skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I actually do not know what I would have done or can still do differently. That's the problem. I tried offering a 14 day money back guarantee and kept the price low but that hasn't generated the type of sales I was expecting.
Gift Marketing: The Best Things in Life Are Free
You probably don't care if power is only out for a few seconds, though.

Ice evaporates, but a large block will take quite a while.
I'm not sure if there's any particular significance to this, but the current head of PM for Windows is Jensen Harris and his degree was in music composition.
I could probably switch to DuckDuckGo without much trouble. I could definitely switch to a newsreader, although I'd miss syncing. Still, might be some other service that does it or it's even possible to hack something together myself.

But Gmail? That's the tough one, I really like the interface and it seems every competitor tries to look like a desktop client.

Having a hosted Emacs might be an option (RSS reader/highly customized GNUS). My paranoia/principle level isn't high enough for that right now, though.
Android Dancing on Microsoft Ecosystem
We try to blurb stuff like this from employees on our blog. Not really any purpose behind it beside having linked from our blog as well, and easily found there. Do you think it's obnoxious to link it this way in HN submissons? If so, I can put the direct links in in the future.
Microsoft Windows Phones Are Getting Buried At Carriers' Stores
There have been quite a few of these articles now. This one was both informative and somewhat damning:

http://venturelevel.com/post/4798285366/why-groupon-sucks-fo...

Now that the social buying model is better understood, I feel like merchants are in a much better position to determine whether or not a Groupon deal actually makes sense for them.
Why Android Tablets Can't Win: It's the Little Things
Place something like a coin on top of the ice. If the ice melts, the coin will submerge and be inside the ice if it re-freezes. (Assuming you put the ice in a container).
Thanks for the insight! I guess I've been to involved in location stuff for a while.

You'll get a feel of the location system with Google Maps quite easily: You get a big light blue circle around "own location" when location comes from mobile network cellid, and a smaller one when it uses WLAN-based location. That signifies the accuracy. And it does indeed find this location even when GPS is off. And this works even when "Mobile network"-setting is off, i.e. the phone is not sending or receiving any data, if you are still connected to a previously known mobile cell.

Anecdotally: I moved a few months ago, and didn't change my WLAN network id. At my new place, when GPS was not available, Google Maps was showing my location to my old place. This continued until I renamed the WLAN and used Google Maps with GPS near my new place.

This shows the weakness of crowdsourced location data, but such incidents are rare enough that it basically "just works".
Quantum computing for the determined
Good luck getting a clean shave under those conditions.

It works great when shaving with obsidian chips. I like yak butter as a shave lotion: let it ferment just a bit for a subtle scent and extra moisturizing.
How do you create designer QR codes? Do you have artsy algorithms?
6 reasons to backup your cloud data
> It's a bit of a mystery, but surely if nearly a third of Russian web surfers have made it their default it just might be time for the rest of the world to take it for a test drive

I can shed some light on this "mystery". Shortly after moving to the U.S. in the year 2000, I noticed that a number of my computer-literate friends who remained in Ukraine (which is where I was from) were using Opera browser. They were "hacker" types -- the kind, if they were from the U.S., you would expect to be using Mozilla/Firefox on Linux (I was switching between Mozilla and Konqueror on Linux at the time). However, nearly all of them were running Opera on Windows instead. I remember thinking that this stemmed from the fact that the "open-source" culture originated in the West and was slow to spread to the former Soviet block because of network effects and because of the ease with which Windows could be pirated in the 2nd world. Meanwhile, Russian hackers, not being entirely stupid, quickly concluded that MS Internet Explorer is not the best browser out there and switched to an alternative -- which happened to be Opera. Had the open source culture been more prevalent in Russia at the time, they would have chosen Firefox. The current popularity of Opera in those countries is probably entirely due to network effects originating from those early adopters.
Go CloudFlare!
Why oh why didn't he fork php/php-src, make a branch for his changes, then commit as he went along? This just ends up as a big patchbomb. They're never going to merge his changes, and I don't blame them.

