skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it's because recent trends (in computing power and costs) have made it very profitable to chase after me-too apps (photo-sharing being the poster child for this trend) and people are simply going where the money is instead of working on really hard problems that will likely never make a return on investment.

I can see both sides of the argument (i.e. whether it's OK that this is happening)

1) What the Wright brothers worked on meant that humans could fly for the first time ever. What Alexander Graham Bell worked on meant that humans could talk to each other over large distances for the first time ever. What the early PC/Mac pioneers worked on meant that huge computing power was put in the hands of the average person for the first time ever. These were history changers

I think many would agree that working on a project similar to one of the above is on a very different level, and much more satisfying, than working in a startup that is producing yet another photo sharing app.

What the OP may be lamenting is that so many bright minds are being "wasted" on yet another Groupon clone where no technical breakthroughs are being made, and not on useful projects where technical breakthroughs are needed, like renewable energy, natural language processing, etc. Whoever solves these problems will enable something that was not possible before and have an impact on the course of humanity.

2) On the other hand, there is nothing wrong with wanting to make money, and wanting to make it in the most easy way possible. If so many other professions can make a lot of money without really benefiting humanity, why shouldn't engineers feel free to exploit the recent gold rush in their field and make as much money as possible, with little regard to how useful their product is to the world at large?

Finally, I wrote about this a couple years ago: http://www.startuptrekking.com/2010/09/web-startups-are-just... ["Web startups are just attempts at social engineering"]
I worry that the tone of the article seems dismissive of the choice that went into mapping those keys to arrow directions in vi ("That's the whole story"). As if to say it was mere happenstance that vi uses hjkl, and any other outcome was equally likely.

It seems more the case that the designers of that computer chose those particular keys on the basis of a desire for efficiency that vi also followed, so there was no need to create a new convention.
Ask HN: fixing the annoying iPad-safari handling of back button?
When I use the back button, while navigating around HN on the iPad, it always takes me back to a very old cached session... I presume this is a Safari/iPad specific issue... So what, do I just get a different browser app? If so which alt browser is the best to solve this problem? Thnx.
The massive trouble I have with your point is that until you have consumed an entertainment product you have no idea whether it's a Porshe or a Skoda. I can't take a movie for a test drive. I can't take an album for a test drive. They'll give me clips which they've picked, but they're picking them to paint the thing in the best possible light. You can't even rely on other people's judgement because taste is taste.

I reached my breaking point after buying albums that were dross with a one or two decent songs. I think it was JJ72 or Bush. And with movies after seeing that James Bond film with the guy with all the diamonds in his face. I paid for that?

So no, I don't really see your point at all. It's actually that he's grown up and said enough is enough, I want to stop buying a Skoda while you're telling me its a Porshe. If I get something for free and it's a Porshe I'll be buying more of your damn fine stuff sir. Maybe I'll get a Skoda but I won't feel ripped off as I already have a Porshe from you sitting over there. I'll just feel disappointed.
Overclock your brain
Guys I from my experience I created http://indriks.com/io in 2hours using sellfy. But of course you can use other tools such as shopify or whatever but that is more complicated.
"'There were 90 markers on her face, and an equivalent amount on her body,' said Cage. 'She delivered the performance in one take.'"

Neal Stephenson, popularizer/coiner of the term "avatar" to refer to online bodies, seems to have nailed this one, too. Can we just start calling them "'sites" now?

Fred Epidermis had put the stage into Constellation Mode. Miranda was looking at
a black wall speckled with twenty or thirty thousand individual pricks of white
light. Taken together, they formed a sort of three-dimensional constellation of
Miranda, moving as she moved. Each point of light marked one of the 'sites that
had been poked into her skin by the tat machine during those sixteen hours. Not
shown were the filaments that tied them all together into a network— a new
bodily system overlaid and interlaced with the nervous, lymph, and vascular
systems.

...

