skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, the Linux ports often are written specifically so that the game can participate in the bundle and have not been widely tested prior to release. Most of the developers do not appear intimately familiar with *nix convention and create confusing launch processes, etc. Crayon Physics Deluxe, for instance, had binaries crayon and launcher, and if you tried to launch crayon directly you'd get many more complaints than otherwise (since supposedly launcher tested for various libs and then called crayon with the right options to work with the installed envrionment).

Ryan Gordon is contracted to port several of the games and has bug trackers on his site icculus.org.

Most of the problems with Linux versions get worked out in the first few weeks, though, it just requires a bit of patience, and the HIB is one of the best points of reference Linux gamers have to demonstrate that they're willing to pay for commercial games in order to encourage further development.
Good advice, although from my experience (in San Francisco), getting to know the staff is the easiest way to ensure a free -> cheap working environment. Local places with a lot of people means you can get away with 1 - 2 cups of coffee for the day, which will run you $4 - $7 depending on how swank the place is.

Also, buy a couple of $5 power strips and leave them at the places you frequent. Give something back to the community that's supporting you (whether they know it or not).
> if you pay more than the average price, we'll throw in the entire Humble Frozenbyte Bundle — a $45 value!
That reads the exactly the same. Who are you (rhetorically, not 'you' :-)) to decide that I shouldn't be doing something? It's authoritarian and creepy.

Eric's misstep is precisely that addendum. If he said something to the effect that "If you have something you don't want anyone to know, don't put it on the internet". OK, fine -- that's reasonable. The paternalistic addition of an implied judgment on someone's behavior is unneeded.

I think it comes from being a top-level employee at company or any nominal leadership position. You get used to speaking with authority in one context -- and sometimes you think you can speak with authority in a larger context -- and you really can't.
... but Silk is being rolled out on a WiFi-only tablet. Most users won't ever have to worry about a crappy cell data connection.

Some day, sure, they'll ship with 3G connections. But client hardware on future devices will only be faster and more capable.

A SPDY-link to Amazon's private caching/compression network is a great win and differentiator. But why even open the can of worms that is two-tier _processing_?

If they're leaving flash enabled on Silk, surely that dual-core chip is capable of keeping up with the bulk of browser rendering and js tasks.
Buy they’ll have the advantage that their browsers will run faster than anyone else’s.
Personally I don't like Google App Engine, but I can understand its value -- it has reasonable free quotas (even now, after the pricing scheme changed), and your app ends up running on Google's infrastructure which is rock solid.

However, I never understood why people like Heroku ... it's like renting instances on EC2, only 10 times more expensive.

Of course, people then start enumerating a whole bunch of stuff that they don't have to worry about when using Heroku. However, when starting out, configuring a server is just like configuring your localhost development environment. You just have to start with something that works, then gradually keep learning.

Heroku doesn't provide anything to me other than an unreasonable free quota that's basically useless for serving anything other than static content (poorly) ... even GitHub does a better job with their static pages option, since GitHub's servers don't go sleeping when unused.
> An advantage of electronic voting is that the machines can be designed for use by the blind.

Could be, but aren't.

If you'd ever tried the 'accessibility' features of a touchscreen voting machine, you'd see the UX fail firsthand. (I've worked as a poll inspector.)

There were other truly accessible solutions. The VotePad for instance. Low-tech plastic wrapper for existing ballots. Preserving both the secret ballot and public vote count.

Alas, the inexpensive VotePad couldn't complete with the well financed crony capitalism juggernaut which brought us HAVA.
In the words of Mark Suster 'Is it time for you to earn or is it time for you to learn?'

At the moment, I'm 24 years old (I hated typing the 24 I was 23 only yesterday). I'm in a fortunate but also unfortunate position. I've got a freehold house (mortgage free) but I've got a ton of expenses from my family oh and an ill parent to look after. I've paid down the mortgage on this house completely and I pay for every single thing in this house and my own living expenses.

I've worked in two very very hot start-ups in v.sexy sectors. You've probably heard of both. Unfortunately, I just left college and the positions aren't exactly lucrative but the opportunities to learn are formidable. So for me 'life's ability' to try isn't available due to financial constraints.

