skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I love my 15" MBP screen (the hi-res anti-glare). I haven't used a MacBook Air except in stores, but I have a 12.1" netbook with a glossy 1366x768 screen. I couldn't live with less vertical pixels than 768, but the 13" Air's screen would be plenty big enough to get work done. Glossy screens bother me quite a bit though. Sitting in my home office, they're fine, but when I'm out somewhere where I can't control the lighting, the glare can be quite a pain.

Ultimately I had to have the MBP for disk space and memory because I need VMWare and do a lot of photo and video work. But the anti-glare hi-res screen is beautiful.
I still believe in Merlin Mann's "First, care."

http://www.43folders.com/2010/02/05/first-care

All these little tips and tricks are fine. But they're usually treating the symptoms rather than examining the cause.
All ads are trash. They do not aspire to art - only to hook the viewer with a few seconds of nonsense. Ad people are perfectly aware of this.

Just compare any ad with, for instance, Shindler's List. or Blade Runner. One has a single, cute, memorable tagline. The other is a monumental effort of style, atmosphere, meaning.

If you don't trivialize art to mean "anything pretty", then of course advertisements aren't art.
prerender.js is a script that predicts and preloads the next page when the shortly before the user goes to the page. This will make the time between loading your pages seem shorter. It is built with a prerender function and a prefetch function for other browsers. The prerender functionality is in a trial period with google chrome but, although it is auto enabled on most recent versions of chrome.

a demo of it in action here http://grahamholborn.com/
On the demo if you click before 600ms has elapsed hovering over the link there will be no effect.

Works best with chrome because other browsers function differently.
They also accept bitcoins, which you know nowadays are cheap :P
The stuff we used on our walls at LinkUp.com is less than a $1/sqft and I can use permanent markers on it: http://www.solutionsmb.com/010~Graffiti_Solutions/035~MB4500...

It is made by a little company out of Canada that doesn't know marketing but sure knows chemistry.

I even uploaded a pic showing it over some of our wall art: https://plus.google.com/103755913372126150486/posts
Ambitious iOS Apps by Fraser Speirs
Ipad Apps Best Free: Crossfingers
In patents 'a' is plural.

Just try and write a patent in Word - it grammar highlights the whole document!
The worst part were the announcements they had reached the power of our human brain. For my diploma I have read books of vonNeuman and calculated the assumptions he made. According to this we need a computer who can make 200 quadrillion calculations, if we ignore the clock rate of the brain of 40Hz, the 20 different hormones and glial cells, which no one knows what they do except they somehow support neurons ..
What platform? Do you need playlists? I like Amarok 1.4 but it may be more than you need.
Thanks. I've not looked closely at them, just a glance as they turn up in my mail.
I agree with the expertise statement. I think the money was somewhat covered tangentially with the Weight Watcher's comment. Basically it's WW (points, prepackaged meals, guides) for body building.

What I didn't feel was a connection to your product. I can't connect with your disease, and having to recover weight as how this is posed. If you turned it around and said something to the effect of "I lost a bunch of weight due to my disease and I had to gain back muscle mass in time for football season" then perhaps that would draw in more people. You leave off "football" and just go with a more generic sports to draw in more people. What's the customer's pain? While your disease is the reason for you designing this program, it's not what makes me use it.

Your situation reminded me of Titin, a weighted training vest created by someone at my school. I've heard his pitch and (IMO) it's banking more on pity points than actual product. I don't think you want people to pity you, but instead understand your passion for making this and that you'll continue to improve on it.
I'm surprised by this too, but as I recall the same thing happened when a bunch of sites were discovered to have the Konami code. Leveraging nerd nostalgia = big return.
Here is the corresponding blog post for those not willing to listen to the "blah blah blah"

http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/02/nine_things_successful_peopl...
I could see this making a large impact on image based sites, it would really improve the UX.
Truth about abs
Ask HN: What's after learn python the hard way? too easy.
I started on 'learn python the hard way' and I'm blowing through 5-10 lessons a day. What's next step that will really teach me to build a web app?

