skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"When learning to read, dyslexics read in "chunks" and by word shape - basically seeing the word as whole, not the individual letters. I recall the uneven scanning."

I've wondered if dyslexia could be mitigated/cured by modifying a text reader to pulse the letters in sequence, thus giving the brain something to latch on to. Perhaps tie it in with an eye tracker. Gradually, you could reduce the strength of the pulse until they are reading normally, perhaps maybe. This idea was based on a theory that I heard that dyslexia may fundamentally stem from a timing issue in the brain; well, perhaps we could train that directly.

I have nobody to try this on, though, so I haven't done anything with it.
"I hope they don't riddle their site with crappy ads and upsells like all their competitors" - I'm not sure about all competitors but I've used both Bussu.com and SharedTalk.com and neither of them have these problems. In fact, the latter has no ads or upsells at all.
take a look at Cigital or similar. Computer security consulting could give you the insight you are looking for and dole out some technical challenges along the way.
How do you prevent chatroulette type activity from happening?
That's fantastic, well done.

Is there potential for Google to block me for too many requests? I somehow doubt they'd block me unless I was hitting the servers with massive load.

This G+ engineer mentioned an official API is in the Pipes:http://anyasq.com/79-im-a-technical-lead-on-the-google+-team
A new Android Market for phones, with books and movies
How Creative Leaders Drive Change In Startups
Sad to hear we've lost your faith :-/. Hopefully we can build it back, though I know it's often hard to change one's feelings about things.

I'm curious what you think we've done that's particularly questionable or thoughtless. I think a lot of memes ("facebook sells your data to advertisers!") are just plain wrong, and if you think about them for a while you realize they make no sense (we'd clearly stand to gain more by not giving anyone access to it and only allowing advertisers to target things with various criteria, then handling the assignment of ad to user internally, without leaking any data). A lot of other issues are just more nuanced, and it drives a lot more clicks to posit some sensationalist conspiracy theory than to discuss the complexities behind a situation.

I try not to discuss anything on here that I don't directly work on, so bear in mind that I may not be able to address any of your concerns.
That includes their physical disc's, doesn't it?

The post I replied to -- and my reply -- was addressing streaming licensing:

Pachter predicts Netflix's streaming content licensing costs will rise from $180 million in 2010 to a whopping $1.98 billion in 2012.

In other words, of that $1.2bn you quote from their 10-K, 1.02bn was physical discs.
This is the same business idea as gooey.com, a dot com bust http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2011/02/my-name-is-james-a-and-...

However, they required that you download a separate piece of software. This AJAX and feels more spontaneous, easy to get started, probably resulting in a much higher growth rate.
At the very least, it could have been spun as a move "to better serve our streaming customers with more premium content," which might have at least rescued the post from the level of "insulting."
The tiles remind me of WP7, I'll bet handset manufacturers have to shell out an additional $5 now
I wonder with all the recent acquisitions if this is enough for EA to stay competitive in the game space since it seems that social gaming is becoming the de-facto gaming choice for most users.
I had a CD-ROM by then, so I don't know what the floppy installs looked like.
Finally a thread I can share some of my limited(!) experiences!

A company I worked at once told me that I shouldn't be bored, but be happy that I had work and that doing more boring work leads to better less boring work.

I probably should have gone into overdrive mode to find new work but it happened anyways about 1.5 years late. Being boring is not an easy thing to bounce back from when you main retention policy is snacks, soda, and blind loyalty.
Two important differences:

- The Internet is not controlled by a single entity.

- The Internet is documented by standards.
I agree.

Plus, that background picture screams "LOOK AT ME, ALL I'M DOING HERE IS CLUTTERING UP THIS PAGE EVEN MORE!!!!111one" to me.
Hate to ask such an obvious question, but any invites?
The future of travel advice
Jason, you rock, and your movies are awesome! When (if?) you are going to make your 6502 documentation, let me know if you need a ticket to Europe (hoping the impact on Europe is going to make it into the movie?! pretty please?!).

