skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a very good object lesson in "Don't hang your brand on Facebook" (or any other service that you don't control or have an SLA with). Eclipse existed long before the Twilight series, and here it is ousted because it has less mass appeal than a movie about horny vampires. Obviously seniority and first-to-field isn't a factor with Facebook.

It really sucks for the Eclipse project, though. I hope they're able to get it back, though knowing Facebook, I'd be genuinely surprised if they did.
Entrepreneurs Who Go It Alone
I like this, never thought of it that way.

If you're missing this aspect, musical instruments (to take one example that I sometimes wonder about) can easily seem designed to be "hard" to use. Compare a computer keyboard, with its clear labels, to the (to a newcomer) totally opaque grouping of the keys on a piano.

Now, I still think the keys could be labelled without any threat to the possibilities of expressing one's creativity, but it's a bit less annoying, having read this. :)
What is Symfony2?
Should I drop out of College?
Maybe: "Spaced Repetition System"?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition
This isn't an addition $12500 to invest, this is instead of spending this (or more) on your next 25 years electricity bill. So you might have $12500 in year one, but each year you would be eating away a good chunk of that to pay your electricity bill - and let's face it, bill aren't going to get cheaper. I'd say that pot of money would last you about 10 years max, then you have to find more cash to fund your next 15 years worth of bills.
I've done this since day one in my startup (I'm in day 112). Not being a hacker I have to be really careful where to put my dev money, so any automation I might want to do I have to figure out ways to do it without involving the devs (that money goes to the service I'm building)

I have a combination of processes:

1. User must fill out a form with their name and email in order to get the download link. For this I use Madmimi.com.

2. I have setup a drip campaign. Basically what happens is that once my users confirm their email, Madmimi automatically sends out and email with an welcome text and the download links (the benefit here is obvious: I have the users email and I now have statistics about click rates on the link)

3. This drip campaign has two additional emails. One in 15 days and another in 30 days (after the signup).

The 15 days after sign up email, basically ask how's everything is doing and contains a link to a quick survey about the whole experience so far (I use Wufoo). Is a guided survey with close question.

The 30 days after sign up email is an open question about how they feel with the app. What does it mean to them, etc.

Also, my app sends me a log every-time the user uses it for the first time (here is where I haven't been able to do a full integration)

What I do is:
I receive this log that contain the users email and some data about the usage. At that moment I fire up my email client and write a welcome email. This is a personal email from me to my user. I thank them, give them all my contact info and basically say: I'm here for you 24/7 (to this day no user has ever waited more than two hours to hear from me when they write) and I keep that promise.

Most of the time, the emails I get are basically about the same and my answers are very much alike.

To manage this and to be able to give it a personal touch, I installed TextExpander on my Mac and have setup several templates that contain most of my answers but not the full answer. This forces me to read what I'm writing and actually personalize it a bit.

This method, while not perfect has brought incredible benefits for my startup:

One client was having some issues with the app and my response was fo fast and so helpful that he could not believe it. Turned out the guy was a radio dj and had a show about entrepreneurship. We did a two hour radio interview.

Another client is actively pushing my app to his clients because of the customer support I gave him the first days he used the app. He was having some issues (all created by him) and I dedicated 6 hours to help this client. He is now one of my most active evangelist.

It pays, big time, to do customer support with passion. Let your users feel it and they will reward you for it.
Spaced Repetition Software. It's a technique to become dramatically better at memorization.

This Wired article is fascinating look at the founder of SuperMemo, one of the big players in that industry: http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/ff_woznia... Highly recommended, it's a great read.
There's a section in there that talks about switching it from heat to cool when the seasons change. I don't know if that's more of a suggestion to this device or not, but something tells me it's that same damn heat/cool switch.
Was it really necessary to completely rip off Stack Overflow's design?
JMongoBrowser - Easily browse your mongodb database
Gmail update leak
You may not use "what" you learn, but the skills you developed to help get through exams, hit deadlines, learn complicated concepts and work in groups are invaluable.
Really interesting yet scary account, not what I was expecting!

Google Cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:KLIEiKs...
That's what I thought...
Yeah, the torrents are still a good option, but I like Netflix since it's quicker and easier than torrenting.
The streaming is instant. And if you have "unlimited" bandwidth, then the additional streams don't really matter. When I'm on my couch and want to watch a movie, I don't want to search for and download a torrent, I want to watch a movie. Netflix (on my Xbox 360) lets me do that.

