skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> You can also make passing a small programming test a requirement.

But you also want a few key journalists, and you want designers and other non-programming types: you can't make exceptions for them re: this hypothetical test, because then it calls into question the purpose of this test.

I think they should just sell the tickets, first-come, first-served. Keep the price reasonable, but high enough to discourage people from buying them "just because".
Isn't this article ignoring the fact that a whole bunch of other customers could do the same thing and get a similar settlement?
In iOs, you have no choice. On top of that, I insert information into the email to help me debug it, such as the platform, iOs num and app version num.
That's a good description. Layer comps are one of the most underutilized PS features IMO.

I've used them myself to design alternative navigation styles for a site. For example, since the bulk of the site is the same, I managed a sample horizontal navigation in one layer group and a vertical navigation in a separate layer group. Layer comps allow you to progress on these simultaneously.

I've also used them as "snapshot" states before if I'm trying something experimental. It's a faster way to rollback than a chain of undos, etc.
There was huge value in thumbing through these as a child. We could never afford the set, but I had used copies of individual volumes and I spent many, many hours reading random topics. You just don't get that kind of discovery in an online version. Maybe you could, but you don't.
Joining Microsoft can also be interpreted as "let's help (re)creating the third pole", with the first two being Apple and Google. A stronger Microsoft could surely advantage users.
Not that I think the future is britannica.com is the future either, but not working without javascript is unlikely to be the thing that stops them (or any site, really) from succeeding.
I think you're rather missing the point. What I took away from the article is not "choose better entertainment". It is that many people waste the time of their life on things they do not even particularly enjoy, simply out of habit, and that it is a good idea to give some thought to how you spend your time, and to re-evaluate your choices periodically and see if they still make sense.

This is valid advice and a good reminder for any time investment, whether entertainment, work, your own business, or, as you say, improving the world. Replace "watching Lost" with "fixing leaking roofs in Mexico" and the point still stands - there are more and less effective ways of improving the world, and if you do not take the time to re-evaluate your choices, you will waste time and energy that could help more people. Sure, you could go and become a carpenter in Mexico and build houses. Or you could create a small business loan system to lend money to a thousand carpenters in Mexico. The point is, be flexible and free to change your direction if you see a better way.
Ask HN: Any hackers in San Diego want to share office space?
We're a 4-person team in SD working on some crazy-awesome stuff in advertising and healthcare. We want to get some office space and think it would be great if 2-3 other startups can join us in going in on a small space in SD.

If you're interested, email me at keith [at] zorz [dawt] com
"I’ll never file a software patent again, and I urge you to do the same."

Screw the lawyers and MBAs, engineers can put a stop to this if we want to, all it takes is having the courage of your convictions. You'll probably have many jobs over your career but a patent is a landmine that will be dangerous for 20 years, you don't know when it will come back to bite you. They can't force you to write a patent, you can always get another job.
"If Ifs and Buts Were Candy And Nuts, We'd All Have a Merry Christmas!" - Sheldon Cooper
> Are Microsoft engineers encouraged from top down to do this?

I'm an IC, and while there is bit a "boo Google" going on in the kool-aid, we don't sit around shaking our fist at them every moment we get.

I try to use the best tools I can, whether it be that made by Google or MSFT or someone else. I look up MSDN documentation using Chrome, and I wouldn't have it any other way.
Try the iPhone App Store (assuming that's not what you tried before). If you create something even moderately useful and charge for it, you should more than makeup the cost of Dev free. (personal experience)

What can you do in the mean time before you get the $99 to publish? Not quite sure, but blog/write a book about building an app and see if someone will sponsor your dev fee? (or sell the book?)
Show HN: Manpage generator web service
Judge Orders Failed Copyright Troll to Forfeit 'All' Copyrights
I firmly plan to live to a hundred and fifty or die trying, but I do not believe we're going to see immortality any time soon, therefore I still think that the time we do have is pretty much irreplaceable, especially time in relatively prime physical condition.
https://developers.google.com/events/io/input-output/ahNzfmd...
I think it's ridiculous in this day and age for people to expect webpages to work without JS.
That would be CRO for PPC, but what about on-site page optimization?
At first, I also thought it had to do with branding, and was infact, quite enthusiastic about G+. But then G+ launched, and I tried it, and about half of my friends also came ever to give it a try.

It just wasn't good enough. I've had people tell me that they go to G+ to escape from the madness that people apparently post on facebook. This 'madness', as the person quoted, was simply the fact that people post more personalised messages on facebook. I've yet to see that when it comes to G+, (and to be honest, the only reason I still visit is because of the HN circle).

So I guess you're right that branding is a part of it, but not big enough. Google thought compartmentalising everything with circles would be the answer, but is it really? People complain about facebook's privacy all the time, and yet, when G+ came with better options, they didn't just up and left.
E.g. long-form sales copy (and more) with split-testing.
Reminds me of the think-geek t-shirt from days gone by "go away, or I will replace you with a very small shell script".

