skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been playing with WebGL via the THREE.js[1] library and I'm really gobsmacked. It's relatively easy, and a lot of fun to play with.

I've noticed that a lot of the demos people have created so far are rendering a simple scene, or trying to build a game engine. I'm looking forward to more people building user interfaces that make use of 3D for data visualization and user interaction. 3D has literally never been so accessible.

[1] https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/
Please don't post an exact copy-of-a-copy of a blog post that was already an HN headline yesterday.
Mnesia -- new chapter in learnyousomeerlang.com
It's great MIT and Harvard are combining forces. It completely makes sense. Offering similar courses individually to the same Internet Audience is waste of resources.

By the way, all of these courses from Udacity, Coursera, MITx lack one unique thing. These videos can't reproduce the passion of the teacher in a live class-room. In that respect they are little boring. While they are excellent resources, kind of manuals to learn stuff, to actually 'improve the experience' they need to pump passion into video lectures.
More than these video lectures I like the actual recorded class room lectures that are kept online for public. Like cs50.net and Tom Mitchel's Machine Learning.

Does anyone else feel this 'passion deficiency' in these courses, like me?
Flip side: wouldn't it be nice if everything you had just played well together? I don't see such rage when evernote is going to get the boot in osx 10.8.
Why are you anthropomorphizing a corporation?
Integrated Intel HD Graphics 3000 512 MB (note that your demo does work here with the latest Firefox Aurora)
I realize I represent only one of several types of students, but I couldn't care less about degree credit. I've got a BS in CS, and that's enough degree credit for me.

But I would happily do all the coursework equivalent to a degree in math for my own education. I just don't care if anyone recognizes it as a degree or not. I'm not willing to pay degree prices for it, but I'd pay some token amount.
Grand Theft Walking Around A Bit
I like that it has a frictionless demo.

Reminds me a bit of checkvist though?
This is really interesting project, and after taking a little bit of time to look it over, there are a couple of things that I have noticed:

1. It's not entirely clear how to use this. Is XobotOS a replacement for Android, or is it something that can be shipped as a standard application? In my limited time reading the documentation on the GitHub page, this was not clear to me.

2. It looks like a it is a terminated research project, to quote the README:

This code is provided as-is, and we do not offer support for any bits of code here, nor does Xamarin plan on continuing evolving XobotOS at this point.

From the blog post, it sounds like they are integrating some of this technology in their products, but XobotOS is otherwise just a code dump. As such, unless someone is really interested in this, it doesn't seem like it's going to go anywhere.
Then it could well evolve further. I don't see a need for the "dislike" button.
So I guess they should rename it Skipe open source.
> During this mid-range phase EC2 is usually 2x-3x more expensive than rented dedicated servers.

That expense might be worth it, though, if your startup goes unexpectedly viral and the site goes down for hours or days while you wait for your host to provision new dedicated servers for you.
It looks like I was correcting it whilst you were replying.

Since I moved to the Netherlands and learning Dutch (fluently), the quality of my English spelling / grammar has plummeted :(
That's his express of strong emotion, which is a very important data point for UX. Emotion trumps cool analytic fact in any day for UX. When a user is extremely annoyed, you change you UI/UX.
Code of Duty II
Does not seem like a UX issue, but rather a business decision.
Stock exchange for personal data
It's 2012 and every company should offer flex time
This is annoying, but how is it a huge mistake on Google's part? Sure, they're going to annoy a few people, but I think that these tactics forcing people to use G+ will probably work. People will be forced onto this G+ platform whether they like it or not; the mass exodus threats about any social networking platform never materialize into anything more than a few users deactivating their accounts.
The 3D Globe WebGL library created by google is an awesome example of data visualization. With the blessing of the reddit folks, I populated some Google Analytics data into it.
http://www.webgl.com/2012/03/webgl-globe-visualization-reddi...
I feel plenty of passion from Dr. Agarwal in the MITx 6.002 class. He seems like he's having fun, and it makes it fun to watch.
Most of the press release is about funding and bureaucracy, as evidenced by the number of name drops and shout outs and culminating in which old school administrator will be granted the honor of being the first president of the new initiative, and going straight for brand name of "MIT+Harvard". Reads like a press release out of the 1890s, the last gasp of a struggling and suddenly irrelevant brick and mortar fabulously costly institute of a bygone era.

Conspicuously missing are any specific details about the operation or value other than its brand name and the instantly heavy bureaucracy. It's likely this because they have no specific details yet and the negotiations to date have been about who gets the biggest seats on the board, what compensation packages they can negotiate and who will win the most prestigious titles and positions in behind the scenes political wrangling.

As far as the software that runs it, the old canard of making it open source and having other people build it is just tossed out as if that is a magical solution to design.

