skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not sure why anyone is surprised. You can't listen to your iPod during take-off on a commercial airliner, despite the fact that there is no proof that they can cause any meaningful interference. How on earth did anyone expect the licensing bodies would accept that LightSquared's technology could be trusted not to interfere with such a critical infrastructure component as GPS?
Ah, was wondering the same. I was using FireFox and there was nothing Parallax about it. Tried it in Chrome and then it works. :)
India Leads With $10.3bn in Clean Energy Investments
Bloomberg reports that India invested $10.3bn clean tech last year, accounting for 4% of the world's total investments, but does this mean energy independence?
Making mistakes is human.
How you deal with them is what shows your professionalism.
Have you tried Amazon's streaming service?

56,000 titles and counting. You can generally stream to your laptop, Roku device etc.

One step further, of the current top 5 or so Movies on the Pirate Bay all the ones that are currently available on DVD are available via Amazon Instant Streaming.
The Tim Ferriss Falacy
Virtual Server Hosting
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I'd like to see if the author is still happy about his decision after a couple of years. In particular, if he can't raise funds because he is unable to bootstrap for long enough, or get big enough from bootstrapping alone. The benefit of working before starting a startup, especially for an investment bank, is that you can save a bunch of money, then fund some of the stuff to get the company rolling internally, which will make raising money much easier. You don't want to end up in the situation where you can't expand (fast) because you don't have the money, and you can't raise money because you are too small and unproven. In retrospect, I wish I would have gotten a good job before doing a startup, it would have made things much easier.
WORST TITLE EVER.
This is an amazing article, and it's point of view is so debatable, but the title doesn't attract as the article it self.
Damn You Autocorrect founder posts 25 favorite auto-correct fails of all time
While I concede it is possible that was the intent of that line, I think there could have certainly been a better way of conveying that rather point. Particularly, they could have plainly stated "the law itself was unjust", and dropped that weird "While...".
If I remember well, XP wasn't received with great enthusiasm either. A lot of companies remained on Windows 2000. XP became good with the release of SP2.
That's highlighting, not strikethrough
Request for Startup: Codecademy for Stocks
book from local book store
book/ebook from amazon.com
ebook on Kindle
book/ebook from barnesandnoble.com
ebook on Nook
ebook on Kobo
ebook on iBooks
ebook from Google Books
book from online store with best price
Things Are Not O.K. - Paul Krugman
A Short History of Money
EDIT: I am referring to the dumbing down, over simplification, extreme minimalization, and looks over usability of next generation UIs in general. NOT to Window's entire "Metro UI".

From this day forward we shall call this abomination "Kindergarden UI".

Example: Tom: "Hey how's Windows 8 compared to Ubuntu?". Stacy: "Oh they're both going to shit, they've got kindergarden UI now."

I wish Microsoft would realize that Windows is NOT OSX. In their desperate attempt to fabricate a Windows Cult following and "it just works" culture they're going to end up destroying the very thing that made windows what it is.

I tried unsuccessfully to convert to mac a few years ago, and numerous times to convert to linux. In my perticular situation, my linux installs have less stability than my windows 7 installation. After all trialing 10+ operating systems over the last 7 years I realized: I love Windows, it's Microsoft I hate.
Clicked on "remote" then clicked the submit button and got "Mongo::OperationFailure in Posts#index "
See, I have a different story with Fedora (and maybe this is partly due to Gnome 3). I installed it on my desktop/home server. I've got 6 hard drives, and I couldn't manage to get SMART warnings to stop popping up because one of them had 6 reallocated sectors. Like, every 3 minutes SMART was screaming at me.

Then I was trying to install Amahi and it required a package that was different than one that was installed by default. I could not figure out how to get yum to replace the current package with the one my software needed. The help from the developers? "--force is never a good option, so we don't offer it". Thank you, Microsoft, for protecting me from myself. I uninstalled the package, and it automatically uninstalled Network Manager and everything related to DHCP/networking. After that, I couldn't install the package I wanted because I couldn't configure a network connection.

