QR code is readable even if somewhat scuffed, etc.

It would seem that with a small investment in a magnetic stripe writer and a plastic mould, any scammer could create cards that could fool an imprint swiper or magnetic stripe reader.

Further, wouldn't a signature make all of the above close to equivalent?
In practice, many user experiences have ready substitutes, so people would rather have a different, good user experience than any specific bad one.
Why?

The font size is 1em – whatever you picked as your default font size, respecting your wishes. The line length is set in a way that it fits about 100 or so characters. That’s in my opinion a few too many (I would go for 60 to 70) but it’s certainly a very reasonable number. You should also note that the line length can be reduced by making your window narrower.

Line height is at 130%. That’s miles ahead of the awfully cramped default (look at this comment to see the awful default in action). I would add quite a bit more – mostly for aesthetic reasons – but 130% is, once again, a very reasonable number.

The text provides a summary and has an ample amount of subheadings. Paragraphs are used to give the text room to breathe.

I’m not a huge fan of the aesthetics (I would go for a serif font – not because it’s more readable, it’s not, but because it’s prettier – and I would decrease the line length and increase the line height) but I can’t find any faults with the text’s readability.
Good explanation, but the only difference from how my Firefox 4 installation works is the delayed resizing, which isn't as important since I can close a tab by middle-clicking anywhere on the tab.
"There's nothing savvy about her position."

She's a political animal. In the calculus of politics, what doesn't help you hurts you.

Picking a fight over this would make her a hero to hacker types, but it could possibly burn bridges elsewhere. Unfortunately, media companies punch above their weight in this country.

From a purely self-interested perspective, she made the savvy choice. Stating her disapproval without being too belligerent.

Call it cynicism or call it realism - this is the way these things tend to happen.

"It's cowardice to let the bill pass while talking about how bad it is. Veto the damn thing."

I'm curious to know, since when, in recent times, has bravery been the hallmark of a politician? Almost by definition, the political class tends to be remarkably risk-averse.
How exactly are they disrupting that? They are significantly more expensive than my merchant services provider.

The only place they may have an edge is low volume, low price, transactions.
I've heard this, and I've said it, and I wonder if there's an answer. Are we allowed to complain about the trivial?

I get a chuckle reading reddit.com/r/firstworldproblems, but some of those things do annoy me. I don't go around complaining about it, but it'd be a lie to say that I go without want in my privileged life.

Where do you draw the line?
What about Android and iOS, then?
Pandora One is $36 a year, Rhapsody is $9.99 a month. Big difference there.
Lanyrd is suffering from this misconception as well. Twitter recently updated the copy on their OAuth sign-in flow to specifically list the abilities that an application would have. Unfortunately, since they don't provide finely grained permissions it isn't actually possible to request just the write permissions your app needs. This leaves users thinking that our app will post tweets on their behalf, when we're actually just asking for write access so we can provide a "follow" button on our site.
Why is an NDA so restrictive that no developer with good outside options would sign it, not the fault of the company that has written it?
I really appreciate your reply and the global perspective!

That said, I'm not sure about Germany being approximately as rough as the U.S..

* Retirement - Our benefit is well under half of yours. The _minimum_ German pension, the floor, after reform will be 67 percent of national average wage (cites below). In the U.S., the average social security benefit is $1,153, annualized to $13,863 or about 34 percent of the average national income of $40,711.

So our _average_ govt. retirement benefit (34%) is about half of your _minimum_ retirement benefit (67%). In fact, the maximum U.S. benefit of $2,346 is just 69 percent of national income, i.e. the current German minimum (!) (it will go down to 67 percent under the current reform).

[German data: http://www.economist.com/node/618334 ] [U.S. social security benefit data: http://www.aarp.org/work/social-security/info-07-2010/maximu... ][U.S. wage data: http://www.ssa.gov/oact/cola/AWI.html ]

* Unemployment - (-edited thrice-) The average is 47 percent of wages in U.S. vs 60 or 67 percent in Germany depending on if you have kids. Germany is still more generous. [German data http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/9/54/29730499.PDF http://www.justlanded.com/english/Germany/Germany-Guide/Jobs... ] [U.S. data http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3394 ]

If you are right about "housings costs + 500 per month" this is, indeed, be about in line with U.S. benefits which average $300 per week (~1300 per month); our housing payments average $684. Not sure how to reconcile that with the 60 percent figure from OECD and elsewhere.
You can have the 'customer pays' model in Britain too if you want it - just roll up to a BUPA (or some other private) hospital and whip out your wallet.
Not many people are needed to identify usability problems. If you want to quantify the effects you indeed need many, many people but Nielsen doesn’t actually do that. Three, four, five people are plenty for those kinds of studies.
It's kinda like the Nobel Peace Prize for developers, only better

Somewhere a copywriter felt a disturbance in the force..
I do understand and use that features. My point it's that they aren't obvious. One of Python strengths was that any programmer could look at it and know what was going on, and, for newbies, it was much easier to learn.

