skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One of these days I will see an a detailed comparison of some of these Java cloud options (from GAE, to Heroku, Amazon Beanstalk, Cloudbees, and now Jelastic).

Given that I want to launch a side project on the cloud, this is very relevant to me, but I don't have the time to try all of them.

Interestingly, seems like they are building a platform similar to CloudFoundry and OpenStack.
Oh wow, that is nice. It looks a lot like Gmail.
Would you (or anybody else who's deep in this) mind expanding? Does it have something to do with carrier subsidies?
You really think YouTube only stores and delivers single encodings of each video? They would just deliver a different encoding for Flash.
I'm disappointed that it won't intepret gmt and bst when entered into the search bar, but it clearly knows what they are in the results.

Ergo you can't search;

"hours between 1pm GMT march 10 and 1pm BST march 11 2012"
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=hours+between+1pm+GMT+m...

And get a desired response. In fact it really screws up. Going to keep trying, also I thought that BST kicked in at the end of March. (Google informs me: 25th march)
if you add a location, it gives you the right answer...
example:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=hours+between+1pm+march...

0.9583 days = 22 hours 59 minutes 57 seconds

the time change does not apply everywhere, in places near the equator there is no daylight saving time change.
Streatham cab
0208 672 7272 Min£5 Gatwick fr£29 Heathrow fr£27 City Airport fr£29 Luton fr£54 Stansted fr£54 Kings Cross fr£21 Victoria fr£15 TOOTING Taxi Minicab Car service
There have been several IaaS products I've looked at recently with no pricing info. I'm not going to invest in learning or coding to your system without pricing.
> I don't understand the thinking here:

If you're a consumer, you use the Metro UI.

If you're a producer, you use the Desktop.

You can set the desktop to be default on bootup. And I'm 90% sure this is how home computers will ship from DELL. While tablets will be Metro.

The desktop is not going anywhere, MS has simply re-aligned the default UI to cater for the mass-market: the consumers that want to browser youtube, check the email, tweet, etc.

> Microsoft seems insistant on forcing users to re-learn the OS at every release.

IMO, they are insistent on improving their products.
The result is accurate. Add a location (ie ontario, Canada) to the end of the query. Not every place has Daylight savings time.
Privacy economics: evidence from the field
Hollywood Studios Warm to Apple's iCloud Effort
I've seen child-oriented cases that have a hard cover over the home button. This was for an iPhone/iPod, but they probably exist for the iPad as well.
Why "We use hyphen delimited, lowercase selectors: .thisIsBad{}, .this_is_also_bad{} but .this-is-correct{}"? I understand if the point is about the styles itself having hyphens, like padding-bottom, but it breaks the complete expression selection with ctrl+arrows (or even with the double mouse click) which I find much more annoying than using underscores instead of hyphens. I'm biased though, I prefer underscores to camelCase anytime (I do obey whatever is the rule on any project).
I think that might be the problem. For some reason Chrome was not playing nice with WebM and HTML5 Video which I am registered for. The problem was on my end not on yours. I whispered sweep nothings to my computer while i restarted chrome and it worked fine afterwards.
Should Government Play Venture Capitalist? MA Thinks So
My 5 year old has been using his iPad since he was 4, and we've encountered all these problems and more. The funny thing though is that he learnt to work around all of them! Accidentally presses menu, after a couple of times he learns what to do.

I think these obstacles of bad design are just more little puzzles for children. As parents we shouldnt obsess about having a perfect environment for our kids.

On the other hand, what really bugs me is when educational apps can be easily gamed. The math bingo app was completely useless once my son figured out he could solve it by randomly banging on cells and would eventually win. A lot more effort should go in to designing apps so that the child learns something real, as opposed to just learning to play the game.
Another disillusioned Indian here. I'm in the middle of a month long vacation after living in US for 3 years.

After a boom of 10 years, we now have really good highways in most part of the country. However I saw at least one bullock cart, some stray cows and people trying to cross a 4 lane US Interstate like Highway. Also the entries to highways were ill-planned. Traffic regulations and speed limits were not updated in light of recent developments.

