skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thats partially how the site came about, we were looking for an easier way to make heatmaps that could:
1. Be made without some large enterprise software solution
2. Could easily be shared on Facebook or a blog with embedding
3. Loaded fast & maintained integrity with zooming
If you're open to suggestions, I and I'm sure lots of others would love to see one for objective C.
Yeah, but don't let my results get you down. Just keep in mind that whatever you do, it seems like the App Store still involves a bit of luck.
Very cool.
I tried to run the form example in the API documentation, and it complains that js-bidirectional-input is undefined. Am I doing something wrong?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2705743
Have the ruby thing on github by any chance? Id love to check it out. I've been toying with the idea of writing a mud in ruby, and giving it a graphical web frontend to make it more accessible to new players.
There are already tools like Sencha http://www.sencha.com/products/animator/
(as I commented on the site)

> Account Log-in
> 6 The browser submits Turing’s username and bcrypted hash to SecureR.
> 7 SecureR directly compares the hash submitted by Turing with the one stored in his user record. If they match, account access is granted.

So, suppose I’ve stolen the password database of SecureR. Unfortunately, I can’t recover the password of the user. However, I only need the hash of it (which is stored in the database) to log in, so I don’t need to recover the password anyway.

This does protect against exposing the user’s password, so it’s not a total waste. An additional wrinkle:

You could store the hash of the bcrypted password in the database. The browser would submit the bcrypted password in 6, and the server would hash it in 7 before checking it. This makes recovering the password infeasible but logging in is cheap for the server, and the input to the hash function has high entropy, so it will still be hard to crack. At this point though, you need a security expert to evaluate it.
Added the bookmarklet, I click, and nothing happens. Using Chrome.12.0.742
Is there a VOIP client that doesn't suck? I haven't had much luck finding one.
Pivots, Veers, and Omniscience
Fair use is a potential defense in court, not a blanket immunity from suit.

Pleading fair use is like pleading insanity, there's only a narrow band of conditions it applies to and you can't plead it until you're standing infront of a judge.
the story would be more educating with some more details. may be it's really 16 degrees pivot, how do we know.
Subscriber Data Stolen from Major Military Publisher in Recent Cyber Attack
The most irritating trope of math and CS literature has to be whenever something interesting or useful is "left as an exercise to the reader." I always felt that phrase has no place in the internet age, where the concept of a "page limit" is laughable and a simple hyperlink can point me to chapters upon chapters of appendices. Calling something "trivial" is swallowable, and perhaps this article's example of "it easily follows that..." is the mathematician's secret handshake that the steps in between are boring, but pointing out an interesting conclusion and then saying the reader deserves an exercise to actually make sense of it, I mean... isn't the point of academic writing to communicate research and results already performed? Wouldn't it be better to show the work for your assertion so that others could critique it or offer even better solutions?

I know somebody is about to point out to me that I'm being "lazy" and should enjoy doing more work to learn so and so, but being asked regularly in the literature to reinvent somebody else's wheel seems to run counter to everything we do in CS (and academia in general, I would think). This article aside, I do sometimes feel that academic writing in the math/CS realm occasionally reeks a little bit of snobbery, where communication is held secondary to keeping up appearances.
Depends what stage startup, not neccesarily earning a salary if you're just starting it yourself, and either living of savings or a day job.
Often the DB will show unacceptable time to reply to the ORDER BY stuff but will fetch comments by single ID without problems. But when that second part is a problem as well it is a good idea to use Redis as a "vulgar" cache for items as well, so that the recent stuff are probably into a Redis hash and you can fetch everything with a single pipelined MULTI/EXEC call (and fetch all the items returned as nils from the DB).
How is this them being owned?
This is a great example of how to promote adoption of a new technology. More companies should pay attention to how their product can be used rather than what their product is.
The hardest cases: When children die, justice can be elusive
> Which browsers support Swiffy output?