Nothing about this smells agile. It smells very industrial and slow. Compare to Udacity and Coursera who each are happily running dozens of classes to hundreds of thousands of students each, responding quickly to feedback, and demonstrating clearly they are up to the modern speed of doing things.
天龙八部3
Apple didn't start this. In my opinion, Amazon started in, in 1999, when they sued Barnes and Noble over the prototypical stupid software patent: one click buying.
I'm by no means a DB expert, but that was basically my understanding of the disadvantages as well. As other people have pointed out, you can use caching to fix a lot of those performance issues.

Of course, the author of the article also believes that every database is hooked to a web server that will be constantly pushing its data to hundreds of thousands/millions of users, that every 10 milliseconds lost means another 1% of your users abandon ship, and that if you claim to have some other circumstances, you are pleading "unique snowflake" status and should just get shut up and follow his advice anyway.
I've used Pair and I've also used TheIceBreak and I really don't understand the frenzy over Pair. I just don't understand how it's different from MMS. I've been more impressed by the robust product that TheIceBreak offers. I especially love their Icebreaker section and the ability to track my relationship over time. I think I would give them a shot and see if it offers more to you than Pair does.
Those two don't sound mutually exclusive to me.
You should show the video more prominently. cool idea.
How much does Google gain from having a bunch of people who technically have G+ accounts, but don't actually use them for anything aside from liking/disliking videos?
Using databases as a queue is not an anti-pattern (delayed_job is an example).

A full blown message queue system is often overkill; it adds another system that you have to learn. (And frankly, queues are often backed by databases anyway)

That said, it's best to avoid having application state in the queue, it should be generic. This makes it more scalable and flexible.
I like cutting the input down to only "confused". You can just assume the remaining people logged into that "room" are not confused - either they understand it or are comfortably making sense of it.

Wish I had that for my calc lectures...
Why not just move the logging table into a different tablespace/file group and place this on a different disk? That would fix write performance problems.
But in this sort of timeframe, you'd be able to switch your DNS to point to EC2 or heroku or whatever and scale out someplace else.
I took Sebastian Thrun's AI class last fall, and I'd say he was absolutely bubbling with 'passion'.
Great concept - quality is definitely an issue in the classroom setting that traditional methods of control do little to address - i.e.: end of term surveys etc.

Thinking freely here:

Could you produce a report for the school's administration of each professor's confused/understood ratio?

As gee-totes suggested, a messaging system would close the feedback loop nicely.

Is there a means of authenticating students? If this tool became a means of evaluation, it would be open to gaming by cagey professors.

Anyway, nice work, good video, great idea!
I like this part: "Not featured on" grayed out with huge logos of recognizable blogs.

Smart move of a hackerish spirit :)
First Release of Intel and Samsung's Linux Phone Platform
Text Ascii Art Generator
Clickfree Founder Says Never Expect to Raise Financing
This is great news. The iPhone interface was woefully inadequate on the iPad.
sorry I first commented then read your message; I +1 you.
> I've never met anyone as analytical and free-thinking as Ender that wasn't an atheist...

Some of the most narrow-minded fools I've ever met have been atheists, and some of the most analytical have been religious. The reverse is also true. I'm reading a bit of confirmation bias in your observation.
I do not think it will work. If, just for example, Amazon decide to copyright their API and keep their business in USA for copyright protection, another company, who decides to replicate Amazon's API fully will just do it in Europe. Customers probably will not care, since it is internet. Only possible downside here - latency between USA and Europe.
Tabletop made a huge mistake making their bottom line dependent on YouTube's upvoting system. What if YouTube decides to get rid of the "Thumbs up" system? Or if Google wants a share of your revenue from this service?
See edw519's comments here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2255615
HN lets you sign in with an OpenID...
I loved the little video they made for it. Especially the x2 joke at the beginning.
How To Increase Your Powers of Observation
Thanks!

Great suggestion, producing a report is a great idea. I could even use the confusion data to predict exam test scores.

If students are going to be evaluating their teachers (providing richer feedback than confused/understood), then you're correct there will have to be authentication for students.
Yep, that's exactly my issue. Warning light is fine, lockout is not. Too many situations in which a lockout would be dangerous - false positives/failure of the system locking me into the car, carjackers taking advantage of it by parking a bike behind me, etc.
It's also a metric that because it's tied to accounts is relatively hard to game, at least in a major way.
Why is that? They knew what they typing. I get the humor and the purpose behind it, and the outside box thinking. I should have thought about something like that myself.
This is true for the majority of the HN crowd but what about for jobs outside of programming?
This. I use a Blackberry for work, but still miss my old Nokia 6310... good call quality, great battery life, and no distractions. A phone-that's-just-a-phone. And, being seriously uncool, it has less appeal to thieves :-)
fixed - good catch
Even if you can demonstrate your skills to an employer, what are your chances of an admissions committee even being willing to click the link? I have an A.S. in graphic design, a few years into a B.Arch, and am finishing my B.A. in Philosophy, Art History within the next two semesters. Unless there's some sort of scheduling miracle, I won't even be able to get minor credit towards mathematics or engineering– outside of architecture and philosophy, graduate schools wouldn't want to touch me with a ten foot pole.