The interesting thing for Netflix as they raise prices will be finding out where people's threshold is for paying for the convenience and licitness of Netflix versus downloading a torrent instead.
I've got 2 thermostats in the house right now - do I need two nests? Or can they come up with a way for one to control both existing systems? Or have two, but let each one control the other, so I don't have to go up/down stairs to make a change (remote automation even better).
What people like you don't understand is that there is real value in failure. A system that removes failure from the equation reduces the quality of life for everyone. You are hurting the very people you claim you are helping.
I could care less, for example BlackBerry.
Pay Student Athletes
No, no, no, don't quit college. Your parents are completely right (sans yelling). Jobs come and go, but fundamental education is just that - the foundation for everything else that you are going to learn through other means. No foundation = mess in the head.

Besides, people who are self-taught are always treated with extra suspicion during the selection, interview and the trialing process compared to those with a proper degree. And quite rightfully at that. If you have Masters in Comp.Sci., it's given that you know reverse polish notation. But if you picked it all up by yourself, you could've missed this bit and it could complicate my life as your colleague or boss further down the road.

So, yeah, educate yourself properly first. The jobs will follow.
While I agree with your sentiment, I don't believe davidw wants longer sentences for the sake of length. He simply wants people to use fully formed sentences, with variety in their structure and sophistication. If you ever see some Reddit threads, you may be inclined to agree.
Ah, created by an ex-Apple guy behind iPod and iPhone. No wonder it looks so damn slick.

And costs $249.
Robert E Lee Park - Paw Point - K&S Web Designs Blog
Language? The alphabet order is related to the encoding, and UTF-8 (which is what they're probably using) certainly does ensure that, since it's backwards compatible with ASCII.
Surprised by the lack of support for dropping out.

Is a 4 year education and a degree valuable? Of course.

Is it worth $xx,000 in student debt and 4 year opportunity cost of doing something else? Rarely. Especially for this crowd.

If you are a 19 year old with some programming skills, and you are paying for your own college (via loans or with cash) dropping out is a GREAT idea. Spend the next three years working on your own projects, open source projects, crappy little free lance whatever.. you are going to be in a much better spot than if you spent the next three years going to classes and coming out with 50k in student loan debt.

If college is free, then yeah, you are crazy not to go. But if you are smart and willing to work hard anyway.. education is FREE these days. Save the cost of the house and the years.
Netflix is down 37%
Twitter as Life's Platform
Why Twitter should shed its social scope and become a Short Message Platform.
HALLOWEEN- FROM PAGAN ROOTS TO ECONOMIC REVIVAL
50 hours per week for 50 weeks per year for 4 years is 10,000 hours

Or for most students, 40 hours per week for 16 weeks per term for 2 terms per year for 4 years is 5,120 hours.

Which might just explain why students coming out of college tend to be at most half good at something.
The rumor I've heard is that you just connect it up however you want and it "magically" figures out the wiring for you.
You shouldn't fully automate it. I have a semi automatic process where I click a mail_to link and get a pre-filled email ready to send with the customer's name in it.

Occasionally, there is reason to do a little research into the customer's operations (e.g. visiting their website) from which I can add a personal twist.

If you do it that way, it's not a huge time suck.

Here's what wrecks the experience:

1) The email comes from info@example.com instead of your personal company email account.

2) The email does not contain your normal signature, complete with email and phone number.

3) The email contains too much custom info (nothing more than the customer's name). No real person would take the time to cut and paste a customer's custom URL, for example.

4) HTML emails, unless they are very plainly styled. It needs to look like a regular friendly email.

5) Any sort of marketing speak. Has to be in your actual voice, as if you were talking with a friend. It's not a sales pitch, but an opportunity to connect.

6) Getting the name wrong! Just because there is a name field doesn't mean your customers put their name in it. This is the main automation killer. Better to have no name at all than the wrong name or "Dear Admin User"

7) The email is too long or contains anything that a reasonable person would assume was cut and pasted in.

8) Not asking any questions - if you don't ask questions, you're less likely to get an answer.

I'm sure there is more, but this recipe works reasonably well for me.
You can build an STM in pretty much any language. There have been STMs in at least C++, Java, C#, Common Lisp, Clojure and OCaml.

Haskell may be one of the rare exceptions. Haskell's STM was not implemented in Haskell, and AFAIK cannot be implemented in type safe Haskell due to limitations of its type system unless you add specific extensions required for things like STM.

So to say that STM is enabled by the limitations in Haskell is exactly backwards.
In fairness, I think the circumstances leading up to the layoffs were not something that a better Web site could have prevented. The company was trying to expand into new markets with very different requirements than our previous customers, but it was spending more to acquire the new customers than it was actually receiving from them in revenue. Then the recession hit, and the investors decided that they would rather cash in their chips than double-down.
Having kids is the ultimate startup
Having just installed Coordino in under 5 minutes (from git clone to login) on my Mac workstation at the office, I can attest to the ease of deployment.