> Swiffy uses SVG features that are currently only supported by Webkit-based browsers such as Safari (on desktop and mobile) and Chrome.

That's not the HTML5 future I wanted :(

In Opera it fails due to JS errors that don't look SVG-specific. It's a shame, because Opera's SVG support is a bit more complete than WebKit's: http://www.codedread.com/svg-support.php (sadly the Swiffy's site doesn't say exactly which feature it needs)

Anyway, it's great that they're using SVG. Good use-case for SVG will help it get more love from browser vendors, and perhaps developers won't have to reinvent SVG with canvas :)
Ask HN: Where to sell software?
Which hosted eCommerce services you suggest to sell my own semi-pro shareware software?
If the marketing copy said something like "if we screw up, you can sue us" while the TOS says "we can't be held liable if we screw up", then that might be relevant. However, I've never seen dropbox say anything like that in their advertising, so there doesn't seem to be any contradiction.
Thanks for your response.

One of my irons in the fire is an iOS game. Can you give me an example of how these get carved up into work units? This is exactly the kind of thinking that is fuzzy to someone like me.
Fighting Software Erosion with Explicit Contracts (The New Heroku, 4/4)
"It just happened to me."

No, you have years of experience in a medium that prepared you to interpret that event a certain way.

"it was because you were prepped by playing the game to experience that scene in a particular way."

That's like saying, "Yeah, I jumped into the Iliad at the funeral games for Patroclus, and I just don't get it: it didn't have an impact at all." Duh. The literary experience leading up to that event leads to a connection to the characters that has little weight if you skip it. Saying the same thing applies to video games isn't an argument as to why video games can't be expressive. It means they can, and you have to invest in them to have that experience, much like reading a book.

And the best games aren't "built around" movie-like cutscenes. But suppose they were, and that those scenes were evocative. How, exactly, is that a bad thing? It's not, unless you've a priori decided it is.
It doesn't look like you've ever offered the full app for free. Have you considered playing the "free for a day" game to drive some interest?
http://appshopper.com/games/bullseye-factory

Have you considered updating the app icon? It looks quite dark and flat rather than fun and cartoony like many game icons.

I was a little surprised to see how non-spherical the balls look in your screenshots. If it can still perform well with a more detailed ball model, I would think that would help the look of the screenshots.
There's Edit Room, my product, a dead-simple CSS3 animation creation tool.

http://edit-room.com/
There's a DC meetup of HN readers tonight you may want to check out:

http://meetup.hackernewsdc.org/
Play Infocom Games Online
They can't multi-task, and send one PR guy out to send a batch of e-mails informing their users what happened? Literally everyone in the company was chasing down this one miscreant?
>the attention paid to LulzSec — a litter of script kiddies with kindergarten knowledge of the basest forms of technological harassment since 90s AOL proggies — is disgusting. And pathetic. And dangerous.

Many of the things I've read in criticism of lulzsec is that the writer always considers themselves better, somehow above the techniques employed below themselves. They're writing lulzsec off like some snooty bankrobber who prefers elaborate oceans eleven style heists so much that they find the mere idea of breaking into an unlocked bank at night distasteful. They seem to gloss over the fact that lulzsec got results. Enough doors were unlocked at night that they caused a good shitstorm.

If you want to use them as a springboard for discussion on responsible disclosure, fine. Were they immature? Of course. Want to analyze what the coverage means for the current state of journalism be it tech-specific or not, blog or real news outlet? Good, go do that. But what I am sick of seeing, is the "Oh yeah, well, I could do that if I wanted to, I just don't want to." attitude. Fuck you buddy. What did you do to stop those widespread vulnerabilities from being exploited? Oh, nothing? So you're just miffed that the culture and collective ego you bought into was shaken? You deserve it.
When I read "X is great" while using Y, I reflexively put my choice under scrutiny. I see that as the main reason to talk about technologies X or Y at all. And if X has some terrible drawback, network effects can make it worthwhile for me to dissuade other people. Hg vs. git isn't a compelling example, but if I want to never face another svn-induced merge conflict again, I myself am actually better off if everyone I may collaborate with already knows how troublesome that tool is (I would have said "nightmarish" in the svnmerge.py days).
Excellent point. Storyboarding certainly helped. It also helped me realise how I was thinking in big pictures and my developer pal preferred the mechanics.
Seems to be limited to 512kB. Thats not much of a demo.
This article/blog post is wrong. None of the reasons listed had anything to do with his app store success.