If all you brought to the table can be replaced with a single CSS file and a little bit of javascript maybe your value proposition wasn't really what you thought it was.
This blog is as personal a blog as a Microsoft employee can get without hosting one themselves.

As a Microsoft employee, I could have my own blog on blogs.msdn.com - but the signup process was more complicated than Posterous, so I don't.
> 2. Building a product in a category that is already owned by another brand without positioning themselves opposite it.
> This is classic... Burger King will never take over Mcdonalds market share because they are trying to convince people that they are better. Since the category is owned already, they need to claim, "We are different"

For what it's worth, Apple's Jon Ive completely disagrees with you:

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/lifestyle/london-life/sir-jona...

"...most of our competitors are interesting in doing something different, or want to appear new - I think those are completely the wrong goals. A product has to be genuinely better. This requires real discipline, and that’s what drives us - a sincere, genuine appetite to do something that is better. "
That's how it was at my school. It was actually very nice, because you could run your own servers from your dorm room or the lab with ease. The only thing they blocked were mail servers, and I think you could get an exemption.

There were basically no limits set on our network, and they even left the Direct Connect hubs alone unless somebody reported them... primarily because when the hubs went down, our outbound link would be completely saturated by bittorrent traffic.
From http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html:

"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
Ultimately that's not going to be as important as Wikipedia having stolen the mindshare - it is now the place people go to in order to look things up. It's all very well Britannica claiming to be more citable, but in practice Wikipedia wins because it has far more articles with more detail in them. If the fact you want to cite is not on britannica.com, you can't cite it from there.
If those are your convictions, then you have to do more than just not file; you ought to publish them in a way that allows them to be used in a prior art defense.
I just tried it without JavaScript. It works. It's not pretty, but it's fully functional as far as I can tell. They basically have two different UIs — if you have JavaScript, you get a modern UI, and if you don't, you get a simpler UI that's optimized for a very primitive browser (e.g. those old phone browsers that could only do 32KB per page or whatever it was). Seems fair enough. If you really can't get on there, you might want to check your connection or something.

But hypothetically, even if it were completely JavaScript-dependent, the trend is clearly toward sites that involve more JavaScript, not less, so I don't see why that would preclude being "the future."
Skyrim: The Creation Kit Experience
Web applications, maybe. But content which is primarily text? I like my text not to be Turing-complete, thank you.
He spent a lot more time talking about entertainment than anything else.

You make a good point about being open to changing direction, but I think that is your point, not one made in the article.
This is a great experiment given how many YC teams change their idea midway. For teams who have many ideas (but have not implemented any), would you advise them to

a) pick one and apply through the normal process (thus demonstrating they're capable of coming up with good ideas, and perhaps prototyping one), or

b) go through this new no-idea process instead (thus making it clear they are flexible in terms of what idea they pursue)?
This is impressive work, but I don't see anything that can be done that can not already be done with VNC (other than sound), in terms of the use cases he lists. You still need that Virtual Machine which most people don't have.
"Update your distribution with the last official JRE packages (update 25+), don’t use OpenJDK."

Doh! Is debian the only distribution that does not ship sun's jre?
Actually, you can do a lot of this using "heroku run bash". And it's pretty awesome.

My understanding is that their vulcan build system [1] is a similar thing optimized for compiling things.

[1] https://github.com/heroku/vulcan
No. What does that have to do with hedonism?
This is definitely a good idea. I think a lot of talented groups struggle with finding an idea because the two easiest means of doing so -- solving a personal pain point or uncovering an opportunity in your current domain/job -- are bearing no fruit. After those avenues are exhausted they may not be sure of what path to take to find an idea. As a result, these otherwise talented folks are meandering around until they stumble upon something, which can take quite a bit of time.

My co-founder and I were in a similar boat until we found a process that worked for us to uproot unmet needs, but, if we hadn't, we'd definitely be exploring this track.
Pretty apples to oranges here when saying something as general as '8-bit PIC' there are many architectures within that family, 4 last i knew. The low end ones are not intended for coding to with C anyway (although there are some poor compilers that try). The PIC18 series isn't bad to work with in C, I used the C18 compiler at the time and its 95% ANSI C.

I believe there is gcc support for the pic24/dsPIC (16bit) and the PIC32(32bit).

All that said last I knew Microchip still leads in 8bit mcu global market share.
No aggregation site is going to please everyone all the time.

Don't click on the stuff that doesn't interest you, problem solved.
I also miss the old Google.

