skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Rebranding complete - world's largest mobile network coverage catalog
Today the company I work for announced our new corporate name and branding strategy. American Roamer is now Mosaik Solutions. Comments / Critiques?

This is what the FCC recently said about us:

"In its most recent Connect America Fund Report released on November 18, 2011, the FCC states that 'American Roamer data is recognized as the industry standard for the presence of service' and for the specific purpose of this report, the company provides 'the best available choice at this time for determining wireless service at the census-block level'"
Tlk.io - Open web chat
Is Europe just for losers?
Mutation testing in Ruby with Mutant
Using partial request/response in WCF
Top 5 Reasons Adobe Killed Flash Mobile
Did he actually look at the startup? It's also possible that it was just bad -- lacking in usability, useless features that cluttered up the UI, poor aesthetics, etc.

Customer feedback only gets you so far. Often times people don't know what they want or what the core problem they're having is.
Python and Perl project support on Travis CI
How well do concepts like forking and branching work with wikis, though? You can create categories and place the pages in them (to put the different editions for each title), but you can't really "link" revisions and branches to one another or indicate where they were derived from. And forking is absolutely out of the question.
After a minor operation in the Army the doctor offered to my father to eat the little bit of himself that was cut out raw. He figured why not and said afterward it was like something between pork and beef, but not really that odd.

PS: Now the real question would you pass up the same option?
2010/11 Feltron Report
Confindustria Romania
Hieroglifs Translations Romania is pleased to announce it has joined Confindustria Romania. Read more:
http://www.hieroglifstranslations.ro/en/blogs/
Apparently smart enough to see the correlation between a person's religion and terrorism in New York City. Pretending it's not there wouldn't be too smart.
Note that we do expedite the process for people who receive competing offers; I had an offer from another company the day after my Google interview; I told my recruiter about it and she had me an offer from Google within a week.

I explained in another thread here[0] one of the biggest sources of discontent from people who interview here, in case you're curious.

[0] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3636746
Prototypal document storage
Mozilla's Boot to Gecko project: the Internet is your phone (hands-on video)
Having seen a startup in Austin, TX go through this same kind of thing, I would guess its more common than the author makes it sound here.

The best defense is to build a technology that isn't cheap to reproduce. There is no better moat than killer IP.
This is awesome, both how easily it's broken and how primitive the methods that criminals still use are. Are there literally no calculators or cell phones that can calculate available in prison? You'd think they'd all use http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffie%E2%80%93Hellman_key_exch... these days. I remember more than one documentary sensationalizing "the codes", especially focusing on an apparently frequent use of gang-symbolism instead of words...
As a person who grew up in a so-called bad area i feel in no way offended, because i know the actual risks.

My mother works as a railway attendend and often has to go to different cities without guides just to get to her hotel. I'd love for her to have an app or something that guides her on the safest path possible.

If you live in a bad area you shouldn't be ashamed about it, but ignoring it just makes things worse for everybody.
I made that comment, I am British I lived for many years in the poorest area of London, and I've also lived in the Banlieue de Paris. I would not class these as "dangerous".

That's an outsider's perspective, but the reality is considerably different.
That's not completely accurate. None is still special in Python because it's the value chosen by the interpreter to represent an expression that doesn't explicitly return a value.

It is true that None is implemented like any other object (whther the value of 5 or an instance of my own class), but it still maintains special semantics.
I have taken 200mg of Modafinil daily for more than 5 years.

Before it, I could go to sleep just about anywhere and just about any time. I could easily sleep for 12 to 14 hours a day if I let myself. When I had a work commute of about an hour and a half, I would have to pull over, sometimes four or five times, during the afternoon drive home to take cat naps because I couldn't keep my eyes open. It didn't matter how much or how little coffee I drank, it didn't matter how much I slept the day before, and it didn't matter whether I was eating my typical diet which was fairly healthy, or if I had unusual amounts of junk food that week.

Caffeine doesn't work "normally" for me. I like the taste of coffee, I usually have one cup a day that I sip throughout the morning. However, I don't have a Folgers moment. I am not groggy until I get my first cup. If I drink a soda or coffee or even have a shot of espresso in the afternoon, I don't get a sudden boost of energy. I don't even get the boost of energy from energy drinks. When I drink a lot caffeine or other energy drinks in a short period of time, I find that they will give me a mild case of the jitters, but even then, they don't counteract my actual drowsiness. Hence, I've never gone higher than my typical cup of coffee in the morning and frequently a soda in the afternoon. More than that has almost all down-sides and no up-sides for me.

