skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They should've stuck with Silverlight as a rich javascript library (similar to v1), and used the Silverlight CoreCLR to power the javascript JIT in IE, providing a superior user and/or development experience compared to other [desktop] browsers.

Of course, it's entirely too sensible to have actually happened. Instead the IE team went off and wrote their own JIT for IE7/8/whatever and are still playing catch up to Chrome.

At this time about 2 years ago they did have JS running on CLR and it was 2x faster than any browser out there.
Great design; Does anyone know if that was from scratch, or if there's a visual/back-end framework behind it?
Simplified Investing for Ruby Hackers
It doesn't show percentages unless you hover over the pie chart. (Chrome)
We're launching a new VPC in the region today. Unfortunately none of the Community AMIs we used in US East and US West-1 are available in the new region yet :(

To second your sentiment, it would be really, REALLY nice if we could port AMIs across regions.
if my parents had done something like this I'm not sure I'd be too amused.

What if one of your parents passed away while you were young? Wouldn't it be nice to have some concept of interacting with them as an adult? What if a house fire or flood destroyed the home videos and photo albums of your youth?
The contrast looks a bit better on my browser(Opera). Maybe the blog software wants to deemphasize comments(like HN does for selfpost text and downmodded comments)?
Propeople sessions for DrupalCon Denver 2012
How is this different from photo albums and letters written to children stored in a box somewhere? I know my mom has an inordinate amount of childhood paraphernalia stashed away somewhere. I could see it being a touching gift to give to your child later on in life.
Agreed with others - Love the design and it made a great first impression. Your explanation and walk through was very well done as well. I would maybe put a few cues as to which part can be hovered and more information will be presented.
I'm not 100% sure, but I think that this kind of stuff also happens in most other communities? At least I've met a few people in the banking community that had their fair amount of crude jokes.
Just sort of a karmic side note, a really useful way to rant is to actually blog your rant and then start a conversation about the pros and cons of your rant. (and you can submit it to HN but no guarantees that it will make the first page etc etc)
"....It's interesting how often the last sentence of a paragraph can simply be deleted."

well done
When I clicked on this link I thought it was going to be about the wage slaves that work for me down at the local mall.

Day in and day out they shuffle into their meaningless jobs, selling shoes or flipping burgers. 8 hours a day 5 days a week for 40 years. They rack up a life time of debt in the first few years of adulthood and struggle to stay on top of it for the rest of their lives.

I'd much rather live within my means and enjoy life instead. I want to build interesting stuff, fun games, follow my dreams...
Siri raise-to-speak feature uses modified iPhone 4S proximity sensor
Doh! I must be one of the SQL bunnies everyone else is superior to...

I didn't know about the WITH statement. Thanks for enlightening me.
>maybe the Mac community doesn’t want people like me to be comfortable? Perhaps they would rather keep this a boy’s club forever, and it’s simply irritating when people like me disrupt that.

I find this kind of generalization or assumption pretty much as distasteful as the author found the presentation.
Wow,
Myabe it depends on the business but I used to work in customer service in a retail company's call centre and we used to send out letters with our own names on them.
Federer mauls Mannarino 6-2 6-3
This is great - thanks so much for this. I think showing them that they're important, and that it was completely my absentmindedness that resulted in the situation, is a good idea. Giving them the opportunity to schedule a time is even better.

Thank you!
No worries, appreciate the work figuring out the locations
Open letter to dipshits:

Stop being a dipshit, you dipshit.

Love,
I imagine voting out Biden/Hatch means the next set of pols will just take the campaign contributions instead. What can be done structurally to prevent this cycle from repeating?
Oh Christmas tree...
I think it just shows you that everything you ever do is built piece by piece and that never be afraid of changing or swapping any of the pieces. Your only goal is to put the pieces together better.
Ask HN: what's the best way to run a tight meeting?
None of like to sit through long meetings, and we definitely don't like to waste other peoples time. Unfortunately, both can happen.