My primary goal over the next semester is to compile all of my notes and certificates from these courses and scrap with hell to get credit for them. Otherwise I'll be 21 with three degrees and still need to go back to school for two years, just to get my engineering degree so I can go to graduate school for CS/eng.

--typed quickly from my ipod so apologies if my argument got funky and rushed
It's misleading. Too subtle for my taste.
Please note: this is not an attempt to clean-room reverse engineer Skype, or even to reverse engineer and create an open-source replacement. As shown with things like WINE, Microsoft does not (and probably cannot) take them down.

No, that's not what "Skype Open Source" project is. This is a confusingly misnamed attempt to attach code to patched copies of copyrighted official Skype clients.

Microsoft is not overreaching here; this is what anyone would expect with a lame project like this. I'd love if someone really created an open-source Skype client, but this is not a project to do that.
If its a problem with writes, then why not put the logging tables onto a different disk? Surely that would fix write contention?
> I am adding now: Those upvotes are incredibly important to us, because we need them to earn another season of our show.

I'm assuming the changes are site wide, and not just targeted at you? If so, everyone will get less votes. Therefore it doesn't matter in regards to this point at all. Supply and demand right?

> You don't get people to enthusiastically use your services by forcing them to.

We're talking about a button.

It's amazing how much hyperbole and irrationality comes out the woodwork when small changes are made. How is such an angry meaningless blog post making it's way to front page of HN?
G+ is a joke. Nobody outside of the tech and geek industries either wants it or uses it. And yet they carry on doing everything they can just to herd people into creating G+ accounts.

Hey, it might work. Got to get those numbers up, right? But they can't make me USE my G+ account.
> java -server compared against out of the box Mono 2.10.8 is not an apple's to apple's comparison, it is by no means "regular Java"

Since at least Java 5 the default on machines with 2 or more processors and 2GB or more memory has been -server. That's what regular out-of-the-box Java is on those machines.

Do many new laptops not have 2 processors and have less than 2GB?
I like it - quick, easy/simple to use, I was/am working on something similar for PM purposes (after something very basic, tracking multiple projects, tasks/blockers within projects etc. for 1-2 users)

What are your future plans for Tasskr?
Well I had taken db-class as a supplement to actual course at my College. It was just the professor speaking into the camera. While the courses like CS50, were so exciting.

I guess it's a personal problem then!
Paul Tyma - How to get your resume "Silicon Valley Ready"
They already have a ton of people who have G+ accounts and do nothing. Automatically sharing youtube likes to your G+ stream would an explosion of activity for the majority of users.

It's all about baby steps. The chicken and egg problem sometimes needs coercion in the beginning
> I'm honestly not trying to be mean,

Hey, no problem :), I'm just here for the discussion.

> but I'm not sure you understand human psychology in this area. Humans are very consistently swayed by looks over intrinsic value.

I do understand that looks matter to a degree. Some website redesigns does make them much more appealing. But I feel like at best the effects are only temporary. It doesn't take long before the user gets bored and thinks about how ugly it looks, unless the redesign comes with added functionality/feature (which I fail to find in this case).

Moreover, I mentioned earlier that it doesn't seem beneficial for Bing that its redesign is a reminder of its competitor. So I still find their decision puzzling.
Thanks. I think you're right.
Drones invade campus
Also, if your using the DB as a queue index on the status element. Inserts are still low overhead and the DB can handle poling that table 10,000 time a second without issue.

Edit: Just don't pole the 'finished' status as that can have a lot of elements in it.
Public commenting on the JOBS Act is open
I still remember using NCSA Mosaic on my Mac Classic to browse the web in the '90s. Back then there were two ways to lay out your website: tables, or no layout at all. All I'm saying is, we've come a long way.
I'm reasonably sure that the gp means that Mashable etc will cover it now, sooner or later.
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The case is quite unique in some ways because the alleged infringer disclosed that they had intentionally instructed a designer to design around the original.

Copyright, at least in the UK, has for a long time granted protection for copies which are not necessarily identical, but similar where they are a substantial reproduction of the original.

Admittedly in the case above the line between protecting an idea and the expression was pushed towards the idea, however, as stated, the specific facts of the case (in the sense that it was a blatant attempt to mimic but not infringe the original) made it more likely that the judge would find infringement.
I think maybe it's a difference between "this is a cool product" and "this is a cool tech demo." As a tech demo, it's a neat idea that's been tried before. It becomes news when someone manages to put together a shipping product that actually lets you do new and useful things with your phone.

