skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
i don't know why sprites are still recommended? they save big on HTTP request, but they have quite a DOM rendering overhead. the best icons, are no icons. you can cut back on icons big time without loosing any usability (as measured by time on site, average page views, ...). the benefit of a faster site by far outweighs the loss of some meaningless icons that are mostly only there to stroke the ego of designers. (but if you still need icons, use unicode)
"Curate" (verb) is one of those words that has lost most of its meaning, due to people using it in order to steal its cachet. Previously it was associated with art museums and libraries, institutions of supreme cultural importance. Now that anyone can make a list and put it on the internet, anyone can be a curator, which means you don't get much information about someone if you learn that he is a "curator".
Whoa - I was looking for a hyphenation and join-back tool earlier today, and couldn't find anything even remotely useful. Scribd has a pretty good record of contributing to open source: any chance you'd make that component available? Alternately, is there something off-the-shelf that's almost as good?
At INcubes Demo Day, Tech’s Devils and Angels
You purchased them from TI. I was referring to their samples.

All the stuff I've purchased from TI has indeed been shipped directly from TI itself and not through Digikey.
Its me Dennis. Just having brand conversations.
You should always follow the standards.
You just cause an exception in the Deathnote implementation code and crashed the universe...
Foursquare.com ditches Google Maps for MapBox and OpenStreetMaps
Looking good. I wouldn't want it as an editor, bt hey, what's with all the negative comments. This would be very to have a quick peek at a portion of code.
It should be easy to integrate this with emacs so it can be displayed in an extra window while your active buffer runs your favorite mode. No?

I have a vague memory of seeing something like this a fiew years ago, without the bubbly rounded corners look, but I recall a similar thing. Anyone?
I personally think this would make a much cooler hacker space:

http://founderscastle.com/
At 99c though, do you expect the software that you're purchasing to be bug free? For apps that I've done I've skipped a lot of formal testing. I know the user base will be small enough to not mind the occasional bug, and if the apps do become popular then I'll invest the time to add some.
Constitutional Showdown Voided as Feds Decrypt Laptop
My deal is that I already went down the 'scratch your own itch' path, totally ignorant of the customer development approach and got burnt bad. So now I am going extreme opposite. My guess is there is a happy middle ground I need to drift back towards. I'll keep your advice in mind.

All my hobbies are too nerdy, and therefor over-served btw. Except one: sailing. Maybe I should take a harder look at that.
> Wave was too complicated and did not integrate into everyone's existing mail clients.

This is exactly the point, people were to entrenched with email, Wave was trying to kill email simply by being better than it.
On similar lines, I wrote an unofficial API for Amazon's CloudPlayer: https://github.com/mwylde/cloud_player.
In which we coin a term which is the opposite of deprecate
Sounds unlikely. May I ask what experience you had with 1980's structure editors (presumably Interlisp)? My reading of history is that it wasn't rejected by users, but rather killed off by MacLisp implementors teaming up to create Common Lisp, thereby getting the ARPA funding (when ARPA wanted to consolidate Lisp). (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.lang.lisp/Llmnxk2...)

Paredit, a favorite among modern Lisp users, was directly inspired by Interlisp's structure editing. Paredit's own author calls it a "cheesy imitation" of Interlisp. (http://mumble.net/~campbell/emacs/paredit.credits)

Personally, I think Lisp is ripe for many different visual/kinesthetic interpretations, and this one certainly is pretty.
i'm the ceo of a company that sells b2b software. we never sell a product for less than $2k annually, and our contracts are frequently in the 5 figures annually.

our current sales cycle includes a lot of the negatives that you point out. however, we're up front with our pricing while our competitors aren't.

we actually created a product that did nearly exactly what you said. we didn't get nearly as many customers with that method. people would sign up (sometimes) and when they did, they tended not to pay once their 30 day free trial was up. our conversion rates sucked. we ended up canceling that product and removing it from our site after 8 months.

when we have a webinar with a sales call, our closure rates increase dramatically. customers tend not to pay by credit card even when given the option.

i actually think you're 100% right for many, many products. but i don't think it'd work in my boring b2b industry.

edit: we probably didn't do enough experimentation on the small product as we should have, so i take some of the blame for that.
You're right, I should have said that what you're describing sounds like something that is very much not depression, as you're describing your experience as beneficial, something thats overall positive to your life, not something harmful. And yeah I'm not a doctor, and if you have been diagnosed with depression I'm overstepping my bounds, but we all know that even professionals, especially in the field of mental illness make mistakes. But clearly a something painful is not necessarily the same as something that causes harm, and if the painful emotion you have is something that improves your life, that is the complete opposite of the definition of mental illness.
Hmm, code bubbles actually looks interesting. I might actually try something like that.

