skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a sign that Nest has found a great market. I don't mean smart thermostats, but in accessible premium home technology (as you can tell, their name is more general than thermostats).

There are many areas of technology in the home that are controlled by very old companies that are in markets that are very slow to innovate. The real proof of this is in these patents (q.v.), which detail seemingly near-archaic technology. Seriously, this is their state of the art? These are exactly the kind of competitors you want to have.

That is a byproduct of the fact that brands and design for home technology last a long, long time. Recently, I replaced my gas water heater valve and discovered that it's a part that's been around since the 1950's in its current design. Proven technology sticks around. Similarly, Honeywell has been in thermostats since forever.

Finally, the margins in this business can be pretty impressive. There are home appliances and technology products whose premium versions cost twice as much as the regular version even though they're not much different. Some people are just willing to spend a good bit more for the absolute best. Very much an Apple market strategy (i.e. high-capacity iPods).

I hope to see Nest introduce more devices like their learning thermostat soon, as well as a new way for them to communicate and be controlled which can hopefully improve on and replace the ancient X10 automation standard. Nest is in a great position right now.
As someone in the startup HVAC Optimization industry, it really pains me to see this. To be fair, Nest scares the crap out of me as the proverbial Goliath to our David, luckily we're not in the same markets (for now). If Honeywell is throwing these types of accusations at them, what chance does my company have?

I understand that tech patents are just a part of the business, but coming from the little guy here, how do I not get slapped with a lawsuit for having an idea?
Whatever happened to radios?
Hacker News Seattle Meetup #6: Tues, February 7th. RSVP now
What startups can learn from Haruki Murakami (2008)
In order to apply to options, 83(b) requires (among other things) that the options be readily valuable at the time they are issued. In FB's case, it is likely that the stock options could not be valued (i.e,. because they were not publicly traded and there was not a recent valuation study).

See the Regulations to 83(b), which provide a lot more detail about the applicability of 83(b) than the statute itself, especially Treas. Reg. 1.83-7 (regarding stock options).
Ask HN: I'm quitting my job and I need advice on life & disability insurance
I plan on quitting my job in few months to pursue full time iPhone / Android game development. I'm curious what other, self-employed people are doing for all of those nice benefits you get form the corporate life. Luckily, my wife is a teacher, so I can get health insurance for our family through her job, but do you have any recommendations on where to get disability insurance and life insurance? What else should I know before getting disability or life insurance? Thanks!
This is not a tech bubble
Don't think too hard about Windows version numbers; your head will asplode.

Windows Vista is Windows NT version 6.0; Windows 7 is actually version 6.1. Similarly Windows XP was version 5.1; its predecessor, Windows 2000, was 5.0.

Windows Me was version 4.9 of the Windows 9x code base (whose first version -- as an obvious successor to Windows 3.x -- was 4.0, Windows 95).
I'm glad someone posted about this mouse problem. It is the most annoying thing that prevented me from switching to a mac for a long time. I was telling my friends that the mouse was not behaving the same way in Mac Os X and Windows. They were all saying that I was imagining it. I switched to Mac a year ago and got use to it, but I can still feel a difference.
All browsers use UTF by default and all web pages should be serving UTF-8: http://hsivonen.iki.fi/accept-charset/
This is not true at all, though - what compromises exactly did they make in power pitching? At most, the team structure would decrease their chances in the playoffs by a few percent. Any analysis based on strictly playoff results is going to be rife with small sample size problems...you can come up with pretty much any conclusion you want based on a sample of a few series.
Well, by some stretch it is: this is a word most women don't like to be called, and when referring to men, at least part of the offense is that it's bad to be a woman.
Amazon to open a brick-and-mortar store in Seattle
Honestly, I'm not convinced that lag is the problem more so than acceleration. I've never been able to disable acceleration since Tiger, so I don't have that information. Since it's quite reasonable to have acceleration with a trackpad, I've never had any problem with Mac trackpads.
First off, very nice. I'm working on an app this would be perfect for, assuming the performance is good on mobile devices.