Word of mouth was there: and it was 'don't bother'. If it's an app or game that people have to have, most of these techniques would have yielded different results.

Except for a few: like submitting to websites for review... most of them are looking for cash for reviews, so you get what you pay for.

I haven't seen any games that topped the list that were not worthy of chart-toppers... If games or apps like this were chart-toppers, then the chart wouldn't be worth much.
What bugs me is when folks use "pivot" to avoid having to confess that an idea failed or was poorly conceived. It's really hard to learn and get better at something without moments of reckoning where you take stock after something fails.
I'll add:

Soundproofing. The best, reasonable cost version I encountered (in someone else's executive office) was expanding foam sprayed between the drywall surfaces. In this case, installed during construction -- I can't imagine it was that expensive to add.

A window admitting natural light.

I add this because I've had the experience of working in private rooms, but next to very loud/noisy people. Still miserable -- sometimes open space is better because the noise blends (a very limited form of better).
I'm an independent iOS developer. My paid apps have sold over 100,000 copies at 99¢ or higher. In total, my iOS apps (including free apps) have been downloaded over 7 million times.

I took a look at your app in the App Store.

Here's your problem: your icon.

The icon is the most prominent thing the user sees when first looking at your app in the App Store.

Change your icon, and you'll get more downloads. Trust me :-)

Feel free to contact me if you'd like to discuss good icon design, or other under-appreciated aspects of selling an app.
A few more thoughts:

- When you do put together the ad-supported version, include a mechanism for it to pull text from a web address and display it in a popup -- that way when you release Bullet Factory: Super-Bullet Edition, you can update that text file and all free versions will tell the players (pirated or otherwise) that the new release is out.

I'm always surprised more devs don't do this.

- I didn't want to sound critical or insulting about "not worth 99 cents" comment above, let me further qualify it.

I am not saying your app or your effort isn't worth 99 cents in a vacuum, I am saying given everything else I have to consider along side it, I may want to spend that 99 cents on a different app.

It is the same reason I won't buy $5.99 new releases on VUDU to stream them -- it's a hell of a lot cheaper than a theater, but along-side "free" on Netflix, it seems insanely expensive.

So when I compare Bullet Factory along side some of those top-10 or top-20 games that are 99 cents, I'm hesitant to spend to even get my foot in the door to check your app out, which doesn't help you at all.

A free version with an announcement feature (that maybe checks every 10 launches) would give you nice marketing for whatever game.next() is.

Hope that helps.
As requested:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank#The_intentional_surfer...

> The Google toolbar sends information to Google for every page visited, and thereby provides a basis for computing PageRank based on the intentional surfer model.

For it to display a pagerank, it has to send the url to Google (otherwise, how is it going to know what to display the rank for?). Google can then send the crawler to that address later.

> If valid, I'd consider this an almost dangerous breach of privacy.

I don't believe they monitor who is going where. Just where people are going. Although it would be trivial for them to monitor who is going where ...

