skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
And the vast majority of those games are terrible. Partially because of a low budget, partially because of a low barrier to entry for the developers, and partially because touch screens are terrible interfaces for human beings to interact with where precision (positioning, timing, speed of repetition, among others) is concerned.

Some genres make sense for touch (RTS, Angry Birds), some don't. Accelerometers are flaky.

My point was that I believe phone designers are sacrificing substance for style. The iPhone has space for at least 4 more buttons without a slide-out.

Touch-only phones are a fad. Buttons will be back. Watch.
My post, and his reply, were only discussing the disclosure of vulnerability information. I didn't say it was legal to attack a live system that you don't own. I see how you are making that logical leap in the case of facebook, but it isn't necessarily a given. There are ways one can legally become aware of vulnerabilities in facebook, and share that information.
...... you know the commenter i was replying to linked to that exact website, right?
Most Americans eschew insects, dogs, and cats. That seems like a better analogy.
The Best Games of 2011: The Finest RPG, FPS & RTS Games
You may want to look into the school segregation lawsuits of the 70s, not to mention much of the civil rights movement of the 60s with a particular focus on education. The Supreme Court decision didn't automatically mean integrated schools, which is why my daughter (in an inner-ring suburb of Dallas) attends a magnet school created as part of our desegregation court order. Come to think of it, so did I (though it's, erm, been a while).
Add that there is not a whole lot of case law on robot driven vehicles to understand how far the accident will go legally (unknown expense for an unknown number of parties)
"I'm terrified of doing this."

I'm not an angel investor but I'm a good salesman. What we are really talking about here is selling yourself. I'd be glad to offer advice on that. Feel free to contact me.
I have been pulled over 3 times and gotten 2 warnings (one written, one not) and a ticket for not having my insurance card on me (that was later dismissed). The first time I was going 75 in a 55, the second time I was going 45 in 30 and the third time I was going 65 in a 55.

The 65 in a 55 I pulled over as soon as I saw him slow down to turn around, the rest of the time I just admitted I was probably going too fast. Again, nothing special just mindfulness.
Google swaps "Video" search with "YouTube"
Would this really be telling us anything? Presumably, they've chosen 5-sigma for a good reason (they make so many observations?). So what would a 3-sigma result signify?
Agreed that the model as well as features present are the important issue. Most thinkpads have either perfect or near perfect linux support, so the main question is which feature set and known design defects the OP will want to live with. For example, some keyboards or screens are better than others, some batteries last longer than others (x220!), and so forth.
If it didn't say "Windows 8" next to it, I wouldn't have known that it was the Windows logo.

Frankly, it is kind of a let-down. The Vista & Windows 7 "pearl" logo is cool - it is flashy and is artistically impressive with it's lighting effects on the rounded semi-reflective surface. It draws the eye to itself. The new logo is a bland blue monochrome square whose slight tilt causes the eye to passively move right over it without notice.

Is this the first hint that Windows 8 is an operating system to "pass" on instead of adopting?

If Microsoft wants this operating system to grab market share, a bland Germanic logo that tells the user "don't mind me, but your next exit is in half a mile" is a poor first step at grabbing the market's attention, IMO.
"What followed were three of the most productive years of my life."

Well, normally college years are the most productive years of anyone's life up to that point. If they're not you're doing it wrong.

Plus, if all you used RSS for is to keep up with "Bush's latest folly", then of course you'll be more productive giving it up.
Can someone explain why this is a preferable solution to fixing the problems with JavaScript? Or say CoffeeScript?
[Tutorial] How To Add RAM To Your Desktop Computer
I think you may be confusing HN with Reddit. Then again, so is everyone else.
Volleyball Socks
Welcome to Volleyball Socks Dot Co.
Many thanks for thebrowser.com. Something similar; http://www.aldaily.com
I definitely agree, and I do think Siri and the like are very important steps to get there. I just don't think in the short term (relative short term) that these apps can gain enough traction in the wide scope that is championed by some of the proponents for voice apps.
Tesla X will have two electric motors and beat a Porsche 911 to 60 mph
I don't think anyone is incapable of learning. I'd say the reasons more people don't do it are (it's not easy) and (there's no hard evidence, therefore it's easy to dismiss).