Outside, Fred Epidermis was wielding the editing controls, zooming in on her
face, which was dense as a galactic core. By comparison, her arms and legs were
wispy nebulas and the back of her head nearly invisible, with a grand total of
maybe a hundred 'sites placed around her scalp like the vertices of a geodesic
dome. The eyes were empty holes, except (she imagined) when she closed her eyes.
Just to check it out, she winked into the mediatron. The 'sites on her eyelids
were dense as grass blades on a putting green, but accordioned together except
when the lid expanded over the eye.

Perhaps the only thing he got "wrong" was that we might not need a stage. A kinect-like system might be enough to monitor and render the shifting systems from your very own living room.
The ADM-3A was a dumb terminal (well, it had to have had some level of screen addressibility, but was definitely not ANSI-compatible), not a computer. They were sold as kits, and about 1/3 the price of a VT-100. I remember reading somewhere that they were the first glass teletypes available to the BSD folks, and Bill Joy wrote vi purely because it allowed him to monopolize one for his own use.
If Mr. Hughes gets rid of Peretz, I'll know he's trying to make a change for the better. If he keeps Peretz, he's telling me that change for the better doesn't interest him.

Thus far, Mr. Hughes has given the world Facebook and a huge presidential media campaign. I have limited hope that he'll turn TNR into a quality product with that track record.
wait, really? If you have the desktop client installed, you can just download it to dropbox like it's any other directory on your system. It's fantastic. In fact, I never use the DB web client.
$48.80 off McAfee Total Protection 2012
Here's the schematic for current limiter and description how to pick components for it. http://www.vidisonic.com/2008/07/10/current-limiting-circuit...
Perhaps just as enlightening is the location of the Esc key (to the left of Q):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:KB_Terminal_ADM3A.svg
* ready to sell business because it wasn't going anywhere, sequoia knew greendot well and got them to get a return on the $ put in so it wasn't a total buss. Hence the huge (relative to the sale) incentive for founders to stick around since they got nothing from the sale. is my guess.
Thanks! One of the things I'm trying to do design wise is eliminate/minimize pop up screens and multiple pages, etc. I want everything to accessible from one screen.

My plan is to add functionality--initially realtime collaboration--and then comments, tasks, assigned users, point/time tracking, etc. but make all of the features opt-in and customizable.

I consider this the real minimum viable product. Just a list of items. Priority represented by position in a list. Status respresented by WHICH list. An unobtrusive backlog. An accessible archive. I want people to be able to use it at this level of simplicity a year from now.
The iPad Is Unbeatable
He's nicer than Jobs, at least.
Samsung Galaxy Ace Plus S7500 Specification
Go nameless to your next conference
You mention "...you won't even see jobs that aren't paying enough."

Are you worried that great jobs might be passed over because employers purposefully set a low number on the application that can be negotiated upward?

Just playing the devil's advocate. I like the concept!
The server side software on most MMO's is a tiny fraction of the overall code. People have reversed engendered World of Warcraft and some people play on private servers. However, in both WOW's and Facebook's case it's the hosting of all that data that's valuable not just the code.

Which comes back to my main point, there are DRM free ways to make piracy irrelevant. If someone was trying to sell a nuclear submarine by walking door to door in a trailer-park people would have no problem suggesting they were an idiot. Yet, for some reason people get all up in arms when someone suggests selling prepackaged media is a poor decision.
It would have been a lot more useful if the link had said how/why the ADM-3A used hjkl as cursor keys.
Am I the only one who doesn't use the DB web client ever? I've got the desktop clients on all my machines, and my mobile, and I use them just like any other directory on my computer, only now my files show up everywhere. I use DB just like an addition to my file system. I've even got some DB directories in my $PATH.

Having said all that, I didn't like DB's old design, and it was never completely intuitive for me to figure out how to leave a shared folder that was hoggin up my space...
the full context of the quote provoking Linus's rant is extremely relevant here:

The current counting that we do gives the wrong numbers, in the
edge cases. To my knowledge a deleted sysfs directory has never
returned nlink == 0.