With that said, I have to agree with @dangrossman I don't see any Parallax effect. I just see nice sliding pages.

[edit] went back and looked more closely at the background. I can see the effect, the image choice for background is just poor at showing it off. Maybe it's more visible when you don't have a bright window behind you like I do, but those thin gray lines really ought to be replaced with something more visible.
that looks like it provides pretty much the same functionality as the start menu.

Windows 8 is looking like such a failure.
I used to work there, and they have a skypekit license. It doesn't use the "spawn a skype linux client and use the plugin interface" method, it's a direct integration.
AngelHack (3/3): 1,000 Hackers from SF, Boston, NYC compete for $75k in prizes
In other news, scientists find that water appears to be wet.
Stop using boostrap in production
Well, you have to look at those versions a little bit finer grained. Windows NT 3.51, 4.0, 2000 and XP were all very usable in a business environment; Windows 95, ME and Vista not so. Windows 7 seems workable, and with Windows 8 it seems that Microsoft wants again to alienate their business public, catering to 'consumer tablets' instead.

The funny thing is that during all those transitions, the basic Win32 API stayed more or less stable. The programs I wrote for XP (or even Windows 2000) still work well in Windows 7. They just don't have the visual bling (which my customers don't need anyway).
I still don't agree. I don't think knowledge for the sake of knowledge is such a bad thing. I feel happier when I learn things, even if the things are unlikely to help me be productive in any measurable capacity. I will go on Wikipedia binges on bizarre topics like fighter aircraft or quantum mechanics, and it makes me happy even though I certainly don't retain any real expertise of the subjects. I guess that makes it "entertainment" more than anything, but I think that's fine.
1000 members in 5 days - Hackful, the Hacker News for Europe
All World Thinking Day February 2012 Celebration
jorangreef said "RE StartSSL..." then pointed to an article about the problems of SSL w.r.t mobile apps. Since this is in reply to a very positive post about StartSSL, the obvious inference is that his linked article provides some evidence on why one wouldn't want to use StartSSL. But that's pure FUD because the only mention of StartSSL in the whole article is that they close their connections so two more TCP connections are required to authenticate the cert... but anyone worth their salt would be bundling in the CA cert anyway, obviating the need for those connections.

I don't know what your beef is with 'disingenuous,' but that's exactly what I meant.
You should make it so recruiters pay when they get a response. The could only message candidates through the site initially (not via email) and their email would also be anonymized. If the candidate replied then the recruiter could be charged $XXX per reply.
I find it odd that people would put such a wide discrepency between current and desired salary.

If you are making 30K, as a webdeveloper and are seeking 60K as a web developer, I dont see why anyone would read this and think "Hey, here's a guy who wants double what he is making now, lets go get him"

Like the manager in UAE who states 130K current and 180K desired.

50K is a lot, even though its a smaller % than the 100% - Why do these people feel that if they are worth twice what they are making now, that advertising via this site is a good idea.

Maybe I'm confused?

Like this one:

"I'm a Generalist, and I currently make $120,000 in San Francisco.
I'm ONLY interested in jobs as a Generalist that pay at least $140,000 in San Francisco."

This tells me absolutely nothing.
I, at least, enjoyed reading it. I'm in a comparable situation, although I haven't left my job at this point. Good luck!
I agree that convenience and ease of use are a compelling argument for piracy, but really I think that most piracy occurs because it is free. It just so happens that the technology that makes piracy possible also makes it convenient and easy.

Really, what we are asking Hollywood to do is compete with free. This post is saying "Tack on all these features to your movies, and I'll pay less than the current price of your movie for those features." I get the feeling that Hollywood hears that as "Your product has no value, so do all these things to add value to it."