Before I switched majors to digital media (facepalm) I covered in C++ vectors, pointers, arrays, loops, constructors, strings, classes, recursion, various C functions, as well as basic data structures and algorithms that I can't quite remember. So this is all pretty basic review, just in a different language. (and after C it feels like I'm cheating, lol.)

What's going to be a lot more intense and teach me the type of data structures that I need to learn in order to produce web applications?

Is there an online resource that goes through your first big app like lpthw does with basics?
VLC has a Mac version. I don't know how good it is, though.
Should it have been "generally relatively"?
Absolutely good job! But like canadaduane said, the flying boxes effect could be annoying when scrolling down the page; and, on the other hand, your design fits imageboards (like 4ch) more, because when so many pictures showing up, I (like most people, I think) would not read the text.
Any reasonable editor can be set up so that the tab key will take care of that: ideally, you would also indent with tabs not spaces, and then you could set any tab width (in pixels, or better, points) you wanted and your code would still look right.

The problem comes if you want to left-align some code with a character on a previous line which is not the first non-space character. People often do this for run-on lines, for instance. Then there's no guarantee that spaces or tabs will align you correctly.

The ideal solution to the latter problem is:
(i) Don't Do That, Then.
(ii) If you want to align code in some carefully prescribed circumstances such as run-on lines, your editor should handle it for you when it displays on the screen (and the alignment hints need never make it into the saved file).
I am one of the people listed in the acknowledgements at the end of that paper, for having done work on Dapper when I was at Google. It's nice to see HN taking an interest in it -- Dapper is a very cool system.
I recently started teaching technical subjects and here are some points from the other side of the classroom
a) Every class has outliers on either side of the performance spectrum and teaching is a resource allocation problem on part of the teachers time on how to deliver maximal benefit to the students at large.
b) The number of people who are simultaneously entertaining, inspiring and educational is very few. Look around you and shortlist the number of people whom you consider extremely knowledgeable about some subject, now remove from that list the number of people who have great people skills. Of course people skills can be improved over time but it takes real effort and time.
c) As a teacher the best one can do while teaching challenging material is spend time in the first part of a lecture developing the motivation for getting students interested. Usually that leaves little time for interactivity in the latter part of the lesson.
d) Classes where students ask no questions are very hard to make interesting. When this is happening your teacher is probably feeling like a comic doing an act where no one is laughing. Next time youre stuck in a class which seems overly dull try to help out your teacher by asking intelligent questions.
e) In some challenging material there is simply not enough time to do it justice. In those cases the best a teacher can do is do a non interactive session where they do a brain dump hoping that students will be motivated enough to follow up with the material in their own time.
f) There is also the philosophical question about who gets to teach -
1) someone who is at the pinnacle of their field and hence can earn a livelihood by teaching people so that they can contribute with original research.
2) someone who is a great educator.

g) I think truly great teachers occur with the same frequency as truly great comics because both fields have something in common.
What to anticipate at Your First Grownup Plaything Party — Adult Toys
But why did you switch to RealPlayer from Winamp?
Doing the same thing a hundred times until you've got it down isn't the same as doing a hundred different things and picking the best effort, though.
Excuse #4 - Running the tests takes forever
In case anyone is wondering, the meme
1. Do xyz
2. ???
3. Profit

Comes from South Park S02E17 Gnomes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBiSI6OdqvA
Mark Zuckerberg is the ninth most powerful person in the world, says Forbes
As far as I can tell, it's mostly just an ugly version of iTunes.

* Visuals aside, the UI is basically iTunes. It has the exact same elements in the exact same places, except Winamp looks like a tacky GTK+ theme.

* I couldn't figure out how to hide "Genre", which I strongly dislike, and "Year", which I don't care about.

* No fullscreen on Lion - this takes, literally, 5 minutes to add. I guess they would have to spend some time drawing a completely custom button.

* The largest UI element is the number of seconds that have elapsed in the current song. Is this really something that people care about?