Pretty list still doesn't look very appealing to me. It doesn't help organize the code, all it does is replace parenthesis with visual boxes.
Chicago CodeAcademy reviews?
Hello,

Has anyone here been through the Chicago CodeAcademy.org's 11 week Web Development course? Any feedback, suggestions? I'm thinking of quitting my job and going for this program.

http://codeacademy.org/programs#development

Thanks
Interesting. Do you know (honest question) why they didn't just make find(:all) work that way? In my imagined perfect world they'd have never got rid of find_all in the first place, and they'd have just added the lazy eval to it later. Or, failing that, done similar with find(:all).

Enjoy your podcast.
I just received an update on my GA and after inspecting the new graph elements I found SVG instead of Flash.
While I like the concept of the open maps idea and I'm sure it has a bright future, what about aerial views, street view, etc? Is this not a functionality step backwards for FourSquare hopping on such a new service at this point?

The biggest problem I see with MapBox right now is that their map labels don't seem to be dynamic. There are a lot of places around my house I can zoom in and I have to pan to see the street name because the label is out of view. There is one location nearby where I can scroll 3/4 the way across town and not see a label on one particularly major street. This could quickly make for a frustrating user experience.

Don't get me wrong, I applaud what MapBox is putting together and I'm sure it'll improve rapidly. At this point though it does seem like a significant drop in functionality for a major service to move onto it.
Portrait of Artist as Businessman (2000)
Sales capitalizes on what works. If an enterprise sales process works for a company, guess what they're going to keep doing?

This blog post should be titled "How Not to Sell Software to Alex Payne".
Annual IBM layoffs hit US
It’s 2012. Practically everyone who’s paying for software is doing so through an app store: one click or tap and you’ve got what you want.

Practically everyone buying software for mobile or from Apple? In the rest of the world almost no desktop software is selling through app stores, one click or otherwise.
Infographic - Are Android or iOS users more likely to convert to sales?
That is true, although as mentioned above the Chinese get their own deal. And Blizzard did get into the 'real gold for virtual goods market' which is quite large. Teasing apart the revenue per subscriber from their reports, talks, and sometimes off hand remarks is very challenging. There is the 'max' rate of $15/month, there are the 'free til level 20' players, there are the 'Yearly Pass' types, and of course there are the pay per hour guys in China and elsewhere in southeast Asia.

So my guesstimate at $10 per was a 'blended' rate. Pessimists seem to put it closer to $7, not sure why though.
I don't know if this is already common knowledge to everyone here, but this is a YC co, from the second class, which was in Cambridge.
No, it's HTTP. It makes it relatively straightforward for a somewhat experienced ASP.NET MVC developer to build an API that works over HTTP, uses HTTP status codes and headers for things like content negotiation. Such an API can be consumed in an HTML app using JavaScript or in a native mobile app (e.g. an iOS app using Objective C).

http://www.asp.net/web-api
I wonder whether this is related to recent introduction of leaderboards in Google Latitude check-ins.
I hope they will improve the installation experience for the real thing. The product key we are used to, but the rest is more horrible. Do they really _have_ to have my email address? Mobile phone number? Country info? Zip code? Birth date? Am I getting old, or is that CAPTCHA system incredibly hard? Why have on, in the first place? Or does that stuff only turn up when one makes semi-random selections elsewhere?
Anything analogous, at least qualitatively, to USAA for folks with no military connections, in California?
24 Most Popular jQuery Plugins of February 2012
The SunFlower Home Heliostat
Windows 8 Consumer Preview: Multi-monitor desktop video review
the ovals are far too deeply colored. If they were closer to invisible (especially the horizontal segments)
it wouldn't be so bad.

and the linebreak between "defun" and "hello" is just wrong.
"hello" should be colored, and "defun" should be desaturated.
The issue with GPL code and the App Store is that the way the App Store works, Apple makes and distributes copies of your executable code when you make an app available through the store. If you own all the code in your app, that is no problem. When you submit the app to Apple, you are giving them permission to make and distribute copies.

This works even if your code is GPL. Even though the terms Apple imposes on those who obtain software from the App Store are against the GPL, that doesn't matter in this case, because Apple isn't relying on GPL for permission to distribute. They are relying on the license you give them as part of submitting the app.

In other words, when you put GPL code THAT YOU OWN on the App Store, you are actually dual licensing it--GPL for the world, and a special license for Apple.

The problem arises when you do NOT own all the code in your app. Then you need to make sure that the owners of the code that isn't yours give Apple permission to make and distribute copies of their code.

This is what brought down VLC. The people that made the app owned some of the code, but not all of it. They were only able to dual license the code that they owned. One of the owners of some of that other code was not willing to dual license it. He was only willing to distribute under GPL.

