skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yep. I spent a weekend with a group of sculptors once, and they were debating the merits of particular drills just as eagerly as we discuss editors. Tools matter when you use them the whole day, every day.

Though still it should be noted that most of programming is thinking, not typing ;-)
People like to talk about the tools and techniques they use regularly.

Hackers and "people" might not be interested in hammers, but I can attest that if you get a group of blacksmiths together in a pub, they will spend entire evenings talking about different kinds of hammers, techniques for striking, etc.
Breaking News on Twitter part 2: authority is everything
I guess this has to be a parody, and yet if this article actually existed I would click on it immediately.

Learning how other people use tools is what technology is all about. Otherwise you will make dangerous assumptions, like "of course my cutting tool is sharp; the reason it's cutting so slowly is that hand-powered cutting tools are always slow." Or "obviously space aliens made this artifact, because what society could have built such a nifty thing using nothing but rocks?"
We do have something called "Indian Low Price Edition" http://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22indian+subcontinent%22+%22low+pr... but not all titles are available for whatever reason. Mostly, these are books used as texts in schools & colleges.

Another note: An LPE of a book that is available for INR ~500 would cost anywhere from INR ~4000 to ~6000 if the original publication is ordered. Generally the original is not stocked so there is a wait period of ~5 weeks from placing the order.
He's written either a book or lengthy paper about this every few years since he wrote The Age of Intelligent Machines in the late 80s. At that time mainstream opinion was that he was nuts. The book was especially ridiculed for its predictions of a computer AI unseating a world chess champ by 1998 and of the human genome being mapped out by the early 2000s.

Both happened ahead of schedule, and that's the primary reason I took his later books seriously.
Thanks to your comment I decided to take a serious look at this. I'm a big fan of IntelliJ so I know how good their other IDEs are.

After working with an existing project for about half and hour I think I'm convinced enough to risk $99 on it. My main worry was that it wouldn't smoothly hand off xibs/storyboards to interface builder but that seems to work ok. Already this feels like a tool that was designed for programmers and not to fit somebody's idea of a shiny interface.
Do you notice something about the Wiki sources? It lists people who climbed to the top of the building and jumped off it in a public manner. This isn't every suicide related to work at Foxconn. These are the undeniable suicides.

If you think this is normal, I'd like you to show me the list of large, public companies in America that had employees climb to the top of the building in 2010-2011 and jump to their death. It doesn't happen.

Could you leave it open to the fact that maybe, just maybe, there are interests at play here that may want to keep a story like this under wraps? Mainly the Chinese government who craves the foreign investment and Apple, the biggest company in America that's banking billions in cash? I bet if this was Goldman Sachs, we'd be all over over it.

>Please learn to think for yourself.

Exactly.

Knowing a bit of history, what is easier to believe:

1. That a massively profitable American company ignores the work environment of a factory in a second world country, but insists on low cost production, which results in worker abuse.

Or, 2. Everything is great at Foxconn and this is all a big conspiracy to bring down Apple.
Sounds like an awful lot of data entry at a time when primary process takes precedence. It might work if you're in a team where someone has a mission to watch the process.
What might work is pushing it as a competition. Your target audience is full of competitive people, after all.
How to Find all Website Hosted in same Server
Apple To Sue Chinese Firm Proview For Defamation
Hacker News != Ranter News. Take it to the $VENDOR support forums.
except for when they take their prototypes and loose them in bars
Quick guess, Moore's law applies for capacity of silicon industry to improve storage and processing of one production line.

If you include the increasing number of production lines, the total number of simultaneously connected computers, capacity of producing software that solves complex problems and the many others factors that are included in the global processing power and relevancy of calculus, you might explain this super exponential growth.
Amon Plus didn't exist at that time.
Where is Ember.Select?
X-rays reveal why the Moon has no volcanoes
> it's wrong to do market segmentation for electronic
> goods based on [..] location

I think it's OK to do it, so long as you do it in a way that doesn't leverage the government to be your enforcer.

I worked on an education publishing system. They were concerned about customer organisations photocopying the books. They implemented an online learning system, where each book came with one license being a serial number printed inside the cover. Now the students could tell when they were being short-changed.
I admit I have had no experience with code academy so I can in no way be qualified to judge it but what the post wants to convey is just simply true.

It's not the hard way, it's the right way to go about building something. You build your knowledge while you are working on your project and learn from your mistakes. This is how we all started and I suppose that the way to go about it has not and will not change for a while.
In Israel, who runs a european-style welfare state, you are supposed to only get the VAT relief on stuff your business sells forward (the idea being that VAT is only ever paid once on every item).