* Sorting by artist seems to be broken - if I sort by artist, it should logically order each artist's albums alphabetically as well. I'm not sure what secondary ordering its actually using - it's not alphabetical by track or ordered by track number (all 1, all 2, ...). iTunes calls the manner of sorting that I suggest "album by artist".

* Scrolling is broken (not smooth). This is also an issue in Spotify.

* For some reason there is a prominent button to show the "About" dialog.

Good things:

* When the track changes, this list doesn't snap back to the new song. This is one of the most annoying features in iTunes.

* When the track changes, if you have searched for something, it doesn't just stop like iTunes. In iTunes, if you start playing a Beatles song, then search for "The Clash", if that Beatles song ends, it will not go to the next Beatles song, because the original song is no longer visible.

* Watch folders, which, if it wasn't ugly, would be reason enough to use it.
iTunes for Mac is a great music player/jukebox. The Windows version is slower, buggier and less responsive. As a result, it's a pretty bad library based music player in Windows (although nowhere close to as bad as people make it out to be).

iOS device management is as flaky on Windows as it is on Mac OS X, which is what they have in common and one of the most frequent complaints. But to be fair, nothing besides iTunes even tries to do device management as comprehensively, so there is little to compare it to. Still, it can be buggy and slow and that is easy to judge even with nothing to directly compare it to.

IMO iTunes gets an excessive amount of over the top flak from techie types. As someone who has used it since version one in Mac OS 9, it's really not that bad. I'm quite picky about my applications and I've been using it every day for around 10 years now. I always check out alternatives when they come up for OS X and they are always much worse in very simple areas, like scrolling. Go ahead, grab almost any alternative music player for OS X and throw in a 20k song library. If it scrolls as smoothly as iTunes, I'll be amazed.
Americans love their fun and to have their undisciplined freedom.

It's not particularly popular to say, but disciplined work yields the best results.

Can't say as I think ties will help with discipline tho'.
How to Stay Healthy While Running a Startup: The No BS Guide
A good resource might be the the wakemate blog or contacting on of their employees. I think they went from prototype to design with a similar product to the fitbit. They wrote about sourcing Chinese manufacturers and a whole lot more. I'm curious what others in this field have to say though.
It's not like huge customers for your crop are necessarily easy to get. And Walmart did buy all the non-spoiled output; they probably had the contract well-written to let them get away with what they did.
Awesome; will download as soon as last.fm supports it. In my (albeit limited) search for a music player on OS X, iTunes is the best last.fm supported music player available, which is unfortunate because iTunes blows.
Interesting idea: digging a 65 story hole and lining it with a building. It may be uniquely suited to Mexico City (on an ancient lake bed). In most places you would have to remove 600 feet of bedrock, not a cheap proposition.
This is not in any way comparable with iTunes. It’s a list of your songs. You can create playlists. That’s it.

It’s ugly and it has jerky scrolling. There is no way to edit metadata. It fails completely as a music library and there are much better options available if all you need is a player.

It doesn’t even try to innovate.

What I want is a competent and feature rich music library (iTunes is perfect for this) I don’t have to micromanage (iTunes fails at this). There is nothing there.
I agree with most of what you said. My edit to the comment obscured its main point, which was: the expression "true geek" has shifted away from its previous meaning (again).

My point being: we were geek before it was cool.

(Come to think of it, that might not be totally acurate either. The "proud geek" generations of the 80s and 90s, though slightly marginal to mainstream culture, at least were proud to wear the moniker. Before that there were the labeled geek generations, to whom the word was indeed a very uncool slur. Maybe I'm closer to the Seth Cohen generation than I'd care to admit.)
Clementine works well on Mac.

I will admit it's pretty similar to iTunes, but it's cross platform, has some features not in iTunes, and is lacking some iTunes features that really annoy me.

Now, if only it were possible to uninstall iTunes...
There used to be a version called MacAmp, back around the 2000s. Back then, it resembled the current windows version 2.7-something.

