skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Firstly:

A designer is allowed to come up with whatever they want.

An engineer is subject to constraints, most notably: does it work, is it safe, and is it cheap. That last value does not always mean money--what is the cost if the design goes wrong, or if others have to maintain it, and so forth.

This is the popular notion of "engineering": that a stoic engineer sits down, sliderule or vim in the one hand and coffeepot in the other, and sits up into the wee hours of the night scrawling schematics onto a sheet of paper or typing into a VT101, only to go pound rivets or machine code the following morning with only the aid of his throbbing turgid member--this is absurd!

Secondly:

In your case, for an engine, I would ask for details about the weight, cost, power output, speed, time, maintenance lifecycle, and predicted loadings of the engine. Then, I would sit down and blackbox the inputs and outputs. Then, I would go and figure out mechanisms to accomplish each box. Then, I would look up the values for those materials--honestly, do you expect me to come up with the vibration amplitude of a forged 316 stainless shaft of x length and y rpm myself? You don't want me to not use tables for that!
Those things--the "engineering"--done, I'd get to the actual "design" work: how do I shape these mechanisms, how do I get them to fit in a box in the size we decided on, etc.

To hold you to your own standard:

Would you write your own web stack?

Okay, would you write your own protocol?

Your own compiler?

Linker?

OS?

Hardware?

We stand on the shoulders of giants--I am no less an engineer for using reference tables and formula than you are for using Redis/Rails/libc/Ruby/Python/etc.

The lack of invention? That's the sign of maturity.
This conversation should have ended years ago... Are people really still bickering?
E.g.

* Annual impact -- 5-20 kt (~Hiroshima)

* Indonesia superbolide (2009) -- 50 kt

* Tunguska (Siberia 1908) -- 10-15 Mt (~large hydrogen bomb)

* K-T extinction (65 MYA) -- 10^14 t = 100,000,000 Mt (complete detonation of ~2 million tons fusion fuel)

I'm not sure how far you can compare these figures -- issues like (i) how much energy is released as an atmospheric shock wave vs. infrared radiation vs. heat; (ii) what altitude the explosion is at.

http://www.nature.com/news/2002/021121/full/news021118-7.htm...

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v420/n6913/full/nature0...

http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news165.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous%E2%80%93Tertiary_ext...
I worry that this sort of article could be misinterpreted easily, even with the disclaimer.

It's talking about optimizing something that takes less than 1% of the vast majority of an application's cycles. Which doesn't really mean anything... Be careful using this sort of benchmark to disproportionately affect decision making.
It isn't clear if you meant to imply that Apple has made better decisions with Xcode. If that is what you are saying, I firmly disagree. This isn't meant to imply that MS is better. Having said that, I don't mind complexity in UI for professional tools. I've been programming for longer than a lot of people on this list have been alive (an assumption on my part). You learn the tool you have to use and move on. No big deal.

I have problems with dumb-ass decisions that make your job harder. Like compilers that don't accept /a/path/that has/spaces/in the string/. Or the absolutely dumb-founding way Xcode does not let you organize your files in a real file structure, you know, with directories and stuff, in the file system. Or how hard Xcode makes it to create use and maintain code libraries. I don't need my IDE to look and act like an iTunes clone. Thank you very much. Pretty doesn't matter to me. Easy and incredibly flexible and functional does. I mean, take the way they've absolutely ruined documentation access in Xcode 4 when compared to Xcode 3. True to iTunes style, the Organizer is overloaded with all kinds of crap it probably shouldn't do.

Anyhow, no tool is perfect, but there are salient examples of the less-than-perfect even in 2012.
This is not true. You _can_ develop programs that only work on Windows, but you can also choose your technologies carefully and make .NET programs that work on Mono. you can code stuff targeting other languages and so on.

