skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
BeOS was the greatest experience I've ever had with an OS.

It felt faster booted from a ZIP Drive on a 160MHz PPC with 192MB of RAM than my machine feels today, and this is not an overstatement. There wasn't a single click that didn't instantly produce a response.

Everybody points to iOS's design, but to me, one of the reasons for its success is that a system that fits in your pocket feels faster than the one at your desk.

If more people had been exposed to it back then, maybe we wouldn't put up with today's software as it is.
I know how you feel. I invested a lot of time in a game that just isn't selling. Nor is the free version. I mean what is wrong with free games? :)

I think sometimes we just fail to see that our games are really crap. I totally fell in love with the idea of a real-time multiplayer quiz for the iPhone. But nobody else did.

[EDIT]I am not saying your game is no good. I haven't really played it. More of a general comment on how we may not fairly judge our own work[/EDIT]
You can get some raw data from Wolfram Alpha:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=United+States%2C+United...
U.S. Mint Stores $1 Billion In Dollar Coins That No One Wants
Just to throw in my own "I like X" better. I recently had some pages that Beautiful Soup just choked on and couldn't parse.

I like html5lib, which will even spit out a Beautiful Soup parse tree if that's your thing.
Ask HN: What do you think of my first app WoOtmatch and what should I do next?
Actually, the most prominent scholars in this field often do include land ownership as a natural right. John Locke, the modern father of natural law, described natural rights as, "life, liberty, and estate". I think its largely settled philosophy now.

Copyrights are still much more debatable. The main defense for pro-copyright activists are that they're necessary for the economy. I tend more and more to the belief that the economy will change as a result -- a freer economy, but a different one.
I tried disabling Javascript and loading Facebook, and it recommended using the mobile version.

Maybe it would be more feasible to merge "mobile" and "accessible" versions into a unified interface?

The issue with building a separate network is that it singles out people with disabilities, meaning they'll have less people to connect with, and would most likely feel ostracized. If accessibility is a big issue with current social networks, it's probably best solved like any other issue - get a lot of people talking about it and make sure the right people at Facebook (or any other company) are aware of exactly what needs to be changed.

That said, are the mobile versions not adequately accessible? What sort of disabilities aren't being accounted for? We have screen readers, text magnification, tablets, touchscreen phones, desktop computers, laptops, braille terminals.. even Simple English Wikipedia. I'm sure there are plenty of edge cases, but some concrete examples would help the discussion.
Just make sure you can tie everything you do to your customer's needs. If you find yourself thinking about technology for technology's sake (e.g. "let's rewrite in Scala" or "We need a 12-tier system to manage scalability) (for you curtsy user...)), start worrying.

Fortunately, there is an easy cure: go talk to customers. Your good customers (or potential customers) will point you the right way.
After taking a look into Facebook's API, I concluded that you are right, although some details are missing.

With the process you described, it would be really easy for apps to simply use another app's id. So, it seems that Facebook has implemented additional measures to prevent this. (e.g. using bundle ID and iTunes app store ID for iPhone apps)

Also, Facebook published iOS SDK that required secret key, but has since updated it to remove that requirement.
Lukas is one of the preeminent thinkers in the field of user experience & user interface design and if this book is anything like his blog, it'll be a must-buy for anyone working on software that other people use. Congrats!
They have a call centre in my hometown, handling calls for a cell phone provider and a credit card company (for the most part at least). My understanding is the company mostly does incoming calls, ie. customer support lines and the like. Their operators identify themselves by the company they're taking calls for, not as Online Support.
Password  - e.mail
Anyone know how to find email passwords?
Abstractions… Enough is enough…
Pi is tough and pees on tau?
Not the same logic at all.
Being given the wrong medicine is entirely different due to the relationship between patient and doctor. That is a relationship defined by the position of trust the doctor has. It is a privileged relationship. And a Doctor is known to have years of training and experience behind his belt.

The relationship between a customer and a minimum-wage worker employee is entirely different. You don't expect them to have the years of training and experience behind them to help ensure everything runs smoothly.
I love Between the Folds as well. It totally inspired my 10 year old son, who has turned origami into a hobby.
IPA & X-SAMPA text-to-speech
Thanks. This is really helpful. I'm using PayPal because some clients and services only pay with it. I'm spending the money on online services and to buy stuff. Does this make me exposed to risk?

Another thing, I'm using my real information. Just a fake address. I heard from a user that he did that and then when he got caught, the disabled his account and transferred his balance to his bank account. Can this be true? And what are the legal issues that can happen?

