skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Re double-tap to zoom, nobody mentioned that I'd lose features when I upgraded, I honestly was starting to think I'd imagined that feature. It certainly doesn't behave like I remember it doing.

I'm having the opposite reaction as well, likely for similar reasons as the author: I use an iPhone 3GS running iOS5 and am comparing with a newer Android phone. Nearly every gripe he mentions having about Android, I have with my iPhone.
Don't even get me started on web browsing, maybe iOS5 is just using a ridiculous amount of memory or something because I never had this problem before upgrading, but now visiting certain webpages (eg Canada Post) crashes Safari. Nevermind smooth scrolling.

I'm not about to write some link-bait blog post about it though, the reasons why are obvious, I'm using an older phone with a newer OS, and am comparing to a recent Android phone. Doesn't mean I'm happy that iOS5 is reducing the usability of my phone, but at least I can apply critical thinking to the situation at hand.
I agree with the basic tenants of this article. Yes it was true, that k&t were moving the model into the 'economic sphere'. But I think you cannot overstate the importance of this. Behavioral finance/economics coming back into cog. psych. and cog. neuro. is absolutely earth-shattering. the money dictated the research and now that research is FINALLY being applied back into where it belongs. I can't wait for these ideas, and those of choice designers/specialists/researchers to make it into 'machine learning' and 'weak ai'. If ever there was a subject that was full of shit from the beginning with regards to how people actually think, and needs to be re-architected from the ground up. Also, someone needs to start listening to other Princeton Researchers like Eldar Shafir on these topics as well.
Guide for Solar and Wind Power
If they verified the links then go after them for the much nastier charge of downloading child porn.

While it's possible to make a directory that encourages illegal behavior, it's also possible to make a directory that sits idly by as a repository of factual information. Yes, the court should check for direct encouragement of illegal behavior. But I'm not comfortable letting the motivation in creating the site matter very much because it is so difficult to prove one way or the other.
Would. Except for the ones I already launched...
I've been working with the Dropbox API (among MANY others...) for my early stage startup Snapier (http://snapier.com/), and I must say it is a pleasure to work with. Very sensible and logical. I can't say that about all API's...

Another example of how Dropbox is gonna keep its momentum. With it, it should be rather straightforward to bake in some cool iCloud type of preview/revision stuff into native apps.
This is getting out of hand and quite annoying, especially for technical queries. Maybe Google can indulge us geeks with options or on a different Google site? Surely the tech folks at Google can't be happy with this? Maybe they have a more powerful internal search for themselves.Cmon, share!

Not counting on it though, after seeing what happened to code.google.com. If Bing or anyone else having decent web converage implements a proper search, I'll be all over it.
I know this isn't the typical submission but cmon its Blizzard doing DOTA crossing over all their characters!

EDIT: love the backstory/intro.
Not from what I saw or heard. Engadget's review for example praised how silky smooth the entire user experience now was.

Though I can imagine that being a beta build running in debug mode doesn't really help, if someone did see the occasional hiccup.
To me, the most important point is not the semantic difference between "profitable" and "sustainable" but instead the author's invocation of opportunity cost: "You could have rented the space out at fair market value for much more money than that. I'd argue you're losing money."

While it's nice to have the security of an infinite runway, if the value created by staying on that path is less than following a different path, then overall it's a net loss.
Hydrogen is still a large percentage of the huge planets mass (Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune), but yea there is going to be a lot of water out there.
It's double quotes.
Why? What prompted you to move off an RDBMS in general and to MongoDB in particular? Did you move your entire data tier to MongoDB or just particular parts of your data model?
So now you need to "quote" "every" "word" "you" "are" "searching" "for" - how crazy is this?

What is even worse than this - and this is pretty bad already - is that terms are no longer included by default.

Google will leave out terms you are searching for, if it so chooses, unless you purposely put the plus (or now quotes).

