skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That may be true in the abstract, but having a registered copyright does give you additional protections that could make it easier to dismiss a suit.
> There is, as far as I can tell, no way which you can cause a sound to play (programmatically)

I suggest you give my audiolib.js ( https://github.com/jussi-kalliokoski/audiolib.js ) and sink.js ( https://github.com/jussi-kalliokoski/sink.js ) a shot, they're designed to abstract away the differences between the "competing" Audio APIs, allowing you programmatic access to as deep as the sample level and providing abstractions such as filters, reverbs, delays, etc. For browsers with no Advanced Audio API, there's an inferior fallback using the <audio> elements.

> On the other hand, there are platforms like Java or Flash (or Unity, so I've heard), where you can write once and expect it to work identically everywhere (even on out of date browsers). That must be nice.

I've heard good things about Unity, and it seems to be a great toolkit for game development. However, write once, works everywhere is a pipedream, really. Even for something as simple as a document website, taking all the possible input methods and screen resolutions, etc. into account is hard work. This is where the mentioned technologies fall short and the web stack shines. If you really need to care about that, it's up to you.

I agree with your sentiments about the B and C to great extent. Also the performance of imagedata is absurdly bad. The interpolation issue is, well... I think I'll write another blog post soon, about how ZOH interpolation may sometimes be the best quality option.
Completely agree - Toca Boca definitely have the right approach here. In our safe YouTube for kids app, DuckyTube, we tried hard to make the children's part of the app look fun while making the grownup parts of the app (selecting videos from YouTube, sharing with friends, etc.) look more businesslike so kids are drawn to click the duck and get back to the fun part. Similarly, if there is an error or whatever that we have to interrupt the app we make the "Continue" button look most interesting so children prefer to click it.

Another bugbear of mine is children's apps that make it too difficult for parents to access the menus. One of our competitors requires you to go to the iPhone Settings page for the app, turn on the "Show Menu" option and return to the app to press the Menu button. Then when you are done you have to repeat the process to turn it off again!
I do that already because that just makes sense, but I've been working to clean up my super-newb CSS recently and I'm trying to make it more manageable. I've been using trial and error for the stuff I'm unsure of but that one says it's !important and I didn't want to tempt fate. :D

I'll cut it and see what happens.
Defining Property
Let's take the following hypothetic example, which by the way isn't so hypothetical:

Your company decides it wants to build its business on mobile phones. You go out and hire the best iOS developer you can find, and she builds the app. Then, once you have a few thousand users, you realize that actually this app should be a website. You pivot the company to become a website before an iOS app. Now you have an expert iOS developer and nothing for them to work on. You'd be in a better position to have a super awesome programmer who can (and has interest to) learn new things.

The above example happens all the time. The earlier a company is, the more likely they'll make big pivots.
Wow, I had no idea they did this same UI overhaul to their Server product. I'd like to hear the business case for that drastic product change.
Location-based Functionality: Amber Case & the Invisible Button
Epicurus on Happiness – Philosophy: A Guide to Happiness
> I'm not talking about multiple simultaneous installs. I'm talking about the hardware being the same across operating systems. If I'm buying hardware to set up a linux machine, I will go to the same place as if I were setting up a windows machine.

Building a machine from scratch is not normal user behavior. You can't talk about "many people" and then describe uncommon behavior as if it's typical. The vast majority of users buy off-the-shelf computers with bundled keyboards. Power users who build their own machines should know to buy the right keyboard.

> But I wouldn't. Because I don't use full size keyboards.

What keyboard do you use that doesn't include the Windows key? A compact keyboard does not imply a lack of a Windows key.

> I don't think the operating system should expect this "command" key at all.

Why do you believe this? How is the Windows/Command key any different from the Control key or the Escape key or Alt key or any of the Function keys or the other "special" keys? Why is it reasonable for the OS to expect those other keys will be present but not the "Windows" key that's present on virtually every keyboard that's shipped in the past 15 years?
Against Intellectual Property[1], a monograph by intellectual property lawyer and libertarian legal theorist Stephen Kinsella, tries to show inconsistencies in pro-IP libertarian and furthermore argues that IP is not a valid form of property, and that it collides with physical property rights.