I think it's a mistake to blame this on ads though. I don't believe that the G+ crusade is being driving by advertising (though I'm sure it looks that way to people who assume that everything is about ads).
except now hes a "serial entrepreneur" and has evidence for building up extremely valuable skills. Its an exit that can springboard him higher.
Interesting that we now think "The website is broken" because google can't index it... rather than "Google is broken" ?

I remember reading somewhere google executes javascript as part of its crawling...
Fascinating, at least from an outsider's perspective (you mention you've kinda been doing this already).

This effectively opens the floodgates but it might also reduce the number of poorly thought-out ideas since teams now have a different access point.

Fits well with the 'replace university' comments in the PyCon talk.

edit: Makes me wonder how about the proportion of people who apply with demos (and how advantageous that is -- or is not).
Google has parsed and indexed info thru JS for a while now. [1]

[1] http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4159807.htm
Wouldn't a more accurate title have been, "Remote access in your browser using HTML5"?
In 2011, we spent 700 billion on the defense department, and we spent 1,205 billion dollars more than we took in. It's time to stop thinking of the government as a free money fountain.

I'd suggest it's much cheaper to look into how we could reduce the regulations making it so expensive, rather than throw government money at a problem of the government's creation. At the point where we are seriously talking about the entire edifice collapsing one must take seriously the question whether the costs of our regulatory regime have managed to exceed the benefits. Right now we have a terribly irrational balance between those who are hurt taking insufficiently vetted drugs vs. those who are hurt by not having drugs available for years that turn out safe. The former are visible and the latter invisible, but they are still real. A classic recipe for irrationality.
Yahoo Sues Facebook for Infringing 10 Patents
Seeing "(e) None of the founders are programmers." on the form, I was wondering - and I fear this has probably been answered before but it's not an easy thing to look for - pg, would you mind saying how often, if ever, you have taken in founders who literally couldn't code their way out of a paper bag, and if so do you have anything you can share on success rates / examples?
This would have been clever on April 1, but I guess this is serious. ;)
Thanks for that article. Makes sense now. They were able to achieve higher frame rates and take advantage of hardware acceleration by using CSS animations with the individual sprite slices serving as key frames.
Forgive me, perhaps it's the cranky Britishness in me coming out like an uncontrollable fountain of bile, but sweet jesus this bloke is an insufferable hipster.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Then are you just asking how to get a Scala REPL using sbt?

If so, you can get one by entering the command 'sbt console' in a project directory. This will give you a scala console with the added bonus that all of the files in your project will be loaded as part of the REPL's classpath.
Covert Penetration Testing Dropbox Disguised as AC Adaptor
Hrmph. Startups are a means, not an end.
Pixar has actors and studios.
Oh, really...

In an age,

* where the Internet can be seen on ever increasing number of diverse devices

* where every day people discover that every additional layer of software complexity adds security vulnerabilities

* where the default installation of even many existing heavily used browsers, for both personal and business, have everything except html and stylesheets disabled, especially for new sites

* where some/many people may wish to choose to use your site in its most bare form possible, including command line users

* etc.

you choose to ignore all of these usage scenarios by not even having a graceful fallback for your site?

Thankfully, most web administrators and developers are not as short-sighted as you, even most start-ups!

One more thing: if a new site, even one that has been heavilty recommended to me, does not provide even basic information without scripting or has a horrible front-page with a default NoScript Firefox installation, I treat it as I would a spam site and I immediately desist from using the site and ignore the link.

You will not waste my time with lack of basic Web competence and awareness.
Python gangsta rap
I think it's just because first, entertainment is an example anyone can relate to, and second, he's a game developer, so entertainment is the context he is working in.

And look, less than half way in: "... The same metric can and should be applied to all activities: is the experience worth the irreplaceable hours of your life? Not just consuming media, but hobbies, travel, acts of creation and destruction ..."

Anyway :)
Clicking on your link prompts me to download and install Chrome. Care to explain what it is there that Chrome users see when they hit the link?
Kansas to Pregnant Women: "A Little Lie from Your Doctor Won't Hurt You"
We have a guide explaining how other customers can take AT&T to small claims court on our blog: http://blog.publikdemand.com/how-to-fight-att-in-small-claim...
Dabeaz: PyCon 2012 Followup
Pyrasite 2.0 beta - A tool for injecting code into any Python process
"Your goals should be to effect positive change in the world."

Should it? Why? What makes positive change a more valid goal than making more mans? (http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2481) And in turn, what's so morally bankrupt about the pursuit of fun? With a focus on the individual, it would seem to value human life more than simply measuring the size of the shadow you cast.
Kids and video games: Why children should play more
I wonder if selling the most popular Wikipedia articles in printed form for around $100 would have a market.
George Dyson's history of the computer: Turing's Cathedral
You can do this pretty easily without leaving the realm of OSS via VirtualBox and one of a few frontends. Besides, this is more of a {RDP/VNC}<->WebSocket project.
> Further, the web is currently the closest thing to a free press that exists today. Anything to exerts control over this is doubly compared to the certainly objectionable activity of extracting patent-rent from a given industry.

