skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Home cinema
Shapesmith v0.2 - Hello Workplane
Apple Unveils New iPhone 4S
A "let's gain empathy by playing being poor" game seems like a horrible idea overall.

If it was a decent game and let you learn and succeed by smart choices, it would only give you a feeling of superiority to poor folks.

If (as it does) it inflicts you with pre-existing poor decisions and random "the gods are angry" punishments, it seems to impart a feeling that poor folks are somehow hopeless and cursed, which isn't really helpful either.

Wouldn't it be a lot more helpful to teach teenagers and pre-teens real-life strategies for independent living? Things like showing you how much money you end up paying to rent furniture or lease a car?

Maybe something like the old board game Pay Day?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pay_Day_(board_game)
IPhone 4S Announced by Apple, New Gaming Features
Algorithm behind the Facebook News Feed aggregation of stories
True, but you often don't realize that until you've exhausted Google and StackOverflow.
V8 is a lot faster than Ruby, so I'd expect page rendering to be a lot faster with Node than with Ruby (supposing both use good rendering engines).

Also it seems a lot easier to "outsource" computationally intensive tasks to other processes with Node than with Rails. With node you can stall the response until you receive a result of the computation (within limits), and use the wait time for other tasks. With Rails if you do that, you block one thread of your limited pool of threads. As an example: with my first Heroku Rails app (free hosting) I discovered the pool of threads was one.
Market underwhelmed by Apple launch
Save time. Wait 'til it's over, and then find out everything you actually want to know when someone posts a summary.

Do we have a summary so far? There's an iPhone 5, I assume? How does it differ from the iPhone 4?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reference_class_forecasting
iPhone 4S? I want the iPhone 5 :(
> Am I the only one that puts computationally intensive tasks into a queue to be taken care of by a pool of seperate processes?

Thank you. I really find it hard to believe that the reaction to Ted's post was to mess around with Fib implementations rather than to just say, "use a background queue," and move on.

If Ted has a point at all, it could be that he thinks that people using nodejs don't realize they're running in a loop. Maybe that's fair.
I'm surprised so many live blogs have gone down considering how tame the rumors leading up to this event have been.
I was not aware that potential professors are carefully screened for troll-like qualities before being given the position.
I think the "dey took our jawbs" line is a little bit of a red herring here. Sure, there's an impact, but automation and outsourcing are both bigger impacts, and for all 3, they're here, we better deal with them.

I feel like a path to citizenship would bring the wages for these jobs back above-ground and create a fair marketplace for labor where people could compete.

What's the other option, "ship them all back to latin america"? If you think that's a good idea, I'd invite you to think about what that enforcement action would look like, and if it fits into your concept of "America".

EDIT: Watches blanket downvotes without counter-proposal or likely even reading my comments. Whoever that is should run for the House.
"The MBA, which has fundamentally changed the way people think about computers"...

Err, no, I really don't believe it has.
This is too vague to be meaningful. You shouldn't hesitate to consult your coworkers for advice on a problem. If the problem is external, they may have wisdom and feedback on, for example, what library works best. If the problem is internal, they may spot your coding error in five minutes that you've been blind to for two days.

Should you make your coworkers and Stackoverflow users solve all of your problems for you? No. Should we repeatedly categorically demonize these excellent resources, thereby instilling an irrational fear of using them in new developers? No!

I've seen more problems caused by prideful programmers who refuse to consult with coworkers and consider their input. Furthermore, the people who have complained the most about being pestered by others were the ones who wrote the convoluted, undocumented mess that everyone else was stuck maintaining.
Apple Announces ‘Find My Friends’ — Which tracks friend's locations
Does the same criticism applies to code written with Greenlet/Gevent (see for example Brubeck web server)?
As far as I know Jobs hasn't publicly electrocuted animals in an attempt to scare consumers away from competing products. Yep. Clearly no Edison.
Hmm, everything seems pretty expected till now. Dual core processor, better graphics, "4G" support, better camera. Roll out the speech tech and nfc !
And the zebra won't miss it at all, because the zebra wasn't making the lion any money.

