skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We're designing web apps using jQuery Mobile. We have been using a theme that looks very much like iOS - with the right pointing carets, for example. I hadn't really considered that it'll look foreign to the Android user.

Are there toolkits for designing Web apps that automatically switch themes, based on the User Agent?

It'd be very cool to design it once, and then have the site rendered to look a little more native, depending on the platform. But maybe that's a dream.
Bullshit. The reason we don't have to worry about getting a job is because a computer programmer provide value and because we are good at it.

So no we don't live a life of privilege. We worked for, and earned, our position.
Oh man, when I was 8 years old I wanted a Z88 but it didn't happen. I might try to get hold of one to play with.
I see the problem as an issue of trust with people identifying themselves as a potential customer or non-customer (some-one who would never pay for your content).

Because there is no immediately lost revenue when a non-customer views premium digital content without paying (due to the free duplication) the only reason I can see for denying non-customers your content for free is because there are indirect consequences to their revenue. Such indirect consequences might be the devaluation of content due to its perceived lack of prestige and exclusivity. But the main focuses of piracy, music and films do not gain value due to exclusivity or prestige (I struggle to think of anything digital that would benefit from this). In fact one could argue that the spread of these goods creates advertisement by word of mouth and increases the potential set of customers (and non-customers).

Determining who is a valid non-customer is however nigh impossible. The only scenario I can envisage of a provable non-customer is when some-one clearly does not have the finances needed to be a customer. However this scenario falls apart because you cannot prove they would never acquire the finances and become a customer in the future. You can however obviously prove yourself a potential customer by paying for the product.

Ultimately I like to think most people would be honest enough to say whether they're a potential customer or not (and O'Reilly clearly agrees) and in an ideal world I think every-one should have access to anything (spend all your money and you're then a non-customer for other products). However it's the prerogative of any company to only sell their content to proven customers and not give it away to possible non-customers.
As someone who's worked with both Rails and Django professionally for years, Rails is far more mature. Both are quality frameworks, but Django has far more warts, and the quality and number of good third-party libraries really isn't close. Django has forms and the admin going for it, and South is really excellent, but on the whole Rails feels better thought-out and more flexible than Django.

Django is very strong as a rapid-development tool (forms, generic views, admin), but I am more comfortable with Rails for a project with a reasonable timeline. Django class-based views are a far cry from Rails controllers.
In the 1920's my Granny was arrested in Germany when she was a teenager because her father sent her to Berlin from Glasgow without a passport because 'he didn't believe in this modern nonsense'. Even passports are pretty new.
Forced? I've written dozens of parsers, and personally I avoid parsing libraries like the plague - unless you're writing a really simple parser with few needs for error reporting and recovery, my experience is that parsing libraries usually end up being far more pain than they are worth.
We do this often through our 0-click sources, e.g. Wikipedia though there is an algorithmic component as well. However, we try not to have false positives so it is clamped down pretty tight.
sounds great now, i loved it anyway!
It is typical religious guilt. You must sacrifice for the stranger because if you help your friends you may get some enjoyment out of it too.

surprisingly common in atheists, environmentalists, etc even if they are not traditionally considered religious.
It could have been a problem with his Passport (e.g. within six months of expiring).
Looks like a clean, straight-to-the-point design.

The top box has some padding issues when hovering the contained links: there's more padding on the left than on the right, and the first link has more padding on the right than the next two (tested in latest stable Chrome & Firefox). See screenshot: http://polyprograms.free.fr/tmp/DuckDuckGoPaddingTopBox.png

On an unrelated note: I have a hard time taking your service seriously because of the duck branding and the DuckDuckGo name. It looks like you're doing a great job but somehow DuckDuckGo doesn't feel like a name for something I would use on a day-to-day basis. I guess I can just overlook it if the service is good enough but I do wonder if your brand is hurting your service. Maybe it's just me though!
Confetti.js
Like putting roller skates on a turtle.
>And what codes are these? the pen-squiggle?

There are codes that indicate the level of screening you should get along with codes that have "Special screening" indicated on them. And then the TSA is supposed to squiggle in response. Buying a one way ticket usually means you get special screening, I hope the terrorists don't figure this one out.

>Is it your hobby to try to sneak past TSA checkpoints?

In a way yes. It is my hobby to get through these things as quickly as possible. Sometimes I go through the staff/express line, you get a long way by being friendly to TSA agents.

>Are you successful often enough that you have been turned away at the gate for not having the proper 'codes'?

Yes. TSA agents make mistakes and don't always check the passes properly. I swear with half the agents I could give them an ID for someone completely different, all they do is check that it "looks" real.