As far as I know, Apple presumes that the submitter of an app has all the licensing details worked out. They only pull an app if someone with standing complains.

Putting that all together for the Insurgent Games code:

1. Their repositories include library code that they do not own. I looked at a few of these, and they seemed to be under permissive licenses, so they should be no problem if you wish to use them in a game.

2. The Insurgent Games code that they own is under GPL. Like any other code that you don't own, if you use it in your app and try to put it on the App Store, you need to arrange for a license that allows Apple to distribute.

Presumably Insurgent Games does not have a philosophical objection to the App Store, so if you just went ahead and used their code in your game there's probably a decent chance they would not object. However, it would be best to clarify this with them.

If they do intend to allow people to use their code in apps on the App Store it would have been better for them to use GPL with an exception for this rather than straight GPL. If they do NOT want to allow this they should add a note in the README saying so.

3. Keep the above in mind if you build a game using some of the Insurgent Games code, but bring in outside GPL code. You'll need to make sure the owner of that outside code is OK with App Store distribution if you are going to distribute your app that way.
Candid Insight into a Venture Capitalist's Mind
But how would you know the one large chunk will be the only one? Layoffs are bad for morale regardless of how it is handled. I've been through both sides of a layoff and it wasn't fun either way.
As I'm not on the Rails core team and didn't really pay much attention to their design process, all I can offer is the major rewrite of ActiveRecord from 2 to 3 and, specifically, the introduction of Arel in AR3 had huge implications for the API design.

Specifically, check out the README at https://github.com/rails/arel .. if you're familiar with Rails 2 and earlier, the sorts of things you'll see there probably seem quite alien to you. I believe AR had to change a lot to fit in with this approach to SQL generation.

(And thanks!)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binding_precedent
I've off-and-on dreamed about that as a revitalization for the old millionaire's neighborhood I live in. Lots of huge 1880's brick houses (including mine) chopped up into squalid little apartments for drunks and dumpster divers, when they'd actually be absolutely perfect for living/working spaces. Big ballrooms and so forth would be great for working in. And dirt cheap.
This stuff is awesome for mass computation and clustering of intense CPU applications, but with only 4GB of RAM per blade there seems to be some applications limitations.

Regardless, SeaMicro is a great pickup for AMD. They've been getting their asses absolutely handed to them in the server space. Hopefully this gets them competitive again.
There is this space between "personal" and "enterprise" where this model works. Call it "startup" or "small business". I want something, I have a credit card, I buy, I move on. The less hassle the better.

But in real enterprises, I don't have a credit card. I don't even have authority to purchase. (There is a whole department named "procurement" for that.) But I need to see "sales decks", do webinars, talk to salesmen trying to understand my needs and saying yes to every question I ask, download trial versions, spec out requirements, do a business case, write up a recommendation to management, and figure out how complex software with lots of optional modules fits within our existing environment. It could take months to make a purchase decision on some software. In the past year, my current client has paid to fly me 500 miles away (a few times actually) to talk to salespeople face to face to get product demos and talk strategy before the ink is signed on the purchase order. These decisions are not easy nor quick nor cheap.

I understand the frustration in this post. I respect this model doesn't work at smaller scales. The current model is not perfect at larger scales. But $50,000 a year software doesn't get sold by credit card online nor through "app stores". Any company that tried to switch away from the old model and follow the new model at that level would fail, I believe.
I'm so terribly bored by the same Feynman lectures reposted again and again to either YC, Facebook, or Reddit. Do a search and they come up again and again.

I wish there were more lectures by others spread around. Say John Bardeen, for example.
This Tweet is Recursive
OK, I laughed out loud at the last one.

Its true how that word has lost its meaning. Don't mean to pick on the article from the OP though, he seems like a nice enough guy.
So it turns out that even though the only display up to -4, it keeps going down from there on the karma score. Good to know.
I've been to Medellin and that's not their first escalator. Maybe it's their first outdoor escalator. The city is actually modern and a great place to visit. It's 75F/24C all year. You read stories like this and you'd think it's 3rd world. In much of Central/South America, you will find slums, but a lot of people live quite well and you'd think you were in an average European or US city.
I am not a citizen, but I crossed into the US many times, and never had any trouble with CBP. But I know they do have a lot of power and I can totally believe some of them can't deal with it, especially when suitably provoked or think they are. Unfortunately it is very hard to estimate the extent of the problem based on third-party anecdotal evidence.
Justin, What's involved in the interview process? What are the different stages?
Based on the amount of not-strictly-necessary stuff I own, I'm pretty sure I shop recreationally too... but I still don't go to malls or Worst Buy.
This looks quite interesting. Even more interesting to see it come from a company that's done as much to damage the web and offend the notion of UI as Scribd. I personally will never forgive Scribd for encouraging people to post documents with them and then demanding a sign-up to get the pdf. It just has this spammy "re-hosting other people's content surrounded in ads" feel to it. Scribd should never have been made.
Hands on with Firefox’s Developer Tools
There is already a specification between employees and private inventors, and I like how it favors the individual discovery. Even though that just leads businesses to say every discovery was by the owner.