It really seems the only time I have to resort to using the command line is when the distro's "intelligence" breaks the GUI. Ubuntu doesn't not break things, but at least when it does I know the best recourse (since I partition /home on it's own drive) is to just reinstall. Wouldn't have fixed a thing in Fedora.

I grew up on a command line, and I really hate being forced to go back to that just because the developers don't care enough make the GUI work properly.
‘We the People’ Loses Appeal With People Around the World
You may not have been judging people on their past.

Thanks for retracting that. :)
Sounds like you're unclear on the concept of "hacker" and "hack". Remember, if people never reinvented the wheel, we'd still be rolling our carts around on discs made of three pieces of wood.
Couple curiosity questions: Which system did you start using? Also, have you done any activities requiring high precision at fine detail, such as gaming or design?
CSS variables are in the works
As a third year student at a Business School in the northeast. I can relate to how you feel.

You're being pushed and herded through internships and boring classes into what you think will be your dream job. But then you realize that none of that is what you love.For me and it sounds like for you this is when I realized that computers and technology are my passion and that's what I love.

Everyone always says that people should do what they love, and that's how to be happy. I think that for some people that's easy and for some others it's really hard. I usually find myself having to do the wrong thing before I figure out what the right thing (or way) is.

Lots of respect for taking a chance and doing what you think is awesome. I wish I had the courage to do the same. Goodluck with your first startup, I hope it's a blast :)
Damn clever phone manual from Samsung (video)
Dropbox's last valuation was about $4bn, so if a "handful" of startups have talent acquisitions, which tend to be in the $5 to $50m range, that would confirm his argument.
I'm not so sure that the need for touch is really that great in a desktop environment. It's probably cool for someone looking over your shoulder and wanting to take control of your computer. But for sitting at the computer and making something happen... I don't think the usability needs to be 'equal'. And in the desktop world it should favor the keyboard/mouse.

Here's an anecdote for touch vs. mouse/keyboard:

Pretty sure I'm not - nor is my family setup - typical of a windows user. We have two touchscreen desktops in our house.

I have a two year old that can work the touchscreen very proficiently. My 5 & 7 year old stick with the mouse and never use the touch, I almost never use touch, and my wife rarely uses it.

Based on my personal observations, on the desktop, touch is good for very new users or those who lack the physical coordination to control the mouse and keyboard. Otherwise, mouse and keyboard wins.

The Windows 8 mouse experience is really lacking at the moment. I expect that gets a major update in the next version.
Pointer Lock API Brings FPS Games to the Browser
http://codeyear.com/
to be honest, I remember reading on HN a similar comments about DropBox, that its a matter of setting up FTP server.
And yet when was the last time you heard of someone having to apply a patch to the firmware on their thermostat?
I’m Not Looking for a Technical Co-Founder, I’m Looking for a Technical Leader
Not sure if you are being sarcastic, but there is some research to back that claim (http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/study_says_patents_hind...)
It's not just "switchers" that complain about this stuff. If there is one thing Apple can't get right, it's mouse input.

The input lag is one thing. What about the actual hardware? Remember the hockey puck? The pro mouse? The mighty mouse?

There is a joke somewhere in there... maybe about Jobs having to "invent" multi-touch because he couldn't grock the concept of a mouse.
Design 101: Stop Yelling
Just because there's a free option doesn't mean you can't successfully offer a non-free alternative. Books have long been available for free - from libraries - yet the bookstore industry has done well both online and offline, despite the lending library system.