The engineers are not in control, it's pretty darn obvious.

added: Doesn't the use of quotes prevent stemming? Didn't plus allow stemming?
My revelation came from more simpler stuff. I was programming some service at work, and as usual there were a lot of bugs. I tend to worry a lot during programming about corner cases etc. I analyzed myself analyzing, and thought may be this is what a computer should do, which is inline with an earlier epiphany that "It is cardinal sin of a developer to do himself what a computer can do".

Now I tend not to worry about corner cases etc while programming. I just write all the stuff I can, and write tests for all the stuff that could possibly go wrong. And let the computer figure out the bugs for me :). It somewhat reminds me of Prolog.
Dropbox for Developers announced
Walkthrough of SBT's inspect command
Looks very nice, a worthy successor to http://wideimage.sourceforge.net/

I look forward to using it.
Scaling Isomorphic Javascript Code
After Android, iPhone 4s just LOOKS wrong.

I am switching back from 4s to Android because I find Safari unreadable with my old eyes. No control over font sizes, and the double-tap zoom doesn't reflow text. So HN is completely unreadable in portrait, and only barely so in landscape. No problem on my DroidX.
http://cran.r-project.org/other-docs.html
My team was writing a Linux-based PABX and a round of changes had caused lockups - but a weird kind. The machine was there, but just not responding. It wasn't dead, just maybe 100K times too slow. But when I hit alt-sysrq to shut the machine down and it responded instantly.

So I wrote an Alt-Sysrq handler that dumped the stack of the running process. The failed one was usually the one running so it was pretty easy to find, and then the stack trace told us enough about why it was deadlocked to make a fix without needing more investigation.

It was essentially just a one-sample sampling (monte-carlo) profiler.
Maybe they should "replace" those figures with a search composition figure that denotes how close the results are to the search terms, in the case where Google returns related-type results when it can't find exact matches. Green/yellow/red type stuff.
I can imagine they don't want people continuing to say that "the google plus doesn't work anymore."
I never caught on to the whole jQuery hype. Why do people use jQuery for such trivial things such as DOM? Wouldn't it be smarter to use getElementById() and end up with universal code that could run on any site without the need for 3rd party libraries?
Kareena kapoor in kurbaan top stars
I'm not claiming they're largely libertarians. I'm saying all of the libertarians-since-2009 are either plutocrats in disguise or being taken for a ride. Where are they on military spending? How about the Republicans blocking Obama's proposal to cut the payroll tax? How about immigration policy and drug policy?

The only time I hear "small government" extolled as a virtue is in defense of policies that screw the little guy.

The OWS people are, once again, not campaigning for "more/less government intervention". They're campaigning against most government actions being driven by lobbyists and campaign donations.
This, a thousand times this.

I think it's a shock to nobody that Apple has made damn sure that their UI is lag-free and smooth while Android hasn't. It seems like they've put a lot of work into ICS on this front, but still.

But I've always loved what I can do with my Nexus One that I haven't been able to do with my iPhone. Everything on your list, including:

* Google Maps: the client continually gets better, and built-in turn-by-turn audio navigation is amazing.
* Locale / Tasker. It's not a "can't live without" but it still feels like the future when my phone detects its location and environment and changes settings based on that.
* Swype gets a second mention because it's just that awesome. In fact, being able to replace just about every stock function on the phone is great.
Principles of good design - Dieter Rams
Oh, good point! Thanks!
Like the plus-sign of late, this works "sometimes."
Holy shit, I think the front page signinless-demo is using the css visited hack to figure out popular sites that I've visited, and showing them to me in the demo. Devious, but brilliant.
The article has interesting thoughts despite the flame bait headline and the lack of any actual legitimate grievance against Steve or Apple.
Not true - iOS (being held up here as essentially lag-free) has several long press actions. Closing running apps in multi-tasking and organizing apps require long presses.
Hi, there is a book on this topic:

"Gamification by Design: Implementing Game Mechanics in Web and Mobile Apps", written by Zichermann and Cunnigham, from O'Reilly, August 2011.