At the end of the day, there's one solid evidence of advice that I've ignored one too many times.

"Just try it."

also exercise.
I suspect you're trolling. But just in case you're not, and the problem really is that you cannot find interesting, educational and/or enlightening material... have you tried:

Random Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random

Ask.Metafilter (with accepted answer): http://ask.metafilter.com/home/answered

Hack a Day: http://hackaday.com/

LifeHacker Top posts: http://lifehacker.com/top/ or http://lifehacker.com/tag/top/index.xml

Wood Gears: http://woodgears.ca/

Cool Tools: http://kk.org/cooltools
I agree with this. I still keep some news/tech news sites in my Google Reader, but the vast majority of feeds are ones that update infrequently, from once a day and fewer, most of them being developer/designer blogs.
Are there any over all stats as to how the general public feel about all this?

Its cool that all us techie types knowing all about these issues, but does the average mug user know, or know enough to care? Most of the "normal" people I know don't even consider this sort of stuff, they just go along with it. "Yeah, whatever", seems to be the usual response. You can see them glaze over and mentally shut down if I dare try to explain it. That sort of go in to "conspiracy nut" mode.
Perhaps the best piece I have ever read on io9 (which is admittedly not a high bar to clear). I have a few quibbles with it, particularly the bit about not having too many aliens that look "suspiciously similar to humans," but in general the conclusion is well-supported.
They also broke the Gmail logo. KILLING me.
"Self-improvement is masterbation."
It would help if you grasped the difference between "computer science" and software development.
But how much are the enzymes going to cost?
I think that may just be because "normal" people finally got a real person to associate with the faceless (ha!) entity that is Facebook.
Shifting from "I've never heard of this man" to "his moral character aside, this man is responsible for Facebook" can be seen as an improvement.
Can any CSS wizards see if this might have been breakage?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3603103
I see a time in the not to distant future where people in other countries start copying well used and know US sites and hosting them in say China. OK, China is scary, but what about, say, Poland? A kinda of whole website piracy. It might work because they can simply market the safe as being safe from the US government.

I'm thinking of sites like that forms site that suddenly got taken down wrecking the day of, what, millions of customers? How many of them might changed to an identical site that guarantees no US gov interference? Such people might not even realise its not the same people.
I saw this today and was wondering how long that'd been like that.

The other thing I thought I saw was they stopped hijacking the search result links for me briefly, but it's probably too much to hope they get rid of that permanently.
Your browsing history will tell FB everything about you, even if your profile says something different. When all your accesses come from IP addresses in one state, it's not going to matter what the profile says.
Some years ago, I had an interesting experience in...
Photo manipulation Tutorial: Create An 1930′s Old Photo Effect.
Here in this tut you will be seeing how to transform a normal image into a old looking worn out 1930’s image. Here I have used few filter effects and some adjustments to make the image as realistic as possible.
It's only badly broken because voters don't participate in the process. The US political system only works when you have an engaged, educated citizenry actively shaping government. Cynicism about one's vote being foregone is one thing that leads to a broken system.

This article has relevance to this problem as well. The vast majority of people won't realize that news is just noise, noise meant to misdirect voters. If you really want to know about the candidates, you can look up their record and do some research. Unfortunately, this isn't taught in civics classes, and most voters are content with what their favorite news channel tells them about how good one candidate is and how evil another candidate is. Then they regurgitate the same talking points with their friends and neighbors and reinforce the media message, entrenching an opinion in non-swing states. The system will work if people would be more willing to participate and educate themselves, like Roshan decided he would do.
I cannot click the logo neither on Chrome nor Firefox. Have you tried with empty cache on all browsers?