Imagine the uproar that would occur in the publishing industry now if the government proposed to create a lending library system where none existed.
The Why of Your Startup
The Santa Cruz Experiment: Why You Should Care About Big Data
Yeah it can and does happen but fortunately its outside the workplace so an event such as this probably wouldnt be the result of a drunken stupor ;-)
Mouse overs should be better now, thanks.
Here's a completely different solution to the same problem:

http://hckrnews.com/about.html

Grab the browser plugins from there, and then use hckrnews.com as your front page.
Has anyone measured the "write amplification" rate of LevelDB? I have noticed small writes cause lots of disk writes (which is an issue on SSD) but haven't measured it with actual numbers yet.
Anonymous May Have Completely Destroyed This Military Law Firm
I've written something similar as a Chrome extension:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/kikfikaiccdaabdilg...

Code is here: https://github.com/tkahn6/hn-newcomments-chrome
I've been using this for a long time: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/imeeonmdbakdmilnnc...

HNHalfLife's "new comment" indicator seems a little subtle to me. I like how HNCommentTracker makes the new comments really stand out. However, I like the saved page idea. (Will it indicate that there are new comments on your saved pages?) HNCommentTracker also shows new comments on the "threads" page. Does HNHalfLife do this?
Is there any way on HN that I can save this comment for future reference? That was a pretty apt analogy.
I think it would be quite unlikely that the majority of users would be given a Windows 8 machine without some kind of tutorial. Windows has had a "Welcome to Windows" since at least Windows 95 (IIRC). Corporate users are generally given a brief documentation page on how to use their computer (we rolled out Windows 7 last summer with a 3-page document with screenshots of how to get around).

There will be precious few who can never get the hang of it.
K-12 Marketplace Sees Major Flow of Venture Capital
What An Autopsy Looks Like — and Why You Need One
If by "AppleTV" you mean the iTunes Store (since AppleTV does not provide its own content), you have to be joking. No wonder the content companies are most friendly to that place — it makes their old distribution channels look downright cheap. Three episodes of "Whitney" costs as much as a month's subscription to Netflix.
Ask HN: What are some potential themes for a hackathon?
We are going to be holding a hackathon for engineering students in college over a weekend, was wondering of some potential themes to base it around? Was thinking along the lines of payments or healthcare but they seem too generic. Thanks
That's pretty nice. I wonder if you could squeeze my <canvas> font rendering engine under 1K? The base64-encoded PNG font is 635 bytes, but you could probably use the 4×6 font by Janne Kujala to cut that down to ≈512 bytes.

http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dofonts.html

Edit: yes; a 1023-byte version, specialized for the 4×6 font, is now linked to from that page. The 1023 bytes includes the entire HTML file, including both the font and the code to render it.
hmm, thanks. It's probably a quite expensive license, as the default developer agreement is quite restrictive:
http://www.mail-archive.com/asterisk-dev@lists.digium.com/ms...

any explanation why 30% of calls were dropped?
I have a 750 watt PS but typically the system case uses 150-250 watts. I overclocked the CPU turbo-mode only because most of the time my system idles below 2 GHz. Software development also has very low utilization of the video card.

I am not familiar with Matrox video cards. I believe certain ATI cards support 3 monitors.
Personally, I use a mouse all the time, I'm not a fan of trackpads. I'm not much of a gamer, though, which may explain why I haven't noticed the 1/30th of a second lag.
Hey Noah, I can't speak for the OP but I will speak for myself here as I share a similar sentiment. You can't please everyone all the time and I wouldn't expect anyone to start taking advice on how to make a post more relevant to me personally. I would simply find another blog that fits my interests. There are plenty. You know the audience and you did a good job of engaging them. Your writing style is great too. You totally captured the 37Signals voice while still making it your own.

Now, what I was talking about is a pattern I see where posts from particular sources end up here very frequently. When I see that happen I start to wonder if they're here because they truly are great articles or just because they came from a particular source with a lot of clout. There's nothing wrong with this in and of itself, it just makes me wonder if we're starting to give particular sources a free pass, allowing them to ride the wave of their previous successes without really evaluating if the latest article truly is worthy of so much recognition. For me, the test would be to put the same article on an unknown blog and see if people still feel the same way about it.

