skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem with "leniency and discretion in enforcement" is exactly what we've seen: people will reflexively be outraged at Google when they appear to break their own rules.

Now, if Google's policy was to be lenient and to "give each offender a chance," think about how they would respond to two situations:

The first situation is some unknown marketing agency that's clearly violating the rules and arranging the selling of links to inflate their PageRank or their clients' PageRanks. This would be the typical case that their policy was designed to weed out, and Google's webspam department would have no reason to be lenient. And they likely wouldn't.

The second situation is when another department at Google appears to violate the Google webspam rules. Someone from Google webspam would see that Google Chrome is in violation, and of course they would feel the need to be lenient. Sure, it's a big company, but I'm sure any employee would assume they could work things out with the Chrome department.

This would just end up being the exact situation we've seen unfold today: Google Chrome would appear to get a pass, while the "obvious spammers" would be punished normally. I don't see how "leniency and discretion" could possibly result in anything other than unequal application of Google's policies.
Air Conditioning - A Black Art for Controls Hackers
Meet the (mobile) spectrum bosses
That's a paid ad. You can tell from the yellow background and from the text that says "Ad" in the upper-right.
Meanwhile Google banning its own browser will generate more buzz and downloads in the next few weeks than the video campaign no one knew about could have.
If you're going to post a link to your own blog that has no content, don't you think you should at least start a discussion on this page about it? I mean, the one post on your blog is about not reading blogs. What epic shit did you have in mind?
Game consoles compete with other consoles in their own generation. PS2 beat XBOX 1 to market by a full year, and trounced it in sales.[1] XBOX 360, on the other hand, beat PS3 to market by a full year, and did better in sales.[2]

XBOX is also uniquely distanced from other huge Microsoft brands, and the overall Microsoft brand itself. People usually just say "XBOX", and it's conspicuously removed altogether from other brands such as Windows. Imagine if it had been called "Windows Game System".

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_video_game_consoles_...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_video_game_consoles_...
The buyer need not lie for this to happen – it could be as simple as they were mistaken and genuinely believed that it was fake (assuming it wasn't).
Clearly Matt did the right thing here, but the cynic in me says that all press is Good Press ... and now Chrome is going to get lots of it for free. Mission accomplished.
If you look at their implementations, they're very different :)

But as I said, they could converge - CQL fits nicely as a higher-level interface over Korma. And for what it's worth, I didn't build Korma for no reason... an awful lot of people have wanted an alternative to CQL. If for no other reason than to have something that is being really actively maintained.
Good post Ashutosh. Actually I didn't build MVP yet. But I would say, not after building a prototype or MVP but after ready prototype on paper or on your mind. Yes, it's not good dreaming all the day, losing your main concentration and naming your baby when you're in high school. But I think there is nothing bad naming your baby if your wife is already pregnant. After naming you're starting to think that you did 10% of your startup work and it starts to motivate you to go on. I am a designer founder, I founded 3 startups, I always build the product on a paper, design it, calculate the possible progress of the startup, than naming, buying the domain, branding, ui/ux design and hiring a dev to build my prototype.
I'm fine with that; the Mini is used as an HTPC, so I really need the overscan correction only so I can see the menus in VLC / Quicktime.
I'm torn between "That's almost cute" and "This is wrist-slapping ourselves to give the appearance that we administer our guidelines in a manner which is not arbitrary and capricious."
What about looking even-handed to those eyeing Google on antitrust issues?
Khan Academy hires Vi Hart [video]
Not to criticize unnecessarily, but what would anyone want to code web apps in C? I'm not saying rails, etc. are the be-all-end-all, but why C? To seem extreme?
Over 3 years ago Joel and I bought Site5 from Matt/Rod. Feel free to hit me up too.

Thanks, Ben
Site5 CEO
bwb@site5.com
Show HN: During the last week, I built a SPDY server.
It's more that there are large numbers of people who consistently don't get humour, either for cultural reasons or deficiencies in their humour glands or whatever.

