skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Does anyone know if there are more detailed upgrade docs available? The ones provided in the repo (http://markdotto.com/bs2/docs/upgrading.html) mainly cover features and I don't fancy finding all the various classes that have changed since 1.4.
The wonderful thing about Lisp though is that you can write a macro to produce more parentheses! However, to do this you have to be able to write a macro.
Yeah...I stopped reading at "growing interest from developers in BlackBerry OS"
If a client taints the beautiful layout, maybe prototype screenshots can be used for your portfolio?
I remain convinced that coming up with a fair and practical method for dealing with intellectual property is the most important question of the age.
How lo can you go?
Are iBooks the New Apps?
It's great to know something good came out of that discussion despite the silly trolling that blemished parts of it.
I have no objection to being downvoted, but since this was an attempt at a rational argument as part of a discussion rather than trolling, I would appreciate an explanation of what you think I got wrong.
Check this: http://37signals.com/bootstrapped

Also many more posts by 37 Signals on their blog.
As a person with red-green color deficiency, I got a 3.1. I'm proud of that!
I can't get my head around why anyone would design a hiring process to "scare off" anyone. Sure, you'll chase away superficial candidates... but some fraction of all the real talent will also blow you off.

I really think the problem here is how people do outreach to candidates. I feel like too many companies haven't figured out that recruiting is a marketing problem, just like software sales. Companies get all kinds of creative addressing marketing problems --- but when it comes to hiring, they plug "reqs" into "job boards" and then try to "deflect" the "pretenders".

Calibrate your outreach so that you can safely pay individual attention to all candidates. Don't post reqs to Craigslist or Monster or Dice or whatever your HR person --- in fact don't let your HR person near recruiting --- thinks is the place you're supposed to post ads. You will still be giving "early no" responses to lots and lots of candidates, but it'll be manageable, and it'll be very unlikely for your process to cost you talented candidates.
It'll be bigger, slower, buggier and more expensive (all rewrites are). A hard sell.
Funny cause HUD reminds me of Maya who has one hell fast mouse based UI/Widgets. Unfortunately, almost nobody in the software industry (I mean beside some 2d/3d progrmas) knows or follows this kind of design.

You make me wanna design a keyboardless system, or maybe a two thumb only input system.
Unified Communications Solutions
Two good posts on the subject:

http://hollaforthatdolla.com/2011/discussing-desired-salary-...

http://hollaforthatdolla.com/2011/be-prepared-to-discuss-sal...
I agree. This sounds like the same reaction. People were like "oh this is stupid because it's different". Turns out it did solve the needs of a different interface.

HUD + Unity (just like iOS before it) will simplify how to use menus on a tablet interface... especially once the speech-recognition part is added.
It's firmware, loaded on boot and replaceable by someone with root permissions.

So it's not a trivial thing to bypass, but it's not secure. Use a sticker or post-it note if you're paranoid.
The currency in the developer community is enthusiasm.
>a credibly completed e-commerce site for a few hundred bucks?

You'll get a slightly customized OSS e-commerce system.
1 in 4 are pirates
The biggest use for lithium batteries is probably shake-and-bake production of meth. I saw a dude at Walmart with a cart full of Energizer Lithium batteries and those instant cold packs. I just laughed and moved on.
Quick and simple way to get direct feedback from your app users
Super exciting, but at $75K for the privilege of taking a week to assemble your own car, it'll be a bit out of my price range for a while.
How do you get list of properties that a given entity supports?
James Coglan's Faye project (https://github.com/faye) contains some nice implementations of Server-Sent Events for Ruby and Node.
The GNOME 3 shell is in the Ubuntu archive, same as Debian. AIUI, it's one "apt-get install" away.

It seems a bit overkill to switch distro just because you don't like the default.
I'm sure most of those 94 minutes per day are playing Angry Birds and other mobile games. I don't expect we are going to see any new billion-dollar companies being founded over the next 10 years that primarily sell mobile games.
There is plenty of mobile opportunity, but the big players are already fighting over the obvious stuff.
I'm not convinced mobile has significantly more profitable hidden gems than consumer web, certainly not based just on this article. I wouldn't recommend web devs change their careers anytime soon.
"If we can use your details to legally make a profit, we probably will."
LEGO bricks are made to fairly rigorous standards. I suspect DIY bricks would be closer to existing knock-offs: very much like LEGO bricks, but they don't necessarily fit together "just so" all the time.
So this is mobile apps vs. web, not internet access via native apps vs access via browser, right?
"Unions are a voluntary arrangement, copyright is not."

oh? can GM kick say "no unions"?