By the way, have they forgotten to change the topbar on video search? http://www.google.com/videohp?hl=en
The lesson I draw from this is that this music, and more so its minor celebrity performers and instruments are just not relevant and fascinating to the commuters in the DC metro when they're trying to get to work. Even if they don't listen to classical music at all it doesn't mean they have no taste or should be looked down on.
Don't talk to the police [video]
Measuring the Success of a Public Web API
We had the same exact experience with out app. It was Facebook login only, and we got a 50% drop in conversion, bad app store reviews, and some of the people who tried to login couldn't because Facebook login either didn't work or was really slow.
Fantastic idea!

I've recently taken to discarding my bookmarks and relying on other methods to save interesting links. If I want to save something for later use, I'll tweet about it, write a tiny blog post about it, or jot it down in a notebook. I'm not terribly diligent about it, but it's made a huge impact towards helping me filter what is truly important.
Hi eyeareque,
could you please add your email in your profile or just ping me, I'm trying to gt in touch with you. Thanks
EDIT: It appears that this was a slow rollout, it appears you can no longer click the logo to get back to the google homepage in ANY browser.

EDIT 2: Why did this instantly fall off the front page? This has happened with 5 out of the last 5 things I have posted that made it to the front page. I think my account account is flagged as spam or something.
“Hey my name's Roshan, I'm the Cofounder and CTO of Bloc.”

You got a high ranking hacker news story. I visited http://www.trybloc.com/ just now as a result of your story.

I am wondering what it is. The page didn't tell me.
Good point. This hadn't even occurred to me.
Interesting. Does this have to do with pushing SPYW/G+, since it encourages retyping queries next to the "personal" results?
https://developers.geoloqi.com/features/geofencing
Apple posts a guide “Start Developing iOS App today”
this is awesome! had to read through a lot of comments to get here, but power to you, man!
What was it that caused such a rapid change after 2007?
Why is there not a service that tracks news stories and algorithmically relates them into the narrative of history, driven by the singular question of "why?"? Something in between google news and quora/stack exchange (anonymized to avoid embarrassment of dumb questions like "what are Israel and Palestine fighting over anyway?" but with a points/voting system to propagate quality answers.) Whoever makes this, please Tell HN so I can sign up for your beta.
What does "Get corporate membership with EFF" mean?

Anyhow, I totally agree that the gov't is out of control. It isn't just with this copyright stuff either.

I sell electronic cigarettes and have an innovation to improve adoption with smokers. My product will undoubtedly be proven many times safer than smoking and more effective in helping people quit, but we face seizures and the threat of regulations which will shutter small businesses like mine.

I'm doing #4, "Migrate yourself to a non-US controlled country." as soon as I can afford to.
This is still on the front page for me...
Seriously? It's Google. Their frickin' home page.

I would hope Google employees use enough of Google that no such breakage would ever make it anywhere near user's eyes.

Also, nonlinking is unlikely to be caused by CSS problems.
The reason this upsets me: I see quite a few people flounder because they feel they still haven't found what they love.

Because sooner or later, they always hit that dull moment. And so they just jump from one thing to the next, disappointed that they just can't get to that mythical sweet spot everybody mumbles about.

I'm not saying willpower yourself through years of drudgery. I'm just saying that there is nothing that will you infallibly get out of bed and motivated every single day of your life. There'll be dull spots, there'll be lulls, there might even occasionally be a dull week or month.

If I read things like "The writer gives in to the joy of playing with words, moving past the aggravation", I want to scream. The writer often struggles with words, and occasionally hates having chosen that profession. And yet the good ones stay with it. Entrepreneurs notice long days, and they occasionally wish they didn't have to suffer through them - but they're compelled to still build that vision. (And some days, the only thing that compels them is knowing that their business might run into trouble if they don't go to work)

I've had the privilege to know world-class people in several different professions. They all occasionally hate all the hard work that goes into it, but they continue it. Not because they "love" it, but because they're compelled to excel at what they do, and they're already good at what they do.

