skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're a real piece of work. Do you understand the definition of confirmation bias? Does the likely over a dozen point difference in our comment scores on your our posts here not give you any indication that this just might not be an isolated issue? Or are you one of these people that is never wrong and can't admit that you might not have experienced every possible use case or code path of iTunes?

Seriously, do you understand the absurdity of what you're claiming, outside of this application or your or I's anecdotes... that the claim that the software is bug free or works perfectly for everyone is just an outlandishly stupid thing to claim as an absolute?

>Give a break. Here: Send me your music player, $20 says I can get it to crash on launch.

Soon enough, I'm preparing to release it by the end of May. I'm not really sure how you plan on crashing it given it's design, but it's cute that you continue to make absurd assumptions and personal attacks.
I dunno why, but I do feel a Content Optimisation tool's homepage could be a little more ... content optimised.

Having said that, loved the article, fascinating stuff!
Oh, totally. You figure, first, that America doesn't have 50,000 soldiers there for no reason. No country has ever had soldiers in other countries for no reason.

The reason is that it's a vassal state, and the way it pays its tribute is, depending on how you want to look at it, by sending awesome manufactured goods over, or buying bad paper at high prices with its huge annual trade surplus. Cf Germany.
Perhaps he is referring to hardware fragmentation? Calling it a catastrophe seems a bit exaggerated given the enormous success of Android though.
Distilled, one of the more well-known and reputable SEO agencies have a good post on what they've been seeing: http://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/google-updates-april-2012/

I also work with a larger number of sites and have seen all kinds of crazy things in a number of different industries the last few weeks. Fllow SEOs at other agencies are seeing the same fluctuations.
My takeaway was this:

"what’s even more interesting than improving a piece of software, is to improve the way we write and improve software. Changing the process of making software has sometimes been some of the most painful parts of software development (because we so easily get used to certain models), but that has also often been the most rewarding parts. It is, after all, why “git” came to be, for example."

Exactly! with so many frameworks, platforms, languages and what not floating around this is getting more and more important. Yet, AFAIK, truly innovative approaches like Light Table are rare.
From my questioning of (emphasis mine) :

> Mutual Assured Destruction principle is the ONLY reason for protracted peace at the global scale

you seem to derive that I think something along the line of "Equilibrium in nuclear abilities played no role in global stability during the cold war."

The answers to your rhetorical questions are of course all no. But do you truly think the huge size of our nuclear arsenals are a necessary feature for global stability nowadays ? If yes, could you explain to me why a smaller arsenal could not do the trick ?
Is this website using frames? It is basically unreadable.
Comparison of Diagnostics between GCC and Clang
Thanks Chad. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and it'll be a pleasure to have you back on a future show.
I recommend exploring your day to day tool set. By that I mean things like your text editor / IDE, various OS features/hotkeys, the unix command prompt, scripting languages, etc...

If you have some spare cycles and the motivation, focused learning on such things can pay off a lot in the future.
http://www.rubyinside.com/ruby-iso-spec-draft-2900.html describes the reason behind the standardization. Seems it's more about allowing Ruby to be used in project dealing with the Japanese government than it is about insuring portability.
Yes, sorry. The article link was down when I was first read the comments, so I wasn't aware of this new book.
Idea #4 is done pretty well with http://liveninja.com/
I have this great recipe for what I like to call Stone Soup.
It's really quite simple...

Wikipedia's version, "Some travellers come to a village, carrying nothing more than an empty cooking pot. Upon their arrival, the villagers are unwilling to share any of their food stores with the hungry travellers. Then the travellers go to a stream and fill the pot with water, drop a large stone in it, and place it over a fire. One of the villagers becomes curious and asks what they are doing. The travellers answer that they are making "stone soup", which tastes wonderful, although it still needs a little bit of garnish to improve the flavour, which they are missing. The villager does not mind parting with a few carrots to help them out, so that gets added to the soup. Another villager walks by, inquiring about the pot, and the travellers again mention their stone soup which has not reached its full potential yet. The villager hands them a little bit of seasoning to help them out. More and more villagers walk by, each adding another ingredient. Finally, a delicious and nourishing pot of soup is enjoyed by all."
Can we get the prices adjusted for square footage?
I strongly suspect 'social hackers' are exactly what this particular company's looking for, and the negative connotation serves as a useful filter.
Because it allows laptop manufacturers to claim that they have a FOO inch screen while not having to pay for as much screen surface area.
Their messaging is a non-standard protocol. AMQP standard would be kick ass.

