skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Plug: I'm working on this exact problem. Are you based in the US? I only have UK laptops at the moment, and the data needs updating, but have a look at http://giniji.com. Sign up to get notified when I add more laptops - http://giniji.com/newsletter

Meanwhile, I can help you find a laptop manually. What's your budget and size preference? Do you have any other specific requirements?

Would you be interested in buying a pre-installed Linux laptop?
Too big to fail... too small to fail... Doublethink is everywhere! Reading phrases like these makes me feel like a hashmap is being crammed into a boolean. All these people can fail! It's like people are intentionally trying to cause confusion with nonsense phrases. Stop it.
I'm surprised to hear about your bad experience with Lenovo. Most people seem to really like them. What went wrong for you?
Failure point: Since you are really busy you have decided to cut corners in your current work. Didn't write tests, didn't maintain your current system with bugs and now Alice is the victim of the land mine infested mess you have created.

If you realized you were over extended you should have hired earlier. If you didn't that's another failure point.

Most work cycle books Agile or not talk about how increasing team size does not necessarily increase throughput especially initially. If you don't have a team strategy then yes you are throwing money at a problem without understanding what the problem is.
How do You Search?
Link to a PoC in JavaScript - anybody tested this? https://gist.github.com/1725489
If you get really angry about the choices other people make for their own work, you're doing life wrong.
Ask HN: Startups that do hardware?
All of the startups I see around HN seem to be developing some kind of app that connects, syncs or organizes something. While this is all exciting, are there any stories about startups that do hardware?

I would be interested to know about startups that want to change the way the internet works by building the next generation router or a different way to store data. How did they fare? What were the challenges?
Unfortunately he also replied in a similar fashion on his FB page.
Not only is the observation that P&S cameras are going to decline obvious, the author posted this after various P&S manufacturers reported on said decline. This is like predicting the Superbowl champion on Monday.

In other news, alarm clocks, MP3 players, GPS units, and voice dictation devices are all going to decline at the hands of smartphones. News at 11.
No link or mention of 12.04 Alpha2 link on Ubuntu's download page
I have to agree with the rest of the commenters here. You make a blanket statement about something you've obviously never used. You're leveraging hearsay and third party complaints against a framework and language that you don't appear to be overly familiar with.
I agree, in snow leopard i learned to love 2 finger universal scrolling, with the option of 3 finger navigation between pages and around a document. All of that broke in Lion.
German Federal Office of Information Security recommends Chrome
> I can't think of any good reason any web page should ever scroll…

They give you a very good reason why the webpage should horizontally scroll: task boards. I've implemented and used task boards before and hit this exact same issue.

Horizontal scrolling is only really an issue for those users who don't have a decent device for horizontal scrolling. On trackpads and the Magic/Mighty mouses, horizontal scrolling is very natural.
I made the OneWay app and posted it here about 2 years ago. I have a fairly decent amount of users still but I'm hoping that maybe some new people can discover it today and give me some feedback! Lately I have been thinking about updating it and putting in the Mac App Store. Anyone been through that process with a free app before? Was it worth it?
apple's working on the eyephone.
This has been known for some time now. What would make your blog post more interesting is if you cut down on the conjecture and put some real research in it. For example, heres flickr's report on camera usage: http://www.flickr.com/cameras/

--edit--
heres another list: http://bighugelabs.com/topcameras.php
Work around this by using suhosin to restrict the variable count even more than PHP's limit.

Also your get/post size limit should be restricted anyway, the defaults are far too high.
Gestures are one thing, scrolling is another. To get a look at the immense difference in usability, check out an app like flipboard vs feedly, one uses vertical-scrolling and the other uses side-scrolling. I very much prefer the vertical scrolling, but I won't speak for everyone, just giving an example to try out.
"countless usability studies" References?
great for Europe and everyone else! love the idea.
Carwoo should buy you.
if its your company's people choice, and thus that impacts you directly, you're actually doing life right.
The problem isn't apple or safari. Chrome copied a safari feature poorly, THAT is the problem.
Wow, this guy seems like a very angry person.
Nice implementation of XMPP on Node.JS!
From the article:
"The hype around Node.js on this issue makes me want to punch faces."

"But the kind of misunderstanding going on in this video clip seems to pervade the Node.js hype and gives me rageface."

This seems like a really over-the-top response to people that have a differing opinion. I can't take the rest of his post seriously after reading these parts. This certainly isn't the sort of thing you read in an informed opinion piece.
"Improving the productivity of a software team is hard. It involves understanding the business, the team, the history, the obstacles blocking progress. It is a complex, context-sensitive problem."

TRUE.