EDIT - Hopefully we can straighten this around: https://github.com/infusion/PHP/commit/790d551ac9ef8e204b44f...
How to Take Advice
The sheer scale of it. Average corrupt politicians have a mistress, or two, or three; he has a harem of a couple dozen, several of which minors.

The allegation that some are minors is distasteful, but the fact that he sleeps with more women than you feel comfortable with is neither here nor there when talking about how he "ruined a country".

It's depressing to see The Economist's article open by talking about his sex life. It's utterly immaterial.

His grip on the media, his lack of reforms, his policies on this that and the other, his changing the law to avoid prosecution for fraud allegation - those things matter to the story of how he "ruined Italy"; how many people he sleeps with and how righteously outraged Americans are by it? Doesn't matter.
To the Cloud
next up, money shredding treadmill?
No thanks, Google will host my personal data for free, and it works on all platforms.
Mathematical Drumming
Feet Ostinato in 3x (16th notes). Group them by 4 notes and that becomes your 4/4 foundation. Then play "Table of Time" on Snare drum on top of it. Start with quarter notes and go all the way to 32nd notes including "tuplets". It takes 3 time through the full Table of Time to land back on "One" with feet and hands. Enjoy.
it's sort of like the difference between physically and psychologically addictive drugs - there are no real penalties for switching your search engine, but you're used to google so there's a certain "feel good" reward to keeping on using it.
Show HN: My latest Flash game, Super Goblin War Machine
Use These Mockups: Lots of Design Patterns in Balsamiq Mockups (BMML) format
Hi Everyone,

It's been about a year since I've shamelessly posted one of my games here, so I thought I'd show off my latest creation. I'd love to know what everyone thinks!

I'm running a free weekend for the game's expansion pack to help promote the site and iPad version, although I'm promoting that aspect of it harder elsewhere on the web, I don't want people here to be buying it while others are getting it for free:

http://www.bigblockgames.com/promotions/goblinnyc/

Also, if anyone has any questions about the games business or game development, I'm more than happy to talk shop. Although this is my first foray into iOS, so I'm probably making a lot of mistakes right now.
Could you not build up a lot of speed in the ecliptic plane with the slingshot effect, and then use the gravity of a planet or the sun to deflect the orbit perpendicular to the ecliptic? (I mean in practice this maybe be unlikely to be feasible, but in theory it is with the right planet arrangement)
No it wasn't. As sc68cal says, its a patchbomb. And if you think otherwise, let me know how I can revert his changes to remove short tags and the mysql* changes using a single git command (hint, there isn't).

I'm all for changes to an open source project - whether it acts like one or not - but every open source developer should, at some point, learn that gigantic patchsets with lots of unrelated changes are a big no-no.
Pretty cool. Probably best for a novice -- I knew most of these. Great way to learn stuff from scratch.
Well, actually there is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_depletion
I love HN: you can ask companies questions, they answer.
3 Low-Competition Niches In Retail Software
Are you suggesting that Chinese will buy an iPad to do their computing?
> These tests were run against a copy of the live database in a production environment.

Read above line twice. He is saying that test is done in 'production environment'. Do not assume there is 'development environment' for testing within 'production environment'
Blah blah politics blah blah blah. Flagged.
length/address pair.
Can you explain how the cost of trying another service is high? If you hear about another search engine that's supposed to be better, it seems easy enough to try it for a few searches or compare results. Seems like plenty of people tried Duck Duck Go and others, but they simply weren't better.

The other way to beat google at search is to disrupt/obviate the search market the way that the social networks are purportedly trying to do. Which I'm entirely skeptical about.
ie/windows-plugin-only websites, for one
There is an anecdote I've read a few times:

"During the space race back in the 1960's, NASA was faced with a major problem. The astronaut needed a pen that would write in the vacuum of space. NASA went to work. At a cost of $1.5 million they developed the "Astronaut Pen". Some of you may remember. It enjoyed minor success on the commercial market.

The Russians were faced with the same dilemma.

They used a pencil."

