skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Finally, somebody said it! A 30 day app is a hobby. The chances of success are like winning the lottery. It is ideas like this that give people very unrealistic expectations. In my experience there are 2 main types of people who are hurt by the "30 day app" idea and others like it.

The first is the Instant Millionaire type. They think they just thought of the next Facebook now all they need is someone who knows how to use a text editor to build it! So they get it done by an outsourced company in India or they hire their nephew who "is good at computers" or they hire the local "web developer" in town that just finished reading "HTML for Dummies" and charges $100 for a website that looks like it was converted to HTML from a Word document. Inevitably the idea turns out to be crap, it fails, and it ends up being someone else's fault somehow.

Then there are the legit hackers who are super passionate, have a great idea, and have the skills to execute. They see all the stories of the quick hack app that seems to be blowing up online and they feel like the only way to compete is to keep up with the guys who are doing this stuff. But the reality is that if you really want to make a business out of your idea there's a lot more to it than just building version 1 and sending the link to your friends. It's sad because these people fail and get down on themselves never realizing that they had unrealistic expectations to begin with.

These stories of the 30 day app and others like it are the exception. They're so rare that when they do happen it gets massive amounts of attention. But those stories are the exceptions with the rule being that even well planned businesses default to failure. I site around HN and read stories of all these incredibly talented people doing stuff that's incredible and it makes me feel like I suck unless I keep up. It promotes the idea that success is quick and dirty. I hope everyone remembers that all the trends and fads in business are either bullshit or you really need to adapt them to fit your situation and have realistic expectations from the beginning.
The racist/anti-Obama/anti-Democrat remarks are getting many more "likes" than those with opposing viewpoints. That does seem kind of odd for a site like NBC; I would expect the numbers to be more balanced, at the very least. I wonder if an influential right-wing site linked to the article, and this is what's driving all the traffic.
Eating Our Own Content Marketing Pudding: An Intigi Sneak Peek
>Remove control and it's easy to remove buttons. There is no brilliant design or innovation there.

I beg to differ. Deciding which control to remove is the essence of brilliant design and innovation. To paraphrase Einstein, good design is as simple as possible, and no simpler.

The iPod didn't allow you to manage files on your device, letting it be simpler than Creative's products. Yes, it also overcame a bunch of other barriers (physical interface, size, skipping, transfer speed, etc), but removing what everyone erroneously assumed was essential certainly contributed to their success. It's no surprise that the Nest guys are using the same playbook.
One could argue that the very fact that you saw fit to copy my statement to present an "impressive" rebuttal proves that my statement was valuable artistically.
Thanks, the article wasn't terribly clear on this either. I found it kind of odd that Redbox would aquire a POS solutions provider...
The differing mouse "feel" that you're describing is most likely a result of the different mouse acceleration curve that OS X uses. (Mentioned in the article) I've noticed this too but I was able to resolve it by changing the mouse acceleration curve using this tool: http://triq.net/articles/mouse-acceleration-preference-pane-... Now I think it feels just as nice as Windows.
Twitter Bootstrap for Drupal
ridejoy is pretty cool. try it out!
> Where are the startups?

This type of device may need FDA approval which would require the setup of clinical trials, etc. So that would be a significant barrier to entry for startups.
@monastic

I see :)
And about the "can't even conceive" bit, well, I think he's just saying that. That's what idealists do sometimes.
For me personally, sharing shouldn't be frictionless (which Facebook have started using as a synonym for 'involuntary'). Sharing should be a conscious decision. I do understand how this is beneficial to both Facebook and Fandalism, and although I don't agree with the concept, it looks like you've built a really great product, and you deserve a good bit of exposure and success. I'll certainly be evaluating it for a while. Great work, sir.
What on earth can u do with href.ly?
Hmm I cannot tell if it runs for all copies of Firefox, I have several installed.

Cannot tell if it's the sandbox running or the native plugin either, just says 11.2.300.130

Oh nevermind, it only runs protected mode on Vista and W7, they exclude XP, oh well.

I guess only Chrome can sandbox Flash on XP.
Your impression is wrong, it is actually very often that things like this happen. You basically say I didn't do it, but even if I did, it is not illegal.
That's a pretty ridiculous comparison.
Even if you aren't interested in using HTML5 Boilerplate for your projects, the comments littered throughout the repository are enlightening.

The style.css file[1] in particular is full of gems—many of the comments contain a link to a relevant, in-depth article explaining the rationale behind the given rule.

[1]: https://github.com/h5bp/html5-boilerplate/blob/master/css/st...
Looks like a great project. Just curious: How did it resonate so far in regards of downloads?
The Spice Operas are Coming
A short history of _American_ money.
Design/artistic types are definitely welcome - a few months ago we actually had David Kadavy, author of "Design for Hackers" as our speaker!
Once I left a comment in a source file of the following form.