People still abuse this, claiming e.g. that the Spiderman DVDs used for "research" ended up inside the final product and thus qualifies for tax relief -- but if they audit you, that might not fly, and a VAT audit is one of the easiest way to get in real legal trouble.
Caterina Fake Talks About New App Pinwheel
This analogy is exact. At the beginning levels people argue about power tools versus hand tools; shooting board vs. chopsaw, japanese plane vs. iron. Professionals have their tools that work, are interested in new tools insofar as they can improve results or productivity, but don't engage in recreational arguments.

Masters of the craft have no dogma about tools and are always exploring, but also have strong opinions. They will rarely broach the topic but if someone is interested will talk for hours about their favourite tools. Their emphasis is on how the various tools change the process of work, not on how they change the work itself - the piece will be what they want it to be regardless of the tool. It's the worker-tool interface that's important at this level.
Its London Fashion Week which is why that story got a lead - and Stela Macartney frocks are way out of the "middle england " price bracket.

Why do you think it strange that a rare example of the UK actually making stuff is featured?
You have to enable file types in the Speedbar cf. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2220005/how-do-i-enable-S... I think you will find that the TextMate tree drawer is a toy compared to the Speedbar.
anospic ||= ... # average numbers picked

The Ruby convention would be to write out the variable with underscores anyway, just sayin'.
Best Tools to Make Easy CSS3 Development
CSS or cascading style sheet is basically a style sheet language that is used to describe the presentation semantics or the looks and formatting of a document.
He literally wrote the book on disruption, which I expect, from your comment, you haven't read. http://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-Busin... He doesn't need to start a company to prove his point because it's not really about startups, it's about the problems big companies have. He wouldn't be the founder or employee number 1, he would be employee 10,000, the one they get when everything starts going wrong.
Survey: What Do You Think of the Windows 8 Logo?
> Shopping on Amazon is physically painful, when you
> see how much you end up paying for extra costs.

That's not my experience. I recently bought a stack of ancient machine code and assembly books and paid 2p for some, with two pounds of shipping on top of that. The books are practically free to me.

> Buying e-books on O'Reilly feels the best out of all
> current e-book sellers

Nostarch are pretty good. You can go in and download your books when you like from them. If a book you already own subsequently gets a new electronic format release, they open up access to that to you automatically.
Google is Facebook is AOL: what happens when a good Google goes bad
Yes, but as ridiculous as they are, they're still good for some uses.

E.g., if you follow the "fraud-closure" robo-signing story, you know that the banks and mortgage agencies are all guilty of perjury. In some cases, there are 20 distinct signatures supposedly by the same company officer, at least 5 of which were supposedly signed on any given day.

Not that the government or attorney general wants to actually prosecute and I doubt anything will come out of this. But if there was no "wet signature" (handwritten ink signature on the original document) requirement, there would likely be no evidence of wrongdoing, especially after the mass deletion of emails and shredding of printed documents that the mortgage industry practiced.
Ask HN: where to go from here with my app?
I'm looking for feedback on my product as well as on the business model.

I am about to launch Afford-It, an app for Android built with jQueryMobile and PhoneGap. Its function is to figure out for the user what part of their balance they can actually spend, and what part they need to reserve for recurring bills later in the month (like rent, power, cable, insurance).

My business model is to ask something like $3 in the Android market for the app. There are existing budget apps going for that price (after a free trial) and those are terrible apps that ask you to enter every single expense and income.

Perhaps a bank, or Mint, will come along and hire me to pimp up their online banking with my app's functionality. But that would be bonus, not baseline.

My USP is that with my app, you don't need to enter all your pastexpenses: after a one-time setup it only needs your current balance to give you meaningful advice, plus a list of upcoming bills.

There are admob ads in a few of the pages of the app, but I don't expect much income from them.

There are some basic things that will need to wait for v2:
- entering incidental future incomes/expenses
- patterns other than monthly (i.e. biweekly pay, saturday shopping trip, etc)

My current roadmap is to add these functionalities to my (cross-platform) code, meanwhile get it on iPhone and iPad, and maybe do a Dutch translation (I'm living in the Netherlands, so it might be worthwhile to push a Dutch version where I have better in-person access opportunities)

My questions are these:
- Where should the product go from here?
- How does the business model sound to you?

The online demo is at: www.afford-it.me/demo. You can log in with username hackernews and password reviewers.
You make the assumption that the quality of comments has any bearing on placement. Simply put: it does not.
The article seems to be part of a trend where people are made aware of the value of letting go, rather than engaging in futile medical care.

However, before making end of life decisions, one should be aware that there is a large and growing hospice industry that benefits from people "giving up" (sometimes leading to greater suffering, as treatable conditions go untreated), and weigh one's decisions carefully: http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-12-06/aunt-midge-not-d...
You can't link to the SaaS purchase directly from the app. If you download Netflix or other services with an app, you will notice there is no option to sign up for the service within the app itself.
Ms. Benjamin has had a couple of decades to realize success, CodeAcademy has had a couple of months to do so. I doubt she was suggesting anything as complex as Agile Web Development with Rails to the children she introduced to the topic. That sort of thing, I am certain came, much later and to very few of her former students.

