skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I upvoted this article because I actually hold the opposite opinion. While I wouldn't deny that most people are going to have a better experience on Windows or OSX right now, I believe that as the commercial software world becomes increasingly focused on web, tablet, and mobile platforms, room appears for the "open-source desktop" - Linux or otherwise - to experience a renaissance.

The open-source ecosystem accomplishes something no company really wants to bother with - maintaining and polishing up old working code. Over a period of a few years that is no advantage, but when you start taking a decades-long view, old solved problems want to stay solved, and open-source increasingly becomes the option that gets you there faster.

And the cutting edge has already moved on. Although there are still plenty of high-end tasks that need the kind of deep hardware access you only get on desktops, the web has proven that it can do an increasing breadth of high quality apps - and so have the mobile environments. If you're selling software, you want to be on those platforms if you can, despite all their maturity problems.
Optimism Should Be at the Top of an Entrepreneur’s Checklist
I've seen kids aged about 4 and 8 see Windows 8 on a tablet device (one of the ones they gave out at build) for the first time, and they both 'got it' within about 15 seconds of using it.
Not only is iostream bloated, but it often injects a static constructor into every translation unit (which visibly angers the – usually calm – LLVM style guide[1]). Oh and it's really godawfully slow unless you turn off a magic flag somewhere[2].

Friends don't let friends use iostream.

[1]: http://llvm.org/docs/CodingStandards.html#ll_iostream

[2]: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9371238/why-is-reading-li...
It doesn't sound bad that they would know they wouldn't always win. They could still pull off a successful campaign if they won about ~80% of the cases. (Which shouldn't be hard for any phone if you only pick specific tests where the phone is exceptionally good at). Those 20% losses would be just aggregated to the total marketing costs of the promotion. That would be a really cool and healthy campaign even if they lose some of it.

It just seems to me that they screwed up in poor internal communication and training. Employees should be prepared to be honest and generous. And be very alerted of the serious risks of a PR madness that false negatives could cause. It's a seriously bold campaign, really hard to pull off. I like it that they tried, but unfortunately the risk might not have payed off.
Flutter (YC W12) Wants To Put The World’s Webcams To Good Use
I would say that the virtual currency solves that a lot.
This does seem like a bit of a problem, but I'd imagine the idea is you "re-sell" anything you no-longer want-- which may mean it didn't fit you right.

What it strikes me this business needs are small pre-paid boxes which will fit in US mailboxes or can be left for your mailman.
Rent the Runway stocks the clothes themselves while this and My Dress Affair (another competitor) are a peer-to-peer marketplace.
Your evopsych argument doesn't explain the drop in female enrollment rate since the 80s.
In a recent article on Hacker News regarding the evils of classes, one of the valid uses of classes were for makeshift namespaces. I would have to agree with this. The model of Java requires all functions to be inside classes. If you have a class full of statics, it functionally becomes a unique namespace. It's semantics, but at that point, they're interchangeable.
The author's calculation seems to be off, 1.2 x 1.5 degrees is 1/72,000 of the total sky area, or roughly 0.0014% (not 0.004%). That still leaves an order of magnitude to be accounted for, but considering the ballpark nature of the 200k estimate and also this being a "dark" spot it's not very surprising.
I'm more sympathetic than usual to the part of the patent he screenshotted. At least pull to refresh is novel.

But this broad construction? It attempts to patent any interaction where you start out scrolling then trigger something else:
http://cl.ly/0U3t391I3n1O2p2g0r2a
Issue Tracker for Mobile Device Bugs
I think that you're onto something there. I need to wear a suit three times a year. Most of my friends are the same way. We all have a suit in our respective closets, but it's just taking up space for most of the year. Now, we're different enough sizes that we couldn't all just share one suit, but, if you had a few thousand clients, you could certainly send a fitting suit to the fellow who needs it, when he needs it.

There's also a huge boon to be found in having branches in both hemispheres. Instead of spending December paying the land tax on a warehouse full of shorts, just rent them out in Australia. Then, come July, send out the shorts in the US and the sweaters down under.

