skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A television is not a 'necessity', and if the policy is designed correctly the income should be designed to support just the bare minimum of existence, i.e. food, shelter, and some sort of health care. This can be done providing debit cards or other payment systems that only allow the recipient to spend the funds on approved items.

Most first rate economies already have fairly extensive welfare systems in place, and you do not see people begging to get fired from their jobs so that they can get unemployment. Most people have at least some ambition to increase their social and economic status and that won't change.
Facebook rolls out Facebook Timeline for brand pages.
This is a fantastic opportunity for anybody who follows sports and hopes to work at a start-up when they finish college. Start-ups are really hungry for people who master these kinds of skills right now.
Trine was a fun little fantasy arcade scroller. Side to side action. A platformer.

Torchlight is a dungeon crawler in the vein of diablo. Lots of equipment dropping, items to get, etc, as opposed to the more platformer-style of Trine.

Very, very different games that happen to be set in the same fantasy genre.
Maybe the rest of the game will be better but I felt the beta had really terrible pacing, claustrophobic corridor-style level design and an odd Tim Burton-Warcraft universe fusion art style.

Sounds like Diablo 2. (I loved that game, btw.)
> It's been out for a little over a year in a crowded marketplace.

It's been out for 16 months. In that same time both Android and iOS had posted much better sales. Furthermore Android tablets have been out for a shorter time and have sold more units.

> Windows Phone is targeted far more broadly than the competition - from the 4G smart phones of Europe to the data planless feature phones of Zambia.

And Android isn't? Get real.
I think it'd be interesting if everyone did this with their failed side projects, at that point when they realize there's no value in continuing down their path. Bravo guys.
It's funny, more and more I'm moving my work to Mathematica because it works sort of like this already. That, and it's as far along the power curve from python/ruby as python/ruby is from C.
Schmidt: UN treaty a 'disaster' for the internet
Edgecast was one I looked at but more expensive than other options for a site our site, are they better than other CDN's?
Appliance repair in Thousand Palms
I certainly hope not. I hate coffee.
Gears (Sam Stephenson's Sprockets port for Python with Django and Flask support)
Mind The Gap while creating content for SEO and Humans
I believe less than half the 10 million pay the $15 a month typically charged in North America. Many accounts in China are linked to internet cafes, which charge peanuts by the hour to their customers.

Still, the 4 million or so North American and European monthly accounts still makes it huge.
Star Trek Meets Android And Explodes Into Space
A little anecdote to support your story: Just this morning a US citizen using my appointment scheduling web service (based in Europe) got into trouble for selling English lessons to Iranian students (it wasn't intentional he sells English lessons to anyone, PayPal flagged the money transfers).

I spend a good part of this morning figuring out how to keep Iranians off of the scheduling calendar. I believe that world peace would be much better served with more Iranians learning English but I really do not want my business to get in trouble with the US over it. Sad really.
His answer on why he does not believe in Computer Science is pretty convincing. What I would love to have happened is a professor telling me that what I am going to be learning is not exactly science. Nobody did, so I spent a couple of years trying to scientify things.
I would happily give up any yearly bonuses and
possibly even a slight pay deduction (as a single
guy I don't have many expenses) in order to keep
a fellow teammate from being laid off.

Assuming the company isn't really hurting for cash you lay off people that don't contribute more than what they cost.

You can either let them go or I guess cut their salaries, but cutting someone else's salary doesn't really solve the problem that you're paying someone more than what you're getting from them.
Ask for your money back :-)

* * * *

In all seriousness, I wish more defunct software companies would do this. Or better yet, I wish thriving companies would do this with their old programs, like ID Software and how they've released the source to Doom and Quake.
They still have the upcoming Titan game and another unannounced game that they are hiring for.
I don't like this trend of putting "wacky" pictures in an otherwise professional project. Last week there was a project where the final screen was a gif of dancing duck with clapping pigeons. Now it's a smoking monkey. Before that it was the "This is a test, bitches!" email. Then there was the time a web hosting company accidentally charged all their customers for a full year and then posted a picture of Homer in a dress saying 'Oops'.