What are you recommendations for staying on task and on target?
Google is especially bad in this regard. I'm a software developer, and I can probably write a pretty decent bug report. I'm also available to further look into the issue, and can use development tools. I help fix bugs if I find them in many products we use. But with Google, I just don't bother. There's often no way to even file a proper bug report, just some Google Group, and never any feedback.
Is there any specific information on what conference this was and who were the speakers mentioned? I find it hard to gauge what I should think based on no information.
Thanks, Timmee.

Cues are a good idea! It does take a bit of guesswork to figure out which piece has content.
We just naturally assume that any reported issues that we receive are vastly under represented. I assume that only 10% of users actually report things.
Google ate my email address
There are real methodological issues here. Even so, I'd prefer reducing the number of people forced into slavery. Does anyone have suggestions on how to do this most efficiently?

Some numbers:

- consume less: my consumption seems to require about one "slave" (in the site's sense) per EUR 1000/USD 1500. (Being a fairly frugal vegetarian may help here. Or not.)

- Fair Trade: http://www.slavefreechocolate.org/ suggests that 100g of cocoa (say one good bar of chocolate) requires about one child-slave-day;

- no diamonds: this is surprisingly hard to pin down. Searching the internet suggests that the cost in lives lost in wars is much greater than the cost in lives lost in slavery.
This was a Mac/iOS developer conference, not a adult standup comedy show in Vegas.It's a conference meant to showcase different development methodologies and paradigms, not awkward base humor.
I use the cheapest and the best tool available: EXPLAIN EXTENDED

You cannot do any better than have the DB tell you exactly what it is going to do with your query. Then you can experiment with changing / adding / removing clauses and see how it would affect the query plan produced by EXPLAIN.

For example if EXPLAIN says the query would generate a temp table you could often achieve improvement by managing the same temp tables explicitly. Many times you can get a huge performance lift by using a "group by index". You could identify and rewrite un-indexed table scans too.

I've found lots of other "unobvious" optimizations that cut down queries that ran for days or hours to minutes or seconds.

Here are a few references to get started-

1) http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/execution-plan-inform...

2) http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2006/07/24/extended-expl...

3) http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2010/06/15/explain-exten...
> But have you tried doing anything graphically complex in HTML5? ... Things that Flash used to laugh at will bring Chrome to its knees.

Agree. An example is graph visualization. Fire up your CPU monitor and go to http://arborjs.org/atlas/ and view this very cool physics-driven mesh visualization written in Javascript. You'll see the needle jump to 95% or more. On my relatively modern laptop, if I run this for more than a few minutes, it shuts off due to overheating. Also, this app does not work on IE.

By contrast, I can run an similar Flash-based visualization and CPU usage ratchets up to 60 or 70% but not more, and it works on IE.
Butterfly Sword
Are Netflix's streaming videos DRM'd? On a closed system like the PS3, an HTML5 video player might be possible, but how would they protect their video in a HTML5 video player on a desktop computer? DRM'd desktop video seems like a good opportunity for Flash and Silverlight since HTML5 is unlikely to offer might DRM support.
I think the average customer service response from a company nowadays goes something like this:

Me: "I'm having a problem with the fribbulator. It appears to be broken - the metal is snapped cleanly in two."

Them: {no response}

Me: "I sent you this last week but didn't receive a reply. I'm having a problem with the fribbulator. It appears to be broken - the metal is snapped cleanly in two."

Them: "Here are instructions on how to reinstall Windows. Please see our FAQ as well. Did this response answer your question [Y/N]?"

That sort of response might as well include a .gif of a raised middle finger. Companies that intend to provide better-than-this customer service should factor in customer conditioning into their plans. The customer has been conditioned to complain publicly first. You'll have to fix that explicitly if you don't want it to happen to you.
great short.
btw, direct link is http://vimeo.com/31617919
Got it! Yeah, that's supposed to happen. I guess we'll see how intuitive it is for people and then think about auto-populating the percentages.
I see... good luck to you!!
A customer once reported a problem with a product I worked on. The issue involved a user interface intended to show a list of users which were fetched from the database. They said that the software took about an hour to display all the users. The expectation was that it would be pretty much instant.