I'm doing legal stuff.
Most Indian computers I've seen are standard American or British layouts. India has a lot of English speakers [1] and most computer-savvy folk, especially the kind that use Groupon will definitely know enough English to use English usernames and passwords.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-sp...
"I find it depressing that your comment was down-voted by at least two people — two people who, by virtue of their karma, are supposed to somehow have an understanding of what a productive comment is and what it isn't."

Am I missing something, or how can one possibly see a list of downvoters for a given comment?
Actually, I don't think this kind of standard iPhone app promotion advice is worthless at all. But like any business problem, not every technique works for every situation.
I wish I had some better advice to suggest, but in my experience, games are a particularly hard category to market and I've never been able to figure out what works well there.
look really hard.
Viralheat Grabs $4.25 Million For Affordable Social Media Intelligence
PayPal Money Market Fund to Close
I received this email this morning:

Thanks for using PayPal and the PayPal Money Market Fund. Unfortunately, we’ve decided to close the Money Market Fund, effective 7/29/11.

What does this mean for you? PayPal will transfer any undisbursed dividends you’ve earned into your PayPal account within 7 business days after we close the fund. Don’t worry; you don’t have to do a thing.

Your 2011 tax documents will continue to be available on the Fund Summary page in your PayPal account throughout 2012. You’ll receive a tax statement from PayPal only if you’ve earned $10 or more in dividends in 2011.

Thanks for your understanding,
PayPal
Ben Chandler really has a lot of what's great about those games. Try Awakener[1], Air and Eternally Us

[1]http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/games.php?action=search...!
I think it is unfair for them to be required to email their entire userbase when maybe 0.1% were POSSIBLY affected.

They emailed the people that logged in during that time and anyone that had a shared folder with anyone that logged in during that time. That seems pretty fair to me.
That is a really cool idea. I could easily see how it could be helpful to daily deals websites (groupon, livingsocial etc.) as it would allow them to see where they are getting traffic from and perhaps focus more on deals in those areas.

Also any sort of online marketplace would benefit from your services. They could use myHeatmap to see where most of their users are coming from and therefore figure out where they need to boost advertising.
Couldn't you use inspectdb to introspect your Flask database and use Django's admin that way? You'd have to remember to do it every time you changed your database; but it'd probably get you most of the way there.
Monkey Island on the iPad? Sir, you've made my day :)

I miss the golden age of graphical adventure games: Monkey Island, Day Of The Tentacle, Space Quest, King Quest, Hands Of Fate and many others... :/ Today's games aren't that fun, or maybe I'm just old.
it was so embarrassing i had to remove it. what was i thinking
Mostly yes. Then, the fixed all the bugs that particular compiler flag exposed. Then, they compiled new repos.
Does anyone know if hdf5 would be an acceptable optional replacement for the current Redis disk format?

I have a console app that's backed by Redis (in much the same manner as described in this post), but I save my sessions to h5 when I switch between datasets. That means I need to combine the Redis data with my app data and export -- I do this using two separate h5 files, with with the appropriate links.

It would be nice (for me anyway) if I could do a Redis-native save, and move the resulting file. That would also improve my startup times when I reverse the process.

But, while h5 is nice for My data, I can't say it would be any good for generic Redis data...

thoughts?
Agreed. This is a great article that finally connected the dots in my head.

I'd like to see some recommendations on similar articles for other related tech (couch, mongo, hadoop, etc) that did the same for others.
WebKit is embeddable, sure, but if you're to write a browser that functions similarly to today's browser, it still takes months. You're gonna need to do bookmarks, tabs, history. Things have been made easier, surely but things are still as complicated as ever.

However this is drawn too far from the topic of Tau, what I'm trying to imply is that science and maths has work centuries with Pi, we've found many great theories with it as well. But in the modern era (quantum), Tau seems irrelevant (okay, I haven't studied too much about quantum, but I've read on articles and there's no mention on Pi either, correct me if I'm wrong).

What's the use of making things simple at the same time confusing people? Things have always worked out, and it should continue to work on.
These findings lead me to further believe something I have long suspected...Since 1980, the Women of Canada have not abided by the rules of halfsies. Stop eating my skittles, ladies. :(

In all seriousness, why do you think there's a noticeable difference between Canadian men and women according to this data? I mean from the looks of it most, countries Mens numbers were higher.
How to create an awesome 3D parallax effect with JQuery
Right. Most buttons I did notice feedback. It was mostly when I first entered the app. Didn't see feedback on the button in the splash screen or the screen immediately after (if I recall correctly). And yes, I had sound off.