Tamil Nadu, one of the growth engines of Indian economy gets 10 hr power cuts everyday because the chief minister refuses to open a newly constructed nuclear power plant.

Engineering colleges in India track their students round the clock and report to parents on their activities. Someone I know goes to a school where they conduct "aptitude" classes 3 saturdays+ one sunday a month for preparing students to attend Infosys(Wipro, TCS)( All three have the same business models, body shops) interviews. Kids literally buy their thesis(project) from companies that have a ready made project for them, so they could focus more on getting into one of the Body Shops.

Also I just read that many of the companies that got into "emerging "(Airlines, Telecom) Indian economy are either running on losses or never made a profit.
Because Firefox Mobile is some bullshit if it can't play any video content (it doesn't support Flash.)
ipad kills kids' eyes.
i buy real books instead.
Play also has first class support for Java. I would love to see how this Scala code translates to Java. My understanding is it should be fairly straightforward.
The idea that "nagging works" is widely used to craft advertising for children's television (source: The Corporation (film)). Is the march toward such advertising in this nascent children's entertainment medium inexorable?
It's additional evidence (in addition to dhconnelly above) that the author actually has no idea how to use the shell properly.

"I've designed a new car ... this one, you can POINT in the direction you want to go! No more stopping, getting out, and manually turning the front wheels every time you want to turn!"
We already have the technology to send trains into space
Phones need serious improvement to run these kinds of games anyway, we're probably looking at at least half the time it's going to take for these games to run with the web technology stack on the mobile to get it running even natively on the mobile. So for mobile, the wait is on, no matter what.

It's going to take a while, but our toolkits need sharpening as well, so I'm not expecting a non-trivial web game to emerge very soon. But the platform is growing in the right direction.

You got me interested, what kind of a game are you working on? Sounds like my kind of a game.
Infographics & Data Visualization
I disagree slightly with the Affordance Is King point. You should identify the hot spots on the screen, but you should also reward childish exploration. I think most of the screen should be hot. Pretty much everything should be a target, and they should all be big. "Animals For Toddlers" (Eiswuxe) does this well (and is just plan excellent all around, by the way).

I also disagree with the advice that arrows are best for pagination; I think he's overgeneralizing. My toddler is great at swipes, and still doesn't use arrows well. Broader testing may be a good idea here, and implementing multiple paradigms might be the answer.

The bit about not putting the menu on the bottom of the screen is good, though. The kids apps I have on my (Android) tablet often disable the soft button menu and implement their own elsewhere. Of particular note is the pull-down-from-a-collapsed-bar-at-the-top pattern, which my son seems to know how to not get into. Or at least get out of.

And that bit about ads and in-app payments is right on the money. I've bought a few apps for him after seeing he likes the free version, but the ones that result in him launching dating sites get uninstalled fast.
Reminds me of a friend who used to run IT for a school, telling me the feature he looked for in educational software was greying out the 'print' button for 30 seconds after it had been clicked. Otherwise, the scenario was: kid clicks 'print', looks at printer, sees nothing coming out (maybe the printer is out of paper, or warming up, or whatever). So kid just keeps clicking 'print'. Result: when printer finally comes online, it wastes reams of paper printing dozens of copies of the document in the queue.
At least "vi" gives some feedback. "ed" is far worse.
No reason other than that is what I started off with and I’d rather keep things consistent. Had I started off with underscores then I’d be asking the team to stick with that.

I guess that section is more about ‘keep everything the same’ rather than ‘we must specifically use hyphens’ :)

Cheers,
H
This still says 24 hours for me. Is this different from what you're seeing?
SXSW Panel Recap: Social Media Is A Bubble, SXSW Is A Fad
Funny. On my netbook, Ubuntu used to feel like it was finally ready about one major version ago.