In our testing, we had only tested to 100 users, but when we tried 4000, we couldn't reproduce the problem. It took 5 seconds to show the data, not an hour.

It took a long time to track this down. It turned out that the results from the database were in sorted order, and then the UI sorts them for display with quicksort. A list in pre-sorted order is the worst case (n^2) for quicksort.

(As an aside, the results were in sorted order, even though the query did not specify that they should be sorted. The reason for this was that this table was loaded into the database from some other source, and that other source outputted the data in sorted order... So, it wasn't just a case of removing a 'ORDER BY' from the query)

After thinking about this a bit, I decided to randomize the data after it was fetched, and this brought the time required back down into the sub-10-second range. The problem with sort algorithms is that the worst cases are sometimes fatal to your application, and aren't as rare as you might think. Having an algorithm like timsort that is tuned for these not-so-rare cases sounds quite useful.
Fair enough. You can lead an idiot to knowledge, but you can't make him think.
> At least I've met a few people in the banking community that had their fair amount of crude jokes.

Sure, but how many banking conferences do you see jokes as crass as the ones that were mentioned here? No one is getting hot and bothered here how people talk privately or to their buddies.
I am curious what conference and also what session this was?! Word of advice to anyone reading these comments, when presenting, ALWAYS take the moral high ground. People are easily offended period, and for all sorts of reasons you may not care about. The last thing the developer community needs is to offend people. We're all here to make the future a better place to live in, so lets act like we care too.
Funny, just reading the title of this HN submission immediately said in my mind "Nothing". Who in their right minds develops flash mobile games?
FWIW, Silverlight does run on OS X[1]. The demo link above was for WPF. The Silverlight version is here: http://demos.telerik.com/silverlight/

[1] http://www.microsoft.com/getsilverlight/Get-Started/Install/...
fair enough.

I don't want to minimize the issue, but there is room for some realistic perspective, somewhere between indifference and equating consumers with slaveowners.

The link says there are at least 12.3m forced laborers.

If every American had 10 'slaves' that would be 3.1b slaves.

This was a pretty eye-opening story about an unfortunate Chinese deliveryman a few months ago

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/22/nyregion/22victim.html?pag...
Lots of my friends, although for many developers it was never so much the question of developing a Flash game for mobile, but rather moving existing games to mobile. Kongregate did a great job on their Android app as well, they have a very nice catalog of free Flash games that have been repurposed for mobile.

It's worth nothing Flash as a development platform is an increasingly viable vector to getting on mobile but published as a native app with AIR.
That's not my fault ;)
Startup Quote from Aaron Patzer, Founder, Mint
No offense to the banking...actually, you know what, fuck those guys. I'm sure there are a lot of nice people working there (I have two friends who do so), but the average level of juvenile bro-tude and that passes for normal behavior among young ibankers is embarrassing. We are better than that.
Turn a perceived risk into an asset.

- Aaron Patzer (@apatzer)

http://startupquote.com/post/12566815371
Comes off as a marketing trojan horse...
This is exactly what I mean.

Unlimited meant that there were no preset limits to the number of hours you were allowed to use, and there was no surcharge for hours used. It did _not_ mean that you were _guaranteed_ to be allowed access 24/7 all month long. I think that's a fair definition of "unlimited".

We were very clear about this, and said so in our ad fine print, and very prominently during the sign-up process.
Flash Player Mobile, a Post Mortem.
Do you aggregate the number of times a song is shared/mentioned on Twitter each day?
> The only need is credit unions and financial institutions who are FORBIDDEN from behaving in certain risky ways.

Wasn't that exactly what caused the subprime mortgage bubble? Giant pools of cash (pension funds and the like) that could only be put into "completely safe" investments but also wanted decent returns, thus providing massive incentives to misrepresent risk?
Use two-factor Google Authenticator in your own sites or apps
Indeed, but there is a place for fun even at serious conferences. Some of my favourite talks at conferences have been filled with humour. Usually they're informative at the same time, which the talk in question apparently lacked, but such is life.