This metaphor is severely broken at this point, but you get the idea.
I do front end dev work, and mostly it comes down to experience. I usually try to work out a small test of some of the more complicated problems beforehand, so I might have a sense of how much time they'll take. Then I break the project down into parts and assign hours to it

You can bill your client for actual hours, or do a flat rate based off the hours you think it'll take. I tend to do a hybrid approach where I bill them based on a flat rate with a defined scope, then can charge more if they change the scope or something takes significantly longer than expected. Most of the time I come in under my hours, but not always. It's worked well for me.
> You do this kind of thing to get ahead in a certain world where you want to achieve something that you wouldn't normally achieve if you did things, as you say, "naturally".

I don't want to live in that world.

> You say you would never go to a house party full of people you don't know. Would you go to one that has lots of people you do know -- i.e. your friends?

Certainly. New people are fine in moderation, I'd just never go to a party full of strangers. It'd be no fun at all.

> Let me ask you something ... as an introvert, how do you plan to meet someone e.g. a girl you are attracted to, if your immediate circle of friends wouldn't introduce you to one? How do you meet people if you never go to events full of people you don't know?

You don't have to actively seek to attempt to introduce new people to your social circles to run into them anyway. You meet friends of friends without it being planned. You meet new people when following your own interests as a side effect without meeting new people being the goal.

> Actors in hollywood, etc. have to hustle and make connections. Same goes for musicians, comedians any other performing art. They can't ALL be creepy can they?

Yea, they pretty much are, because they're always selling something, always trying to use you in one way or another to forward their cause; it's annoying, insulting, self centered, and causes many introverts to avoid these types of people all together.

> If you do this systematically with everyone (e.g. think about what a promoter would appreciate before coming to the party) then you aren't being creepy, you are being considerate

I agree with that. But if you're being considerate while also thinking how can I use this to my advantage, then it's no longer considerate even though it appears to be. To me it's not your actions that make something considerate, it's your intentions.

If I met someone who consistently helped me out here and there, but I also noticed that every time, it also helped him out in some way then I would no longer consider what he does friendly, I'd consider it manipulative and avoid socializing with that person. Real friends help you even when it's not to their benefit, not just when it's convenient to them.

This is all just how I feel of course, but I doubt I'm alone in this regard. I'm sure many introverts feel the same.
Both GSM & CDMA. This is going to be one of the huge factors for the 4S & 5. If I can now play Verizon, Sprint, & AT&T off against each other then this may be a big, big win for US consumers.
I thought the point of "terrorism" is to inflict change on behaviors and confidence of a population? Changing someone's way of life impacts their confidence which seems to be the end goal of terrorism. It stands to reason that in order to make it an ineffective tactic, change as little as possible within the population and do not react.
This thread is indicative of the bias I see on HN. .Net and Java are "uncool" and therefore must not be suited for solving real world problems or doing interesting things. They are also often synonymous with bloated corporate bureaucracies and meetings. By these same stereotypes, should I assume that every Ruby developer is living in a party house with his 4 other co-founders, eating ramen and making social networking applications?
Citing Dice as a source gets about as much credibility as using a ouiji board.
Questions of Fairness in Silicon Valley Apply To Acquisitions too
I see this as /. users prefering open source browsers (i.e. Firefox) more.
I'm very glad the node.js community got trolled so effectively. It's been clear for a long time that these most of these advocates are not grounded at all in reality, and it was very entertaining to have them revealed in their ignorant zealotry. Evented solutions have been available in every modern language for some time. They aren't used that often though because they have serious inherent limitations!