One time I almost missed a flight. One of the gate agents was nice enough to run back to security with me and hurry them along. Someone else watched my bag rather than wait and get it searched properly.
Security theater at its finest.
Code Re-use With Abstract Classes
You're right. However, there comes a point where we don't need yet another framework, or productivity app, or another project management tool. I also think the author is addressing people who build "thin value" startups as well, not just developer tools. Like Color, or Farmville, or Diaspora.
I wish they'd make this searchable. This is from Google after all.

Does a button marked "on" indicate it is already on, or that pushing the button will make it "on"? I'd like to see that standardised.
مباراة الاهلى وسموحة اليوم 14/1/2012
What's with the [scribd]? Shouldn't it be [pdf]? I know what scribd is, but why use it as a tag linking to a pdf? It's misleading as scribd used a flash applet, right?
I accidentally left a pocket knife in my carry on as well, and made it through the first leg. On the second leg, I had to go through security again and they spotted it. I explained that it made it through the first security check, so it must be safe. They allowed me to keep it. I wonder if that would have worked with a gun...
Spot on. Some of the key economic principles are covered in this EconTalk podcast with Paul Romer, on growth and "meta-idas". http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2007/08/romer_on_growth.htm...
Wait, how many users do you have that use mostly your app but on multiple platforms, versus users that use multiple apps but mostly only one platform. I'm thinking the first case is pretty much non-existent.
I thought I had heard that they looked at the Url/Website field on the Wikipedia page for the company, but it would work for Fog Creek too. Strange.

DBpedia [1], for example, seems to have nicely formatted dumps of all infoboxes.

[1] http://wiki.dbpedia.org/Datasets
Re: > "But the vast majority of customers are willing to pay if the product is widely available and the price is fair."

I pirated Crossing the chasm a few days ago because the publisher thought it would be smart to make it "not available in my region" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3436550.

I was willing to pay, I had paid for several kindle books. I evan bought another book after pirating the "unavailable" one.
... ok, and the obvious question: "Why are .co.ke domains auto-killed?"
Agreed entirely. I only meant that when you choose do work harder than you have to, the necessary trade off is that you're sacrificing time with other people you love.

A typical dev could probably work 60% of a normal schedule and afford a comfortable life for their family. You could go home at 1pm every day and that'd be fun, but you can also sacrifice a bit of that and make change.

IMO, life without friends and family is wasted.
Is it really plausible that Google would agree to a partnership and provide payment to a false Mocality representative without even speaking to the Mocality CEO? We can't rule this out without more knowledge of the case, but it seems very far-fetched.
I think you're missing out on an important point - Users are not the same as Customers.

Customers pay you money, they are what you need to build a business. Having millions of users who don't provide any revenue is only useful if your goal is just to be bought by someone else.

I personally think that it's a sad state of affairs that most startups don't seem to be interested in building businesses, but instead just want to play the acquisition lottery instead.
The platform isn't deficient. Android users are familiar with the way the ActionBar works - any design that explicitly labels their back button is deficient and wasteful (on Android).
That still doesn't make sense. The only thing the scammers did with those IPs seems to have been searching the Mocality database.

The only reason why those IPs even got exposed is because of the thorough investigation Mocality has made (or, claims to have made): After the first wave of confused calls by their customers, they cross-checked their logs and found one IP with an uncommon UA accessing all these records, then they served a fake phone number to that IP and confirmed that whoever was making these fraudulent calls was indeed operating from that IP and claiming to be Google in cooperation with Mocality.

Now it could be that these are scammers that found a clever way to proxy through Google on the off-chance that Mocality would do this investigation and evidence would continue to point to Google? Ok I get "pretending to be someone else" is scamming 101, but "pretending to be someone else when the person you're pretending to be cooperating with finds out about and the scam is pretty much exposed" it just sounds like an incredible amount of trouble for an eventuality that is very unlikely and even then it doesn't seem to help much?

"No, let's somehow proxy through Google so that if Mocality becomes suspicious and tracks us they'll think it's Google and the whole Internet will get confused and the people of HN will get into arguments ... mwuahahahaha ... excellent ..."

Can't you see, this is what Google wants us to think! ;-)
You're right. Ethics don't exist. Let's hope they weasel out of it and learn their lesson at the same time. Instead learning that they can break the lawn AND weasel out of it.
I agree. Google is not dumb enough to do this. Talk about no upside and all downside! Risking your reputation for the equivalent of a few pennies is ridiculous. Scamming African small businesses, of all things, that's making money the hard way.
> Why aren't Mexicans considered Americans, yet Germans are considered Europeans?

I think you know this, but that's just a quirk of the language, that there's no euphonious way to say "United Statesan" since "States" isn't really a proper noun as a place name. "American" is a least-bad option.

Also, there could be other "United States" entities in the world. The USA isn't the only example of that construct. The demonym for a resident of the Federated States of Micronesia is "Micronesian".

