skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Microsoft seems insistant on forcing users to re-learn the OS at every release.

When has Microsoft made this kind of switch before? Last time I recall this significant of a jump was 3.1 to 95.

Disclaimer: Microsoft employee
Thanks, will definitely see the video.
Some nice ideas, but not many new ones.
And the new ones don't always make sense:

"For each level of markup nesting, try and indent your CSS to match" <= that made my teeth itch. Mostly just down to personal taste, but I really find it quicker to read css if only the values are indented. It's easier to compare nested classes that way, as repeated values would occupy more similar space.

"Also write vendor prefixed CSS so that colons all line up" <= not all vendor css3 values have the same structure, so this can't be a standard (eg: gradients, mixed border-radius)

I suppose whether or not you add conditional support
for IE is a matter of taste. I prefer to handle IE the boilerplate way, with conditionals determining what class the html element has, and including appropriate styles in the main css. Why sacrifice good, standards-compliant css for dirty IE?
The advice to be explicit when using shorthand is excellent. This has come back to bite me many times (you end up re-writing background and margin declarations to undo your clever shorthand).

The multiple measurement units is cool too: particularly unitless line-height, magic numbers, and relying on parent box sizing.

Great stuff, thanks for sharing this. Couple questions:

Do you find indenting descendant selectors helpful?

For your comments, do you adhere to CSSDoc or any particular convention?
Bypassing maths to make a better model? This is called machine learning (-;
> Not if .nav li a{} and .nav a{} are specifically meant to be differing nests.

But in the example they aren’t differing nests; if you change your example then obviously it isn’t correct any more.
A cross between simulation and RTS game. You're supposed to build up a colony and manage your society. The details are not too abstract, as all units you see will have individual names and the details of your infrastructure are pipes, conveyor belts, workshops, electrical lines, generators, and so on.

You could say it's a "dwarffortress" except the details are totally different. For example, chopping down trees will not kill dwarves, but it does in my game. Production and logistics in my game is a lot smarter to prevent players from worrying about managing food production so that they can worry about more interesting things.

It's a very ambitious project for sure, and I am not expecting to complete the game until many decade latter. I am in this project at about 4 Kloc of code, yet a completed RTS game is about 40 Kloc. Mine will be bigger than this.

The main challenge in doing this project is whether or not I have the ability to slog it out for several decades and the ability to resist temptation to rewrite the whole codebase at once.
PirateBox offline file-sharing solution puts pirates out of authorities' reach
I actually had to get a refund from Apple for an in-app purchase my son made while using Talking Tom Cat (I since deleted that app and turned off in-app purchases).

I've got two kids and what I would add to the observations listed in this article are as follows (these apply to any app that is intended for kids, but also apps where a significant section of the userbase might be kids - for example, my four-year-old is quite adept at Plants vs. Zombies, and given the depth of strategy utilized in that game I don't feel bad when he plays it):

1. No part of the application should require that you can read in order to use it or navigate it.

2. Don't pop up dialogs that a child cannot understand. For example, I watched as my child, while using an app intended for children, pressed "OK" on a dialog that asked if he wanted to turn on push notifications. That's just ridiculous! He'll press "OK" on any dialog because he just wants it to go away.

3. This really applies to all applications, but it becomes very apparent when watching a child use an app: the most desirable menu items should be larger and/or differently coloured than the least desirable ones. I.e. "Play" should be a big, brightly coloured button, while "Settings" should be small and tucked away.

4. Don't make it easy to do destructive things like delete accounts. This might seem obvious, but I have more than once opened an app only to find that my progress in it had vanished because my child had deleted my account (Plants vs. Zombies makes this too easy, for example).

5. On any app that has the potential to be enjoyed by both kids and adults, consider providing a kid-friendly mode that makes the game easier.

6. I don't know how difficult this is from a development perspective, but if possible, make the app resistant to having non-active fingers touching the screen while active fingers are attempting to use it. Kids will often grasp devices, especially phones, in such a way that fingers from (say) their left hand are touching the screen, and on some apps this causes them to cease responding to touch events from their other (right) hand.

7. If your app produces revenue through advertising, it probably shouldn't be marketed at young kids. Kids will press on the advertising and will just get frustrated when they arrive on a webpage somewhere, and adults will eventually delete the app because we don't want our kids feeling frustrated.
Found the catch (though it's not really a catch, easily worth the discounted price):

"Unlike other formation agents, GoLimited.co is not a money-making exercise – we don’t offer any “premium” packages or add-ons, and only charge £4.50, making your incorporation VAT-exempt. As more people incorporate our costs will go down, and so will the price. Our service has proven so popular that the price has already fallen from £14.
We just want people to incorporate quickly and easily – and if you decide you want to sign up with Crunch afterwards, that’s great! If not, no sweat – we’re not going to pester you."
Invalid Whois Problem at Go Daddy
Ask HN: Surgery for RSI injuries? Running out of options...
Over the last year or so, I've had increasing discomfort with my hands, arms and shoulders when typing. I'm getting worried as I now almost dread being at my workstation given it leads to physical discomfort, sometimes almost immediately after starting work. This doesn't bode well for professional development as a software developer.

