skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Funny the article never addresses "they don't ask for help because either there's nobody to talk to or nobody who isn't reading from an inapplicable script." After that becomes the dominant customer support experience, seems the only solution is fling bad vibes into the ether[net] and buy a different product.

You know the drill. My obligatory anecdote: bought a popular notebook from a big name computer company. Called tech support for the same problem six times. Five times was connected to someone who ran me through a pointless drill and refused to vary from the script, culminating in sending the machine in for replacement of random parts, which each time worked briefly then the device died again. The sixth time someone more conversant was willing to LISTEN to me, understood my job is designing such things, went off script, and informed me he was not allowed to tell me that complete exploded mechanical drawings were available online at http://www.bigcompco.com/foobar/product_X_disassembly.pdf ... I expressed my happy dismay that he couldn't tell me what he told me, hung up, took the machine apart (now knowing the secret sequencing), and proceeded to vacuum out the clogged heat sink which somehow nobody in the repair department managed to notice FIVE TIMES. Worked fine ever since.

Anecdote 2, short version: called MegaSoftware Corp about a non-booting OS. Was told to delete all 2GB of somebody else's data (a huge amount at the time) and reinstall everything - and was told this for $29. Unwilling to, 20 minutes later figured out copying one file solved the problem. Credit charges were soon reversed.

Upshot: we're now conditioned to assume there's nobody (or nobody competent) to talk to. The only hope to get attention is to leave scathing feedback and assume nobody will notice anyway. Quite a surprise when competent willing support appears.
IPv6 is going to open a floodgate of innovation. All kinds of things are going to become so much easier to develop and more robust without the Internet-breaking devil incarnate known as NAT.
If you want colorful flow charts, there are plenty at the "Isomorphic" link:

http://blog.nodejitsu.com/scaling-isomorphic-javascript-code

The proposed Resource-View-Presenter model is a bit of a brain bender.

Anyway, that aside, I agree -- this is described as a framework "initiative", and that page has no links to actual code, making it sound like a mere proposal.

However, looking back at Nodejitsu's blog, it looks like they have a post with a more cogent explanation... and github links:

http://blog.nodejitsu.com/introducing-flatiron
Express is quite low level, with many frameworks built on top of it. This appears to be higher level.
5 Key Errors in Small Business Accounting
Here's another example of Popcorn in action. It's used on the people's choice awards website to bring in celebrity content from Freebase synchronized to when the announcers mention them: http://search.peopleschoice.com/v/26948149/bill-paxton-prese...
I think one of the problems may be that people dealing with AppStore or Android Market customers are not realizing that they are dealing with a different kind of user group. One cannot compare the feedback that HN users (developers/advanced-users/early-adopters) give, with the responses from your average iPhone user. He doesn't understand how complex a piece of software may be. There is probably an expectation that even a free app should work perfectly well.

Additionally the abundance of similar apps means that there is no real interest in "asking for help"; the user can just try the next app. Still, before doing that he will post his comment for the benefit of future users (this app is (terrible|bad|doesnt-work|...).

Finally the feedback channels may not be as easy to find as for traditional software. I am not sure where I would send feedback about some indie-app that doesn't even have a homepage (or that may be ranked on page 20 on Google).
The Kindle Fire is going to absolutely destroy the iPad in terms of profit generated. However, there is room for both devices on the market, and the iPad won't be "killed" as the press likes to claim.

But Amazon has essentially built a magic portal that can instantly swap your money for anything they sell. Do you realize how much money someone can spend in 1 minute while sitting in a comfy chair with the Kindle? There's a huge list of "things people want" in Amazon's electronic goods inventory, even more in their real goods inventory, and they already have your credit card info ready for you to use.

Have you thought about what pages gain the most from the Silk browser? That's right, Amazon detail pages. You'll be able to browse amazon.com faster than ever before, and buy even more things.

