skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here's a man who's certainly not afraid of newness itself (I mean, he single-handedly released a new JVM hosted LISP)

Though, I note that at the time, those were two mature and and well pedigreed technologies.

I assert that anyone who trumpets the inherent value of "new" hasn't been around long enough to understand that there is a never-ending stream of new things and that, as Teddy Sturgeon famously quipped, 90% of everything is crap.

A big reason for that are "pop cultures," which are defined as cultures/sub-cultures whose rate of change far outraces their rate of actual progress. Unfortunately, programming as a whole is one of those things.
The Next iPhone Will Be the Sixth, Not The Fifth
A Great Wallpaper Round-Up
No, not sarcastically. It's the first time I saw the noscript message actually try and explain why exactly the Javascript is needed.
Mine Mars : A Voxel Based JavaScript + WebGl Adventure
Those were strategic decisions, though. In this case, EA needs Apple a LOT more than Apple needs EA.
Developing Imperfect Software (video)
Javascript is already out there in the wild solving problems that Ruby/Python/Clojure can't.

Examples?
14 Startups Disrupting The Fashion Industry
So they said two things: Presentational and Metrics. Presentational they should do what you said, with graceful degradation, but with metrics I would just give them up. I'd rather not have metrics on a user than lose a user.
So I originally got an email from Roshan, who asked if I wanted to join your first cohort. I think at that time, you guys were offering for $500. I actually said yes, but then Roshan replied that you guys filled up quickly.

I then asked him if I could join the second cohort. This time I learned that the price moved to $1000, and he again told me that he would contact me as soon as they open a class.

So is the class now $3k? What made you switch the price point?

Also, I am still interested in going through it, but I really need someone to reply to me. Plus, as fellow UIUC alum/enterpreneur, would truly appreciate that.
This is exactly what I do with my Kobo. I buy EPUB format books and immediately crack the DRM off and load them into Calibre, confident that I'll be able to convert it and load it onto whatever device I may buy in the future.
The Future of 1950 in 1925
> To prevent shrinkage and increase product visibility,

Which is also a feature to discourage shoplifting.
yes, i used to be with rogers and switched to teksavvy a few months ago. fair price and larger/unlimited monthly cap. haven't noticed any throttling.
I think I might have explained myself poorly. I'm suggesting using separate var statements for each assignment, e.g.:

var a = 2;
var b = 4;
var c = { blah: "whatever" };

Leaving out a semicolon has no effect. They can be copied without any fuss. It's easy.
Massive EVE Online player event: scaling & analysis
Thanks. What's interesting about it? What should I know about the culture?
I usually ask YC founders why they think you picked them. I wonder the reverse. Why you picked him.
With capslock on the password would be entered as 'aAaAaA' (which would pass) not 'AAAAAA' (which would fail). There is no guessing, it is just the inverse.
That was our first product, www.trybloc.com. We're now doing a $3k / course, one-on-one, personalized dev bootcamp-style product.

If that sounds like something that interests you, I'd encourage you to apply!
Shrinkage is shoplifting.
Incredibox - Express your musicality..
My capslock key is backspace, so this feature is useless to me.
People use things like typekit and fontdeck because it is cheaper than buying the actual fonts and they also provide highly available hosting for decent pricing.

If you want to serve them yourself and pay a one time fee you actually can do that with most of the typekit fonts but the fee is actually much more substantial than the yearly fee for those services.
It seems that every day on HN there is some post offering something "every programmer needs to know", yet the post is actually some very in-depth dive into the minutiae of the author's pet subject.

The other day there was some post on front end/client side programming with a crazy amount of things everyone needs to know. Now apparently we also have to know the characteristics of the charging/discharging of capacitors in memory.

All in all, this is WAY too in depth too have the title it has. The only way you have to know all this stuff as a software engineer is if you are working on the lowest level of something like an OS kernel or a video game engine.
Not the included ones (there are about 5)
Customizing Google Analytics Starts with Objectives, not Metrics
I figured I would jump in here too. I am currently a part of the first cohort that is going through the program now at the $500 rate. I know that both myself and a few others practically begged them to raise their prices. It was HUGELY undervalued at $500. Value aside also, I think $500 is not really the kind of figure that really demands a certain level of commitment from the other students involved in the course. While $500 isn't something you just happen to find in your wallet, for a lot of people they are still able to write it off mentally when things get difficult.
I wonder if that's a small enough component to count as de minimus copying.
TimeHop: What were you doing a year ago?
Over the years, the one thing you can almost always count on from Microsoft when it comes to product announcements is their large and mostly useless chart of which version is going to have which features.
Also relevant: Most best practices exist without explanation. We are supposed to just use it without question. I think that's what Issac meant with "fears and lies" (not that I agree with his statement). Raymond Chen puts it great:

Good advice comes with a rationale so you can tell when it becomes bad advice. If you don't understanding why something should be done, then you've fallen into the trap of cargo cult programming, and you'll keep doing it even when it's no longer necessary or even becomes deleterious.

source: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2009/11/04/99170...
Watchpoints in Python
Cheesy but entertaining in that magical 80s way. The last line really stood out to me though:

"For... [Apple] have on their side, the most powerful weapon on Earth, an idea, whose time has come."