I'm not sure about the environmental impact. On the one hand, you have quite a bit of carbon footprint from shipping the clothes all around. On the other hand, the company would have a strong economic incentive to maintain the clothes. I'm betting a lot of clothes that are currently thrown away could be saved with proper cleaning and sewing skills. I'm now imagining reading the company's blog having less posts on Redis integration and far more on their new way to remove grass stains.

Honestly, given the sizing issues, this probably makes more sense for men's clothes, but that avoids competition with 99dresses.

Dammit. I'm going to be thinking about this all night.
I checked out the site. Look interesting, but I noticed one major issue: pagination is a mistake in e-commerce. "View all" or infinite scroll is a must.
I think I've eaten some stupid soup today. Could someone explain to me what the backend is all about? As far as I see it, the command line creates a backbone template and syncs it with the server. Which is dandy, but as it's client code anyway, that's mostly static web hosting.

So now I'm ready to create a hyper-nifty Web 2.71 interface to WHOIS. So normally I'd create a simple web app that serves me my data. Where does backlift come in here, as I'm not doing CRUD all from within the app itself?
you can signup without facebook too. We'll make that more obvious

I'm on board as one of the folks to receive questions, and yet every time I visit the site, it asks me to log in again, unlike almost any site I have signed up for as a regular participant. I probably do some kinds of script-blocking that only a minority of users do, so this bug in persistence of sign-in information may not have been experienced by anyone else, but I'll not for the record that I don't even see a display of a way to log in with Facebook, so that's probably a symptom of the same issue. Never assume anything about the characteristics of the user's browser unless that is mission-critical for your site. I can use other online sites (including Facebook) just fine.

AFTER EDIT: To answer your kind follow-up question, caoxuewen, I'm using Chrome with all of the following extensions installed, mostly with default settings:

Adblock Plus (Beta)1.2

Warning:
This extension failed to modify a network request because the modification conflicted with another extension.

Don't track me Google2.0

F.B. Purity - Cleans Up Facebook6.6.2

G+me for Google Plus™6.0.3

Ghostery3.0.0

Google Calendar (by Google)0.7

Google Tasks (by Google)1.0

Google Translate1.2.3.1

Google Voice (by Google)2.3.6.8

Highlight to Search1.0.36

Send from Gmail (by Google)1.12

Show Full Domain on Hacker News posts1.0

(I'll work on fixing the one conflict while you figure out what's going on with Askolo. Thanks for your help.)
For some twisted interpretation of beautiful I guess http://140byt.es also qualifies
A site where getting poached is the whole point
> The purpose of patents is to advance public knowledge.

IIRC, the primary purpose of patents, since they were invented in 15th century Venice, has been to eliminate the monopoly of trade guilds. This was an issue well into the 20th century. But has software ever had this problem?
Designing Our Lives To Use Less Energy
Glad to finally know the story!

Are you guys the reason why they locked the 500 offices permanently (so you can only get in with a iPhone app)? Did Dave finally tire of all the ramdom dudes pitching him?
Yes, and the story will be even more awesomer by then
There's also the huge difference in that RTR specializes in designer clothing that is more for one-time-wear-only kinds of occasion that might warrant renting (I've done it a couple times for a wedding and a super formal dinner event), while 99dresses seems to be just selling run of the mill clothing I have in my closet with shipping potentially costing as much as what I paid for the dress in the first place just to sell it to someone else.

The fundamental idea of reselling used clothing is really cool and needs an overhaul from the usual Goodwill and other thrift stores, but 99dresses seems targeted at a specific audience that quite literally only wears something a couple times before tiring of it. I'm not sure how compatible that is with constantly changing fashions and questionable clothing quality from some of these clothing stores... I have a lot of old non-designer dresses I could be selling on this site, but after a couple times they've all got small problems (I don't want to sell something I mended!) or are out of fashion by a year or two.
I've recently notice that Facebook has settled into a way for me to communicate with my family, much more so than my friends or acquaintances, so something like FamilyLeaf makes a lot of sense to me. However, I use Facebook to talk with my family, because they (and everyone) all joined Facebook.

