skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The fact that this measurement is an approximation (and a very good one in fact) doesn't make it "dumb". In fact, it's flat displays that are "dumb". An optimal display would be curved so that each pixel subtends a roughly equal visual angle, and it's only the fact that most displays subtend a relatively small visual angle that allows us to approximate this with flat displays.
Several execs have left. I think people at Yahoo have made peace with the situation or have a strong reason for staying there. I know some people who are there because they feel that the tech/scale they work on won't be possible at any other company. Others because they just like the team/people they hang out with, etc.

So no, I don't expect an exodus because of this. I do think that this will cause major hiring issues, even more than before. Not because employees have a moral stance against patents but this move signals desperation. Folks can 'smell' that this is different than when Apple uses patents offensively and that this isn't something a healthy company should do.
You know, iPads are awesome for kids. You know why?

2 yr olds can't pull the key caps off of them.

(unlike, say, macbook pros.)

So, I've got three, from 2.5 to 7.5. They've seen mommy and daddy working with computers and ipads all their life. (well, ipads for the last 2 years). No tv. Minimal netflix. A little screen time for other stuff, maybe a couple hours a week. Their latest thing is downloading lego instructions and reviewing them to see how stuff goes together, and to see if they have enough parts to build some of the sets we haven't bought.

The third one has gotten a lot more screen time than the other two at their ages, just because he's got to do what the big boys are doing. He's only twigged on to what a mouse does in the last couple of months, because the ipad is so much more direct. If the touch screen doesn't work, then it's a broken computer. It's strange seeing that distinction so differently between the kids, as the older ones didn't get the whole touch screen thing till they were much older.

There's a lot of interesting observations you can make about UI when you're watching someone with a much different POV than you have.
Unseen footage: Peter Thiel on Entrepreneurship & Innovation from 2011
Silicon Valley's tech barons are not even remotely close to the robber barons of the Industrial Era.
You see my kids on a plane, and I've probably deployed the i devices. Waaaay more freely than they get at home. It's a treat, and it can work well in reasonably sized doses.
Except now the patronage system can be easily distributed instead of relying on rich people. I doubt it'll ever fund an "Avatar", but 2.9 million dollars is nothing to sneeze at: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/66710809/double-fine-adv...
Somewhat related? Is selling your physical dvd allowed in the US? A crowd sourced Netflix would be awesome, where you can rent directly from and to other users.
Marginal cost does not include initial investment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_cost
The acquiring company can always just give them bonuses irrespective of the acquisition.
> In other words: My family farm is empowering until I hire on my first field hand to help bring in a big harvest, at which point I become an evil capitalist oppressor.

How does a homestead become owned? Many accounts for such a transition tend toward some labor-mixing theory. But then the field owner invites someone else to mix their labor with the field and that mechanism is now denied to the new person. Why does an appeal to labor-mixing confer ownership in one instance but not any part of it in the other?
Score one more for people and organizations who invested in running their own site on their own servers (or vm instances).
I think the most egregious example is his recap of the SOPA blackout. He accuses Google of "looking the other way" on copyright violations (a _AA talking point that they have never substantiated), points out in a nudge-nudge sort of way that "it was remarkable how quickly legislators caved" after the blackout, and then notes that "tellingly" Google didn't participate in the blackout but the nonprofit Wikipedia did. There is no coherent argument there, just a bunch of _AA talking points clumsily thrown around. Like, Google's really into profiting off copyright violations, so Wikipedia blacked out its site? Huh? It's just plain sloppy.