A simple statement that describes the launch of the Mac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad. Similar products existed before all the above were launched, it just wasn't time for them. Apple nailed the timing just as much as the execution of the product and marketing.

Gets me thinking about what ideas are just now ready to truly hatch in 2012.
I can see how it could be confusing, but for us, finding our business model and learning how to teach were in tandem with one another.

I think the main thing we discovered about teaching was that we weren't going to get anywhere by relying on other people to do the teaching for us, or with a fancy web application. The thing I find most interesting about our story was that it took us four iterations to realize that the best way to teach people was also the simplest -- teach what we know and do it directly. As far our methodology, it's going to be pretty simple: try to teach people, online, as if they were all in the room with us. That means lots of Skype calls, chat room, etc.
Blurb, The Custom Book Printing Startup, Is Tossing Its Hat Into The E-Book Ring
You're splitting hairs.

The OP is correct; while technically slightly different (perhaps closer to tweeting to a protected twitter account), its basically the same thing:

Your votes are publicly viewable by your social network friends.
Well, you can't get it for free. Avg processing fees are 1-2% even for credit cards.
That interview question would be completely irrelevant for 99.9% of software jobs.

Nobody is denying that this stuff is essential for some very specialized software teams. But the claim that it's something every software engineer needs to know is utterly ridiculous.
Out of curiosity, what did you think 'shrinkage' meant in that context?
I don't know about iPad app, but the iphone app is TOTAL SHITE! I have NEVER been able to click on a link in my email and get to the mobile site successfully. It crashes every single time and I just stopped using the damn thing.
Its the phone of choice in Bermuda... I estimate that there's at least 30,000 people with a BlackBerry here.
You're a Business, The employed and self-employed
I am really starting to like Google docs as a possible Evernote replacement, as soon as they improve their offline editing support. One thing I can't figure out is how to change the default font for new documents. I try saving the "Normal Text" style with Ubuntu as my font, but new documents always revert back to Arial.
RIM CEO: We’re Not Leaving the Consumer Business
Hackerspace class to build 2500 lb. rideable robot spider
One not so minor point: you can't just "write off unpaid invoices"
- if you're on an accrual basis (i.e., you record income when you bill), then you can "write off unpaid invoices", but what you're doing is simply subtracting the unpaid invoice from the income you earlier recorded;
- otoh, if you're on a cash basis (i.e., you record income when you receive it), which is far more common for small biz, then you never recorded the income for that unpaid invoice, so attempting to write it off will get you in big trouble with the IRS (or the equivalent in the Great White North).
I believe shrinkage is most commonly used by retailers to mean theft by employees. Shoplifting is customer theft.
Best Buy Employee Allegedly Outs Straight Customer On Facebook
My money is on "the new iPhone"
Speaking from having met someone on the renovation project, That is indeed artwork from the architect, The building itself quite nice, but it's gone a bit to shit recently, the renovation is supposed to be rather impressive.
There seems to be a parallel with other warranty/consumer protection laws here.

In the UK, for example, we have laws like the Sale of Goods Act, under which anything you buy firsthand must meet certain criteria such as being fit for the purpose it was sold for. If it isn't, you are typically entitled to a repair/replacement/refund. However, that need not necessarily be a full refund or replacement with a brand new equivalent, depending on the circumstances.

Typically, if a physical product is found to be faulty within six months of purchase, the onus is on the merchant to prove that it was not faulty when it was bought. After that, the burden shifts somewhat, but the merchant can still be liable for fixing a problem even a few years after the original purchase if the item would normally be expected to last that long. As time goes by, the amount of a refund you might be entitled to receive if the product breaks and isn't be repaired or replaced instead would tend to diminish, to reflect the value you have already received from the use of the product before it broke.

Usually, in physical product world, a court could make a fair determination of how long something might reasonably be expected to last based on the general market, the original purchase price, etc. Of course with software it's harder, because bits don't magically break, but on the other hand there are platform compatibility issues to consider.

As you say, that raises the question of what is a reasonable expected lifetime. If we're talking about pure content -- an e-book, music, a movie, etc. -- then I would argue the answer is "forever". If someone has paid for the content, in the expectation that it was a full purchase and not for example a rental or all-you-can-watch fixed-time subscription, then there is simply no excuse for ever deactivating the product after the purchase.