Also, when posting to HN. It would probably be best to organize an up vote campaign. I'm not saying game HN to get on the front page, but getting some initial up votes and comments will help you to get others interested in a headline they might otherwise ignore in the "new" section.
Can bcrypt’s computational expense be reduced on the server side?
Essentially correct. The dying star does not collapse into a "smaller mass", the amount of mass stays the same (difference between the stars original mass and the cast off from the preceding supernova). It just gets crushed into a very tiny volume.
Swiffy: convert SWF files to HTML5
Not a call like that. I have received several calls offering to "renew my magazine subscription" on some magazine I don't read, and I always play along until they want my credit card number at which point I ask for a callback number and they hang up.

In general, I've gotten so weary of this that I never give any info even to valid callers unless they can spout off a whole load of info about my current relation with whoever they say the represent. They almost always say that I'm the first to ever point this out, which I find unbelievable.
Pre-1972 sound recordings is actually an issue currently being debated by the Copyright Office. http://www.copyright.gov/docs/sound/
While it's done all the time (see Obvious Corp and Twitter), one potential downside for a bootstrapped startup is that you'll need to make an extra effort to protect two names (trademarks, licenses, etc.).
My counter-advice would be this: if you want to make money writing apps, get consulting gigs and write them for somebody else.
Finally a case where Googles voice recognition (text-to-speech, incidentally, is the other way around) makes about as much sense as the original call...
I'm not GP, but Aeris's death was a big deal because it happened after the player had invested several hours into playing her (and probably given her some nice items). This is one of the strengths of the form you're talking about.
Ask HN: The Care & Feeding of Your Developer
Hi all,

I'm one of those creative types who has app ideas, but can't speak any digital languages. From harried dealings with my Comp. Eng. pals, I've learned that any developers I'm likely to consult with look at projects in a far different way than I do.

I'm wondering if you all can help us "ideas" types

1) Teach us how to present our ideas in a manner that is useful to the programmers,

and

2) Suggest tips for n00bs on sourcing our first developer.
P.S.

Since I've heard about Aeris being killed by Sepiroth before, I went ahead and watched it on YouTube, and I wasn't impressed. It must have been because I didn't play the game. If that scene affected you at all (if it looked like anything but cheesy crap animated with expressionless plastic dolls) it was because you were prepped by playing the game to experience that scene in a particular way. You can watch a clip of "La Strada" or "Midnight Cowboy" or "Unforgiven" or "Casablanca" out of context and at least get a sense of the emotional dynamics of the characters. That's the strength of movies. The strength of games is the immersion and feeling of personal involvement with the characters, personal involvement driven by your own actions, choices, and sacrifices. I may have felt like Ratso Rizzo was my friend, but I never picked up a john to get money for a bus ticket for us to leave town together. I may have shared Rick Blaine's feelings as he put Victor and Ilsa on the plane to Lisbon, but I didn't decide to do that. It just happened to me.

Games will always be second-rate next to movies when it comes to presenting scripted drama, but they don't have to feel that way. Aeris and Sepiroth is proof of that, I guess. Gameplay allows games to affect us in ways that movies can't and enables different and stronger emotional contexts for experiencing games as art. The art of games is in the gameplay. Detaching from gameplay is just a crutch, like filming a stage production, copying another art form because we don't understand the new one well enough yet.
This may be true, but it doesn't really address the point of the article. The argument is that modern games could take a lesson from text adventure games in engaging the players' imaginations.
Counters Everywhere, Storing Stats in MongoDB
500K Android devices activated daily and growing at over 4% per week
Merge is an excellent idea when two projects, frameworks, etc have the same goals (Not necessarily the same features). For example The Pylons Project taking BFG as is base and making Pyramid, with all the experience from Pylons community and BFG. This will make changes on both sides of the community but brings a new Framework with the possibility of improvement. I guess the idea is take the best from both frameworks y make a new one, better, with a big community, and a lot of knowledge from the previous experiences.
Newsflash: "if you build it they will come" is bullshit. It's dawned on your that you're not getting your message out.

Now what?

1. Buy ads. It costs about $0.00001 to show an ad banner on mobile. $0.01 to buy on a click basis. $10k to get into the app store top 25. Do the math. Minimums apply.

2. PR: meet/call or otherwise contact the people who can get your message out and convince them how cool your game is. Or pay someone who can do this for you.

3. ?