The actual point I was making was slightly different, but i'll leave it to the reader to figure out what it was.
Make an option to add sound (select an mp3 or microphone) and you have the most amazing learning tool for programing; it would be like a videotutorial where you can directly copy the code!

edit: redaction
I'm surprised the leading providers of mobile fart noise applications would be so immature.
I've been in the Mac (and now iOS) and UNIX development communities for decades, and I've never come across this sort of "rockstar" immaturity.

I have, however, come across this in other fields. I assume this is likely due to how small the Mac community has been, as well as -- and this may be a stretch -- the kind of professionalism that Apple has themselves demonstrated.

The fact that this sort of conduct may be becoming more prevalent in the iOS/Mac space is disappointing, but not entirely surprising.
I can do NAT66 on my internal devices without an issue.

Except the issue of doing IPv6 completely wrong.
The Startling Science of a Starling Murmuration
I think I read recently that using the Oracle (+) operator can give you the error "cannot outer join to more than one table" if you try to outer join to two or more, but the ANSI syntax will allow you to do that - I really should test this out ...

edit - I tried this out and right now cannot get that error, so not sure where I got that idea from.
Did you even read the essay? Visions of the future are critical in shaping the focus of today's research. GUIs, laptops, etc. came almost entirely out of Alan Kay's mind. Visions of the future that just plain suck, such as Microsoft's, then become misguiding.
Get people to agree with you first

A slight twist to this: get people to say yes.

My "success rate" (with approaching women) went up drastically when I changed the first words out of my mouth to "Can you hear me?". I now ask this even when I know a woman doesn't have earphones on.

Why does it work? I have a couple of guesses. It is a question that you can't help reply to. And inadvertently when you answer this question, you begin paying more attention to the party that asked.

In ad-speak, this pretty much takes care of the A(attention) in AIDA.
Is your name a wire reference? If so well done.
The site wont load on an Android browser. Take off the "if statement" that says dont run on small screens.
Yes, for me too. Every time.

Edit: Works in UIWebView though - might be a bug in the nitro JS engine.
What’s interesting is that much of the discussion focuses on Apple’s insistence on C, C++, and Objective-C. Apple did backpedal on that issue. Using Flash for apps is now no more a problem.

Most commentators seem to have recognized even then where Jobs had a point and where he absolutely did not.

It sure doesn’t look like it today but if you take the wider view it almost seems as if Apple and Adobe both moved away from their extreme positions to met somewhere in the middle: Flash for apps is ok, Flash on the web is not.

Most of Jobs’ letter is about the web. Some, however, is about apps. In the end you could probably say that he was only two thirds correct.
Yes. The site on this post seems to be "the word made flesh", though. :-)
We can agree that traffic rarely comes in at an average rate.
No Android version in the works just yet, but we've gotten lots of requests.

For what it's worth, I've personally found that having the intention to write someone's name down in Namerick makes me more likely to remember in that initial exchange. Not as technologically elegant, as say, universal audio recording and transcription, but in practice it seems to still be a useful life hack around this problem:)
This kind of conversation happens all the time with "support" accounts on Twitter. I tweeted the @ParallelsCares account for help and ended up in or around the third circle of hell [1] trying to get a simple answer to a simple question [2].

I think customer conditioning, as you suggest, is part of the solution. Training also needs to include learning how to thoughtfully write a response, which would then show empathy. Instead what we have are a lot of Twitter support accounts whose names end with "Cares" run by a lot of people who don't.

[1] https://twitter.com/#!/shaggyfrog/status/100974626112421888
[2] https://twitter.com/#!/shaggyfrog/status/100727705112285184
Well some people say if you are getting offended by "inappropriate" jokes that's basically your problem, not the problem of the majority of people there having fun. After all its just jokes, as in having humour. At a developer conference you shouldn't be so critical about it.
To put it in context, this open letter was the month before Google's demo debacle at "Flash Camp" in May that year, when every attempt to demo Flash running on Android resulted in a browser crash.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/apple/7709473/Disastro...