Hiring more devs won't solve the complexity problem unless you happen to lasso a few certain devs with the right experience, perspective and willingness that can identify the true core of a problem and solve it fully and with expedience. Sadly many ("smart", "rock star") devs I've seen are content with shortcut, local maxima solutions that only buy a little bit of time before the team starts hurting again. I don't know why this is. Maybe b/c it's more fun (or feels safer) to code and produce behavior than to do the vigilant things required to stave off complexity. But this is a suicide run -- you feel the wind in your hair b/c you're hacking, coding, etc. but you're actually just running back and forth exhausting yourself and not pushing the line forward as fast as you hope. Don't let this evoke The Tortoise and the Hare fable. The team that does development right will be less like a tortoise and more like an elephant. Ground speed somewhere in between the tortoise and the hare, wise, and pushing the line at the greatest speed.
The Ruby and Python communities are just now, many years after the hype has faded, learning that stuff like dependency injection and proper modularization are actually good things that help you maintain code over time.

This remark is off the mark. Dependency injection, as in injection by parameters and injection by constructors are so obvious people do it sub-consciously. A fluff word isn't needed for it. As far as IoC containers are concerned, I don't see Ruby/Python communities using it, mainly because half of it is fighting static typing.

And people are learning proper modularization now? Seriously? Python/Ruby has proper namespaces(ruby doesn't have it), modules, classes et al. Like any other languages, Python/Ruby has it's share of programmers who write spaghetti code, and programmers who don't.

Again, if he writes AbstractConnectionDepenencyInjectioManagerAbstractFactory and calls it proper modularization, I am happy Python/Ruby isn't picking it up.
> JavaScript has very little support for any of those nice things: it doesn't even have namespaces, for chrissakes. Why would I want to repeat these same mistakes over and over again in a new language?

Javascript doesn't have this (by itself) but node has a very nice require() system that is really excellent for long-term maintainability. When you bump a dependency in a node project that change will only affect the code near it because of how node_modules are resolved to the most local copy. You can bump dependencies without worrying how this will affect other packages.

Plus, require() just returns an object. It doesn't puke a bunch of objects into the current scope. This is massively useful for readability. I've sunk a lot of time on other systems tracking down unqualified exports to figure out which package's documentation to consult.

I've got nothing against scala and am sure it's a useful language but I wonder if the author has even used node.
Yes, the author of that post wrote the GitHub plugin you're referring to.

https://github.com/micho/jQuery.preventMacBackScroll
What's interesting is that the sophistication of the attack is immaterial to the fact that they achieved a significant security disclosure. You don't have to be a sophisticated hacker to perpetrate meaningful hacks, you just have to be more sophisticated than the target of your attack.

This is what makes the Anonymous movement so fascinating to me. In Anonymous culture, being "dox'd" is a big deal. That's kind of end-game stuff for hackers. Once you're outed, you're out. Coincidentally, the same rules apply for espionage.

What makes this doubly interesting is that Anonymous is made up of young, tech-savvy individuals. The establishment (government, large corporations, etc) increasingly rely on tools that are created, or at least well understood, by their attackers. It's a classical asymmetric battlefield problem. The attackers aren't big, but they have some very specific domain knowledge, and are increasing in sophistication over time.

That previous paragraph is probably way to generous in my evaluation of the skill level represented inside Anonymous, but that's a large part of the problem. We don't really know much about the insides of Anonymous by design. As the establishment pushes harder and harder (SOPA, PIPA, ACTA) to enforce the status quo, who will turn? There's a tipping point at which the establishment can no longer wage the battle. Acquiring the talent becomes too expensive and breaks their business model.
I dont' think thats correct. This occurs in Firefox as well.
Well - I'm happy (for now), because the government admitted it's mistake in not consulting ACTA with all the interested parties. For me, it was the most important thing.

As for ACTA being ratified by EU, Polish government admitting that they were wrong will help in killing it in the EU parliament. I can't imagine any polish party voting "FOR" now.

Finally - the thing I'm really hoping that will happen is that the future changes in the law will be consulted with the society. Politicians will think thrice before signing a copyright extension law, or software patent laws.

Edit: but you're right. Our government kept telling us that the signature means nothing, because our Sejm needs to still ratify ACTA. Now I'm hearing that polish Sejm can do jack to stop the ratification, wtf.
Clojure/core — Functional Relational Programming with Cascalog
DEF-CON Chennai January Meet 2012 | The Hacker News (THN)
I guess it depends on what I how I want to do my life. If I want to live my life by learning new ideas and using those ideas for something tangible, Node's a pretty good choice. If I want to live my life as a person with a particular language/architectual ideology, then anything that is not in that world view is wrong.

I like node for system level scripting. I find bash annoying and non portable to windows. I really don't want to have to learn batch scripting for dos on windows. But I can use JavaScript with node to script in both environments.