I've tried a number of changes to my setup so far, but I'm still experiencing pain. Here's what I've so far:

- Avoid working on laptop as much as possible in favor of desktop setup with monitor, keyboard, etc.

- Purchased Kinesis Advantage keyboard (my third keyboard change this year)

- Switched to Evoluent vertical mouse. While this helped, I've also added an Apple Magic Pad as the mouse still results in hand/wrist discomfort

- Installed a keyboard tray on my desk to keep the keyboard near my lap as well as avoid resting my arms on my desktop surface

- Purchased carpal tunnel wrist braces. I try to wear these at night when sleeping. Still not sure if these are doing much for me though

At the moment my symptoms consist of:

- Very stiff, sore thumbs. The worst is my mouse hand. Just hitting space/enter on the Kinesis can become painful by the end of the day

- Tender/burning/numb finger tips on both hands. Mostly the middle, ring and pinky finger in each hand.

- Sore right shoulder (mouse hand). I've recently removed the arm wrests on my chair entirely to avoid lifting my arms at all

I feel like I'm running out of options. I'm considering going to talk with a surgeon as I'm getting nervous since this doesn't seem sustainable in the long term and I'm worried I'll be unable to work in a few years.

I'd really appreciate any recommendations from others who hopefully were in a similar situation and found a solution.

Thanks
I don't think #1 about where you have bigger impact is universaly true.

I worked in BigCo on a big (and commercialy successful) software project used in hospitals. More than 1,000 people (soft devs, QM, sales&marketing) are employed by BigCo to work on it. Even when I contributed less than 1/1000 to the project, I believe my contribution to the world is still quite big, since the software is deployed to 10,000's of hospitals and assist with (sometimes life-saving) procedures every day.
Hidden gestures everywhere seems to be the biggest problem I have with Windows 8.
Pod2g Working On iOS 5.1 Jailbreak
How my 7-year-old son and I created an awesome game with Corona SDK
Hi rkalla and thanks for your feedback.

The idea behind Play2 is to have a framework written in Scala (the core) but providing a full API for both Scala and Java languages.
Hence, users can choose their preferred language to write web applications.
> I was hoping for a more technical article

Sorry to disappoint, there are a lot of more technical articles out there, I wanted to look at this more from the perspective of the process of making games than a more detailed technical overview.

> the core techs for HTML5 gaming aren't quite from what I can tell. WebGL and the Audio APIs in particular seem on shaky ground for the moment... it seems there are still rather major security and performance problems to deal with.

The alleged WebGL security issues are mostly solved now. WebGL has about as much security issues as anything to deal with graphics, a computer can crash because of CSS 3D transitions almost as much as it can because of WebGL.

As for Audio APIs, open security issues are mostly to do with user permissions. The worst thing you can do currently is break the ears of the user and make the application unresponsive. You can do as much without audio APIs: var a = new Audio(); a.src = 'noise.mp3'; a.play; while(1);

As for the maturity of the APIs, WebGL offers most of the capabilities of OpenGL, except for a few quirks like Texture1D not being supported, more strict limits in construct sizes and referencing arrays (for some types you need to use constant value indices, unlike in normal OpenGL).

Audio APIs are in a weird spot now, we have two proposals, one from Google and one from Mozilla. Both have their virtues, and they offer solutions to a bit different problems. But at W3C Audio WG we are working on making these things better, so that eventually we'll get audio APIs across all browsers.

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

This is indeed a huge weak spot, but it's hard to achieve securely. Making solid APIs for P2P connections, spanning more use cases than video streams would unleash open a galore of new doors, so I do hope WebRTC will bring forth a good solution.
Ok. Rating widgets usually annoy me, which is why we didn't put one. But the downside is that we didn't get a lot of feedback, so we'll follow your advice and try to time it as best as we can.
yes,the italian audio is about contemporary bookwriters, the spanish one seems to welcome users to this new Microsoft Research projects, while the english one is a request for questions.

And I agree the audio is mechanical and seems the usual text-to-speech, maybe a little better
Yet they were not shy to provide them in the past.

The reasons are still there - it's even pointed out in the parent discussion that they're still a problem on Windows. One main difference is that Windows 7 is an order of magnitude more widespread now than it was 2 years ago - when those posts you refer to were written.

And as you already admitted - they're doing this on mobile first. There's no guarantee yet it turns out to be actually feasible on desktop if those same arguments can't be properly addressed.
If you were trading salary for equity and the startup fails you're out that. You're also out time which you could have been advancing at a different company.