On the other hand, in forums where people upvote humour, there can be mechanisms that actually are counterproductive. E.g. on Reddit where there is something serious that you are interested in, but some idiot starts a punning thread which takes off and runs for pages. Or slashdot, where a witty one line (simplistic) put down off a complex issue will recieve maximum karma, whereas a well thought out retort will struggle to break the readability threshold.

Hacker News has a number of mechanisms for impeding flame-wars, and I think some of them also impede the flow of humour. No fast replies for instance slows things down, and also the depth algorithm because PG doesn't like deep threads. Another one is de-emphasising karma. If people hand out karma for being entertained, then the system 'rewards' you for being entertaining, so again people go for the slashdot style one-off witty put down.

On the gripping hand, now that HN de-emphsises karma (and has weird rules about what can and cannot be down-voted), I'm much less likely to actually bother. Karma is already pointless, but rubbing our faces in it simply reduces participation. The ideal system would 'reward' well thought out replies, and I don't see the current system doing that anytime soon.

On the invisible hand humour is an important part of geek culture, as are references to things such as invisible hands and gripping hands. I'm not sure why that is, but word-play and recursion (important parts of being a really clever programmer) are already pretty close to humour, or possibly even forming some of the foundations of it.

Which leads me to conjecture that all of the really good programmers have a healthy sense of humour, and that implies that if hacker news is overrun with people who don't have a good sense of humour, that would indicate the ratio of good programmers here is falling. Why would that be? Perhaps because of the emphasis on money, and winning the startup lottery. The programmers who are only in it for the money tend to view themselves as more 'serious' - so I suspect they are the source of the "humourless git" demographic.
Right. One of the rules is "be nice".

OK. This article is flawed and many of the comments are just as flawed. Having been involved in the design and manufacturing of LCD displays (down to writing all FPGA image processing code, scaling, deinterlacing, etc.) I think I can say that none of this is accurate if the intent is to apply it generally.

Caveat: If you buy a TV don't expect it to be a computer monitor. Most TV designs are just that: TV sets. They are made to do one thing reasonably well: Take a crappy satellite/cable/whatever signal and give you a reasonable image back.

EDID can be programmed with any resolution you want. Do you need 921 x 333 at 12 frames per second? No problem. There is no such thing as a resolution not being available in EDID. Standards are one thing, but the EDID mechanism isn't inherently limited by standards.

BTW, there are commercially available EDID modifier gadgets that allow you to modify the EDID readout from the monitor. So, the monitor says one thing and your computer (or whatever device) receives your programmed values.

If you need a TV that will play nice with a computer you need to find one that was explicitly designed to do so.

Most consumer TVs use one of a very few commercially available processor chips to do their image processing. With a few exceptions they all do the same kinds of things. And no, the signals are rarely converted to YCbCr 4:2:2 internally but for the absolute cheapest and crappiest of processors. All the good ones convert the input to a common internal integer RGB format. The nice ones might standardize at 12 bits per channel (36 bits total) internally. When I did custom FPGA video processing we went as far as 24 bits per channel in order to avoid truncation of calculated values until the very last moment. This can make a huge difference depending on the application.

In general terms "monitor mode", if you will, should be a mode that bypasses as much of the internal processing as possible. You can force this bypass by using and EDID modifier gadget programmed for the actual resolution and timings of the panel. In other words, open the back of the TV, get the panel model number, get the data-sheet and program the EDID modifier to output these values to your computer. The processor should push this straight to the panel and you get very little, if any, processing. Again, this does not work on all TVs. As I said before, they are designed to be TVs, not monitors.