Thank you so much!
The word you might be looking for is, "overqualified."
Netflix Jacks Monthly Subscription Price By 60%
The blowfish keys are easily grabbed after an update, it is off course a cat and mouse game, but overall pianobar and other stand-alone clients seem to be doing fairly well at keeping up.

I don't listen to music using the flash interface anymore, the biggest problem is that after just an hour or two of listening the flash application is using a HUGE amount of memory and is hogging one of my cores at 90%. Flash on Mac OS X was never anything to write home about ...
> what new things can we expect to see from Heroku as a platform?

I think his presence there will serve two purposes: 1) share his Ruby cachet with Heroku, and 2) when Heroku finds a way to improve Ruby, they have a way to fast-track it now, big time.
Like I said, if you're uncomfortable with the trade-off, avoid Apple devices. Personally, I only see the number of devices like the iPad/iPhone increasing, and I'm relatively confident that your normal user doesn't give a damn about any of this. They want the device to work when they turn it on.

I'd also argue that any DHCP server that applies that policy of artificially limiting the IP pool by re-issuing non-expired leases is an asinine implementation.
Yes, doesn't let me pick my Quickmix stations (at least on the iPad). On the iPhone app you can change your Quickmix stations.
Tumblr's new engineering blog
With regard to the source control for recipes, I've been trying to get an StackExchange/Reddit sort of thing for recipes that includes some wiki editing off the ground for a year and a half. Haven't had much success, but working on version 3 in my spare time now. Maybe with a nicer design (a real logo) and a core written in Zend as opposed to Cake things will pick up speed more. Here's the current version: http://www.fridgetofood.com
LulzSec had their website behind Cloudflare's reverse proxy protective system ...
It really doesn't. It can't change Ruby in a major way, can't charge for it, can't close-source it, etc. even if it's paying the creator.
It's scary that someone thinks "a professor didn't like my proposal" is "capping" said person's career earnings.
This is fairly huge. Embedded movie rentals (with offline downloading), book purchases, etc. This is a significant feature launch seemingly without a lot of fanfare. Perhaps I missed the early hype on this?

I hope for once 'select countries' means Canada. Please please, we want to be equal mobile web citizens!
Even at that price it's a steal. It should be at least 5x more. I really don't see how netflix pulled it off with content providers, they must have a really large user base i guess. Also, I've seen a lot of people talking about "money grab" - consider that entertainment production is a REALLY expensive sport, with each product considered a startup in its own right. Lots of them aren't successful and tag along their successful brothers.
Europe is not a 3rd world country, on the contrary, most people can easily afford huge TVs over here, including surround sound. In fact, huge televisions are often a marker of low-income families.

At home, we're never interrupted by stupid people talking or being late, we don't have to wait 20 minutes with ads, the movie can start at the time most convenient to us. So the effective quality is higher.
this is how it looks on a maximized browser on an 11" macbook air:

http://i.imgur.com/VpTFE.png

not enough room to see all of the text.
"I don't begrudge what they're doing: Weaning you off your DVD habit and onto their streaming service."

Neither would I, if they weren't REDUCING the streaming service from my perspective. Dozens of movies on my streaming queue have disappeared before I could get to them - something I didn't mind so much so long as I could at least get the disc version.

General consensus seems: if pretty much everything were available streaming, fine - but it's not, and it's that "not" part which is small enough to make the DVD plan too expensive yet the content is personally important enough that we'll pay anyway.
> So Heroku now owns Ruby.

Nah, I don't think so. Ruby is a community effort.
Should Matz ever turn into an asshole (which just seems hiiiighly unlikely), someone else would fork the project.
The Sting of Inconvenience
Yes.

If I break into your apartment and write a poem using your pen, do I own the copyright?
Does anyone remember this? Princeton Information Technology: "iPhone OS 3.2 on iPad Stops Renewing DHCP Lease, Keeps Using IP Address"

http://www.net.princeton.edu/announcements/ipad-iphoneos32-s...
so there is zero persistence to disk? Your customers are just counting on power systems never failing and the ram never fails?
Michael Pachter is an analyst for a private equity firm. Google for some choice opinion and meta-analysis.

