skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'll second this. It makes you more comfortable as a user to know that if the incentives aren't misaligned your pricing will be more stable and easier for you to build a business on. I think its no surprise that AWS can keep making its services cheaper and App Engine had to change its pricing model entirely.
Ask HN:Any good book recommendations for an advanced noob hacker
Would love some good books for summer reading!
You don't actually need a credit card to open an iTunes account now. You didn't need one when I opened a Google account either and I don't think that's changed.
Shortly after moving to the US, I lost my passport after visiting the social security office. I didn't even notice it was missing until a good samaritan sent me an @mention on Twitter claiming he'd found it on the sidewalk. He interrupted his day to hand it to me personally.

Good samaritans are everywhere. Most don't write blog posts about their good deeds.
It is extremely awesome. Demo video is at http://vimeo.com/41822151
At the risk of being pedantic, it's worth noting that some things benefit from memorisation (e.g. the alphabet) and some things benefit from "higher" learning (e.g. understanding the concepts of programming). I don't think patio11 is necessarily saying "something is better than nothing"; sometimes it is _better_ to teach someone 'if you see the shape O, you say "oh"'.
What's better:

A) Picking up and giving to EXEC when you don't have time to deal with it
B) Leaving on the ground and letting possibly worse hands get a hold of it

Although handling it himself could have been better (assuming he is more trustworthy then EXEC), It was a responsible choice.
The next patent troll frontier - gaming
The Great Outdoors Is Good for Allergies
Christian Audigier Men Shorts
Pocket iPhone App Vulnerability
Accessibility support for Android in mobile Firefox
With that many job openings, looks like $2.6MM wont take you very far. Better get back to raising more.
mnicole nailed exactly what i was trying to say. Thanks!
This looks incredible. My one burning question: For integrations on mobile devices, how does this affect the battery life? I'm concerned that there is some open-ended connection from the client to server listening for data changes which will drain the battery while the app is open.
Use Google Drive as a cloud based music player
I uploaded some mp3s to my google drive today, clicked on them and they played instantly on my iphone. Just go to drive.google.com, click on an mp3 you uploaded, and it plays.
prevention is king!
The profit maximization puzzle usually involves tax minimization. Just because startups typically ignore it doesn't mean it doesn't have value.
You may need to be more specific about your technical experience and interests. There are many books out there! :)
I totally agree with the idea of owning your own data. I think that's the big thing lost with "web apps", and the cloud in general.

That said, the data needs to be on the cloud to be useful. So...what to do?

My sense is that a dedicated, trustworthy company needs to store the data and only the data. In particular, they need to not be in any other business, e.g. advertising, or selling stuff to developers, etc.

They need to be owned by the people entrusting them with their data, full stop. That means they have to charge for it.

BTW, I wrote code to do this very thing back in 2009, called HubSync. It's great to see all of these other companies making a go at it.
We do the same thing with written language (no one knows or questions where e.g. "pull out all the stops" comes from but it doesn't matter), so why should our visual language be any different?
This is definitely a cool and interesting service, sure, but how exactly do you "own your data"?

It's sitting in Simperium's database and you're locked into their platform once you decide to use it. Maybe there's an export, but that's irrelevant because all your apps in the wild and all your users are relying on this service to move data around.

If Simperium gets hacked, you get hacked. If Simperium goes down, you go down. If AWS goes down, Simperium goes down, and then you go down.

Say your app gets huge, and Simperium can't scale (and really, "half a million users" is nothing for a free service; that's not any meaningful scale and not a number that can really be cited as a signifier of ability to scale) -- what happens then?

Say you outgrow Simperium, and it's now costing you too much. What happens then?

The above isn't really about Simperium, but really about all backend-as-a-service services. They're great for starting out, but if you actually have a successful product you're going to need to be running your own backend at some point.