What about things like amazon's 1 click patent. They are a web company.
I can find in 1 second on google a 1999 case where they used that patent

http://www.zdnet.com/news/amazon-sues-rival-over-1-click/103...

I don't know what you are talking about.
This is why YC is amazing and why anybody who says they ask for too much equity is an idiot. Most investors won't invest until you have traction and prove out a bunch of risk. YC used to invest when all you had was an idea, and now you don't even need that. Bad ass.
Scott Turow on why we should fear Amazon
Err, 2.998, not 2.98.
Seems similar to Alan Kay's often repeated observation that what made ARPA and PARC so innovative in the 1960s and 1970s was that they "funded people, not projects": http://www.vpri.org/pdf/m2004001_power.pdf

This is very, very rare.
I switched to Bing on my iPhone, and I prefer the results to Google. The presentation is nicer, the results do an infinite scroll (which means less clicking on teeny tiny links), and the quality of the results is the same, if not better.

I'm no Microsoft fan, but I'd love to see Bing get some marketshare, just to reduce the single-search-engine hegemony.
The Sexiest Electric Cars, PHEVs and Hybrids of 2012
>Why are people so upset with Yahoo?

Because after years of inept technical execution, executive shenanigans and other corporate failures, they are resorting to trolling instead of actually doing anything innovative.
I would think that the type of person who would succeed in the startup world is one who would come up with an ad-hoc idea in order to do a startup, rather than the type of person who wouldn't do a startup because they couldn't think of an idea.

Anyway, it's an interesting experiment.
What are you planning as a retirement career?
As I cross into my mid-40's, it's occurred to me that I should start thinking about what areas I'd like to start emphasizing, so as to be able to gracefully transition into a retirement niche, that will let me have fun, earn money and hopefully not have to work brutally hard.

I recently started a fantastic job as a support team lead, with freedom to poke into code etc., and as our product sits on top of a database, I've been using the opportunity to improve my Oracle skills and knowledge.

Most of the Oracle DBAs I've met have been pretty laid back, worked normal hours and generally seemed to enjoy what they do, so this seems like it might be a great area to think about moving towards, some ways further down the line.

Who else is thinking ahead, and what are you planning?
This works out well for all parties. There are a lot of people out there who are in love with the idea of working on a startup more than they have passion to make their particular vision a reality. And YC realizes that they're basically playing a numbers game, and so they need to get more meat for the grist--both to boost profits and for the network effects of the YC brand/experience. At the dirt cheap prices they pay for equity, it's a no brainier.
I dunno, it feels like there's enough noise and low-value startups in the ecosystem already I can't help think this is a little predatory and simply further dilutes the perception of value to investors outside the YC fold.
> I don't think Google /want/ you to have any files on your computer.

Oh, yes they want. They also want to be your computer.
MIT urban planner rethinks parking lots
There is plenty of fiction thats explored some side of the idea. Neal stephenson "the diamond age" is probably a good example.

To my mind though, this is only 1/2 of the problem. most fiction has focused on nano fabs + nano dissemblers. perfect recycling + perfect fabrication.
It is easy to disparage the Encyclopedia Britannica from a modern perspective - out-of-step, overpriced, outmaneuvered by competitors - but there is a great sadness here at the demise of something that represented an effort by western scholars to "capture the world's knowledge." Imagine assembling a "A" team of scholars and scientists, getting them to make substantial, substantive contributions in each of their respective areas of expertise, and publishing the results under the guidance of a top editorial board. The results echoed in the western world at the highest levels for no less than two centuries, culminating in a famous 1911 edition that was widely regarded as the pinnacle in assembled human knowledge to that time - something to be marveled at. For years, collectors paid a great premium to buy the 1911 edition, just for that reason. Even in the period leading up to the 1960s, the EB was a staple in most every western home where parents valued education and academic achievement for their kids. Whole hordes of door-to-door salesmen supported their families very comfortably just by selling this particular product.

So, yes, the EB became kind of laughable with its clumsy marketing efforts and awkward efforts to adapt to modern technology in the past couple of decades, but be kind to its memory. It was one of the great attempts in all history to try to do what many dream of doing today through the internet and the advantages of the digital age: limited by the resources of that day, for sure, but an amazing achievement nonetheless. There is something special that has died here and, if only for old time's sake, we can mourn its passing.
mA may matter for something like a phone but really the war in the 8bit space is over uA and nA.

Many 8bit mcus end in places where their battery is expected to have a life time measured in years. Last I looked I think MicroChip is leading the way here in terms of sleep power. Their PIC XLP series only draws ~20nA while sleeping.

There is more competition in the 16bit space with the MSP430 from TI.