I took a sleep study, and I was not diagnosed with narcolepsy because that diagnosis is very specific. You must immediately fall into REM sleep. I was diagnosed with a "we have no idea what you have" condition of excessive daytime drowsiness and received a prescription for Provigil. Originally, it was a 100mg dose, but when that was not effective, it went up to 200mg.

It is a bit of a wonder drug for me, but certainly not in the terms that it was described in this article. It doesn't make me hyper focused or give me unusually sharp focus, it just removes the incapacitating drowsiness I suffered in the afternoon. I've actually found that music is more distracting to me during work hours since I started taking it. While I still enjoy listening to various types of music for recreation, I don't play music while working anymore.

I would definitely say it is not addicting in the manner that coffee is. On vacations and at times I didn't have my prescription with me, I've gone weeks without taking it. There are no withdrawal symptoms, other than the fact that I would be excessively drowsy again, especially in the afternoon. If I stop drinking caffeine, I will suffer migraines for about two weeks.

I will agree with the part about broad focus vs narrow focus. I can think better about large system design late in the evening. When I am working on an architecture problem during the afternoon, I find myself frequently rat-holing. I'll focus on one specific part and just keep going back to it over and over rather than spending enough time at the higher level.
Recommended especially if you run propietary ATI drivers. Also, stock Linux Mint (Gnome) really doesn't fit multiple screens. The top bar and menu are fixed to the main screen, even if you place it below the extra screen. Really a PITA to use on multiple screens, way over-engineered IMO as it's the trend in both Gnome and KDE world lately.
Guilds and cooperatives may work where employees are required.
Keep in mind one of the reasons it's profitable is because running above ground wires is much cheaper than in the ground or whatever has to be dealt with in big cities. The article even mentions expanding to other towns will mean going into debt.
How photo filters are aging us
The Republican Brain: Why Even Educated Conservatives Deny Science — and Reality
Nokia announces 41-megapixel camera phone
Remember that Nokia PureView tease from a few days ago? Well, suddenly it all makes sense. We are indeed looking at an imaging flagship phone and a true successor to the N8. It's called the 808 PureView and it's expected to reach Europe in the next quarter for a price of 450 Euros.
There may be a point here somewhere, and monads probably have a bigger use than this, but what's presented here looked more like my syntactic sugaring beats yours to me.
That's just nitpicking, though. Here, "rule" means "what happens 99% of the time".
Another good take on modafinil:

http://www.gwern.net/Modafinil
One could say the problem is using None for indicating errors. Python does have exceptions, which also prevent further statements from being executed.

try:
b = f(a)
c = g(b)
return h(c)

If f(a) raises an exception, g and h don't get executed.

None should be returned when it's a valid value (say, in search() if it doesn't find anything), and in those cases it makes sense to have explicit handling.
Moving from Site5 to Heroku
Its really great to see Google living up to their promise.
Elsevier Withdraws Support for the Research Works Act
I wonder how they can do this without compromising sales of their main product -- it seems like many people can now just use the free version linked from ux.se instead of getting a proper myBalsamiq account.
Photoshop Touch and Its Conformance to Apple's Unified Vision
Knowing Product Demand: The First Step To A Successful Business
So Google's going to let Moto continue their losing strategy while Samsung and HTC reduce their investment in Android. And they're rapidly losing karma on the patent front as well. What's the upside of this acquisition?
The 'expert' comment at the end is interesting and sad... speaks to the fact that any field that deals with non-obvious knowledge will basically be saturated with people who present themselves as knowledgeable but provide little utility.
Yes, actually, you are right. It's all the same in Python because the references can always point to any value, and None is just a value of the NoneType.

And due to Python's runtime types, it wouldn't matter either way, because even if None only existed within the context of a Maybe type, you could still just apply any operation on it and have crash at the first method call on it.
This is fantastic looking and I'm absolutely going to try it to make a UI.

Does it work with Twitter bootstrap if we're using it as our base?

And thanks for making this free!
Page by Page Onsite Optimization Walk-Through
> Except that they didn't make the OS perform better, they just literally lowered the requirements.

[citation required]

The phones are gonna be using a different branch of WP it's quite likely that they improved some stuff
Something similar happened to me years ago. They accused me of "click fraud". All I can figure is that a disgruntled reader decided to click repeatedly on my ads to get me in trouble. There really isn't an appeal process. You email them asking for details, and they reply with form letters.
Don't you think it also works the other way around? The majority of people don't like you because you support a violent dictator that's clearly bad for them.
Get ready to be jacked in.
I agree, but that particular issue can be fixed with a type system tweak instead, to treat nullability as a type modifier, vaguely like constness, which can then be statically enforced. Cyclone adds nullability annotations to C, for example, and Ada has a "null exclusion" type modifier.
That is a limitation, but I'm not sure the marginal benefit of forking and merging functionality justifies the significant added complexity. Each edition gets its own page, and the revision history of each edition reflects versioning.

