skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
HTML and JavaScript are a real step backward for getting games into the browser. Instead of having a bytecode (or virtualisation of machine code) that is designed for efficiency we get big APIs to do specific things thrown into the browser. Then everyone gets excited because the browser can finally do what the desktop has been able to do for years (without all the ludicrous overhead). But what about the applications that need raw CPU power? There's an unimaginative attitude these days that says that because we can implement some obvious-in-retrospect demo (like all these games are) that there's no need for efficiency. The design of the browser does a real disservice to programming.
I second this. The only downside to this that I see is that it would be less mainstream music. Why this is bad is mainstream music (although not always that great) targets what most people would like. This would mean that it is unlikely that there would be the odd song that would be really jarring to someone. I figure this is a bad thing as you want something for people to listen to in the background.
I cannot imagine that this is really meant as a music discovery tool as it is meant to be the top 40 most mentioned things.
Engineering Social Commerce
This definitely sounds interesting, but there's nothing really tangible presented here. The video seems to explain the concept, but there's no definition of the software itself (at least, until the summer of 2012). Would love to know more if anybody knows about this...
At least some versions of Sybase SQL Anywhere have a small HTTP server built in. Specially named/declared stored procs return HTML. I've built a smallish web app based on one, complete with Ajax touches. It was fun for one of my first programming jobs, but I don't know how maintainable it ended up. On one hand, at least your logic is close to your data... on the other hand, oh my god.
I like it as it doesn't give you too many things to do on the site (where I find the real distraction comes from) and just does things for me and looks good.
But I see a problem with this model.

I think the more startups apply, the less value angellist is going to provide to startups and investors. I think, that's pretty obvious. It's quality not quantity. I'm sure for sake of angellist, they want to get more users. But you can't have both, somewhere there has to be a sacrifice to be made.

Honestly, I hope angel list stays small. The more exclusive it gets, the better. I just don't want this place to turn into another myspace that is littered with millions of "me too" startups and profiles no body cares about. Then at which point, no one will take it seriously.
Ra.One Third Wednesday Collection on 9th November | NEWS 365
Yahoo still owns PPC advertising patent, could put pressure on Facebook pre-IPO
Watch PG make mistakes on Stypi
Excellent stuff, my kids simply loved this game! Looking forward to the blog post.
Know Thyself...And the Other Guy Too
Because every device is setup in a super secure manor that it can be on the Internet? Let's not kid ourselves devices will sit behind firewalls for quite a bit longer
They can't be clearer, because, I suspect they don't know themselves.

I imagine they will analyze usage patterns and decide which 10% or so of customers they want to get rid of every so often, based on a per-user P&L type of analysis.
They don't need to know what I am actually running. Each time I have had to call tech support they always ask me what router I am using, and I tell them it is a stock Linksys router. I can just as easily claim that I am running OS X Lion (which I am, just not directly on the cable modem)...
My suggestion would be to find senior level freelancers and offer them your services, See if they have low hanging fruit that they can throw your way with the understanding that you get to take a crack at new challenges as well. This way, you always have a back up should you get in over your head. You always have someone that has a vested interest in the project at you disposal that you can call and say hey I just don't get this, can you give me a hand to get through it. A lot of freelances need another hand but they don't need a senior level price tag. Enthusiasm goes a long way to convince them that you can be that second set of hands.
Enable panoramic camera mode on your iPhone without jailbreaking
Back in the early 90s, I worked for a very small (12-ish people) technical graphics software company. The CEO and lead coder would help with tech support calls when we were slammed, but he would use a pseudonym to make it appear that we were a larger, more established company than we were.

I think that it may have been a more appropriate facade then, but there are quite a few precedents for very small companies providing stellar service and support now so customers should be a little less anxious about buying boutique software.
Single-molecule car takes a test drive
Seems like quite a feat has been accomplished. But it also feels like it was simply done for the sake of it, instead of creating a framework that addresses real problems. Will have a close look however, correct me if my 2 second impression is completely off.
Ownership of data is just one tiny sliver of vendor lock-in with PaaS. The wider issue is how much "stuff" needs to be reimplemented to move to another platform.

Sometimes that's not so bad - if what you have to reimplement is stuff you'd inevitably have to build yourself if you didn't have the PaaS provider, then you're just deferring the cost of it (potentially "forever"). But often you would make different choices if you did not have the choice of the PaaS.
Overview was probably the wrong word.
How Does Hand Orientation Help Consumers Imagine Using Products
Ask HN: How do I apologize to someone after missing two meetings with them?
Hi there,

I recently got in contact with someone I really respect, exchanged a few emails with him, and quickly found that we had a lot of common ground.

He suggested we have a Skype chat at some point. I thought that would be great, and I scheduled one.