Disclaimer: I worked at Amazon until October (and hold stock), but I am not revealing (or aware of) any confidential information regarding the Fire.
For the first step of their rollout, having few people actually using it is probably a bonus, not a problem. Start small, then work up.
We do... http://popcornjs.org/
Yes it has been active for a little over a year I believe, at least thats as far back as I have been using it.
Areweplayingyet.org: An initiative to improve HTML5 audio support
Well the interface is very bad so I gave up after 8/11...
> That, alone, is not really an issue. I suppose you could do the same as native games. If a demand is there, an API or libraries to do that will appear.

How do you propose to obfuscate images and audio in a way that's going to work across all browsers and can't be easily circumvented (and it obviously can't be security through obscurity if it's to be used by more than one game).

> In practice, though, can someone make something out of loads of minified javascript ? Or is it equivalent to reading deassembled C ?

Minified Javascript would be very easy (unless the minifier renamed everything, but even that isn't too bad). Javascript compiled with something like Google's Closure Compiler would be a lot harder, but still a lot easier than disassembled C.

The assets are much more of a problem than the code - although not being able to compile the code means if you do find a way to obfuscate the assets, your deobfuscation code is going to be out in the open.
I'm a hobby blacksmith, as well as a professional programmer, and I love making physical things, too. This film strikes me in a very personal way. I see a lot of intellectual discussion on this which, while interesting, I think misses the point. This guy found a trade that he really loves, and is making sacrifices for. He's making a living, but he's certainly not getting rich off of it.

I do a lot of different things with blacksmithing, but I've been really getting into kitchen knives, as well as spoons, ladle, forks, cleavers, etc... I like combining copper work with blacksmithing.

I can't tell you how much I enjoy it. Mostly because I like making functional and unique things. There is a great sense of satisfaction that I just don't get from writing code. Also, blacksmithing uses a wonderful combination of technical ability and visual/artistic skills. Also, it's hard to find good friends and a good community that you feel comfortable in.

That film did a good job of expressing the emotional side of making stuff. It really is just a huge amount of fun. Thanks for posting that.
Ask HN: What do you use for website monitoring?
The Many Reasons We Rely Upon Our Clutter
Don't look at it as a threat, because I don't think the user intended it as one. He's not saying "Fix this bug or else I will stop playing." He's saying "Not fixing this bug will cause me to stop playing."

As for the rating, he's saying that this bug is so bad that it kills the entire experience for him. This is how people react to things they don't like: if they enjoy something for 9 hours and absolutely hate the 10th hour, most people will just say they hate it.

As for contacting you first, how easy is it for him to contact you? Did you say anywhere in the game that you all are happy to hear suggestions for improving the game? Also remember that for most users, the App Store is the only place they will interact with you. That's the model. Even if you had said in the game itself that you welcome suggestions and how to reach you, that may not be how users think about you and your game.
(i.e. "unlimited means I should be able to stay connected 24/7 all month long!!").

Yes, that sounds like unlimited to me.

A buffet is unlimited. A small 90lb old lady will eat maybe half a plate. Then come some big 400lb fellas who clean off 8 or 9 plates full. Either one should be accommodated when it's called "unlimited". Otherwise, call it what it is: service with a high limit.
Yes but their hardware always comes preloaded with software and services. Since they don't sell "naked" hardware, there's really no way to parse the value proposition. For what it's worth, Steve Jobs said multiple times at the D conference that in his mind, most of the value comes from the software...the hardware enables it and is the "pretty box".
Remember that the alternative is no business at all.

We have a similar product where we provide a backend for game developers, and there are quite a few of them making quite a lot of money on it. But without us, those single developers or small teams simply wouldn't be able to pull off the games that they do, because they don't have the knowledge or resources to make the backend systems we offer.

If you can afford to make your own backend systems, you're not the target for Parse, or us.