On the rare occasion that changes in one edition need to cross over to another, a non-technical user should be able to copy/paste the changes across the two edit pages.
Travis CI Supports Python and Perl
Make it cheap enough and the branding matters a lot less.

Just cycle through brands until once sticks. The meat products industry is already full of potentially disturbing stuff that people think is delicious (hotdogs and chicken nugget goo (really, mechanically separated chicken) come to mind).
Essentially, they have taken up the strategy that Google had back in Oct 2008. There were a lot of early comments from Schmidt, etc that indicated the Android plan was to compete on the low end of the hardware spectrum.

It sounds good, but I really question how much room there really is down there with the data plan requirements that typically come along with using any kind of smartphone.

Do people really want to pay $100 for a stripped down device when $200 will frequently buy them a full-featured smartphone (with similar data plan prices)?
I used iframe in two yet-to-be-released security products. Both uses iframe to displays site-specific information to user securely. Neither are used for tracking users.
I was just as productive if I was well rested, healthy, well fed with healthy foods and working on something I cared about.

Those are four conditions that are difficult to fulfill 24/7. I'd go so far as to say that it's difficult to have a normal social life and always be well-rested and fueled with healthy foods. Case in point: I have a dance class on Wednesday nights that breaks up after ten o'clock. No way I'm sleeping until 1am or 2am on those nights. But I exercise in the mornings, so I can't stay up until 1am or 2am every night. My life is an engineering exercise, and like any engineering exercise, there are a lot of compromises. I'm curious about using Modafinil judiciously to make up the gap once in a while, possibly at the once-per-few-months frequency he says would be okay. It's incredible what our body will do -- virtually anybody can run a marathon, for example -- but it takes a lot of orchestration to convince our body to release its miserly grip on our resources and do the job we'd like it to do.
Using the ports of SDL my app runs the same codebase for WebOS, Android, RIM Playbook and soon Apple iOS. While I already have a few Android-specific shims I'm trying to remain as platform-independent as possible to ease porting.
One of the most interesting books I read was "The Servile State" by Hilaire Belloc. Belloc suggests that in fact most people when desperate will gladly trade freedom for subsistence. He suggests the natural evolution of class warfare is from unrestrained capitalism to a welfare state, to one which legally compels workers to labor for the benefit of someone else. And indeed that's the system we have in the US, if you listen to folks like Cornell West and look into the prison industrial complex.

The way out, as both Belloc and his contemporary Chesterton (Note: I am NOT a Catholic. I am NOT even a Christian. I am not endorsing Chesterton's religious writings) thought was to try to push for an economy of the self-employed. This idea may seem less welcome on a VC site.... But the basic idea is that if labor and capital fight, both get to declare victory, but really Capital wins. The way to win if you are on the labor side is no to play the game, and go into business for yourself as an independent agent, freed from worker protections but also in a relative position of power and freedom compared to where you would be as an employee.

Time was when almost everyone was self-employed. The only reason it isn't for everyone is we make it so darn hard in the US. I say that as one who has been in Indonesia and Malaysia for the past six months and I can say that no third world country makes it as hard to be self-employed as we do in the US. Indeed no developed nation does either.....
The cost per user to support 1,000 people/mi^2 vs. 4,000 people/mi^2 is not that dramatic. At first glance the distance between houses might seem to be the square root of the population density, but people tend to group together. Picture 2 sets of row houses one of which has a back yard and the other does not. As the ISP's run their wires down roads it makes vary little difference how big those back yards are just how far down the road you need to travel from one house to the next, and how far from the road to each house.

PS: If you’re on city water chances are you’re fairly cheap to wire up to a modern network. Unfortunately the incumbent players tend to also be selling you service on the old network so they have vary little incentive to upgrade you especially if it might lead to you dropping some extras.
I don't think it was ever very good, but they did fire a bunch of people I would consider competent. Apparently competent is too expensive.
Indeed. I have no interest in building a company with employees, but owning and running your own one man product business sounds amazing.
If you can't export and save it should be fine. Also I doubt you can create a clickable PDF with this, which is one neat use of Balsamiq.

ux.stackexchange.com is exactly their target demo. Normally a company like Balsamiq would pay for ads on a site like this, that would entice you to try their free demo. This cuts out that step, they can try a basic version of the software right on page. And it's good for the ux.se community too.