The idea is to show outcome-oriented thinking. The desired outcome wasn't to use a pen, but rather, to simply write or record.
I think all politicians suffer from Narcissism.
Microsoft has talked about "cloud computing" for a long time and not delivered anything. Even a bad anything.

They haven't delivered Live SkyDrive, or Windows Live, or http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/ or http://www.microsoft.com/online/exchange-hosted-services.asp... or http://www.microsoft.com/hosting/en/us/solutions/hostedcrm.a... or http://www.microsoft.com/online/sharepoint-online.aspx or http://www.hotmail.com or the MSN Music store?
Swiss, U.S. in talks on tax probe settlement
Turning a $1000 loan into a $66 million exit – one Shark’s story
Notifications for when new imagery is added to Google Maps and Earth
Re: E-mail

That's the thing that annoys me the most about Yahoo.

I don't want a sluggish, UI heavy e-mail client. I want minimalism without in-browser tabbing.
Exactly, all this is is marketing, yet a lot of the commenters here have been swept up in it.
Would be best if they would also say how the registration of the imagery changes/improves with each update. That would let others who base their geodata on Google imagery propagate the update.
Every reader of that blogpost: Oh blabla unfair, the C code of the thing would be faster if the thing had included the other thing blabla.

I think its a fun benchmark :)
I was there. His talk was OK (best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago, etc.) if a little too buttoned up. Must have filtered out the Rand part. Steve Hoffman's talk was much better, I think.
I never suggested that there was scientific evidence that taking showers has health benefits. I simply indicated that I've started taking cold showers, that I'm getting value out of doing so and that perhaps readers should try taking a cold shower and seeing if it also gives them value.

I've linked to another blog post that suggests there are health benefits - I encourage you to read it, perhaps look for others and form your own opinion.

http://gettingstronger.org/2010/03/cold-showers/
I don't think we disagreed on the tense: My point is that there was indeed plenty of apps for Symbian.

I find it extremely odd that someone working with Symbian wouldn't know HOW to install apps in the phone. Or maybe they were not tech people?

I had to check some dates:

We released "Pro Session Golf" first as part of the N93 Golf Edition package in 2006[1], and later in 2007[2] as a downloadable standalone. And it definitely wasn't the only Symbian app around at the time!

Where are you based? I am from Finland, I guess Symbian
products and especially app culture varied a lot between countries.

[1] http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/news/item/4143_Nokia_N93_Golf...

[2] http://www.prosessiongolf.com/press/Pro_Session_Press_Releas...

BTW, about ways to install apps to Symbian devices, I forgot the popular and simple way that I personally hated: Nokia PC Suite and USB or Bluetooth -connection.
I'm just pissed that he didn't even bother to actually fork the project. On Github! WOW! All the previous commits before the fork? Gone. Poof. It's completely without any context. Even though there's a big "FORK" button!
It would be absolutely great if you also added icons, color coding or some clever visual convention to make them understandable at a glance.

I'm thinking about something like this http://goo.gl/9g7jx or - possibly - even simpler (e.g. like the CC icons)!

That would absolutely make it a winner for me.
Do Us a Favor and Read About This Social Start-up Called Favo.rs
Actually, the cost is your click habits. Google is all about getting advertisers to sign on by saying "we have better information on all these people because we house all their data." If you are comfortable with that, that's fine.

Personally, I like Apple's (and for the most part Microsoft) "we don't give a shit about you unless you pay us money." When I stop paying them, I don't have to worry about them keeping any of my data. When I stop using Google products do I have the same guarantee? This is the same argument I use against Facebook.
That anecdote, by the way, is an urban legend: http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/spacepen.asp
Nice, now only $65 per megabyte. You could txt someone an entire Blu-Ray disk for only $3.3 million!
Well I wasn't sure what you meant by in a batch. I agree that it wasn't well done, but I wasn't commenting on that.

