skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I might be the only one, but design quality is a signal of development quality for me (even though, as a developer I know well that it's not). But when I see badly designed software or application, I say "If the developer didn't care, why should I?".

Another thing, these are things that I won't die without. I enjoy well crafted products (and will pay few $$ instead of using an ugly product that does the same thing).

Mobile Applications is not my expertise, so I'll give you a few suggestions on the landing page

- A contrast. For the moment, the logo is lost in the white. The iPhone video (and the iPhone device itself) is filled with white.

- A better font. You already know about font-face. Now try to pick a nicer one. TypeKit is free to start.

- A logo. Costs $25 to buy from Graphic River. Stock Templates/Scripts are a good quality/cost solution when you are bootstrapping with empty pockets.

- The social icons are buried. Also why is the Facebook button in French?

In your source code

- Don't put your scripts tag at the header, make it loads fast. Also don't use in-line JavaScript. Your CSS and JS condensed in one file

- It seems like non HTML5 users will not watch your video.

In your video, instead of the mouse cursor, use a 0.7 opacity rounded circle. It looks nicer and feel like your fingertip is moving there.

Nice work.
FAPIIS May Be the Worst Government Website We've Ever Seen
distributed power generation that's cheap enough and renewable enough so people in rural parts of sub-Saharan Africa don't have brown outs anymore.

desalination that is cheap enough for a farmer in Mozambique to do himself

I am sorry, but you can not fix broken states with technology. Want to help Mozambique and sub-Saharan people? Find a way to turn their governments into well working ones. This is at once infinitely more difficult and also the only thing which will really solve the common developing world problems.
Keys to Innovation and Growth
Emily Litella: "What's wrong with holding rabbits? They're cute and cuddly and just awfully good pets. Sure they make messes and eat the lettuce out of your garden. But when you hold that cute little fuzzy bunny with his little wiggling nose..."

Jane Curtain: "Ms. Litella, that's rabbit holding, not rabbit holing..."

Emily: "Nevermind"

In all seriousness, if you don't allow yourself to go down a few rabbit holes and be "unproductive", you'll sell yourself short in the future. The place where "rabbit holing" is dangerous is in meetings where what should be a quick & efficient get-together gets drawn out into a debate over meaningless details.

Context matters.
I wonder if he knows Kirby Puckett died in 2006.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirby_Puckett
I've had that conversation. I'm so glad my youngest is 8 now. Yes, I wish all the apps that make their money from free + in-app purchases would just give me an option to buy the whole thing for a one-time price.
IOS 5.1: Deleting Images from Photo Stream
Startups are a fun place to work, but don't fall for the fallacy in point #8 (the only one in the article that's wrong).

Your market value is your market value. Sure, a startup will ask you to take a pay hit, but that doesn't obligate you to do so. Having "good people" is way more important to a small team than a large one, so if you fit that description you absolutely can negotiate a good bill rate. You'd be silly not to, since they definitely need you more than you need them.

If they make grumbly noises, be sure to point out that you're happy to trade in your lottery tickets for a competitive wage. As has been discussed here endlessly, startup employee shares are pretty close to worthless even in the best case. Tell them they can keep them, but since they're hiring real computer programmers they're going to need to pay a real computer programmer salary.
I can't imagine a clearer way of treating errors in C than the macros from Zed Shaw, which use goto (http://c.learncodethehardway.org/book/learn-c-the-hard-waych...):