The first time, I put it on my calendar on the wrong day. The second time, I didn't realize I had the wrong Skype name, then somehow forgot about it and started working again.

I don't know how best to say "I'm sorry I blew you off twice." I've been feeling pretty awful about this for the past few weeks, and I want to figure out a way that I can make amends, if that's even possible.

This person thinks about a lot of the same things I think about, and I'm kicking myself for screwing this up, potentially for good. I want to be completely honest about it.

Thanks a lot—I really appreciate the help.
The first company I worked at would advertise with different extensions, such as (800)555-1212 x 123 in different publications, when we answered the phone and somebody asked for x123, we would just log what they requested and say "I can help you with that..."
You are correct. It looks like the datacenter is actually the construction site to the northwest of the jail. http://g.co/maps/gk8py

I have the addresses, but pulling them out from a satellite photo is a bit harder. :)
Code Analysis for VC++11
I am against macros. They are not allowed in LoseThos.
What does the [xfs] placeholder stand for?
Created WeSkateboard as a social site for skaters.
I would not call this an example of constructive dialog.
Just before Adobe bought Macromedia there was a lot of noise (and angst) that Microsoft would be the one to buy them.
Congrats guys! I really like how Flowdock is frequently updated with features that the users really need. Keep up the great work!
The article states that 'mobile browsers will catch up', but isn't this one of the areas where the OS creators are have a disincentive to improve the gaming ability of their browsers.

Unlike desktop where you have the option of just installing another browser, aren't you locked into the installed JS engine on both iOS and WP7? I'm not sure about Andriod.
Sure, devices can sit behind a firewall and I highly suggest implementing a border firewall anyway, but in the long run it will be easier. Devices can still use UPnP to dynamically ask the border firewall to open up ports, and instead of having a finite number of ports because of a single IP address that is being used to NAT now each device behind the firewall could technically ask for 65535 different ports to be allowed through the firewall dynamically.

Now Bobby can run his game server on port 2275 and Billy can run his game server on port 2275 both connect to the same cable modem, and each will be able to get their own traffic routed to them.
Why not get a job as a programmer for a company directly? You'll learn more this way. Freelancing is generally easier once you have more experience under your belt
Now lets see some of these mainstream tech media outlets comb through the terms of use for the major service providers looking for "gotchas". I'll bet there are quite a few there.

Republic isn't the be-all solution to our shitty carrier woes, but it's progress. A rag like PC World should be on board promoting this sort of advancement, rather than spreading FUD.
Google books steals cmd-F. :-(
So, this is "not a tax," according to the administration.

OK, fine. But taxes are being used to operate the program.

And, as the article points out, what business does the government have in promoting the fresh tree industry over the artificial tree industry?
Officially Today
Heading Uptown for Fedora Linux:Tale of Science, Secret Agents & Corporate War
Yeah, ditto to this. I have Schwab and I can go to any ATM and they reimburse me at the end of the month. No yearly, monthly, overdraft fees. nothing.
The people who make $1/day stop making $1/day. There is crisis. The crisis is caused by the cessation of a domination-based dependence relationship. The crisis could cause government collapse and mass-death. Out of the ashes will arise a (necessarily) more self-sufficient community.

The fact is that globalization fixes countries as "slave countries." It's very easy to control people by giving them a locally beneficial option. Which sounds better to you:

Make $1/day working 16 hours per day - spend the rest of your time sleeping/taking care of yourself/family.

Making $0/day refusing to work - spend your day working on building up your community in creative ways, but suffer much higher probability of personal/family death.

The option that 99.9% of people will take is #1. However, real change can't occur if everyone takes #1, so we have stasis.
There's still plenty of DBAs out there preaching "do it in a stored procedure", because in theory it lets them do things like changing normalization without affecting the application interface. (In practice, I've never seen happen that way.)

But in general, people did thing that way because there wasn't any common middleware or services interfaces. The RDBMS was the "app server".
Twitter is putting Ads in the timeline now.
Same thing that xkcd stands for: nothing.

It's just a series of letters that is unlikely to exist in any normal word, so he can search for it easily later, and replace it with a number. Since you never know what order the footnotes end up being, he starts off with a key in a hash, rather than index in an array.
The Boxee Box is getting a live TV tuner (video)
Parse user here, I think it's great. I'm curious to see if they do anything with their Facebook integration. I could see them building a user interest profile based on what apps the user has which could be very valuable to both developers and advertisers.
A new type of social network: Wormhole links MIT and Stanford
Just explain exactly what happened, and apologize profusely. Who knows what could happen? I think that's all you can do.
Please don't do this. They're doing these tests in a specific order, in specific markets, with specific people for a reason.
Substroke, a research language for drawing dynamic (data-dependent) pictures
I'm surprised you didn't go with "Jail or Yale"--since they're much more similar to each other.