In a perfect world, copyright produced by big name corporations such as Microsoft would last 5 years or so, so that a product they make can mature, take market, they can make their profit, and then it goes public domain. They can still sell licenses for the automatic updates and such, and they don't need to make the source available - they just can't sue for duplication anymore.

Likewise, I would like to see independent content creators given a means to extend copyrights on things they keep iterating upon. An example would be Penny Arcade - it started as a small venture and has since matured to a recognizable standard amongst game circles. However, Tycho and Gabe continue to make comics and have been doing so for ~15 years. I figure their early work should be public domain by this point (consider how few people read the entire archive of their comic that far back) but they should be able to file a renewal after 5 years to double a copyright to 10 if they are actively iterating on a copyrighted product or concept.

I could settle for a blanket decade copyright if it included patents. Everything copyrighted expires after 10 years without exception under any circumstance and after expiration duplication and reproduction is no longer restricted to the copyright holder. Reproducing content and material becomes the responsibility of the one seeking it or someone else providing it, such as when the patents on some car engine expire after a decade of being on the roads, you can reverse engineer that engine without fear of patent infringement but you still need to take the steps to actually rebuild the thing.

That last point is important to understand. Just because something goes public domain doesn't mean that the original manufacturer (example, the car engine) can't continue to sell that engine. They can sell it for whatever they want. Having patents expire just means their competitors can copy design decisions in that engine after 10 years to improve their own engines and sell them competitively.

Same thing with media. Piracy only exists because the cost of reproduction is near 0 for almost any digital data. But people would still pay for features - Steam games could sell for a dollar or two to have cloud saved games, screenshots, built in recording features, etc.

And then when the steam platform passes into public domain, that doesn't mean Valve can't sell games with it - it just means people can alter or reverse engineer the software if they have it and if they want to and sell it however they want. But Valve would still have all the servers, and would be selling the usage of them - and they don't just become public goods. They are always private property.
I've heard others give the same argument, but I don't find it very compelling. There's no rule that says that science cannot be applied to purely human endeavors. We would not say that sociology is not a science, even though it is a study of a purely human concept. Science is simply a method of increasing your knowledge of a system. It doesn't matter if that system is the bare physical universe, the chemical interactions within a cell, or the flow of data and logic in a computer program.

One unambiguous application of the scientific method to computing is in debugging. Your program behaves unexpectedly – aha! a new phenomenon. The lateral thinking hardware in your brain engages as you tinker around, reproducing the bug and noticing the conditions in which it happens. You gather all of this together with your existing knowledge of the system, and come up with an explanation for the bug – a hypothesis! Then you try to falsify your hypothesis. You might try to falsify it by watching a value in the debugger, for example. Or you might modify your program and see if the bug persists or changes its behavior. You aren't usually recording all of this on paper, because in this case you don't care much about presenting your findings to others. Others will be satisfied if the bug is gone. And of course, you probably aren't thinking of the words "hypothesis" and "experiment". But that's what you did, and that's why you figured out the bug.

(On the other hand, some programmers try to debug their programs by poking and picking randomly at their code until they get it working. I would urge them to try adopting a scientific approach. It's not just a way to satisfy a teacher in a chemistry lab, as it turns out.)
I can guarantee you SpaceX has a very extensive onboarding stage with their customers, but I love how they have a no-bullshit pricing guide.

http://www.spacex.com/falcon1.php#launch_and_placement

Want placement on that rocket? 10.9 million regardless of who you are. From there, if you're a serious customer they'll begin the onboarding process. I love it.
this article left out the importance of IO. from our past experiences w/ several projects, implmenting SSD/SAS were the single biggest improvement in performance (as you can notice right away visually), all the other optimizations (minify/yslow/etc...) were just very subtle improvements. CDN is very good at relieving load off your server and comes in pretty important at times of HN/Digg/Slashdot effect. been toying around with cloudflare lately and I think it's a good replacement for your DNS hosting. it gives you CDN out of the box just by pointing your DNS at them.
I think Jack Dorsey (and now Justin Kan) are pretty good examples, too. Why are you excluding those two?
Hm, we should probably add that feature. When we go to London we will definitely post here again.
thanks! LOL try it out please! I need some beta testers! Can u tweet from it please?
I can live with this. DNS is an insecure and non-robust system, and the modern Internet has broken it. The good news is, we know the weaknesses and how to defend against them, so at some time in the future, DNS buggery will no longer be possible.