I will address the "HN hivemind" when I see fit. Especially when it holds true.
Pre-recorded videos seem like a supremely silly job interview requirement. Recording a video is nothing like talking to a human being, and ability to execute videos is a learnable skill, not a marker of innate ability, so it's weird to optimize a process around it.

But USV can create any requirement they'd like, and they'll still get candidates, because a role at USV is a prestige job. They might just as well require candidates to compose a freestyle rap about their accomplishments; it wouldn't cost them candidates.
You might think of it this way:

You can start with an OS where everything, more than you will ever possibly need, is turned on. Myriad drivers are present and all are activated without any user intervention.

Or you can start with an OS where everything is turned off by default. It's up to you to choose the drivers and turn things on. The user has to make the first move.

In the former scenario, you will unlikely ever have full control of security (if that's what you are aiming for). It's too complex to think of everything that could be turned on and too account for every driver. You will never have full control.

In the later case, you will be able to achieve a better sense of control. Not to mention you will understand your OS better.

In sum, laziness/convenience cedes control to someone else, whether it's Apple, their "approved" business partners or some miscreant.
Think about printing a car when we have point to point instantaneous transportation (beam me up, Scotty)? Perhaps cars will become just another form of entertainment.
Perhaps the cost of recycling the material your boat (used to be your couch and XBoxen-5D) into a car via some futuristic process will be negligible, such that it would resemble downloading an MP3 today (after all, you do need some sort of storage medium that you bought to hold the MP3).
Well, that is what the article claims, they compare their own stats with comScore and Alexa stats. But I think the conclusion is indeed flawed as the Flurry stats include people with smart phones with apps on it that use Flurry, which is just a subset of all people using the Internet. They should include the absolute numbers to make the story complete.
But yeah, there is a strong trend we can't deny :)
Foldable keyboards and dirt cheap projection technologies could mitigate the form factor issues. How about holographic displays? Or huds?
Superformulas is very cool, but I dont understand whats wrong with their triangles demo (the last one).
Agreed. And further, the longevity of larger interfaces is also a matter of the overall quality and feel of the UX:

A phone sized interface will probably always feel constricting and confining when trying to tackle anything complicated. (And a good part of mobile UX is preventing and alleviating this feeling of claustrophobia, IMO.) It's extraordinarily difficult to cram the full neuro-kinesthetic experience of a complex task into a playing card sized screen; we're more comfortable interacting with things that are "body sized".

But whatever the backend is (and remember, your users don't give a hoot where the computing is done), certainly large sized interfaces are not going to disappear. What is most likely going on is a re-centering of the bell curve: more people will have a smaller screen as their primary interface to the net/web, and larger interfaces will accommodate more complex behaviors and tasks as well as group activities.
I quit real estate development and built a startup.
And who would mine, gather, process, prospect, and distribute the materials? What motivation would those individuals have? (Actually, I would love to see a candidate who was actively sinking a shovel every day to produce or driving a tractor trailer to deliver raw materials for her/his constituents.)

Based on the current trend, however, I doubt we'd ever see a post scarcity world: oil, rare-earth metals, gold, silver, and even wood and stone are all scarce at scale. Sunlight may be one of the only things available on earth that humans can't destructively consume.
Until it comes to maintenance time and you discover that your cadre of less then stellar developers has created a "works as indented" pile of excrement that is largely unmaintainable. Then the difference between the best developer and the next-best is no longer irrelevant.

In my experience, design is undervalued in most software projects, but the sentiment expressed in this article is beyond over-correction.
Cars and 3d printers? That's short term thinking. Just wait until we have the technology to print people. That's when people will really get pissy about pirating.
Do Drones Undermine Democracy?
Perhaps there are many, but they don't feel the need to issue a press release about it. Would you?
Came here to say the same. Also raw disk slices vs file systems for databases.
My understanding is that no one actually wants to be with Comcast, I was under the impression that people were generally with them because they have a monopoly on fast internet in a lot of places.
Two things:

1. The author of this article clearly has money on one side of the issue since he's trying to sell a cross-device app development platform.