As a consumer, I would prefer to be treated in 'business casual' manner and not like a 13 year old. I hope this trend gets old.
He's previously written books on Windows Phone programming and on XAML.
If you are interested in physics and have not seen Dr. Feynman's 7-part lecture series entitled The Character of Physical Law, you really owe it to yourself to watch them in their entirety [1]. The site's interface has some neat features, such as links into the transcript and notes related to the topic being discussed.

Dr. Feynman delivered these lectures as part of the "Messenger Lectures" [2] series at Cornell University in 1964:

Lecture 1: Law of Gravitation - An Example of Physical Law

Lecture 2: The Relation of Mathematics and Physics

Lecture 3: The Great Conservation Principles

Lecture 4: Symmetry in Physical Law

Lecture 5: The Distinction of Past and Future

Lecture 6: Probability and Uncertainty - The Quantum
Mechanical View of Nature

Lecture 7: Seeking New Laws

[1] Requires SilverLight: http://research.microsoft.com/apps/tools/tuva/index.html

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messenger_Lectures
> As you said, as long as you can defend what you have, it "belongs" to you.

...in which case, there is no ownership of property. Someone else can just come along and take it.

Honestly, embracing this kind of "natural law" does make sense to me, as it's least internally consistent, but I don't see it as synonymous with calling the cops because someone takes something that a legal document says is "yours".

> Government is, by itself, a huge body of asymmetrical power against individuals. You do not "choose" it, when you are born you are already, automatically, subject to it.

> When you buy some goods, however, every dollar you spend is a vote for a product, a company. Should that company screw up, you will not buy it again.

I sense some cognitive dissonance here. So when it comes to politics, people are always stupid, picking tall wealthy men with good hair and no conscience; but when it comes to spending decisions, people are always smart, based on their rational self-interest.

Now, I'll concede that capitalism has a faster, tighter feedback loop: you generally don't have to wait 2-6 years to change your mind. (Why there has been no public advocacy for rethinking the concept of only voting periodically, I have no idea.)

That aside, I see the same phenomena in both arenas of human decision-making. People are mostly smart, left to their own devices, but they are sometimes irrational with both voting decisions and purchasing decisions. Moreover, there is a strong incentive in both arenas to manipulate those decisions, and the industries we have developed around this goal have become extremely efficient: electioneers, marketers, public relations, and all other sorts of "compliance professionals".

In my mind, the question is not whether democracy is good, but whether it is possible. I have yet to conceive of a social structure in which the smart and/or rich cannot play the game at the expense of the foolish and/or poor, whether it plays out at a political rally, or a corporate boardroom.
People occasionally suggest we should provide housing. I think it's a mistake for the same reason having founders work out of our space would be a mistake.

E.g. it probably is encouraging for the weakest startups to have some kind of shared workspace they have to come to every day. But for the best startups it's not only unnecessary, but undesirable. Larry and Sergey would not have been better off in some kind of shared workspace. Their garage was the ideal place for them.

The arguments pro and con for shared living space seem to be more extreme versions of the arguments for shared workspace.

If we have to choose between helping failures become small successes and helping successes become big successes, we'd prefer to work on the latter.
Gioachino Rossini
Gioachino Rossini , Gioachino Rossini , Gioachino Rossini ,
Gioachino Rossini , Gioachino Rossini , Gioachino Rossini ,
http://www.psdmate.com/2012/02/29/gioachino-rossini/
Can you recommend a good Scheme tutorial? I haven't tried it.
And patches to generate, mailing lists to find and emails to write. If only every open source project were on GitHub.
Sorry about that. I'm deploying a fix right now.
My guess is that any full-fledged "Apple TV" will take your preferences into account. Here's my wild theory:

How many unique TV channels are there in America? OTA and cable. Maybe 2,000? With a ton of redundancy in the programming. What if Apple simply recorded all of them into that big fancy data center? No need for a DVR: Now you can stream anything your cable provider offers any time after it airs whether you have a "season pass" or not.