Same with their cloud search - sooo obviously solr/lucene-based but 0 exposure to the lucene syntax.

Not a big deal though, it's not like it totally locks you in to use these.
Glad to help :-)

Personally, I would drop "Powerful Shortcuts" and "Convenient Both Ways" as neither one adds much for me. The first seems obvious -- not like a cool feature. The second just makes me nervous -- are you likely to forget implementing the use of the mouse?

That might give you room to include some sample uses. Or direct improvements on my life. Something that's less focused on how great your product is, and more focused on how great my life will be when I buy it.
How Small Businesses SHOULD Use Technology
Ask HN: Is using a cloud backend service viable for a mobile startup?
I'm developing mobile apps for a long time and I think I'm spending nearly %50 of my time (and money) on building the backend, choosing the technology, etc.

I feel I'm losing my focus on what matters - the UX on mobile itself. So I decided to try a backend service like StackMob, Parse and Kinvey.

Do you have the same problem? Do you have any experience on using them?
#4 sounds like an awesome idea. who's with me? finding the right balance between how much people are willing to pay based on the quality of the teachers and making it worth while for quality teachers to spend their time would be a challenge I'd imagine among other things but I really do like the premise.
This podcast is amazing. Exactly the type of news I want to hear. Just in case you don't check hn every day (or even every couple of days) this podcast has you covered.
The one we are using (names withheld to protect the guilty) is being used in a turnkey manner. No customization or custom code, just the base functionality. It is the pure gall of shipping a sql file as an update that is longer than most programs.
Thanks for doing this. I'll be a regular listener.
I suppose the issue is slightly deeper than "users want to see their movies without letterboxing"

Sure, you could simply slap any resolution in a PC monitor.

But if you keep the aspect rate constant across devices, you can easily change displays. Why? Example: 2nd monitor, and especially the big screen TVs that are being used in place of projectors nowadays.

Funny that the 13' MacBooks (Pro/Air) still have a 1.6 (16:10) ratio, and the 11' has a 16:9 ratio
Your phone doesn't usually broadcast an SSID. Your home router does. What you've linked to isn't the same thing as the article, unless you're carrying your router along with you everywhere.
Which means it is not too much unlike a quality RDBMS like PostgreSQL. For adding (remember to not set a default value for large tables) and removing fields in PostgreSQL there is no requirement for locking the tables more than an instant. But for complicated schema changes you may have to either force a long lock or use some messy plan either involving replication or doing the migration in multiple steps.
You'd never find it since it was Steve Yegge on Credit Card buckets :P : http://steve-yegge.blogspot.ca/2009/04/have-you-ever-legaliz...
Brilliant handling of rivers. Everything I've seen in the past is either error-prone (rivers flowing uphill) or computationally expensive (needing to simulate erosion & deposition)
Backblaze turns 5 - a timeline
What do you mean by soulless exactly?
Worried About Someone Stealing Your Ideas? Eric Ries's Answer.
I heard Eric Ries field the question about lean startups, what if I release my first iteration and some big company steals my idea.
His response," If you have one idea, you probably have more than one idea. Take your second best idea, one you probably will never execute, and find the perfect company to implement the idea, find the right product manager at that company to implement it, and try your hardest to get him to steal your idea!"
Open source online erp with apple style ui
Apple-style ui in the eyes of a non-apple fan
You win, made me share the link just because it's got my score attached!