[1]: http://mises.org/journals/jls/15_2/15_2_1.pdf
The difference is you actually have to sit through it this time.
I assume Devin is bokonist?

I ignored his statistics because he was using an appeal to emotion with "residents were begging the police". I have now looked them up; he's not wrong - you could halve the incarceration rate and still put twice as many people in jail as in England.

I don't have an answer for that!

I suspect it has to do with a lack of leniency and a prison system set up for punishment and not rehabilitation - the problem behind that incarceration statistic are repeat offenders and long sentences. The TAL episode I linked above really digs into it. Incarceration rates have skyrocketed since 1980.

That said, reducing the prison population by half doesn't strike me as a half measure.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rat...

Finally, his end conclusion is still spurious - if you lock up more people than everyone else clearly law enforcement isn't the problem.
Silicon Valley's Billionaire Bullies
What does the author mean here?

> "If you're using [...] another OS (tsk tsk tsk) [...]"

I develop on Mint and Gentoo, so any joking here is probably passing over me. Other than a jab at MS (and maybe Apple), does this mean that programming in Clojure would/could be difficult outside of Linux?
As far as I know, this was Lear Siegler's invention; I don't know of any other terminals from the era that use ^K and ^L for "move up" and "move right". (Someone did mention that ^K and ^L did do that on the ADM-3A, right?)
The Spanx Woman is Worth a Billion? My Key Takeaways.
IPL Most Wickets: Leading Wickets by Bowlers in IPL (All Seasons)
Here is the list of IPL Most Wickets Taker Bowler. Get the name of Leading Wickets by Bowler in All IPL Season.
I've been playing around with Canvas2D and now WebGL (via ThreeJS) for a little over a year for my pet project 88etag (https://github.com/lucaspiller/88etag). It's a clone of an old 2D space RTS I used to waste many hours playing.

Personally the biggest issues I've come across is the poor performance of the interface code between Javascript and the rendering layer. If anyone has any tips for how to avoid these they would be highly appreciated.
This is the best advice here. I just got married in November, and my wife and I discussed my programming habits outside of work. I have a few hours of downtime during the week and weekends where my wife is off to work before I begin work that I am able to hack around with stuff, and for me, that is enough time.

Your priorities change when you're married though. You're wife wants, and deserves your attention. She has given her life to you, and the well being of her life and the family you are starting falls on your shoulders.

Once I got married, if I wasn't able to somehow profit off of the little projects I was working on, I dropped them. If the project was a dream of mine to finish, and I really wanted to do it, I figured out how to do it in such a way that it'd be financially wise to finish it so I could make a profit off of it in the future.

Since being married and having this state of mind, I am bringing in some extra money every month by still doing what I love to do.
If copyright enforcement is considered agression, then GPL enforcement is never initiation of agression. The GPL only needs to be enforced in response to someone else's copyright claims.
For those interested, I'm almost certain that this is from MIT's 6.042 (Mathematics for Computer Science) class: http://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.042/spring12/ There is a publicly accessible, most-recent-draft of the text at http://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.042/spring12/mcsfull.pdf
Meet the crazy start-ups from the Startup Bus
Thanks for this.

I feel I can now go back and cover all the math i've forgotten since the first couple CS years (only a couple years ago!). I'm not really sure if it is worth the time from a practical standpoint, however I always feel slightly slower than other students when it comes to algorithm-related classes.