Besides, "American" would be a bit too broad in applying to two whole continents. Nobody lumps Germans and Japanese together under "Eurasians". A Mexican is a "North American", which along with "South American" is a perfectly serviceable term and carries just about the same amount of specificity and meaning as "European".

Yes, naming is important, but it's also important to go along with established convention for meaningful communication. "Startup" conveys the potential of shoot-to-the-moon growth and profit that isn't possible in an established large company, and your listeners will lose some of that connotation if you switch to simply "business".
People who build things that "we don't need" get the message when no-one uses their product and they run out of money. But it's still a valuable process for them and everyone else, as long as they learn how to build things we do need.
Very cool! I was looking for a python js interpreter just the other day, maybe I'll take a crack at it :)
It's not hard to imagine that someone could fraudulently claim to be Mocality's CEO either. How often do you verify someone's ID in a business meeting?
There are many more blind speculations to make. This is just one of them. Aliens!
The only major color on the page is the red navbar and the yellow sponsored ad. The sponsored ad draws my attention and then I go below it since it's an ad.

The zero click info and official site badge are both grey which makes them fade away into the background; not stand out like intended.
Top Best Premier League Transfer Signings So Far This Season
I'm no UI/UX expert here, but the official site does seem to get lost between the zero-click box and yellow sponsored result.
Of the total $6.1 billion in annual losses LEK estimated to MPAA studios, the amount attributable to online piracy by users in the United States was $446 million—which, by coincidence, is roughly the amount grossed globally by Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel.

That's the money quote right there.
IP addresses are not easy to spoof. Most ISPs do egress filtering, and most TCP stacks use cryptographically-secure sequence number generation. This makes forging HTTP traffic nearly impossible in practice.
IP addresses are not easy to spoof if you want receive an answer to your packets. In fact, they're pretty much impossible to spoof unless you control a router between the target and the IP address you want to spoof (though that's not really spoofing anymore at that point, more like capturing).
Who did your graphic design, that looks nice on the blog.
Senator Leahy's Promise to "Fix" PIPA Falls Short
Who cares what a group of people think? Especially on the Internet?

The only real use of 'public opinion' is trolling people with their own cognitive dissonance. Without strong evidence, you just sound whiny.
I work for one and find it rather useful. Most weeks are 40 hrs; no biggie. I use to eat overtime. Now I don't. I put 50 hrs. Management doesn't like it, stuff. We all need to know if we are missing estimates. There is no use lying.

As a result, I use the time track as a truth keeper. Without that, there is no metric tracking; everything is just annidotal.

PS. I'm forced to use IE so misspelling are not caught.
TVShack student to face US trial
I think you're right to be angry; it certainly sounds like you did not have a positive experience at Codies and it certainly appears like they messed up the redundancy process for the Guildford studio.

However, I don't agree that you're entitled to more money for your unpaid overtime. From the mails, it looks like they notified you in advance that TOIL was off the table and therefore it was your responsibility to work hours that you deemed reasonable for your salary. I'm sure the company was very pleased that you worked so much OT, but it's clear that they did not require you to do so.

I also don't think you can justify keeping the extra months salary that they accidentally paid you.
If your bank accidentally paid you a million bucks, you would not expect to be able to keep it, would you? What if you accidentally gave your buddy $100 instead of $10? You'd expect him to give it back, right?
Sure, they screwed up; however they came clean about it and asked you to give the money back. They even gave you an extension to help you find the money.
It sucks that you had already spent the money, but that was your mistake, not theirs. I think you're just going to have to bite the bullet and cough up the cash, sorry.

I'd chalk the whole think down to experience and move on. The games industry can be a very unforgiving place and now that you've seen some of the things that can happen, you can prepare yourself better for the future.
There are many games jobs available in the UK at the moment, but, due to the bad economy, the publishers are all hurting for money. I would expect these kinds of situations to be quite common for the next year or two.
Don't like it.

I really hope people stop copying the Google/microsoft "big block color squares" UI strategy. Please copy Apple more, gradients and buttons that stand out nicely and perfectly rounded corners. Things which pop out of the screen nicely.
You should check out instapaper or readability. Both offer browser bookmarklets for "Save for Later" functionality.
I've tried three times to switch from Rails to Django, but each time I ended up coming back. Python isn't bad, but it's a more asymmetric development experience than Ruby (IMHO) and simply doesn't sit as well with me.

However, Django is just so radically different in its approach than Rails. It may have the admin console baked in, but other than that I felt that Rails was far more "batteries included". It's nice that it leverages the Python ecosystem in many cases, but I found it frustrating to have to make so many decisions on what to use when Rails typically provided most everything I needed (minus auth and file uploading...but two gems quickly solves that).