A lot of the comments in that thread would have been posted before that.
Nice contest. It's too bad that the prize is only 10,000 pounds. Maybe one of these start up incubator countries (like Chile) can mimic this idea, with bigger purse.
Nope that's what YOU think it means. See my answer above. We never charged anyone for extra hours, but we did not _guarantee_ that you could get online and stay online as much as you want.

Take your buffet example: You can eat all you want from what is on the tables, no matter how much that is, but there's no guarantee of an infinite supply of food. If you eat all the pancakes, they are not _obligated_ to supply you with more.
I didn't know about Cmd+L, thanks!
Ray Higdon & Michelle Pescosolido Numis Network
I can't find a group called 'Lunar Robotics' that joined the Google XPrice http://www.googlelunarxprize.org/teams
Cardiff UK Node.js User Group
Meet the Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime, the World’s First Supercomputer Tablet
If we're holding investment bankers up as our moral benchmark, then we're screwed.

Not that ibankers are necessarily the worst of the worst, they obviously aren't, but c'mon people, aim high?
Infographic: How and Where People Share Content
We have someone like this. Her name is Christine.

:)
Pentagon Regrowing Soldiers’ Muscles From Pig Cells
The Christmas Tree War
I'm not supporting this kind of behavior, but I think least think any community needs is to be too scared about offending people.

Like others have commented, author makes pretty _offensive_ generalizations of the whole community and people in it, which I think is even worse and untrue, than some guy having an offending talk.
Let me guess, you're white and male? Me too, and for a long time I thought to myself "Gee, I can't believe people get offended at stuff like that." Then after a bit, I really put myself into other people's shoes. How would you feel if your credentials were constantly being second-guessed just because of how you looked, talked, or your gender?

The thing is, as white (or white-looking arab or jewish) dudes, we _never_ have to run into that. The closest I ever came was immigrating to a different country and constantly getting singled out over my accent — so much so that I changed it.
In the Android Market, there's a "Contact Developer" button for every app. Click it and write an email. No "registering" or complex forms to fill out.

In my game, there's also a "feedback" button. I say early in the app description to please contact me if you have any problems. I answer any questions that come in, and am polite even to the insulting emails. Well, at least mostly polite. ;) And I typically answer them in hours, at most.

And yet I still get 1-star "complaint" posts that hurt my ratings, from people who have never contacted me. Frequently they just say that they hate the ads, which are only shown between levels, and therefore don't interfere with game-play. I guess I should work for free?

I don't think it helps to justify their behavior; if they make the least attempt and give up, that's one thing, but if they don't even try when dealing with an indie app developer who's obviously not some faceless company, that's just lazy (and in many cases selfish -- they can pay to turn off ads, after all, and the games don't write themselves). It's the EASY thing for them to do, and they're being jerks.

Or if, as you say, they've been hurt before, they're taking out hurt from Faceless Corporation on me, which is pretty much indistinguishable from being a jerk from my point of view.
Does this mean I’ll finally, finally be able to get a static IP (albeit an IPv6 one) for my apartment? Or are they going to ultimately pull some obscene perversion out of their hat whereby you have to pay stratospheric business-class rates to actually get an IPv6 address, and their justification is because it comes bundled with an infuriating potpourri of cut-rate “business-class” nonsense that no one wants (web hosting, email, etc.)? The fact that I can’t just pay $10/month (or whatever) for a static IP on my residential broadband connection is so exasperating.
The title should be cropped to, "Lesser Known Ways to Persuade People".
Really? That’s how you are going to spin it? Talk about entitlement.

There is no guarantee that all free apps on the App Store will be free forever. It seems absurd to me to believe that. I treat free apps like presents: I don’t expect anything from them. (I guess that’s why I prefer to pay for apps.)
How does that work? You add two bytes to the address and somehow that makes the address longer by more than 2 bytes?
A new Male Extra Review * Read Before buying