It's especially interesting considering he says this in the comments:

...I don't want to leave it as a stand alone project. I modified PHP as proof of concept in order to get these changes into one of the next releases.
When I took the intro digital logic course at Caltech in the late '70s or early '80s, the textbook had a chapter at the end called something like "The Engineer as Dope Pusher" that urged engineers to not get carried away by technology.

An example he gave was designing a timer for a clothes dryer. The user needs to be able to specify how long to try the clothes. The dryer should run for that long and stop.

The standard solution was a mechanical timer. It had a dial. The consumer turned the dial to the appropriate time, the dryer started, and when the timer ticked down the dryer stopped.

Engineers were starting to replace these with digital solutions. The digital solution was a lot more fun for the engineer. He'd get to design some circuitry, maybe use a microprocessor. He'd need a power supply for the electronics. He could have buttons and a nifty LED display. Maybe have preprogrammed drying times.

That's a hell of a lot more fun for the engineer than to just specify sticking some commodity mechanical timer in there like his father and grandfather would have done.

However, the mechanical timer is cheaper, easier to build into the dryer, more reliable, and easier to use for the consumer. There is no advantage whatsoever to the consumer or the dryer company in using the custom digital solution--it serves no purpose other than the entertain the engineer who designs it.
I'm sure Windows 8 will be a huge improvement over iOS5. It has to be to adhere to corporate needs. No large buiness is going to want to put anything in Apple's datacenters, and iOS5 will not allow any type of serious adminitstration or configuration, or it would threaten what Apple is trying to build. i.e. iOS5 comes in any color you like, as long as it's black or white.

When Win8 is released, it will be the defacto standard inside Fortune 500s and that's all Microsoft really cares about.
The Steve Jobs WWDC 1997 speech that was linked on here the other day - he was talking about his dream for the future, and mentioned that he doesn't want a hand writing computer with local storage like the Newton, he wants a screen and a keyboard which syncs to the network data stores where his data is.

iPad pretty much does that, at least for email and buying audio and video and apps from iTMS. Windows tablets didn't - they were local data, handwriting based, windowed Apps, like a movable desktop.

They didn't just fail because their spec was poor and their tech was early, they failed because they weren't a compelling thing to use, they were like an ordinary computer but worse.
I love this gesture, and I wish phone OSs made more use of the screen edges this way. I find it to be very easy and natural to reach above the top of the screen and pull down. It requires no precision at all.
Video: Steve Jobs' pitch to build a 'spaceship' in Cupertino
I completely agree! We are working on this and this is one of our fist aims, I'm really proud you pointed it out.
I'm already in touch with Aza Raskin to implement his beautiful icons, proposed here: http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/privacy-icons/

If you have any other idea or feedback, just drop me a line at andrea@iubenda.com or write a comment here! I want to know from you where we should point our efforts!

Andrea Giannangelo, Founder of iubenda
I am not an expert at these things but if something didn't take off despite your marketing efforts. Your product probably doesn't have a market. e-books might be hot but not the niche balloon business. You should move onto the next e-book. Hopefully it will do better.

If you want someone to just bounce things/ideas off, hit me up, email is in the profile.
Yes, of course there are exceptions to every generality. Man also isn't conditioned to sit at a desk for 8 hours a day or eat highly processed foods on a consistent basis. This doesn't disprove his point that exposing yourself to a little bit of the natural environment is probably a good thing.
I see. Why is strlen such a hit then?
the Ayn Rand stuff doesn't work ... it didn't, not even for her.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uz2j3BhL47c
It's not so much a technical issue as it is a marketing decision. The store being down creates a sizable amount of suspense. Of course they could leave it up if they wanted to, but it's as much part of Apple folklore now as Steve's turtleneck.
That anecdote happens to be false though. The Astronaut Pen was made independently of NASA and was sold to them (and Russia) like it's sold to the public. Wood pencils pose trouble in zero-g (graphite dust, broken tips, flammable wood, etc).

http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/spacepen.asp
Well what project would he fork? The (apparently) official PHP mirror is way out of date:

https://github.com/php/php-src
well, you can do this with email to some extent. i was concerned about my reliance on google, but didn't find any other search engine as good (i use google a lot for debugging and related technical work). so what i did was:

- use the "disconnect" app to make my google searches more anonymous https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/jeoacafpbcihiomhla...