I'm among the few unimpressed by list comprehensions. I use them because they're "idiomatic", but I'm equally comfortable with good old map(), which, I admit, it may be equally foreign for imperative-only programmers.

About the xrange() example, IIRC the iterator protocol predates generators, and probably is easier to grasp since the state is handled explicitely.

Decorators, as Lisp macros, are powerful but, if not handled with care, the source of very subtle bugs, because the thing you're looking at(the decorated function) doesn't do what it seems to do.

Anyway I'm not arguing against this artifacts, just pointing that, some of the merits of Python that were true a decade ago, aren't anymore.
It's actually not that bad. And it looks like its perfect if you're using it for payments on the move. But if you're not going to be moving the payment station around you should be able to opt into a bigger and sturdier one.
When to quit your job and go full time on your start-up
Impact Dialing wins Lean Startup Challenge
You are not their target customer.
I need a hacker 
Hey I really need to sort out my online profile in google, I am really frustrated I have been let down by so many people. please can anyone help.
> But why would I buy a $500 device to sit next to my cash register?

Because many "point of sale systems" cost far, far more than $500 and are steaming piles of bad user experience.

> Although this seems like more of a win for door to door sales and maybe mall kiosks.

Definitely, and private instructors as well. I teach dance classes/private lessons and being able to take a card right on the spot is incredibly convenient.
My parents live in western NC and have the same problem.

They're in a very rural area. Time Warner provides service down their road but stops about a half mile or mile from their home. Why? Because my parents are in a different county and their county has some sort of exclusivity thing with Northland Cable.

Northland Cable has no desire to run service to my parents' street as I believe my parents are the only ones on their street that would use it.

BellSouth/AT&T Does not provide DSL access to their area, either.

Their only option is a private company providing wireless internet. They pay about $50/mo for 1mbit down/1mbit up. Quite often with 20-30% packet loss. More if it's raining.
I recently travelled to Argentina and there it is true for hotels too.
"Disclaimer though is that I was one of the Java guys and I had completely bought into the notion of 'write once, run anywhere'. Making that true turned out to be impossible for a number of reasons, not the least of which that the underlying OS providers were hostile to the idea."

The company I work for uses Java and targets Windows, AIX, HP-UX, AS/400, and Linux. We have remarkably few portability problems with our Java code. It all "just works", as advertised.

I'd be curious to know where all your Java portability problems stem from. The UI (Swing)?

In any case, I do share some concern and skepticism that web apps will rule the roost. At least one company, Microsoft, would seem motivated to make sure web apps cannot completely replace desktop apps, and thus will always subtly cripple IE, the dominant web browser.
How I teach Java in 1hr 5 sessions
I don't want to work at that kind of company either. I agreed with you, remember?

The point is that there is excessive armchair quarterbacking here from people who haven't actually headed companies.

You could've just said, "I wouldn't work there for such and such reason" and left it at that.
Not particularly relevant to tech consulting. Going to grad school probably harms your ability to consult professionally. You don't have to pay referrals (I don't know that we ever have). It does help to think big-picture about the business outcome you're providing to clients, though, instead of getting shoehorned into $/loc --- which is death.
Apple Tells Lodsys Patent Troll to Back Off
“Apple is undisputedly licensed to these patents and the App Makers are protected by that license,” wrote Bruce Sewell, Apple Senior Vice President and General Counsel."

Edit: Full Letter: http://www.macworld.com/article/160031/2011/05/apple_legal_lodsys_letter_text.html
i'm pretty sure you can't replace something graphically intensive as Unreal's Infinity Blade with a cross-mobile-browser web app.
They already do it with Automatic Updates...Of course, MS also hasn't figured out how to update components in-place while they're being used, so expect your machine to be restarted in the morning. :-/

The part before the ellipsis is contradicted by the part afterwards. Also, Microsoft will have to get the patch to the update mechanism very quickly as well. Their record with that has also been poor. Otherwise, they will not meet a goal of keeping ahead of the black hats.

Just because your military has tanks, jet fighters, and assault rifles, it doesn't mean they're on the same level as everyone with the same equipment. There are significant organizational factors at play.
housing costs are amazingly obscene in some cities. Based on my minimal looking around, the cost of living is going to account for a lot of those "barely survive" stories.

That plus nice cars, eating out, and buying iPads.
Live video streaming from the MeeGo Conference 2011
I used all three: LaTeX, Lout, and troff. Each has its strengths and weaknesses. I love them all. If I could not work for a living, I'd spend the rest of my life playing with typesetting :)
Scott Adams: Hello from Heaven
Really? This isn't the first battle that's been fought in this conflict:

http://arstechnica.com/telecom/news/2010/07/north-carolina-k...

I would just like to note the minuscule effect that victory had on the ultimate outcome. It seems to have merely delayed the inevitable.

Take a look at the map in that article. The problem is that unless some kind of solid, pro-municipal broadband legislation comes down from the federal level, the big telecoms are going to fight a take-no-prisoners, state-by-state war of attrition. The big ISPs are well-heeled and, unfortunately, politics is a money game. Given the present situation, I just don't see things working well for municipal broadband in the long run. There has to be a game changer of some sort.