Hopefully this should get me up to speed again!
The entry level for a new-grad software engineer is 75-100+k in US. If you are working for 35-40k you are doing it wrong unless you chose to live in middle of nowhere where 40k is actually a nice salary.
Why Contests Freaking Rule
And congratulations! Being married is the beginning of the greatest thing that will ever happen to you!
If I invested in, say, Twitter and you asked me right after they exploded "how do you feel about this investment?", I'd tell you plainly: I doubt they'll ever be profitable, but I'll make my money back in future rounds. And that's what happened, except that they eventually, maybe became profitable (if you look at the numbers the right way). Pinterest may end up being a brilliant investment that makes everyone a ton of money, but I find it highly doubtful, and right now they're hoisting the "Mission Accomplished" banner before they've even gotten into the hard part. Sorry, but the metric for success in business isn't getting people to use your product, it's turning that utility into money. They haven't shown they can do that.
Don't mess with the Internet
How technology should be used to spur open government
Current mobile browsers, yes, very much so.

But I think Chrome for Android 4 (which I believe will replace stock Android browser eventually), IE10 for Windows 8 phones / tablets, and Firefox on B2G will change this. I've seen B2G already running mobile web games smoothly on Android hardware.
Anybody who enjoys Steve's thoughts about gaming addiction will probably enjoy this "hidden gem" too.

http://www.nickyee.com/hub/addiction/addiction.pdf

It's a decade old now, but IMO it does an even better job explaining the dynamics of game addiction.
IANAL, but can someone explain what information might be gained via this subpoena to build a case?

To me, it seems like the information from twitter would be useful in building a conspiracy case, but since this guy was only charged with Failure to Obey, Blocking Traffic, and Prohibited Use of Roadway, I don't see how information from his twitter account will help prove those charges. (Unless of course, he tweeted: "I'm blocking the roadway and disobeying police!")
If your game has essential elements (not things that are supposed to be mysteries) that it does not present to the player, then it has failed.

Not that I would play Borderlands through again, I didn't enjoy it at all.
We used to treat people as property too. Things change... for the better most of the time, hopefully.
Bill Joy didn't invent modes; all editors were very modeful until Bravo, in the 1970s. And in vi, you don't use ^H to move left; you use h. Tony has already corrected you on ^K and ^L, but I'll point out that there was a way to move the carriage right on a Teletype, even though it wasn't ^L: the SPACE character does that.
The last time I tested SVG on Chrome (five months ago) it was very buggy: moving certain shapes left a trail behind, trying to visualize large graphs with d3 (two months ago) crashed the browser. I need to retest this but my feeling was that we are not there.
I find it endlessly amusing that communists or socialists would call themselves anarchists. I think this is just an example of socialists attempting to coopt another movement.

Libertarians are often anarchists because they believe the state cannot exist without violating the NAP. The state (By definition as an entity with a monopoly on the use of force in a geography) thus uses violence to conquer a land and takes for itself rights that naturally belong to the people.

>You mean to say that a workers' occupation is an act of aggression or force,

I don't see how this follows from anything I said. I can't connect it so, I can't respond.

>You're also insisting that "libertarianism"—a political philosophy—tells us anything about morality or ethics. That's a much stronger position than what, in my experience, even U.S.-style libertarians tend to espouse.

I'm not insisting anything. I'm giving you the definition. I'm a Libertarian, and that is what we believe. This is consistent across the US, and in my experience, among libertarians across the world. This is consistent with the founders of the Libertarian party in the 1970s, Rothbard and Nolan, and with the philosophical groundwork and economics that they took inspiration from.

FWIW, wikipedia is a crowd sourced entity. It is not authoritative, and it is often quite biased when it comes to political topics that leftists have a strong opinion about.
I don't think that these changes actually require re-learning the OS, though. They do require some learning, but "re-learning the OS" implies a much bigger learning curve than most people actually faced with the changes in the past. Yes, some people are greatly confused when, say, the control panel changes. But those people were already confused by the control panel. It's not as if these people were ultra-competent until the category view was added.

I actually agree that the control panel change is annoying, though. I think it was a bad change, because it's not merely different. I think it's actually less usable.

And yes, the change from Win7 to Win8 is massive. Not a lot of people would dispute that.
libertarians only believe in intellectual property rights protected by contract, not government.