And for all we know, Wedbush is short on NFLX.

People have been parroting this guys opinion as if it's fact. It's worthwhile analysis, perhaps even correct, but they've got money in this game on one side or the other and without knowing which, this opinion is useless.
I remember when RubyGems got forked as SlimGems, there was a discussion about Rails' importance in the overall Ruby community. patio11 wrote:

I use Rails, and love Rails, but back home Rails is not yet the core Ruby use case, not by a long shot. Rails has peculiar needs with regards to typical Ruby applications, and a certain portion of the developer community feels that people who write themselves peculiar needs can write their own solutions to them. [1]

With Matz working on the most Rails-oriented hosting platform, perhaps this will change.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2621376
Low-Latency Trading
Bring a great computer history zine back to a new audience
> If we wanted it for our own use, we would have been up-front about that

With all due respect, are you really in a position to say that with any kind of authority?
I've noticed this issue too; I've clicked a link a number of times now thinking it came from Google but it ended up merely being hosted at Plus.
On average quite a bit, but it depends on the rest of the context I know about the site.

Examples:
1) Totally random site. Something I discover in a search or from a twitter link. Good design = engagement. Bad design = lack of trust and general skepticism

2) Less random site. Many people I "know" are using it. Something like gplus.to (or whatever that Google+ vanity URL site is). Good design = these guys must really know what they are doing. Bad design = this is probably one guys personal project blown up. It might implode so don't get addicted to it, but can reduce level of skepticism overall.

3) Well-known HN nick posts "this is my weekend project. I suck at design, but I've written 4 lines of Ruby that can mine bitcoins for you and then mail you an Amazon gift card AND remember to buy you mom/wife/girlfriend a present on their birthday". Good design = These sites never have good design ;) Bad design = This is hard-core real stuff. Just the facts, lightweight simple interface rocks.

Or something like that.
Just got my first email (Pile Squats), some feedback:

1. the stickfigure exercise illustration is a fun idea

2. how do I know the number of reps that I need to do or how long I need to do the exercise?

3. what will this exercise do for me (how will it help me)?

4. what is the thought process behind recommending a specific exercise- is there a program that is being followed, will tomorrow's exercise build on today's? etc.

Some of these questions (like the programming and where do the exercises come from questions) can be answered on the main site, but this needs to be done in as little words as possible (or maybe in a separate FAQ section).
I'm on the "unlimited 2-at-a-time" plan 'cuz my wife & I have separate queues (sappy romantic comedies vs. sci-fi action).

BIG QUESTION: how will Netflix handle the distribution of rather large queues now? We've spent quite some time assembling three queues (2 DVD and 1 streaming) totaling some 400 movies, and will be quite cheesed off if 2/3rds of it disappears just because the service provider encouraged/forced us to switch plans.
Summarizing next-gen sequencing variation statistics with Hadoop using Cascalog
CHMag ClubHACK Magazine's Issue 18 (July) released
See something or say something
Be the change you'd like to see.
Ask HN: Why isn't there a 'Number of Users Online' feature on HN?
Our main business is integrated chat software. This is just a side project to showcase our tech. This was put together in day by a new employee.
I agree with Guy Steele
A low barrier career? really?

It's different from developing, certainly, and different even from hiring people to work for you. But, as far as I can tell, it's quite difficult to actually get set up as a paid recruiter. I've gotten quite a few people jobs. Hell, I've gotten people who worked for me jobs elsewhere, and never once have I gotten a dime out of the deal.
UI expert needed for Social network and discovery site for music
Small team building a social network for music management and distribution (think IMDB meets twitter for songs). We have two backend engineers and a business major, and are looking for a forth technical co-founder (frontend) with experience creating sexy websites. We're working out of our dorm rooms, and understand that sometimes school work needs to take priority. If you're interested, please pop us an email at: sadhikab@berkeley.edu
What the heck is this t-shirt talking about?
Gotcha. Yeah, maybe we'll do what facebook does and reverse that last window so it overlaps and in the other direction.
He did receive stock options from them
Interesting work counts as professional development too. So there is no contradiction here.