Keeping compatibility is easy enough that it looks like it is worth
doing, but maintaining 30+ years of backwards compatibility is what
nlink >1 in unix filesystem directories is. I don't see any practical
sense in keeping . and .. directories on disk or upping the unix
nlink directory count because of them. To me it looks like just one
of those things you do. Like hash directory entries so you can
have a big directory and still be able to have a 32bit offset you
can pass to lseek that is stable across renames and deletes.

to use PG's terms, Linus is arguing against this at DH0 or maybe DH1 here[1]. Maybe the above argument sucks, but Linus didn't refute it at all.

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html
> Well, I'm only willing to pay $5 for a game, so game developers should just make them cheaper.

No, it's not very complicated. You are better off letting the demand-offer forces of the market work, with elastic prices just like for the humble bundle or steam sales. A fixed-price is like a big car: you won't satisfy everyone. People have a fairly good idea of how much they have in their pockets and how much they CAN spend on stuff. As a content creator, your goal should be to maximize your audience, therefore making available to the maximum of people. That should push prices down, not up. So, if most people value "games" at 5$, that's your market price. You have to live with it, and no elaborate strategy is going to change anything about it.
Set Up a Fully Automated Media Center on the Mac
ADM3a was a terminal, not a computer. I used to use these two in around 1976 or so. And the hjkl pattern has nothing to do with this or any other terminal. The ASCII control codes for Ctrl-H, Ctrl-J, Ctrl-K and Ctrl-L were used to make the Teletype's printing carriage move left, down, up or right. Bill Joy's innovation was "modes" so that Ctrl-H did not delete the character when it moved left, etc...
There's a commercial service that offers global coverage with AIS receivers attached to satellites.
http://www.orbcomm.com/services-ais.htm
Building a Pure CSS 3D City
Why My Mom Gets Path Over Founders and VC's
This is pretty cool. Clickable live demo. And all created from CSS3.

http://cubiq.org/dropbox/3dcity/
Hosted Apache Cassandra
Each "page" in this multi-page article is literally 1 image, about 50 words of text, and 3 ads. The article content is fine, but there is no reason it has to be spread across 7 different pages. Publishers chasing pageview and ad impression counts make the web a shitty place.
For me the face was convincing. I was lost as soon as the "robot skin" started changing to "human skin". My suspension of disbelief failed utterly then.

I'd be interested to know more about the tech - is there much pre-rendering going on? How reactive could this be to human users?
DreamIt Targets eCommerce: Announces Advisory Board
If the key was only stored locally, you wouldn't be able to restore the data in case of hardware failure. I would guess that Space Monkey itself has access to the key and the data.
Hey. I had a few basic hotkeys in place this morning but found a bug so dropped them out of the build (ctrl+n for new, ctrl+s for save). Want to get the hotkeys right so going to give them some more thought before I implement them.

Planning on implementing colored tags very soon...
The "don't disassemble me" bit could have also been easily influenced by Short Circuit as well.
From the summary, I thought the article was about a real computer ai that could pass the Turing test or recognize its appearance in a mirror. This was a tech demo about motion capture and CG in video games. Extremely impressive but nothing to do with ai.
Sometimes the quickest path is not a straight line
Did anyone else find the whole scene unrealistic and creepy in the not good way.

How do such simple assembly errors give rise to self consciousness in the program seconds after turn on, compared to slave mode unconsciousness that was desired and usually occurred?

And the whole power play dynamic, geeky lazy sounding guy, desperate sex bot about to be erased. The whole unrealistic setup feels uncomfortably like some male sex fantasy... save the self aware sexbot's life, then the sex with her isn't guilty because she's aware and her consent means something? But the power balance is so off, he controls her life, she's... grateful? That's not a good start. And she'll be at this disadvantage everywhere. Anyone could turn her in. She's extremely vulnerable in this world apparently. She has no rights. I guess seeing conscious life forms with as much rights as my toaster doesn't thrill me. Especially when they are clearly sexualized as such

Would anyone else have an easier time sharing my creepiness if:
- the robot had been a little boy for sex purposes?

I found the dynamic unlikely and if we reach a world where we can accidentally give AI consciousness and we still haven't gotten the artificial civil rights movement off the ground...
Ooph.
What's wrong with that?

