skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A couple of quotes from comments on the Guardian's version of the story:

"There is no need to teach people in the UK how to be a computer programmer because the work can either be shipped out to India or companies can employ people from India to work in their IT companies in the UK."

Which is bad enough, but this one really takes the biscuit for me:

"How can this be true when our exam pass-[rate has been climbing for yonks? The guy's obviously talking crap. What would hr know about education? We should listen to our teachers and ignore capitalists like this."

Wow.
After your first comment I was thinking the same thing. Thanks so much for your feedback. I really aprreciate it.
I develop for Android and iOS too, and Android Market is terrible with declined purchases and "failed to deliver" issues. What's worse is that there is no good way to get information about what's wrong and who's affected. In-app purchases also have terrible bugs on Android - bugs like this http://code.google.com/p/marketbilling/issues/detail?id=14 open for months cause payments to just 'disappear'. The only thing worse than Android Market bugs is Android Market support. There is no way to get Google's attention, and emails to support come back with useless, auto-reply messages. I spend at least 30 minutes a day fiddling with refunds and fixing things up for users who contact us about problems. It is infuriating - I'm embarrassed for Google.

I haven't had a single bad payment experience with iOS.
Warren Buffett to invest 5 Billion on BofA
here I'll summarize the article for you in one sentence:
just think of the earth as it is, only with 8 huge mountains one on each corner.
Comparing Reddit to USENET is probably one of the most insightful descriptions of Reddit I've seen anyone make.

It is indeed a big loosely-related collection of communities, from which users choose a la carte their areas of participation.

The Reddit my wife sees when she logs in is very different from the one I see, which is very different from the one fans of meme participation (rage comics, etc) see.
Interesting interview. Thanks. I am always interested in companies that make products that allow others to create products (meta products, if you like).

My start-up/project - http://www.tiki-toki.com - is in a similar space, allowing people to create timelines. Thus far, I have focused mainly on the actual product, rather than building up the community. But if colourlovers is anything to go by, I should probably start turning my attention to the community.

Btw, we recommend to our users that they use colourlovers.com if they want to find a nice colour scheme for their timelines.
not to create touchpad fans, the touchpad is dead. it's about creating webos fans. what they're doing with the firesale and now with the apps is increasing the value of the platform so they can sell or license it for a higher price
Reminds me of a similar let down when a certain tablet computer was sold at a ridiculously low price and quickly became impossible to obtain...
Great info. Was this app featured prominently in either store at any time, or just listed rank and file with all the other apps?
I agree. That why, as other comments have pointed out, this is not the interesting part of the hack.
I am the exact opposite to you. I find the design much more fun and it is what I do first. I will usually pretty much have the design worked out before I start any dev work, which is perhaps a bit odd given that I am a much better coder than designer.
How RSA got hacked
Japoneses Weekend break can make probably the most comfy lay Lilac maternity
I would have probably not stored the state of selectedness and left it to the DOM. In order to remove the selectedness state before setting the new selected image I'd just do something like this. $('div ul li img.selected').removeClass('selected')
More and more mattresses these days are side-sensitive; you can't flip it over.

This reduces the number of possibilities to 2. Not very interesting, group theory-wise.
When I wrote this 2.5 years ago let me assure you: the tutorials were not plentiful.

Update: Well, har har har, I actually wrote it 3.5 years ago.
0.1% of tweets mention Bieber. Obama? 0.03%
Not really. This file is 1.5MB, and a 150dpi low-quality JPEG export of that is 2.7MB and the street names are barely legible. For a map like this, consisting of mostly text and really simple vector data, with only a handful of colors, raster images are really inefficient.
Great article! Inspirational and a lot of people can relate ;)
Compare Donald Knuth vs. Lady Gaga at Google FTCS!