2. The data he supplies isn't broken down by usage type, so it's a little hard to analyze. What if 50% of the 'app' time is spent playing games? Or 20% of it is spent only in a couple of apps like Facebook? He's suggesting that native apps are supplanting web usage, but the graph actually shows web usage going up. So, are apps complementing or cannibalizing web usage? Hard to tell.
Markup and CSS are the ones that generally slow me down the most. I really like where Bootstrap is going. It's a great boon for developers in my opinion, not to mention quick prototyping of designs for everyone.
I've been fortunate enough to be a FiOS customer for awhile, so I haven't had the pleasure of dealing with Comcast lately, but until I moved into this building I'd used them all over the east coast. They had a particularly galling bug in their customer service system where you would be routed to a regional call center based on your phone's area code. This meant that every single time I called to talk about anything, I would first have to wait on hold at the call center I knew to be wrong before they would finally answer me and transfer me to the correct call center, where I got to wait on hold again. Several times I was given "direct" lines but they had the same problem.
I'd chalk wanting to live in the mission or other areas to two things. Most people hate living in large apartment buildings when you can have a sweet victorian flat and the "nightlife" in soma is a totally different vibe than in the mission. Especially the variety of options.
Found this: http://services.sunlightlabs.com/docs/congressapi/legislator...

Sunlight Labs rule.
I don't think people here are giving Canonical a hard time because they're trying to innovate. I think it's because while Canonical is innovating, they're shoving alpha-quality innovations down the throats of their users. They're making their users their alpha and beta testers, in effect.

This is a perfect example. If Canonical's past innovations are any hint, HUD will be released broken and unfinished--and in an LTS release no less. If they completely replace the menubar in this LTS, users will get mad (and rightly so), and Canonical will throw up their hands and say, "But guys it's not done yet! Give it a chance in the next release!" Which is what they always say.

That's no fun for people who just want to get work done.
No, I doubt most of them have heard of bookmarks, at least not on their phone. I bet if you took a survey right now of iPhone owners, maybe 10% would have any idea what you're talking about.

Pure speculation, but I wouldn't be surprised.
Well, their goal is to make it self-replicating, but it's far from it for now. I think it can essentially make the specialized parts, but you still need to buy various common parts and assemble it yourself.

See the BOM of non-printed parts: http://reprap.org/wiki/Prusa_Mendel#Non-Printed_Parts_.28.22...
They sell a new version of that keyboard. Typing on it right now. It has the updated "big delete key" keyboard and no trackpad. Pretty awesome.

http://shop.lenovo.com/us/itemdetails/55Y9003/38/C39222A11DE...
I'm really liking some of the new js additions and looking forward to trying it out.
I believe it has both native as well as HTML5 elements, just like the LinkedIn app.
It's rather lovely to see simulations providing robust direction. The old method of seeing what sticks to the proverbial wall is horribly tedious.
I have no trouble believing it, which is a big part of why it has such terrible ratings and reviews now, as compared to when it was native.

And from what I understand, Facebook has done a lot of significant engineering to try and improve the performance while keeping it mostly HTML5.

Mobile web apps aren't ready.
I'm pessimistic for the future of the cloud on mobile devices, because we'll reach a bandwith limit. As the frequencies fill up the pipes are going to get more sluggish over time, unlike the trends we see in other tech sectors.
If you are really worried about this, I recommend surgery.

There might be a Kickstarter product in this. Simply devise a magnetic activation switch for the microphone. I've opened up multiple 13" Macbook Pro laptops, so I know how little space is in that corner where the microphone and magsafe socket board is, but there is enough.

Perhaps even better: a microphone that has a deactivation pin which can be pulled with a pair of tweezers. A service would solder this in place for you, and the laptop could be used with no internal microphone. Then, when it was time for you to sell the laptop, you simply open the case and pull the pin out of the back of the microphone, reactivating it. You could even construct this out of the same microphone element as used in the macbook. Just have the pin short across the mic capsule's terminals.
Exactly!

I'd love to have a blog! Doesn't mean I want to write one, though.
The Truth About Mutual Funds: Fees vs. Returns
Ask HN: Is there a Yelp for Special Dietary needs? Can we build it? 
I hope you forgive me if this all sounds rather naive, as I'm new to both app development and diabetes. I'm curious about either finding or building a tool that would be like Yelp, except for special dietary needs.

I personally do not have diabetes, but my girlfriend just got diagnosed with pre-diabetes and gout both in the past 2 months. The hardest thing for her is getting used to what do eat and what not to eat given the new diet. I am hoping for something to merely help find (via crowdsourcing) dishes at restaurants that are specific to different dietary needs. Think "Yelp", but for particular dishes at restaurants that friendly for diabetes, gout, vegetarians, kosher, halal... Users that categorize their own dietary needs will post pictures/descriptions of the foods they eat, allowing similar users to discover them too.