On the server I think that node might be helpful for certain network level tasks. But I haven't used it for much. But honestly what type of person would I be if I don't even consider it? The OP seems to be making an emotional decision rather than a technical one. Interestingly he's using Scala. There are many similar posts about Scala being the wrong way to do life. I just can't agree with any of those views.

Finally I wonder what the value is for these rage posts. They just seem to further divide people. I do see the value in the posts about I've used node for X months, here's my thoughts or here's why I'm going back to X paradigm. But just a rant where faces should be punched seems out of place for HN.
check their page; what I meant specifically was the ability to run vim inside of eclipse.
What's the problem if someone creates great stuff with it?
So uh, what was their benchmark test for the CPU Usage section? There are many things HTML5 is more efficient than at Flash and the reverse is also true.
Regarding Competitive Misinformation
Six of one, half a dozen of the other.

http://news.php.net/php.internals/57655
This is why headphones, noise-canceling or not, are not a perfect solution to the problem of conversational noise. You can still hear conversation through noise-canceling headphones; it's just quieter. And not necessarily so quiet that you don't parse it.

You can try to train yourself not to parse conversation, to think of it as a slightly irritating set of noises. I think we all try to do this to some degree – it may be one reason why programmers are famously uncommunicative when we're in the zone. I mumble and wave people away when I'm trying to sustain focus, and even if I deliberately break focus I tend to take a couple of minutes to snap out of it and get back into the flow of conversation, and in the meantime I struggle to produce words.

But, like you, I'm not convinced that consciously ignoring words really works. Your brain is still parsing them at some level. It's like the studies which show that noise, in general, is stressful, even if that noise is just white noise. Your brain is trying to find signal in the noise. It never really stops trying. The more noise there is, or the more structure your brain detects in the noise, the harder it will try.

Studies have shown, and my own experience bears out, that voices are hardest to tune out, and that structured music is also relatively distracting: Your brain parses music too. Ambient music, which is deliberately designed not to attract conscious attention, works better for me. White noise works, too, to some degree, but silence is still best.

Of course, some people are conditioned to have noise all the time. These people are both lucky and unlucky, in my opinion.
If it happens in ff the same as its reported to work in chrome, then they're both at fault.

Safaris implementation makes it very clear you are going to navigate back a page, and it's very easy for the user to cancel the action.
HN giveaway: 6 months of static hosting (OpenBSD & nginx)
Hello, I am giving away six months of static web hosting for an unlimited number of sites (as much as you can host in one GB) to the first 100 who email me at:

hn@ramov.com

You will also need to paste or attach your SSH public key in there (as that's the only way to login) as well as write down your desired username. Put at least one additional username if the one you want is already taken.

Please use the email address you actually use and care about so I can send you your login details as well as possibly contact you after six months are over.

Important: If you fail to follow above instructions, I will not be able to provide you with this service, so the first 100 correct submissions will be processed.

I will try to process your submissions as fast as possible but please allow for few days...

Basically, I love static hosting and this is something I would love to turn into living at some point. I also regard OpenBSD as the absolute best OS there is, so I decided to put the two into use, for me and for other people.

One additional thing. This is a manual, managed service, not some cookie-cutter automated hosting system. I actually care a great deal about its operation and everything is done by hand. So I will need to activate your desired virtual hosts after you upload them. This is done to guarantee the absolute best quality of service.

You can find more info about the service here:

http://ramov.com

Thanks!
20 Upcoming Hackathons: USC v UCLA Rivalry, Music and Startup Weekends
from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2715066

"If someone integrated a contextual playlist generator into a web-IDE and changed the music based on length of current session, degree of nesting or other complexity values, time of day based on location, etc..., I think it would be a much appreciated feature."
The article title is very misleading. He spent at least 8 months developing a product, and he "got lucky" and was featured near the top in the app store in multiple countries in order to make the $30,000.
>"i confronted them that they should hash password"

Maybe they should. Maybe they don't need to.

My bank needs to encrypt may password because of their fiduciary duty to protect my money.

HN does not because the consequences of unauthorized access are relatively trivial and there is no duty.

In other words, passwords should be encrypted if it is a better alternative than not encrypting them and customer service concerns can easily outweigh any benefit encryption provides.
Apple Overturns German Injunction, Resumes iPhone Sales
I miss not having Steve Jobs around. His commentary on issues like this was always amusing.