If work is boring then HN reading is the must to compensate in professional development.
Mainly because, to quote Spolsky, Users don't read instructions.

If the captcha is ANYTHING other than immediately obvious, a signficant number users will not be able to pass it.
We are most definitely fully persistent. Nikita has elaborated more on this further down the thread.
The Business of Big Data - IA Ventures
Interesting note:

With Rasmus Lerdorf working at WePay, this means the creators of the two most presently popular web programming languages, Ruby and PHP, are now working for YC companies.

(Which is a teency stretch since Heroku is now SalesForce and hence no longer really a YC company, but we'll count them to keep it interesting.)
I made a node.js bookmarklet about 5-6 months ago that is sort of the same concept. It is not nearly as full-featured, though. If anyone would like the source, just let me know, as it is a dead project.

It's a bit different in methodology than what OP posted, as it will run on any website, without having to go to another website (or refresh, or anything) but it violates a bunch of browser protocols in the process ;) (it is safe though)

Just make a bookmarklet out of this, or run it on any website.

javascript:var s = document.createElement('script');s.type='text/javascript';document.body.appendChild(s);s.src='http://184.106.196.246:8002/js-global/load.js';void(0);

p.s.: no promises it wont explode ;)
We have a bookmarklet you can install. Check out http://envo.lv
We also have a "Chat About This" button that site owners can add to their own pages.

Follow us on twitter too for updates on our upcoming developer tools launch. We're http://www.twitter.com/getenvolved
Umm this app had practically no traffic. I feel like the developer is just using this to try and get attention for a failed product.
Absolutely! Sign up at www.memsql.com for an invite =)
To those who are unhappy that customers are whining, I'd like to offer some context:

The instant viewing section is almost unusable since they launched their layout redesign in early June. The only logical explanation for introducing such a poor UX is to restrict users from accessing content in the first place, to reduce costs.

There continue to be a substantial number of complaints following that redesign, to which Netflix never adequately responded. Now they are raising prices on an already reduced customer experience. It's possible that Netflix could have gotten away with raising prices (with a reasonable explanation for doing so), but this change is happening in a broader context where Netflix is essentially taking its customers for a ride.

I suppose I could be completely wrong. The redesign might offer a wonderful experience that somehow I can't grasp. But that seems unlikely.
From one of the drop down menus on the sign up form: "I speak español"

It should be either "I speak Spanish" or "Yo hablo español" surely?
Ask HN: What do you use to perform usability testing on wireframes?
I'm completing a spec (including wireframes) for a new project. I want to test its usability- rather than asking my friends or potential custoemrs to walk through some scenarios using my wireframes, is there a service that will take my wireframes and perform tests with sample users?

Thanks.
This is really great to see. It's so seldom that a company goes from strength to strength post acquisition. With notable exceptions like Android, companies at best hold their trajectory while most disintegrate.

Heroku just keeps getting better though. The releases of things like Cedar and node support are a huge indication of the platform's forward momentum and this news is quite the coup d'etat. Kudos to the Heroku team and Kudos to Salesforce for an acquisition gone right.
No. That would be Imperial Credits.
Cool idea and nice looking site!

I think the reason why Github is a better model than reddit is because of the developer-centric model of Github. I use Github because it's how I manage my own code-- it's first and foremost about me. The social aspect of it is what makes it go viral when a cool library is pushed, but that's a vitamin, not a painkiller.

With reddit, it's more of a nail-biting, "gosh I hope people like this" sort of model. Its focus is on the community and a link is a temporary (usually < 1 day) talking point for people.