I understand the appeal of node.js. It makes the web stack feel much less complex, and I like to reduce complexity as much as the next guy. But in the end, node.js is just a thin wrapper on top of a simple C library. In the end, it really only excels at solving a small, narrow, niche problem.
Ricky Gervais: My First Week In Hollywood
The spreadsheet browser extension I would happily pay $50 for
Ted hates queues, too.

But I don't, so instead of playing tough-guy and picking on random open source communities that don't want me, I get to write cool computer programs. Maybe we should all do the same.
I'm having a hard time separating the wheat fromt the chaff in all that camera talk, is anyone familiar with these changes/sensors (since I suspect they're not unique to Apple devices)?
at least in the case of MS technologies, the developers were exposed to the most of the components (or their previous incarnations) of the platform well before official .NET packaging. I'm still wondering what good candidates were placed into one position i came across in 2005 that had 10-12 years of J2EE experience requirement. Somehow i was scared to apply to such a place - as i only worked with Java since 97 and with J2EE since 99 :)
Sure, there's always going to be a mountain of job applicants for each position, it doesn't mean they can do the job. Finding qualified .NET developers is the real challenge, someone who can architect and build a functional system.

These are the very type of people who are bailing on the platform.
Building the global startup - Part 5
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1854333

Looks like you may be able to keep Ubuntu with a current release and configure Gnome Fallback, looking like Gnome 2 to your users.

(Apologies for multiposting - just saw this)
As another spanish speaker I have to say that the name isn't a problem at all. But I must acknowledge that for the majority of people the name sounds stupid, I wonder how many will get used to it.
Yesterday I realized dropbox is basically a giant consumer facing pubsub system. This paper describes a giant consumer facing pubsub system.

Draw your own conclusions.
It's possible I'm misinterpreting the results (or the benchmark is flawed), but this seems to imply that it is often the case: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=all...
Good point. The site has a little over 1M pageviews per year. Of those around 750K are unique visits. I don't know how many unique visitors it had, but I can check.

What does this all mean in terms of generating revenue? Which ones are more important to focus on than the other?

(again I'm pretty new at running an online business, thanks for all you input)
I don't get why all these back and force rants get upvoted.
Oracle Joins the NoSQL Club
I certainly see a significant number of people on IRC asking questions that could be typed verbatim into google to get a better answer.

I guess some people just want/need to avoid as much thought as possible.
Certainly, I would love to take responsibility. But, generally, the data shows otherwise. Of my 10-20 closest friends, many of whom I consider smarter than myself, many are still in working class poverty, working as bartenders and laborers. In fact, only about 25% of adults in the US attain college degrees. Most of those degrees are attained by people already in the middle class. Furthermore, many are in uneconomical specialties like Literature.

At some level, I suppose I was a better decision maker, but overwhelmingly I happened to be in the right place at the right time.

Some 'luck' factors:

- At 17, I became friends, by accident, with a boy in another area whose dad was the VP of an engineering company. His dad saw my interest in science and encouraged me to go to college.

- At 18, while working as a temp, I happened to make friends with a retired engineer who encouraged me to college.

- I went to college in the 90s, at a time when Computer Science was a much more achievable major. Now, it is much more competitive.

- In the 90s, Computer Science had much less inspiring occupational outlook. I believe chemical engineering was all the rage then.

- I stumbled into Computer Science by accident. I happened to be a Physics major who had a sad, late night addiction to MUDs. And, I decided to start my own MUD and code it myself.
"2:02PM Phil's taking a shot against the Atrix, Thrill, and Inspire 4G. "The iPhone 4S is just as fast as these phones.""

