skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As an Android developer for many years I was excited when I read the blog post about the site. When I went to the site, I was very disappointed. I've spent the better part of 10 minutes on the site so far and haven't seen anything other than marketing text and screenshots of what my phone looks like.

How do I make these "beautiful designs" work across all Android phones? How do I use an Actionbar on a non 3.0+ device without external libraries? How can I supply a consistent look and behavior for my application when some android OEM keyboards don't even offer the same modules as other ones?

How am I supposed to follow these guidelines when every Google application has a different implementation of the Actionbar itself?
This falls exactly into the scenarios I talked about...

Given how much randomness was involved in our creation as a species, let alone our technological ascendance, it is highly unlikely that other intelligence would develop in exactly the same amount of time elsewhere. It's astronomically unlikely. If they didn't develop at the same time as us, they're either still incapable of radio or have had radio for a long time. A long time in the life of the universe certainly doesn't mean 100 years, it means much longer. Even if it's only 1000 years, if they progress at anything like the rate we do, they'll be massively more advanced than we are.

If a species only has radio for a short period of time (like 200 years) and then disappears or loses it, the odds of overlapping with them are virtually nil (if they die out after getting this far, it says we're much more likely to die out soon too).

And I don't know if they would talk to us before we'd talk to them. Stephen Hawking has a lot to say about why trying to communicate with other civilizations is a bad idea, and they might be smart enough not to try.
no, they only have CAN-SPAM. As long as Apple doesn't actually send emails, I believe they can keep the address indefinitely; however, the minute they shoot out a promo email, they have to obey CAN-SPAM, so the user would have a right to be removed from the database.
I completely agree. The wording is so basic and kind of insulting as seen here for instance, "Text fields allow the user to type text into your app. They can be either single line or multi-line." Very elementary for either a developer or a designer to read.
This is a long overdue but very well put-together UI and Usability Guide for Android Developers. My only qualm from reading it thus far is the very last section under Navigation [1] regarding System-to-app navigation:

"For the Back key, you should make navigation more predictably [sic] by inserting into the task's back stack the complete upward navigation path to the app's topmost screen."

No. This piece of advice is the sole reason why the back button is confusing to users. Injecting activities artificially onto a user's Back Stack based on some arbitrary and imaginary path that they might have taken to get there is horrible. If I'm in the middle of reading a book and get an email notification, and I touch that notification to quickly read the email, that Back button better damn well take me BACK to what I was doing. Don't take me UP to the list of emails in my inbox. This is where the average user will become lost and not understand why they aren't taken back to reading their book, and will just end up touching Home out of frustration.

Bad Google!

[1] http://developer.android.com/design/patterns/navigation.html
Also, Vundle has a nice interface to manage installation/removal of new plugins (BundleSearch, BundleInstall, BundleClean, etc.). Pathogen is more of a 'do it yourself' approach, while Vundle tries to be a complete suite a la Aptitude.
I have 5+ years experience with Erlang, a language I know literally not a single line of. It's from a repo (that I forked) that is half/half Erlang, Python.
Right. Because no ISP sysadmin will ever keep some sendmail logs open and thus see that secretive_user@other_isp.com is sending mail to another_secretive_user@this_isp.com
Can you increase the line-spacing a little more?
Utterly worthless. This looks like a web designer on crack had too much time to promote the beauty of the new Android.

However, from a developer's point of view this is almost unusable. By not providing the according XML/Java code, we are forced to reimplement everything from scratch, making smaller and larger errors, introducing inconsistency and making the look and feel not quite the same between apps.

Then again, it fits well with the current way Google is doing UX design (http://minming.posterous.com/google-currents-yet-another-con...).
Nothing's wrong with it but the imaginary non issues invented by a bunch of bloggers pretending to be lawyers.
Some bits from the 'about' page:

1. The distribution does not provide pre-compiled packages. It only provides package building scripts ....
2. Hadron is fully free. It only contains free(free as in freedom) software.
3. As possible as up-to-date and stable.