Pretty brilliant move.
Very cool indeed, but ironically, I don't think editing the wireframe is very "user friendly". Anything requiring me to click "edit" on someone's post, copying code, canceling, pasting, and THEN having the ability to edit the mockup isn't ideal.
Project Gutenberg is a complete mess.

It took them years of discussion and they haven't yet chosen a master file format for their books.[1]
As a consequence, they are hosting thousands of books in many different file-formats provided by distributed proofreaders[2] and some other sources.
But since no master-format exists and conversion is .. well .. buggy, they have no leverage on their quality problems. The textual content may be fine, but the reading experience for the casual user shows how big the iceberg is under the surface.

Having seen endless flamewars[3] and several unsuccessful approaches to their formatting and complexity problems, I propose clear reset.

What about a nice fork with only a few important books that get proper treatment in regard to

- master file format

- conversion (mainly html, pdf and ereader formats)

- design and page layout (e.g. for pdf versions)

From then on, one could build a growing git repository of _nice_ books and build an infrastructure around that.
Tackling their current mess directly (and taking on the burden of their internal politics and historical toolchain) will be completely in vain, as the past has shown.

I don't have much time to spare. But for a really good cause (and the future of bookreading is a really good cause), I am willing to invest.

Who is in?

[1] This one is the latest candidate: http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:RST
Before that, there was one guy working on a simplified TEI format. But that never took off.

[2] http://www.pgdp.net/c/

[3] The home of many-a-flamewar: http://blog.gmane.org/gmane.culture.literature.e-books.guten...
We're not too worried about it, I have found that the old "the more you give the more you get" adage really has some truth to it. I also fundamentally believe in the goodness of people. Those who want to take advantage of you always will, but the vast majority of people do not live to take advantage of other's hard work, or at least I like to believe so.

That said, there's one thing we did to prevent people from using the UX.SE.COM integration as a non-nagging web version: you cannot export from the editor, just Import. You can only save the BMML from the publicly posted image of the mockup on the UX question page. So if you want to save your work, you have to do it in public. Not a huge step, but we think it's enough.

Peldi
Sounds like the "E-Myth revisited" situation where the business was something that was not separate from her.

A "real business" is one that does not make you a slave to it: it's something that you own, rather than something you must be intimately involved in for it to continue functioning. You make money when you are sleeping.

Not sure where the downvotes are from on this, it's not exactly some horrible thing to say about someone: many businesses "are" their owners. But unless you recognize that, you'll never fix it.
I agree with the sentiment of your comment, but being better than everyone else is not enough [1]. I'm sure there a lots of better alternatives to things you use in your life, but you're not using them because you never heard of them (marketing) or it never got to market (bad financial management) or many other areas where that better product got beaten.

[1] I'll take better than everyone in this case to mean better at painting and not better at everything.
Totally agree. We're working with the SE peeps to make this workflow smoother. We just punted about it for MVP. :)
Using Sass' each to create DRY selectors
Dieet: het dash dieet tegen te hoge bloeddruk
Do you know of a better intro? I wasn't even aware of [[ ]] :(
Personally, I have not been waiting for another Html driven platform. I don't like Html/Css as a UI framework, I just think it's highly overrated.

Things I like better: Qt/Qml, Wpf because they are much more precise (meaning, I don't have to use an opaque type like "DIV" as a placeholder for a list-view or something else that I really wanted).
Not necessarily pertinent to the discussion, however in the linked article-

"Well, technically it doesn't amaze me at all, because Windows Mobile PocketPC SP2 CE Embedded Compact Ultimate already ran very fast on PDAs ten years ago, but still. "

Fast or fluid is not a word anyone would ever use to describe Windows Mobile / CE. I lived with those devices from the iPaq through the Moto Q, and it was always an absolutely miserable experience (worse than Android in the G1 release days, which is pretty bad). This has little bearing on the current generation of devices, but that incredible claim just could not go unmet.

EDIT: There is no "sarcasm" there beyond a play on a product name. If the poster doesn't really mean what they explicitly said, they convey it extremely poorly.
Building everything a customer asks for and following the "customer is always right" mantra doesn't seem like a good idea.

As Steve points out in his article, customer development is about better understanding your customer, their needs, and how to sell effectively to them. It's not about giving away software consulting services for free-- it costs a user nothing to ask for a feature/solution, but it costs you quite a bit to build it for them and even more if they're the only user that wants this particular feature or if they're unwilling to pay for it.

Tough to know where the balance is sometimes though.
LLVM Common Lisp Bindings