Wow. "Guys, this is awesome! Our new phone is just as fast as an Android phone that came out a year ago!" (The Atrix, about to be supplanted by the Atrix 2).
They're not really directly comparable. GlusterFS implements standard POSIX semantics and is directly mountable on a client. On the backend it can use another file system (ext, XFS, etc) where it actually stores the data. It's highly configurable in a variety of different server distribution schemes similar to RAID levels you'd use on local disk.
Will tomorrow be Steve Jobs' last big thing?
IPhone 5: Apple Dances Toward the Main Event (Live Blogging)
Wordpress is a good reminder that every great product starts from humble beginnings.
This also means that Verizon's iPhones lose one of their biggest downsides, that whole worldwide compatability thing.
This is _always_ what happens. Buy on the rumor, sell on the news. AAPL always trends up before a major event, drops immediately after, and then climbs back up to top the previous high within a week or so.
Meanwhile in India, the government is wondering if 60 cents a day would be a reasonable poverty line for urban areas (somewhat less for rural areas) http://the-diplomat.com/indian-decade/2011/10/04/govt-backtr...
Roofing West Palm Beach | Palm Beach Roofing
"Jumped the shark" joke comments are the sort of thing HNers vote down.
Forget terrorism. This is EXACTLY the same as God and Elevators. Think about it. Lets start easy:

I see people every day come into an elevator and press the door close button like it is the only way to get air. Nobody realizes that the button does nothing. Furthermore many do, but they do it any ways on the off chance that it saves them an extra millisecond here or there of waiting. It never gives any benefit. However "may as well do it just in case it works". Trivial to disprove but still.

God: People worship. Why? Do we know god does exist? no we don't. In fact all signs point to got not existing. Why worship though? On the off chance that god does exist and we won't go to hell. It does not matter that there is no god, people will still worship.

Both examples are ways for people to feel better about something they can't control and makes them feel that they can.

Now the TSA is exactly the same. It makes no difference, or it does, all signs point to the TSA being complete horsecrap, but people want it just in case there is a possibility they can prevent an act of terrorism and save 10 people at the price of insane expenses, time expenses, people unalbe to travel, personal rights violated, etc.
Out of curiosity, why? Wouldn't they have pretty good proxy data on the demand for different skills?
Similar professional experience: I go back to having built rudimentary microprocessors with diode arrays and gates; Creating my own microcode and ALU; Wire-wrapping my own computers using 8080, 6502 and other early processors; Punching in my own mini-os using a hex keypad; Rolling my own Forth-based OS, editor and applications; working with PALs and later on multi-million-gate FPGAs.

I find myself agreeing with the author on many points. The evolutionary progress in computing seems to have stalled a long time ago. The fact that we are still hand-coding loops and such things means that it is hard to move up into a higher level of consciousness, if you will. The paradigm shift we need is one where the programmer is able to think and work in problem space rather than being pushed down into verifying loop counts and semicolons every five minutes.

Back in college I experienced a mind-opening moment when a physics professor insisted that I enroll in a class he was teaching. The class was for a language called APL. I won't go into details here. Look it up if interested. That class and that language changed my view of computing and how computing could work forever. I was taking FORTRAN and C classes at the same time. The contrast between the languages was almost beyond description. While we were mired in do loops and other language-mechanics in FORTRAN and C we were actually solving real problems with APL in very short order...even writing a game or two, database applications and doing some scientific computing. Programmer productivity and the ability to express and solve a problem simply could not be compared. APL felt like it was a century ahead of anything else.

APL lets you focus on the problem space. In a certain way it is like playing the piano, you don't think about frequencies and durations, you think about expression of ideas.

As people focused in languages like C++ (which were easier to grasp and use with equipment available in those days) APL never became mainstream and, to some degree, did not evolve into what it could have become. Ironically, the machines we all have on our desks today provide an incredible environment for a language like APL in terms of available resources and speed.

I am not saying that APL is the end-all. What I am saying is that my path through this craft was altered in a non-trivial manner by being exposed to a very different set of ideas. I find myself longing for feeling that way about the tools I have to use today, particularly when hitting the pavement with languages such as Objective-C and VHDL, which, despite their many supporters are far, very, very far, from providing the kind of evolution and progress we so desperately need in computer science.
Reminds me of the last Github post I'd read about their load-balancer setup from their server guy(2009):
http://www.anchor.com.au/blog/2009/10/load-balancing-at-gith...