The description on amazon mentiones case studies. I haven't read this book, I have just seen it in the book store, so I can't tell you if it is good or if it is what you are looking for. There are no customer reviews yet, but I hope that this information helps.
Anyone else feel that the article was exceedingly lacking in subtance, especially for an NYTimes.com article?
> They have different origins, different goals, and different areas of expertise.

The greatest threat against Intel is the decreasing importance of the PC and the increasing importance of tablets, überphones and other non-Intel-based devices. Intel is common on desktops because the most popular OS for desktops runs on nothing but an x86 and on servers largely because what we call a server these days is just a (sometimes exquisitely) well built PC with rack mounting rails that has to be a PC because a very popular server OS can't run on anything that's not an x86 PC.

So, as x86's vanish from desks, there will be less reason to run desktop-derived OSs on servers and less reason to run them on x86 servers. With Windows 8 there is even less reason to have x86's in the remaining desktops, users being able to opt for more power-efficient ARM engines. I am not sure whether Windows Server 8 will support ARM-based servers, but, if they do, I expect the x86 to become a legacy platform.
the siri bit is might cool
The trouble is, many things are obvious when we're doing it. It becomes non-obvious months/years later. Document as much as possible.
"Clearly they lack consolidation and any real agenda for change. But hell, you have to admire their stoicism. They’re dancing and singing as the weather slowly deteriorates into a cold soggy mess. And you know what? They’re smiling."

What bothers me about seemingless aimless activism though is that it can be easily manipulated. And even if it isn't manipulated, groupthink can be just as bad and chaotic (as is the case with riots). These people would be better off consolidating and meeting with people of like minds in a more organized fashion on a continual basis rather than getting together with people that have intent far from their own.
Interacting with new Developers
Danger of Displaying Anger in Court, Divorce Attorney, Stuart, Florida
If Google is a company for the 90%, then it's for the masses right?
I find that jQuery gives you a lot more than just DOM manipulation. If you were doing just that then JQuery is overkill. But JQ gives you a lot more in the way of animations, plugins, and all sorts of other useful methods.

I also like the community. There seems to be a jquery plugin for damn near everything. Kind of like PHP. Yes it can be a mess. But when you are just trying to "get shit done" JQuery isn't bad at all.
Because the job is rarely just manipulating the Dom in some simple way.

Sure, if you just want to add the current date to <div id="rightNow"> then use basic browser builtins, but it's usually more like "I need every other child of each list with the class 'rowStripe' unless it's the last entry in the list", in which case jquery saves you a ton of time.
You made my laugh out loud, you are a central member of the HN community, but I had to down vote on snark. (I'm sure you have the Karma to burn. :) )
Yes this works. I upgraded to business class because I was going over the limit. Now I use 300-500GB every month with no problems.

Also they have a thing where you can pay an extra $5 to get basic TV (local channels, weather channel public access etc...).

It works out to be cheaper than residential internet + basic channels.
ShowHN: I built a Reddit.com Realtime mashup
How would that differ from S3? Is the concept that people would also have a better local UI on their data directory?
Subreddit example: http://www.scrolldit.com/?r=pics/new

Everything is clientside javascript. Amazon Cloudfront is used as hosting (See http://aaronblohowiak.com/using-amazon-s3-and-cloudfront-to-...). So scalability issues are impossible.

Works great on iPad/iPhone/Android. Any feedback?
FACT: 95% of the use of jQuery can be replaced with document.getElementById() and document.getElementsByTagName()
Make them "SMILE", they really need it :)
Sure it cuts both ways. I was just reacting to the picture of a CNC behind him.

If that is his design studio, it is awesome he has real equipment for making the stuff he designs rather than some art deco chairs from some snooty designer.
From an outsiders perspective, does my startup's value interest you?
Coming in cold, would that page entice you to sign up? (Obviously please assume that you are a merchant that has products) Any and all advice is more than welcome! Feel free to contact me at bwalker@kou.pn
فيديو مقتل معتصم القذافي
Jobs Listing Marketing/Sales & Purchasing
Such is the case with the fashion industry. You have the trend setters, the top designers who innovate. Then you have the smaller design shops who employ "artists" and ask them to copy and mimic the best.