There will probably be a few annoying restrictions (Shows disappear after two weeks?) and you'll probably have to watch ads. But as far as I can guess, it's the only way Apple can give you time-shifted access to non-streaming programming (e.g., the NFL) without reinventing TiVo, which I'm pretty sure they don't want to do.

It all hinges on whether they can get the contracts ironed out. But the cable/fiber companies will see dollar signs from more expensive "Apple TV" plans (with two year contracts to make the set cheaper?) and the networks may be swayed by the promise that customers will have to watch ads, or pay them to make the ads go away.
I think he's referring to politicians more than private citizens. A portion of the Democratic party, after voting for the PATRIOT Act, spent the last 4-6 years of Bush's time in office speaking out against it. But TSA has generally maintained strong support.

I'm not 100% sure that this is all true, but it is my own impression and, I suspect, the author's as well.
They've apparently recently automated a big chunk of their customer support [1], which (along with the decrease in WoW subscribers) would probably explain big cuts to the customer service department.

[1] http://www.theverge.com/gaming/2012/2/29/2833313/blizzard-la...
I was hooping for something more than what Google's page speed or YSlow can tell you. Is this really "everything" one can do to optimize his site? I'm really hungry for some more advanced (if you will) techniques as I don't know what else to do with our pages (they are fast mind you, I'd just like to make them faster still).

And to add something constructive (besides a question) to the whole thing:

"Aggressive caches are best, with an incrementing querystring parameter at the end of them to force browsers to reload them when you make a change to them."

That is good. But even better is to include the version number in the filename (or path) itself: image.jpg?v=2 -> image_v1.jpg ... this doesn't throw some public proxies off and they cache your content that way. See this page for more details: http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/docs/caching.html#Le...

edit: I would also like to see some article explaining how EXACTLY is google measuring our page load times. Because everything I've measured myself on our pages is fucking fast, but google seems to disagree (in order of magnitudes different results). The only logical explanation I've come up with is that google is measuring speed of our page from the states and our servers are in Slovenia. And that means that the page is super fast for our Slovenian users (which are the only one that matter since it is a local page) but slow for google who is way over there on the other side of Earth. This really pisses me off to be honest since there is only so much I can do and we are being punished (as in lower rankings due to speed) for not following some rules that we don't know.
Windows 8 won’t kill the desktop, but don’t worry — we’re still screwed
While I agree with his points, this is yet another rant with no solutions.
It is if you are running an international business, I'd assume that OP meant convenience as in not having to register a domain for every possible country.
The whole post is terribly worded. When I heard "email links" I naturally thought, "links in my email" and not "mailto: pseudo-protocol links." So I was very confused when it said that "an application on my computer that I never used would pop up and interrupt me" and that now the links "will open a fresh Gmail compose window."
I can see how their product being so wildly popular that it sells out in less than an hour could put a damper on its future commercial success.

Wait, that makes no sense, I can't see that at all, nevermind.
Correct. He doesn't have property right(s), he has COPYright(s). Until you can abolish copyright protection in the USA this practice is still illegal.
On the other hand, there have been numerous attempted terrorist attacks on planes in the United States. All of them have been foiled without assistance from TSA, even the ones that weren't stopped until the would-be terrorist was on the airplane.

This isn't proof that TSA hasn't stopped any attacks. You could be correct that fear of the TSA has stopped terrorists from trying, or trying as often. However, given that there have been actual attempts and TSA has failed to foil any of them, it seems doubtful.
Great tip there, thank you!