(Oh, and it's not like AWS has a 100% stellar track record either. :-) )
Now, 15 years later I totally agree. I definitely had all of the intentions of fooling clients into believing that I had a bigger company than I actually had - inventing personnel speaks for itself. I wouldn't do it again.
> It doesn't work for the 10% of heavy usage customers, or the folks who think the provider should be held to their own personal definition of "unlimited" (i.e. "unlimited means I should be able to stay connected 24/7 all month long!!").

How is that their own personal definition? Isn't that what the word "unlimited" means? It is the carriers and ISPs who have started using their own definitions of "unlimited", whereby it actually means "limited".

I get that ISPs need to establish limits. I just wish they would say so. It should be considered false advertising to market any service as "unlimited" when it's not.
They describe their calculations:

http://slaveryfootprint.org/about/#methodology

They appear to count "N slaves working for you" if they predict N slaves were involved in the production of anything you have, not the number you keep continuously employed.
I'm learning to program for a few months now (I'm 16) I did quite a bit of research into what language to learn first.

In the end I chose Python, it's easy to use, simple to understand and with IDLE you can get instant results.

Plus there are tons of resources if your girls get really interested.

Python gets my vote but dependant on how young they start then something using GUIs might be more interactive, ColinWright mentioned a few good ones.
Many people that look to pawn items look at the item as opposed to the economics, where the pawnbroker is looking at the economics, they have no attachment to the item nor value. Even if the person presents a good deal to them, one has to realize that there will be another person that comes along that will settle for a 30-50% discount on the actually value of the item. Sure it is a different item and not "the" item that that person is selling, but the pawnbroker does not care, the item could be total junk so long as they can make their massive margin. Once you realize this and that the pawnbroker has limited capital and store space you then start to see the picture that there is no way you are going to get a fair price minus a decent margin. Because the next better deal is literally waiting behind you.

You are actually in a better position to reduce their margin when you are on the other end of the transaction. When you are standing with cash in hand, trying to chip away at an item that they have for sale. In this situation you hold all the cards so long as you do not reduce their margins past their absolute minimum. In which case, if it is a niche items that will not sell to just anyone, it is better to negotiate, walk away, let the item age on their self and then come back and negotiate again. Time is the best negotiation tactic, when dealing with shelf inventory, the pawnbroker will try to compress your time, your goal should be to expand it because expansion of time means that the pawnbroker eats up margin that he cannot recoup. An item has a fixed price and time eats at the margin built into that price.

Unfortunately Ebay has become kind of an insurance safety net for pawnbrokers and reduced the ability to negotiate for a portion of the deep discounts that they receive, but it cuts both ways too, it has also provided a medium to avoid the pawnbroker entirely. I cannot fathom for the life of me, why someone would pawn, with the exception of hot goods and emergencies in which a person needs cash right now.
I thought AT&T didn't have "unlimited" plans anymore. At least with my iPhone, the data limit is right there in the plan name, with overages being charged a reasonable amount extra.

Here's a crazy idea for the carriers: if there are limits, don't call your plan "unlimited".
Child's play!
Well, I guess you guys are in a bad mood today.
This is really neat. Potentially a huge time suck. Well done.
A relevant quote:

Tellers of stories with ink on paper, not that they matter anymore, have been either swoopers or bashers. Swoopers write a story quickly, higgledly-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over it again painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awkful or doesn't work. Bashers go one sentence at a time, getting it exactly right before they go on to the next one. When they're done they're done.

I am a basher. Most men are bashers, and most women are swoopers....

Writers who are swoopers, it seems to me, find it wonderful that people are funny or tragic or whatever, worth reporting, without wondering why or how people are alive in the first place.

Bashers, while ostensibly making sentence after sentence as efficient as possible, may actually be breaking down seeming doors and fences, cutting their ways through seeming barbed-wire entanglements, under fire and in an atmosphere of mustard gas, in search of answers to these eternal questions: "What in heck should we be doing? What in heck is really going on?"

