skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been rewriting my latest released Android game in Html5 and Coffeescript for PhoneGap, which lets me deploy on iOS and Android, plus Blackberry and other platforms, but I'm focusing on iOS and Android for now. I'm doing that because I need to make an iOS version, and would rather spend my dev time adding more features or developing more products rather than redeveloping the same product on multiple platforms. This approach also opens me up to the possibility of having a web version, perhaps a Facebook and/or Google+ module. I'm astounded on how much smaller my code is in Coffeescript than Java. It's about 1/2 the size of its Java counterpart.

Many people will of course not move on to HTML5 app development. Every time technology changes, lots of people don't migrate. But it really is an amazing way to go. Coffeescript solves a lot of problems and makes the code very small. Jasmine unit testing helps with the scary feeling of not having type safety. PhoneGap lets you deploy it as a native app. Chrome has a surprisingly awesome stepping debugger built right in. Vim + the cofeescript plugin automatically compile the Coffeescript every time you save. The difficulties of debugging in Coffeescript are mostly overstated in my experience, and countered by the feeling that I'm developing code faster than I ever have before in any other language.

It's not all cake and ponies, and I've had to figure out a number of things. But it's a really fantastic way to develop apps. Try it.
No it won't, [[ -f $file ]] will fail and `continue` will be executed, moving on to the next iteration of the loop. Think of the different successive values the $file variable will have. At no point, will it hold the full name of the file at once.
If Canon or Nikon wanted to produce a stupidly high (100MP+) megapixel full frame 35mm sensor they could. The pixel density on their compact cameras is about .3MP/square mm, a full frame 35mm sensor is 36x24mm (864 square mm), yielding a ~260MP sensor. They keep their high end bodies at a much lower resolution to increase the available dynamic range and enable shooting in much lower lighting conditions. It'll be interesting to see what they pulled off, but in low light situations (or high contrast) is where you'll see the issues of cranking up pixel density start to crop up.
This is a good explanation, though like the Dr. Dobbs article linked on this page I prefer the exposition of logs. (Looks like the author updated for it.) I also have a personal displeasure of Venn diagram and set-based and event-based versions of probability, and non-conditional probabilities rearing their heads, but that attitude comes largely from reading Jaynes...

I wrote my own Naive Bayes function for helping me tag my blog posts back in January. I did a longish explanation and implementation (PHP), it'd be cool if someone wanted to check my math/intuition since while my button has worked out so far (that is, no really surprising results have crept to the top as most likely) I wouldn't be surprised if there's an error or justification for a better calculation of a particular probability term that I missed. http://www.thejach.com/view/2012/1/an_explanation_and_exampl...
1) Self-reported happiness is an EXTREMELY unreliable indicator, as the social pressure to "seem happy" is very real and very different by culture, class and educational level

2) Happiness and income are relational in that we've seen over and over again people are most happy not by being objectively "rich" but simply objectively richer than their peer group. "Poor" countries with a growing middle class see themselves as having -- or at least with the potential to have -- more than the median material wealth of their peer group. "rich" countries with shrinking middle classes have the opposite expectation.

Bottom line, this is merely a very clumsy study
Well, is not technically meat because it was never part of an animal (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Meat).
I didn't get around to trying Modafinil, but I've discovered that pure caffeine and guarana extract work better than coffee for me. I was a heavy coffee drinker all my life, but several years ago, it just stopped working as well. There's something in coffee besides caffeine that makes me feel jittery and nervous without feeling more alert after a couple of days of drinking it regularly. Basically, it helps with physically intensive tasks, but doesn't help when I have to sit down and do any kind of mental work anymore.

Using 100 mg of caffeine 3x a day, on the other hand, gives me the same effect as coffee once did - I can jump around filled with energy and work at my computer with more energy for longer periods of time. 400 mg of guarana extract (~80 mg caffeine) makes me more alert without the physical tension or jitters - if anyone has "coffee fatigue", as I call it, try caffeine pills or guarana extract (but not in high dosages!).