How are you overcoming the chicken/egg problem - getting families to join when I'm imagining that most families already just use a subset of Facebook for similar items?
Just wait till he talks about A/B testing the name from MelonCard to PrivacyPlum to SafeSheperd. How many hours did you spend on that domain name suggestion website?
Ask HN: Do you look back sometimes and feel like you've progressed?
Working on a startup, you lose track of time. With the long hours, the built up stress, you begin to wonder if you've really progressed.

I never notice how much I progress until I really look back and realize that I'm now doing something I would've never been able to a year ago.

Show or tell us how you've progressed. Be proud of what you've done.

For me, it's our upcoming iphone app Persona. It's everything you are, in pictures. It tells you hundred of things about your friends that you might not even think to ask, and at the same time tells the world about you. And it does all this at the speed of sight.

http://www.grooovy.me/persona
I saw something like this on r/malefashionadvice but they would mail you a box of stuff every month and you would just keep what you liked and mail back what didn't fit or you didn't want. looks like a few sites are doing it now

http://www.reddit.com/r/malefashionadvice/comments/gyg6z/i_g...

https://www.trunkclub.com/

http://www.frankandoak.com/

http://www.manpacks.com/
Webkit prints the file and line number out in console.log. I use it all the time, but I guess that's because it also links to that point in the code.
Hate to continue the chain, but on the off-chance government organisations know more than they're letting on, we might need to extend that to "most humans". Though, in that case, it might have to be "thought by most humans"? Just speculating for the hell of it. e.g.,

Fixed: Earth is known by most humans as the only planet to have life.
It combined a known, existing event (scrolling), with a known, existing action (refreshing). It would be akin to be patenting the ability to right click, hold that right click, and then have a different menu appear.

So, what you do is take all know actions, and all known events, and put them on a big table so you can cross reference them. See which ones you like, and there you go!

In fact, that's so ingenious, (a mechanism to develop knew UI concepts), I could probably patent it under our own system!
Talk about a false dilemma..
What's the threshold for being considered a programmer, really? For example, I don't consider myself one, even though I have created scripts in PowerShell and Bash.
Hi tokenadult, this is indeed a bug, we are are looking into it now - curious what browser/version are you using?
Can 46 rich dudes buy an election?
You can't explain something like that without considering the context, the social/work environment of those years, that led to this change. It may just have been that, for example, since the 80s new interesting fields were born or discovered by women, thus reducing their interest in computer science. This factor, for example, may have led to men predominance in the field, and that subsequently may have led to new scenarios/environments again, and so on till nowadays.

I'm sure that if there was a time when multitude of women were interested in CS probably today there would be more of them, and less men. That's unequivocal. Environments change, always in every field.
P90X2 Worksheet Download
It's funny you mention this, because I was just thinking about this today.

I progressed more in one year working on my own startup than I did in 4 years working for another company.
There's also threadflip.com

This market is probably all about getting the critical mass of users so you have supply.
James Cameron Completes Solo Journey to the Ocean Floor
Astronomical numbers may be large but in e.g. computational science people have been dealing with even larger numbers for quite a while now.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon_number
That seems to be how fashion-conscious women feel about new clothes. And fashion is a major channel of non-verbal communication about status/lifestyle/cleanliness/trendiness. While one may differ about it's philosophical value, it's certainly a market need and it has real use; Humans make snap decisions on appearance.
That's pretty bad, made me flag your post at first because I thought it was spam.
unfortunately unlikely.

every horrible thing in history, every holocaust and slave trade, every excruciating death,

is probably playing out countless times over throughout the universe.
Frequently asked questions for Silent Updates in Firefox
Do we see no place for patents in true UI innovation?

No. I see no place for patents anywhere except in cases where disclosure of the method is necessary to teach others to implement it.