It's developer's choice whether or not to code portable.
The questions proposed in the article seem to be optimized to produce the most bullshit responses.
International Money Transfers
Scalado introduce the world’s first object removal innovation in a mobile device
This privacy bill seeks to limit what businesses can do to consumers, not the government.
Show them the PIRE wheel, it will blow their minds: http://www.google.com/search?q=pire+wheel&hl=en&prmd...
I have actually used it. What a terrible browser! Every link opens new window? No thanks! and so many menus.. the only good thing is the included editor (i love colored text)...

Sorry Tim, i will try ViolaWWW instead which looks more promising. In every case, nothing beats CD-ROMs
I get ads on nanotechnology and Siemens. Maybe the Google Ad machine works different for each person. Oddly too, a search for Rick Santorum leads to Republican primary results fist and then ricksantorum.com second, but, then again, this is my work computer ;)
How the iPhone is changing the way Washington thinks
The point, imho, is not about you caring where your code is, it's about other people discovering that's where it is too.
Yes, I also have the zig-zag in mind. However, as a point, the lion will never catch him.

The lion has to move further to the side than the tamer, so the tamer switches directions after each "step". This works, because within a circle the tamer with his back to the wall has to move a little towards the lion while moving sideways. The lion moves a little bit more to the side a little bit less towards the tamer. Over time the lion comes closer and the steps become smaller. When it gets really close however, the round wall looks increasingly like a flat wall. Lion and tamer end up just moving sideways without ever touching? We need some more math for this.
I especially like that the entries put front and center the degree to which the official RFCs are actually respected by browsers. That content is all (obviously) in Wikipedia and other sources, but usually buried in a subsection.
I did email him. He told me I needed to go through Microsoft PR, and after I explained the topic of my story Microsoft PR declined to let me talk to him.
Someone finally noticed that the Internet replicates the internal chatter of the mind. The web is designed to prey on human weakness, to encourage wilfing through the Internet, and to discourage learning and meditation. If our machines are to help us realize our potential, we must teach our machines to meditate. We must quiet their computations.
Hmmm ... aren't these cogs called libraries?

But the question was: can I afford to go through a tcp socket (and that's a long way, possibly even to another machine) or not. A language cannot cover this up.
Hands-down the hardest part for me:

"Unfortunately, a post is never “finished” and you can always make improvements. At some point, after you’ve iterated a few times on your work, you just have to let go and post."

Any tips on getting better at letting go, or reducing friction in the process for an over-thinker?
I'm actually curious about that distribution; could you gain compression efficiency by grouping them into 3-base-pair codons? Or is DNA pretty much random at the base-pair level and the codon redundancy makes it actually work anyway?
There's a huge difference between running out of gas (which is bad) and running the car without any oil in it (which is terrible).

When I was a child, my mother "bricked" our car by ignoring the oil light and taking us out for a nice drive in the country.
It does add something to the discussion, and rather succinctly at that.

It shows the type of dissent/criticisms new ideas hear. Some of these retorts did seem very reasonable back then. There is perhaps something to be learned from this hindsight.
Speed is fine here and I generally enjoy working with VS 10 when I'm on Windows (showing errors while typing is a fantastic feature which I haven's seen for c++ before VS10). But my annoying VS 10 bug is that approximately once per week it simply refuses rebuilding a changed c++ file until I clean and rebuild the whole project. It just continues using the old object file despite having c++ files with a newer date - and what makes this really annoying is that this is a bug you certainly only notice after a while when results just stop making sense. Others in the project have the same trouble - maybe we messed up some setting, but we haven't found any setting yet about simply ignoring source-changes...
Well, if I need to turn on a few extensions and download obscure python scripts just to get the minimum viable experience, I consider the "Lego" badge mine.

"it's pretty easy to hg diff your change to a file, switch branches, and then use the GNU patch command to apply your changes on top again"
It feels like mercurial developers wanted to inflict pain on me, and makes me want to hurt them in return.
See, it's three steps. It's four actually, because you also want to delete the diff file.