# This comment included for the benefit of those grepping for swear words: shit.

I don't think I'd do it today, but I was young and it was for a place that had demotivational posters hanging in their lobby.
Charles Dickens
charles dickens
Charles Dickens (1812-1870), novelist, was born on 7 February 1812 in Portsmouth,
England, son of John Dickens, a clerk in the Navy Pay Office, and his wife Elizabeth, née Barrow.
http://www.psdmate.com/2012/02/06/charles-dickens/
Netscape included a mail client.
First Day of Being A Full-time Startup Founder
"to be smut, it must be utterly without redeeming social importance" -- tom lehrer, "smut"
Will the America Invents Act change anything to this problem? Or should it require another reform?
“Let’s see how the competition goes…” - Ballmer Laughs at iPhone Release
Anyone who games at all can confirm this. There's a reason why no competitive starcraft player plays on OSX, despite it being available on that system. The lag is immediately noticeable. The acceleration curves are fixable and fine, but the input delay has led to enough frustration personally that I ended up installing windows on my MBP for gaming. It's a shame, I really like OSX as a platform, but these tiny hurdles stop hoards of gamers from touching it.
Don't be jealous, on the contrary -- be thankful you got to learn without having the correct answer handed to you on a silver platter.

If there's anything to be thankful for in the current climate, it's the diversity of browsers and device form factors forcing designers to think about the layout outside of Photoshop.
This raised a (silly) question in my head: Does a public comment on the Internet, like the one he made, fall under his copyright thus allowing him to deny you the right to copy it?
Isn't it problematic that 11, 01 and 10 XOR together to get 00? And why not use a simple counter?
The police are fully within their rights to determine if a law is worth enforcing. Here in Ontario it's still on the books that if you purchase alcohol it has to be taken directly to the property it's going to be stored at. IIRC the law dates back to bootlegging days to prosecute the mafia shipping the alcohol down into the US. This isn't even mentioning the laws still on the books that got inherited from the British system.
If package management was as a happily solved of a problem as you imply, I think we would see fewer solutions out there. Each tends to solve for the needs of its own environment, users, and sometimes the whims and bias of its developers. When you ask, why not use "gems or maven jars or cpan or whatever" I think you have to stop and ask, "why are there so many options already?"

There are many views out there for what the answer should be for Chef cookbook workflow. What you are "baffled" by, another person uses daily and argues for.

When using knife to download a cookbook into your git managed chef repository, it creates a 'vendor' branch to store the upstream version. You can utilize this to create diffs and patches to contribute back to that cookbook project. It is up to the author exactly how to do that.

Some really like git submodules, others prefer one cookbook per git repository, some just have one company-wide repository and ask you to fork and apply branches against.

I think you're right about the 'Chef toolchain.' There are [large enterprise] users of Chef who don't care that Chef is written in Ruby nor particularly want to learn Ruby. They want to use Chef. Opscode continues to strive to provide tools to make the workflow easier for Chef users as a whole over preference to a particular toolchain, especially one tied to and solving problems for a single language.
(from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_test)

The Miller test was developed in the 1973 case Miller v. California. It has three parts:

* Whether "the average person, applying contemporary community standards", would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest,

* Whether the work depicts/describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by applicable state law,

* Whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.
In principle, k is limited by O(log n), where n is the number of changes to the database; it's not quite accurate to call it "arbitrarily large".
Touchpad support in Linux is a crapshoot and the uni-button, multitouch touchpads are even worse. If you poke around the Ubuntu forums there is a rewrite of the touchpad driver that works better for Macs. Then you just have to deal with the atrocious battery life compared to OS X (though that has to do with MBP's lovely implementation of EFI and the graphics switching).
"I'm going to ..." = hasn't been done yet
American to offer Galaxy Tab 10.1 to premium class passengers
Sounds like sandboxing is only on Windows, not on other platforms?
I'm sorry but I think this is a failure of strategy.

Musicians use social networks to reach existing fans and acquire new ones. Speaking as a musician, ten years ago we were all about Myspace. These days we're on SoundCloud, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. We don't use Myspace because nobody else does either. We use YouTube, FB, and Twitter because everybody else does, and we use SoundCloud to share new music with hardcore fans and with each other.

If you're looking to share your music with as many people as possible, you put it on YouTube, not SoundCloud. If you want people to go to a show, you talk about it on Facebook or Twitter, not SoundCloud. If you want to get a label to sign your new track, or you want your hardcore fans to be able to hear your newest music right away, that's when you go to SoundCloud. If you're on SoundCloud, you're either a musician, a hardcore fan, or, more often than not, both.

What I'm basically saying here is that a social network for musicians gets something very fundamental backwards, because of the four social networks musicians use, SoundCloud is the least important, the least promoted, and also the only one which was actually built for us.