int test_check(char *file_name)
34 {
35 FILE *input = NULL;
36 char *block = NULL;
37
38 block = malloc(100);
39 check_mem(block); // should work
40
41 input = fopen(file_name,"r");
42 check(input, "Failed to open %s.", file_name);
43
44 free(block);
45 fclose(input);
46 return 0;
47
48 error:
49 if(block) free(block);
50 if(input) fclose(input);
51 return -1;
52 }
If there's a $1.99 "20 additional game levels" after you finish the first 20, that's not scummy.
If there's a $99 in-app purchase (Basket of Smurfberries), that's scummy.
Microsoft details leap day bug that took down Azure, refunds customers
Which kinda goes to my point about out of memory exceptions - they generally end up being fatal sooner or later. Trying to catch them just results in memory running out somewhere else. The only place you can deal with them is if the code is doing something you expect to cause memory issues because it is consuming an atypically large amount of memory (like a cache or some such) which you can get away with shrinking.
Build Your Own Social Network with Diaspora
I am disappoint, Wolfram Alpha
When we developed Aeir Talk, an speech pathology app for children with Autism, we locked the setup screen (where parents can customize the cards, pictures, and audio) behind a nondescript "Setup" button in the title bar. When tapped, it does practically nothing: It changes to describe to parents how they can unlock the setup screen: "Press While Holding 'Please'", referring to a button on the other side of the screen that is part of the apps regular function. Compared to other touchable elements in the app, the button provides very little feedback, so kids largely ignore it. The gesture requires two hands, tapping two parts of the screen at the same time, so it's unlikely for children to end up in there by accident. You can see a video of this workflow at http://aeirtalk.com/ .
Well, from that standpoint why should Windows ever change? MS shoulda just stuck to shipping security updates for Windows 95, apparently.
Tudou's stock is up 150% today, 100 USD of stock last week would be worth 400 USD now.
The problems with NCLB are several. Nobody disagrees that having students do better on standardized tests is a good thing, everything else being equal.

NCLB is set up to punish schools that don't meet their improvement goals. The schools, wary of being punished themselves, punish teachers whose students aren't meeting the goals.

While teachers are busy trying to teach basic math and language literacy to the bottom rung of the class, the students who could excel if they were challenged end up left behind.

For reasons beyond a teacher's control, a class may not meet the requirements, and the teacher is punished. You can look at a teacher's career and determine with reasonable accuracy whether the teacher is good, but looking at one or two year samples does not give the same accuracy. Yet that is exactly what NCLB encourages schools to do.

There was plenty I learned in grade school that standardized tests never tested. The optimal school and teacher strategy under NCLB is to strip out all that excess baggage and spend every waking moment figuring out how to get students to perform better only on what is tested.

I disagree with your notion that other countries are doing things right. They are doing things better, perhaps, or maybe the parents in other countries encourage students more not to give up when they're struggling with homework; the opposite of which is a major failing that seems to be common in America. An educational paradigm can be garbage but students will still learn more if it has support from parents.

Khan Academy's model or something even more radical is the direction all basic skills education needs to move toward. Teaching basic skills is critical, but they need to be taught in a way that both encourages under-performing students and that doesn't hold back better performing students. That's the only way to leave no child behind.
I did the same. Plus the education was an expensive proposition that had no return as just about everyone I studied with now understands.

I know a qualified BSc mechanical engineer who works in a supermarket for wage scraps.
Deciding Whether Or Not to Get The 16, 32, or 64GB iPad
This is great advice. You'd do well to heed it.
Public Opinions On When Kids Should be Allowed On Facebook
Not an article, a post in a forum.

One person opinion != Mozilla opinion
I just saw Norvig give this talk. The quote cuts off before he offers his explanation: the 1.5 means 'trust this data set more.' For whatever reason (e.g. bigger sample size) the probabilities from that set tend to be more accurate.

It's not some sort of deep mystical counter example. It's a clever tweak that comes from the observation that empirical observations are not uniformly reliable.
Warning mobile users: OnSwipe site, cashed my iPad browser immediately.
To be honest, I know what a windows key is, but I haven't used a windows key keyboard in my lifetime.

On an Apple keyboard, the Command key does the job. (Or vice versa, if you use a PC keyboard on a Mac.)