You know how many steps did it take in SVN? Zero.
When you switched branch, it just preserved all your changes and applied those back. You didn't have to do anything.

Maybe it didn't work when there was a conflict - once per 100 switches. But mercurial won't let you do that - that's 100 per 100 switches.
I know exactly what you mean. The fact is, every single program you write is going to be executed by a little stateful machine ticking along. So if your programming language doesn't model such a machine and instead uses higher-order constructs, then I will have to mentally translate everything you write to make full sense of it.
Are you looking at the same table I am looking at? All major compilers except MSVC 'mostly' support C99...
Crowdsourcing and the end of job interviews
I think you got downvoted b/c it was off topic
I may be wrong but I think Patrick was referring to the people who can put up a minor website and earn 'lifestyle' living dollars out of it. Google has created this industry with their AdSense for Content system. Prior to this a small player (read small web site) would have no chance of selling advertising space to a 'big name' and conversely a 'big name' would never seek out the small guys (well their ad agency might or might not).

The 'value' creation is the small web site owners. And they filled the money pot for that eco system with remnant advertising dollars.
The $35k CK paid for his site didn't include continuing cost of continued hosting, bandwidth and administration. These guys seem to be offering to cover those costs indefinitely. So apples to apples, development cost is $0 compared to $35k.
Thanks for the great feedback. The tone of the site is meant to be lighthearted, so as to appeal to a comedian. We're not aiming this at a corporation wanting to entrust us with their millions, but a particular person with a good sense of humor. Sorry that didn't come through. Its also just a hook; obviously he wouldn't hire us based on this site alone.

The launch page as it exists right now is not really related to this campaign. We've just been using it to a/b test marketing language so far.

I totally agree the design is crap, after all, I made it myself!
This is one of the worst executed pitches I've ever seen.

A few things totally infuriate me.

1. > The bate and switch. Using an asterix to play down your "free" "fee" is not cool.

2. > The site design is sub-par (this didn't annoy me, just a constructive criticism.) No one should be criticised for having poor design skills, heck I suck.

3. > You have posted this story multiple times. This isn't cool. This is the aspect that is the worst.

4. > This isn't some good will gesture, it's a business idea sugar coated as some ploy to make money.

5. > 5%?!! (I especially thought of 5 points so I could say five on point five!)
It would be strange if the Attorney General and the President didn't speak to each other very often. imo There is a difference between empty PR gestures and real action. The 'bill of rights' excludes the government.
I'm pretty sure the Google board knew all this. They obviously looked deeper at the guy's track record and personally interviewed him several times.
And it's never the same half of the mistakes, is it? :(

That's the thing that annoys me about software engineering--it's impressive that it works at all, and that isn't a good sort of impressed.
I used to worry about Git vs. Mercurial too. Neither made me really happy. Then I found Fossil[1]. Now I am coding instead of worrying about version control.

[1] http://fossil-scm.org
What Social Entrepreneurship Can Teach Social Design
Actually both IE and Firefox now (I think) insert tabs to the left. I don't know why it became a 'thing' at some point, I dislike it enormously as well.
I've found it distressingly easy to kill changesets in Git unintentionally.

That does not make me a happy camper. I use Git because of Github - GH is a very nice system. Hg IMO is a better interface if you just need to pick it up, hit it a few times, and then go do your thing.
While he was a genius at marketing, that's not the main lesson to take from Apple. The main lesson is that it's possible to focus on a few products and make them work really well. I don't think all the marketing genius in the world would have made the MacBooks and iPhones a success if they had been running Windows Vista or Windows Mobile 6 when they were released.
I hear you, but my point wasn't to show how to optimize AR but instead what's going on when you initialize a model.
In other words it's more about software design and architecture decisions than performance.
I'm not a scientist, and this is perhaps irrelevant to this thread, but since Jayzee is here, I just wanted to say how much I admire the charming video they've had on their site. Not to be negative, but it's not the most artistic or beautiful explanatory video out there, but that's why I like it; it's the embodiment of the Lean Startup approach, and how you don't have to have to spend loads and be a master at that particular craft to put something out there to explain your product. For the longest time I was unsure if I should make my own or pay for someone to do it (not sure what you guys did but I assume it wasn't one of those $10,000 videos a lot of "starups" have.) but seeing this gave me inspiration and the realization that this isn't some blockbuster movie, it's supposed to explain the product--and well, you got me moving and learning animation and some other neat skills in my spare time--and you showed me a great lesson...so thanks!