But I do wonder what the scoring system is like? Do you optimize based on what you're looking for, or just general awesomeness?
We can do it for the entire US. Stay tuned.
How Bad Do You Want Success
Useful information about EDI software functions
I wasn't trying to get into a Mac vs. PC argument here. I was strictly pointing out that saying Apple was the only one making thin and light laptops is just plain wrong. That being said, your oversimplified "short version" of the reviews of all ultrabooks reeks of Apple bias, and my own experience with the Asus Zenbook contradicts all of your bullet points (except the included software not equivalent...I'm not sure what the Air comes with).
Feature request: could you upload the podcasts as videos with a still image on YouTube? It would improve the UX and help with discoverability.

Google gives some easy ways to do it: http://www.google.com.hk/m/search?q=mp3%20to%20youtube&c...
The y-axis scale distorts perception of the relative differences.
It says "Get a job." It doesn't say "Get a job doing something else."
I'm very happy to report that in the UK GoDaddy don't even appear on the first page of results!

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=domain+name&pws=0
Would love to see this applied to generate much larger, more expansive worlds.

To me, "an island is an island is an island" and they all feel the same (mountain in the middle). More expansive landscapes with larger biomes and geologic process would be awesome.
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=numpty
I remain surprised by how much music piracy seems to take place on YouTube. Nearly any popular song out there has a YouTube video with essentially blank/random video content and a nicely encoded layer 3 with the music. Combined with all the tools/plugins out there to "download YouTube videos" it seems like quite an easy spot to steal mp3s of most popular songs.
I know this might be off topic, but can you please submit your podcast to the Zune market place too?
oh crap, does concat create a new object, or mutate the current one? is it the same as using + or do they handle objects differently....? should I be using << here maybe?

I agree with you that the verbosity of ObjC makes it harder to mentally parse fast, but I also think there is a lot of clarity to it when you read it slow.

Where I see ObjC fall down is more in terms of command verbosity. For example in Ruby,

File.open("readfile.rb", "r") do |infile|
while (line = infile.gets)
puts "#{line}"
end
end

...would be ~150 lines of code in ObjC (Dave DeLong: http://stackoverflow.com/a/3711079/196358). Which is not really a failing of the language, actually. It's a failing of the libraries that come with the language.

Apple chose to give you a couple ways to read a file. The easy way is `stringWithContentsOfFile:encoding:error:error`, but the next level of control is way to low level. Dave DeLong's solution to reading a file line by line exposes an api that looks like this:

DDFileReader * reader = [[DDFileReader alloc] initWithFilePath:pathToMyFile];
[reader enumerateLinesUsingBlock:^(NSString * line, BOOL * stop) {
NSLog(@"%@", line);
}];

Not actually much more complex or verbose than the ruby.
Pantaloon is one of my personal heros. He used to tell his wife that he'd go to a game developer's conference when in fact he was getting piss wasted at a demoparty. Details, details.

EDIT: (I hope his wife doesn't read HN)
Why it is a good idea to invest in “Unsexy Startups”?
Great sense of humor!

...

So how can I invest in this?
> Does the likely over a dozen point difference in our comment scores on your our posts here not give you any indication that this just might not be an isolated issue?

I can't see the point difference between our comments, how would I know that? Moreover, why should I care? Congrats, you've proven other techs also don't like things that confuse them and would prefer to join in your bitching.

> Or are you one of these people that is never wrong and can't admit that you might not have experienced every possible use case or code path of iTunes?

You're acting like I'm saying iTunes is perfect. It's not, it's riddled with issues and a frank conversation on it's future is important. I'm just saying the issues most techs present to me, including the one you did, are the simplest issues to solve and indicative of a weird attitude techs have towards iTunes, where they assume it will fuck them over before trying anything to solve the problem.

If you had presented a real issue, I wouldn't have even continued. You instead presented the simplest one that only happens to novice users, so I laid into you appropriately.

> Seriously, do you understand the absurdity of what you're claiming, outside of this application or your or I's anecdotes... that the claim that the software is bug free or works perfectly for everyone is just an outlandishly stupid thing to claim as an absolute?

That is a ridiculous claim. Good thing I never once said that.