I'm not trying to denigrate SoundCloud, it is in fact awesome and incredibly useful, but it's so much more important for a musician to be where the fans are. Also, if your goal is to occupy a smaller niche like SoundCloud does, you're still more likely to succeed building tools which make it easier for a musician to graduate their fans from the "hitting Like on YouTube" level to the "downloading everything on SoundCloud" level.

I think this is kind of like, "I want to make a social network, what's a topic, musicians, ok go." Rock on, it's good to stay focused and keep shipping, but it's better to make stuff people want, and believe me, what musicians want is to be able to make music as much and as often as possible, and that means making money from music, and that means either fans or students.
But the point of the Miller Test is to define what obscenity is. If porn isn't obscene, then what is?

I'd say porn pretty clearly fails the Miller Test, with the possibility for argument of works containing elements relating to the prurient interest being granted clemency under the third criterion, that is: someone may argue that a work containing a subsection that may generally be considered "obscene" should not be considered "obscene" on the whole because of its other literary, artistic, political, or scientific qualities.

So this case means that they have to prove that their specific pornography does not meet the 3rd criterion of the Miller Test to classify it as non-obscene.
New England’s Victory (for Big Data)
Not quite. Every edge in the dependency tree is assigned a random 64-bit id, and when a tuple is acked it sends the xor of all the incoming and outgoing edges to the acker.
WiB is more about appreciating barebone low-level tools, like C/Unix in the posted example. These tools are crude but technically polished, otherwise no-one would bother to use them.
I'm not sure if she's saying "you can't copyright porn" exactly. She's saying that particular movie they accused her of downloading is obscene, and you can't copyright obscene materials.

porn != obscene, they have different definitions under law.
Perhaps because those those species are borderline atrocious, but their non-meat parts is what keeps them within the realm of what is reasonable?
In regards to the "random people" scenario, I have found that people who harbour such feelings will almost never make them public in a public forum even if they feel comfortable telling close friends or acquaintances. I have found that this has somewhat changed over the past few years where more and more people are somewhat saying "meh" and openly voicing any anything-phobic thoughts.

I certainly think you're right about the fact that this can partly be attributed to the fact that more and more people have more efficient ways of posting these sorts of comments/articles but there also seems like there's something more to it. There seems to be some fundamental social change in the US that has emboldened people to feel comfortable to spew rhetoric publicly. It's almost like a legalized form of hate under the guise of free speech laws in ways that have never happened before.
Quite the minimalist... sure, changing his Mercedes-Benz every 6 months.
I'd like a simple interface to go back and browse/read those old threads (even if read-only). Has anyone done that?

(I had some archived but lost the archive... I know.)

For example, pick a date and see all the threads that started on that date.

However, I also have concern for the load/overload this might place on the HN systems. So... maybe present time is the best, all things considered. But I do miss the tone, quality, and signal/noise ratio of those early threads.
If you're going to write a new theme, please start from scratch instead of just modifying the TwentyTen theme. There is a ton you can strip out from that theme that is unnecessary.
Good point. I was curious about that too. Didn't consider the fact that there could be various in-bound links from various sites.
it can actually be good to put a deadline on the development. But as this article wisely points out, you should not expect for your work to be done once your have a released or release-able product. In many ways, you're just getting started.

As an aside, I think it's best to not be intimidated by what other people say they can do in a certain period of time. Different people take different amounts of time to get things done, based on what tools and techniques they have in their bag of tricks, and how long they've been working on a given problem domain. If someone brags that they did some awesome app in 7 days, but it would take you 20 or 40, just don't worry about it. It's not relevant for most discussions, and it's easy to get distracted by such things when evaluating ideas or products.
I don't believe that the materials used in art need have artistic value of their own.
Good points but it all depends on the definition of success. A 30 day app can very well make someone a small living and be successful in that sense.

Just because it doesn't make you a millionaire doesn't mean it's a failure.
I wouldn't use UTF-16 unless having to work with a legacy system. A lot of software claiming to handle UTF-16 is broken and really only works with UCS-2. You have to worry about endianess and so on.

If you develop an application for the international market you should probably go with UTF-8 as well. Maybe if you develop only for the Asian market it's a bit different. But in my experience significant amounts of text usually come in some form of data or markup format (HTML, XML, JSON, etc.) and usually those markup formats are defined in the ASCII subset. So UTF-8 still wins. Just take a random page from the Japanese Wikipedia and encode it in UTF-8 and in UTF-16. You'll see that UTF-8 almost always wins.
Ah, thanks for the heads up. I hadn't tested it extensively, but I'll fix that up.
The comments in that thread aren't much different than what's said on talk radio or even certain mainstream TV news and opinion programs. It's probably not worth worrying about for your business aspirations but certainly is an unpleasant facet of living in the USA.
He is saying that the statement...