To be honest, I haven't seen a keyboard that was manufactured since the late 90s and didn't have a 3rd key down there (whether it's Command or Windows). Even the Happy Hacking keyboard has one.
I agree. Kinda of an uncomfortable position here. Let's see how this evolves.
Er, how does what you've asserted comport with code released via MIT/BSD? The only strictures that they impose is retaining copyright and license notice.

No restriction on usage or brand confusion. That seems a rather immaterial difference along a hypothetical alignment spectrum.
You'd think Microsoft has an entire panel of USER beta testers, not just bughunters. Seems not.
Sure, they're dead. In the same way that NeXT is dead.
Thank you very much, we still have a lot to learn on web design. We'll rework the website based on your very constructive feedback.
This has been done for the last 20 years (sort of in secret) in the Automatic Speech Recognition community. In brief, if A is the auditory observation you're trying to transcribe and W a possible word sequence, then you use Bayes law to rewrite

P(W|A) = P(A|W)P(W)

The first is known as the auditory model which is responsible for transcribing sounds into phonemes and potential words. The second is the language model responsible just for ranking likely word sequences.

The first tends to be a lot harder than the second, it's models are fuzzier. So to compensate, the real, in practice model is

P(W|A) = P(W|A)P(W)^a

where a is a positive number. I forget what the typical value of the fudge factor is, but generally you use cross validation to optimize it.

Exactly one class told me about the existence of it. Most others pretend like it's not there.
Gaetan, excellent demo. You covered 3 technologies that work wonderfully together: Play! 2.0, WebSockets and Canvas. Fortunately the usage of each was all straight forward but you married them together into a creative demo app that didn't require black-magic in any of the implementations.

I've never worked with Canvas before but was surprised/pleased to see how it feels a lot like working with Java2D when rendering a 2D context (strokes, lines, joins, etc.) -- I felt the same about WebSockets, definitely had a "It is that easy to use them? Nice!"

Scala on the otherhand... I'll happily concede that I am possibly a lost-cause when it comes to Scala (14 years of Java will do that do you, and C/C++ before that). When you went to that Hub impl on the server side, a small tear rolled down my cheek caused by brain-pain trying to feel my way through that Scala code (nothing wrong with your code, I just don't like the way Scala looks/feels).

Thanks again for putting this all together and sharing.
But is it really a huge group, though? Diablo is a franchise from a different age, when gaming was only for people who were willing to step up to a certain hardcore threshold. That requirement automatically limited the size of the audience. The explosion of more-casual gaming over the last decade has created franchises whose sales make Diablo's look anemic.

If this list (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_PC_video_g...) is accurate, for instance, Diablo and Diablo 2 sold about 6.5 million copies together, which ain't hay; but The Sims, Sims 2 and Sims 3 together sold 39 million copies, making it a completely different magnitude of hit. (Not even counting all the expansions, either.) And how many hundreds of millions of copies of Angry Birds have been sold?
I cringe so hard when I see Reddit style memes like "I am disappoint" on HN. Please, please don't let this become commonplace..
For starters, the article is mistitled. A more accurate one would be "10 opinions About Working at a Startup vs. a Big Company". Although "platitudes" might be even more accurate than "opinions".

But there's one thing in particular that annoys me here:

And by the way, if you’re a good engineer you’ll have zero issue finding another job. Zero.

You'all have zero issues finding a new job if you're a good interviewee, but not necessarily if you're a good engineer. I know lots of people (myself included) who are at least decent engineers but terrible interviewees.
But that might shift in the future, we might be looking at a time when the only version you need to make is the web version, even for non-casual games.

Unless your game requires or will requires heavy duty CPU and lot of RAM. In which case, you would need to wait several generation before a phone can run your game.

Think of FPS shooters of today, except the resource spending is inverted from the art department to the software side. Instead of racing for the biggest and greatest graphic, they aim for the most complex and detailed world as possible. Instead of gameplay being only 40 hours long game, it is measured in years.

That is the kind of game I am working on.
This isn't wrong - /any/ time zone has a constant 24 hour delta before those two points in time.