If you get too big/successful/etc and things start dying and you end up like Friendster before Facebook decides to buy your company, you're going to look back and wish you built your own backend and knew what was going on behind the scenes.
Gucci Joy Bags Sale,Gucci Joy Bags Online
From the 1983 BBC "Fun to Imagine" series. Video for reference: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMFPe-DwULM
Could still have a field day... copyright doesn't expire (in practice).
"Caller(1)" returns the address of the caller. All subroutines must use the following convention

PUSH RBP

MOV RBP,RSP

...

POP RBP

"Caller(2)" returns the caller's caller.

PrintF("%P\n",Caller());
Manual hinting may be fine for simple vector shapes like that, but in most cases it does more harm than good. It's the same debate of windows vs OSX anti-aliasing: windows tries to fit shapes in to the pixels for a sharper look, while OSX favors preserving the exact shapes resulting in more blur.

In the Hulu pixel-fitted example, the typeface is mutilated beyond recognition. Yes, it's sharper, but it doesn't look right, the 'u's even appear higher than the x-height.

In a screen where everything is anti-aliased, images like that stick out like 8-bit art. And just like in HD vs FullHD, most people can't even tell the difference. Be patient and we'll be over this in a couple years :)
People have made hay about the save/floppy icon for some time. This is the 1st time I've ever realized where the term `radio button`. I've successfully used them countless times and none of my coworkers/clients has ever been confused by the term.

It demonstrates to me that it doesn't matter what the icon is. What matters is convention. Nobody has to ever see the original as long as there is universal acceptance about what the icons mean.

I've wondered how non-english speakers learn Java. I don't think they really have to know what the translation for `public` and `class` are as long as they understand how they work.
Is the rule "we don't do business with people who are assholes" or "we don't do business with people that are assholes to us"?

Because if it's the former it's obvious that it applies to all the examples.
App stores should make it easier to pay for the apps without having to register a credit card. Going for an enterprise feel won't help if people don't want to (or can't) register a credit card but can't pay any other way.

Apple has done this extremely well with the iTunes cards, which has made people more inclined to pay for apps.
touché =)

I understand that very clearly when you put it that way. I remember my dad beating the alphabet into my head. It was the only way that he could eventually teach me how to read.

Thanks for that.
I can see a few missing things (correct me if I'm wrong):

1. peer-to-peer sync (no intermediate server)

2. cloud server isn't passive and stateless

No. 2 is very important for scalability. 1 is mostly a nice to have, especially on the WAN, where you can sync directly from, e.g. an iPad to your iPhone.

Both are doable (I did both in HubSync back in 2009).
Actually, I discuss origins of such expressions with my sons quite often, which they find helpful and enlightening. But I had old parents -- my father is one year younger than my ex husband's grandmother and my ex and I graduated high school together -- so I grew up with somewhat more exposure to where things like that come from historically than most people appear to have.
I hope they bring back the yellow folder icons.

And add more color to everything. It's all so very drab and boring now.
So Windows 8 on ARM only allows IE to run in the Classic environment and Windows 8 on x86/64 only allows one browser (not necessarily IE) to run in the Metro environment? This sounds like a return of the 1990s Microsoft everyone loved to hate.
Envelopes are a very common item for anyone who runs a business. The vast majority of correspondence with Uncle Sam is done via USPS.
Good question. We haven't heard any complaints about battery life so far. If you'd like you can check out Simplenote to judge for yourself: http://simplenoteapp.com

You do have control over the granularity of your updates. For example, we spoke to a game developer who would want to disable Simperium while a game is being played, and then enable it again at the end of levels. These coarse changes are supported since they'll resolve automatically when the client comes back online.
Watch Dark Shadows
Cinematography of Watch Dark Shadows is by Bruno Delbonnel which is editing by Chris Lebenzon and Seth Grahame-Smith. This film is distributed by Warner Bros. under Village Roadshow Pictures, Infinitum Nihil, GK Films, and The Zanuck Company studio which is about to be release in movie houses on the 11th of May, 2012.
100% agree. The crap music gets forgotten and the classics are celebrated. Think now we are also over exposed to the crap music because it is much more accessible these days.
Why not just use Google Music?
DC is starting with a bitmap not vector source. He can't move the corner points in a bitmap, just chop off or duplicate rows of pixels.