Willy Tarreau (author of HAproxy) had sparked a nice discussion in the comments section, that time.
Is SproutCore Dead?
Yeah. I wonder how things like carrier lock are going to work on this new model. If I have Verizon service in the US and go to Europe can I drop in a local SIM card and use that? If so what is to prevent me from using that same feature when I am back in the US? Hmmmm....
Thanks for your reply! That is very true, the advertising is coming from a third party that focuses on the niche market of pregnant women and new parents. All of the hits are from Sweden since the site is in Swedish.

I'm very open to the idea of an affiliate partnership, but I must say that I'm cautious since a many online stores advertise on the site (which generates extra revenue separate from the third party)

I would very much like to look into it. Not sure if there's a DM feature on HN, but if you know of companies that would be a good fit then I'd like to explore the opportunity with you. Thanks!
Google Trusted Store: create a trusted Online Business Store for Customers.
I don't get upset when businesses outsource to India. If anything, hiring me the first time would result in less work for me. If I was hired for a few months to solve problem foo, then I'd be finished and gone and not getting paid. But because there is so much damage caused by bad programmers, I have to stay employed indefinitely just to keep the damage from being too bad. Multiply this by the number of good programmers in the world, and we're wasting a lot of money on outsourcing.

So yes, please outsource your programming some more.
>That's a lot of smoking.

A pack of 20 in the UK costs about £6, which is about $9.

It's going up in the next budget.
It's not that they're unable to pay -- they choose not to.

I see so many companies that want something for nothing. They want the automation and savings from the systems that developers are building, they're just not willing to pay for it. But then ask them if they'd rather go back to the manual business process they were doing before (that doesn't require paying developer salaries) and they look at you like you're crazy.
I'm just tired of this, it's beyond dumb.

I remember the spectacle of the Java hype machine and the dot-com 1.0 hype machine. In comparison the node.js hype doesn't even register on the meter. Moreover, I don't see a rash of people misusing node.js to the degree that is prevalent for pretty much every other web technology out there. Are some people going to misuse technology? Always. Is the node.js community out there trying to proselytize to the world, selling node as the solution to every problem on the planet for every developer on the planet regardless of whether it makes sense? Not in the least.

This is a faux-controversy.
Create a fading magnifying glass overlay on image hover with jQuery and CSS3
awesome stuff - i always see events i MAY go to, but don't necessarily want to put it on my calendar. looks like this will do the trick
Think Sprint may still be able to sell that big chunk of phones they committed themselves to. I can definitely see going back to Sprint, if they get reasonable roaming deals, particularly on international data.
I'd never heard of the C10K (http://www.kegel.com/c10k.html) but I love scaling issues and this looks to be some fascinating reading. Thanks!

EDIT Interesting annecdote... Cal Henderson is the author of "Building Scalable Websites" http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596102356 and has worked in "the trenches" as the lead engineer of FLICKR and developer at B3TA.

Apparently his newest company http://tinyspeck.com/ is using node.js for their game engine.

Assuming he's planning on scaling to a reasonable size, that seems to be a pretty resounding endorsement that there's at least something going for it. I mean ... that guy's got a bit of experience in working at scale.
is this a joke?
apple used to be cool.
today apple is lame.
it's unix made stupid. with a gui.
jobs is a marketer. true colors.
he could not code his way out of a wet paper bag.
the people who deserve the credit are the design team.
for designing stuff that looks good.
from the icons going back to the late 80's, to the hardware casing which just keeps looking better.
too bad they're wasting their talents working for a company that cannot innovate in software (no, gui's do not count).
if unix is to be improved, it will not happen at apple.
and they will do everything in their power to prevent you from running a better os on their hw.
Great point :) Revenue would increase with a higher number of visitors. Any good tips on SEO or other strategies? Currently, 80% of the traffic is from google. Thanks!