Also, an FYI, if you are logged in to Google and you're using their search engine, then they ARE monitoring you. Check out Google Web History.
If instances require more RAM, they can cram fewer instances into a single box. That's my understanding, at least.
-> http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2705918
I enjoyed the Calculus for fools link :)

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/33283/33283-pdf.pdf
Everyone who was affected by the bug was notified by email, and Dropbox's CEO even gave them his phone number so that they could contact him. As I see it, that's the proper response to issues like this: informing everyone who was affected, and not panicking all the unaffected users.
This is the page I get when I visit that url http://i.imgur.com/e4ske.png
Chromosome ends tied to life history, chronic diseases
Playing Rybread Celsius on my browser is giving me the warm fuzzies. Those were such fun times!...
I can't help but wonder if all of this might have gone away had they even just appeared to take this issue seriously. They didn't even bother to reply to my request for access logs on my account, personally.
Or Canadian men were eating way more than their fair share of Skittles in 1980 -- their rates of diabetes are still higher than women's.

http://www40.statcan.ca/l01/cst01/health53a-eng.htm

I would guess that Canadian men have had problems with diabetes for a long time (>30yrs) and women are now starting to catch up. But I think you'd need more numbers than are in that map to get any real answers.
As you're not looking for any sugar coating, after watching the video showing the gameplay you would need to pay me to want to play it. The reason is that there is no "why" to it. Shooting low-resolution textured balls wasn't fun in the late 80's, and I'm not seeing anything in the video that tells me it won't just be a chore to play.

Is there some back-story to this game that is interesting? Are these spheres of mutant gel being produced by the evil Dr. Klaus Scheitzenburger to turn children into mindless drones so that he can take over the planet and only I can stop it using my Mutant-b-Gone sphere blaster?

Oh, none of that? It's just a sphere popping game? There's no marketing that can save that.

Now a killer back-story isn't a requirement, but it would help if it were "juicy fun". There's some great advice here: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/2438/how_to_prototype_...
Zynga Planning to file for IPO
$15-20 billion valuation
The most irritating thing to me is when someone says they want to understand something, but then they are unwilling to put in any real effort. It is a misapprehension, misunderstanding and misrepresentation to say:

... reinventing the wheel runs counter
to everything we do in CS.

You can read all you like about how to juggle - if you don't put in the hours, you won't be able to do it.

You can read all you like about how to unicycle - if you don't put in the hours, you won't be able to do it.

You can read all you like about how to program - if you don't put in the hours, you won't be able to do it.

Skills require practice. These instances of "left as an exercise for the interested reader" are to help you really learn and properly understand the material. And if you don't care, don't bother. If you are unwilling to put in the time then the chances are that you would end up thinking you understand an explanation, whereas in fact you don't.

The above is only for good writing, of course. There are plenty of instances of bad writing, but that's not then a complaint about the subject, it's a complaint about the writer.

Someone once said of Feynman that his lectures were beautifully clear, and that those who listened gained real insight and understanding. Until they had to use it. Then they realised that they didn't really understand it at all.

If you want understanding, do the exercises.

So there you are, I've done as you predicted and pointed out that you're just being lazy, and that if you really want to learn then you have to put in the work. Just because you preempted it, doesn't mean it's wrong. It's right, you already know it. Complaining won't help you.

Put in the time.
That's natural, since mathematical notation is heavily slanted towards writing on paper and symbol manipulation. Use of one-letter variable names and highly context-sensitive notation reduces the number of pen strokes, but doesn't help the reader.

Modern programming languages and conventions are quite a bit better in that respect, since people design them to be maintainable. A program using one-letter variable names for everything and a set of similar macros meaning entirely different things in different files would be considered unreadable by pretty much any programmer.

IMO, the world would immensely benefit from another version of mathematical notation designed specifically for explaining things, rather than doing calculations on paper.
High level concepts like this have their place, but what really makes or breaks a company is the hundreds of details that you have to get right. I'd love to see way more discussion of the details and less business guru pontification.
ReverseHN - find the original discussion thread for any page on the internet
I see you had the bravery to make that statement without resorting to a one-time account, so your karma isn't effected. Bravo!