Obviously, though, it's atrocious how much is spent punishing perpetrators of victimless/non-violent crimes, especially when there are so many socially positive things it could potentially be used for instead.
When I interviewed for my current position (which involves database design/query writing/storage/etc), the interview was heavily SQL-focused. My would-be manager started with very easy, general questions, and then continued to plumb the depths of my knowledge 'til he hit bottom (took about 30 minutes[1]). He is of the opinion that if you can think on your feet about general database design and set theory, you're a pretty competent programmer for the work the company does.

[1] Though I apparently did well enough to get the job, I felt as if I utterly failed the interview.
How about: "I'm sorry I blew you off twice. I've been feeling pretty awful about this for the past few weeks, and I want to figure out a way that I can make amends, if that's even possible."
Sounds good to me.
Open letter to the Mac/iOS dev community regarding conduct
I want to be completely honest about it

Honesty is the best policy, there is no reason to not be honest mistakes happen, I would explain the issue, tell the person that I would still love to have the chat but that I seem to be screwing it up each time, I would give him/her my Skype handle and tell them to give me a time and to contact me, that given my screw up even if I have a meeting with the president and the pope that I will cancel it to meet whatever time they schedule. It's no so much the screw up that you have to worry about, at this point, you have to affirm to them that you view them as important. The best way to do that is to put all the power of deciding into their hands and benevolently accept their decision. If they do not want to meet, send a note of understanding and apologize again ask if you can still send emails because you would like to build up trust and that you hope that they will eventually see that it was just a fluke and not a reflection of your true character.
Crashes on my iPad 2 too
Did I hear the part about "sacred water supplies" correctly? Are there really situations where religion is preventing access to water?
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To put things in perspective, in the financial crisis, China GDP declined even more than the US since they're export and manufacturing-based. They did a huge stimulus, which unlike certain other countries (ahem) was highly effective. Lots of construction, high-speed rail, etc. Recently the economy has been overheating and inflation has been running hot, the stimulus was withdrawn and money was tightened. A lot of stories of companies going bust, entrepreneurs fleeing loan sharks. (The banks mostly serve state-owned and established companies, but there is a sketchy shadow financial sector).

It's possible that there will be hard landing, but it's also possible the authorities will sidestep it, and it's just a shift away from light manufacturing toward higher value stuff, as that shifts to Philippines, Bangladesh etc.

China is a huge and complicated and rapidly-evolving place... worth a trip, had the chance to go for a few weeks earlier this year. The media gives us a bit of a cartoon version, kind of like they get the Hollywood version of the US (although since world culture is US-centric they're probably a little less ignorant of us).

Not to downplay that there are some big economic and environmental and civil rights issues (we have some too). They're sort of a billion-plus country version of the startup trying to bake a royal wedding cake in 10 minutes.
It's the ignoring not the complexity that's frustrating. I'm suffering from an annoying bug in Google Groups. I've raised it a few times and it disappears into the void. Next time there's a bug, even if it's serious, will I bother? Probably not - my expectations are set.

-- (Edit)

Incidentally, for software issues this makes a public bug tracker something of a marketing tool. Even knowing my bug rather than lost without trace would be an improvement.
This post: https://engineering.stanford.edu/news/wormhole-connects-stan... has a picture.
I really like this idea, any suggestions on going about finding people willing to do this? Or just finding senior level freelancers to ask. Thanks.
Much of this playback reminded me of watching my metrical-verse generator run: a backtracking search editing just the end of the text (or the paragraph anyway), getting stuck for a while on a difficult rhyme before backtracking further, etc. Neat. (Of course this human wasn't limited to that one style of composition.)
FounderFuel launches nine new Canadian tech startups
This is the wrong mindset. Just because you can implemented some specialised idea of video games that dates back more than a decade is nothing to be optimistic about. What about the next innovative idea? There are some things you need raw CPU power for.
Parse probably has the easiest-to-integrate library I have ever used...in my life. It took me five minutes to have a database backend to store 'share event's for my mobile apps.
I'm pretty sure Sophie isn't reading the emails as they come in.

Correct, which is why he writes in the end I have been writing you since you were born.....Until then...
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Wow, watching this allowed me to get 3x more value than just reading the article because it allowed me to see PG's thought process more clearly. But it was also 5x more difficult and painful to read than just a regular article.
I think he means "lower right."
I was curious what they recommended behind the "take action" tab, but it required a signup. Here's what's on the other sign of the registerwall:

Make Progress. Get the App.

You earn Free World points for spreading the news
and encouraging brands to audit their supply chains.
Down the app and use it for check-ins, sending
pre-written notes to companies, and sharing your
progress with your community. You can also earn Free
World points right here.

To get Free World points:

- Easily send notes to companies, asking them
to examine their supply chains.

- Make a donation to support the fight against
slavery in the supply chain.