I've also found L-carnitine to augment caffeine in physical tasks, and taking 400mg of guarana extract with ~200mg of rhodiola rosea and 50mg of L-theanine lets me work and then sleep pretty well, like I never took caffeine in the first place. YMMV, but it's definitely fascinating to see how we can alter our bodies with psychoactives (obviously, you take a risk, so you have to understand that and doing proper research before using anything).

I still want to try Modafinil, but just can't get my hands on it right now...
IFrames - Why?  How do we stop the madness?
google.com
gmail.com (logged in)

And other sites utilize iFrames? Why? I try to explain to devs that I deal with that iFrames are worse than table based layouts for presentation. I make the case that iFrames should only be utilized for tracking/ads/etc. The response I get is, "Google uses them."

What are legitimate and illegitimate uses of iFrames?

How do you use them? What lengths did you go to get rid of them? Was it worth it?
Well, I guess I must not be using the Internet, "effectively," then, whatever that means.
How to Write Superior jQuery Plugins
Why yes, I am. That's the point of this submission ^^
The big 'Pay with PayPal' link really throws me off about the whole thing.
The Galaxy May Be Teeming With Nomadic Planets
This is a massive problem on YouTube right now. Essentially, there are a few large troll operations that abuse Google's "Content ID" system to steal ad revenues from random accounts, while Google shows no interest in fixing the system or shutting down the fraudulent accounts. The targetted videos often contain original music or no music at all. It's so common that it seems to be a fact of life for anyone as soon as they start monetizing their videos, and it's enough to remove any desire I have to do business with Google.
No picture of the phone? If they unveiled it, then you'd think there'd be a picture of it.
Yep you are right, I am reading writting from the Iphone and made that mistake.
Geezus internet. How and why are so many people getting so damn angry about this?

Rumblefish presumably gets thousands upon thousands of copyright infringement claims every day. And so far, there has been one guy who had birdsong mistaken for music. Instead of just writing an email and getting it fixed, he decides to make a post about it to make people angry, and then once Rumblefish hears what happens it gets fixed.

Let's look at the key elements here.

1) It got fixed!

2) Of course they use an automated system for confirming copyrighted audio content. It's a second line of defense after Google's initial scan. The third line of defense is called customer support, and in any other situation that would be the obvious and trivial solution.

3) It's one guy! This happened ONCE!

4) It got fixed!!

And if you're still worried about your own stuff being falsely identified as copyrighted music, rest assured you can always make an internet s*storm about it and your problem will be solved (this is clearly the ideal solution, yes?)

Now can we please get on with our lives?
Samsung Galaxy S III: 1.5GHz Quad-Core Processor, Ceramic Body, 1080p HD Display
Version control is superior than other "sync" solutions when the data is:

- Modified mainly by humans, at human speeds
- Mistakes can be made and need reverted atomically
- Data integrity and chains of changes need to be preserved

I agree with the article that PG is a great example of where version control could work with great effect.

The downside is that teaching non-techies how to make it work is difficult, and the first time a merge is required they're frequently in too deep. This is more of a human problem - Word's revision tracking is somewhat inscrutable as well...
Pretty good explanation - my only gripe is that all bayes classifier tutorials like this build the 'spam detector' type that's specialized to text. Though it's a common use case, that isn't the only thing that the classifier can do - you can use it for raster classification, other types of predictions, etc: and building a non-specialized version would make this point more clear.
Using multiple devices (laptop with several OS, iPad, eeePC, ..), I really needed IMAP to keep them in sync, so I switched to gmail. Then, I started to use the web interface more and more, until I never really used Thunderbird anymore - I guess I like gmail's interface better.
I did something similar with SNES roms. Sometimes the in-game text is encoded using "DTE compression", a mapping from one hex character to an alphanumeric sequence (bounded Huffman coding, basically). On certain sentences you can notice that gaps are smaller (in terms of bytes) than what should fit in there ; so you can deduce that it was a bigram (or trigram, or more).
Totally agree. I've done exactly the same with the excellent node_redis driver. A thin layer to remove boilerplate, but still directly fire commands at the DB.
It is incredible what the body can do on its own. On the other hand, it's a little disappointing that the body can do this under normal circumstances, but society today pushes it to a false sense of efficiency, and people start taking performance-enhancing medications to get back to the ability we already have.
He's mixing imperial and metric measurements in the same recipe.
First off most cars build after the 1980's don't have a carburetor and generally use fuel injection. Also, to much water in the tank can easily lead to a blown head gasket among other things.