Please know, that there's nothing about the content or style of your post that I object to at all. My mind just goes off in that direction after seeing any source on the front page very frequently in a short period of time. And you're right that this on the front page because the majority found it appealing. We have a great community here and I trust them to choose what's good. I want to thank you for posting this comment here because it forced me to be honest with myself and ask, "what made me react so negatively/too critically to this post being here?" and while the reason I mentioned earlier is still true I have to admit that there are two less than desirable traits or attitudes that I let slip out.

The first was plain old jealousy. The "I wish I was successful and cool like 37Signals" type jealousy. The second was negativity for negativity's sake. It was like I just had to go against the grain here for the sake of going against the grain. I'm also in a bad mood today which doesn't help. I think I have to admit I was partly just being petty and that's not cool. Rather than delete my previous comment I'll just man up and admit I was letting my inner asshole/troll slip out and maybe others will be able to learn from me and catch themselves when theirs slip out. Anyway, it wasn't a bad post at all and I'm surprised you even took the time to respond to this unwarranted negativity.
> There are outstanding distribution licenses with many companies for many different parts of the world which can't just be wiped away so this service can just spring to life.

Copyright is not a right, it s a privilege given to promote the creation of new works in exchange for reasonable access to that work.

Hollywood could easily lobby the government about their contracts not being in the spirit of copyright and that they need to be wiped clean in the interest of the American people.

Instead, they lobby to reduce the reasonable access even further. Forcing people into pirating even more.

I guess they know they have a better chance changing the law for 300 million people than to change it for a couple of other corporations. Pretty sad, really.
I'm sorry if I have offended you, that was not my intention. There is nothing terribly wrong with the post. It's fine. That is not the point. My point is that there seems to be a certain cult following to several persons/companies in the industry among HN readers, which doesn't entirely surprise me, but does disappoint me. I think this community should be more free-thinking and not drink anyone's KoolAid. In fact, I'd like to see posts coming from from certain figures given a much more critical treatment than a reverent one. HN is full of useful, insightful critique, but there could be more of it, and we can do away with the unnecessary reverence.
If your website does not load correctly with IE8, which has the largest market share in the IE group and is also about 20%-30% of all internet browsers, this is a failure, especially if there is no technical reason for this to be.
From this day forward I shall call people who tell others what to think "doomsayers". Judging a UI before you can actually try a working, functional version of it and then espousing that ignorance to others is just asinine. Even worse if you've tried it and hated it just because it's different.

"Kindergarden UI" is a ridiculous term, and very subjective. I really hope no one actually takes your advice on anything.
This Is How Facebook Will Conquer Your Real World Identity
With the photo in their possession, they may crawl it sometime in the future and extract (via computer vision, facial recognition tech, whatever) further information about the person, their friends in the photo, etc. if they hadn't done it already. They may mine the metadata in the image itself for camera GPS position, etc.

There is still very much value in these photos, and a great chunk of it can be unnervingly personal.
Initiative over hype.
Congrats guys! The Ridejoys are a really friendly, smart, and humble group of people. I'd really recommend working with them if you can, so if you're thinking about applying to their designer or software engineer job openings, definitely do so!
I agree with you, that was the point of my post. I think that touch interfaces and desktop interfaces can stay distinct or complementary. I think there is an expectation that Windows 8 must make a touch based app great in desktop mode and vice-versa which I think is untenable.

It's like old efforts to make cars and vans run on the same body. The cars handled like vans and the vans handled like awkward cars.

If you're looking to only use a mouse, I suspect you will be spending time in Desktop mode. I know that the CTP has enhanced the mouse support in RT mode, but it's still touch-first apps. I don't like tablets and don't love the nature of touch interfaces and I know that I will not be happy with a mouse and WinRT mode ever. Frankly, if the buttons and layouts are accommodating for touch interfaces, it's NOT going to be optimal for use with a mouse. (I think some additional evidence of this would be the intrusion of ribbon into Windows Explorer. IMO it's pretty obvious that it's motivated by touch interface needs.)
I liked your playlist. Thanks!
News Flash: Apple Not IT Friendly
Yes exactly. And furthermore the proposition is even more interesting when you consider that as a consumer you don't actually want to think about these things.