Things don't necessarily look fancy or nice because they are, but because they typically debut in a velben good. They begin to lose their luster as the copycats catch on and as the market becomes over-saturated with copycat designs, the trend setter is forced back to the drawing board to create the new, fresh look.
Breast Cancer Insensitivity Fail
http://www.breastcancer.org/treatment/surgery/reconstruction...

Miguel, go with one of the other analogies.
Kudos to the Dropbox team for developing their product into a platform. Giving developers an opportunity to develop things on top of their product keeps not only the community excited about things to do with Dropbox, it also gives them fresh ideas from how people consider to use it.
Apple added 22 more nations for iPhone 4S pre-order
Firefox’s CSS3 Image Scaling Quirk
But, that's also the problem with Ramen Sustainable startups. The entrepreneur may keep going longer than would have been warranted, instead of moving on to their next big idea.

The assumption here is that the next big idea will be anywhere near as successful. I don't know about you guys, but I see way more businesses fail before they reach ramen profitable/sustainable/whatever than after. I know plenty of people who make $100 a month from their business. I know very few who make $10,000 a month.

If you're at the ramen stage, it's probably time to reexamine your end goals. If you're looking for a super-big exit, maybe your current path doesn't lead there and you have to hit the reset button. But, if you're like me, and all you want is a boss-free business of your own, tweaking your ramen into a comfortable lifestyle might not be too far off.
We practically rewrote the whole application. Some code was spared, but I would say that less than 20% of the original source was reused. This was not just because of the migration to MongoDB but more because we decided to take the product to a different direction.

Fundamentally while we could have migrated without a full re-write, SQL Server was only one of the technologies we wanted to replace. One thing led to another and eventually we decided to re-launch the product instead of iterating on it.

As for the performance issues, most of them are stemmed from MongoDB's current locking strategies. I heard 2.0 handles it a bit better but we haven't rolled it out to production yet. Planning your indexes carefully so they fit in RAM is very, very important to assure a high throughput with MongoDB.
What does? I'm not sure what's going on, since the meaning of the operators keeps shifting.

So what DOES + mean now? double-quotes? quotes around individual words vs. phrases?

How do I now say I want to find an exact phrase, nothing between the words, no variations in spelling?
The article states that it's designed to be used for bits from 1 to 10 cm, which mostly means stuff that has already fallen apart.
Daring Fireball: Why the QR code is failing
For the record, if there were a swank gelato bar for Python developers, I'd totally go there.
RDFa 1.1 Lite
It seems to me that Ramen Profitable is a narrow enough window that a given startup isn't likely to stay there for long. Either it will continue on to become Unqualified Profitable, or it will hover there for a few months (which isn't that long in the grand scheme of things) before falling back to unprofitable.

Extending the runway metaphor just a bit too far, when an airplane is within about 1 wingspan of the ground, it gets benefits in lift and drag from ground effect, but almost nobody flies there for very long because you're still really close to the ground.
> alleged misspelling detection

I agree, it is incredibly annoying.

I touch type and I know how to spell.

I rarely make typing mistakes, and when I do make a typing mistake, I see and notice it because i'm staring at the freaking screen.

(Conversely, when I don't make a typing mistake, and Google randomly changes my search, I don't notice, because I didn't do anything).

Particularly when you are searching for something and google changes it to an off by one that looks similar. For example, today i was trying to find libbcrypt, but Google kept changing the result to libgcrypt, which is not what I wanted, but they look similar enough that I clicked through some irrelevant results before I noticed.

Searches that would have taken one attempt, if Google had done what I told it to, now regularly take at least 2 searches.
You are missing the point. The probability of an exploit being ultra-low or hard to mount is not a valid justification for ignoring it altogether.
Steve Jobs: American Icon by Walter Isaacson
I've never experienced any of those issues in my 2+ years with Android. I've always used stock Android (on the MyTouch 3G and then the Nexus One) -- I think you must be using a buggy build.
For me, it has always been about creating unified interface across all the different browsers. While getElementID is universally supported, many things are different (see all the remarks about setting the `name` attribute on elements in Internet Explorer http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms534184%28VS.85%29....).