That said, I've connected many computers to off-the-shelf, un-modified, consumer TVs via DVI and HDMI. I have yet to run into any real issues.
Researchers in Germany create a virtual sky for office workers
This is a tad ridiculous. Very few of you know anything about violins and I'm sure none of you know the details of this story or if it's even true. Regretsy was being irresponsible in posting it without any evidence and many people here are behaving like key members of a lynch mob.
I'm aware of that. My point was that not much has actually changed in practical terms. Yes, there is a little "Ad" text and slightly different background, but both before and after, the first thing people see when they search for "google chrome" is the Chrome download page.
The author edited the post since my response. I used the word lifestyle because that was the word he used.

There are a lot of options. Infinite options. There is also a big difference in potential risk and outcomes of those options. There is nothing wrong with approaches to creating lifestyle businesses. In many cases, this can be optimal.
> If you have a theory about something but aren't too sure, fine. Just say so.

> And most of all, please never start a sentence with, "It seems to me...". Many of us already get too much of that from our PHBs.

Could you expand on this please? I've always interpreted "It seems to me..." as "I have a theory but I'm not certain".
Yes, in my district teacher salaries range from $42,000 to $60,000 depending on experience (0 to 30 years of experience, respectively).

My first year teaching I'd estimate I put in 70 hours a week. Now (with fifteen years of experience) it's 40-50, though it does spike up periodically.

However, teachers of core subjects (esp. math, English and history) have so much more grading than I that they work a lot more hours.
That is pretty private information, and up to his family if they want to get into medical details. The important point is that it sucks, not the reason for it.
Thanks, Ben
Final Fantasy VS Dead or Alive
When two worlds collide…they fight fight and fight!!
On losing respect for Feminism
Have you tried CodeIgniter? I've been using it for a while, it's pretty lightweight in comparison with Zend, it's also much faster in speed.
I'm from Perth but now live in NYC and I've lived in London, Zurich and Germany.

I can tell you that the erosion in the real standard of living in Australia, particularly Perth, in the last decade is mind-blowing.

The way I see it the resources boom has driven up the cost of construction both directly (through infrastructure projects) and indirectly (increased demand for residential housing from net migration). It now costs anywhere from $1500-2000/m2 to build a house.

That's insane.

That cost is then passed on through wage demands, the cost of running any business and so on. Rent is at or above New York levels (my old apartment in West Perth is now more expensive than my apartment in Manhattan).

Apart from roughly comparable rent in NYC, everything else is significantly cheaper.

Increased population pressure, property prices and construction costs are also reflected in the skyrocketing price increases in food, water and power.

London is (or at least was the last time I visited) reasonably expensive.

Zurich has a reputation for being expensive but honestly it's not anymore. Fact is, you can still get a studio in the city for maybe under CHF1000/month (something you can't in Perth). Yes food is more expensive but you pay lower taxes and everything else is, at worst, comparable in cost. I look at property prices in nice towns like Zug or Luzern and (IMHO) it's way more affordable than Perth.

So ignore whatever the CPI tells you about Australia. IMHO it's not a place you want to live now unless you have owned property for at least 10 years (and thus rode the property boom and are reasonably cashed up) or are rich. Either way it's one of the most expensive countries on the planet now.
A Disciplined Approach to Evaluating Ideas --Scott Anthony
But they are insanely cool, aren't they?

It's the kind of money you spend to develop today against the kind of computer that will be mainstream a couple years from now. At least, that's one bet. Xerox bet correctly - GUIs, bit-mapped displays and object orientation got hot in the mid 80's but, nevertheless, they didn't collect their prize.
I totally agree about iTunes on Windows, but it is at least better than the Zune software for Mac OS.

I hope, for everyone's sake, that the Windows Phone market is bigger than just the handful of people who bought Zunes.
And in German.
I respect you as a person, but yes, oh $deity yes.
Sad, I always keep missing the threshold
EFF's 2011 Holiday Wish List
Best golf wedges
The low carrier support and the lackluster hardware have indeed hindered the platform. As a college student with a Windows Phone, however, I can attest anecdotally both to the operating system's (mostly the UI's) popular appeal and, on the other hand, to widespread popular distaste for the brand itself.