Reading the first two points together, do I understand correctly that I cannot use the package manager to install proprietary binaries like graphics drivers? Is there room for flexibility akin to Arch's AUR setup for user-management of such packages?

What does that third point mean, exactly? Am I dealing with something closer to Debian Stable or a rolling-release system?
The link at the bottom to the core developer site shows you how to implement most, if not all, of what they discuss here. Though it would be nice if they had links interspersed throughout the design text to their tutorials and API guides about the UI features.

http://developer.android.com/index.html
The contexts are all different. A VP told me that he had a bunch of mediocre programs and it would be hard from them to use it, and hard to hire new programmers. A friend of mine who tries new languages all the time simply doesn't like it cause it's a lisp. A Director at a different company didn't say clearly, but it seemed to boil down to it being a lisp. H was fine with us trying Scala or even golang, but no clojure.
> What's the logic behind these pointless distros?

Distros, like IRC bots and text editors, are a popular (to use ESR's phrase) "finger exercise". It's fun; nothing more is needed.
Actually, I think it is disturbing how many sites have no way to delete an unwanted account at all.
What does this get me that Gentoo does not?
I think the opportunity for developers to showcase their work to the world has also been one of the biggest factors in Github's success.
I think the article completely misses the boat.

The first question is: What happens when Greece defaults?

The next question is: What happens when the next PIIG goes?

These are monetary issues, not traditional value-investing issues.
Am I the only one who read that as "Hardon is ready"?
Ha! I love that they are using Hipster Ipsum:

http://developer.android.com/design/static/content/ui_overvi...

http://hipsteripsum.me/
3 months of warning for the shutdown of a product with no drop-in alternatives is really an insult. Look closely at the migration page (https://support.urbanairship.com/customer/portal/articles/31...) and you'll get a sense of the effort to replace SimpleGeo. For instance, the recommendation for users of the Context product is to read the Wikipedia page on R-trees, then download various census etc. data to replicate the functionality in-house.

This isn't about users being too lazy to switch to option B, this is about SimpleGeo building an innovative service and then abandoning its paying users.
Study Finds Planets More Numerous Than Stars in Milky Way
Iran Escalates Campaign Against Online Expression
Cheers for the heads up - great plugin. Hadn't heard of Vundle before, but its handling of plugin installation, update and removal is really slick!
Urban Airship Shutting Down SimpleGeo
Our IRC bot had this feature before it was popular...
I tried to do this last year, but every single twss-related handle was taken. Don't believe me, look for yourself. I can't wait for the day when Twitter starts reclaiming unusued/squatted names (and have a pay for service that let's you claim it for life.)
Ask HN: Who should own the software copyright in early stage startups?
I'm in the process of co-founding a web service startup (my first one) with a non-technical business co-founder and we're in the process of negotiating seed funding.

My family and family friends are encouraging me to attempt to retain copyright of the code that I've written for the company so far, but this seems dubious at best -- I would never invest seed money into a web startup if the code wasn't owned by the startup in which I was investing, but maybe others would?.

I know it's standard practice for employment agreements to have clauses that say the company owns all of the work product and IP, but what about founders?

So, is there a standard practice for this sort of thing?

Opinions are great, but I would really love to hear from people with anecdotal experience.

Thanks!
> Vahid Asghari, a 24-year-old student in India, was arrested on May 11, 2008 at Tehran Airport and accused of hosting websites with “pornographic” content critical of the government.

Wait, what? That's gotta be a new genre.

Or, the Iranian government decided that "critical of the government" didn't sound bad enough, and prepended "porn" to shore up the charges.
What you're describing sounds more like temporary depression instead of being bored. Actually, I wonder if the state of boredom is actually a form of depression?
A few things bother me:

1.) On the About page, the very first sentence states "Hadron is a Unix distribution which is based on Linux kernel and GNU operating system". Linux is not Unix, but they refer to it as "Unix" throughout the website.

