skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Everyone needs some basic instructions on how to use something, in this case it's what is a click or a double click, what a slow double click does. When you simplify it that much it makes perfect sense to remember which springboard page you are on.
100% agree.

A bunch of CSS3 animations whizzing around the page is the last thing we need. (Though it's likely to happen as people go crazy with new capabilities).

But with a bit of constraint these can be used to add value, simply the difference between good and bad design.

Simple HTML markup with a bit of CSS position would be a huge step up from flat jpegs, particularly as far as type is concerned.
That's not what bothers me about software being used in important physical systems like the brakes of a car. What bothers me about that is not knowing anything about how that software was developed or tested, the amount of rigor that went into it, etc. All software has bugs but the laws of physics don't.
That's not entirely true.

When you hit back in the browser, you go back to the email message iff the browser did not open with an existing history. If it did, then it navigates to the previous page inside that browser, instead.
My understanding (and the article reflects this) is that the "module pattern" generally refers to a function that is executed immediately after definition; ie: var module = (function() { ... })().

I'm guessing you're referring to Crockford's pattern (IIRC he calls it a "functional constructor" in JS:tGP), which is generally the same, but the function is instead executed when an object is instantiated with it.

It's a small distinction, but your drawbacks don't apply to the module pattern as I understand it, since the function is only executed once.
So true. I'm surprised at the level of indignation in the comments here. I think there's room to make email better for different groups of users and I think this might be a good start.
UK government: Terror groups are early tech adopters
Pouet.net visualized
According to
http://www.laserscanning-europe.com/en/blog/3d-laser-mapping...

they're using Riegl VZ-400s.
http://www.riegl.com/nc/products/terrestrial-scanning/produk...

The (fairly) new Faro Focus is ~€30k, and that's about a quarter the price of anything that came before it. http://www.faro.com/focus/us

Can't wait to get my hands on one of them.
You're expressing a prejudice here and advocating discrimination based on it. It seems ideological. You're saying "Don't hire people if they don't contribute to open source projects." You assume they are watching TV, rather than, say, working on an iOS game that they are selling.

Resumes are for deciding who you're going to interview. If github is the new resume, then you're not going to know about the side projects.
Dropbox Earns Massive Valuation Topping $5 Billion
Elements of chip music
A slideshow presentation tool built on a microcontroller
Oh, so you are projecting your pattern of 20 or 30 years ago on everyone else and lecturing us about how we're just selfish for changing the world?

I've seen plenty of people who have fixed their personal crap -- at that point they realized they were far more passionate about helping others than continuing to advance their careers.
The pricing strategy is based on nutrient content, again according to the Harvard pyramid plan. For the vended products, you pay: one cent per gram of sugar, two cents per gram of fat, four cents per gram of saturated fat, one dollar per gram of trans fat...

Reminds me of the time I encountered a world renowned nutritional expert...

edw519: "I'm having trouble understanding these food labels."

expert: "Don't eat anything with a label."
Buying a sponsored AdWords ad on Google results in people viewing it while they are actively looking to solve a problem or buy a product.

Buying an ad on Facebook that happens to be related to something they once had interest in, and may still do, will result in it being shown while they are not always looking to solve a problem or buy a product, but to entertain themselves, and most importantly may not care about that subject at that moment.

Online advertising is not a cut and dry field. You can get great results from either place, but you won't get the same results from both, at least in my experience.
"As China and India continue to evolve, their supply of engineering talent is likely to outpace demand"...Spoken like someone who has never tried to outsource a development project.

I've been hearing this since I started my CS program in 2001, back then I was worried that by the time I graduated the whole north american industry would be hollowed out and I'd have to go to law school. If the engineering sky was falling, it would have collapsed by now.

He is, however, correct about the importance of customer understanding, but that is not at the expense of engineering in any way.
Java Best Practices – String performance and Exact String Matching
Maybe I'm a numbskull.. I found Scala pretty complex :) Just could not get to complete the 6th chapter of the staircase book... I've kind of given up on Scala.
fwiw, I've had completely the opposite experience. I've found the back button a godsend on both WP and Android platforms, and haven't really noticed this unreliability. Actually, as a user I prefer to use my Windows phone over my other devices almost entirely because of a combination of two features: the back button (missing from iOS) and a decent soft keyboard (missing from the Android phone I have, which is running 2.2. I've heard the keyboard in 2.3 is much improved, but unfortunately the upgrade wasn't available for my phone last I checked). There are a lot of things the other platforms have over the WP, but being able to have those two things together is enough to outweigh all of them and ensure that my SIM card stays in my Windows phone 70% of the time ...
Most efficient algorithm for determining if X out of N inputs are true
Frankly, I think you're out of your mind.

You should hire people based on absolutely as much useful information as you can ethically get your hands on. Why waste the information in a person's github profile?