With other, tech-ignorant college students as my data points, I have found that most people's first impressions of the OS are quite positive, ranging from "oh, that phone's nice" (and they aren't talking about the physical device, a bland, somewhat chubby HTC Trophy) to "that's the coolest phone I've ever seen." As mentioned, these aren't people into tech I'm talking about—most of them have iPhones because they wanted one, or everyone else has one, or because there parents got them, so they did, too. I thus do not actively promote my phone in any way—all I've been doing, when I've gotten these sorts of responses, has been showing someone what someone else texted me, or some other datum or whatnot.

When they inevitably ask—"what kind of phone is that?"—and I say "Windows Phone," they, just as inevitably, immediately lose all interest.

This may parallel, I suppose, the reason Xbox, for example, remains instead successful years after its introduction: one of my uncles called my dad on Christmas day this year concering some computer or network problem (my dad, as a software engineer, of course bears that burden in our family), and mentioned incidentally that he had gotten my cousin an Xbox as a gift. My dad, who used to work for Microsoft and still gets a discount on their software, suggested that he might have been able to save some cash had my uncle told him ahead of time, or that he could still save on games if he wanted. What did my uncle say, however, but "oh, I didn't know it [Xbox] was Microsoft." Indeed, my uncle to this day refers to Microsft in conversation with my dad as "the evil empire."

So yeah, I think the brand name itself, however irrational the reason, hasn't helped at all. Also, there isn't a single actual window in the Windows Phone OS... Time to change up the name.
This is already implemented in HBase. View your table as 3D: row, column, time.
I don't think this does explain the disparity. Most core teachers I know also have an additional 10-20 hours of "unpaid" prep time. (Time outside that 40 hours, anyway.)

I think the disparity is more reflected in the relative value of one-on-one instruction vs. what you typically see in a classroom (closer to 30:1).
Absolutely. I bought my wife a new iPod touch and haven't plugged it in to the computer once.
It's always been a problem with subject matter experts dealing with the non-experts. A lot of people get agitated easily dealing with something outside of their scope of knowledge.

Neither does it help that computers can be especially complicated and finicky (looking at you windows).
That is a really valid point. I am not a creditable source when posting from this accoutn. The words coming from here can only be trusted as words without weight. No more, no less.

As an aside, I was not the person I was three months ago. Neither was anybody else on here. Part of my world view is that nobody is ever the same person as I remember them as.

Rationale:

a.) my impression of a person on the internet is inherently imperfect.

The internet is an autistic medium and can't really describe the complexity of a person. Maybe he is a "dummy" but happened to know one thing really really well and was having an awesome day mentally when he posted that comment. Or perhaps he was a putnam winner who was hangover and just broken up with a long term girlfriend when he made that really douchey comment. I just can't know this things and won't pretend to know them.

b.) people change.

What if my comment about not knowing anything about Python 12 months ago spurred me to go out and master the language last year? If you compared a persons comments at the very beginning of reading hacker news and then a year later, I expect you will see a massive shift in their writing style. People change and aren't the people they were the last time I interacted with them. How could I trust anyone on here (or in real life), if I know I can never be sure they are the same person they were the last time we interacted? It's a hard question that I haven't really found a good answer for yet.
It's reasons like this I'll never have a paypal account or offer it as a means of payment on my site
In California, the small claims court fee for this case would be $50, and lawyers are barred from representing either party.
Thanks Noah. If it's hitting the DB then that's great.

I'm just trying to point out that the definition of "uptime" is hazy at best. :)
I can't agree with that. Subscription is a totally different way of paying for music, and comparing them doesn't really mean much. Subscription means you can access any track instantly- yes, you'll lose that if you unsubscribe, but you can easily sign up for a competing service and get all that music back. It doesn't really make sense to compare it to 'ownership'.