You're right though; The P and S look too plump, and the L looks too skinny. It's not a good advertisement for the procedure.
Absolutely the best thing I have seen in a long time! Great tool to illustrate recursion to anyone and also to surprise yourself.
Old trick. Go search for [postscript snowflake] sometime. Great fun for drawing psychedelic images and/or crashing network printers. (It turns out that .ps is actually an archaic programming language and not just a page description language.)
Here's a thought. Do you know your Meyers-Briggs type? It sounds like you might be more of a "thinker" than a "feeler".

If you're more of a "thinker", start at the beginning, learning about the roots of blues and ragtime, what life was like in New Orleans in 1900.. Then work your way forward, learning about how jazz evolved into more modern forms. It's a really fascinating story.

You could check out the Ken Burns documentary. I also really recommend this "coffee table" book, which really covers everything (in case you don't want to watch 20 hours of documentary about something you don't really care much about): http://www.amazon.com/Jazz-John-Fordham/dp/0751300500/ref=sr...

This approach will work for art, literature.. really anything..
Redesigning chkdsk and the new NTFS health model
The code gets open sourced, and you allow "syncing" to a local database, where everything is accessible.

I went through all of these business decisions for HubSync in late 2009, and came to the conclusion that you had to do the following to make "owning your own data" a reality:

1. Cannot charge developers or earn money on the actual data itself in any way. (Google will not be competing in this space.)

2. MUST, MUST, MUST allow removing any data from the cloud AND reloading it later, without losing any features/abilities.

3. USERS need to pay for cloud sync storage/service, NOT app developers.

4. Code must be open source, visible, and peer reviewed, just like a crypto algorithm.

If Simperium will do all of these, IMO they can raise money, and achieve a Dropbox-style exit. There's no doubt the potential is there.

2 is the most important. If you cannot remove your data from Simperium's backend and then reload it again later, either to their own backend, or a competitor, you have vendor lock in of the data, and you don't own your data.

3 means you have to have to do something like Dropbox, where you give away a certain amount of storage/sync for free. Ultimately, this is why I didn't pursue HubSync further, even though the products are nearly identical (even down to syncing CoreData on iOS with a web app running in the browser).

(In a nutshell, I didn't want to get funding and devote years of my life to data sync, when I'm in the middle of working on building a live action Pixar. But it's a great idea, and I really hope Simperium or someone else makes it happen.)
Urban Airship has delivered 20B push notifications, doubling in just 4 months
I think old people often lack context, which is part of what this post is saying but I think the post doesn't quite capture an important part of what I mean. Unfortunately, I am not sure I can explain myself adequately.
Why would you choose a country to be the custodian of a city state instead of choosing a city or several cities to act as custodians?

I hardly think that nations are fit to manage a special economic zone.

Hong Kong, Singapore, NYC, San Francisco, etc. are better equipped to manage a special economic zone than England or Switzerland are.
this is one of the funniest videos I've ever seen. I love HN!
Whilst I believe that this as you present it, I think you guys need to work on your marketing somewhat. Basically, the narrative of a spontaneous act of goodwill that just happens to be enabled by your service is at odds with the significant knowledge of the story and the posed photos.
Mars was covered in water just like the Earth
Gamma-Ray Bending Opens New Door for Optics
Bring back the yellow folder icons!

Also, the entire design has terrible contrast. It's just dark on dark on dark. And every color has been stripped out.