-- Kurt Vonnegut. Timequake p.137-138 (1997)
Funny you should mention MIDI keyboards. Many musicians are now seriously using iPads to play music. For a good example check out ProjectRnL on YouTube. They use a bunch of apps, some developed by Jordan Rudess (keyboard virtuoso and keyboardist for the band Dream Theater) that let you play things you can't easily play with a conventional keyboard. He managed to replicate a lot the features of the Continuum Fingerboard (an expensive "continuous keyboard" controller) with some iPad apps. The main thing missing is, as you stated, pressure modulation. I'm convinced though that something like that will be coming to tablets not too long from now.
At Microsoft you have a bunch of brilliant programmers who are forced to follow "strategic direction" from above. Even if they wanted to, there's no way they can continue working on a mothballed project they still believe in.

People who relied on the Silverlight plugin certainly cannot continue to develop it, either.

Long-run, there's more security in relying on software created by a sufficiently large and capable community of enthusiasts. Such software will never die if it's good enough to be useful - sunk costs, NIH, and all that.

The "strategic direction" of a community won't change except by consensus. People will enter and leave. By the time the community withers and dies, nobody cares any more.
Come have lunch with us! It's when we sit around and Yack anyway ;) Though, beware, any good eng talent that enters our office doors we shower with attention and attempt to recruit ;) I'll shoot you a email.

Susan
co-founder, Triggit inc.
Couldn't agree with you more. I'm thoroughly frustrated with AngelList.

Tried to introduce my startup/self to people but you can't do anything until you have an investor/advisor on board. It's the classic can't get a job without experience–can't get experience without a job scenario.

I know it's probably not the case, but from the outside AngelList just seems like an online good ole boys club for all these angels that already share deals with each other.

I've even emailed a few advisor/investor types that I met at conferences. It basically comes down to "I only advise and refer people that I already know well"
When things get complicated with co-founders of a different gender
The irony of Netflix
I'd love to have this 'during playback, show me things that survived the editing process' feature to be able to better reflect on my own writing. The feature may convince me to switch from to Stypi from Google Docs.
Win Cash Prizes
New Christmas Tree Tax...Because Growers Need PR
Jeff Atwood already did it much better than I can:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/10/a-visual-explanatio...

Hope that helps!
Publicly-facing websites not v6-enabled, yet:
http://ready.chair6.net/?url=comcast.com
http://ready.chair6.net/?url=comcast.net

"As the world gets faster, it turns out that the glacial changes of years and decades are become more important, not less." -- Seth Godin (http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2010/08/resilience-a...)
Thanks so much for this! The graphs are exactly the kind of "conceptual flow" I like to have to give me a 1000 meter view of what's going on.
Don't you dare to take away Cmd+L from me, Stypi. This one is sacred.
This solves a really important problem, because who has ever heard of Christmas trees? Or knows when/where to buy them?
Flash on IE is Active X.
Very cool. I'm listening to it right now. But how much variation is there from day to day? Like if I go back tomorrow, will the songs all be the same? In a week?
Microsoft Plans $250 PC For Low-Income Families
Kernel Log: Linux 3.2 main development phase complete
Ya I couldn't get it to go past 8/11. It kept trying to load something in a sidebar and wouldn't allow me to click past it.
Is that really unfair though? Was it made clear on the product page that it was not i18n?
This particularly works well with web development gigs. You get to work from home, with Internet connectivity providing the communication to the client. This way you can work on several part time projects simultaneously. Do this with a focus on a single language or framework and you'll reap benefits in just a couple of months.
Video: The Pandora App Universe, How We Got Here, How We'll Grow
Actually I believe they started from scratch. They're pretty good hackers.
Is there a startup scene in Madison? I lived there a few years ago and loved the place. It seems like it would be a great place to start a startup... and I knew there are a ton of people who are vaguely tired of their jobs at Epic.
SoundCloud launches the HTML5 Audio Improvement Initiative
Here is some background on the status of the code (from about a year ago) - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1833010

Here's a brief explanation of how to get it up and running - https://github.com/nex3/arc/blob/master/how-to-run-news

I had arc.news up and running a few months ago. The code is quite outdated but has all the essentials to get your own HN site. Truthfully, it'd be very nice so get a crack at some more recent code.