> but it's cute that you continue to make absurd assumptions and personal attacks.

My point was that any software on a machine with sufficient issues can crash. That wasn't an "absurd assumption or personal attack" it was verifiable truth.
Good questions. I'll do my best to answer them.

1. We assume that the distribution of rewards for each lever is fixed (over the short term). This allows the reward to vary randomly so long as the average reward (over the short term -- days to weeks) is constant. There are more complex schemes, which allow for greater variation in reward, but the initial Myna offering is intended to be directly comparable to A/B testing.

2. It's not necessary to assume that feedback is instantaneous. Basically you can continue to make suggestions (pull levers) in proportion to your best estimate of their expected return and the maths holds. Very long conversion cycles will cause problems for any system, I think, as you'll spend a long time in a random walk. In these cases we recommend using a proxy measure which is correlated with conversion, if one is available. As for one option speeding up conversion, I don't think that will matter as you'll simply refine your estimate of one lever faster. I haven't thought too much about this particular issue; it would be worth doing some simulations to see.

3. Just turn off the bandit when you've satisfied with the results. That is, you can use Myna like A/B testing, and the Myna UI displays confidence bounds for this very reason, while still getting the benefits of optimising as data arrives.

4. I actually like bandit algs as there is less for the user to mess up. You don't have to worry about how much data to collect, what p value to use, and so on. Just set it running and it optimises automatically.
UK Government's design principles
Thanks! After so long, they all blend together!
Stealing gas from a police car
Michael Baker, 20, was swiping the gas last month from a Jenkins Police Department squad car, he made sure to flip the bird as his girlfriend snapped a picture.
Defending Dan Hesse on Sprint Business Strategy
I haven't thought about it that way.

But when I try all the possible TLD's as a separate addresses, none works ( http://com , http://org , even http://xxx or http://museum , nothing works).

What is the reason... is it DNS servers that don't like this type of nslookup?
On one hand a 500-ton asteroid is way too small to make a difference if the smelted iron and nickel could be safely landed on Earth. Nickel ore is quoted at about 30 USD per ton in Indonesia, so the asteroid's material might only be worth 15,000 USD on the Earth's surface.

But on the other hand, the smelted ore is much more valuable if used for earth-orbit construction, especially high orbit construction. SpaceX charges about 2,000,000 USD per ton to launch a payload into low earth orbit. The cost to put 500 tons of ore into space from earth would thus be 1 billion USD. By comparision, the mass of the International Space Station is about 500 tons.

This rough analysis shows that the most cost-effective mission would be the construction of large space facilities using material smelted from a well-chosen asteroid.

Maybe the investors have in mind something like the Stanford Torus: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_torus
Fuck off if you have nothing to add to the discussion except BS, thanks.
That was 2008, an entirely different time. Crowdfunding barely existed as a concept and to my knowledge it was never Wedon's plan to pursue it.

I'll draw your attention to the fact that the big videogame kickstarters have been for franchises that have been dormant for decades. Surely their principals wanted to bring them back sooner. If they could raise this kind of money, why didn't they do it in 2008? The answer, of course, is that they couldn't do it in 2008. But they can in 2012. And Whedon could in 2012 as well.
Very interesting post. It hints are some serious architectural differences between MacRuby and MobiRuby. It'll be interesting to see if these differences limit the ability of MobiRuby to create a usable way to work with Cocoa in ruby.
I agree. It is kinda embarrassing, but we have limited time and have to focus where we think we'll get the most bang-for-buck.
Top wacky sports around the world
These will be ICANN domains, thus still under US jurisdiction.
You're ignoring half the equation.

It's possible the millions in revenue is not enough to make up for the huge fines and extra work required to do the filtering .
I think a big enough nuclear fleet on bath sides has led to the first half-century in the history of europe without a major war.

I think it's also odd how politicians 'claim' that Iran/Korea/Belgium mustn't be allowed to get nuclear weapons because then they would be unstoppable. So MAD works against the USSR but not against Iran?
I think the word here is accessibility, not usability. Every step of the process can be made usable without the need for JavaScript.