CodeAcademy makes tradeoffs, so do Zed Shaw's Hardway books. Both however attempt to help people avoid paying the entire dumbtax in learning to program. I suspect that's what Ms. Benjamin strove for as well.
E-Books 'Democratize' Publishing: At "Tools of Change"
I absolutely agree with you on the passwords. When I once accidentally typed my password into the username field, I thought: "...this is what my password looks like? This can't be right."
MagnetSVN - Handy Subversion Client for Microsoft Office
I couldn't agree more with this article. I wrote a post about my personal path to becoming a programmer, and about the most specific I got about what I actually programmed was "stuff I thought was interesting." The most specific advice I gave was "program" and "work hard." The comments I got both here and on the article made it clear that people wanted specific tutorials and sample projects they could replicate.

This misses the point entirely. The way to become anything -- at least a good anything -- is to hard work and repetition. I can't tell you what to program. I can't give you sample projects based on what I did because why should you care enough about some dumb thing I made to extract meaningful lessons from it? Find something you think is neat or cool to make and make it.

When it comes to sports, or tradecrafts like carpentry/masonry etc., singing, painting, etc., it's understood the only way to become a professional is to bust your ass. It's the same way with anything in the world. There is no magic bullet. There's no wand you can wave or wish you can make. You just have to work. The number of people for whom this is a completely foreign concept is surprisingly large.
eh? they build phones in China - the other side of the world with a massive language and culture barrier with the sole purpose of saving money - how are they NOT thinking about profit !!!
The example you give is the typical Emacs feature Vim zealots like to mock.

If I want to read an email I simply switch to my email client, thus virtually eliminating (almost) all risks of Vim/Emacs crashing.
Background compiling for better completion and as-you-type syntax-checking.

IDE stuff mostly.
Popek and Goldberg virtualization requirements
Please change the spelling of "straightfrorward" to "straightforward" on your home page.
The graph is visual, it's the relation visually; if you're trying to calculate the actual %change, then a table is needed. But having all the bars at full length makes it near impossible to see the differences between bars of length that are within a few % points.

I see the graph as answering the question: What is the difference in achievable wages between different "hacking" skills? The graph, as shown, displays that difference well. Like I said, there are no hard and fast rules, but I would have done it the same way!
Nice initial attempt. Besides the encryption issues mentioned here, here's my suggestion. This needs to be built into a mobile twitter application (non-jailbreak), I use pgp encryption/decryption programs on my iPhone and they are fast. Also, you should allow the use of any key server that the user wants, as known public key server access can be blocked by a country.
I find that thinking about good names for things can help guide you to design better code.

As Lars mentioned—if something is hard to name, it's probably because the thing you're naming isn't very clearly defined, is a bad/mixed metaphor, or is just plain hard to understand.

And if all else fails, there's always http://www.classnamer.com/ ;-)
I am glad someone wrote this article - Now I know I can point it to my colleagues who are often baffled at the amount of time I spend thinking about names :)

I have found that when I can't find a good name for a method or a class, it's because I haven't really thought the reason for the same through. This is especially true for classes where I often realize that I am making the class do too much, or too little.

This book, "Clean Code" by Robert Martin has it's second chapter dedicated to naming things. A whole chapter! The book, alone for that chapter is worth the money. If you haven't read it, I highly recommend it.

http://www.amazon.com/Clean-Code-Handbook-Craftsmanship-eboo...
I think those workers were building Xbox for Microsoft
Then I'll have to convince that collecting internally the data is a best practive (it is!) and that not doing it anyways is like night driving without lighting.

I'm afraid pushing it as a competition would fail. It would so easy to cheat.
I didn't say start, I said run. The dilemma he speaks of (yes I have read the book) sounds good on paper but doesn't play out in the real world, there are plenty of examples, is Coca Cola afraid of launching a new soft drink, or does Tricorn worry KFC is eroding the market of Taco Bell? Like most economics or sociology it's an elegant model that has little basis in reality.
Ask HN: Help me to choose one of my pet projects!
Hi HN readers.

I have few side projects, I made for fun or as utilities. Here is the list http://motyar.info/works/

I need your help to choose one project to focus on, that you think can help others.

Thanks for your valuable time.
Python from scratch- The journey continues
7 Ways and Why to Treat Your Career Like a Startup
Small project's life depends on his owner
If you need a pill to speak with your wife, you really have a problem.
Chinese court orders ban on Apple’s iPad
The irony now being that the Mac is from a hardware level, a PC clone...
If you are charging $3 for the app, you shouldn't have AdMob ads in it. Offer a lite version with stripped functionality and the advertisements to complement the full paid version.