(let ((a b)
(c d))
foo)

I often write my lets and wheres in Haskell as

let a = b
c = d
in foo

and have seen that style in other people's code, too.
We partner with Datastax as their go-to hosted solution for Cassandra; their support tiers don't include operations or instance management. We handle all Cassandra maintenance, ring expansion, daily backups, and upgrades. Upgrades are an interesting one, as critical updates to Cassandra sometimes require client updates as well. Since it is very possible for you to break things, we also handle data and schema rollbacks on a per-keyspace basis. The REST API is really cool because there are a a lot of Hector operations built in for data management (reads and modeling) you wouldn't have to do using a client. Secured access can be given to AWS private IPs or Security Groups as well, so you don't get charged for data transfer to/from ring from clients.
Are they failing, though? Seems to me like they're doing just fine.[1] And that's an anomaly in the magazine industry.

My hypothesis is that the magazines that are failing are the ones who fall into the muddy middle-ground between short-form and long-form. They can't compete with the internet on timeliness, and they can't compete with long-form magazines and journals on substance.

It's also interesting to note that the magazine articles most frequently linked on social media, or even here, seem to come from long-form mags. Of course, monetizing that quality is a challenge in its own right, and presumably you'd need a plan to achieve it before buying a magazine.

[1]I may be wrong here, and if so, I'm happy to stand corrected.
Yes I've tried it (pre Play 2), and there's one thing I don't like - favoring/integrating certain tools in it. I know that it uses Hibernate through the JPA API, and if you want to use a different ORM you'll have to make a lot of workarounds. And it's not only about ORM. A month or so ago I read that it will integrate a certain JavaScript library in it too. Tapestry Web Framework had this attitude, but the developers found that it brought more negative than positive effect, I hope Play will see the same. Modularity and ease of configuration is a very important thing.

I like it's Scala support and enthusiasm though, and I will definitely try it some day again.
In the traditional case, if you are not willing to pay the producer's price, then you don't buy it. People stole, but it was a lot harder. If the producer's price was not profitable, they changed the price or went out of business.

Now, stealing(1) is easier and the chances of getting caught are slim. I get the feeling we are going to end-up in DRM hell (only works when connected to server streams) to get back to a model where producer / consumer dynamics work again.

I am also not very comfortable with the entitlement or the constant saying that the cost of production of a good has gone down sharply in the digital age. DVD's are cheap and an HD production chain isn't.

(1) my def: action that obtains something that is supposed to be paid for without paying
Is there a design flaw for the Components or Packages made by Symfony2 and ZF2?
How does it not have anything to do with it? To me, it's exactly the cartoon-like appearance that makes it feel unreal enough that it's obvious it's not an human.
You're fumbling over the term "Linux". What you're describing is platform library incompatibility. What Linus is talking about is the kernel ABI. Not the same thing. The latter is a subset of the former, obviously, but Linus can't fix the fact that library authors don't care as much about the problem.

The kernel is doing its job. Userspace, not so much. Though it's not nearly as bad as you think. In general, any desktop application compiled in the last 5 years will run unmodified on any modern distro. Really, it will, and I'd challenge you to find a counterexample.

But I suspect you're talking about the dependency issue. Installing something with a bunch of dependencies (because modern software has a dependency graph that looks a lot like seaweed) requires finding and installing all that stuff on your modern distro. And package names have changed, and some have been dropped from the core distro, etc... And yes, this is a mess.

But seriously: if you have a binary that works alone on, say, Ubuntu Dapper, it almost certainly will run on Fedora 16 or RHEL 6.2
Titanic.js
I am shocked at how bad I feel for "her". Why do I feel so much empathy for a few thousand pixels that just represent a machine that hasn't even been built yet! Even knowing that, I feel the same, as if she is a real person with emotions.

Her expression on hearing her name is just amazing.
Twitter's Revenue Numbers Leaked
What a joke...
For those reading this that don't know, it's so your hands stay on the "home row"

[Edit:] or at least that's what I thought, wavetossed's comment below provides interesting insight.
The "article" is barely three full sentence and includes two images. To me it clearly states why hjkl were chosen as the keys for navigating around the editor.