Hope things continue to go well.
You say "Android is basically a stolen product" and then "We don't need to get all emotional about this". If you don't want people to get emotional then stop using highly pejorative, emotionally charged words like "stolen".

Aspects of Android were inspired by the iPhone. The iPhone itself was inspired by the Blackberry, Palm and Windows Mobile series of devices before it.

There really is no such thing as "stolen" when it comes to knowledge. Everything is built upon other things, emerging from the context where they are conceived. It is utterly impossible to not "steal" when you create because your creations are a direct response to the environment in which you create them, which by necessity is a result of creations that came before.
Zencoder is looking for Video Encoding Specialists
FWIW, I first noticed the "use monochrome icons to reduce distraction" approach in Windows 7, when it was applied to the default system tray icons. I think that predates the Apple trend (but I don't follow Apple closely enough to know).

I suspect these kinds of things tend to just be general "design" trends though - I bet the people designing these interfaces probably talk to each other, subscribe to the same magazines, read the same articles, follow the same non-software industrial designers and artists etc.
Ah - it's working now.

Some feedback points (just my feedback - this all could be wrong):

-the "what do you want to learn" input box should be at the top of every page. It drives your core value add more than any of the other stuff.

-The black/white contrast at the top of every page is very distracting and it's difficult to read. The color contrast aside, the header text on your content pages is unnecessarily too big and bold.

The copy needs some work - here are a few suggestions.

-browse by source: "browse by school" would be much more clear way of saying this (I know - some of these places aren't schools, but it drives the point home more clearly for non-technical people who think of source as an obscure reference to a credit in an annotated bibliography).

-clicking "Create a Plan" takes you to the login page, clicking "Start Sharing" takes you to the public plans page. There are disconnects in the language for both of these that might lead to a confusing user experience. You'll want to fix the language/messaging on the homepage buttons or the resulting page to make sure navigation is more consistent.

-I think the "share" section would be better off as "Add" - especially on the web, share has the connotation of somehow being connected to facebook/twitter/social networking. What you mean here by share (correct me if I'm wrong), is "add your own content to our database".

-I'd also rename "plan" to "schedule". Plan also has a connotation of being associated with payments (pricing plans, payment plans, etc). Which is the opposite of what your site is trying to do. Class Schedule is the more consistent term for what you're doing. Your "public plans" page looks like a pricing template at first glance.

Hope that helps - aggregating and organizing free content is an awesome idea that I've been waiting for someone to execute on for a while!
How heavy would a small ICE unit need to be to produce enough current to keep the batteries alive for longer periods of time? And how much fuel would such a thing use?
Thanks for the correction, and the explanation. I recalled reading the following in the Wikipedia article, but forgot about it as I was writing the comment, while trying to juggle several other things.

"The initial three-stage design was capable of yielding the power of approximately 100 Mt, but would have caused too much radioactive fallout. To limit fallout, the third stage and possibly the second stage had a lead tamper instead of a uranium-238 fusion tamper (which greatly amplifies the reaction by fissioning uranium atoms with fast neutrons from the fusion reaction). This eliminated fast fission by the fusion-stage neutrons, so that approximately 97% of the total energy resulted from fusion alone (as such, it was one of the "cleanest" nuclear bombs ever created, generating a very low amount of fallout relative to its yield). There was a strong incentive for this modification since most of the fallout from a test of the bomb would have ended up on populated Soviet territory."