Even worse is what he left out: Nowhere does he acknowledge the real issues anyone had with SOPA, even in passing. If all you had to go on was this article, you'd think it was the most benign thing ever and the only people who opposed it were those who can't stand the idea of copyright in general. And to support the _AA narrative of "Silicon Valley abused its power," he skips straight from the blackout to SOPA being withdrawn, completely ignoring that it was ultimately the public backlash fanned by the blackout that did SOPA in.
Oh, OK, I didn't catch it, sorry ;)
Let's say they do give you the platform... What do you think the care of feeding of the servers cost?
Either you ducked too early, or your XML is malformed.
Three signs (flickr fiasco, massive job cuts, now patent trolling) so far, of possible buyout... either by a good-willed or malignant purchaser, depending on how Yahoo management play their cards.

These are good moves only in the short-term. Either Yahoo is flailing, or it's setting itself up for sale. Lots of good folks who work there (some of whom I know well)... I hope they're prepared.
As much as I wish to see Google Chrome (and Firefox) update their bookmarks manager....I cannot really trust a third party service for my local bookmarks.
Right - I'm finding that this behavior (or something related to identification) makes it finnicky to update title/tags, and changes I make in the browser don't always seem to apply, even after resetting the connection.

If I edit a URL, stashmarks doesn't reflect the change in the UI, at least when the original is still pending download. Looks like it's actually changed internally.

Also, I can't delete (or edit) a bookmark in stashmarks that I no longer have saved in my browser. Recreating it and deleting that does nothing, even when logged out and then in.

Hope these critiques are helpful.

Clearly, these are all edge cases, and overall your service is impressive.
JEE7: Looking ahead to a new era
Show HN: Smooth.js - Turn arrays into smooth functions
Nuclear plants can be kept safe only by constantly worrying about their dangers
I've mentioned this before and I'm not the first to say it, but it's time to stop using px and start using in its place absolute measurements like inches or millimeters. It's the only sane approach to supporting different resolution displays.
Homeless hotspots at SXSW Create Uproar
I've been looking for something like this lately, it really fills a need for me!

But you really REALLY need to modify your icon. There are a million bookmarked shaped icons in this world, and for some reason no-one ever incorporates a mark with the bookmark icon so that it can be differentiated. So now on chrome I have 2 bookmark icons that look identical (the other is for 'read it later'), and two other ones that relate to bookmarks but are stars. Great.
Really liked the idea of pairing your product with a problem. While you may know that you are solving a problem it can be helpful to remind the consumer what problem you are solving for them.
Agreed. I would be very very careful about using this. The headaches it could cause far outweigh the (arguable) benefits.
#1: I'm Not a Designer, I Just Pretend to Be
Talk in London
For anyone who might be interested, I am doing my regular talk on the Mathematics of Juggling in London on Wednesday afternoon at about 17:00. It's not guaranteed, but it's plausible that a small number of extras could be accommodated if you're interested in coming to see this.

For what it's worth, I give this talk about 80 to 90 times a year, and have spoken in New Zealand, the USA, Portugal, Belgium, Sweden, The Netherlands, Ireland, and the UK.

Let me know if you're interested and I'll check with the organisers to make sure you can come along.
I think "ignoring it due to being overworked or misaddressed" is the most likely -- and if it's either, try fedex/ups mailing a physical item (like a book or other gift, or food, or whatever -- something which doesn't fit in an envelope, and which is obviously nice enough that 1) dude feels guilt if he doesn't respond and 2) intermediaries will try to pass it along.

I've used this trick quite successfully ($20-50 items from appropriate gift vendors -- Cabelas for outdoor type people, gourmet food vendors for other people).

It's like the next-level of conference schwag.
Desperately want a skip gesture.
My episodic spiral into entrepreneurship. Ironically I just finished a design for my Posterous blog when they announced the sale. /facepalm
Not really. Most startups simply fail. Only a small fraction of them make a good enough name for themselves that the team has value. And the ones that accept those deals tend overwhelmingly to be companies that would have failed anyways. Startups all start with a confidence liability; this is just a fact of life.