Actually, not all libertarians. Ayn Rand, for example, considered them an extension of natural rights: http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/patents_and_copyrights.htm...

EDIT: Anyone care to point out where is the post wrong? I'm not a Rand follower, but as far as I know she's considered a libertarian and the quotes make her position very obvious.
Fuck ‘em
I didn't mean to characterize you, but your thesis. I apologize to the extent that I did this.
the solution to "our bloated application server takes 20 minutes to recompile" is "then use our distributed compiler that runs on 100 machines,"

This is a bit disingenuous. The app servers are bloated because every library is rebuilt and statically linked, avoiding deployment problems and apps that use massively-outdated libraries. Continuous integration is expensive, but we can afford it.
I think this is probably a significant part of why multitasking gestures are turned off by default. They won't ever be on for any device whose owner doesn't feel comfortable poking around in Settings.

I've seen an app on startup recommend turning them off if they're on. (Which doesn't mean that Apple considers that OK, of course, just that the reviewer of that one app did.)
Eh, when I'm writing on a forum, I tend to use train of thought. I don't really feel I'm changing my argument, more of clarifying that I'm not picking on Ubuntu (as all systems have problems), but Ubuntu has a more significant problem of needing to be better than better. Windows and OSX don't need to be good at anything and they would still keep their marketshare.
I support your IE stylesheet ban. CSS can definitely be written without a separate IE CSS and be pixel perfect across browsers. Several techniques I've incorporated to help avoid browser inconsistencies:

Use a good clearfix.
Avoid margins and use padding instead as much as possible to avoid issues with margin collapse.
Be weary of inline-block.
I used a scroll knob to move up and down (and left and right) on my Blackberry in 2000, and it was awesome. It's dramatically better than using arrow keys. It's a real shame the original CRT terminals didn't have scroll knobs. It would have dramatically improved the usability of computers throughout the 1970s and 80s.
Fair enough. All I know is that I can't recall ever seeing it, and I've set up a couple of iPhones and an iPad. I'm not willing to wipe a device to confirm, though.
So they can keep him in jail for an extra couple hours by charging him with "Conspiracy to fail to obey, Conspiracy to block traffic, and Conspiracy to ... uh ... prohibited use of roadway."
* for private prisons
I wrote this short piece because I think quite a few startups could benefit from running contests after launch to keep the surge of new email leads coming in the door.

Launchrock style pre-launch are awesome, but how do you keep the big subscriber bumps coming after launch day?
Because the Member's Portal & iTunes Connect are clearly not given the same attention that the consumer facing products are given.
He does know how specificity works, I guess. But he is talking about reusability and inheritance. Still I find the claim way too harsh. I use id's in my CSS occassionally. For #wrapper or #carroussel maybe. It it premature optimization to (re-)write everything to classes. Your HTML should be leading.
How Patent Monopolies Work In Reality
Are you suggesting that "Talking Tom Cat" is not a children's toy? Because otherwise, you're sounding more than a little self-righteous here.

I don't know the answers, but I think it's reasonable to ask whether technology can make a positive contribution to kids' lives. I don't think it's productive to belittle people for experimenting with ways of doing so.
What are specifically some good things to post to such collected email addresses?

Actually I am just running a contest for Candy Japan (http://www.candyjapan.com/?c=smbc) and had a default unchecked button to allow me to email them. Well, now I'm getting a bunch of people checking that button and giving me permission to email them, but not sure what to send.
Does anateus have a monopoly on paulgraham.com updates?
Old media generally has more money than brains. They are used to command-and-control and think if they just buy new media hotness they'll then be able to grab the steering wheel and drive into the future. The reality is their impulse to control usually makes failure inevitable.
So what does this mean? Should people not be able to charge for content? There's not a single yes or no answer to that question. People should be able to charge for content when it works to charge for content.