I'm not trying to be pedantic, but to me, this demonstrates poor situational and historical awareness.

2.) Who's responsible for this project? It's not straightforward to figure that out.

3.) A new package manager I've never heard of. This is fine, but combined with #2 -- I'll wait a while.
Acoustic invisibility cloak - with holes drilled in PVC
I agree, whilst Stewart spends most of his time poking fun at the establishment, he isn't actually anti establishment.

Most of his material comes from picking up on hypocrisy by politicians when they make essential compromises in their head for money.

The establishment is afraid of the internet, they want to place restrictions on it. Stewart may well agree with them.
General summary: Don't send syslogs over TCP.
MBA or Learn to Code?
8 reasons startup incubators are better than business school
Yes. Stand with all of us and go dark. If HN doesn't make such a gesture, how can we call ourselves true to our convictions?
another pointless distro from Turkey after the Turkish government screwed up Pardus? No thanks.
I'd been considering using it through Heroku to be able to find nearby bus/train stops in a public transit mobile web app. I see that SpacialDB is in private beta as a Heroku addon (http://addons.heroku.com/spacialdb) - does anyone have SpacialDB experience? I'm looking to find nearby points out of a database of ~5000 locations, namely all the public transit stops in the Boston area.
Yes, but you wouldn't have to send the cookie to Google's servers every page load. This is a great use of the localStorage or sessionStorage in HTML5. Another obvious benefit we will see when using sessionStorage in specific is that you can store your session ID in that storage space and not have to worry about logging in from a new tab causing a session to overflow from one tab to the other.

Cookies are shared between browser sessions, but sessionStorage is not. localStorage is the same way except it persists over browser sessions and between tabs.
FreeBSD AMIs are available for m1.large and larger EC2 instances: http://www.daemonology.net/freebsd-on-ec2/
more generally, what problem does it solve?

a tool that solves a nonexisting problem is quite useless in itself
“Don’t Laugh George, It’s the Future”
Yea, the author really means creative and motivated people.
Yeah? I think there's a man whose last name is Holmes and first name rhymes with ... uh, merlock who would disagree with this guy.

'Course I haven't read the article so I might be off base.
Interesting, it had not occurred to me that a syslog server going down would take down the whole infrastructure. How long was the syslog server down for? rsyslog supports reliable forwarding, where it will buffer to memory when the server is down, then to disk when it runs out of configured memory [1].

[1] http://rsyslog.com/doc/rsyslog_reliable_forwarding.html
I'm not sure how you got that impression. I only skimmed the article, and picked up the one bit per 12 atoms detail, thinking, "Well, it's not quite memory diamond, but it's as close as we've ever come."
No, thats exactly how I read it
Why on earth is ryanklee's comment dead? He's right - it's not violating copyright to sing a song for non-commercial purposes. Hell, you can even cover a song in a paid live performance and not have to pay royalties. You just can't record it and sell the recording without ponying up.

edit: looks like the live commercial performance thing is not true in the US, according to snopes. I guess those guys don't have cover bands...
This is trivially refuted by the fact that "good creative people" with concentration/motivation defects, depression etc. exist.

The whole article is a non-sequitur.
This release is a nice piece of kit for storage systems even if you're married to other OSes elsewhere.
Seems there are differing definitions of "bored" here. Methinks the more common is "I have no idea what to do".

I'm not bored ever, as the universe provides an infinite array of things to observe or do - and that's assuming I've gotten thru my "to do" list, which I start every few months and soon give up on because it grows so long so fast there is no point in so much as prioritizing it (even top priority items will be so numerous as to take the whole foreseeable future). To the contrary, sometimes I find the plethora of options paralyzing.
Fast Food Ads Vs. The Real Thing
The Secret to Amazon's Success, Internal APIs
US Looks to Cloud For Cost Savings
So they didn't buy SG to get the founders, and aren't going to use the tech, so all that's left is customers, which they're not going to keep using a transition strategy like this.