Apple always won by playing their own game. Now they are playing the game of, "if we can't beat them on the merit of our products, we'll sue them out of existence." It turns out that other companies have been playing this game for decades and are much better at it.
I think extending the analogy of runtime to argument repetition is interesting. Are there any n^2 comments?
Here is a suggestion for those who build a statup for getting acquired as a team. Build a start up centered around an opensource project that is awesome but not necessarily profitable. A Big$ company could acquire the group. They get a bunch of top quality programmers. Your creation wont be sunset. The opensource project may develop a life of its own at least through forking. At least it is better than creating a project that will be terminated on acquisition or lack of business model.
Moral Philosophy And Income Inequality
It alerts you if you have typed stuff and try to go back
http://comtruise.com/kc/ More Com Truise mixes
Funny, I'm an American working in the EU and my experience has been loads better than when I go back to the US. Growing up in the places I have you learn to say as little as possible to authorities (ie, don't give too much rope to hang yourself).

In every country I've visited it's known your flight number, know your hotel address, know your return date, and if anyone asks, you are just visiting. Getting into specifics just invites more and more questions.
Not sure if the app has been out longer than 1 month, but what has the revenue been like after 30 days?
I haven't used node.js before, but I see 2 main points being made about it, by proponents and detractors respectively:

* It uses non-blocking evented IO so it can scale well.

* It is single threaded so it can't scale well.

Someone teach me: which of these statements is true?
That's cool and all, but these folks are hardly Picasso, and the art in question could've been trivially generated by picking a few words at random from a database and adding color.

Don't treat this like a masterpiece.
Visualizing popularity of Yahoo homepage stories
As a general rule, we're looking for 1 hour long noise/dronescapes with no (or very few) drums or vocals.

Happy coding / knitting / drawing / running / painting / writing / baking cakes!

Apparently this should really be called "MusicToGetThingsDone" :)
Mobile Morning Coffee (02/03/12)
Why are these two guys using a conference calling system for a 1-to-1 phone call? Why not just a direct call?
I've got my doubts about Node.js, since it seems like rather a one-trick pony.

But it is a good trick. Node.js deserves credit for calling attention to an underappreciated design pattern that has a lot to offer in certain circumstances. (Personally I think the .NET team hit the nail more squarely on the head with TPL, a pony that can do that trick as well as many others. But .NET doesn't have the sex appeal it takes to be a spokesmodel so meh.)

Javascript isn't my favorite language, or the most performant one. But as a "Lisp with C syntax", on a semantic level it's much better suited to the higher-order programming techniques that the pattern requires than most other popular Web languages are. Ruby also has the right features, but it isn't exactly the poster child for high-performance computing either. Might as well flip a coin, because either way opinionated folks with blood pressure conditions will call you an idiot.
I fully realize the advantages that an IDE has over vim:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2938995

If your point is that this handful of advantages is a slam dunk, and that it makes IDEs and vim+console incomparable such that whoever does so is making a categorical error, then your point has no legs to stand on.
So, are you a good designer, or one who's work has never been used by others?
Do you have an iOS SDK? What are the licensing terms? I'd love to integrate this into some of my math games.
I'm really pretty anti-node, but this article isn't very good. The concerns here are mixed up and not very thorough. All these points need graphs, charts, something solid to anchor them to. This is the sort of article that polarizes, but doesn't add to the discussion.

It starts off strong talking about a high bug count, but never gets into specifics there.

As far as scaling across cores goes, it's disingenuous to suggest that node can't do this, there are a number of options here. Message passing, for instance, does indeed work.

As far as nested callbacks sucking, I totally agree. But a walk through why would add a lot more substance here as well.
"this developer already knows flash and is grasping at justifications for his unwillingness to learn new things? advantage: flash"
That's not true, but even if you don't have the right to a lawyer, a lawyer can start petitioning the court on your behalf. You just have to pay for it yourself.

Despite all the rhetoric about Guantanamo Bay and the 500-mile "Constitution-free zone", the government still has to charge you with a crime to detain you. And to punish you, they have to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that you are guilty of the crime they say you are. The Constitution applies to all "people", not just citizens.
The font Symbola already has the PILE OF POO glyph, in addition to a number of glyphs for ancient scripts.

http://users.teilar.gr/~g1951d/
Tested on one of my dedicated servers - definitely slows it down.
It appears that the iPhone 4S and the iPad 2 no longer use the chip set that forms the basis for the present litigation, so they are not affected (Apple presumably will be absolutely devastated at being forced to only sell their high end models).
I'm sorry for the author's experience but knowledge and preparation is the key to winning the war i.e. getting in the US and/or stay for certain amount of times. I'm not a lawyer but I have filed visa applications and petitions with the US Immigration Office USCIS many times by myself and have always been successful despite the fact that my country used to be in a war with the US. The laws are complicated if you don't read ahead and prep. If you do, it's a breeze. Hope this helps someone: visajourney dot com
The spaghetti code of node.js callbacks is really a problem of Javascript lacking monads, and in this case something like the Async monad from F#.

TameJS is a step in the right direction by adding a C#-style await.