>Steve Jobs was quite a miimalist in how he lived. He even debated for months what furniture to buy -- and he lived for a while in an unfurnished apartment.

...is factually incorrect.
A couple of days ago I talked to a very gifted friend of mine who is spending his days finishing up a truckload of patent applications for his current company. Something I find very sad because I think patents are inherently bad and I wish he would spend his time doing more worthwhile things.

However, in the space they operate they need patents to ward off other companies with large patent portfolios. In fact, he likened what they do to creating mine-fields. To make it really, really dangerous for other companies to even try to compete with you. And to make sure that no challengers will get uppity with you.

In any case, what stuck with me was what he said about his next startup; in his next startup he would spend most of the money on patent lawyers. Because inventing, developing and bringing an invention to market is just too risky these days. The money is better spent on rigging whatever IPR you have with patents to "increase the number of possible exit strategies".

This makes me really sad.
Try using something more colorful like a landscape or bokeh so that the perception of parallax feels natural and impactful. I had totally missed the parallax had it not been for the comments here.
Twitvid is hiring a Data/ Backend engineer
If you have always wanted to work on big data, we need you. We have millions of unique visitors a month and hundreds of millions of video plays a year. Our trafic is growing at 10-20% a month and the job should be a ton of fun.

We need someone to help us build our next generation search, and recommendation engines.

I am one of the engineers here and I would love to see us build a kick ass team.

send a link to your resume to my twitter account
@jdavid
Know of a persistant Instant Messenger service?
I've stumped myself in trying to find the right words to search the Internet for an existing solution so I'll try HN and see if my description yields anything from you all.<p>I've tried a bunch of Instant Messenger clients that offer different protocol support, etc. But there has been a feature I really want which keeps me logged-in to all of my chat services so that whether I have Internet access or not I can continue to collect messages and have them delivered when I log-in. It's one of the things about Google chat that I like and it'd be great to have this for all of my (4+) chat services.<p>Anyone got any leads to things that might solve this problem I face? Spotty internet and loss messages is quite frustrating!
Random 64 bit ids are used in the process. So the probability of accidentally completing a tuple is very, very small (1 / 2^64 for every ack).

Counters don't work because of the asynchronous nature of Storm. For example, consider a topology that looks like this:

A -> B -> C

\-> D

Let's say A emits 2 tuples (+2 differential), B processed those and emits 2 to C and 3 to D (+3 differential), C processes 2 tuples (-2 differential), and D processes 3 tuples (-3 differential).

Everything's asynchronous, so the acker could receive the acks in this order: A, C, B, D

The counter would then look like this: 2, 0, 3, 0

So it would think that the tuple was complete before it actually was, which means the counter algorithm doesn't work.
>Live by the patent sword, die by the patent sword.

So if Nest had owned no patents, Honeywell would not have sued them? I find this exceedingly hard to believe.
Judges must educate about contempt — before a tweeter goes to jail
Yeah, it is a godsend to all developers who aren't great designers.
Yea, I pretty much cannot stand OSX for exactly this reason.
So are you guys going to finally hire a designer or keep posting 'designer needed' ads on HN? ;)
Technically yes, I believe so. I suspect it would be rather hard to win that case however.
How useful is the API for speech on iOS? Do you have a link to the docs for it? I did a quick search for "speech recognition API for iOS" but I didn't see anything official from Apple on the results. (Is there an official one?)
Nope.
Lighter-weight (1.13kb compressed).
No dependencies (ie jQuery).
I wrote all the code.
Out of curiosity, did you ever check out DiveBoard? (http://www.diveboard.com/)

I haven't used it that much (2011 was a busy year for me), so I don't have much experience with it, but it looks nice.
The web consists of a lot of markup and javascript. That's all in ASCII compatible characters. So on the web UTF-8 usually wins even for Japanese or Chinese texts. For example take a random page of the Japanese Wikipedia and encode it in UTF-8 and in UTF-16. In all my tries UTF-8 was smaller.
Ask HN: Who will hire a Udacity grad? Would your startup?
Sebastian Thrun and Udacity may offer an entire CS curriculum. Do you see the large software companies like Facebook or Google hiring someone who has completed a degree worth of courses? Would your startup? Would you pay competitive rates? Let's assume the candidate has also built a decent portfolio of work/code.
There's a difference between formal language and the corporate lexicon. Formality is a form of respect, but managementspeak is essentially a political creation.
Shit Sam Altman says
You still have to worry about combining characters.
One of the best ways to determine if you might have apnea is to ask your sleeping partner. If they complain about you moving around a lot, or making lots of "grunting" noises or noises that sound like you are choking, then you are a good candidate.

If you don't have a sleeping partner, use a video camera and record yourself sleeping one night.