I don't get it...
Flask-peewee - orm/auth/admin for your database for flask
I'm not sure where I stand on this; and it's possible the context should determine the behaviour. But equally, perhaps Google just want consistency?
All we know for sure is that (a) they counted the number of files, and (b) they read a filename. I'd be willing to bet they don't even know who the user is - in a properly normalized database, all they'd likely see is a user ID unless they explicitly have an interface that correlates user ID and file data with personally identifiable user information.

Perhaps saying, "it was a cat" was a poor idea if they only read the filename, but a lot of people are making a lot of assumptions here. If you're dealing with regulated or high-value data, you probably shouldn't be using 37signals without doing any kind of audit of their operating practices anyway.
The ideal behavior would be if the app is launched via another app it should not touch the back stack. If I launch the email app from the home screen or app folder, it should populate the back stack so that hitting back brings me from the email I had open to the inbox.
No one can be "on" all the time. I would even go so far as to say that a creative person who doesn't periodically crash and burn isn't trying hard enough.

Many creative people are even prone to varying degrees of hypomania, cycling between periods of despondency and fits of irrepressible energy.
Assuming you're being sarcastic. You're welcome to make a pull request if you don't like it, but I would start by changing the color palette on your website http://many9s.com/
The only thing I can think of is that Hadron is completely Free Software. I don't know of any way on Gentoo to not use non-Free, particularly in satisfying dependencies. (It's been a Very Long Time since I've touched Gentoo, though; that may have changed.)
Holmes was never bored. Every smudge told volumes. Innumerable books were there for the reading. And when "bored" nonetheless he dove inside his own mind and explored its behavior under various pharmacological abuses. (Surely you don't expect his hypothetical "trips" were akin to a common doper's?)

BTW: the article is just 487 words long. You spent more time informing us that you didn't read it than you would have spent doing so. ...and I'm so easily not bored I found it interesting to find the word count.
TextMate 2 has `rmate` which lets you edit a remote file from a terminal session: http://blog.macromates.com/2011/mate-and-rmate/
I like the date picker

http://developer.android.com/design/building-blocks/pickers....
This is great! If apps start following this it should significantly improve the Android user experience, as well as making it much easier to design good Android apps.
I've had this debate a number of times, but in the end it's very evident that Google is an engineering company that hires designers (and not a design company that hires engineers). I don't think that they took design seriously at all until more recently and there hasn't been any lack of posts on HN or elsewhere talking about the growth of good web design. In short, their design has improved from 2010 and beyond due to a large push by management for updated and unified design across products, and I'd argue Matias Duarte's position on the Android team.

As for the chat/mail integration, I didn't like it either. It filled my gchat with hundreds of useless contacts from gmail.

That's another great point: Did they not even test these features, not even once? The gmail/chat integration sucked, and it filled my gchat buddy list of a number of users I'd emailed -once- in my life without ever asking me if I wanted to suddenly be chat-buddies with them, sharing my away/idle/etc information, etc.

I'm sorry but Google has always sucked at privacy and I find it funny that you use something as poor as the chat/mail integration as an example.
We all shall replace reality with fantasy so not-so-bright people can be able to write about it.
What does this accomplish again?
I've seen no evidence to suggest that
I happen to like this functionality and don't think it's confusing at all. As long as pressing back eventually gets me back to where I was before it's just fine.
Engineers other than the founders?
You're missing my point entirely.
That's definitely true, I don't know why they didn't put a "click here for more technical info!" next to each point.

The things that really bother me are:

1. If I implement one of the new themes they're discussing on the linked page, it only works in 3.9% of Android phones on the market, so if I want my apps to look like Google's on older phones I'm left to implement my own version of the themes. This is the same thing that happened when they announced "Homepages with square buttons for activities are the new way you should do everything!" and didn't release source code for how to do it for years afterwards with the Google I/O app, so every app that tried it did it a different way.