However, because working at a startup is gambling, you have to treat it as such. If you can't live with losing out on salary you could've made at another job, you shouldn't work at a startup.
Where vs. Who: the Battle for Internet Marketing Dominance
Microsoft didn’t before this. But now they do. It’s a surprising and daring move.
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I'm guessing here but it might be .xsession-errors

I've had it filled up once, because vinagre disagreed with some other library and it kept printing the same error message over and over. After several days it filled up the hdd.

Not saying it's vinagre's fault, just that it might happen and it's a "hidden ." log file
I'm surprised by the lack of spaces in, say,

.error{ color:red; }

I much prefer

.error { color: red; }

or

.error {
color: red;
}

(The latter is particularly nice because it implicitly acknowledges the likelihood that additional rules will be added.)

I don't recall seeing the space-compressed version much in the old days. Is it a new trend? I don't like it.
Thanks for the comment, I’m glad you like it :)
The shorthand one is a really interesting one; it takes while to kick the habit and be purposely more verbose, but you soon get tired of undoing previously accidentally-set styles.

> Do you find indenting descendant selectors helpful?

Oftentimes yes; it can give a new developer more of a clue of the markup structure that a previous developer intended to be used. I can see at a glance that `x` needs to be in `y` but `a` needs to be a sibling of `b`. Of course you could just glean that yourself by looking at and reading all the selectors individually, but it’s nice to get an idea of structure at a glance.

> For your comments, do you adhere to CSSDoc or any particular convention?

Nothing official; I have my own habits but no documented standard. I like the look of http://warpspire.com/posts/kss/ though :)

H
Eh, .deb may as well be a "universal"--I have not found any packages online that were packaged for Linux without a .deb file. They always either have a .deb or only provide the source for Linux users. Now, they sometimes don't even have an .rpm file, which is a little annoying on Fedora, but that's a different story. And, of course, they almost never have any other packages, but that's only to be expected--anybody using a non-deb, non-rpm distro can very probably fend for themselves. And, these days, I think only a small minority of new users choose distros other than Ubuntu, so supporting .rpm files is also less important.

Also, is installing a file at the same time as doing an update really a big feature? I've never even wanted it on Linux and I don't think I ever used it on Windows either.
I totally concur. I recently tried an experiment - could my girlfriend use the Wubi installer and get Ubuntu going without any boyfriend tech-support?

Results:

The installer is far from perfect, but after a few tries and a few seemingly random glitches it repartitioned and installed flawlessly. She was able to boot into Oneric no problem.

Once she was there, she liked everything. Thought it looked really "zoomy" and way better than her experience with XP. Found the Software Center, and thought it was a great idea. Then, she tried to download some software.

At that point she got some confusing non-human-readable errors. Hmmm, I guess she'll try another one. No luck.

Finally she turns to me, and I realize she's not connected to Wifi. I try to connect, and it auto-promts me to install the Wifi drivers. "Awesome," I thought, maybe she didn't need my help after all!

Then, upon attempting the install it quits with a hilariously unreadable error that I wish I could remember at the moment. I realize that it's trying to download the Wifi drivers when there's no connection.

To put it bluntly, my girlfriend has no idea what an ethernet cable is. To expect her to figure out she needs one and further go buy one is far too ambitious for a distribution that claims it's for "everyone".

I understand the license implication for restricted drivers, but this in fact proves the point that Linux may never in fact be for "everyone". (And don't get me wrong, I'm an Arch fanatic!)

To be brief, Ubuntu is pleasing UI but terrible UX for anyone not willing to troubleshoot problems on their own.
Run an update of 60 packages, browse the internet while waiting for it to complete, find a .deb you're curious about and try to install it. You can't. Regardless of dependencies. Apt uses a global lock. That is bad UX, whether you acknowledge it or not.
The more you do at compile time the longer compilation will take, of course. It's hard to say how much something like that would affect compile time without actually doing it. The official compiler, dmd, is already incredibly fast though (the 182,955 line standard library phobos built in 9.254 seconds on my machine) so you have a lot of headroom to work with.
Shaan injured during shooting of Acha Gujjar
If you can tell that a bad interviewee is a good engineer, you've cracked the elusive interview code that everyone has been trying to figure out for decades.

A teacher has an ongoing relationship with a student, so time is on their side. An interview is the opposite.
Last time was XP to Vista.
American Psycho author tweets sequel tech: Bateman uses Blendr to find victims
It's going to have all these same steps, but they'll mostly be in python. I'll try to write a tutorial on this at some point.
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Hey! I'm the author of the story.