Today, 11.10 is so unusably slow it might actually make Windows Vista feel competitive. I thought it might be the outdated video card but then Unity 2D made no actual difference; any simple UI interaction still sucks CPU hard. Just for some icing on the cake, the Wi-Fi driver is now also causing random kernel panics on my hardware.

I heard someone exclaim somewhere OS X Lion was Apple's Vista moment. Well it looks to me like Ubuntu 11.x is Canonical's Vista moment. I'm holding out hope version 12 will be their Windows 7 moment, otherwise the long painful process of adapting to another distro will have to begin.
The difference is that memory checking in debug C runtimes doesn't paper over your mistake: instead it breaks your program reliably so that you know you have a mistake. As per the linked article, "While recursive mutexes may seem a convenience for debugging, in fact it's the opposite -- you're better off with a "strict" debugging mutex (like the POSIX error-check attribute) that checks, tracks, and enforces ownership restrictions a "normal" mutex may ignore in favor of runtime efficiency."
> the default "no barrier" purchase mechanism

Ugh. This, combined with the x-minute no-password-required feature have contributed to more than one horror story I've personally heard.

This is why I disable IAP on my iPhone. I haven't seen the IAP experience either, so I don't even know if it takes you to the App Store to give you a chance to back out.
Also:

* Adobe announced two years ago that Flash would support WebM, but it never happened. (And since then they have stopped updating Flash for mobile platforms, and for non-Chrome browsers on Linux.)
If I kill you over a bad drug deal, but none of us has drugs on us at the time, what crime do I get charged with?

The counterpoint offered by phillmv was that just because, on paper, the crime has nothing to do with drugs, doesn't mean that it wasn't motivated by the drug trade.
Per Miguel de Icaza, try a paper clip!

http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2011/Mar-23.html
Spot on regarding the in-app purchases.

I have a rule of giving 1 star rating to any kid's game that has them regardless of how well it's done and if my kids actually enjoy the non-gimmicky part. Milking parents by making their kids beg and nag them is an unethical way to earn money.
Ah and finally java guys reinvent something which has been in ruby for decades :P
This is kind of a cheezy, non analytical and barely informational article, but I agree with the standpoint.

Ubuntu is easy. It's actually strikingly easy. From install through normal everyday usage the experience is painless(actually enjoyable) and fluid. For the vast majority of machines it will be self configuring and for the rest installing drivers ranges from just as easy as other systems to of course much harder but thats a vendor problem not an Ubuntu problem that really can only be addressed with Ubuntu gaining users.

Don't get distracted by comparing the other OS's feature by feature to Ubuntu. You're just going to waste your time and get unnecessarily hot headed. Ubuntu's greatest strength is still, and arguable always will be, that its FOSS. But it is also a dead simple, batteries included, no noise operating system that normal everyday users would find lovely to use.

What Ubuntu really needs now is community optimism and a bit of lighthearted activism. It needs installs. The more users and attention, the more interest and support. Ubuntu is definitely ready for prime time, we just have to put it in that timeslot.
Do you happen to know "an external system (software or hardware) / API that expects actual UTC"?

Unix/Linux computers don't, Windows computers don't, GPS doesn't:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Positioning_System#Timek...
I'm disappointed at you...
I never finished Borderlands... Killing tons of skags with an automatic weapon is only fun for about the first 30 minutes for me, but reading this article makes me want to play to the end-game. Then again, the time investment getting to playthrough 2.5 is probably not worth it.
This is what we do for our son. From what I can remember it isn't obvious that you can set up an iTunes account without a credit card - we had to go into iTunes (on a PC) after-the-fact to remove the CC info.
>Why would an OS be built to expect a special OS specific key?