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2476164
Pitt: 3 children (Age 47)

Asimov: 2 children

Knuth: 2 children

Jobs: 4 children

In the evolutionary struggle, I'd say all the fame and gorgeous abs haven't created Ramses-style success for Pitt. Academic reputation and billions of dollars do less for you than simply marrying a nice girl who likes babies would.
>To think that only Tea party members and Christian fundamentalists are the only ones who might not understand or have a problem with the scientific method is absurd. I really doubt your average 20 year old wearing a Che shirt cares any more about the scientific method than your average Tea Partier.

even a 20 years old wearing a Che shirt would see a connection [possibly after several trials] between stepping on a rake and a strange immediate sensation on the forehead and will cease to step on the rake thus manifesting basic grasp of the scientific method. Not so for a Tea Partier - he (or she) will every time think that it is God's will or somebody attacking them and their freedom to step on the rake and the Tea Partier will continue to step on the rake to assert their freedom and will also force others to do so.
Most of the volume is in MtGox. Currently $668K today, $12.25M last 30 days.

http://bitcoincharts.com/markets/
On the second point, a strong cryptosystem wouldn't have such a poor security design that RSA could break into any of its customer's networks. I'm sure a number of other RSA customers were surprised that RSA retained this power; I was.
All quoting is selective by definition. I didn't add the end part because frankly its irrelevant. This person is trying figure out pricing. But you need to figure out if this is a product people want at all first. If people are telling you that you couldn't pay them to use it... that IS the big takeaway. You're right to ignore the "but ..." part of the sentence, but not because their pricing information is not valuable -- but rather because they told you the important part in the first half of the sentence.

The fact that the author and you miss this is probably indicative of why we see so much crap software produced with no real audience or use scenario.
Xbox Live Gold Membership Is It Really Worth - Are You Serious?
For those who are serious about gaming, investing in an Xbox Live Gold membership is absolutely essential in order to get the most out of your Xbox games.
But if you're wiring together several views dependent on the selected state, this type of code can lead to spaghetti and tight coupling between views.
I was never featured on either store. Everything came from organic downloads and word of mouth.
The guys that did the RSA hack would have found another attack vector even if Flash wasn't installed ... The more complex your browser's capabilities are, the more surface area you have exposed to attack.

Perhaps, but interestingly enough the attack wasn't against a web browser, but against Excel running a Flash applet. Maybe that path was chosen because it's less carefully examined by security policy and security software; I don't know.

In any case, it's certainly true that this pathway wouldn't have been available if not for the unnecessary use of Flash in places where it doesn't belong, i.e., Excel. Which ties into the theme here rather nicely; Flash used unnecessarily is worse than Flash eschewed entirely.
I think you might need to put your sarcasm detectors into British mode.

Questions around outsourcing, the standard of secondary education, and how education meets the needs of industry all loom fairly large in the British political landscape.
It’s a shame that they obscured incriminating details in the screenshots with simple image operations like low-radius 1- and 2-dimensional blurring. Using a guessable point-spread function on an image region with so many known characteristics (because we know the font)
is very, very leaky. In this case it would not surprise me if someone could deconvolve the e-mail addresses enough to match them against EMC employee profiles and such.

If you want to hide text in an image, you should, at minimum, replace every pixel in its bounding box. That still leaves spacing data, but it’s a start. Smearing or lightly jumbling the pixels is barely a notch more secure than rot13.
Never trust your sources
I friend of mine spent something like 2.000 eur for renting sports super cars and try them on different circuits on Germany.

I would never do that, even it it were free, but I can spend a lot of money on computers and gadgets like 3d printers and plotters.

Every body has different interests and necessities. Let it be.
Good point, and I'd much rather believe that this is the reason than something more dire.
You are really comparing a 17" gaming laptop with

- 13" gaming laptops (really? Those are lighter?)

- a popular 17" laptop that lacks in gaming power

Why the snark?
Some people use expensive hardware as a status symbol, and having something expensive with a flashy UI will probably appeal to them. I don't know how common this type of person is.

Others spend a lot on hardware to eke out as much performance as possible. The Razer laptop will fail miserably with these people, because the specs obtained for the cost are abyssmal.

________________________________________________

Razer at $2800:

2.8GHz Intel® CoreTM i7 2640M Processor

8GB 1333MHz DDR3 Memory

NVIDIA GeForce® GT 555M (2GB VRAM)

________________________________________________

Sager/Clevo at around $2700 (using xoticpc).