The idea behind patents is to offer inventors an alternative to locking up their innovations indefinitely in the form of trade secrets. Specifically, in exchange for being granted a "limited" (sic) term of protection from competition, the inventor is required to teach others how to replicate his results.

But if a patent's teachings are not needed to help someone implement a given idea, then the bargain above does not exist. Any such patent is worse than useless. It does nothing but give engineers a list of obvious things they're not allowed to do.

Society can get by just fine without such "protection."
Maybe they could crowdsource this type of information.

"People who said this item fit well, also said these items fit well..."
Google: Developers, Stop Draining Android Battery
> Did they say Excel was broken when they let you make spreadsheets in Docs? Did they break down email to its bare bones and remake it for Gmail?

no one had managed to make a good spreadsheet/wiki cross before google docs. i know because i looked for one for years. as for gmail, they didn't fix email, they fixed webmail. if coldewey thinks they didn't he has clearly forgotten what the webmail landscape was like before gmail came out. (it is possible that microsoft's outlook-in-the-browser was up there with gmail; i have never used that. everything else pretty much sucked.)
Just a thought: IBM made a big effort to recruit women into mainframe programming jobs. 1984 roughly when Unix and PCs started to take over the industry; perhaps those companies were not as interested in recruiting women.

Also, you can be sure there's far less sexual harassment now than in the 1970s and 80s.
I don't know if it's something that needs to be addressed. People who are more lenient are the target demographic more than people who would otherwise not rely on an online service.

EDIT: On an unrealted note, the name "Forever 21" is incredibly sad.
Flexible Self-Control
New startup naming trend: two digit number followed by a noun.
HootSuite on Verge of Closing Massive Financing Round
Roughly, "my measurements are X, and this item fit like Y" is how I would want it to boil down. I'm not sure it would go over if implemented just that way, but the idea is there somewhere.
I agree. It shouldnt take more than 1 or 2 clicks for a user to review all your products. Ecommerce sites tend to not pay close attention to this - but look at how much significance Google pays to this metric.
No, a lot of our extant problems would not be present under any reasonably sane (not necessarily benevolent) monarch, very likely including some of the more useless security apparatus. We'd just have different problems.
I'm not sure what the appeal of the virtual currency model is ('buttons').

There must be a scare for potential users in not receiving real money for sales, but something which can collapse or fluctuate in value at any time (also, it is potentially almost valueless if for instance you move somewhere the website doesnt operate).

Maybe not all people are as skeptical as me, but I'd imagine that this model will prevent users from 'leaping in' by selling large amounts of clothes, (and thus ending up with a huge store of 'buttons' that they may or may not ever find a use for).

I am very curious as to what the founders see as the upsides to this model which overcome said downsides.
Contrary to what people are saying I actually believe that a patent should be granted for the "pull to refresh" feature.

The inventor obviously thought very deeply about the problem, and implemented an elegant, intuitive solution to solve it.

What I don't agree with is that the patent is valid FOR 14 YEARS. Patents are meant to reward inventors for the behaviour I outlined above, but 14 years is a lifetime for a software patent.

If the patent period was reduced to 1 or maybe 2 years, that should be more than enough time to capitalize on a novel refresh method.
I am thinking what if someone buys branded clothes from this website and sell it in other second-hand market, the cost of one button is only one dollar which I think is too cheap?

How about using the library system, having a certain amount of deposit on the account, if the user lost the clothes then the presumed value of the clothes will be deducted from her account?
There are infinitely many things that would improve the sales of an e-commerce site. First among all things is making sure the site is not on localhost.

Many sites do not implement view all or infinite scroll and, empirically, still manage to make quite a lot of money. One prominent example is Amazon.

More broadly, I would sincerely love it if HN did not try to play "Let's one-up the founders" on day 1 for every startup, with special attention paid to YC startups. All startups will have great big honking problems on day one. (They're more of the flavor "Nobody knows we exist" than "Our 100 products are paginated rather than on a single page.") The ones that succeed in solving those problems will, in the process, revisit almost every stupidly inconsequential implementation detail, in the same sort of painful, considered depth that all of us who have shipped software before know will eventually happen.