- install my own web server. i use procmail for filtering, with all email stored in imap directories. then i use mairix for searching http://www.rpcurnow.force9.co.uk/mairix/ . finally, i read email with the mutt client.

that works surprisingly well. mairix is awesome once you get used to it (you call it from the command line - or by pressing "!" in mutt - and it populates a maildir directory, so you can see the result in the mail client; it's also fast - uses an index database for speed). and i can read mail remotely over ssh (i use a free aws instance with an ssh tunnel to provide external access - my isp's modem does not accept incoming connections).

configuring email in linux has gotten much easier over the years - yast in opensuse pretty much does everything you need these days.
We actually know what gravity really is (basically, curving of space due to mass), and we know why the speed of light is the speed limit of the universe (it's necessarily true because space is continuous and you can't teleport). These come from general relativity, which is an extremely well test theory. Whatever we find out about gravity and light in the future must at least reduce to general relativity.

What I find curious is that it's the people who don't know what we know who think we'll overturn what we know. Perhaps that's because it's easier to say "Oh, someone will overturn that" when you don't actually know what "that" is.
Dropbox Etiquette
If anyone of voting age bought their mother to a job interview at my company that would be the shortest interview on record.

Seriously, what's wrong with these people ? Are they so mentally stunted ?
Apple's Post-Purchase Experience
Ask HN: In San Fran Area today only, Looking for interviews
Hey guys, I flew out here yesterday for two interviews with startups and one went well, while the other was mediocre. I figured that while I'm here and the day is far from over, I might see if anyone else is looking for developers.

About me:

I'm a junior level developer + project manager by day. My biggest tools are Ruby, Rails, Javascript (jQuery mostly), and HTML/CSS. Half front-end/half back-end dev in my day job.

I'm passionate, fun, outgoing, and ambitious. I want to move out here and build something awesome, whether it be with an established team or something just getting started.

email me at aanon2247@gmail.com if you're interested in talking.
Coincidentially I had just taken a cold shower before reading this. But then, it's 95 degrees out; it's 75 with high humidity in the earth-sheltered house, and in these conditions a spring-fed shower is very welcome.

I'll bet this guy is going from an aggressively airconditioned room to a cold shower. No wonder it's unpleasant.
Well, then just use git svn to update the master of his fork to match the official PHP svn. It'll just be a fast forward anyway.

Two birds with one stone.
Not only are you wrong, but your links are to vendors of pens that emulate touch. The vendors aren't arguing that "style = touch" but that "our stylus works on touchscreens" (as opposed to styluses that work on pen-based systems).

The fundamental idea of the iPad is that you don't need something else to make it work. It isn't that you mustn't use something else.
on the banking video: go to feefighters.com - save yourself a ton of money by making payment processors compete for your business. Almost all of them integrate with authorize.net which does what ryan was talking about with recurring subscriptions and storing cc's on their servers (so you don't have to be PCI compliant).

on the accounting video: ryan is wrong about quickbooks only working on one machine. It is designed to live on a fileshare and have multiple clients connecting to it on your network. They also have an online version, however almost ALL US accountants will know what to do with a quickbooks file.
In this case, it would be better to maintain it as several topic branches (so that each logical change can be implemented in as many patches as necessary), and then a good old octopus merge as "master" that you force-update every so often.

(Yes, everyone hates you for modifying published history, it's evil, it will give you bad breath, yeah yeah yeah. But you have to think of this use case as a "code wiki" rather than "list of changes leading to the current state". After the patches are accepted, then don't force update them. When they are still in flux, modify history as often as necessary to make your changes easily comprehensible.)
I'm definitely one of that core group, but since the twitter app started doing push notifications on mentions the only notifications I get from Notifo are ones I send myself from my webapps.

Grantit, I've found those insanely useful, but can see how that's only getting so big.