Ugh.
Title: The Refractive Index of Silicon at Gamma Ray Energies
Also it's a matter of ability and free time, most people don't have a nack to repair electronics. And if they do, they tend to be busy people.
They are unhappy because websites won't see HTTP Referer headers and will have to rely on Google's webmaster services to get referral stats:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=633773#c43
That Wikipedia page says the practice originated before 1400, so it could be that mathematics stole the word from finance.
"Until we have Retina displays everywhere, we're going to have to live with antialiasing techniques"

I don't think Apple needs to come in and rescue every display maker in the world with their branding. Any sufficiently high resolution display will do.
Yeah, I would call this "CUDA compiler backend" rather than "CUDA compiler". Still a nice release, though.
New York’s Tech Industry Tops U.S. in Growth, Study Finds
Password Protection Act: Ban bosses asking for Facebook passwords
Windows 8 on x86/64 only allows one browser (not necessarily IE) to run in the Metro environment

I haven't seen anything about that; you should be able to run IE and Firefox.
Umm, hardware knows NOTHING about threads. Threads give you a very fake view of the hardware. Everything about threads is an emulation over the hardware layer, hence why they have a large memory overhead.
Really interesting, but a correction should be noted: CC is for courtesy copy, not carbon copy
* ...because they're called folders, and we know how to use them?*

Historically they were called directories, which I would love to see a return to from the wrong and infantilizing "folders".
wow, a company that refuses to release hardware documentation sans NDA has open sourced something. let's give them a gold star!

by forcing OS devs to sign NDAs it has actively slowed down the open source community. releasing open source code to make further use of their own products is talking out of both sides of their mouth.
Was I a scumbag for automating manual work and eliminating a ton of jobs when I was only a new grad? In fact, was my entire team? That's a question I struggle to answer more, though we all already know what the reality of the situation is. Did reality excuse me?
Can't seem to figure out how to draw Sierpinski's triangle. The hello world of fractals.
That's interesting. I just assumed it was a sound-alike for "nautical miles per hour", spelled "knots" instead of "nauts" for some arbitrary reason.
A nice side effect of using HTTPS is that Firefox 13+ will be able to use SPDY for Google searches.
In the test, the node code is actually calling an asynchronous function fs.readFile on every single request:

https://gist.github.com/2650401

Even with os caching there is still quite a bit of overhead there. Would be interesting to see the benchmarks run on the corrected code:

https://gist.github.com/2650401
The Western Electric handset was still used for years after touchtone phones became commonplace: http://www.telecomwholesalecentral.com/catalog/2500%20WE.jpg
Ugh, that widget really stresses me out!
You own your data in the sense that, unlike services like iCloud, you can mirror all your user accounts and data to your own backend database that you control.

This extra degree of control, though not absolute, lets you develop your own solution (or integrate someone else's) in parallel should you stop using Simperium.

Our libraries are designed to have a small footprint; they're easy to both add and remove. And we plan to open source them in the future.

Beyond that, you cite valid concerns for any service.
Back in my day we didn't care what the icons looked like. I had to use a mouse with hard to move wheel to scroll all the way across a 10 inch screen! And I liked it!

The entire internet was AOL! It took 30 minutes from the time you turned on the computer to the time you loaded your first website. That is when you got all your thinking done!
Oracle loses on fair use; Only rangeCheck left (w/o new trial)
3 Days, $100k and Why We Gave it Away
If you phased out "alpha" and "beta", you'd have to call the alphabet the aybee.
This is the new best thing ever.

I am probably going to make strange trees until I fall asleep on my keyboard. I hate waking up with keys stuck to my face, but the trees will be there to comfort me in the morning.
I started wearing a suit and giving screwed-up smiles for answers like the Jim Halpert character on The Office (American version). Everyone at the office thought I was the best thing since sliced bread.

* * *

It didn't hurt that I accomplished more work than everyone else while socializing more (meaning I went to the office parties/brunches and laughed at the appropriate times).
I'm happy that the guy got his documents returned to him, and I don't question the story's truth. But how is this blog post anything but a PR thing for Exec?
The core problem is what you've identified in your blog. You assignments don't explain many core concepts that students struggle with, they move WAY too quickly through concepts, and there's no coherent sequence. For example, in the middle of the "Conditionals in JavaScript" assignment/tutorial, you throw in arrays and loops. Both are MUCH harder than conditionals.

Zed Shaw, on the other hand, does a marvelous job of not covering concepts until the prerequisite knowledge is already in place.
Memoir of a Web App: Technology Stack
> What have screwdrivers and wrenches been replaced with?