Also, if you have the time, I'd like your opinion on what I said about atmospheric focusing.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3626601
Oh do you remember the internet at this speed? Up all night and you'd see eight women."

-- from The IT Crowd
quote from the article:

Another error on the part of the blogger is the claim that if the cars discharge fully, the battery
packs will be damaged. This is blatantly false. The battery management system of the Tesla
Roadster keeps the battery from being discharged to a damagingly low state of charge under normal
driving conditions. It's true that a full discharge to zero percent state of charge can potentially be
damaging to a battery. However the battery management system of the Roadster won't allow the
car to reach that low level of charge.
A lot of people see woot.com's copy and how some people curse and think it's easy to pull off but it usually ends in disaster.

The style of writing that can be childish, tasteless and crude is very difficult to successfully pull off. Most times you're going to need a professional writer on staff to manage that persona effectively.
Ask HN:how promote desktop Facebook music app get feedback to improve the idea?
first im sorry for the cross posting here and in Reddit,it was very imported for me to get feedback form both so here it is:

I had idea so I build prototype for desktop music app , something that will keep you updated with music. its divided to 2 main sections

* first is real-time music aggregation

* second part is small local db that holds the data

So you can keep the music links.
its prototype but working one , I use it all the time also 2 of my friends .

my question is how can I promote it make it more viral get more suggestion on improving ?

( except posting link here).

thanks and here is the link use it on own risk ,its early alpha prototype .

http://code.google.com/p/play-list-builder/

Thanks!
Furthermore, Google often encourages publishers to theme their ads so that they blend into the content.
Did you read the article or just the headline? You can disagree with my conclusions but I think patent policy is an important topic.
Developers beware: Visual C++ 11 cannot compile executables that work on Windows XP at all:

https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/...

C++ devs may want to skip this release and just go for Visual C++ 12 when it's out, since by then hopefully XP will be ignorable.
I'm in favor of a lot of ways to fix this problem. What I cannot abide is the whole "people are stupid and want stupid things, I'm just fulfilling their stupid demands" excuse.

What hope does this world have when its best and brightest are content with swindling money out of the ill-informed?
Developers hire other developers that think like themselves.

Technically oriented developers hire other technically oriented developers.

A mediocre developer won't be able to distinguish who knows their stuff or not. But at least getting team fit / communication / personality right is half the battle.
Why should I have to assemble my DVCS from parts before I would be able to use it? If I wanted Lego I would have got one.

Because sometimes simplicity is a good thing? I'm not a Mercurial user, but there are plenty of times when decoupling features is a good thing- look at Mozilla Communicator Suite (or whatever it was called) vs. Firefox.

For the record, I use git every day and I'm yet to need rebase. No, my projects aren't all that complex, nor do they have a huge number of branches. But I suspect that is the case for a lot of other people, too.
> If you focus only on the single feature that is multi-touch, sure, but it's the entire package that likely pissed Jobs off.

The "entire package" of Android included a huge number of features that the iPhone did not, many of which later got incorporated into iOS.

> Pre-iPhone, Android's demo phones looked like a BlackBerry clone

As I understand it they had full screen touch-based prototypes as well. They were experimenting with everything. Of course, what actually emerged into production was iPhone-like because by then the market had moved in that direction.
Going on about 30 minutes for me now. http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/flickr.com

I'm getting a DNS error when connecting to http://flickr.com and "connection refused" response for http://www.flickr.com
1) Building out sufficient solar power collectors to solve the Earth's energy problems forever.

2) Manufacturing medicines, alloys, and materials that can only be produced in micro-gravity.

3) Protecting humanity against social breakdown and/or extinction in case of massive asteroid strike / global pandemic / etc.

4) Because every dollar that has been spent on space development in the US has put $7 back into the economy by way of spinoffs, technical advances, etc.