Wouldn't we be a happier, more productive community if the tone was less "I have found your flaw!" and more "That's a good start. You might consider adding X, Y, and Z to the roadmap. Those have previously had outcomes like X1, Y1, and Z1 when tried in circumstances X2, Y2, and Z2. X and Y can probably wait, but Z should be a fairly high priority because $EXPLANATION_OF_HOW_Z_PREVENTS_YOU_FROM_DYING."
How can you possibly be so sexist to alienate the men who wish to have infinite closets? It's not just women who wear dresses, you know. It's sexist bullshit like this that keeps men from getting started in the fashion industry.
Luck is preparedness meets opportunity. Having a star angel investor in town so close is always an opportunity worth taking advantage of.
You're changing the subject.
News Corporation paid hackers to leak keys for rival company's TV smartcards
I'm sure if Apple really wanted to incorporate this into their apps they would either a) license the patent or b) just do it anyway.
My favorite is the point that there are often better strategies (more profitable) than going after the most popular terms.
Using Spree and Refinery all together: auth monkey patch
Well, they are the only .com domains that are pretty much left.
I ported a theme called Tricolre across which is much more subdued, the pull request[1] just got accepted a few minutes ago. Hopefully I can get a few more themes done, they're very simple to create. The joy of open source is that if there's something you don't like about someone's code, you can just fork it and make whatever changes you want.

[1]: https://github.com/ccampbell/rainbow/pull/3
PrivacyPig would have been SO much more awesome.

(and i still have it btw)
>And second, even if it were broken, Google has never fixed anything before.
>Google never said “What you’re doing is broken. Use our thing instead.” They always said “Did you know you we can do that too, for free?”

I don't agree. I think they saw search was broken, and then fixed it. I think they also basically 'fixed' webmail with GMail.

The argument in this article seems spread pretty thin, to me.
Stack Overflow Meetup Everywhere: April 28, 2012
I love these business models that find ways to put unused inventory / capacity to good use and reduce overall consumption in the process. My most recent favorite is a "tools as a service" co-op in Seattle: http://wstoollibrary.org/

Cheers to fewer underutilized dresses and belt sanders ending up in landfills.
RTR will also ship a second identical dress of a different size in case you find out you don't fit the original size chosen. RTR also sends the dresses using a premium shipping service with tracking (i.e UPS or FedEx).
Open Web Judo: ThinkUp App Goes For-Profit In Bid To Decentralize The Social Web
Federal Government Needs Hackers
Justice Dept. takes hard line on e-book price fixing
Google+ is not Facebook, and it's just getting started -- At this point, I don't see how anyone outside of Google could think they have a strong enough grasp on what's in store to come to these conclusions.

You don't see any Facebook profile postings on Hacker News, but PG had to change the HN URL format to accommodate all the Google Plus postings. Moreover, a Google Play link just appeared on my black bar -- Google Plus will come more into Play as it goes mainstream.
No doubt! It is exceedingly egotistical to think that we are the only life-forms in this vast expanse.

Also, this image seems like a good use of the iPad 3 retina display...
Why China won’t be innovative for at least 20 more years
Dude, just charge more. like 5x 10x more.
The funniest part of this for me is that my friends' company is halfbaked.com.au...
CaribbeanKisses.com Meet Singles Dating and Personals:
>Remember that browser plug-in that sounded a siren whenever it detected Google in any way, shape, or form?

What's this plug-in? I'd love to see one where people compete to see how long they can go without using one of their properties. Think of it like a "this many days since the last on-the-job injury" counter.
Would you then own all future interface interactions?
I'm more than happy to toss the idea around with you, I think it's an interesting idea and if it reached critical mass it could do really well - but I'm skeptical it could get there and that the price points would be such that consumers would be interested.
Good luck getting women to post their detailed measurements on a public website....

Not sure this will work.