What is changing is your time zone from, say, GMT to BST.
I think this paints a too rosy picture and doesn't nearly touch on all the startup horror stories that can exist, especially for points from #4 to #9.

This post speaks well about startups done right. It barely says anything about startups done wrong. Likewise, although the examples are much fewer, there are big companies done right and big companies done wrong.
Not sure it would work well for this app, but I'm always looking for anything visual or easily shared, especially if your audience are likely heavy Facebook users.
I am not sure what you are disappointed about. A more descriptive title would be good.
Shining LIGHTS on ICS Cybersecurity
The thing is, this isn't a first-time user. The guy in that video is a Windows user. The expected learning curve should be short and shallow, because he should theoretically be dealing with incremental changes and not a completely alien system.

But he's sitting down at a new version of Windows and using it as if it were his first time using an alien OS. In other words, the metrics are completely at odds with what should be the expected learning curve.
You can also click the lower right corner, then click the windows flag on the menu that pops out.

This has exactly the same problem as the above method.
As an engineer, you should also be aware of when discovering the basis of the tweak is crucial. Discovering that tweaking the beam bending equations gives a much better fit to your test results on the beams you would like to use for your building is one example.

In some cases, these tweaks provide better results for a small range of conditions. That small range may be big enough for you (given your task at hand), but without understanding the tweak, you can't actually know. So care must be taken.
So are you actually making that income? from the 100,000+ unqiues?
More like Microsoft has enough user beta testers that they can aggregate their anecdotes in order to get useful data, instead of just treating single user anecdotes as "proof" of anything.
The original Start button had an animated prompt to help users out the first time they loaded Windows 95. I wouldn't be surprised if Windows 8 ships with similar hinting.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UxwAlqCCmk
A move between non-DST and DST is considered a time zone change - in my case from EST to EDT.

This time zone change is listed there. It says 1:00pm EST to 1:00pm EDT on the page linked, and so it is incorrect.
Most HTML5 games i've seen seem to be more proof-of-concept. Is there a good example of a HTML5 game which is a proper product and which generates revenue?
Creating a universal cocos2d app that supports Retina iPad assets
It provides the right output if the right timezone is given:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=hours+between+1pm+est+m...
It reminds me old good times when we started "vi" editor in fullscreen terminal and asked newbies to close the program.
According to their press release[1], this is their pricing:

> $0.02 per cloudlet per hour from ServInt, and 0.016 euro from dogado.

However, when you build your environment it still says 0$ regardless of the resources that you want, and has this clause at the bottom:

> Our prices will only be published at the official sales launch.

[1]: http://blog.jelastic.com/2012/02/16/next-generation-java-paa...
Building Love (and Retention) with Intercom
Make sure to time your widget popup carefully. You don't want it to trigger after - say, a failed connection. Instead, perhaps try to figure out when the "end" of a conversation is maybe, and trigger it after 3-5 of those? You're far more likely to get better votes if you don't ask people immediately after they experience internet latency or the like.
I find that I need these periods of intense rabbit-holing, in order to fuel my work. Even when aimlessly strolling the internet, I'll somehow link that information to a later project or conversation I have later on. As we know, this can often become aimless and we feel a certain amount of guilt, or in extreme cases mental fatigue from focusing on too little. It's a bit of sensory overload.

On the other hand, if I've been intensely working on a project, I can often times feel as though I'm burning out; I have trouble finding further breakthroughs and I lack inspiration to push a project forward.

I certainly feel that I can get stuck in either environment, so often times it is about being able to know when to transition before reaching that fatigue. Like others have mentioned, making lists to prioritize my tasks often times will help me manage this. Staring at a list that has nothing crossed off is a very effective deterrent from internet use.
I really, really, really wish there was some way to disable the Home button on my iPad.

My 19-month old and 4-year old kids, who absolutely love to sit with me and play with the iPad, simply find it irresistible to press that button. And when we're watching a movie, its a sure-fire way to ruin the whole experience. If it were lockable so that it didn't do anything, they wouldn't press it.