Resumes suck, and are damned near useless. Bringing people in based on resumes wastes your lead engineer's time because the % hit rate on them will be very low. You will, at the very least, need to phone screen somebody that you only know from a resume, a process which takes a surprising amount of time.

Talking to people is totally useful, and necessary, but not sufficient. It's prone to passing bullshitters (esp since you have your best technical person interviewing) and useless smart people (who don't get shit done), and to failing good employees who don't speak well or are having a bad hair/brain day or are very nervous.

When you go to hire, use all the information you can. Look at their github, interview, have the person write code, have lunch with them to see if they get along with the team. Don't fail them for missing any one part of the interview, but take it all into account.

Especially in a small team, you're making an decision with an enormous impact on the future of your company which is difficult and painful to undo. Don't waste any information.
Paradigm shift? No, more like visibility shift.

While it is true that shaving megahertz and kilobytes doesn't give you command of a market anymore, engineering still defines market leaders. Look at Amazon, Google, and Facebook. Their "customer understanding" is key to their success (and is most visible) but they couldn't serve their customer experience without mountains of engineered infrastructure.

What about Apple? They're just a pure design firm now? No, they may fly the design banner but below decks the Good Ship Lollipop is manned by notoriously cut-throat band of engineering scalawags bent on shaving components and squeezing price/performance blood out of their suppliers.

Yes, component engineering and manufacturing have moved overseas but system and product engineering still dictate what the user experience designers (who also need a fair amount of engineering know-how) can deliver.

At minimum, every "Liberal Arts" kid should learn math, science, programming and basic web technology. Think about it: We live in a world where artists use tech skills and librarians are computer scientists to some extent.
If they're storing it in plaintext, with a mysql backend - mysql doesn't care about case, by default. (At least, in my experience, this might have changed.)
How Digital Detectives Deciphered the Stuxnet Worm
Also nedmalloc https://github.com/ned14/nedmalloc and hoard http://www.hoard.org/. There is some comparison between the three here http://www.nedprod.com/programs/portable/nedmalloc/#FAQ The following is a snippet from that FAQ

Is tcmalloc better or worse than nedmalloc?... nedmalloc
is about equal to tcmalloc for threadcache-only ops and
substantially beats it for non-threadcache ops. nedmalloc
is also written in C rather than C++ and v0.5 of tcmalloc
only works on Unix systems and not win32. tcmalloc
achieves its speed by never returning memory to the
system - free space reclamation is one of the slowest
parts of any allocator. Therefore tcmalloc should NOT be
used outside long running server processes (and indeed
its own docs say the same).

However I am not sure if the criticism about not returning the memory is true anymore for the latest version tcmalloc.
A big problem with github-as-resume for the experienced developer is that it destroys the idea of side-projects as play. I can no longer just fool around with something for the sake of fooling around with it. I now have to judge whether my “fool-around” project is good enough to go on github and be evaluated by potential hiring managers. And if not, I need to ask why I’m working on it, rather than working on something that I’d want a hiring manager to see.

Moreover, everything I put out there now needs to be of professional quality, including comments, code organization, adherence to conventions, etc. And from the beginning, because hiring manager might look at logs and frown upon the fact that I inserted a bunch of comments, and cleaned up a much of memory leaks, two days before I applied for the job.

For a side-project in a technology that I use at the office, this basically makes side projects the same as work. Which is going to lead to burnout really fast.

For a side-project in a new technology, I’d be much less inclined to take my time to learn something new. My first few attempts at writing something in a programming language I’m learning are invariably something I don’t want anyone else to see. But again, why would I take time to work on something that I can’t put on github, if that’s how I’m being judged?
It depends a lot on the domain and your expertise of the business overall. For example, working for a non-profit is completely different than working on trading algorithms for a hot hedge fund where you also partake in creating the algos.
Yes. We funded them because we liked the founders.
Yes you can use SQLite currently, but in the next weeks we will install postgres and mysql on our servers.

We haven't decided on which analysis we want to do (although we have some in mind) but will simply implement what our users want and need the most.

We will try to make it affordable to anyone, but send me an email to flo@railsonfire.com and let's talk about it a little more. We always need great feedback from our users.

We want to build the perfect solution for you and can only do that with your help and feedback.
I can't be the only one with a sudden, fond memory of the Muppets.

Which I find, indeed, hackerish. Jim Henson and crew hacked an entire presentation medium, mainstreaming an entire character type (the puppet, formerly relegated to kids shows and ventriloquists).