3.2-3.46GHz Intel® Core™ i7-960 8MB L3 Cache

ATI Radeon DUAL (2) HD6990M's (4GB VRAM)

12GB - DDR3 1333MHz Dual Channel Memory

________________________________________________

The GT 555M's 3DMark 06 score is 10586.3. The Dual HD6690M has a score of 23292, more than double. I would have honestly expected at least a single GTX 570M (preferably 580) from a cutting-edge gaming laptop housing an NVIDIA card.

The Sager will be a bulkier laptop, but my experience (with dragging an Asus G73 to and from university and work) is that carrying bags/backpacks mitigate the weight issue, and that bulk is never a factor. An inferior gaming experience due to weaker hardware, however, is.

Sources:

http://xoticpc.com (for configuring/pricing a Sager/Clevo laptop)

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Mobile-Graphics-Cards-Benchmark... (for video card benchmarks)
Yea. I have two SmartMachines through them. One of the now unavailable 512mb machines and a 1gig. I've been pretty happy with both of them. There are certainly ways they could improve but it's clear that Solaris Zones as a way to do virtualization isn't going to show the same level of performance degradation as a typical virtualization setup.
I really liked Kindle's samples in this regard. Most of it is a few pages from the introduction, and most of the time that's very representative for the those types of books. If it starts with a recollection of the author's childhood or the experiences of a client, you can ditch it most of the time…
Everyone seems to have one of these static site generators these days. Probably a lot of people, myself for instance, who have written their own over the years as well.

This one looks like it has some interesting ideas related to pre-processing using the 'controller' idea.
My process usually goes like this: design main page with 20 iterations, code 20% of project, redesign main page, code another 20% of project, redesign main page again and make some additional pages, etc... It's a vicious cycle - though I don't think I am a bad designer by any means I think my designs just always grow stale in the couple days I take off from design to program.
Let's hope it stays that way -- I don't want Apple to fail anymore than anyone else. Tim Cook is a fairly dim bulb, though, just a paper-pusher with a bad temper. I hope he doesn't get in the way of those at Apple with real talent.
Actually, I am British. I did consider the possibility that those comments were an attempt at humour but sadly I think it's unlikely based on my previous experience of Comment Is Free. (For those not familiar, that's how The Guardian refers to its comments section).
Singling out a group of people and then identifying their thoughts as not worthwhile seems to undermine the conclusion of the study.
That's kind of what I was trying to say. The fact that "sales" is so bent on selling you stuff instead of getting you the right stuff for what you're trying to do instead is a problem.
It may be worthwhile for me to chime in here with my own stats, which are far less impressive than bignoggins. I recently ported my iOS app, BridgeBasher, to Android. I took a different route though. Since I had no users on Android, I thought the best thing to do would be to create an ad-based version on Android, mostly because I've heard a lot of people say that Android users are less likely to pay for apps. I decided on using Mobclix for advertising, and here are my stats:

Date - Android / iOS

8/7/2011 - $2.16 / $142.00

8/8/2011 - $1.68 / $97.00

8/9/2011 - $1.15 / $84.00

8/10/2011 - $1.82 / $76.00

8/11/2011 - $0.98 / $78.00

8/12/2011 - $0.57 / $103.00

8/13/2011 - $0.59 / $88.00

8/14/2011 - $0.72 / $102.00

8/15/2011 - $0.43 / $74.00

8/16/2011 - $0.44 / $75.00

8/17/2011 - $0.18 / $88.00

Total - $10.54 / $1,007.00

This is obviously comparing apples to oranges, since the iOS version is paid ($0.99) and the Android version is ad revenue only, however given bignoggins success with a paid app on Android, I'm thinking I have made a mistake going the free route on Android.
Ah yes, contracts, a fake warm and fuzzy. So what happens at 72 hours and one minute when neither of your suppliers can get to your location because the roads are blocked?

Or they have no employees because they are taking care of their families or even injured from the storm?

Or they oversubscribed their service and don't have enough fuel?

Or it is commandeered for the greater good?