It's even worse if you're selling to enterprises, and was worse long before anyone ever thought of the term "acquihire". You can trounce your competitors on every axis, come in at half the price, charge a flat-rate site license instead of a metered seat license, and buy the purchasing team 52-day aged ribeyes every week for 6 months and still lose if you're the one who looks like you might be out of business 2 years from now.
You're right: this implies that a browser needs to render pixels at the edges of the screen differently than the ones in the middle to fully conform to the spec, particularly very wide (e.g. 30") displays and/or when your face is very close to the screen.
I have to correct you.

In the phone call I had with a PayPal executive after the Christmas debacle, It was stated to me that when an account is frozen for bringing in too much money too quickly, the CS representative taking calls is asked to "make a judgment call. " In our case, "they made a very, very incorrect one."

That's my entire complaint with this process. In any other business, a good customer who makes you money gets dedicated customer service. Your account is treated carefully. That's not how they do it there.

I also want to say that I understand the compulsion to lay blame at the feet of the person being screwed over in stories like these ("They used the wrong button!" "They didn't read the TOU!"). Human nature is such that we have to find fault with the person on the receiving end of treatment like this. We desperately want to believe that if we'e very good, nothing bad will ever happen to us.

It honestly does not work that way.
Routine, but Cannot be Automated
Curing The Black Box Syndrome
What's really irritating is that it was Yahoo who sued Google before their IPO. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

I don't think Facebook is going to stand for this. Obviously, I don't have access to Yahoo's patent portfolios, but it just seems frivolous. If they actually had a case it seems they would've sued a long time ago.

And Google did bite. I read they gave up some 2.7 million shares to Yahoo. It worked once for them, so it looks like they're trying it again.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-THdG5gVTw
10 ways to celebrate Pi Day
Sure, if the cost of infrastructure is taken to be a result of the requirement to replicate data. But given an infrastructure that is maintained irrespective of its use for data replication, replication is free. The former case may describe Amazon and Apple, but the later case describes pirates.
I'd agree that Borderlands was a "more fun" game than Rage, but I think Rage actually entered development before Borderlands?
>That does not provide the same utility for riaa as the avatar.mp4 did for Joe blow.

Good old Adam Smith teaches us that value in exchange is often the opposite of value in use. (His example is that we pay very little for water, which is vital for survival, but lots for a diamond that has very limited value in use, in comparison.) Joe's utility for watching the movie is thus almost irrelevant to the question of how much he should pay for the privilege.

>The question comes down to how much Joe blow WOULD have paid for avatar.mp4 had his only option been to purchase a DVD

Not true, considering our entire economy runs on consumer surplus:

http://www.cliffsnotes.com/study_guide/Consumer-Surplus.topi...

For example, a rabid "Twilight" fan may readily spend a hundred dollars to see the movie, but will actually end up paying just as little as the guy who was dragged in by his fiancee.
LIME: Lisp Implementation with Moderate Effort
Ask HN: If you had a month of free time, what would you learn?
I am taking a month off to do something new (C++ programmer here). What would you recommend I learn ? iOS, Ruby, node.js or anything else (don't know any of these)
Will Ron Conway and Yuri Milner offer $150k to new YC startups in summer intake?
Unfortunately, redefining "px" from its original meaning as "device pixels" to a new meaning of "probably one 96th of an inch except on mobile browsers where ..." means that CSS no longer has any way to express "device pixels".
I find it interesting that I was downvoted to the negatives, then you posted this reply, and then I got upvoted to the top. I wonder what the causation is there.

I suspect I know why I was downvoted; I used unnecessary emotive language ("dumb") and didn't explain my point clearly. Most of the rest of the commenters were focused on one part of the article's point, which is very relevant -- the idea that a pixel is no longer a pixel, but a particular fraction of an inch of screen space. I was complaining about a different part, which is the article author's claim that the function mapping real pixels to CSS pixels is nonlinear (which I think is just a misreading of what the spec intended.)
> My point (which I stand by) is that normal users struggle with small changes that power users quickly work around / accept.