I hope this combination of earnest endeavor and levity can escape our gravity well.
Shop Groceries using QR Codes in South Korea
That's funny -- I love it. I rarely swipe off the home screen; I just find it easier/quicker to launch all other apps by name. Usually just takes a character or two, since it seems to prioritize past selections when sorting search matches.
You've got it backwards: I haven't seen anyone, including Chas, argue for disallowing Unicode. As you say, replacing a simple, common, 2 character operator with the unusual Unicode version is an odd and inconvenient decision. At present, this is Akka-specific, though the line between Scala and Akka seems to be blurring like Erlang and OTP.
americanexpress.com caps passwords at 8 characters long, FYI. Not sure if they also limit which types of characters can be used.
The domain/work/location doesn't change the fact of how much you get paid...just the justification for why it is a particular amount.
How Hard is it to Become the Michael Jordan of Trading?
I'd start him out with an interpreted language like Python and then maybe move towards Pygame. Zgame is also quite good and is available on Windows, that would give him a framework to develop working programs without getting lost in reinventing the wheel.

Over the long term I'd say work towards the tablet environment because that's where the action is going to be, but I don't know how friendly/accessible/affordable the iOS development tools are for Windows, or what the 'Hello world' stage is like. If it's great, then by all means start there. A pet hate of mine are tutorials that start out with the basics of variables, loops, and so on, and then dump the would-be programmer into the deep end bereft of any actual algorithms or structural guidance. It's like showing someone how to hammer nails and use a saw on day one, and then expecting them to build a house on day two. That's why I suggest Python as an alternative, because there's lots of high-quality educational material to get going with.

If the kid is somewhat computer-savvy already and doesn't need much hand-holding, maybe you could let him loose with the Google coding tools as an alternative - lots of good stuff on there for everyone from the casual to the committed programmer, and while it won't perform as well as native iOS stuff on the iPad, it won't be locked into that platform either.
The 31 Best New Tech Founders In NYC
Should Burger King Do More Than Just Hint at Apple Fries?
I'm not sure that is accurate. To my surprise...my NYC salary of $176,000 adjusted to San Francisco should be $217,151

Is SF really more expensive then NYC?
The back button on iOS is in the software, which chooses whether there is a back button, where it belongs.
The formatting tool in question defaults to _not_ doing this, specifically to comply with the Scala Style Guide which does _not_ do this. The tool had to be explicitly configured to make this unfortunate change.
I can't agree more :)
I was on EC2+apache+wordpress+mysql and had my blog go down as well after being featured on HN. In my case, simply rebooting the cloud instance fixed the problem (I had lots of other old projects running on the same instance). However, I did do some research into figuring out what I could have done as my blog kept getting more traffic ... had I used RDS, I could have gone to a bigger instance with little downtime. Unfortunately, my understanding is that there would be no way to go back down to a smaller RDS instance.

P.S. I upvoted you. I also don't get why people downvoted you.
I don't see how to search for SSD there.
Verified that, at least, passwords are not case sensitive.

Good thing it's a one-off that I think they generated for me (it's too short for it to have come from LastPass.)

I imagine this was done on purpose so that when grandma types "goodkitty" instead of "GoodKitty", she doesn't get confused by the website's refusal to let her in. From a usability perspective - for the majority of customers who don't use password utilities like 1Password - it makes sense.
I've seen http://www.alice.org/ recommended as an intro to programming for kids. I can't speak to its value personally.
Lanyrd's improved speaker profiles - promote your talks, discover new events
Why not bring your own food? Some sandwiches for example. Nuts and seeds (flax, hemp) or (canned) fish (salmon, sardines, mackerel, tuna) are also a good option.
I just tried and it indeed closes the notification center. Wow. That just seems wrong.
I just don't think that comparing programmer salaries across the board makes much sense because of the different domains. Understanding the domain is often more difficult than understanding the programming language.
I'm not sure - never lived in either place. I'm not particularly tied to that calculator, it just came up first in a Google search. I do, however, think it's important to remove the location parameter from the salary function as best as we can. Otherwise the distribution of results is meaningless.
At that scale, you simply aren't betting on world-changers. You're betting on flippers. Flippers are your bread and butter

That's false. Effectively all our returns come from the big successes. HR acquisition valuations are rounding error by comparison. Which is why for example when I recently estimated the total value of all the companies we'd funded, I ignored the bottom 90%.
It bugs you because you don't get get it, freely stereotype and readily tell people how to spend their free time.

I work for a bigco that doesn't contribute to open source. I used to work for a bigco that was one of the biggest contributors to open source. I spend spare time working on an reasonably sized open source project, of which I was one of the founders, hosted on, yes, github. I have interesting (to me, atleast) side projects, mostly hardhacks, which I don't necessarily build to share. I do it for fun. Obviously, I read HN.