Now here's my answer: This isn't about sexism. It's about the way a group of men behave when they are working in / learning a field of study where the overwhelming majority have, in the past, been men. It creates a lot of needless tension for the women in the group.

Women stand a far better chance of learning to program when they are in a non-intimidating environment where they don't have to put up with a bunch of condescending jerks (take your pick): staring at them, competing with them, putting them in "their place", patronizing them. And this is not because they are women, but because enough of the guys are jerks. Reverse the roles, and this would be just as true.
Close Encounters of the 3rd Kind: Not the Movie
Lets set up a gambling site on the probability of this actually happening and donate all proceeds to The Church of Scientology in Will Smith's name.

Would be kind of funny actually...
for a C corp the income taxes are deductible up to a reasonable amount (so its not quite two full income taxes). At a small level, it may more sense to make salary payments rather than dividends (depends on the scale)

last i recall, pub 535 discussed this
The important thing about this bug is that it allowed log-ins without passwords. No passwords were compromised. Therefor, asking users to change their passwords would have been FUD, as well as making it more difficult to identify which users were affected by the person exploiting the bug (if almost every user logs in during 4 hours, you're going to have a lot of trouble identifying the <100 accounts who were accessed by the attacker).
To gain any sort of traction, I suggest allowing more choices than code, log-in, or watch a video.

For someone who doesn't necessarily want to code scheme right away, log-in with their account, or put headphones in to watch a video - you've lost them immediately. Never to come back.

The option that is missing - let me read about it.
First this:

1plusV claims its sites were “blacklisted” by Google and lost most of their traffic over a period of several years, suffering “irreparable” harm

then this:

Between 2007 and 2010 no less than 30 vertical search engines created by 1plusV were “black-listed”, some of which showed significant business potential.

By definition, a business that can suffer "irreparable harm" because of another entity's actions which are outside their control does not show "siginificant business potential".
This was my first thought too -- when I saw the icon at the top of your page, I was bracing myself for an awful-looking game and saying to myself "well there's the problem right there". But then the game looks great, compelling even. Talk to this guy about your icon!
Today's AppSumo deal is very misleading, disappointing.
It's counterintuitive but Adobe should be working on a project like this.

A decent server side SWF->HTML5 would enable existing websites to offer the first class experience (the SWF) to Flash enabled browsers, and push a HTML5 conversion for non-Flash browsers (Apple mobile devices). It would shaft Apple (Why does this run so slow on the iPad?) and slow the move away from Flash (Adobe could still make a credible 'runs everywhere' argument).
And as a sidenote, if you look at e.g., Africa, you can see women's rates are going up faster in many countries, and in fact globally:

"Across the world the rate of diabetes rose by 18% for men and by 23% for women"
Twitter is claimed to have pivoted from podcasting to microblogging.

The fixed point there is the team, and the knowledge they gained.
"Mesothelioma" is a lucrative keyword because anyone who has mesothelioma has most likely been grievously injured by some commercial entity. I'm sure there's lots of scams revolving around it, but it's hard to imagine a clearer-cut justification for suing a company than that company negligently giving you terminal cancer.

These two parent comments --- unintentionally, I'm confident --- give the impression that "mesothelioma" is a get-rich-quick scheme for plaintiffs. But if a plaintiff actually has mesothelioma, I don't think it's anything to snark about.
Captain Crunch and the Crazymakers. Working conditions in games.
Software will cost small businesses $6 a user each month for a package with programs like Office Web Apps and Exchange e-mail software, Microsoft said. For an additional $12 a month, companies can add a full version of Office, including Word and Excel programs.

Versus Google Apps for free, up to 10 users and you get the full Docs suite.

I think this can work.
Definitely the minority here on HN, on Reddit, and other similar websites, but exit the bubble, and there's a whole world of other people! Some of them even own TVs and buy newspapers :o
I can't help but wonder if content owners might view this as a threat to the security of their flash creations. Afterall, this is essentially a decompiler, isn't it?