Let's pose a hypothetical. Say she vetoes it and somehow the legislature upholds the veto. All the ISPs would have to do to get the situation back in their favor is to run some TV ads decrying big government. Ordinary people will line the streets protesting government takeover of the internet. Within weeks the whole thing would be rolled back, and we're back where we started.

It is great for us technologically savvy people to sit over here and be hopeful, but the reality is that the most effective way to fight back against this kind of legislation is to educate consumers about how things could be. The impetus is on Netflix and similar companies to get ordinary people to place more value on better bandwidth offerings. Until then, we will continue to see these types of setbacks.
In my experience, diff + diff + diff = super-long update process. It was done for many game updates up to several years ago, and an update from the box version through 3 patches could take up to an hour. The install, meanwhile, would take 20 minutes or so at most.

edit: not that I don't think this can be improved, nor that the updating software they used was any good. Just sayin'.
Can you speak to any of those from first-hand experience? I can.
The full text of the letter: http://www.macworld.com/article/160031/2011/05/apple_legal_l...
I'm just going to leave this here: http://adamloving.com/internet-programming/gamification

There is good gamification and bad gamification. Bad gamification is slapping extrinsic rewards (or a contrived story) on top of an interaction. Good gamification amplifies the intrinsic rewards of a particular behavior – to increase the feeling of fun, flow, or accomplishment of the player. Players know bad gamification when they see it, because it doesn’t take their interests into consideration. Good gamification aligns the needs of both designer and player.
Perl is perfectly readable, and in many cases elegant. The creator is even a trained linguist. Sure it's possible to write unreadable perl, just like it's possible to make a mess in any language, but I'd say perl is as readable in general as python.
1-Bit Symphony
> Because the magnetic stripe contains a security code that's not otherwise represented on the card.

Not really: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_stripe_card

The stripe usually just has the cardholder name, the card number, expiration date, and sometimes the CVV. It depends a lot on what tracks are present on the card, what info your bank has included in the "discretionary data" chunk, which track was read by the reader, etc.

If you grab a cheap USB magstripe reader, you'll find that most things (library cards, student IDs, airline tickets, etc) really don't include much of anything that is not already printed on the item.

There are technologies like MagnePrint (http://www.magneprint.com/) that use the signature of the ferrous oxide particles on the card. But it requires your bank and the merchant to use the tech.
I'm sitting on an HN self post on this topic, which largely follows your logic and expands it a bit more (though not too much for a self post). Haven't been able to figure out if I should post it or not.
Slides should be at http://blog.fogus.me/2010/10/02/naivete-vs-experience/ (in Flash).
The whole thing is an exercise in silliness, but it keeps newspapers in business I suppose.
Paralyzed man can stand and walk again, thanks to spinal implant
in reply to your aside: you could use something like Twill for command-line navigation script (doesnt work with javascript though I don't think) http://twill.idyll.org/commands.html
Full text: Apple Legal's letter to Lodsys
Provillus Hair Loss
Provillus a very popular and natural hair loss product that tackle hair loss by blocking the formation of DHT in the system
Interesting. Perhaps she was lacking something else, then, or perhaps the time it took for her to develop object permanence was a testament to her brain damage.
Can someone "compare and contrast" this with existing CWDM and DWDM technologies, which also use different "colors" (think different frequencies, really) traveling over the same fiber?
What do you mean "miss too much work" ?

Seriously, what's the worst that could happen if you're not there for a week or two?
1. I don't do Twitter. (I'm an old fogie.)

Don't worry about this. I have never actually met anyone under the age of forty that used twitter for anything except perhaps extracting money from other people, and that doesn't really count. The only people I have met who use it seriously for social interaction were all "fogies," and they pretty much exclusively work in the media.

I know a fair few hackers IRL as well, and none of us have ever used twitter with anything but reluctance. As far as I'm concerned, twitter is something mysterious done by other people on the internet, like fanfiction, and selling giant penises or whatever it is they do in second life. And, as we all know, the other people on the internet aren't real people anyway.
We have the Netflix policy, well almost. We get the time off when you want it, but never more than 5 working days together (Thats a week). Did I mention that a large number of the employees travel abroad to visit family?
I wouldn't have expected much less, but glad to see this happen.
Because many "point of sale systems" cost far, far more than $500 and are steaming piles of bad user experience.

But those systems that cost more than $500 take credit, cash, and check. And you get accounting for all of the different types of sales you do. You still need that machine, if you do cash/check sales.
Everything depends on what you want to do and what your previous experience/education are. I am currently pursuing a MS in MIS and have a BS in CS, I do feel like it is a good combination. I have a good exposure of what Business Intelligence are, learned machine learning, project management. Is it worth the money? It depends again on what you want to do in the future. If you want to climb up a company ladder, then maybe it will be worthed. It might even be more worthed to join into a Entrepreneur program rather than MIS if you want to be more involved in a startup