If we're talking about executable code in an application, then I would argue that the answer must be as a minimum "as long as the supporting platform is available", where by supporting platform I mean the device/OS/etc. necessary to run the code, and not including any sort of artificial dependency introduced exclusively or primarily for the purpose of allowing the software to be disabled in the future. If there is a legitimate dependency on some system outside the consumer's personal control, for example a centralised server used to co-ordinate a multiplayer game and operated at the game developer's expense, then I wouldn't have a problem with a system whereby the dependency was OK but anyone who wanted to maintain the usual legal protections for software would have to leave in escrow a version of the software that allowed third party systems to replace such dependencies if and when the original systems ceased to be available.
下颌角手术注意
I understand, but (to me) graceful degradation isn't using a noscript tag to explain why you need JS, but rather implementing your site JS-free from the ground-up, then developing JS-based improvements that are loaded into the site for maximum grace and compatibility.

It may be different for me since I've been deploying JS/AJAX on a number of eCommerce sites where you really don't want to lose even a single customer, I suppose. The basic site is designed without any JS, then if we're able to load JQuery and the browser meets our requirements (for instance, we just disable JS on any IE6 or below browsers), it'll load up nice features such as JS presentational effects, AJAX form submission, etc.

EDIT: There's isn't a "budget" for this, it's really minimal extra work.
Terry Tao writes math games in Scratch
Introvert has a definition which is colloquial, which is what you're pointing to.

It also has a definition used in psychology as well, which is something completely different, than the term used colloquially.
宁波通途苑宾馆订房
Shrinkage encompasses all of the above [1]. The retailer I worked at for a few years (::shudder::) used this definition.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrinkage_(accounting)
Again, it's a very specialized gig. Each of those companies probably has a small handful of people who work on optimization and could answer the question we're talking about here. But the vast majority of employees in these companies work in higher level languages and never have to think about the specifics of memory management at all.
Tracing and Drawing Hello World in Java
You can use Django to do much the same things as Rails. Now whether it's worth the upheaval to switch across to a similar framework on a similar language, that's the real question. If you already know Ruby and Rails, you need to be dead sure it's worth the extra time switching when you could use that time building.
Does node let you use things like libcurl? I only ask because there are libraries which already have that implemented. I don't use node so I have no idea if it can hook into system-level stuff like that.
Meaningful CSS, a presentation by Eric Meyer
Java is split across Windows and Linux for the most part but with Linux and other Unices winning on deployment environment.
For me having my own business (self-employed) is a lifestyle choice, not monetary. Most weeks you probably work more hours and you do have more bosses, this is the downside. However, you can take a healthy amount of vacation time to recharge, which most jobs don't allow in the US. Your standard 2-3 weeks just isn't enough to not burn out and lose focus. Of course doing what you love helps too and makes all the long hours worth it.
New Collection 2012
Well, at least they stopped insulting our intelligence by pretending that Linux was a supported platform but really only offering packages that were so outdated as to not install on any distribution newer than 2-3 years old even with extensive hacking. Like this: http://www.amazon.com/gp/dmusic/help/amd.html
This is very cool. Definitely giving it a shot.
Yes, but I think you'll agree that getting them over the air is better. However, this would be adequate, just not as good.
This just begs the question: they're broken, because they're broken? And anybody who thinks the features neat is wrong?

The reason people talk about omitting semi-colons in JavaScript is because they don't think that feature is unusable--they clearly think it's better than adding semi-colons everywhere! When reasonable people disagree like that, the situation is rarely simple and clear-cut.

Now, perhaps you could reasonably argue that the behavior is unfortunate. But you can also reasonably argue the converse. And, most importantly, it isn't immediately clear who is correct.
You can also tell tools like JsHint to look for this common error, and not have to use _:0 everywhere.
Well, there you go. You obviously have a budget for this sort of work.

I also suspect that those with JS intentionally disabled don't really add much to the conversion rates even if they are treated nicely. Just look at the replies in this thread - a sense of entitlement to be spoon fed in the format they fancy is frankly disturbing. I wonder if showing them just a blank page would work better.
Another page with suggested font combinations: http://typestacks.com/
A couple of things to be aware of when working with tables in SQL Azure
Yeah that just sounds like marketroid startup dude speak. If you want to say that your business model and $3000 price tag are weeding out all but the most dedicated students, well then don't claim that's an effective teaching model. It's an effective way to find people who will learn no matter what, and doesn't say anything about how effective what you're doing is or is not.
There seems to be a disproportionate difference between perceived intelligence of males and females. The males rank much lower. Could this be due to a bias towards males in the people who were voting? I imagine if the voting sample was mostly male, then females would come out more favorably generally.
You seriously aren't willing to admit that your question has zero relevance to someone working in PHP?