Absolutely. I think we just disagree on how catastrophic that is. I think most Windows XP users would find that Windows 7 is much less of a change than OS X Lion.

Windows 8 is a different beast altogether and it is indeed a huge bet.

> Honestly, can you explain why Microsoft chose to all but abandon the desktop market? The only explanation that makes sense to me is infighting; the Windows division successfully killed the courier and got to be the ones that made the tablet, and it made sense (to them) to not break the team into 2 separate groups (as is more logical) so they simply picked what seemed like a more future-proof bet.

[What's below are purely my thoughts and guesses. I have zero actual insight into the Windows team or its non-public history or plans.]

I don't think infighting is a factor. I think a fairly unified vision is driving Windows 8. But I personally think that it's for the best that Courier was killed off. After using modern tablets, it becomes obvious that two smaller screens is simply less compelling. It's worse for media consumption, and it is also more awkward to use when not placed on a flat surface. Gate's original vision for tablet computing was close to what users want. However, touch first and pen second is what was missing (and obviously users will give up the pen entirely if they have to). Of course shoehorning the desktop OS onto tablets was not the right approach, any more than it was the right approach for phones.

I also don't believe that Microsoft is abandoning the desktop market. They've got a different vision for it now, though. The Metro world is much different from Windows 7, but it's not worse. I would say that in many ways it is much better. I even think that Metro with a mouse and keyboard will be an improvement over Windows 7. What's jarring is the marriage between the legacy desktop and the modern style. I think the legacy desktop is intended to become less and less important over time, though, and eventually typical users will never see it at all (though I could be wrong). At that point, the only interface they will use will be Metro, and the transitions to and from the legacy desktop will be gone. I expect that the various other differences will eventually either become moot as people adjust or they will be addressed in a future release.

I disagree that splitting the team into separate groups would be more logical. There's no reason that a compelling tablet OS can't be a compelling desktop OS. It does require changing some interaction paradigms, though.
That's a long time in this industry.
Hats off to you sir/madam. "Pain Oriented Programming". I truly love it. +1 all around.
This was the previous press around the announcement http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/28/yuri-milner-sv-angel-offer-...
I think software development is definitely getting "warm and fuzzier". I've always wanted to build beautiful interfaces (even though I'm not good at designing them). I always side with the designer that wants something nice over the engineer that just wants to do the easy thing.
I'm thinking my kids won't use any tech until they can read. What good does it do them otherwise, anyway? As a toy for a few minutes, perhaps. I think people use tv/ipad/etc as a way to avoid having to interact with their kids for long periods of time. That's how it works for a lot of people I know.

Time spent on an iPad by a 2-4 year old is time spent not learning more important things.
Use em, yes, but meanwhile "px" should have continued to mean "pixel", not "96th of an inch except on mobile where ...". Occasionally you really do need to talk about pixels in CSS, and redefining "px" makes that impossible.
We will try to get in out ASAP!
> My Macbook-using friends tell me there's no way to close the lid without suspending it.

95% of the time for 99% of users, this is perfectly reasonable behavior - unlike wanting to shut off your computer which is a far more useful use-case. For the small remainder (power users), there's InsomniaX [1].

[1] http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/2389/is-there-any-w...
That's exactly what Marginal cost is, the change in total cost to produce one more copy of the same product.
Anyone have this working in Linux? I get the error, "Sorry, we couldn't connect to your browser." I have the extension installed and enabled.

UPDATE: Seems to be working when installed from the Chrome Web Store, rather than the link on the site.
are you aware of other thiel footage?
The RIAA doesn't sue you on the claim that you received some utility from the downloaded copy. They sue you simply because you made a copy. If I download a movie and absolutely hate it, or never even watch it, or it turns out to be terrible quality, then I didn't receive much utility from the pirated copy, but I'm still just as liable.
The charges are not over his speech. He would not have been arrested for writing to the newspaper, yelling in the public square, or any number of other activities that would have gotten one arrested (and perhaps tortured) in those other countries. This is decidedly not what Iran does, or what Syria does.