I beleive you can do more, for example if you start looking:

- DNS (I don't know too much about this though)

- How the web server handles the requests (I saw a post here on HN about this recently but can't find it where MS/Google change some deep settings to improve loading time)

- Preloading pages by guessing users next page choice

All are quite difficult to execute however and provide diminishing returns over making sure you have all the fundamental things set up correctly.
Yep, it can be a big annoyance to say the least. I'm using Rackspace in this case because I only need to constantly export the same 5,000 to 10,000 data files. My individual embed file sizes are in the low KBs, so AWS was going to murder me on the per transaction costs (low file size, high volume).
This is exactly the problem I'm getting at, you're not actually working within the confines of C here, you're creating funny workarounds for the fact that certain C features don't work how you want them to, and you're violating the type system in the process.

The concept of VLAs does not fit the language well, they're inherently something of an anomaly. Allowing them in structs would simply multiply the anomalies.

I'm frankly shocked that they were codified in C99 at all, rather than codifying something akin to alloca() with implementation-defined behavior, but I'm infinitely grateful the committee did not elect to make them anything more than they are -- which is a semi-portable mechanism for allocating arbitrary amounts of automatic memory.
Previous discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3603452

(polite way of saying this was already submitted only 12 days ago)
irccloud.com (no affiliation, it's convenient though quite buggy) will open irc: links.
Ask HN: Please review my Rails API for Hackful Europe 
Hi guys!

My name is Oemer and I'm a Software Engineer from Cologne, Germany. I'm pretty silent guy around here but in the last couple of weeks I took the chance and developed an API for hackful.com (HN like site for european based startups).

To implement the API I forked the project on GitHub and you can see it here: [https://github.com/Oemera/hackful](https://github.com/Oemera/hackful)

I want use this API to create an iOS App and make it also open source :)

What do you think about the API and my Rails code?
OK, the latest beta version of Dexpot works - I'm good!

Metro is also surprisingly intuitive - I've picked up everything on the first try (the corner actions are cool, too).

Now, what I don't like:

- All of the advanced settings (Control Panel and everything) are hard to access;

- WIN-TAB shows only Metro apps, but ALT-TAB shows Metro and the normal apps, cluttering the interface.

- While I like the Metro apps and will probably use them, the desktop should be loading by default on a laptop/desktop - there's no reason not to do it, and it looks like it's easily doable with some tweaked settings;

- The dumbed down everything feeling of Metro is cool at first, but gets annoying on a laptop after a while;

- I had to register a LIVE account to login to the OS - what if I don't have an Internet connection?

But that's about it - Windows 8 looks like a great OS, I like it. I still don't get why Microsoft had to make it an all-in-one OS for tablets and desktops when they could've packed Metro only for a tablet edition, but whatever...
Free-to-play Microsoft Flight released
If you have a look at how player numbers have declined for any other mmo, their numbers are amazing. Can't forget that WoW come out in 2004, the life span of most games is measured in months.

The game doesn't hold people's interest indefinitely, even of it is a lot longer than most games and probably most people who would want to try the game already have. Also competition is way higher than it was in 2004.
Those evil corporations, though, are basically non-profits whose sole purpose is to manage the facilities.

For example: http://www.aura-astronomy.org/about.asp

"AURA is a consortium of universities, and educational and other non-profit institutions, that operates world-class astronomical observatories."

and http://www.keckobservatory.org/:

"The Keck Observatory is managed by the California Association for Research in Astronomy, a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization whose board of directors includes representatives from Caltech and the University of California."
Agile – Dealing with complexity by avoiding chimeras
If I'm not mistaken, the drivers are also written in C++ (They used to be in Objective-C).
You are correct, but it's still fun to speculate wildly.
Do spam and piracy problems have a common solution
Please email me at justin@iamexec.com. We can make it happen!
I completely agree. I really meant to say that we looked for someone who was passionate about coding and they could defend their style/structure because they cared.
We always worked in the style/structure of the original author because the code should be consistent. That is more important over personal preference.