The entire point of coding in a language like PHP is that you don't think about the low level stuff. And even if you did take the time to truly understand the source of PHP and made some fabulous optimization, they could change implementation details in a future release and break what you did.

Bottom line is that your interview question has almost no correlation with whether someone would be a good PHP developer. You might as well ask what the capital of Macedonia is as that is just as good of a screen for potential applicants.
Sure, but if you compare Google Docs with even everyday, popular functionality in say Excel or Word, it's sorely lacking. It's not really a competitor product for a serious office suite, whatever the PR people would like you to think. It's more a cheap and cheerful office suite but with real-time collaboration features (which is just fine if that's what you need, but a very different kind of product).
Error bars!

Law of large numbers says that your error should scale like 1/sqrt(N) where N is the sample size. In this case N = 1000, so 1/sqrt(N) ~ 3%

This measures 1 STD (68% of values lie in an interval of 3% of reported value). To be on the safe side you should take 2 or 3 STDs for the error bars. This already nullifies most of the results!
I don't know, we were a really small shop?

It was the first app launch, and we prominently showed an iPhone and a Nexus side by side with our app. Whoever reviewed our app didn't like that, so we took the Nexus image down.

We probably could have just posted the old design back up after the app got approved, but the company didn't last very long past that.
Obat Sakit
Awesome idea, but it doesn't have Japanese. Got me excited for nothing. :/
Christian Louboutin Men
I love the idea - I've been looking for ways to try and "immerse" people in a new language without actually travelling for a while now.

I do have two worries about it, though. The first is that they seem to be using translations which aren't particularly accurate, which means its possible that if it works, you'll still end up sounding like a beginner.

The other worry is that the language you are learning is still embedded in your native language. I'm pretty sure this will not help with learning the grammar of words, and when you are constantly switching between your language and another language, it won't be very conducive to memorisation of the new language (from my own experience learning Japanese).

Its still a really neat idea though, and I wish the best to the creators.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3800926

I'm doing customer discovery/development at the moment before going too far into the actual prototyping. My current business model has changed a bit so the first product might end up being aimed at enterprises - essentially taking the top half of the robot platform described in that link and putting it in the middle of a conference table. The aim being to bring virtual conferencing, remote desktop assistance, and tele-presentations to the same level of efficacy as being there in person.

So the product lets you do things like background subtraction behind the presenter, then stitching their image into the actual presentation or screen. Simultaneously the presenter gets to see the augmented image on a nearby wall by way of the projector part (like a portable green-screen). If both sides of the communication have the device then you can do cool stuff like rotating the projector to simulate having one party actually in the room with the other party. Add to that gestural and voice-controlled interfaces and I think its a step change improvement from existing systems.
> The drawbacks are that elements of your UI may not appear "native" and that some events are a pain from Javascript, especially dealing with swipes.

Another drawback on iOS is that it can be hard to limit the memory that your UIWebView consumes, and it will crash the whole app if it needs to much.
1859's "Great Auroral Storm"—the week the Sun touched the earth
Android users targeted in drive-by download attacks
That's too far toward useful. Over a campfire, maybe.
RIM offering $10K for Blackberry apps that make $1000
Booze. Especially whiskey. At least if the appearance is self-assessed.
That's a very Windows-centric view. On OS X, caps lock + shift is still uppercased.
The opposite of fragmentation.
One user can have up to 10 free websites in their account (and unlimited "designer platform" websites too) so more than 1 website is the average per user.
Same here on iPad 1. And the scrolling "bounce" feels odd too in some views.
As a note http://apatch.org/index.php A-patch is a patch to rip out the social gunk and toolbars, I haven't used Messenger in years so I don't know if its any good anymore but it used to be great for keeping the UI tolerable.
If users want that, it can and should be solved in the client instead. One of the really nasty things about ISPs doing this is that it actively prevents clients from doing it, since they can no longer easily identify a nonexistent domain.
Showcasing Sliderocket...Using Sliderocket
If people use them, they are useful, but my feeling on smileys has always been negative. The vast bulk of the time they are used to disambiguate a joke or sarcasm. But telling people you are joking kills the humor anyway, so just write plainly.
This is amazing. Perfect way to practice a language and pick one up. Only problem I can see with it is that it wont have pronunciation. This is a problem for character languages like Mandarin. I'll be using it regardless though.

edit: Never mind, you can hear pronunciation as described by the post replying to me.

I wonder how they will manage to increase the reliability of the translations. It would also be interesting to be able to practice multiple languages at the same time.
Meka Robotics - Dexterous Mobile Manipulators and Humanoids
I suppose it depends on the school. My experience is that academia handles the administrative issues with a lot of diversity. At the admission level, there is a lot of noise. Undergrad is very different from graduate work.

Masters or Ph.D?