Hollywood is saying: "We shouldn't have to compete with free. Our product has value (regardless of delivery or portability). Free is illegal." Now, this may or may not be the case technologically, but I find it difficult to fault an industry for failing to come to terms with those realities.
Apple completely dominates MP3 player sales. No one else matters. Apple's iPod ads just need to keep people thinking "iPod" when they think "MP3 player", so their focus should be something that catches the eye and pushes the brand.

The market in smart phones and tablets is quite different, and thus the proper kind of advertising is quite different.
Phen375 review
Phen375 – Phentemine 375 – works by burning fat and suppressing appetite and claims to help achieve a weight loss of 25lbs on average in just six weeks. According to its promotion, it uses maximum strength synthesised ingredients of pharmaceutical quality to help you ‘lose weight faster than ever before’.
I think an argument can be made that domains do require special protection. Web-based businesses are living, breathing entities that are permanently damaged when offline. Simply look at the before/after traffic statistics of the few sites that have been wrestled back from the claws of the government after seizure. The sites are dead.

The real world equivalent of domain seizure isn't temporarily restraining a business from certain questionable activities. It is to fire missiles at the corporate headquarters the moment they are indicted, destroying the building, and then posting a billboard on the empty land saying how the company that used to be there and all of their customers are criminals even if they haven't yet been found guilty. If they are found not guilty, then, after more legal wrangling, they'll get the empty lot back. They are then "free" to resume their former operation.
If you're going to be installing Linux on it, don't buy the MacBook Air for the hardware. The lack of PageUp/PageDown keys seals the deal. If you are going to install Linux on it, then the MBA shouldn't be a consideration and you should get an ultrabook in your spec/price range. If you want OS X then the MBA would be your best bet.
So If I started a website that only catered to the distribution of illegal credit card numbers (but not the actual stealing of those numbers) and your number was on the site, would you fight for my right to keep the site up?

I'm merely pasting numbers on a website, which isn't illegal.
Wow, contrasting this with the latest 2 experiences my family had:

My stepfather went for a routine visit to the doctor in Vienna, Austria. They found a suspicious object, and decided to treat him immediately, and he was operated on the very next day. It ended up being benign, but I was amazed at their speed of treatment.

My uncle went for a cardiologist evaluation here in Montevideo, Uruguay (where we have a form of socialist-style medicine in the style called Mutualism). They found a suspicious spike in his heartbeat, which they suspected to be a treatable syndrome (Wolff-Parkinson-White), and decided to do some special evaluations. He was treated (with full anaesthetics) one week later (at almost zero cost).

Both were quite good experiences, times are a little slower in Uruguay but everybody has access to basic medicine.

That said, I suspect that for difficult-to-catch diseases, you have to make yourself a bother, otherwise you might slip through the cracks like your friend almost did (doctors here in Uruguay are heavily penalized if they take too much time with one patient).
A better arXiv
To me, the offer exists. Is called Cuevana.tv (http://www.cuevana.tv)

I would GLADLY pay Cuevana 35$ a month to watch the content in there. That's 35$ the industry is not getting from me when they could.

Hollywood should embrace sites like Cuevana: they would have the distribution, the bandwidth, up-loaders, ratings, subtitles... all outsourced for FREE.

Not to mention, these type of sites can work like marketing tools: you have ratings, user sentiment, geography...

It pains me the amount of effort being placed to find a solution to stop this. It makes no sense.
Clarifying The Ruby GIL
Tablets may not be a fad, but I sure hope tablet style interfaces for laptops and desktops are. The UI should be adapted to input devices and screen size.
Very cool.

I'm not seeing a license file, or any mention of licensing. You might want to toss that in there, if you want to allow / encourage people to use it.
This one is funny though:

"I'm a Very Unhappy Facebook User, and I currently make $10,001 in creating Facebook's content.
I'm ONLY interested in jobs as a Happy Facebook User that pay at least $10,002 in creating awesome content."
Malware automatically uploading stolen data to the File sharing sites
Ok, I didn't know that. What I should investigate is whether the same people that authorized those shady tactics are still in charge there (or whether that culture persists).
My cable ISP just implemented a 150GB monthly limit. At 1gbps, this is 20 seconds of transfer.