Running the washing machine at night when it's cheapest may not be desired, rather running it when no one is home and it's off peak. Turning on alarms, switching off lights, dropping temperature automatically. Allowing individuals in the household to have their own work patterns and temperature presets etc.

The key point is that it has to be effortless. No complex interfaces or setup. Plug, play, forget. And only in the next 12-24 months do enough technologies hit critical mass to make it economically feasible.
Strategies For Selling Stock Post-IPO
In most cases (99.5%, except for foreign movies), you can.

The better question is: are you truly willing to pay or are you just like the "I'm a vegetarian meat-eating" guy?

You know... wanting to be labelled as "I have CC but no way to spend easily".
Get her an old copy of Kids and the Commodore 64 and a Commodore 64. Then she'll be retro cool.
Its usually a bad idea for individuals to hold specific stocks.

Its never a bad idea for individuals to learn some basic code.
Are you actively using other windows while in the process of launching a new one? It's not like the start screen stays there forever, or the window you were looking at goes away. There are a lot of nit-picking curmudgeons in this thread.
As soon as I "experienced" unity I RAN to gnome, screamed in horror, then ran to KDE and just cried a bit to myself. What the hell is happening to linux? Ever since the nearing of Steve Jobs' decline & death it's like every amateur designer in the world's been tyring to take his place.

They're all trying to mimick his vision and design but without understanding it at all. I think this is why we keep ending up with all these heartless, sterile, Kindergarden UI designs.
> streamable via the web with proper copy protection

That won't fly with me. If I'm paying for content, I expect to be able to make backups and put it on any device I want/need. Again, proposing paid solutions that are harder and more inconvenient than free is just not feasible. You can argue the ethics all day long; but economically, no way.

On the other hand, a large proportion of people will pay for a subscription rather than per-view. That won't work for me or a lot of other users, but something like e.g. Spotify is definitely the music industry's best bet for now.

If, as you say, these kinds of solutions won't fly with the big content companies, they're just not going to survive in the long run.
I've known about LightSquared (and their spectrum issue) for awhile now. The impression I get is that there is little technical evidence that using their spectrum will infringe upon and overpower the neighboring GPS and other signals. LTE has VERY tight technical specifications, just to get valid data through, as the throughput is so high, and is unlikely to be a noisy signal out of band, enough so to cause interference with it's neighbors. If you'll notice, the linked article carries very little (or none) technical detail, it almost sounds like some fear mongering politician wrote it. This ain't the 1940's here people, we aren't just sending random analog radio waves out using oscillators with a 10% tolerance ratio. The spec is tight, the technology is bleeding edge, and modern receivers (of GPS and the like) have pretty good front end filters, out of band noise shouldn't be a huge problem for them.
Capitalism rewards understanding: Why your business needs Philosophers
That doesn't solve the problem. Anyone acting as a patent troll could just create a proof of concept; it wouldn't add significantly to their expenses in most cases. I don't think you could safely define "marketed product" in any way that excludes such cases, without effectively limiting the use of patents to large companies. Meanwhile, companies building actual products can still create a giant pile of excessively broad patents which apply to your product, and which also apply to any better product that tries to displace yours. That doesn't make them better than the patent trolls in any way that matters to the end user.

By definition, patents exist to prevent competition. If you build a product, it should compete with everything else. If you can't stand competition, get out of the way of those who can.
Perhaps this is the problem.

Does content have inherently lower value now that it is abundant, and distributed for (nearly) free?

If content providers charged say, (cost of bandwidth)+10%, for each item rather than arbitrary whole-dollar prices, they would certainly see more takers--and perhaps higher profit.