I'm sure if I had learned Django first instead of Rails it would be a different story. As it stands, if switch to anything in the future it's likely to be Play! (http://www.playframework.org).

ymmv
"Then at some some point while trying to debug it, John accidentally touched the multimeter's leads to something he shouldn't have, and suddenly my keyboard didn't work any more."

I'd really like to know what the hell they did.
www.amazon.com/TCP-Illustrated-Vol-Transactions-Protocols/dp/0201634953/
RStudio (IDE for R statistical environment) 0.95 preview adds Projects and SCM
Build what you build, as long as you help one person, you are contributing to society. You don't need to affect end users directly to sit back and think that you are really helping the world to be a better place.
Sure, most people have active direct debits set up, but isn't the number of those are set up solely through the internet somewhat smaller?
Furthermore, most people seem to associate direct debits with a certain class of business, usually utility companies. In my experience, it just isn't common for someone to set up and manage a direct debit online.

So yes, whilst one-off payments are significantly larger, I'd still be wary of a reduced conversion rate through GoCardless. Of course, if I had a very narrow margin, your incredible rates might easily redeem the difference in revenue, but without hard numbers it's difficult to make a business decision.
Thanks for the screenshot -- I'm adding those padding issues to Asana.

We've had endless brand name discussions from the beginning :). So duly noted!
How Messaging and Design Affect Conversion Rates
>Aliens!

Pssh - Ninjas!
I'd hope enterprising Google employees had bigger ambitions than selling small business web hosting for $2.50 per month via call centres.

As for the corporate behemoth themselves, if they wanted a better directory of Kenyan businesses, then buying Mocality would hardly dent their acquisitions budget. It would certainly be a far more effective way of obtaining it than manual browsing and data collection via call centre operatives' personal gmail addresses. The idea the world's largest provider of free internet connectivity is looking to branch out into paid webhosting in LEDCs doesn't pass the smell test either.
There's an interesting twist in this tale.

Have a look at: http://blog.mocality.co.ke/2012/01/13/google-what-were-you-t...

It says:
"OMG!!!!! We received a call on the office line (the one listed on Mocality) from India stating that they were offering website services. I think the guy on phone was Deepak or something (it sounded almost like a scam) the guy said he was from Google Kenya blah blah, we refused the offer as we already have a site. Then few days ago I was just searching our page when I stumbled upon our site on .kbo.co.ke site…I mailed them n told them to take it down! aaaaaaaarg!!!!!!"

---
This is one of the small businesses contacted by 'Google'. SO it seems that after they got the call, they later saw their business website put up on kbo.co.ke (which is Google owned).

Doesn't this sound like further proof that this is Google sanctioned?
Show HN: Siri doing flight search/status lookup
I don't know about the kernel specifically, but most large code bases are modular.

There's probably a small set of core kernel functionality that provide services for everybody, and then specialized interfaces for each of the driver types.

I would guess that few people are familiar with the entire structure. Most probably know the core interfaces and the design of the subsystem where they mostly work, like wireless drivers.
I wouldn't mind that -- then I wouldn't have to keep track of the hours manually (If I work more than standard hours I am entitled to equal time of).
Completely agreed. Once I got the hang of hand-writing parsers, I never looked back; they're higher-quality, generally faster, easier to write, and are easier to maintain than generated parsers.
IPhone 5 to feature slimmer design, may operate on all 3G and 4G LTE networks
Given that the"New" page is jammed with submissions, it's probable that they were auto-killed for spamming.
Where and who is this mythically ethical game studio? In my experience, publishers force these hours: a studio can't land the publishing contract without milestones insuring these conditions.
I'm with you on this one. It's less that the RIAA and major labels 'don't know how to use the new technology and...succeed in the new marketplace' so much as we're currently (still) in an in-between stage of market control.

Take for example Radiohead or Louis CK. Their previous successes allowed them to produce, release and distribute independently of big entertainment — but I don't think we're at the point where a small independent artist can effectively take their own music to market in a manner comparable to using a label. I don't have data to back this opinion, but high profile successes in independent distribution have been biased toward artists who were well-known and previously successful.
Google may have been under the impression that they HAD talked to the CEO.
FWIW, I downvoted your comment simply because I don't think that kind of snarkiness is appropriate here on HN.

That said, I agree that there is some basic, foundational knowledge that it sounds like the author of this piece was missing. That's not uncommon among technologists though, in my experience. Myself, I was in this field a long time before I got around to reading "The Art of the Start" and "The Four Steps to the Epiphany" and that's when I really started to understand more about this "startup thing."

So yeah, I agree there is some stuff the OP might want to read / research / study... but I would suggest ditching the snarkiness in communicating that point.
Windows Server 8: Server Applications and the Minimal Server Interface
Russia's space chief says failures may be sabotage