I haven't tried installing it, but here's the link for MacAmp. http://www.macamplite.com/
Thanks for the question. At the moment we don't expose an API to our customers though it is in the works. We've definitely heard this request from enough people to make it real.
Ahhh Winamp... Brings back to the days of Napster. I like to call them, the glory days of music.
Because RealPlayer was better. And that's not saying much.
Yeah, but does it play FLAC?

That would seal it for me.

I use Fidelia at the moment, but the library is appalling and loading and scanning is just broken on large collections.

If WinAmp only provides scanning of large collections, a basic library and FLAC support I'm going to be happy.
Yes, it's like something out of The Hudsucker proxy.
A mess is not technical debt! http://blog.objectmentor.com/articles/2009/09/22/a-mess-is-n...
So do you mean the project is incomplete in its current form so it needs works to be done to enable its full potential?
In the short run, yeah. In the long run, the Internet has fundamentally changed the value proposition of ad agencies, and their old core competencies aren't that useful anymore.

I'm reminded of how in high school and early college, every teenager thinks that the way to get your ideas heard is to shout louder. But if you actually look at effective leaders, ones that change the world, the quality they share is that they listen more. That's what the Internet provides us: a way for brands to listen more to their customers. And when you have that, you don't need an industry that grew up around being able to shout louder.
I go to a fairly prestigious engineering school and it works the opposite way here. Math and science grades are always curved. You have no idea what grade you are going to get for the class until you get it. The grades you receive are more often than not more than you've earned. Either, the grading scale is lowered (90 and up is an A, 86-90 is A-, etc.) or your grade is boosted at the end. For example, I got a B in an organic chemistry class when it should have been a C-.

On the other hand, every humanities class I've taken, I've gotten the exact grade I have earned.
Is there an equivalent of foobar2000 for Mac?

The only player I've used on a regular basis on Mac is Vox ( http://www.voxapp.didgeroo.com/ ).
Same here. Whenever I go on news websites, I find the stark white spaces that would otherwise be noisy, "loud" ads is much more comforting.
Clementine is fantastic, but it isn't really enough. As of now, it doesn't support CD ripping and other all-in-one media player things. It might be a worthy alternative in the future.
Uglier than iTunes...now that is something I have got to see....
+1. This should become the standard in customer support. If it's cheaper to provide in addition to being a better user experience, everyone should be moving this way.
Almost everybody seems to miss the mark in the "What do you do?" type questions. What do you think it is about these interviews that prevents them from describing it in the way you want them to? Or do you try to make everybody be more specific than their first pitch?
Looks good. But all I want is a file system browser. Which I don't see? I'm using Clementine at the moment which has one.
Panels Are Now Enabled By Default In Chrome Dev
Sorry about the confusion. Hey, I'm confused too :)
For as long as you know in your heart that what you're making or doing matters, and, consequently, for as long as you accept and embrace the immutable laws of scarcity, your options for maintaining focus will, like Frank's perfect answer, remain stunningly obvious.

Those are very true observations, but the problem is, how do you care? We're told things like, "do what you love," and " follow your passions," but that's just not realistic in an adult, professional world. Writing code is awesome for the first 10% of a project. After that, it usually becomes a grind to complete all the uninteresting things.
It'd be far from the first site with a much more usable mobile version.
Depends on the idea and what it requires. If its easy enough to hack, then just build it and launch it with its core features. If you need more validation, then time to do some market research, build a landing page, drive some traffic to it, etc. to see if its a worthwhile pursuit.
7. Always have something worse to do. It's amazing how much you'll get done trying to avoid that one thing you're really, really dreading.
Well, unless this was done by someone posing as Anonymous.

The hostage returned with a message claiming that the kidnappers said any exposure of information resulting in the outing of a gangster would result in the demise of Anonymous 10-fold.