I'd rather let the library developers abstract all that out for me.
I'd really like to know if MIPS is actually competitive at the same performance-per-watt levels as ARM.

As I understand it, MIPS is easy to license and cheap to build, so when cost is the biggest factor you go with MIPS. That's nothing to sneeze at.

The way I see it ARM dominates in phones and tablets because these devices do much more than, say, a wireless router.
Steve Jobs told biographer he 'cracked' the secret to a simple HDTV
Especially juxtaposed with this:

"If I wanted to go about it the right way I would get a group of people together, break off from Occupy Wall Street, call it something else, rebrand it and start the right way, with people who maybe have some connections in Washington.” (lobbyists)
If it is not possible, I think it is more a web programming limitation rather than Dropbox failing to implement something.

Everything their SDKs do can also be done using their REST API (https://www.dropbox.com/developers/reference/api) and they support JSONP to allow cross-domain GET queries. However, my understanding is that JSONP is not supported for other REST methods, most importantly POSTs. A person claims to have found a workaround for doing POSTs via JSONP here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5345493/using-put-post-de....

Has anyone tried that or know of a way to do cross-domain POSTs?
FastSpring Ranked #1 Fastest-Growth Firm in Greater LA - 17,468% Growth
The woot "we got acquired" letter[1] was hilarious.

[1] http://www.woot.com/Blog/ViewEntry.aspx?Id=13390

shortest footnote marker-to-footnote distance ever?
I was amused by the author's misappropriation of the gay nineties (1890s).
Cool.

Although my first reaction was surprise at how awful the default front page of reddit is (I do use reddit but I don't subscribe to the pic- and meme-heavy subreddits).

How about text snippets for the text links?
I just had one last question:

Did you evaluate any other "NoSQL" DBs, such as Riak? If so, what was your main impetus for choosing Mongo? Did you go with mongod or mongos for your environment?
Why the QR code is failing
It is much cheaper to scale an application putting data onto peoples' Dropbox folders instead of S3. For S3, you would have to pay for the total amount of storage used by your customers; with Dropbox you wouldn't have to pay anything for storage, and for the most part your users wouldn't have to either since each gets a certain amount for free.
I dunno. The whole one-click patent thing. Abuse of government privilege to derive a monopoly.

Sure, he/they are just one of many, but if you don't hate the players the game continues.

There are many people in many positions who have a free ride because they got some doddering politician to introduce their legislation without thinking past the immediate benefits. This isn't how good laws are made and any business, lobbyist, or lawmaker even tangentially related to this stuff is a valid target.
No person can know what is best for another person.
I mean really know; sure you can say we have some responsibility to the youth to nudge them in a good direction.

But my point is you can't really _know_.

I have a problem that you are essentially telling little Jimmy that he's _probably_ not going to be Bill Gates, so why try? Better to go to a good school, get a good job, and be successful.

Only you can't and shouldn't define success for another human being.

For me the only way I can be happy is if I do myself Justice. That means trying to accomplish the things I want to accomplish. Note I said trying. You know it doesn't really actually matter that I do it or not, it matters that I am actively trying - that's called living life. The journey is your life. The goal is just an end. And who wants to be at the end?

/end philosophical rant
I think you could focus more of code organization and layout. What are possible ways to make Javascript code modular? Why are namespaces important? Why shouldn't you (generally) declare variables in the window context?

A few more:
What are dangers of using prototype inheritance with many instances of that class (meaning accidentally attaching variables to the prototype rather than the instance)?

What are some gotchas with IE < 9 event objects in event handlers that contain closures?

Explain the same origin policy, why it's important, and how it impacts your development.

(jQuery twister): explain where the '$' variable is defined when used with jQuery. How might you manipulate the DOM in another popup window you've created?