2. How am I supposed to use the action bar if Google's own applications can't decide on how to use it? Look at the "What's up with the bar" section of this blogpost: http://minming.posterous.com/google-currents-yet-another-con...
S02E02 can prove that.
The debate is not over them posting the filename, it is over the fact that it is exposed to them.
Yes, but it doesn't really mention that in the documentation. It would be good to something along the lines of "You will need to know Clojure to use ClojureScript One, go here to learn it".

This looks excellent though - I'll give it a go once I think of a toy project to try it with.
That sounds more like depression or ahedonia than "being bored".
Fun fact: the up and down arrows work exactly opposite how you expect them to.
I think he was downmodded because of his spectacular failure to understand that the process of blaming A for the acts of B is exactly the point of SOPA... so complaining that we shouldn't apply to Smith the same process that Smith wants to apply to everyone else looks very short-sighted at best (and at worst, just partisan).
why the downvote? I thought some people might be concerned about clicking on a cryptome link and I thought this was a safer-looking link.
>These patterns are mostly borrowed from BSD family and Gentoo Linux.

No. Stop blaming your horrible distros on BSDs. All the BSDs provide binary packages and encourage users to use them. Typing "make install" and watching the build script compile and package an identical binary package as the one on the public FTP servers is not learning anything, and does not make your system "advanced". Exposing the package build system to users lets them build custom packages when needed. It makes absolutely no sense to then say "we won't provide any binary packages for you" and force everyone to always compile everything themselves.
It looks like the creator is Burak Sezer, "a Metallurgical & Materials Engineering student at Yildiz Technical University from Istanbul". His website is http://purak.org/

According to http://purak.org/blog/2011/02/24/new-post/ he had previously maintained a Gentoo derivative.
A company that doesn't own its own product is basically a bomb waiting to go off. The company should "buy" any work that you did pre-incorporation in exchange for your founding stock.
I will just add - Unicode isn't hard - until you have to display or otherwise deal with Right-To-Left languages and their invisible control characters.

I find out that even working as a user with text that is right-to-left in places and in other places left-to-right is hard. It's quite easy to deal with it programatically, but only before you have to display it somehow.

Ok, sorry my ramblings.
Seems like they should be ranked by SLOC or number of total watchers for their packages.
http://hadronproject.org/answers/

>6- Why did you create a new distro? Because we can.

I am probably going to get my karma downgraded but I have to say what I think. The world doesn't need another me too Linux distro, what a waste.
So where is the power to the 5V USB come from? There has to be an external AC/DC converter or an external battery.
SimpleGeo building an innovative service and then abandoning its paying users

well, that's what companies do when they fail, go out of business, or are acquihired, ie a business failure by another name
My thoughts exactly. The power user market is saturated with Gentoo/Arch/BSDs and even Debian for some, we really don't need any more right now. I was hoping this was a new user-friendly competitor to Ubuntu because I can't recommend Ubuntu to newcomers anymore and Fedora and Mint always rubbed me the wrong way.
Double-take >> The powerpc architecture now supports Sony Playstation 3

Is this actually possible now? or is the PS3 still locked to prevent actually installing this?
The company should own the IP, you (and your cofounders and investors) own the company.
This really seems like an Archier Arch, but harder to use. What's the rationale, and what distinguishes it from the other minimalist distros?
It's awesome that they're including High Performance SSH (HPN-SSH) by default. This is a great project that deserves more attention: http://www.psc.edu/networking/projects/hpn-ssh/
A War To Watch: YouTube Takes On Television
Show HN: OCRing the output of a power meter
Critics See 'Disaster' In Expansion Of Domain Names
Github integration isn't a bad idea. What do you think the easiest way to grab SLOC/author is?
Code Racer - compete in live code challenges
Complain.

Look for other DNS resolvers.

(human and/or automated processes)
> Unfortunately, we live in the world where people eat people.

I'd be up for changing the world so people stop eating each other.