Is there an app like that currently, and if not, what would be the best way to create one for Diabetes patients at least? Honestly, could such an app gain the critical mass it needs to take off, at least in a dense urban environment like San Francisco? Would people be interested in actually using such an app? Would it even be useful for diabetics? If so, do you think it would take a lot more resources than a single dev working nights and weekends? Marketing costs? I'm not too concerned if other apps like Yelp or Urbanspoon take this segment over, as that would have also achieved my purpose.
The ones at ikea last a good 2 days in a wireless mouse.
That cuts both ways. If a track record of accomplishment in open source has market value, then companies offering that benefit can provide lower salaries. If on the whole open source software roles pay less, you can expect a different demographic of developers to work in those roles.

I don't really believe that exposure to open source projects has that much market value, though. I also think it's probably very hard to run a dev hiring pipeline that expects to primarily recruit people from open source projects. There are a whole lot of very talented developers who have spent their careers doing closed-source (i.e.: normal) software development.
If you can replicate material at will, you can spend all your time perfecting robotics to perform service work. Said robotics can than be replicated en masse across the world with previous "replicators".
I think that idea appeared 15 years earlier in The Diamond Age, although people were setting their sights higher then.
I imagine a lot of employers wouldn't really like you discussing stuff you had done for them in any great detail on the public internet, even discussing design / architecture decisions might be controversial (or covered by an NDA).

Plus if your employer finds what you wrote you better need a justification for putting it up there that isn't "so I can apply for this job".

You don't really want to end up in legal trouble or fired.

At this point anyway your "web presence" is pretty much just going to be your resume but put online, I imagine if they explicitly don't want resumes they wouldn't want that either.
Your assuming a lot about what's being built. If you start designing a UI for a USB stick you have already failed. how are people going to interact with this? UC1, you plug it in and it works. UC2, you unplug it and it keeps your files. End of use cases.

That's not to say design is unimportant, just that plenty of teams are better off adding there 30th coder before their first designer. Others may be better off adding there 10th designer before there 2nd coder, but I have never heard of them.
pip install swissknife
I believe the original plan was that you could run perl5 & perl6 together like so...

use v6;
.say for 1..10;

{
use v5;
say for 1..10;
}

# back to perl6

That might (still) be a pipedream however one reality which is working right now is that you can run some perl5 modules from within Rakudo (Perl6 on Parrot):

use v6;
use CGI:from<perl5>;

my $q = CGI.new;
print $q.header,
$q.start_html('Hello World'),
$q.h1('Hello World'),
$q.end_html;

ref: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2188433
I don't think the web can ever be as fast moving as a native environment. That's one of the major downfalls with being compatible with all platforms.
Remember a time when someone talking about the Internet wasn't necessarily talking about the World Wide Web?

Fifteen years ago we were bitching about all the startups abandoning 16 bits worth of open and unfettered TCP port address space for the walled gardens of port 80 and this new-fangled HTTP protocol.

Viva la (r)evoluzione!
No, some minor parts are done with webview, but most of it isn't, at least not for the iPhone. There is a huge library called Three20 that was created while the app was developed (as far as I know).
Your understanding is correct. I have seen a statistic cited somewhere that 80% of the country has no choice regarding a cable or Internet provider.

I'm not sure if that's the real number, but it if were, it wouldn't surprise me.
Yeah, this used to cause trouble for me at work. The way my office was lit, moving my hands too far over the (right?) speaker would suddenly change the kb lights and screen brightness. Turned the auto brightness after a couple hours and never re-enabled it.
Do Pirate Sites Really Make That Much Money? Um... No
Calling it a public utility isn't going to make it all roses and unicorns either.
Isn't it natural to ask, if something is wrong with technology which needs to be broken to make it work?
Fantastic, guys. Great job.

Question: I notice that the button styles are still static (as are a lot of the color styles). Are there any plans to implement project-wide color changing based on the primary color variable?

I ask because I've hacked this out manually in a project at my day job, and another in my own free time. [Edit]: + I'd be more than happy to contribute this.

(Probably should crosspost this to Github.)
I think this is misleading.

It's true that there's a mobile shift in _startup_. Most startups want to hit the mobile goldmine and become the next [enter a company here]. However, we fail to understand that those important minutes spent are spent on either games, which are consumed in matter of days (There's not many games that sustain growth for over a period of a few months), and services that, for the most part, already had a web presence.

Here's my rationale: If your startup/internet service company wants to be successful, it will have to have a mobile presence, if it doesn't, opportunity from competitor will arise and you might get into trouble.

However, considering the cost of a native mobile app (iOS or Android), I wouldn't be surprised if within 2-3 years, startup would go back to focus on web first and if traction occurs, expanding to the mobile area (Except for startup that leverage the mobile hardware, ie camera, geo-location, etc)