I think Technology Review got them mixed up (which is where I got the audio samples from). I first saw it in the TechFest keynote: http://research.microsoft.com/apps/video/dl.aspx?id=160725

I think Technology Review has an English clip from Mundie, but then translations of Rick Rashid speaking in the keynote.

Sorry about the mix-up :(

(And I wish I spoke another language...)
Here is a very petty point that isn't mentioned in the guidelines, but implied by example: Is there a good reason why people don't like putting a space after a colon? Such as...

margin:0;

Instead of...

margin: 0;

The latter looks much more natural to me (probably because I'm used to writing English and other syntaxes), so I don't believe there's an aesthetic benefit. Chrome Inspector and Firebug also prefer the latter, so I don't believe there's a tool benefit. If saving a byte before processing was an issue then we'd be hitting less CRs, so there's no real bandwidth benefit. I don't get it, but I keep seeing it more and more.

Is there some benefit to no-space-after-colon that I haven't considered? Was it established as a standard somehow while I wasn't paying attention?
Windows 95 wasn't hugely different than 3.1. The jump to Windows from DOS was much bigger. In both cases, the newer OS could seamlessly run applications written for the older one.
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> that made my teeth itch

Fair enough; any reason as to why?

> not all vendor css3 definitions have the same structure, so this can't be a standard

Well if it can’t be done then it can’t be done…
But the Windows problems aren't the only justifications they published back then. In the second linked post O'Callahan writes:

"It pushes the software freedom issues from the browser (where we have leverage to possibly change the codec situation) to the platform (where there is no such leverage). You still can't have a completely free software Web client stack."

Given that it strikes me as ironic that Mozilla is now building a platform - i.e. a platform where they definitely have leverage - that is going to support H.264.
Well, the criticism was in fact "you can't install software while updating your system," and it's true - if your system is updating, you have to wait to install another package.

In practice, I don't see this as a major problem, but on the other hand, many people have slower connections that me.

It'd be nice if the apt clients could download the packages without locking the database, and let you select and queue packages even if others are already being installed.
Well, sounds like your son is doing great, that's wonderful. :)

I concede your point that the iPad can stretch/blur the notion of what a "game" is, in interesting ways. Although I am inclined to limit my kids' "screen time" (to zero, at two years old), I would never choose to limit my kids' "book time",.

But perhaps my thinking about it is too coarse, since iPad apps can be hybrids of both, or combine their attributes into something completely new.

Perhaps I will try out your time ticket idea and see how it goes. (But not from 2 years old... maybe 3 or 4.)
Sorry how is that even remotely reasonably priced? It has a limited market, that can't buy their product, that is hard to make engaging and appropriate. Either be willing to pay $15 a pop, be willing to accept in product advertising, in product upselling, are really basic (ie non custom story book artwork), or that they shouldn't exist at all. Frankly, sounds like you are asking just too much.
For me it is purely habit. I think: to each their own, just aim for consistency :)
And installing a copy of Mac OS X is not only questionably legal but also significantly more difficult than installing Linux :).

In my experience, ~90% of all the problems I've had with Linux are at install time--missing drivers, complicated partitioning...etc. Once I have the system running, I've actually had less problems with Linux than either Windows or OS X.
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Right, all those communities are garbage because they were mean to you. But you're still gonna make your little game from the images and ideas those communities traffic in. So, what does that make your game?
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>And it's frustrating.

Absolutely, on any system. I'll admit I swear every now and again when I get caught trying to run apt-get with synaptic open on another workspace.

>You will notice I said "it has to be better than 'better than Windows'", because "better than Windows" still means "learning something other than Windows".

I agree. I guess I'm guilty of accepting a limitation because it's commonplace. I assume overcoming that limitation on Ubuntu/any system using apt would be extremely technically challenging and given the few times it occurs it's not a priority.
There's two aspects of running a business in question here. One is the bureaucracy of reporting your existence and finances to the Companies House and HMRC, the other is managing yourself and any employees.

The former has become so complex and time consuming that I opt for using services to do the job for me, whilst I concentrate on making a living. (or at least I hope to when and if I decide to go Freelance 100% of the time) It's much easier to have professional bureaucrats handle the bureaucracy than learn how to do it myself.

That being said I'll never do something without a bit of research, and the more transparent the service is the better. Communicating in simple terms what's being done with my information is important.
Yes, Microsoft is fond of alienating its user base, it amazes me how often they do that.

I don't plan on using Windows 8, but if I did, I'd probably be alienated just as much as since until now I haven't really used a single touch device.

Also, if the users are going to have to simulate touch gestures with a mouse, I foresee an increse in RSI for the next generation.
Maybe I should get back to working on unscatter.com again. Built using primarily Blekko's api's but it's falling apart as I work on other projects.

Not because "hey PG says I can get VC for this" but rather it's been bugging me that it's been broken and I haven't gotten around to the refresh I've been wanting to do anyway.