Our arguments over small things like indentation were heaps of fun because everybody there was really passionate. It was never about enforcing it because it is the one and only way to do it. Stubbornness on matters like that is not good.
But did you see those pictures?! If there ever is a YC house, you guys should use those plans :)

I understand your point though.

But to clarify my idea, I don't mean an office space people come into... but rather if you had a live/work space, it's like the same thing of a startup getting a house together and banging away for 3 months... but they happen to be next door to other batch-mates. I wasn't in the Y Scraper, but what I can see of the successes from those batches are that it worked pretty well for them to all be in close proximity to each other.
"All indexing in Julia is 1-based"

I once designed/implemented a language where the biggest mistake I made was using 1-based indexing. At first it looked like it was going to be easier to understand/use but 0-based indexing is actually much more convenient when dealing with indexes arithmetic.

PS: the "metaprogramming" stuff is fabulous.
Silicon Valley Workers In Non-Tech Sectors Bypassed By Recovery
information can be pretty empowering. that's a great story
How to disable Metro UI in Windows 8 preview
So, stop before you reach MAXINT.
It's changing the meaning of strlen, but who cares?
Same policy for software right?

Or in HN fashion engineers are protected and other creatives are left out in the libertarian cold?

I think going back to 14 years and one renewal is more than fair. It's far longer than all but the most popular works are profitable for but gives the creator a generation of control over it. No one can feel cheated.

In the old days, most people didn't even renew after the first term expired. You wouldn't have seen Star Wars enter the public domain after 14 years but most of the movies in MST3K, books about certain time periods written at the moment, software that won't sell another copy would all be there.
"Heavily curated community"? I'm beginning to loathe that buzzword because it's so hollow. Of course YC is selective - anyone not stark raving mad would be selective when handing out thousands of dollars of their own (and their investors) money.

A few words that would work better to describe YC (going with just the positive ones here): elite, choosy, discerning, elect, exceptional, exclusive, select, restrictive, hand-picked and so on... 'dict' is your friend.
You are thinking about TCP slow start: http://blog.benstrong.com/2010/11/google-and-microsoft-cheat...

I'm looking into that yes.
of comparable size to Kepler.

Well, Kepler is a <1m telescope, so as far as ground-based astronomy goes, that's something a reasonably well-funded liberal arts college can afford. Space makes all the difference.
It must be 'several' from when it was founded.
"scary" depends on your perspective. The way I look at it, the fact that they still have ~10 million customers for WoW is damn near a miracle -- this is a game that came out in 2004!

Surely they know nothing lasts forever, which is why they are working on that other MMO. I have to believe they are smart enough there that this eventual dropoff was too expected to be "scary".

Also, it isn't like WoW is the only thing they have going on. Starcraft 2 was a big hit, and Diablo 3 likely will be too.
Drop Paul Allen an email about bypassing the http server and machine coding the html serving. He has some great tips.
Weren't there some issues with GPL'd code being on the App Store? If I remember correctly, one developer complaining about the license was all it took for Apple to pull VLC.

Still, it hopefully won't be an issue here, and this is still a really awesome thing to do.
Seems like a decent release. I am unable to find search in Store. Anyone else know a way to search in store?
Fortunately they're also on youtube, if you - like me - either don't like silverlight or you can't install it on your computer:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-JKAHaml7A
Exec is hiring in SF (Justin Kan / YC W12)
I would normally post through the normal YC jobs submission process but I want to get this out there on our launch day. At Exec we are creating the future of work and we want to find a killer designer and senior software engineer (someone who will become the VP Engineering for all product).

We believe strongly in building great internal tools and automation. We are creating Mechanical Turk for the real world -- I think this will be one of the world's greatest hacks.

Come talk to us! Ask me questions below!

http://iamexec.com/hiring
Visual Studio 11 beta in [ASP.NET] context
I've seen a big improvement in the quality of my designs since I started using using a grid system ( http://960.gs/ )for horizontal alignment and element spacing.