Second most cars don't cost 40k, but if your talking about a say a bugatti veyron it's not that hard to do 40k of damage. If you want to compare it to the cost of the car then for an older car having a few thousand dollar repair bill can easily cost more than the car is worth.
I've always seen mobile web apps winning over native mobile apps in the long term. Jacob Nielsen described as much last week as well but was careful not to put a timeline on it.[1]
Hopefully this project helps make it happen sooner than later.

[1] http://www.useit.com/alertbox/mobile-sites-apps.html
What’s Special About The Joyent Funding Round?
What’s Special About The Joyent Funding Round?
You could also start a business and not hire employees. It's not right for every business idea, but if you can manage it, it's pretty amazing.
Yes. Write the text of the mail somewhere else, then use the (not yet implemented, I'll do it tonight) option "paste clipboard encrypted".
Face-Recognizing Billboard Shows Ad to Women Only
The Cloud Gets More Awesome with New Offers
The Cloud Gets More Awesome with New Offers
Flash Hits the iPad, Thanks to the Cloud
Flash Hits the iPad, Thanks to the Cloud
Long term, I agree, but the short and medium term can be heavily affected by marketing, and that can still add up to a lot of money/animals/pollution/etc. before the cost advantage wins out.
If there are exceptions, then there isn't a rule.

Everything we do is best practices and guess work, there isn't a scientific formula to being successful, what works with X, probably won't work with Y. It's just a probabilities game, and by and large, 99% of companies can't approach it the same was that Google and Facebook did. (FWIW I agree with you, just not the way you phrased it).
Firefox already has all that. A good part of the browser is written in JS which runs with high privileges (full filesystem access, full network access, etc) while the code on websites doesn't. It already has systems for unprivileged JS to request access to certain privileged APIs (location, localStorage, etc). "Apps" - websites - are already segregated and run in their own sandbox.
So did the Newton (1993 per Wikipedia). I remember it as my first-ever encounter with a (small) switching power supply — it seemed unreasonably light as “wall-warts” went.
Classics in formal semantics and pragmatics
Wyse Executives to Discuss Leading Trends in Mobility and Cloud Computing
Wyse Executives to Discuss Leading Trends in Mobility and Cloud Computing at America's Growth Capital
look at how much money I spent on my back yard?
This is a neat concept, but like nodemaker I have to point out that it has some limitations in terms of what sort of interfaces it can make.

Additionally, in order to make use of this tool, you still need to be a programmer, and if you are a designer or someone who has ideas and no programming knowledge, you cannot use it. This is one major reason I launched my company, Blueprint - https://blueprint.io - not only can you lay out your highly customized app visually like this (except, by pixel, if you'd like) but it actually handles the entire build process for you and lets you download and submit it to the store.

Thanks for sharing! Hope to see this tool develop in the future. If I could add one request it would be to have some way to iteratively or procedurally lay out views.
Cloud Workshop Focuses on Rediscovering the User
Cloud Workshop Focuses on Rediscovering the User
True Wage Slavery
Rails Themes early access
Local SEO: Secrets to Killing The Competition
Try the new search engine that does not tracks you
Startup Gamifies Instagram With New InstaMatch App
The Copycats at Hacker News
This looks like a "kneecap Android" maneuver.

Make it so your OS performs great on cheap hardware, and then hope that that is enough of a benefit to get phone providers to push Windows Phone over Android because they can make more in margin with your inexpensive hardware.