So is this that product? Well I can't help noticing that every single image on the Samsung site is a (bad) Photoshop. And looking at their ad video, I'm pretty sure that's special effects too -- compare it to the Verge video at about 00:25, and they look nothing alike. So if the manufacturer is showing solely fictional renderings of how they wish their product worked ... it's possible that a little naysaying is still in order.

(That said, I totally agree that it's a great vision -- I'm just not sure Samsung has, you know, brought this particular vision into the light of day yet.)
Meetings.io sounded like a decent idea, but since I didn't have a webcam I was denied entry to my own room. Bummer. I get that the point is to have face-to-face video chat without signing up for a service, but can't people who don't have a webcam participate too?

List is too long to bother trying out everything. Feels like a tech version of a Cosmo list of "35 new ways to please your man!"
This seems legitimate and they are well within their right to do this as the copyright holder.
If you extend this thinking far enough, they have a lot to gain. It's an extra dimension that Google can use to further refine their ad inventory against your interests. The theory is that you will see more relevant ads and Google will earn more because of it. i.e. if you like this video, and someone else liked this video, and they clicked on that ad, then maybe you'll click on that ad.

Perhaps on its own this single dimension doesn't add all that much value, but in aggregate and with a mass number of participants, it should.
I'll also add that he claims he was a driver for Yellow Cab. His boss is going to be pissed if he spent half the night not collecting fares. Edit: As noted by
tptacek he was probably an independent contractor.

Also he mentioned that impoverished people relied on the taxis. Impoverished people cannot afford taxis and taxi drivers are not big on giving free rides.
In the beginning people complained that Google has like a dozen different "Like" buttons on the Reader, Youtube and so on. Now they complain that they want to use just one everywhere?

I think it's a great move. Personally, I even want them to integrate their G+ commenting system into all their services. It's one of the best commenting systems out there, and certainly much better than the Youtube one. It might even encourage better comments on Youtube.
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I showed it to my female friends who use Instagram and Pinterest like it's nobodies business, and they absolutely love it. Only problem is logout is wonky.
I have one simple question,
Can I access the material if I have failed to enroll a course in time ( in general for Udacity / Coursera )?

Even if I get access to the videos and assignments, it is fair enough.
I'm not sure I'd classify Windows as changing dramatically in its implementation, and the cost of maintaining binary backward compatibility has been considerable. Only a company the size of Microsoft could afford to do it year after year.

There's also a difference between building good software and building profitable or even popular software. Sometimes bad design can even help maintain a product's market lead, as if a design is complex, it's hard for competition to make compatible products.

You're also still confusing abstraction and encapsulation. An API can be an abstraction over a lower-level system without being an example of encapsulation.
Vimeo will never overtake Youtube because of their draconian policies on copyrighted content. For example, you're not allowed to upload videos that show videogame gameplay unless it's a game you developed yourself (and shows like these are a BIG part of Youtube's audience).
The iPhone is the new arcade
Are (were) they distributing the patched binaries or just the tools to do it?
The difference is that science at least eventually converges on the correct answer. Religion is basically a random walk that never converges on anything in particular. Modern science may not be correct, but it's almost universally more correct than science of 100 years ago. When it comes to religious topics, we can't even say what "more correct" would even mean, let alone say that modern religion is more correct than religion from the past.
Yup. Other languages don't, though.
I also struggle with this but it's difficult to relay the value or amount of your education to most employers without some sort of credential attached to it.

If I read a pile of books on international development and the economics of foreign aid, participate in local group discussions, go to lectures, and contribute to online communities, how do I communicate that base level of knowledge to an employer?

If I could enroll in an EdX international development program that consists of a series of classes and projects and results in me receiving an EdX International Development Certificate then I have a short one line item that I can stick on a resume if I want to apply to work with a business in that realm.
My goodness! Finally, someone giving Apple a run for their money in terms of obsessive design! I love how they do tabs right to left when using an Arabic locale... They've really thought it out.

Incidentally, no idea who voted you down. That was a very insightful link!
This article is from 2009, and while many of the points it makes are still valid, there is at least one that isn't:

> As a result, it ONLY makes sense to consider a dedicated instance for a machine that will be running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Amazon have addressed this with their Light, Medium and Heavy RIs. The break-even points on the cost savings are on this page: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/reserved-instances/

The one thing I would add about RIs is: they only apply to a pairing of AZ and instance size. They suit people who scale out (adding more instances) and don't suit people who scale up (changing their instance sizes and not using the old reservations).
A lot of that post is specific to SQL Server. I used a MySQL table as a queue as part of Signal Spam (https://www.signal-spam.fr/) and it worked flawlessly. Polling was at 1 minute intervals and queue entries that were completed were simply deleted.