I can't wait for Google (or anyone really) to blow away these awful regressive ISPs.
The term you are looking for is 'zero-sum game'
Ecobee's "where to buy" page points me at a bunch of HVAC contractors. Not really the sort of places where I'd come across the product while browsing.

Am I mistaken in thinking that the Ecobee is significantly more expensive than the Nest?
Given that EEGs record currents from the brain, I see no reason that similarly (even differently) place electrodes would cause current flow to the brain.
What? No they don't, unless you're making the handler in a loop.

$( "div" ).click( function() {} );

Each div will have the same handler applied, it doesn't make a new one for every div.
Interesting story -- I've attempted to use mturk a few times in the past, but it is actually a lot of work to get it right. Good instructions are really important, as well as a way to measure performance.

Good luck to them as I think they might have made mturk easier to use for people like myself who see the value but couldn't figure out how to "make it work."
That seems to be a bit of a slippery slope argument--just because we're willing to exonerate people convicted under laws that are now deemed unfair does not imply we are willing to convict people for old transgressions of a new law.
Today you accidentally send out a test email (with the word bitches).

That makes me worried that tomorrow you'll accidentally send out another email leaking my details, or something similar.

I'm glad you didn't suffer too much for this small error, but the small errors can have big consequences.
Romanian Prime Minister Admits He Has No Idea Why Romania Signed ACTA
Yes! This was my biggest gripe when switching from Windows - the mouse 'feel' is, well, wrong. I played around with the mouse settings, downloaded software to change the acceleration curve - nothing worked!

I'm now used to the mouse behaviour on OS X, but every time I have to switch back to Windows to do some testing I realise what I'm missing.

The mouse is such a crucial part of the experience it's odd that Apple haven't gotten it right.
> Pallet places much more emphasis on using recipes (or crates as we call them) as library functions, in cleanly versioned packages (jar files)

This is something that I can certainly appreciate and something that I've discussed at length with colleagues. In general dsl's require that you perform some impressive acrobatics when you want to extend them and this becomes particularly frustrating when you consider that a programming language like Ruby already has many well thought out facilities for said extensions (mostly directed at chef here). I'd like to think there's some happy middleground between a dsl that's easy to dive into and making use of the language constructs we've come to depend on everywhere else.
I'm also not a fan of patents1, but having to have a product in the market in order to defend a patent just introduces another, different type of breakage.

How hard would it have been for Honeywell to slap out a craptacular prototype product to be "in the market" and then sue Nest? Not hard, if they cared to do it.

How hard would it be for Nest (or another small company), if they had the original patent, to bring a product to the market in order to qualify to sue Honeywell? Maybe not impossible, but surely harder than the reverse.

If I grant that patents should exist, or at least that they DO exist, it seems reasonable that reducing an invention to practice (but not necessarily to marketability) is enough to go seek a patent, such that you could then seek funding or partnership opportunities at far more favorable terms than if all you had was a secret invention that you couldn't patent until you were able to bring it to market with money you didn't have and couldn't get.

1-excepting perhaps in drug discovery cases, where I am less certain of what I think
This is actually very good advice, and you can extend it to comments in source code.

When I was young, I sometimes couldn't resist the urge to put strong wording in comments, like:

// This sucks, use a better data structure for it!

Invariably, when I revisited the code months or years later, I thought by myself: Why swearing? You can also express disagreement in a more neutral way.

So, nowadays I use a better commenting style for bad code and tech debts, always with a motivation along it:

// TODO: This datastructure is probably inadquate
// here because of O(N^2) lookup
ok that sounds good though
NodeUp:Twelve - A Node.js Podcast
You don't have to position it onto the button. The button extends all the way to the corner. So it's a flick followed by a click. A flick alone will trigger the menu accidentally pretty often, and a flick followed by a hover is slower than a flick followed by a click.
It’s even worse for first-time users: There’s no visual cue at all for returning to the Metro interface.