Interesting strategy, to say the least.
Doesn't seem like that to me... Taking psychoactives is like a shortcut if you don't want to (or more likely just can't!) do it the hard way (with willpower alone). Besides, there are people who smoke and drink and still live longer than their "health-freak" peers - I still find that interesting and somewhat unfair.

Also, using caffeine pills instead of coffee and recommending them to others leads to wide eyes and "you take drugs?" kind of questions - apparently, that is crossing the line, yet drinking two huge mugs of coffee in a row isn't. Human psychology, go figure :-)...
Brilliant jQuery and CSS3 Tutorials to Help You Build Apple-Like Designs
Embed the beautiful and unique Apple design into your websites using jQuery and CSS3. Create iPhone-Like sites and add the gadget functions to them in a web based form.
I'm the author of TFA and I must completely agree with you on this point. Is there a human-friendly VCS out there? I don't care how featured or not it is, as Git can be configured to pull from it (a la git-svn). Just anything that non-tech-related persons (or even just non-coders!) can use without wanting to pull their hair out and feeling very stupid?

For example, one of my software products has translations powered by the community. The entire translation files (XMLs) are hosted on GitHub, yet invariably all the volunteers would much prefer to email me their translations and I commit them on my end with silly commit messages like "Commit by John Doe jdoe@example.com with fixes for bla bla bla"

---

I suppose a web interface to git could be written, but it would be very limited and would have to be strict about what can/cannot be uploaded. But multiple drop downs with a simple "pick the file you have an update for," "pick the version your changes are based on," "browse for the new version of the file," and "what changes did you make?" inputs would probably be enough for the vast majority of non-techies..
It's a workaround for Python not being able to type-check, compared to Haskell.
Thoughts from Ann Arbor
IPad 3 who will buy one, and why?
Pics here http://www.theverge.com/2012/2/27/2827158/nokia-808-pureview...

It is quite bulky.
Taking a pill, however, is much easier than keeping a proper diet and sleep schedule and working only on what you like...
Actually, they didn't really lower requirements in the sense that the OS requires less horsepower. They simply removed some networking features and blacklisted apps that use too many resources. In my view that stretches the notion of lower system requirements. :/
Nokia shows-off its 41 MP camera phone, the 808 Pureview.
Svbtle - With only two features, this is the essence of blogging.
Interesting project that apparently powers dcurt.is (Dustin Curtis) and will be available "soon".
This isn't all that surprising.

Regional papers rely on wire services for national stories. Thus, it doesn't matter which newspaper you read, you'll probably be reading the AP's story. You might just as easily read the "really good" original article at The New York Times (it's only a Google search away). The regionals also cover a larger geographic area which means they're getting pinched on their truly local coverage. On an average day they'll have less relevant local content than the small local paper.

The other big disadvantage of regional newspapers is that advertisers don't want to effectively throw away their ad dollars spending to buy a region when they could buy a better targeted town or neighborhood. It's just less efficient for most types of businesses.
Could it check if it is still in a pressed state? There would be a lag, but it wouldn't be broken. I guess.
What Dell's Acquisition of AppAssure Means for the Future of Big Data
Two sides; the primary rationale is defensive. If we are making an illiquid investment in say China, having Kroll investigate who has beneficial ownership of the other 85% of the firm, who in the Party are they connected to, and if anything shady is going on is useful. Additionally, given the increasing salience of macro factors in the capital markets having awareness of areas like Greece or Iran which are economically insignificant but carry the ability to effect asymmetric damage on asset prices (which traders have traditionally labeled as "exogenous" or "fat tail" scenarios) becomes critical.

On the offensive side the edge mostly deriving most traders' view of geopolitics as an exogenous risk. We were favourably positioned for the fallout in Libya, culminating in a life-changing trade where we syndicated oil being sold by the rebels in Benghazi. The risks in that deal were too high if you approached it at day zero. We were willing to commit since we had been watching that market since January.
I agree, this was a great move for Microsoft. Their biggest problem right now is visibility. If this move puts their OS onto more phones and into more hands (especially if they are cheaper phones that more people can afford) it is a net win.