You mean, like the Ctrl and Esc keys you mention two sentences later? There are quite a few "special" keys on every computer keyboard. The OS is quite justified in assuming that your keyboard has the requisite ones.
Hahaha. Hope this thread doesn't become a Ruby/Java battlefield.
What do you think of the new Adobe?
The ironic thing is that you'd probably have zero issues finding a job at a BigCo, which don't often use the same interrogation techniques as startups and tech companies.
Over time, as an app developer and a parent, I've come to appreciate the home button just as it is. As an app developer, it means my app will be rated and compared to other apps based on user experience for the child.. how engaging is the app, how much replay value does it provide. If the mechanics are frustrating or the content is boring, children will always vote with their finger and move onto another app. As a parent, I like that developers have to surpass a certain usability and experience threshold before parents are satisfied with the app and provide a good review.
My daughter does this all the time on my Kindle Fire and my WP7. She routinely has her thumb just sitting on the edge of the screen and she wonders why the game won't work for her, but works for me. You could program dead zones on the edges of the device in applications you develop, but that doesn't work for other apps.
Turing's Cathedral
You're right about apps improving their design, but it should be noted that game design for kids is kinda tricky.

For example, what if in that math app, the player had "X" amount of lives, and every wrong answer cost a life? It might solve the issue of "keyboard smashing", but would create negative feedback, which is very inappropriate in this kind of game. Learning and with especially younger children, positive reinforcement tends to work far better than negative reinforcement. Every option has a cost.
In absolute numbers, thats true. Still, Borderlands sold 4 million copies and was considered a huge success. So the cost vs. benefit was right, although it catered to an audience that might be small in absolute numbers.

Count in other grinding games that are on facebook (Farmville, etc.) and you will see that the number of players that are entertained by grinding is actually a substantial part of the playing community as a whole. It doesn't matter whether the game is "hardcore" or not.

Seeing the rather extreme case that these many years after release, there are still that many people playing Borderlands (and Diablo) just for the grind is an interesting thing.
I'd hire you if you were a good engineer but not a good interviewee :). My hope would be that a good interviewer can see through an interview in the same way that a good teacher gives good grades to good students, not good test takers.
In fact, even if Mozilla did pay a non-royalty-free patent license to include the codecs in Firefox, that license would probably be incompatible with the GPL/LGPL, meaning it would no longer be possible to distribute Firefox under its current MPL/GPL/LGPL tri-license. (I don't know the MPL well enough to know whether Firefox would still be distributable under the MPL alone.)
I was hoping for a more technical article - the core techs for HTML5 gaming aren't quite from what I can tell. WebGL and the Audio APIs in particular seem on shaky ground for the moment... it seems there are still rather major security and performance problems to deal with.

Most worrying however is the utter lack of any non-TCP networking in the browser, not even at the specification-proposal stages. Any sort of real time multiplayer really kinda needs UDP to work efficiently. P2P is also fairly important for certain applications and is in a similar state.

Anyway, not that this means to give up hope completely, just of disappointing there aren't many visible efforts to address these issues on the horizon.
Headline spelling error: s/it’s/its/
This is an advantage of the android style permission system in this case, the 'Services that Cost you Money' section could reveal this dodgy behavior quite easily.
Beyond Exception Handling: Conditions and Restarts (Common Lisp)
Change can be incremental.

Compare OS X 10.0 to the current version - there's a whole lot that has changed, and the user experience is massively superior. And they managed to get there through a series of 7 incremental releases where the single most jarring change was swapping the semantics of the "scroll" gesture. Stuff has come, stuff has gone, but they never once did it in a way that left existing users at a loss for how to interact with the new version.

Heck, skip the tiny increments. I'd go so far as to suggest that if a Mac user were to time-travel forward from 1984, they would be less confused by the current version of OS X than Windows 7 users seem to be by Windows 8.
New Cognitive Biases Articles on Wikipedia
Aye, but the person in question is a high-ranking Mozilla employee, and his "opinion" is presented in a very done-deal sort of way.

(As for "article", that was just me using a generic term for the context of a HN thead.)
Well what's the bottle-neck ?

It's not as if there's a finite pool of disruptable markets or a limit on innovation (or at least one that we're anywhere close to).