Sidebar: UX need to be tightened up and polished - take a look at http://mobile-patterns.com/ for inspiration.
Successful Demo Software Is Hard to Support
The Best Practices Myth
Why would I prefer this over a well-configured monit? http://mmonit.com/monit/
At least a University with a backbone! Others for example in Canada let publishers sift through the private emails of their faculty members so they can spot copyright violations ( http://www.cautbulletin.ca/).
I'm considering this possibility.
It needs no citation. There is de facto proof. In an industry that has historically been driven to commoditization, Steve Jobs, at the helm of Apple, built a company that enjoyed margins many times that of their competitors.
I don't think the guy will lose his job. Do you? He is addressing a very real issue. Adobe should read this.
Hawking contra Philosophy
I have no personal experience, but the wikipedia pages on Local Positioning Systems[1] and Indoor Positioning Systems[2] list some commercial offerings.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_Positioning_Systems

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indoor_Positioning_System
Show HN: Gmelius, Towards a Better Gmail
I was surprised with its on hacknews first page when I wake up today, and So much visits due to the site down about 8 hours and I have to chang the cache policy to keep the site run, its seems its need a more power host.

I'll fix these issues on comments, and I plan to add some these features: support social auth, comments.

Much appreciate for your comments, and sorry for the site hang up so long, its obvious not enough stable to post here.
The buzzwords might have changed but for the last 40 or 50 years software has mainly been about forms (getting data into databases) and reports (getting data out of databases and formatting it for the user). 99% of the web falls into this category. Once you have been in the industry a while you see history repeat again and again. COBOL back in the day was a sexy as RoR is now...
No, that can't be right. Do you have sources to those statistics, as they seem way more drastic than I would have thought.

E.g., after looking around online for a bit, I found this[1] which indicates 300,000 deaths each year are attributable to obesity, which is 12.5% of deaths[2].

Furthermore, the magnitude of the the effect doesn't seem to be 15-20 years. This wikipedia section[3] indicates that being "obese" lowers life expectancy by 2-4 years. Being "severely obese" lowers it by 10 years. But according to these statistics[4], "severely obese" is ~10% of the population.

So I think 1/3 of the US population dying before age 60 because of obesity is way, way off the mark. More like 10% dying at 68 and maybe half the population dying at 75 because of obesity rather than 78.

[1] http://www.wvdhhr.org/bph/oehp/obesity/mortality.htm
[2] http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity#Mortality
[4] http://www.nber.org/papers/w13181
Because there never was a "dilemma" to "solve".
Transistor Made Using a Single Atom May Help Beat Moore's Law
Intro to Subversion Access Control 4.1
UK estimated total of University students: just under 2 million (BBC figures, 2009) and shrinking slowly

India estimated total of University students (or at least places): just over 12 million, government policy to increase by factor 2 over by 2025 (BBC 2011 article)

I think you could discount heavily to something close to local wage rates and still make a handsome profit in India, especially with electronic distribution reducing the distribution costs.

Does anyone else remember/use the Indian editions? I remember Tata/McGraw Hill having a series of Indian printed editions of popular texts. Local production and typesetting, lower price. Some of them even made it to the UK in the 1980s.
I'm finishing up the CodeAcademy Javascript class. I'm not a programmer by any stretch, but over the past thirty years or so I've written a little script here and there to solve a problem.

CodeAcademy won't turn anyone into a programmer overnight, though it might start someone directly down that path - there is a lot of good stuff in the exercises (even though in the end they are just exercises).

Personally, I had a couple of "Aha!" moments where the hands on nature and immediate feedback made something I had read about many times just click clearly into place (recursive functions and passing an object to a function).

The "official" pace of the course is probably a little slow - writing code a little at a time is the worst approach and the exercises really don't have enough meat to drag on for the many weeks of the official timeline (unless meaningful homework is added to the course - in which case it might drag).

It's a good project; it's not going to make someone immediately employable (particularly if it took them two months to complete it); and there is a lot of room for growth of the product.
What can "i look for"
people?
Didn't get that

Until there pretty good impression :)
Lets not forget that Apple make it easy to develop and test using Webkit on iOS. Grabbing the simulator and testing it at native speeds is only a click or two away from the App Store.

Opera on the other hand seem to get it, by offering a webpage where you can get a feel for how your page will run: http://www.opera.com/developer/tools/mini/

If I want to test my website on a blackberry I first have to know which blackberry to test on ( http://cl.ly/3n3x0r0H2C2y0P1O3C3o ) to get the version, I then have to use Windows.

Finally a search for "Samsung Dolfin Emulator", admittedly the first time I've heard of the browser, turned up nothing. I found the dev tools on bada.com, though again, windows only.