What they love are those few, precious moments where they are at the peak of their craft, and everything seems effortless. What they know is that you pay with a lot of hard work for each of these moments.
Nevada approves Self-Driving Car
any idea where to get that data raw?
Oi. you old people.
Click the "search" button. :P
Mapping Tabular Data
I am reminded of the Emergency Medical Hologram from Star Trek: Voyager, modeled (physically and mentally) after his creator Dr. Lewis Zimmerman. :)
The APIs might exist, but whether they are superior to the established functionality of a library like jQuery is debatable.

For one thing, these APIs only support selectors as expressive as the browser they're running in, which could be a significant disadvantage for IE8 in particular.

For another thing, querySelectorAll() doesn't actually return the array one might expect, but rather a NodeList. That means that doing obvious things like iterating over all the elements you find with forEach() is, well, not so obvious at all.

So I think I stand by my previous position: a lot of people are going to have good reasons to use another library anyway, in which case they might also have access to various convenience functions, in which case relying on ES5 for the same functionality and therefore relying on an ES5 shim to support older browsers is unnecessary.
Create your own command line password generator
Google Science Fair: An online science competition
serious question: were you aware who you trying to compete with (or step on a toe) before going into this business? I cannot imagine being successful in such a field competing with tobacoo brands who have such a strong lobbying representation.
Seems you are right, its back now. Go figure.
Oleg, your vision is exactly what I like about Gitbox. Git is a toolbox to create your own VCS, Gitbox takes a stance and uses those tools to define a usage model, without tying itself to tradition.

It doesn't work for hardcore users and even I sometimes fall back (cringing) to the CLI, but I really appreciate it.

Feature request: easier way to switch local and remote branches with the keyboard. Currently I use Cmd-Shift-? to get to the menu.
Stanford University researchers break NuCaptcha video security
really interesting perspective, I hadn't thought about it from the perspective of "richness of life"

I guess my rebuttal would be that the news i was reading didn't make my life any richer. it's all so pandoring that it's intentionally not rich, I think.
Yes, a lot of the species in Mass Effect are humanoid in shape, but when the author says "suspiciously similar to humans", he really means "exactly identical in appearance to humans except for one tiny difference", which is the standard set by budgetary restrictions in live-action media. Most of the major species in Mass Effect are indeed humanoid, but I don't think any of them are nearly similar enough to humans that anyone would ever for an instant mistake them for human (unless they've been to a lot of Blue Man Group concerts).
ftp://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genomes/

edit: Oops, you probably meant the cost graphs. You might find related graphs from Rob Carlson.
Google Tables out of labs; in beta
And? The whole point is, you can have totally new modes of control. They are crappy modes of control, but they are fun, and that's the point of games anyway.

It would be nice to have a joypad, so you can still play stuff that's following the old generation. Nintendo would have sold a joypad with it, because Nintendo makes everything backwards compatible with the last generation. You can play GameCube games on the Wii, and some of them are pretty good, having learned all the rules for the old interface.

I'm not sure buttons will be back. A touch-pad on the back, which displays your inputs on the front might replace them for most things. They'd need to be pressure sensitive, and have some kind of dynamic calibration (because pressure sensitive stuff is either oversensitive, or doesn't register anything), but it's not impossible (I think). It would be an interesting AI question - how to differentiate clicks, "swishes", and fat fingers; but that's the only real barrier I can think of.
From the readme for that library:

> This package requires quite a bit more attention and testing.

> It is not likely to behave as advertised in a large cross-section of browsers.

That doesn't sound like a cross-browser solution. In fact, it doesn't sound like a professional-level solution at all.