This mattered two decades ago. It does not matter now. Two decades ago, there was a large number of people who were just starting to integrate computers into their daily lives. This is no longer true. Computers are integrated into people's daily lives. The only people [1] who are "just starting" to integrate computers into their daily lives are the same people who are "just starting" to integrate using a toilet into their daily lives.

From now on, people will grow up with computers, and I think we should design interfaces to reflect that. "But what about first-time users?" should no longer be an interesting question.

[1] I'm sure someone can come up with specific counter-examples. I submit that those cases are rare enough that they shouldn't be a primary consideration for designing interfaces. Of course, there should be interface back-doors for disabilities and such, but that is not the same as primary considerations for most people.
Im not from US so i never seen Netflix but dont they use flash like nearly everyone else? And why do they use silverlight, drm maybe?
8 is looking more and more like Vista Take2.

And yes, that seems silly and inflammatory... but it has all the hallmarks of Vista's over-zealousness, last minute changes and disdain for Microsoft's core customers.
Recipe reuse in chef is very much at the source code level
- checkout a recipe and edit it for your specifics. Pallet
places much more emphasis on using recipes (or crates as
we call them) as library functions, in cleanly
versioned packages

This is huge; when I was using chef re-use was an absolute mess. Ruby has all this great existing gem infrastructure for first-class dependencies and distribution, but chef ignores all that and just sends you back to cobbling together git repositories.
What do you store the results in? MySQL? Redis? ping.txt?
I'm in the US and just went through their "Where to buy" screens-- it showed a $350 price tag.
The Thousand Cuts Fitness Program
HNHalfLife aims to increase discussion half-lives on Hacker News
Bay Area startup seeking Co-Founder (traction + paying customers)
Teamly.com (Bay Area) - Team productivity SaaS tool (Basecamp for managing teams, not projects). Check out the site to get more info on what the product is and try it out for free. It is built with ruby on rails, JS, Chef, MySql, AWS, Rspec, etc.

Where we are - I recently left my very well-paying salary job to work on Teamly with my co-founder. We are now both working on Teamly full time. We have an up and running product, good traction (very active users), paying customers (freemium model), and a ton of user feedback. We are close to a small angel round of funding and are in talks with a few accelerators. We are now focusing on our data + user feedback (we have tons of feedback) to really improve the product.

Who we are - Matt Berman (me, growth hacker) and Scott Allison (hustler) are the two current co-founders. My background is mostly in user acquisition and coding but I have experience with business as well. I've worked at large corporations and startups alike. Scott has had 3 previous successful businesses and is the most dedicated hustler I've ever met. He is technical in terms of knowledge but doesn't code.

Who we are looking for - We are looking for our 3rd and final co-founder to round out our skill set. We are definitely looking for another hacker to join us. This is not a "small equity" type position, we are looking for a true co-founder. Expertise with Rails is a must since Teamly is built on Rails. The three main qualities we are looking for in a co-founder are: expertise/knowledge of our stack, passion/dedication to startups and our space, and resourcefulness (aka scrappiness). We are looking for someone who is in the Bay Area as well.

We believe we are on to something special and are currently at an exciting point for our startup. If you are interested in learning more, we'd love to hear from you!

Matt & Scott
Teamly.com
matt@teamly.com
Why do you have yellow strikes through all the key words?
Hire this man!
"Beane and the A's were mostly focusing on offense, because that's were they could find value."

This is not true. One, the big three of Zito, Hudson, and Mulder is one of the best front ends to a pitching staff in baseball history. Moreover, Isringhausen, Bradford, Mecir, and others on that staff were all players undervalued by the traditional ways of evaluating players. They had a team ERA+ 122. That is not a team which is "mostly focussing on offense."
Ask HN: Flurry VS Google analytics SDK for iOS
Which one worked better for you?