Marketing is hard work, get busy!
No, I didn't use recruiters based on the fact a lot of them are unscrupulous. I applied to Web product mgmt/project mgmt positions listed in the job boards.

I know the difference between case questions and brainteasers. However, its an entirely different story when a candidate can sense he's getting strung along. (And, no I am not an overly sensitive/emotional person.) The type of questions are not open-ended and nor aligned to measuring my skillset, but the queries are very pinpoint/detailed to deny these are hypothetical. Further, a simple/vague answer will bring "can you elaborate further?" Or, better yet, regarding a possible solution to an ecommerce issue, the head of operations pushes an Apple MBA in front of me and says, "you can type in the URL." Having researched these companies prior to the interview, and now in hindsight it is very obvious they were not only after a different vantage point, but to obtain "needle in the haystack" piece of compelling information.

Clever answers/solutions have rewarded job offers in the past. But I am a bit pessimistic having witnessed some rather interesting job interviews in Manhattan.
You need at least ~500 karma to downvote.
pi-bar? Nooooo, you'll make the Statistics community members' heads explode!
"Pishing attempt" could get one electrocuted if attempting this on a landline.

Oy Vay.
At the end of the day, he created a derivative work to be used in a commercial product without, as a minimum, even asking for permission.

Asking for permission is absolutely not a minimum for fair use.

Of course, we'll never know if it constituted fair use because, at the end of the day, he who wielded the larger stick forced the result that he wanted.
Works just fine on Ubuntu.
NSDate: Working with dates in Cocoa, creating and decomposing.
It should be fine as long as you don't use --no-site-packages
Ok, I buy that you're not trolling, but you're assuming your conclusion. How do you know the investor gets $50K back? It's a lot harder to make money off startups than that.

If what you're saying is true, then founders in general (who leap at the chance to take these deals) are dupes. That doesn't seem very likely.
Morse And Vail Were the Jobs And Wozniak Of The 1800s
What Are The Resolved Debates in General Purpose Language Design?
I suppose a lesson that you might have learned is that doing things the expected or accepted way is not always the right answer.

As you alluded to, releasing pre-Christmas and pitching bloggers with free promo codes is so common as to render it useless unless you're remarkable about it.
I had an interview where they invited me to the next round as long as I prepared a presentation on the competitive landscape and state of the industry which only revealed my Powerpoint deck skills. I got the job. But then again, it wasn't in New York
Edited - it was 7am when I posted that ;-)
ask a lawyer(another one)
Let's also not forget the mechanics of these games tended to be maddening at times. Knowing what you wanted to do and having to guess at the nouns and verbs the designer expected was beyond frustrating.

I'm all for fond remembrance. But the problems of text-based games weren't limited to comparing poorly to graphics. Some of them were inherent; implicit companions of the desirable parts of such "written" games.
Guy Kawasaki on Enchantment
Not in this way. The bcrypted hash effectively becomes your plain text password, nulling the purpose of a hash in the first place.
Ambiguity and conflict in the Wikipedian knowledge production system
Anonymous Italy and LulzSec Italy attack agcom
It'd be interesting if this progressed enough so that browsers could offer built-in conversion of Flash content to run it without the Flash plugin enabled.
Official statement: Mozilla is interested in helping enterprise users of Firefox
Resque and redis-store are like auto-adds for almost any Rails project I work on these days.

Resque is for background jobs (with many add-ons for locking, scheduling, retries, etc.), and redis-store is a drop-in store for Rack::Session, Rack::Cache and Rails.cache. Easy and super fast.
Affiliate Programs that Pay
I think a better way to put this is if you want to make GUARANTEED money writing apps... I still think on the whole, its better to release a product yourself than do consulting for someone else.
It's not unlike the decision of doing a startup or working for someone else. You can either settle for a typical paycheque, or you can take a gamble, which might see you create a huge hit, or might flop and bring no returns.
Affiliate Marketing Newbies Guide
Organizing the Sarah Palin Emails using Machine Learning
On a basic level, you can think of it as just a faster version of Memcached.

Digging a little deeper, you can think of it as a faster, extremely powerful version of Memcached.
Is this true? Can you (or anyone) point to some kind of reference or evidence? If valid, I'd consider this an almost dangerous breach of privacy.
It'll be interesting to see how well the various Flash->HTML 5 convertors will complete the job. I'm a little skeptical that it'll be much more like scaffolding than a full-on conversion but I haven't personally tried it yet. I have, however, been working with Flex for the past couple of years and I have come to the conclusion that web applications shouldn't be developed using it given the evolution of standardized HTML and Javascript.