The limit seems to essentially be on the talent side and PG has commented before that the best startups they've funded were often the last ones they decided to fund in a round which suggests that's plenty of talent that YC isn't getting.
Listening to the two audio samples in the report, I would say the voices don't sound very similar and the translated one sounds very mechanical.
Very good point. I suppose I've only worked at startups that have done very well (Redfin, Cloudera), hence the bias here. While we're here, though, could you share some of the negative parts of working at a (failing) startup, apart from the obvious: you're out a job?
Iwwelewant Cowwection! Actual Bayes law is:

P(W|A) = P(A|W)P(W)/P(A)
> Doing high-performance scrolling is a hard problem. You just can't do it in HTML, at all.

Not necessarily. Especially with Apple adding momentum scrolling to Mobile Safari in iOS 5. I have no problem smoothly scrolling through tables hundreds of rows long.
I'm curious: don't any other people here think 2-year-old kids shouldn't be playing iPad games at all?

I'm convinced that watching TV is harmful to a child's intellectual development. (And there's an established body of evidence to support that.)

As a kid, I hated my hippie Montessori teacher mom for allowing me only one hour of TV per week as a kid in the late 70s and early 80s (elementary school; I usually chose the Duke boys, and later Knight Rider). But, as an adult, I cite it often as one of the things I admire most about the way she raised me (no limits on books, nor daytime outdoor play after school, nor building things), especially after coming to understand how much easier it is to set a precocious and hyper wild little monkey in front of the boob tube so the parents can get a couple hours of peace.

I do think video games (especially good ones) are probably much less harmful than TV, and that they do even have some net positives for the user, in terms of developing various human abilities (cognitive and otherwise). But isn't two years old too young? Shouldn't kids of that age, instead of learning in-game physics, be learning real physics? Like with balls, marbles, and blocks, running and falling down, and not with animated honeypots and flying unicorns?

My own kid won't be here for a few more months, so I'm not preaching; just honestly asking. I know little kids love iPad games... but they love eating sugar cubes, too.
This is very dangerous to create a new thread every time. Sure makes it easy to DOS the system with survey votes. At the very least, this should be a submission to an ExecutorService that contains a thread pool.
This is great feedback. Right now I'm trying to finish our first book for http://non.io (site isn't complete yet, but it will still give you an idea of the core concept), and one of my considerations was ensuring that the app was child friendly. At the end of the day, there will be options and components that are for parents only. Ensuring that a.) they're still prominent enough for parents to see at some point, and b.) that they're out of reach of children is a difficult balancing act. Does anyone know of or have any suggestions of apps who have done this correctly? I only have two components that are for parents - a donation form and an email signup form on the last page. Right now they're disabled until you select a checkbox that says "I'm an adult". Would love to get more feedback on this though.
Earlier discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3690063
Well, just remember that when you say "Some people (on this thread, too) seem to think that in order for Linux to be successful, it needs to become Windows. ", you are including Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Ubuntu...

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1
TYL
So what's the rigorous mathematical justification this trick works and doesn't produce inconsistencies?

The power law smells a bit like P(W) were itself some maximum-likelihood estimate.
I've absolutely no D experience, but maybe others do:

I wonder, if a nice and friendly library uses features like this to provide a fancy embedded DSL, would compile-times suffer? If so, by how much?

Say, you could make something like LINQ entirely from inside a library using methods like these. Strongly typed ORM-ish methods that depend on the data model in use, even, maybe? Would that be too slow?
I break about half of those rules and it works very, very well. Please don't label things that can be discussed as 'best practices'. One day some newbie will wonder across it, take it as gospel, and then will screw up projects by applying them when they don't make sense.

Also there is nothing wrong with magic numbers so long as you don't use them where a % would be more appropriate (e.g this text is 12px, because it looks nice). If CSS is used with out a pre-processor you have to use them, as there is no concept of variables.
As you see on http://foto.stjerne.nu/Other/Serverrum-flood/21787887_cTdTB8..., some public builders dig'ed a hole in a water pipe, in the ground, in the street just outside the server room in the basement
Ziekte van Parkinson: beperk voedsel met hoge dosis ijzer