We've been looking for an in-office knowledge base solution but we're a bit lazy (more accurately swamped with client work) so this was a no-brainer to try when I saw it was PHP.
PlayBook OS 2.0 delayed until mid-February, BBM support still a struggle for RIM
Nokia Needs to Pull Off Some Magic, Now
How much does this thing cost? The store seems to be down.
Personal - First Direct

Business - HSBC

Bitcoins - http://strongcoin.com
It is awesome whats happening in Australia around tech startups and the support for the community. Im running Startup Weekend at the YBF Melb Nov 4-6th where Ive managed to secure 5K from Optus for first prize and JFDI want to do a S15k equity deal with a team and take them to a Singapore bootcamp.
Two teams (Native Tongue and IndexMedia) from the previous Melbourne Startup Weekend are now based in YBF. I've just pivoted (RentWant-TaskWant) in a new incubator called AngelCube based out of inspire9 in Melbourne. Im one of four teams there. It is pretty exciting times.
ShowHN: Refactoring Javascript, A Screencast
music is definitely key. I find sometimes I need something with a good beat to act like a metronome. the beatles is a good one these days.
Wow! If only we could all have our own creative labs....
Yeah. I can't skim a video.
I just got quoted $5.10/W in NC, can't imagine the CA costs are too different.
Now all we need is the link for Visa.
My car gets 60 miles per hour per day, when I am pushing it. At that acceleration I can do a quarter mile in just under 27 minutes.
I've never quite understood this "I don't know what it is, but I hate it" attitude.

Have we really gotten ourselves into the situation where we have to blindly follow the PR from our favorite phone manufacturer and piss any competing announcement before it's even announced?
It looks like it's $249 per unit.
I think he's referencing a spaced repetition system

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition_system

they have software where you can set up a flashcard system if you know what you are doing, and it will time out when you should review what for optimal memorization
You should checkout Askbot, it's used in many places, easy to install, test cases and documentation.

[1]http://askbot.org/
Not exactly surprising results, but pretty entertaining.

Eliza had fewer non-sequiter's, generally kept up the conversation better. Eliza pretty clearly wins the discussion. But Siri demonstrated beyond a doubt that she is a woman of action by searching the web, finding businesses, and calling people. By virtue of actions speaking louder than words, I declare Siri the winner of the shouting match.
Great textual interfaces also try their best to externalize knowledge. That's part of the reason behind DSL's , Object-oriented-languages and good API design.

And because they're better at this, they're more useful than GUI's in many cases.
An explanation of the CSS animation on Apple's iPhone 4S webpage
In order for a phone manufacturer to get the Google seal of approval (which allows you to bundle up the Android Market and various Google Apps in your distribution) their "fork" of Android has to pass a suite of compatibility and assurance tests. Google could simply add that functionality as being required in the test suite to force the phone carriers not to muck with it.
How to Build Your Online Website Real Estate
The Michael Bay Style of Content Development
Incorporating Share Buttons onto Your Site
Here's what I don't get -- why have the display to begin with? Why can't the whole thing be programmable via API/Web/Mobile App/Watch/Whatever.

Ideally that's what I'd like -- some kind of intelligent device that lives inside of my house that connects to my boiler and AC unit, as well as other major appliances if possible and provides an open API for people to build on top of, and can connect to my router.

If someone wants to make a thermostat that looks like Nest, then, it could be something that you just stick to the wall but requires no direct wiring. But it also means that I never need to buy a new thermostat: if I get tired of the Nest, I can switch it like I can any other app. Or just keep it controlled from my phone or tablet or the web.
Standards-compliant is what people use, not what we are saying it is a standard.

Also, the reason for why I wrote the original article for doing CORS cross-browser is that not even all recent browsers have support for CORS. For instance the version of Opera that I have (11) does not.

And the reason why I care -- I got complaints from actual programmers that visited my page and told me that it doesn't work.

I suspect the above mentioned problem is due to an old version of Flash player (used as a fallback in case the browser doesn't work with CORS), but saying that "it works on my machine" is not an acceptable answer, not even to your fellow software developers.
"At the end of the day, all that Amazon is doing is this: helping readers and writers find each other."

I like this idea.
Cars vs. musical instruments to GUIs vs CLIs is an analogy, it won't work in all scenarios, but I think it's a pretty good analogy for explaining how CLIs work for people that have never used them or think they are antiquated.
Paranormal 3 More of the Same | Hot News Movie Online
Indeed, it just looks like an automated welcome message.

In the early days of the internet, I may have fallen for something like that... only to realise my reply went to a ticket support system or a fake 'from' address. Nowadays, I'm cynical about welcome messages and just delete them.
Thats actually a different approach than how I had been doing it - i had been loading a hidden spritesheet by grabbing it from the dom (this is all just prototypal, playing around with canvas code, nothing "production" quality mind you), then keeping track of the position in memory and iterating through the frames using the overload of drawImage that lets you specify a slice of the image as what you want to draw.