Personally, I'd love to use arc.news to run a closed news aggregator/discussion site for a close group of friends.
Oracle Solaris 11 released
Viewing this on a netbook is a nightmare.

On another note, when will they launch? I got an email a while ago announcing the beta but never let me sign up.
Because those three are not dead.

Promotion is required when your competitive advantage is not great enough to beat out the competition on product alone. Zara's advantage is their short time to market, which allows them to respond to consumers faster, and an infrastructure that allows low prices with acceptable margins. Google has a huge competitive advantage in their rise to ubiquity in what was then an immature market. Such is not, however, the norm. You see a lot of this in the online space simply because it hasn't been saturated yet. That will change, just like it did with general stores in the Old West.

Place? Well the place is online. But it's more than that; place is discoverability. A URL is a place just as much as a downtown brick-and-mortar location is a place. It's about how easy and convenient it is for the customer to GET to your wares, and in the case of a URL it's all about ease-of-remembering. Also, people in many non-US countries don't even remember URLs. They use gateway homepages that direct them where they want to go. Getting placement on that page is paramount to online success. I expect we'll see a lot more of this even in the US as content curation becomes the norm.

Price? Price is, and always has been, a major factor. Price sets customer expectation. High price implies quality, which attracts a certain class of customer. Low price? Well those aggregator sites are also frequented by a certain market segment. If your product falls within that segment as well, you must compete based on low prices.

So yes, the 4 P's are alive and kicking, and will be for the foreseeable future.
Right. Twitter is great for distributing a link, but having your link on twitter.com is not going to help you rank for Google search results.

What does work is people seeing your link on Twitter and posting it around the internet.
A lot of the moral judgements made on the linked site about a materialistic lifestyle don't really have anything to do with the fact that people in the west are evil, but rather that the culture in certain parts of the world where manufacturing takes place is conductive to exploitation.

For instance, if I buy a diamond ring, I am not responsible for lives taken with weapons that have been bought with diamonds. If I drink Coca-Cola, I am not responsible for some obscure branch of the Coca-Cola Company which seizes the drinking water source of an entire village. If I pay for sex in Norway, that doesn't mean I am responsible for children being forced to sell their bodies in sex trafficing. Except in a few narrow cases where law enforcement gets involved, I never even see these children.

In each of these instances, there are real wrongs commited - but the wrongs are perpetrated by people who are a lot more unscrupulous than me. It is a fallacy to claim that the end user of products of industries where bad things sometimes happen, does something wrong. Everyone has a moral responsibility, but this responsibility doesn't carry over all the way.

Does anyone really think that the Indian microfinance debt collectors who force children into prostitution will suddenly become upstanding citizens if "microfinance" companies are banned? These problems need to be addressed at the source. Moral judgements like the ones implied in this app are a huge fallacy. Things will not get better if demand for strictly unnecessary goods and services suddenly disappears.
curl -o /dev/null -s -w '%{http_code}' http://www.example.com/somepath/version.txt
Plane Finder: Live Flight Tracking
Even though it would be extremely frustrating to read everything in this format I feel like I got twice as much value from it. With every sentence I watched him make the same point in 2-3 different ways. So if I didn't quite understand some concept he was trying to convey the first try, by the final edit I had formed a complete picture. Reading comprehension win!
Speaking of backend DOM awareness, have you seen this? https://github.com/tblobaum/nodeQuery
Fascinating. I'd love to see it generate a "brain signature" to identify people with similar writing/creation/deletion styles.
Nice features. In what does it make it a "company" rather than a cool side-project? (Don't take it the harsh way, I'm really interested in the answer :)