The OS works great on high-end phones, so it won't be a problem when those "feature phone" users start to upgrade.
Sadly, "The new hit-based payment model" != "journalism".
Trial and error for the most part.

First I tried to find sequences of characters that, without modification, already looked like real words. I found one in particular that turned out to be the name of the city in which the game takes place ("Budayeen", though it was completely garbled).

That was a stroke of luck because that word appeared many times in the text and gave me some clue about the adjacent words, since there are only so many words you could reasonably put around the name of the city.

I tried globally replacing the characters in DISKTEXT.TXT but was ending up with a word half as long as I thought it should be (for "Budayeen"). One of the fortunate things that happened though was that it revealed to me, by accident, a couple other words (even though the decryption wasn't correct, it made some previously indistinguishable sequences look more like real words, which I pursued).

I think it really clicked that I was dealing with bigram substitution when I had to come up with a theory of how whitespace was so cleverly hidden.

Here's the lookup dictionary if anyone is interested: http://pastebin.com/pxJU7q7F

And here's the script that does the substitution: http://pastebin.com/8eYrGbzQ

You know, now that I actually think back to it, the lower 4 bits represent one character and the higher 4 bits represent the other. And there I was thinking in bytes the whole time.
Followed by a misleading explanation that suggests turning ALL your gotos into ifs.
Thank you for writing this, it articulates everything i have felt about it perfectly! Eerily similar to my experiences. It has always bothered me that people think these drugs make you smarter, because they dont. I think of them more like shots athletes get in hurt muscles- the shot didn't make you stronger, you just dont feel the pain anymore, at the expense of long term health. Only in very special circumstances is that worth it.
New York Times campaign finance API upgraded through collaboration
Lengthy: a Chrome extension for GitHub README files
AT&T and T-Mobile - What's $2 billion between friends?
The closest thing to a human friendly VCS for non-programmers would be document management software like Autonomy's WorkSite or EMC's Documentum.
I don't think it's obvious at all. Because the question of how to make money was implicit in the mind of Satish:

(1) build beta version and get some users,
(2) improve product based on user feedback,
(3) charge money for the product,
(4) watch revenues increase

It sounds so simple. It's essentially the 37signals way, right? Build a product. Charge for it. It's so simple -- how can you possibly mess that up? And yet, the model above is simple, intuitive and wrong.

I think one of the key insights here is that you can have two groups of people who use your product: those who are enthusiastic about your product, give feedback and report bugs, and those people who are actually willing to pay for your product. In an ideal world those two groups overlap and it's easy to make money. What's often the case is that the two groups don't overlap very much, and if you listen to the wrong people you end up making a product that appeals perfectly to those people who have no intention of ever becoming paying customers.

It took me years to really learn this lesson, even though it was completely obvious in retrospect. In order to make a better product I should be talking primarily to my best customers (those who have subscribed to the bigger plans for an extended period of time), because the goal is to find more people like them and to keep 'em happy. If I listen primarily to the most vocal users the implicit assumption is that the most vocal users also happen to be the best (potential) customers. And that's a huge assumption that in my case turned out to be false.
Hyperbole blah-blah-blah.

>they are causing DNS requests to return against-spec responses //

That's part of their service. If there was no way to switch it off then I can understand being annoyed but you can just choose to use your ISP's DNS.

It just appeared to me that both comments concerning this were of the form "ZOMG they has borken my internetz"; could be I read the tone wrong.

So anyway, for the service that OpenDNS are offering is it wrong of them to simplify the situation for users making mistakes entering domain names in their browser?
Why not just go up to github and ask them to make a web interface for non nerds? It's half way there already with editing in webpages and what not.
Does it still count as "first world problems" if you're not on "the world"?
LLVM Clojure Bindings
The Horrible Equilibrium that is Facebook Connect
College at Risk
Apple's latest legal victory over Motorola in Germany declared 'huge'