Come to think of it, the sliding-lock switch could be used for so much more. I just don't get why I can't lock the touch-screen so that it doesn't react to things - okay I understand why Apple want to keep touch enabled at all times, but why can't this be an option? (Is it an option and I'm just clueless to know? No jailbreak-solutions, please..)

Anyway, that one issue is an almost definite deal-breaker for us when it comes time to have some iPad time. It doesn't take long before the kids lose interest, because they press that button, the app dies, and then they're in the home-screen game, where not much exciting stuff happens (unless they make the icons jiggle and press the little X's, then Daddy gets very excited..)

That said, I like this article - because I'm working on a game for kids too, and the point about the bottom area of the screen being a no-no for navigation buttons is a really good point. My kids have learned to press anything and everything they can, and the kids game I'm working on is essentially a plethora of weird and fun things to press and interact with, but there will have to be some sort of trick for navigation that makes equal sense in the mind of a 4 year (and 2 year) old, as it does for a 40 year old. Talk about your tricky software problem!! :)
WARNING: this is an OnSwipe site that will crash mobile browsers.
Pieter Spierenburg, a professor of historical criminology at Erasmus University, in Rotterdam, sifts through the evidence in “A History of Murder: Personal Violence in Europe from the Middle Ages to the Present” (Polity; $24.95). In Europe, homicide rates, conventionally represented as the number of murder victims per hundred thousand people in the population per year, have been falling for centuries. Spierenburg attributes this long decline to what the German sociologist Norbert Elias called the “civilizing process” (shorthand for a whole class of behaviors requiring physical restraint and self-control, right down to using a fork instead of eating with your hands or stabbing at your food with a knife), and to the growing power of the centralizing state to disarm civilians, control violence, enforce law and order, and, broadly, to hold a monopoly on the use of force. (Anthropologists sometimes talk about a related process, the replacement of a culture of honor with a culture of dignity.) In feuding medieval Europe, the murder rate hovered around thirty-five. Duels replaced feuds. Duels are more mannered; they also have a lower body count. By 1500, the murder rate in Western Europe had fallen to about twenty. Courts had replaced duels. By 1700, the murder rate had dropped to five. Today, that rate is generally well below two, where it has held steady, with minor fluctuations, for the past century.

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2009/11/09/091...

Philadelphia is one of many city's in the US, but looking at the overall trend and including things like duels shows a different picture. Consider, some gang violence would not have counted as murder 100 years ago.
My opinion on Randi went down, of course you can prove negative statements. (Edit: In fact, here's a PDF: http://departments.bloomu.edu/philosophy/pages/content/hales... But the most obvious instance is that anything you prove true you can also prove is not false.) Anyway, it is important to note that "prove" in this English, not mathematical, context really means "suggests", if you want to be technical and pedantic. It suggests that other users who share similar traits to the person in the video will also experience difficulties.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=hours+between+1pm+est+m...
U.S. cities with the fastest growth rate for tech jobs
If your app for children includes in-app purchases I will delete it as soon as I realise. At present this is just a frustration for my 2 year old as he doesnt understand why the game is no longer on the screen, but as he gets older he is more likely to try and pester me into buying. Not Going To Happen, plus I will leave a 1 star review of your app based on in app purchases alone.

iPads and iPhones are not bought by children, they are ocassionally givent o children to use for a while, as such apps should not seek to bill parents because their kids pushed the worng button or I gave them the iPad too soon after downloading a new app (and thus entering the password).
So creating an image arguing that software patents shouldn't be banned would violate the license?
I feel the same way about falling (c.f. Half Life 2, crossing the bridge spans). I don't like heights in the real world, but for some reason it's magnified in virtual worlds. My virtual acrophobia is so extreme that if I zoom in on Google Maps too fast I get dizzy. If I zoom in over the ocean, I absolutely have to close my eyes for a few seconds to recover.