I never require open source experience when I hire, because my experience in both the 'closed' and 'open' worlds tells me that great scientists and engineers exist in both worlds and using a VCS account as a filter is crude. This is just another facet.
Yeah sure. Why should you do backups when you can start whining and pointing at Google instead...
If you use ngix + php-fpm: the nginx fastcgi_cache module http://wiki.nginx.org/HttpFcgiModule#fastcgi_cache is really neat and a lot faster than the full-page caching plugins. I also found that an object cache does improve performance a lot for pages that are generated from wordpress, saving tons of database queries.
> As we go about our daily lives, we don't open up a file for each of our friends or create folders full of detailed records about our shopping trips.

We don't? I look up my friends in a contact book on my iPhone - each friend's entry is a conceptual "file" in a "contact book" folder.

I keep my shopping receipts - files - in a folder - a drawer in the kitchen. (Okay, I don't, but hypothetically I could.)

If we're talking about documents meant to be shared, that's fair - a simple flat file may not be enough to store everything you want to know about it, you'd want something more akin to a versioning system, or a wiki.
Reddit releases companion extension for Chrome
FWIW, I just recently switched to self-hosting. I was on blogger before, but moved because I want to retain complete rights to my content.
Sure, but there are already "tools to help you" in this realm that are easier to grok.

Early on, developers saved old versions of code via manual copying. That was really easy to grok (Label floppy with "1983 Aug 12", copy, put in box). But it sucked.

So developers invented things like SCCS or RCS, which stored metadata. But they were harder to grok, as now you had to understand the idea of files having history (and branches), and needing to be "checked out" using tools entirely different from standard copying, and being "locked" against change. But they helped, even though they still kind of sucked.

So hackers invented CVS and Subversion, which worked on trees instead of files, used implicit locking and merge algorithms, and generally made life better. But they were yet harder to grok! Now doing regular development meant that occasionally you'd get collisions: you needed to understand the 3-way merge algorithm just to write code. And they still sucked.

So Linus gave us git. Which adds a bunch of new hard-to-grok abstractions like the index and commit ID. But it fixes a bunch of problems too, even if 10 years from now we'll agree that it sucked too.

So pick your point along that spectrum and choose your tool to match your comfort level. In short: your complaints aren't anything new, SCM systems have always been confusing to learn.
So do yourself a favor and move to Github!

How, exactly, would i be doing myself a favor with this? I'm not such a big fan of git and i avoid github on moral grounds[1]. Other code hosting services work great for me and i see no reason to switch both my hosting and my VCS.

I don't disagree with the argument that your code should act as your resume, but it could have been worded a lot better.

[1] I can't in good conscience support the guy who posts things like this routinely: http://dev.pocoo.org/~blackbird/github-vs-bitbucket/bitbucke... and http://whygitisbetterthanx.com/
What I really wonder, reading this story, is how he would have done if he'd gotten a product that didn't look like an iPod.

What percentage of his customers were thinking they were buying an iPod?

My nephew, one day, came to me excitedly telling me he was getting an iPhone and he showed me an ebay page with a "new in box" iPhone for $50. (he had $50 in birthday money to spend.) It was not an iPhone, but it looked like one. He's too young to understand, I think, the existence of knock off products.
The thing is that Google dont kneed to place ads on Google+, but they will know your personal information and place better targeted AdWords for each person.
Show HN: My MVP ShallWeCoupon.com
I recently decided that after a long time of reading about others projects and acting as a marketing agent for numerous successful companies that it was time that I started building and marketing my own products.

While SWC is far from an original idea, I believe as a first project it seems to contain most of the critical elements for creating a successful web-based company. Plus it was fun to build and I hope in the near future it will show a positive return on the investment.

Clearly there is still a bit work left to do especially around collecting and incorporating brand images. I also need to work on gathering some exclusive coupons. But all of these things can and will happen in the very near future.

I am at a point now where I would really appreciate some feedback on the project. What did I do well? What did I fail to execute? What might make the site more compelling?
I kinda have to agree with contextfree that I can't imagine not having a back button on my wp7. But I also agree with you that it doesn't always take you to where you expect to go. Same problem with the search button.

The problem here, I think, isn't so much the button itself, but developers not following the conventions, and Microsoft (and possibly google, I don't have an android) not steering developers in the right direction.

For example, the IMDB app on WP7 has a search icon on the top right of the screen which they expect you to use to search. They should have used the already existing search button on the phone, but if you hit the phones search button, you go to bing search, because the app only knows how to use it's own search button.

Same with back buttons. If the developer has used it properly, it should take you to the previous screen of that app, but 90% of the time, it goes to the previous app.

Hopefully 'app switching' in mango (I don't think multi-tasking is the problem, its that we can't switch from one app to another without going to the home screen) will solve much of the back button issues, and possibly the new Bing/app search integration tools will help with the search button.
This is actually a spatiotemporal cloak, not purely temporal. The probe is simply the laser (the green lines in the article picture).
Apply the principles of penetration testing to your home computer