But by "works" I mean something more subtle than "when they can get away with it." I mean when people can charge for content without warping society in order to do it.

pg, I'd be really interested in hearing more about what (you think) this should look like.
A rare look into one of Google's Search Quality meetings
Isn't that windows sharepoint? And I think it is a huge business. See also yammer (that's probably where they're going, no?), box.net, and atlassian's products (jira, wiki, etc).
They also released several such projects.

Kinect itself was first announced on June 1, 2009 at E3 2009 under the code name "Project Natal".[48] Following in Microsoft's tradition of using cities as code names,[10] "Project Natal" was named after the Brazilian city of Natal as a tribute to the country by Brazilian-born Microsoft director Alex Kipman, who incubated the project.[10][49] The name Natal was also chosen because the word natal means "of or relating to birth", reflecting Microsoft's view of the project as "the birth of the next generation of home entertainment".[37]

I don't know if their R&D department has been a net gain, but you need to consider 20 years from they could be making billions from idea that seemed to have been abandoned today.
minor nitpick: a cubic liter is not a thing. Liters are already measures of volume.
One of my favorites: Minbox. Finally, someone who thinks that the way the inbox works doesn't make sense.
Yes, in addition to the cursor movement control characters, there was a single escape sequence for moving to a specified row and column. I didn't know they were sold as kits. Did you buy a kit?
Don't Upset the Intellectual Property Fashion Police
Coffee Is an Essential Benefit Too
I could see some kind of Parental Controls making it into iOS at some point, and less so "Guest Mode". As for the other 2, I wouldn't bet on it, ever.
The main reason why I think "Intellectual Property" is a misnomer, and it's not actually property, is because creative ideas can not be owned by anyone 100%. So it's not fair for you to benefit from other people's ideas, improve on them, and get get to "own" the new idea for life. Society could give some some limited time monopoly over an idea, if they think the improvement you bring is worth a few years of protection from the Government. But that should be about it.

It's also why it wasn't originally called property, but copyright. The society only allows you to benefit from your idea only for a while, because then it must return to the public domain so others can further improve on it, or at least that's how it used to be. Now copyright protection is virtually indefinite, so that's unfortunate, and it's now how it should be.
My experience working with patents
Designing a Marketing Site: Know Your Customers and How They Decide
I remember in 2004 trying to install Fedora on my desktop and having it not recognize my wifi, NIC, or USB ports. Trying to find the right driver at the library and copying it and all its dependencies onto a couple floppy disks was quite entertaining.
I agree that they should do a better job presenting this. How hard would it be to add some sort of "You can play again with X, Y, and Z being different" after you finish the game?

But it's not that hard to find out about regardless.
blather all you want, but the consensus here is IDs, when properly used, enable speed and specificity. you don't get to tell us what's best practice.
Hold your arm out in front of you for 5 minutes.
While all that may be true - (and as a Brit living in the US who has to renew their passport shortly thanks for the heads up on pricing) at $121 for 10 years that works out to be $1 / mo. That actually seems very reasonable compared to my cable bill.
Investor Inattention during FIFA World Cup matches
Poker games have some weird results, like having numbers for keywords. Is this some way of gaming the system or a bug?

http://www.appcod.es/appsearch/poker
Criticism of the OSX version of Finder was widespread and harsh. Criticism of Ubuntu's new interface has often been similar (not to mention The Ribbon). Heck, if one went by comments from command line gurus here on HN, it might seem as if the utility of GUI's for widespread deployment was still an open debate.

The integration of the Metro interface with the desktop PC requires a paradigm shift, but in the long run it will probably prove better to have done sooner than later because of the benefits it affords developers directly, and thus users indirectly.
Oops, I was conflating cubic meter and liter; fixed, thanks.
Interesting niche. What if you sent out a "crazy flavor" report? Maybe a video of you tasting some of the most insane Japanese flavors you can find.

Could be an interesting way to keep people engaged so when you send out an offer for them to buy a specialty collection of candies they have a better idea of who you are and what actually tastes good :)
Why Nike did a great job in Marketing and Positioning the Nike+ FuelBand