Many a company have relied on "contracts" and used them as assurance that a service will be available only to be shown otherwise.
Beyond Heatmaps: Visualizing Eye Tracking Data
All Shook Up: Mapping Earthquake News on Twitter from Virginia to Maine
A client screening site for escorts? LOL
Can anyone be more stupid? - "Differences Between MACs and PCs"
I agree completely.

Yet, while you mention it, I think you do not emphasize enough the importance of chosing how you rate accomplishment. In terms of ability to attract a mate, there is no doubt Brad Pitt wins, by a long shot.

But change the question to who has had the biggest impact on humanity, and I suspect the answer shifts to Knuth. Ask who will have the largest overall impact on culture, and I think the answer becomes Asimov (I expect his fiction will be read long after Pitt's movies fade away and he has inspired a great deal cultural work for second order effects). Ask who has had the largest impact on daily American life in the present, and Jobs is clearly victorious.

It depends entirely on how you define accomplishment.
Show HN: Loglet: quickly send log messages to the web
Well, at least in the area of virtual machines and interpreters, the usual argument goes like this:

A stack-based virtual machine architecture has compact code representation (only bytecodes) where operands are pushed onto and popped of the corresponding argument stack. Register based VM-architectures require you to encode source and destination registers into the operations. IIRC, for Java bytecode, going from a stack-based representation to a register-based virtual machine grew the code size by more than 40%. But on the other hand interpretation got more efficient, since you have less instructions overall and thus fewer instruction dispatches. If you want more details I'll gladly point you to the excellent and canonical reference for this: Shi, Casey, Ertl and Gregg: "Virtual machine showdown: Stack versus registers." TACO http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1328195.1328197 (There is also the journal article's predecessor from VEE05, https://www.usenix.org/events/vee05/full_papers/p153-yunhe.p...)
How quirky that the British would consider even further erosion of what's left of civil liberties, but only allowed the police to use clubs and shields against looters. Being better armed than the mob one is seeking to contain would seem like a more focused way to deal with riots than by further marginalizing their citizens.
These are all the Erlang-related articles I wrote: http://20bits.com/tag/erlang/
Another android dev with (much) lower volume here. Curious how you know about errors driving that 20% number. Is there a report somewhere with this detail or is it just inferred from customer emails? The only failures I ever see come through are declined credit cards or the regular cancellations from users who used the 15min refund window.
Can you expand on that? What are the issues?
"Nothing Apple does is truly that amazing or innovative."

That's absurdly unfair, companies like RIM didn't even think the iPhone was possible before it came out [1]. The iPad completely changed the "slate" market in an unimaginable way. People may or may not be wrong about a post-PC era, but its undeniably closely related to the iPad and its predecessor the iPhone (especially given Android's UI before and after the iPhone [2]). If your comment referred specifically to the laptop/desktop market, go back to the original Macintosh GUI, unibody design, the high battery life and relatively low cost of the Macbook Air (sure, they existed in the 90s as slim as an MBA but not with equivalent design or battery--and the rest of the market was into netbooks when the MBA came out anyway), touchpad gestures, and MagSafe. And when other companies announce these features, like Razer here, it usually ends with a $2800 Sure, you can name prior art on alot of these innovations but having 'balls' is PART of innovation--execution is just as important as the idea.

[1] http://www.razorianfly.com/2010/12/28/rim-we-thought-apple-w...
[2] http://random.andrewwarner.com/what-googles-android-looked-l...
Never seen/heard of your product before this thread but MAN is it cool. Just wanted to throw some kudos your way!
> While the IIPA says that [...] open source is evil, [...] because it "weakens the software industry and undermines its long-term competitiveness."

What the hell does "undermines its long-term competitiveness" even mean in this context?
This would be much more applicable if there'd be a culture distinguishing the two kinds here at HN. Most submissions about Anonymous or "cyberwar" call them hackers, i.e. there's no "hackers vs. crackers" mentality. (Never mind that for me, having grown up in the 80s, a "cracker" is someone who circumvents the copy protection of a game)

Still, considering that the term has morphed once again into something greater ("life hackers" etc.), I don't see a real danger in the name of this site. Never mind that we've got way more capitalistic neo-yuppies here than phreaking aging hippies…
MacBook Pros have substantially better GPUs than straight MacBooks.
Big Problems With Big Iron
I understand that. It's obvious, and it's also not the point. The point is that Razer made so many sacrifices to specialize this laptop that they ought to be able to undercut the MacBook Pro by a lot more than $150.