I've two options either a) start my own thing or b) join someone else's start-up at the founder or first 2-3 senior hire positions.

At present I'd prefer to do my own thing and being in a full time job is needed. Real estate is an awful investment esp if it is your ONLY investment like it is for most people. I'd much prefer to be in a position i was in 4 years ago with a solid portfolio of liquid investments.

However, I realise a business is a brilliant investment, probably the best especially if its cash generative.

My long term goal actually is venture capital so either way I need solid operating experience to break in.

So, thats really whats holding me back but fortunately, I've got time on my side :)
Dental Videos
Hunch's switch to git
For those who haven't played Frozen Synapse yet, to me it feels like 21st century chess.
I like the "vapor" poster. I wish I had thought of "voter verified vapor audit trail" back when I was fighting against these touchscreens.
This is great! Looking at the Django tutorial in the docs [1], I think it's too bad, though, that they don't provide a build-in, well tuned WSGI Server. This way, you have to choose your own WSGI server, configure and update it yourself.

[1] http://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/django#using_a_differen...
On the other hand, they announced new e-ink version of the standard Kindle (Kindle, Kindle Touch). It seems they understood that the e-ink is a must to keep.

http://www.amazon.com/Kindle-Touch-Wi-Fi-Ink-Display/dp/B005...
Cure for HIV
The Top Programming Languages
It is also available on the Internet Archive: http://www.archive.org/details/ReminiscencesOfAStockOperator
I loved Heroku, many moons ago when I was working in Rails. As I've emigrated away from Rails to Django, I've found dotcloud to be the premiere platform -- I want to qualify this, it is the premiere polyglot platform, but for each individual environment I've deployed on dotcloud, their experience has been the best.

I haven't used dotcloud's Ruby/Rails stack, so I can't compare that, but Heroku is definitely fighting a hard battle if they're going to swing me from dotcloud, but it's always good to have competition, and if anybody is going to bring their A-game, it will be Heroku, who were sort of pioneers in the space.

The Heroku Python Free platform might be better in some instances than dotcloud's, and I'll definitely investigate that, but for anything I can think of using, dotcloud has been amazing for me.
Awesome news topped with even more awesomeness that Heroku is continuing to truck along post-acquisition.

We're now looking into +/-'s of moving from RAX Cloud Servers to Heroku.
Six Simple Small Business Metrics I wish I had used from the beginning
i also dislike the previews :'(
and the cached link was nice and easy, now an annoying extra click, etc. Why oh why?

Aaaargh!
I'm just speaking personally, but I'm on the side of most of the folks here. A senior engineer is looking into the ["society of spectacles"] search now, for example.

What would be most helpful would be constructive examples of bad queries, bad experiences, or concrete proposals for how to improve Google's results page or results UI.
Scrum favors incremental/additive changes, which leads to inconsistencies. Often inconsistencies are too large to simply fit with some other task, and a separate task just for reconciling everything never gets prioritized. Viola.
RightwayJS - MVC framework
A Mac User’s First Reaction to Windows 8
Historically, the profits of the CD era was an outlier. Ever inclining revenue is not a fundamental right.

Whether radio was a profit center or not is beside the point, but whatever, maybe touring and merch can be the new one, or not.

I for one don't feel obliged to come up with a way for them to sustain the wealth of a bygone era.
I've been noticing the same pattern -- the results from DDG aren't quite complete enough. Sometimes, it's just missing a few minor things, other times, I'll run a search query and there will be a major search result that I know is missing, that I can get in one of the top 5 results from Google.

Which sucks, because I hands-down full-on no-buts prefer DDG's interface to Google.

I hope I'm not being uncool here, but a while back I privately suggested mining the data from "!g" queries as a way to see where DDG wasn't returning the results that people expected. Is there a reason you can't do that? In my case at least, I usually start with DDG, and if I don't get what I'm expecting, then I use a "!g" -- so you'd have a nice little database of results to perform comparisons from.
I am a student and lack the proper motivation in the right direction, but have the enthusiasm and will start one day. :)
Wow, thanks for exposing me to how braindamaged win32 really is.