Though as an interesting PS, the Zune Pass offers (offered?) 10 free permanent downloads every month. So, at 99c a track, you'd more or less make your subscription fee back.
It's partially real estate, but I think it's also a combination of a tight labour market distorted by big mining wages and a "captive audience". Perth (and Darwin) are so isolated that the hospitality industry seem to get away with murder.

The good news for HNers - there is abundant work here. If you know people outside the tech scene, they could do a lot worse than get a working holiday visa and visit Australia whilst the US or UK economies improve.
Amazing work! Was it written in VHDL or Verilog? And are you guys planning in publishing the source code and build instructions?

It'd be a nice introduction for other fpga and design logic students...
"EDID can be programmed with any resolution you want"

Indeed, as I said. I then went on to say that lots of 1366x768 devices don't provide a detailed timing block, so they're limited to what you can express in the standard timings - which limits you to horizontal resolutions that are multiples of 8, and so can't express 1366x768.

That's the only thing you appear to disagree with about the article, so "This article is flawed" doesn't seem entirely fair. I'll admit to not being a video expert - I write a lot of code that interfaces with firmware at all levels, including displays, and I work closely with people who are video experts, but I've never built a TV. I don't think I've misrepresented any facts or presented any gross inaccuracies, but where I have made mistakes I'd love to be corrected.
It's a WebGL implementation of a stereographic projection. Note you can also change the shader code by clicking the + button on the top left
That would be easier if the reply box was bigger than the address window on an envelope.

It's like the bad old days of trying to use the Eclipse IDE where most of your screen real estate is taken up with tabs and buttons and you only get a narrow 5x80 window on the world.

Except that in this case instead of the screen being taken up with masses of widgets, it is consumed with vast tracts of whitespace. Good job there, PG.

(Actually, if PG had anything to do with it, I suspect it is a well thought out policy which results because he doesn't like long conversations (possibly a signal to noise bias against long posts?) consider also that there is no easy way to quote the parent, which just wastes bandwidth anyway)
Ecuador appeals court rules against Chevron in oil case
The car <-> technology gets thrown around a lot; sometimes it's apt, other times not so much. This is definitely one of the latter.

The smartphone market is rapidly maturing, but that doesn't mean it can sustain a multitude of niche players indefinitely. Unlike in the car market, we'll likely only see a handful of major players able to participate profitably as the market settles a bit.

I'm not saying that Microsoft's doomed, they've certainly got the wherewithal to last longer than a failing RIM might or Palm/HP did, but in order to ever have a hit, they'll have to come up with some combination of killer new features, apps and devices.

So far, they're batting 0/3 on that front:
1) Mango is catching up to Android/iOS, but you're kidding yourself if you don't believe it's at least a little late to the game.
2) I certainly haven't heard of any killer apps for WP7 and as a developer, I've heard 0 interest in changing that. I'd love to play around with WP 7 and maybe even see what I could create for the platform, but without interest from my clients, it's DOA for me (and for customers).
3) The devices are mostly rehashes from Android models, and even those that aren't don't differentiate themselves from other medium-tier phones.

Great design is important, and I think most (technical) people will agree that Metro got it right, but claiming it's not successful because of that great design and not accounting for the two years it took to get to that point (the cost of lagging around with 6.5 and such while Apple / Android were building new platforms) is purposely misleading.
Funny, I have one of those high-res Latitudes. It's been demoted to home juke box as my Cr-48 has proven to be a much more capable travel companion.

I actually spent a summer working with Edward Tufte, lived in a guest house on his premises. Got the job in part as a physics major who then went to medical school and knew at least enough about brains and eyeballs to be conversant. I think its safe to say I'm a fanatic about transmitting as much data as possible in the eyespan. That said, what people are doing with the extra data is also non-trivial. We, the societal we, are not spending money in a vacuum: IBM discontinued the T221 monitor fleitz cited above.

My question stands: what industry is suffering mission failures due lack of screen resolution?