(cynical) A trash can followed by a trip to Wal-Mart.
Safari Icon Set
I'd go to a smaller police station personally, but then I live in the suburbs, where we have police officers who do have the time to do the legwork and return it. I do agree, though, the police's reliability can get spotty at times.
These services exist for things like... game high scores, not real data that makes anyone any money.

They're for "incidental" data, rather than "valuable" data.

But I agree with you: you're setting yourself up for massive failure relying on any of these things.
this could be solved by requiring a minimum cursor movement before the value changes. If you want only a small change, you need to move it beyond the trigger limit, then back again

the same idea would help with getting exactly 100 or 0 values - if moving back set the "zero" zone between 0 and about -10, or going the other way once you hit 100 you need to progress significantly past it, say to about 10, before it wraps value
And then there is the powerful and ancient weapon - the arrow. When was the last time arrows had heads like this ->? What would we substitute them with in our flow charts and graphs (the nodes/edges kind)? What would we use instead to point people to restrooms? Haskell would be deprived of a major theoretical weapon, not to mention a notational glue of its famous type system (a -> b is the type of a function that takes type a value and yields type b value).

Actually the post points out something interesting - we are in the midst of a transformation from a pictorial communication system to an ideographic language where the connection between symbol and signified becomes arbitrary. Nothing wrong with that "arbitrariness", but the visual language continues to evolve - maybe we'll see a paper clip icon even in "Avengers"-like interfaces for this reason.

(edit: fixed typos)
Well, my point was C) Pick it up and return it at some later point. Yes, A is much, much better than B, and the more responsible choice, but better != good.
TDDing with Backbone.js and Jasmine
Think Big, Start Small(Entrepreneurship)
Thanks! Yea I like writing about complex topics in a simple way that anyone can understand... that's one of my goals, maybe the most important one.
I can't even imagine how you managed to develop this. Seriously awesome.
Textual instructions (if you don't want to watch the demo video):

The left column is the shapes library. The center area is the canvas/workspace. The right area is an outline view of the shapes in the canvas.

To add a shape to the canvas, drag your mouse from the shape in the shape library to the workspace.

To move a shape, drag inside it, when the whole shape is highlighted red.

To resize and rotate a shape, drag the edge of it, when it is outlined red.

To delete a shape on the canvas, right-click it and choose Delete Shape. (You currently cannot delete shapes directly from the outline, nor can you delete shapes from the shape library.)

To resize a shape non-uniformly or add skew, hold shift while dragging its outline. You can use this to make line segments and rhombuses, among other things.

Click the + button in the left column to start editing a new shape.

Remember that you can add any shape to the canvas by dragging it from the shape library. This also applies to shapes you create yourself.

Click on any shape in the shape library (except for the starting circle and square) to edit it in the canvas.

You can see the thumbnail of what's in the canvas in the current shape in the shape library. You can also see the shapes your shape is composed of in the outline. Everything is updated live.

To pan across the canvas, drag outside of any shape, in the white area. To zoom into or out from the canvas, scroll with the mouse wheel while pointing inside the canvas.

You can drag even the shape you are currently editing from the shape library into the canvas. That is what makes this recursive drawing rather than merely nested drawing. You will see the current shape repeated relative to itself. (You might call the shape inside itself a "recursive shape instance".)

You can move, rotate, and resize a recursive shape instance to change its repetition pattern. For instance, if you resize the recursive shape instance to be smaller, you will see a line of recursive shapes shrinking forever. If you edit one of the repetitions of a shape, it will edit the whole pattern.

You can go back and edit a sub-shape, and every shape including that shape will update live.

If you don't know what to draw, try drawing one of these: any kind of fractal tree (https://www.google.com/search?q=fractal+tree&tbm=isch...), Koch snowflake (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koch_snowflake), Sierpinski triangle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sierpinski_triangle), Sierpinski carpet (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sierpinski_carpet), or any other fractal (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fractals).