To be perfectly fair, this arrangement (which I don't like either) is actually inherited from the Windows 3 API (Win16) and very likely goes back all the way to Windows 1.
So you'll see ads when you're not reading on the device. How does this impact the content ... ?
Or combine with another service which uses MD5 hashes differently. You used to be able to copy a Gravatar hash into a Disqus url and see the email address, if that person had ever made any Disqus comments on any blog anywhere using their email address.

No brute-force necessary.
Better infinite scrolling with the HTML5 History API
> This thread creates an invisible window whose job is to do something until it is destroyed

Is this a common pattern? Why?

Wouldn't it be simpler to just create a thread or separate process without an attached window?
I've used both the Kindle and Kindle DX for an extended period of time. When a friend offered to buy me one or the other as a housewarming gift, I chose the smaller one. The DX is just too big for its purpose, IMHO. The fact that it is outrageously expensive, relatively speaking, is just another reason to skip it. I love my little Kindle, and even if the DX were similarly priced, I wouldn't choose it.

I'm sure everyone has different tastes...but, I'd recommend trying them both before buying. You might find, like I did, that the regular Kindle is just a better form factor.
He paused a lot to wait for applause and got crickets.

It's a press conference, not a public event. You measure interest by camera shutter clicks, rather than applause :-)

He's already achieved his business objective, which is lots and lots of frothy press coverage and market position as a value provider. The longer the poor economic climate lasts, the more this pays off. I can see why you're skeptical, but I felt the same way when I first saw the kindle, and boy-was-I-wrong-about-that.
May I ask how you started out with the book? How did you come up with the structure and content.

It seems to me that it is relatively easy to hammer out just a book to have a book. For a memoir or something like that this might be fine. But writing good quality practice/problem centric ones with cases, illustrations, and a decent layouting appear to me like demanding an incredible amount of work. Would be very interested in any thoughts on how to optimize this process.
Population size needs to be factored in. NYC, LA/SF, Boston, London, Chicago, and a couple other large cities are pretty much always the top, primarily because they are the largest English speaking population centers.
I don't believe your statement is true, do you have any stats?
> [...] and the HIB is one of the best points of reference Linux gamers have to demonstrate that they're willing to pay for commercial games in order to encourage further development.

And that's why I was happy to contribute, although I didn't have any fun doing it!
I still find Dotcloud's pricing violently expensive (and I have a free VIP plan). YMMV I guess.
The short answer is all the election administration gear is rushed to market. The HAVA boondoogle created a gold fever land grab mentality. The products are shit. Not just insecure, but just complete garbage. Not to downplay the security concerns, but the poor reliability is a bigger threat. Especially since these systems fail silently and "testing" was a puppet show.

The longer answer is that all voting gear I've seen (in the USA) treat security as an afterthought. Gear in use typically get "tamper evident" seals. But they're really lame (e.g. fall off) or the gear can be backdoored.

I'm just talking the hardware here. The software situation is totally, scales of magnitude, worse.
Top LED HDTV Panasonic VIERA TC-L42E30
Thanks for the words of encouragement! I have to admit, I am having second thoughts about making money from this.
I remember seeing your app either featured in the Apple App Store or being in a Top 100 list on it.
I've been using Flask on Heroku since the Facebook apps announcement, and set up a boilerplate template here: https://github.com/zachwill/flask_heroku
Has anyone actually managed to the alpha page it seems to be down.
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuFriendly (see under Alpha page)
I like weird scifi comics. You should put a link in your profile
Hypocrisy aside, does anyone else find the quality of the "Special Offers" advertisements on the kindle to be higher than the norm?
Sorry, it just takes an extra second to load. Will fix it in a bit. You should still be able to see it if you just wait for a beat.
AIDS vaccine shows early promise
We do not automatically use a wsgi server because we want to offer flexibility to our users. Additionally we felt that having less magic in what we automatically do to your application (other than run it) was more of the Python way.
"it's like renting instances on EC2"

False. I'd suggest you take a look at their architecture overview. It's not like renting instances on EC2 at all because dynos != virtual machines. http://www.heroku.com/how

"Of course, people then start enumerating a whole bunch of stuff that they don't have to worry about when using Heroku. However, when starting out, configuring a server is just like configuring your localhost development environment. You just have to start with something that works, then gradually keep learning."