I wasn't even aware of using background-image-position as a way to do this... I'll stick that one in my cap, thanks!

I'd say the main benefit of spritesheets as i've seen it would be what you've already commented on: Fewer GETs against the server (when you're thinking in terms of scale, for a large project with lots of assets, i'd say this becomes important, but of course that's a fairly subjective metric), as well as organization of files.

You could go with naming conventions... but then for a 45 frame animation, you have 45 distinct files all named something like "SPECIFIC_ANIMATION_FRAME_X", as opposed to using a dynamic approach, utilizing the cell-size of the frames and the width and height of the image overall, to calculate the frames on the fly; To me, that is far more maintainable than a huge pile of aptly named images.

You could make the claim that calculating out the frame each time is wasted cpu cycles that could be spent elsewhere, but I feel like it's the right approach.

But that could just be my opinion. I would love for someone to weigh in with actual metrics on whether or not using a dynamic approach is actually faster or slower in a meaningful way than a brute-force style naming convention animation system.
Skycaddie SGX
Skycaddie SGX - The Best Golf GPS

If you are looking to invest in a golf GPS this Christmas, as a treat for yourself or for someone special, then look no further than the Skycaddie SGX. This is certainly one of those products that live up to all the hype surrounding it. The SGX offers an unparalleled range of features and a level of performance that leaves all other golf GPS devices a yard short of the green, making it the only real choice in golf GPS equipment this Christmas.

So what is it that makes the Skycaddie SGX, such a prodigious talent out on the course, that some people are calling it the ‘Rory Mcilroy of golf GPS systems’? Well let’s take a look, shall we? Here are just some of its features:

o	3-inch, high-resolution, transflective TFT-LCD screen
o	Comes preloaded with up to 30,000 courses
o	Depicts hazards, Carries and layups
o	Utilises Skygolf’s exclusive, interactive HoleVue system, with Zoom
o	Complete with digital scorecard
o	Automatic statistic tracking synching to ClubSG

Now, we all know that us golfers kind of have a penchant for gadgets, and therefore a lack of hesitancy when it comes to adopting an ‘out with the old, in with the new’ mind-set when there’s something new on the market that we just have to have. It is for this reason that you might adopt a bit of a passive attitude to the Skycaddie SGX, especially if you haven’t long purchased its predecessor, the Skycaddie SG5. The fact of the matter is though, that the SGX goes way beyond an Apple-style, barely warrantable update, and does offer some important improvements that justify its new place as golf’s numero uno GPS system. Here are the vital statistics that prove the SGX to be a genuine upgrade on the SG5:

o	AutoView technology, allowing the user to adjust the screen with a simple turn of the wrist
o	Larger, higher resolution display
o	Dual navigation, allowing for one-handed operation
o	TruePoint, high performance GPS engine

These features, added to the fact that the Skycaddie SGX is up there with the iPhone in terms of looks, makes the decision to upgrade almost a non-decision. If they don’t have them in your local pro-shop then you might want to phone around and go on a little reconnaissance to your nearest stockists, because it isn’t until you’ve actually seen one, held it, and given it a try, that you realise just how desirous a peace of golfing equipment you are dealing with here. If you are buying it on behalf of someone for Christmas, then you’ll know as soon as you see it that he or she is going to love you forever.

Of course the final plus which makes the Skycaddie SGX the best golf GPS is the fact that pretty much everyone who has used it so far has been posting drastically lower scores. And this isn’t just the people who have gone from using no GPS at all to using the SGX. This is people who were previously using the SG5, or a piece of equipment on offer from one of the other golf GPS manufacturers. This speaks volumes for just how good this thing really is. If you are a golfer this Christmas, or you are buying a present for one, then the only true option is the Skycaddie SGX.
I also hate sites where the only information is offered through a video and I would like to have readable information as close to the landing page as possible, preferably on it.

It turns out that Nest doesn't have it smack dab on the landing page, but you just need to make the logical (to me) choice of clicking on the "Meet the Nest Learning Thermostat" link and the information is there. Scroll down at your leisure and skim through the text and the illustrations. It's not even one of those annoying PowerPoint-like presentations; you just need to scroll down.

I liked it, a lot.
Its Time To Shop Free Online
This is interesting. I just read four points and was completely like: "Not me, not me, not me, not me."

Then I read the fifth point and just thought: "This more likely me. Except for the savings and the acing of exams without learning."

I was a little confused about the "Do it" since all other points ended with "Don't do it" but it has been fun.

Thanks for this article.

PS. I am about to pause studying for half a year to one year and than continue to study. I am 19.
Guerilla Tactics: Selling A Skillshare Class