The use of a dual-core CPU instead of a quad-core CPU should cover most of the cost of the GPU upgrade, which means that either Razer's trying to make a lot more profit per machine than Apple's flagship laptop, or Razer's getting screwed on the cost of a bunch of commodity components.
I've been trying this form to try to avoid email chains. It doesn't always work but at least gets some basic information.

http://tomio.wufoo.com/forms/pitch-a-story-to-tomio/
There are hundred of thousands of Flash games on the web. None of the issues raised by the article apply to them.

Though I hate Flash websites as much as everyone else, the title is misleading and harmful for game developers.
Looks like there is always a website for everything now...
Just want to say thanks. I bought the $2.99 iPhone app, and the ease of managing my team has definitely made me a few hundred dollars from bets with our pool over the season.
COLOURloves is probably one of my favorite web apps. We used it to create the color palette for our startup. It comes in pretty handy for developers who lack an understanding of color and design, but want to find an easy tool for incorporating colors into their web service to improve the user experience.

The other thing we love about COLOURlovers is that we think Darius is kinda crazy (in a very good way) because you have to be somewhat crazy to commit yourself to building a product and company around something as abstract as color. This type of behavior demonstrates both unrequited passion for the product and the ability to envision a world that is improved by enabling people to experience and discover color in a fun and easy way.

This type of product development requires both artistic sensibilities and product/engineering sensibilities, which is a rare combination to find in most entrepreneurs.

Thanks for sharing your story Bubs! And please keep the hits rolling with COLOURlovers : )
Which points to the oceans "bunching up," not laying flat.
Have you read anything from Jakob Neilson before, he would agree with you. If it were up to him the Web would like pretty much exactly like his article.
Iosdude, looking to join hot startup
Hi HN,

I'de like to ask the HN community for opportunities to join a start-up in the mobile space.

As a bit of a background, I am in my mid 20's, I have worked on several big name iOS apps in the store as a contractor, for small start-ups.

I have recently been made full-time, in big corporate. I'm not convinced I've made the right decision going full-time, so this is why I come to you, HN!

I'm currently based in London, but for the right people (and help) I can be anywhere.

My dream has always been to be part of something that would change the world (high hopes I know!). I have the tools to do it, now I need the motivation and the means to do it!

Sincerely,

iosdude
Opportunities in Mobile Health
Wow, 6 apps!
thanks! If only I took a rake like the casinos =)
If you find TinyVM interesting, one of my own projects might be worth checking out: https://github.com/JohnEarnest/Mako/blob/master/MakoVM.java

It's a stack-oriented VM, similarly designed to be as simple as possible, but my goal was to create something like an idealized game console. Thus, I have basic graphics support and gamepad input. The project includes a compiler for a dialect of Forth and a big pile of example code.
Ask HN: Best cloud host?
I'm in the process of launching a startup and I've decided on cloud hosting. I tried out AWS and I really like it so far, but I was wondering if anyone had any better choices. Cost isn't too much of a problem but I'm most worried about reliability.

Thanks in advance!
> How can this be true when our exam pass rate has been climbing for yonks?

If anyone wants to see grade inflation UK-style in black and white, take a look at these two pages:

http://www.bstubbs.co.uk/gcse.htm
http://www.bstubbs.co.uk/a-lev.htm

The bottom table on each page gives the overview across all subjects.

For those not familiar with the British system, GCSEs are taken at age 16, A-levels at 18.

So, for example, in 1989 when I did GCSEs 45% of grades were in the range A-C. This year it's 69.8%.

When I did A-levels in 1991, 78% of grades were in the range A-E. This year it's 97.8%.
Ruby on Android: Ruboto
Steve Jobs - After the Resignation