From a security stand-point, I don't trust whatever JavaScript engine is running, even more when considering non tech-savvy people.

An activist could find himself in a delicate position and discover that many CPU cycles ate away whatever battery was left in their mobile devices, just to display three Canvas elements in a row, with the text "Tulip", "not", "found" in a cool font.

Now the browser can crash due to a flaky HTML5 Canvas implementation in addition to the JS engine.
The traditional system would eat up a big chunk, as would agents. Whedon might be able to raise funds directly from a hedge fund or rich individual, that's what indie producers do when they can.
Great idea. Not only does this make for good audio content while I work, it's a godsend for when I'm driving. Thank you.
I wrote one of the Ruby bindings (Neography Gem) and write about Neo4j on my blog http://maxdemarzi.com .

Also ThoughtWorks is using it and writing about it: http://www.markhneedham.com/blog/2012/04/20/neo4j-searching-...
oh yeah, the array indexing starting with one is the one I forgot from my list!

I'm developing for an arm processor with no floating point support. so it's best to avoid the software fallback at all costs.

I'm aware of luajit but "plain" lua is still fast enough for my uses. FFI is definitely a killer and beats SWIG hands down.

need to upgrade to 5.2 asap...
How "Fantasy Politics" trivializes civic life
It's called "Theology"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theology
Before you said Android, I thought you were going for the OLPC laptops. :-)
wow, programming directly in gödel numbers... in brainfuck... in base one... in unicode! i think you win some kind of esolang prize for this one....
Adrenaline is a hormone and neurotransmitter. Adrenalin is a trademarked adrenaline product of Parke-Davis. (Wikipedia)

The name "ping-pong" was in wide use before British manufacturer J. Jaques & Son Ltd trademarked it in 1901. (Wikipedia)
Promo Member Alfamart Minimarket Lokal Terbaik Indonesia
That's what I would have expected, but OP says his library is 200GB hence why I made the argument. My library is 115GB and doesn't come close to experiencing these issues, and it's accessed from seven different Macs, all with different hardware, software and of different generations.
Facebook Site Governance: Privacy Policy Clarified
Facebook clarifies changes to its privacy policy
You'd be pretty silly if you had all your data only stored on S3 without a backup under your own control. So moving out should come at a cost of $0. You should be able to cancel your account at a moments notice and not lose a single bit, if only because the other side can do the same.
Visual distortion via BitTorrent on Mad Men
Something inspired by an IV-drip of Red Bull with an espresso chaser. Possibly also PCP. Or, more simply SEO people are crazy about optimization.

I couldn't make heads or tails of it either.
This is unbelievably cool. That is all.
Previous:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3811052
Yes, that's great, as we'd end up paying 5 cents per transaction to the payment processor, and 1.75 to 5% of each transaction (depending on the risk to MasterCard) to MasterCard or Visa or Discover or AmEx. What effect would these vastly increased transaction costs do to the economy?

We'd also be surrendering loads of useful demographic and buying habit data, giving up anonymous transactions, and creating a data store of immense value to Evil Hackers and the PLA's CyberArmy.

This sounds good at first, like urine-powered batteries, or Digital Rights Management, but when you think about it for 5 minutes, it's a bad idea.
Determining when a game has "soul" seems like a difficult trait to qualify objectively, but generally speaking, I think you can just sort of tell when games feel like they have that special touch put in by a human designer.

IMO, TF2 (and most other Valve games) demonstrate "soul-ful" level design pretty well.
I can confirm that this is happening. Usually I'll get a couple search terms on the first page that go up or down any given week. Most of the search terms I monitor have had lots of flux in the last few weeks.
Group hug of 420 developers at European Rails Conference Railsberry
In other words - Happy Friday by @tenderlove ;)
It also doesn't say, "Get a job under a chef as a prep cook." Whereas, above in paragraph 5 he explicitly says to do anything except cook. For me to assume the concluding "Get a job" is a continuation of the theme set forth in "do something else - anything except the job you’re not qualified to do which is to cook" seems reasonable.