In this country, you are entitled to speech, but you are not entitled to block other people's use of a major roadway. There's an enormous distinction.

That said, I don't really see why these guys want the Twitter information. The case seems to make itself pretty well ("Officer, did you see the defendant attempting to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge?" "Yes, I did. And here's the footage of the same." "The prosecution rests, your honor.").
For a few reasons.

First, it's not always "small claims." In the case of our charity fundraising at Christmas, we had collected $20,000 for those kids. That means real court, with real lawyers, and going up against PayPal's legal department. They will file motion after motion after motion and bankrupt your legal fund.

And really, public airing of corporate bad deeds is extremely effective. After we publicly shamed PayPal for keeping fees on charity donations they forced us to refund, they were embarrassed enough to donate $20,000 to 200 needy families.

Traditional court is not where individuals really have power.
Okay, I know I'm joining the choir here, but THANK YOU. THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU. This is EXACTLY what I need. I am so sick of the omnibar not being able to find websites I've bookmarked because it can't search the HTML of the website. I don't want to use evernote either, it needs to just work.
Unfortunately, devices stopped actually making "mm" a millimeter long a while ago; for instance, various mobile devices scale "mm" by a factor of 2 because they assume that sites don't actually want a physical unit of measure.
Thanks Daniel, I appreciate the encouragement. Shoot for the stars!
I am a former PayPal Resolution CSR and I was always making request for the fees to be refunded and it was usually accepted. It was ridiculous to the point that account was suspended because of a negative balance due to fees.

I have heard of people coming to the call center with baseball bat to get their money, so paying a place ticket is not that stupid :)
Yes, it is allowed. It's called the First-sale doctrine, and Wikipedia tells me it's been upheld specifically for DVDs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine#Applicatio...
Good to hear! Glad to hear that you're working on it! I've hosted with four different providers, and I've run a server myself, so I promise my criticism comes from someone who has spent countless hours and countless dollars on the task of running a Minecraft server...
And you run a bank which operates across the entire world with hundreds of millions of customers?

Don't make the mistake of imagining that because you've worked in the same space as paypal that you have a grasp on the true scale of the problems they face.
Assuming he'll forever be in that position.
And people would have quickly learned to not use "pixel" unless they really mean "pixel".
Agreed. Imho this argument that copying is not stealing does a real disservice to the cause. No, you're not stealing a thing when you copy it, but you are stealing the utility that it confers, be it entertainment, knowledge or whatever, that you would otherwise have had to pay for. You're taking value and not compensating for it, aka theft.

This is so transparent and obvious a flaw in the assertion that no trained lawyer (aka lawmakers) will suffer it, and the non-torrenting general public will remain mostly unconvinced. And when the ultimate goal is to force the content industry to open up, to switch from a business model based on artificial scarcity to one based on abundance, this argument is only going to do more harm than good.

I think it would be much more productive to instead focus on the fact that the fundamental problem is that articifical-scarcity-creating, rent-seeking cartels like Hollywood and the music industry have no place in our emerging culture of digital abundance. That their attempt to maintain control of a resource, limit supply, and charge rents for access is increasingly only possible with government force.

Further, as Steve Blank observes [1], we've seen this same thing play out over and over throughout history, any time a new technology made content more easily distributable, the content cartels vigorously opposed it, until finally losing, being forced to adapt, and eventually making more money than previously.

There is a win-win-win way forward, that is just as if not more profitable, but it doesn't include things like DRM, DVD region codes, SOPA/PIPA, etc. Neither the content industry nor the current generation of lawmakers will be able to get us there, so it's up to those of us on the bleeding edge of technology and culture to, but making silly [2], easily-refuted arguments won't help at all.

1. http://steveblank.com/2012/01/04/why-the-movie-industry-cant...

2. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeTybKL1pM4