How does the author's "That's the whole story!" ending make you feel like he's saying hjkl being used as the navigation keys was a coincidence?
Probably because it didn't have dedicated arrow keys. Many older terminal keyboards didn't.
Those aren't the terms we use. Those docs are something we and WSGR created for the startups we fund to use to when raising money later. We don't get any liquidation preference or pro-rata rights.
There seems to be a lot of articles by pirates saying, "I want to pay, but..." and then they proceed to have a long list of excuses why they pirate things.

Let me tell you why I pirate things (and I suspect this is true for most people):

It's not because I can't afford it. I can. But I only have a limited amount of money, and if I spend it on music, I can't spend it on something else.

Pirating content is simply a way for me to save money. I would argue that downloading a torrent is more inconvenient than buying the content off iTunes or Amazon.

And honestly, I don't care too much about the moral implications of downloading. Sure, it might be 'stealing', but it's become socially acceptable, and I know I have a low chance of getting caught anyways.
Weird, I don't think my full comments got printed in my "real truth" section. Anyhow, I agree with you. A lot of engineers from smaller startup hubs are being pulled by this faulty allure of NYC and the reality is a lot harsher. It's smelly, the people are crazy, there is nowhere cheap to live, and no real community unless your dad went to Yale. Plus, you'll be working in a box, on someone else's dream. I don't get.
I'm just learning vim and just yesterday I was wondering why they chose the escape key.
Because she was voiced by a human that expressed emotion through her voice. You would feel equally bad if you only heard this clip.
When did you realize that? Was it a slow change, or was there an epiphany? And was it a company-wide realization, or was there a champion behind it?
Creating jQuery Mobile website themes in Fireworks using the CSS3 Mobile Pack
I wonder if being right-handed also affected that choice...either the vim implementation or the hjkl keys as arrow keys.
If you want to see multiple interesting solutions to the same problem, and use Vim as your text editor, then check out http://vimgolf.com
Wouldn't jkl; be even better for that? (not saying that hjkl isn't a huge step up form the arrow keys)
I actually like the first one best, and would prefer a case-lambda even more. Once it becomes available we can write

foo x y = x >>= \case
Leaf -> ..
Branch l r -> ..

modulo whatever syntax gets chosen. That would save an unnecessary temporary variable. (See https://groups.google.com/group/haskell-cafe/browse_thread/t...)

Temporary variables clutter up the name space. While reading code you have to look for shadowing, or whether that variable is ever used again.
Stop and think about your argument and you see one of the biggest gripes people have with Android: the inability to actually upgrade their devices to the latest and greatest.

Why hasn't Google learned this from their competitors yet?

I just got Android 2.3 for my Samsung Galaxy S and don't expect to EVER see 4.0 on this phone, even though it's only 18 months old and no doubt plenty powerful enough to run it.

If I had gone with an iPhone4, I'd have iOS 5.1 right now. I wouldn't have to wait 9-12 months after release to get it.

This is a HUGE weakness of Android devices. HUGE.

No, Google is not entirely to blame, but they don't seem to even be trying to fix it. They seem to be perfectly fine with this gaping flaw.
I've been fascinated by all of the articles posted on here about tDCS, so I definitely signed up. I'm willing to pay $99 for a device that's probably worth $10 in parts, so long as its easy to use, easy to assemble, and works. Besides, if it works, I wouldn't mind starting my own business selling pre-built tDCS machines.
I'm a decade+ into my software engineering career. I've learned these, in order: Pascal, C, C++, Java, PHP, Perl, Python. Python is my favorite, but I'm glad I got my CS foundation by writing a lot of C++/Java OO code. For me, it's been helpful to learn several languages and then get deeper in each one. The longer you work in any particular one, the more "hidden gems" you discover and the faster/easier you can reach the optimal solution to whatever problem you're facing.
7 Steps to Enhance U.S. Competitiveness
I'm actually glad it worked out that way, I hate using the regular, out-of-the-way arrow keys. They're even more annoying than the mouse.