This may be fine for some, but for those that _don't_ want to worry about sysadmin work and want to focus on rapid iteration, Heroku makes more sense. Besides, it's not the initial configuration that is the most painful, it's the maintenance and cost associated with managing your own virtual instances, and infrastructure pieces such as reverse proxies, caches, etc.

"since GitHub's servers don't go sleeping when unused."

I'm not even sure what this means. Can you elaborate?
Mizuno Volleyball Bag Black
I don't think there is a particular trick to fix that, here's what I do - if the place is in a decent neighborhood and there are other people on laptops around, I'll ask someone to watch my things.

The trick I use is to pick someone that has line of site on my things, so they pay attention even if they don't mean to. And ideally to pick someone with a laptop, and preferably a better laptop than yours, that makes them a tad more trustworthy, because at least they probably won't take off with yours.

If the neighborhood is sketchy or there is no one around, I take it with me.
I think the Apache move is positive. But the name choice is just horrible.

What's wrong with Apache Mobile?
Why Zynga's Profits Plummeted
USITC to probe HTC's Apple Complaint
GNOME 3.2 available: welcome, web apps
The new version of the GNOME desktop environment comes with several new features. One of the most interesting, its web apps support.
Sorry Tim, but looks like Bezos is the new Steve Jobs
> IOS 4 (and soon 5) - Lots of pre-existing premium apps.

Android has tons of premium apps too.

> 8 Gigabytes Flash vs 16 Gigabytes.

The Kindle stores everything in the cloud for free.

> Video/Camera capability on iPad
> 10 Hours Battery on iPad vs 8 Hours on Fire

I see everyone saying here that people don't care about features, they only care about the content, this is why previous Android tablets failed despite having more features than the iPad. Again, I think only time will tell.

> It's a nice first attempt, but for anyone with the extra money, I think the iPad still offers the better value play

But it's $300 more expensive, that's a huge difference for the regular customer. And as I explained, the difference in features isn't that perceivable for non-techies except for the size.
I think Marco is wrong about a few things:

1) The special offers Kindle's will become their best selling models. The offers are totally not distracting. And maybe more importantly, the offers seem to actually be quite good. Even if they special offers and non-special offers were both priced the same, I might be inclined to get the special offers Kindle.

2) There's clearly a tablet market. The iPad though is just so far better than the rest that it's a non-starter to look at anything else. Will the Kindle Fire be the first tablet that threatens it? Maybe. Depends on three things: 1) Quality of web browser. 2) Quality of email app. 3) General responsiveness. If it can nail those three then I think we can see a holiday season where Kindle Fires sell like crazy to the detriment of iPads.

I could see people saying, "I'd love an iPad, but I'd still be stoked to get a Kindle Fire." Given the $300 price delta, a lot of people may be getting the Kindle Fire.
I don't think it well be that bad, eventually. It's already creepy to walk into someone else's home uninvited, or enter a public bathroom marked for a different gender, or even just stare at someone for a while. None of these social norms are based on limitations of technology.
>>If you aren’t getting rejected on a daily basis, your goals aren’t ambitious enough.<<

This is a crucial piece of advice. A few months ago I remember Jeff Bezos caught some flack because Amazon wasn't failing enough, which lead people to think Amazon wasn't taking enough risks. Although I disagree with that analysis of Amazon, the core concept is still true.

It's also refreshing to see that Chris Dixon was rejected a ton before becoming successful. I get rejected on a daily basis and to be honest - it takes a lot out of me. However, when I read something like this it makes me realize all of this rejection is worthwhile and part of finding my way to success.
http://www.bgr.com/2011/04/05/mlb-com-ceo-android-users-less...