I.e. why would Anonymous tell themselves to shut up in such a convoluted way?
Well, I wasn't a big music listener; I really used RP at first because its browser mode was the only browser on my WinME computer that worked. Then I started listening to music and browsing the web, and I thought 'I don't need Winamp! This program is cooler! It even has a dancing sheep!' After RealPlayer got on my nerves, and I got a new computer, I used Win Media Player instead and completely forgot about Winamp. :)
Seven Tips On How To Regain Interest For Life
What I was trying to connote is that 60%+ of that home page was devoted to driving traffic to other stories in the same site.

A publisher's home page shouldn't necessarily be a place for content (even though it is serving ads). A page's home page is to drive traffic to articles in the site (that _also_ serve ads); this is the 60% navigation and "Non-business Related Filler" that the article talks about.
Networking Tips No.1
If you want to keep it lean, remove the plugins you don't use from WinAmp, and use the classic skin. It basically becomes version 2.x, which is a fantastic player.
I love how the three repeated images of him on top are links, but the GIANT one underneath isn't.
Apple iOS 5: HTML5 Developer Scorecard
So can we all start singing the praises of http://cryptome.org/ so that future whistle blowers know where to go?

Oh, and someone make them an attractive homepage please!
I think a lot of startups (and companies in general) become so enamored with their work that they lose sight of the real value of what they're doing. For example, as the author said, losing the forest for the trees: getting tunnel vision on one very good feature causes stagnation to the rest of the system as a whole. It doesn't move forward, it just makes one 10/10 feature in a 7/10 system. Metrics that show how useful a userbase finds one feature are always good because they keep the programmer's eye on the difference between being objectively useful and just being neurotic.
Do. Next is to come up with a web app and build it! Come up with a "simple" idea. Write out a spec or outline. Pick some small WSGI based tools like Flask or web.py or something else that strikes your fancy (Not anything monolithic and huge like Django) and find out where on IRC people who use this tool hang out. Hit a problem, ask someone or google. Rinse and repeat...

Oh and finish LPTHW because Zed gets into the basics of a web app near the end and thats a fine start.
The major benefit of this for me is the syncing with winamp for Android, which I find a very good player.
Gorgeous. It looks like the bulk of the functionality here is made possible by jQuery Waypoints (http://imakewebthings.github.com/jquery-waypoints/). The custom script that contains the bulk of the in-page logic is pretty basic. I'll definitely have to check out this plugin at some point in the future.
Could someone please explain what, exactly, is wrong with that page? I mean, other than the fact that it's full of ads.

Edit: This is not a troll post. I really don't see anything wrong with that site, but apparently lots of other people do.
So true. Flash and glam when new features are rolled out isn't as important as whether or not they're actually an improvement. An example of this is the difference between Bing and Google.
An improved OAuth 1.0a experience
Well, if you multiply by zero it's undefined... (this is nothing to do with Linus or the quote)
I came on as the lead designer at The Business Journals late last year after this redesign was launched -- and while I disagree with the 99.5% number -- I agree 100% that there was lots of room for improvement.

And that's why we're rolling out a redesign of the main homepage in a couple of weeks:

http://cl.ly/25071M0m1R2t3Z0F053B

There are a lot of factors at work with the design of any homepage, and that was certainly the case with the current design -- really tight deadline, new CMS, work was contracted out to a design agency, etc.

But our great local business reporting deserved better and I'm happy to say we're getting there.
Those things are amazing for cleaning grimy bathtubs too! (Not a Mr. Clean employee)
They seem to have succeeded here, though by some excellent luck.
I remember using Winamp even before Napster! 1997, I think? The first version with the basic look. I remember my machine was so old that the mp3 I downloaded wouldn't play at the full bitrate. Instead, it played at 64kbps. I remembered thinking how "crappy" mp3s sounded and was lost why everyone thought they were so great. When I finally upgraded (shortly after), my music world completely changed. Ended up buying a Rio PMP300. Amazing how far we've come.
I thought it was more confusing trying to figure this out then reading an article regarding the whole crisis. The Economist has some great coverage on the whole crisis unfolding for this who are interested:

http://www.economist.com/node/21524378
Particle Debris (wk. ending 11/3) It’s All About Astonishment