- Raise awareness about slavery by sharing this
survey, your footprint, and your progress.

- Download and use the mobile app to check in while
shopping to share your concerns about the use of
slavery in the products you buy.

- Use the Made In A Free World mobile app for more
opportunities to earn Free World points.

So . . . it's a game. I must admit, I find that a bit cold. Compare the approach to something like http://mercyhousecoffee.org
Wouldn't you say HTML is at least partially done?
Gary Morgenthaler Explains Exactly How Siri Will Eat Google’s Lunch
That's really nice and simple. Love the design! So clean. The use of a pie-chart (or donut chart really) is very nice, but it is a bit difficult to read. I like it better than bar charts from an aesthetic perspective, but I think it is more difficult to get a perspective of scale.
I would recommend finding a way to add % numbers to help people get a better grasp of the results.

Also, blue/green and particularly the shades you chose don't work well in your implementation, I don't think. The green doesn't shout Yes, you have to think about it, and blue has never been no. Also I believe blue/green color blindness is the most common, therefore many people wouldn't be able to tell which was which on your chart.

Really a great run, just a bit of refinement I think!
Do your clients really need to know the size of your staff?

The most intriguing part is about the BVI incorporation and the cash withdrawals in Geneva. Do you plan to elaborate on that in a further post? Is it worth the trouble?
I think he missed the point as to why exceptions are expensive. It's not (only) the setup and teardown. It's mostly the throwing of exceptions. Throwing an exception is expensive when compared to returning a status code and checking its value.
It will be really interesting to see how the Kindle Fire and iPad compete internationally. Not only have I doubts about raking in profits via eBooks in countries with less emphasis on copyright, but the Appstore has not even arrived in central Europe. By the time people outside the US have heard of the Kindle Fire, it will have to compete against the iPad 3. By comparison, it takes Apple less and less time to get their products shelved in late markets like Hong Kong,
French, Germans explore idea of core euro zone
I have to agree. I signed up and put as much information as I could about my company, but am now left with an, "Okay, what now?" situation.

We've been banging code for about two years now as a labor of love, and actually have a running system, ready for investment to actually take it out and make something of it. I've been the tech founder a number of times, but this is my first time in the game as both technical lead and business lead, and I'm more than happy to admit that I'm learning as I go.

A site like Angel List would be a great help, because part of taking on investment is also getting experience from the investors. But how do I reach out to them?

And how do I show them what we have without broadcasting it to the world? Because between you and me, what we've built is the kind of thing that I suspect many people would say, "Wow, I can't believe nobody's done that yet!" Sure, the barrier to entry is reasonable, but why give someone else a head start?

Sigh ;)
The original report is here (in Chinese): http://pic.bankofchina.com/bocappd/report/201111/P0201111015...

Later on I'll have a read and translate any interesting parts of it. Right now it's 4 AM here, I'm coming off a long and not-very-fun debugging session, and I'm going to sleep.

There was a very similar report published about half a year ago by China Merchants Bank. HN discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2660178

I blogged about that report and translated some portions of it at the time, see there for my thoughts on these things. my analysis in short: not many people taking concrete action, not many people leaving permanently. http://notlearningcantonese.posterous.com/rich-emigrants-as-...
Mums working from home are the best leaders
How do they know that single computer isn't doing DHCP/NAT for other computers? Are they doing nmap OS fingerprinting and banking off the assumption that people using Windows/OSX wouldn't be doing that, but people using Linux might be?
Exactly. People think that because we can have some completely unimaginative stuff with ideas from the 1980's that HTML5 is ready to be the future of browser gaming. And then when presented with the problem of complex physics, the solution is of course to add a special extension to browsers to handle physics. It's no wonder the browser is decades behind the desktop with myopic thinking like this.
I have trouble with the oracle syntax once you get to two or three tables left joined against each other, and consider it more a relic of old oracle programmers than any actual advantage one way or the other.
You are right, at first I did do it just to see if it was possible. I've been meaning to write in more detail about some of the implications, clean up some of the code, etc. I've also experimented with the API to feel out how it could work with other client side stuff in an isomorphic way, url routes, and other frameworks (https://gist.github.com/1336381), but havent released any of that.
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Quad-core chips in mobile phones is nothing but a marketing snow job
Build Good Decisions into the Product
This is how macros should always have been. I don't know of any other language which does this

They look very similar to Perl6 macros. See recent discussion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3124920
Mums working at home and Network Marketing
Stateful firewalls and NAT are distinct concepts. We can and will be using stateful firewalls long after we kick NAT to the curb.
What would the differences be between what that compiler does and what the Dart compiler claims it will do when its finished?
The ad in question looks a lot like a facebook ad unit. Nice way for them to allow advertisers to reuse their facebook creative across Google's network.