The Android platform offers a broad range of possible devices. There's a plethora of low end devices that account for almost no purchases. If you're looking anecdotally, more developers are likely to have high-end androids (i.e. people you're likely to see). Those aren't representative of the android demographic as a whole, which is less likely to pay for apps.
That's only the case if you look at it from the supplier's perspective: "We're giving you so much! So you should give us every last penny you can afford," or (more hyperbolically) "It'd be a shame if something happened to your business here in our territory. Want insurance?" The research has already been paid for by its initial funding. Why should we have to pay an intermediary to access it?

In other words, the question is not how much access to all the world's scientific knowledge is worth, but whether it's acceptable for an entity that had no hand in creating that knowledge to control access to it.
Feel free to post comments/issues here, I'll be watching the discussion.
There is a great (indi/student) game community in The Netherlands!

First company that comes to mind:
http://www.vlambeer.com/ (they created super crate box; a free game)
Check out their talk on it:
http://vimeo.com/29423887
Amazon's Kindle Touch is as interesting as Kindle Fire
I get paid to work on my open source project.
43 Pithy Quips On The Business of Software
I was bored so wrote some JS to put the links back. Only works in chrome.

As a userscript:
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/114144

Or as a bookmarklet:
javascript:(function(){var c=document.querySelectorAll('a[href*="webcache.googleusercontent.com"]');for(var a=0,b;b=c[a];a++){b.parentElement.parentElement.parentElement.parentElement.querySelector("h3.r").parentElement.insertBefore(b)}})()
It's not a true Scotsmen fallacy to have a tight definition. 'Capitalism' proper may very well be the thing of fairy tales, similar to Socialism proper. It's a philosophical concept, it need not be obtainable.
Yeah libraries are another good candidate. In my experience, libraries aren't as social, and can be a little antiseptic, but I think this varies widely based upon which library you visit.
(Hey, I'm actually the author) We were actually working out of Affinity Lab for over a year. A great place. That's what you do when you want to upgrade.

But the trick with any coworking space is that it's gotta be convenient. We moved out of the city and it's just a bit too far out. But AL is great.

Also, you don't have to spend $1000/month - that's just what happens if you're not careful. I generally spend about $4-5/day - so it rounds out to about $150.
Lenovo does a great job with ensuring reasonable level of linux compatibility in their hardware.

I've been fairly loyal customer for years for that reason and basically everyone I know who doesn't use a mac is on thinkpad running linux.

I think it may actually be meaningful customer segment for them.
Many publishers don't allow their books to use the TTS feature. Possibly because they fear that it would could into their audio-book market. Amazon may have decided that it's a feature that's too infrequently used to justify the cost.
Love this. I've been known to take an extension cable into starbucks.
Where did you get that information? is there an official statement about it? I thought about this too when I read the blog post but couldn't find more information about it.

edit: after reading another HN's thread I found this http://aws.amazon.com/es/amazonsilk-jobs/ suggesting the same thing. Thanks anyway.
Yep, that's the upgrade if you can afford it and there is one nearby. Coworking places can be great.
8,000 Galaxy Clusters Confirm General Theory Of Relativity In A Big Way
Ask HN: Linux on Windows?
I work on my windows (7) laptop for job #1 and find myself constantly missing having unix behind the scenes like on my powerbook to just pull up a terminal and go.

I need to be able to do my work on windows but would like to have a unix terminal around in the background. Cygwin doesn't do it for me, it's not full bodied unix experience - i miss seamless package management, certain resource & network toolchains, and other things critical to effective hacking.

What I really want is linux running behind the scenes (virtualbox, but hidden?) with the option to pull up a terminal (putty?) and crank. VIM inside and a few symlinks & scp ops later I basically can get in & out with whatever I need to.

Is there such a solution? Is the best thing really virtualbox running some really basic batteries excluded (except apt, gcc, etc) version of linux? Which distro would that be do you think? I'm thinking maybe I'm missing something and there's a better answer.
With a $200 Kindle Fire and $800 Windows 8 tab, is the $500 iPad still tenable?