Perhaps one day it will be, but if you're arguing that using this kind of library is a best practice today and that developers should eschew jQuery in favour of such alternatives, then I don't think your position is credible at all.
Noticed this in Gmail, and then suddenly realized how often I used the logo to refresh or go back to my inbox after digging down in a sublabel.

Have been mildly annoyed needing to target the much smaller "Inbox" link in the left now.
There are a few archetypes of programmers, there are those that see the science of the computer, there are those that see the art of software creation and there are a few in between that see the philosophy in the middle. I would assume by your writing that you are in the first camp. The problem is those is the first camp favor languages with a different feature set than those that view it as a art. One cherishes their language because it enforces structure and rules, while those that see it as the art of human expression favor languages for their expressiveness and their ability to bend the languadge to their creative desires.

I like to use Lisp as an example because it is so hated by one camp and so loved by the other and that is the crux of the issue, language are developed for humans to express their ideas. We all think and abstract differently, I do not believe that their will ever be one language that rules them all, because it supposes that it can encompass the way all programers think, by nature it would be the most convoluted language ever designed, as such it would die in the design phase.

Conversely I see concepts like the JVM and the .NET VM as the future. I look at Java, Scala and Clojure as examples of innovation on all sides of the fence on a platform where they can interopt and leverage the creations by all languages that are supported on the VM. At the core, the issue is the differences in thought process and expression of that thought, until direct thought can be translated into software there is just no way to design Utopia++.
I guess this game never really clicked for me. It seemed too much like a video game version of Babylon 5 on rails with predictable sub plot cliches. I enjoyed it for sure, but I don't really consider much of it ground breaking or revolutionary, as I've seen these plots in various other media forms for decades, and the gameplay felt like any other BioWare RPG I've played.
ah crap, sorry about that I'll add a reference right now
I use business cards (my old ones and others'). Finally a productive use for them. :)
This was posted 2 weeks ago:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3547694
Storyboarding for a mobile app development
What kind of tools are available to create storyboards or mobile application flow that could be used with the wireframes? I am coming from the web app dev background and familiar with site maps (e.g.: slickmap). Is there such a thing? If so, how are people doing it in conjunction with tools such as axure.
You would probably like David Allen's Getting Things Done (GTD) book. I think your "Doing" list is what he would call "Next Action", the very next task you can begin because it has no blocking dependencies.
While I agree with the idea that, "consuming has a more immediate reward than creating," the need to be distracted isn't the only reason. We do want to be informed and reputable media outlets, for the most part, do want to inform. It is our inability to effective process the ever increasing amount of information out there. Maybe we need to take on less interests or maybe we need better filters (Google isn't cutting it?).
The number of people with business ideas greatly exceeds the number of angels with money to invest, so the notion of angels pitching to entrepreneurs as an event signals that angels have too much money.

This is not to say that angels don't pitch to entrepreneurs; they do, but they do it after the entrepreneurs pitch to them (and a pitch can be a purely reputational discussion/email (e.g. "if you want money, ask for advice") rather than a session in the elevator, so let's not be constrained by silly definitions).

To see that process run in reverse is insane and signals a serious problem in the market.

Note: I'm an entrepreneur and am in this game with some success, so I'm not speaking out of jealousy...
Yes, but the site collapsed under the load that time, so glad to be reminded!
ok, added. I wasn't thinking, thanks for calling me out :)
Good point. Perhaps the problem is the work station and not the device itself. Still, the way tablets work now, they have to be at a fairly low angle, or one's hands will quickly get tired. That coupled with lack of real world applications doesn't seem to align very well with tablet's possible ubiquitous future.

Maybe it's better the way it is. Maybe having a machine for "work" and machine for "play" is how we keep things intuitive, modular, and clean.
I usually run 5km every other day. What I did was to tell myself that if I don't want to run, I could always just walk and listen to my mp3 player.

That helps alleviate the pressure which would otherwise have made it impossible for me to put on my running shoes.