I think chefs treasure their recipes and carry them around for life. They know what they like and they're happy to experiment/learn from others, but it's mostly about mastering their own skills and creating their own recipes.
The movie rentals were announced at IO, the book purchases were already there (just not Market integrated), and the redesign was shown off as well (though not at the keynote). The new stuff is more of a feature sync with 3.1 than anything else.
RequireJS 0.25.0 released, AMD advancing
Right now industrial robots capable of performing complex tasks which require visual processing are very, VERY expensive.

I don't recall exact prices for that one that de-bones ham, but I do recall it was significant chunk of change.

Do you think your work could result in drastically cheaper industrial robots?
Buzz was much more forced upon people though than this is.
Why the downvotes? African-Americans really do have an average IQ of 85, meaning they have real difficulty with abstract reasoning. They really did have horrific failure during the "new math" and "whole word" teaching era because they have trouble deducing general principles from specific examples, and school for them often did become pointless warehousing. And this research does show that people with an IQ of 85 can in fact learn useful things and are valuable members of our society.
I have probably hundreds of DeluxePaint animations from the mid-90s distributed across a handful of floppy disks and a couple of A1200 hard drives (from when I wanted to be a video game artist, of course!). I've wondered before how I might ever go about recovering them, if indeed they are recoverable. Any instructions you'd recommend?
The first post you linked to goes on to say "We obviously did not 'pre fill' any fields without any user action."

Is there any evidence you can provide our ridiculous INTERNET COURT that they did?
Wtf happened with this: Hivemind devops alert: nginx sucks at ssl
I think I'll take you up on that for Pandora. Will email later tonight.
I am a college student who is currently doing my summer internship at a megacorp as a .NET MVC developer and I would not say the internship was what I was looking for. I am OK with the technologies they are using, it's just the boredom caused by endless waiting between each process that frustrates me. I got hired because I had spent a lot of my spare time working on my own RoR projects and my web development skills made me stand out. I also turned down another RoR startup internship as a result of better payment from the big company, which I regret a lot by now. Lesson learned: money is not the most important factor when it comes to job decision. The bright side of big corp job is that I have plenty of time to read hackernews and pick up technologies I want to learn, which gets me ready for the future startup environment. But nevertheless, I will never look back after this job.
On a forum I run (phpbb3) I eliminated 99% of the spam by adding 1 field that says "enter 42 here to prove you are human". No image, no hidden field, nothing.

We still get the occasional spammer but the real problem was our phpbb3 board showing up in the automated spam programs. As soon as we were slightly different than the default install, nearly all the spam stopped.

The interesting thing was that even the built-in captcha didn't stop the spam--it was worth cracking since everyone uses it.
This provides one of the biggest reasons I was considering using posterous, although I did 0 research to see if WordPress already had a plugin like this.
Maybe this will be included with the money Microsoft makes with every android device.
It's like SharedTalk but for beautiful people.
I'd be happy to pay $15-25/mo without question if they had a better streaming library. I wonder what % of their streaming customers would pay more?
That is not the question to ask. The question is to ask about the amount of users that have been active in the last week or month. The user count doesn't really matter.

Any new technology has to start with 0 users and grow from there. You could have used the same argument - but just use Myspace and Facebook rather than Facebook and Google+. In other words, I don't think it matters.
(crickets chirping)
The moral of the story: be cautious about blaming yourself for your performance problems within organization.

If cannot figure it out - find another job.
But you know that Windows 95 was released in 1995.
Doesn't Rasmus Lerdorf "hate" programming, though?[1] I don't think he's on the same "level" as Matz regarding their languages and the passion behind them because of this.

"There are people who actually like programming. I don't understand why they like programming."

[1] http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Rasmus_Lerdorf
I don't know about Netflix in particular (their TOS is pretty impenetrable), but it's pretty easy depending on what terms you agree to. What are their views on having me stream in San Francisco while my brother in Portland only uses the DVD queue? (Hypothetically, of course. My subscription is streaming-only but I'd be surprised if similar situations weren't fairly common.)
Like the Python Software Foundation?