skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't doubt that they are using offshore call centers, but I still don't think the situation is the same as Quark, where the actual end-user product suffered mightily due to the poorly executed offshoring. Adobe's CS products are still pretty great. Overpriced, maybe, but hardly the unusable buggy mess that Quark became.
Don't do it. It's tacky and misleading.
The best developers I've met were all serious clubbers (well, one of them was an ex-serious-clubber when I met him, mid-30s). Your anecdote is not data; no doubt you hang with people with similar interests to yourself (and do you actually know none of them go clubbing? You'd be surprised how geeky certain club scenes are)
Today I made - You’re a maker? This is your diary
"I hadn't noticed this before since the parser is written in a way that it will ignore everything that doesn't look like JSON."

and this is precisely why you want to fail hard if you encounter invalid input. Yes. It's annoying in the cases of "nearly valid" input or "valid input but with some garbage". Yes it's more work to deal with the error.

But it also means that something like this blows up before you end up in a "sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't" situation.

Yes. I have been dealing with and even preferring the silently-failing kind of functionality, but over the years I've been bitten by it too many times to still being able to prefer it with a good conscience.

Overall you might still spend more time overall dealing with bitchy libraries, but at least you will hopefully never have to deal with bugs that happen only sometimes as those are really hard to track down and fix (if it's at all possible).

Sure. Sometimes you can get away with "yea - it fails at times - that's an unfortunate fact of life", but the moment that issue which only rarely appears costs the customers or your money, it all becomes really important and "it fails at times" just doesn't do. Of course, by then, the problem needs to fixed right then - which just doesn't go very well with "it usually works".

At that point you spend the hours it takes to track the problem down and you will curse your decision to fail silently once.
I think his statement of "the users want you to do the right thing" is being a bit generous. Users want whatever app they want on whatever platform they have. They don't want to jailbreak their device to install your app or go to some out of the way (possibly untrustworthy) place to locate it. Centralized, reliable app stores are liked generally by users. That said, as a developer, it is onerous/depressing to have faceless "bureaucrats" decide the fate of your apps acceptance/rejection.
Colorful World We living In - This Week Photography
I feel like you're just being contrarian at this point — I mean, you weren't even aware that this watermark existed until I pointed it out.
I think there's a difference between "the customer is always right" and "the customer gets everything that they want."

For example, a customer calls and says, "You overcharged me!" You look at the account and see that, no, the customer wasn't overcharged. The customer is right in the sense that they have through some influence of factors thought that they were overcharged. Was copy misleading? Was something not clear on one page or another?

There are a couple ways to handle this. One is where the customer is wrong: "no sir, you were not overcharged." and then argue with them until they hang up in frustration. Or you can get to the root of the misunderstanding (unclear fees? they forgot about taxes?) and then possibly choose to offer a refund as a thanks to them for helping you prevent other customers from becoming equally unhappy.
Looks very nice! Would be nice to see how many other people (through MiBuzz) are watching the same video...
Some meta-advice:

Don't make me click through to see what you're talking about. "Please check our project" is pretty much content-free, and unlikely to get many people taking you up on it.

Then you make me cut-n-copy your actual link. The least you could've done was make it clickable by adding a comment. Look, here, I've done it for you:

http://www.mibuzz.tv

Then there's an annoying, auto-starting video. It might be great, but having opened it in a separate tab, I then had to go find it to shut it down.

It emphasises what your product does, it doesn't emphasise the problem it solves. Concentrate not on the many things you do, but on what pain your user has that you can take away.

Finally, there is no "tutorial tab".

On the plus side, the video is genuinely slick, the design looks OK (but I haven't tried to use it, so usability is unknown to me) and it probably does have an audience.

But it's not me.

These are my instant reactions, and they are probably worth what you just paid for them.
> There's no way to verify Google's statement

This seems absurdly paranoid. Why is it, on the face of things, more likely that the LIDAR-packing robot which is scanning 360 degrees hundreds of times per second got into a fender-bender than that the human engineer who sometimes has to drive that same car did? What reason do you think Google has to lie about this to the public-- considering that if it were the result of a software bug, and that bug made it to production, and somebody died, that little white lie could easily be worth millions of dollars of liability and you better believe that Google PR knows it?

> Google AI car doing laps

And this is even sillier. You use a track precisely because you are not confident that the car will not go off the road, which is very likely to happen while you are building a robotic car. Allowing the car into traffic indicates that they are confident.

This project is trying to alter the future of transportation. The self-driving car could wind up being the most valuable property of Google's. The technological challenges were difficult; the legal and political ones will be Sisyphean. They must make their case to lawyers and legislators solidly in the pocket of the industries they plan to destroy.

Why on Earth do you think the fickle opinion of the tech-press-consuming public matters to them at all?
Whereas the "if the made it as easy as I want, very few people would pirate" is not?
Very cool stuff. I have to say I'm very impressed to see a project like this actually getting off the ground. After working for a few years in California's energy regulatory sphere you can become very cynical about the ability to build much of anything, especially when environmental impact statement proceedings can be used by NIMBY (or any other) concerns to stonewall just about any project for just about any reason, if they've got money.

Looks like Brightsource found the right location where there aren't too many folks worried about the development, and whether or not solar thermal will indeed become a growth industry they've at least set a precedent for this kind of work (and regulatory process) in the 21st century, which is an important development.

I hope Brightsource's decision not to go public was only a good rational choice rather than a sign of a company going under.
Where's the instructs? How do I makering these things? ;-) Would be nice to be able to get "plans" on how some of these things were made, even if they are simple coat hooks.

Not all of us are make-aware...
Care to elaborate. I have never worked on php but I am concerned by settings.py clutter.
I think these lifts should always been done with qualified personnel. Would also recommend the olympic lifts and swimming.
Flattr is not used to pay for a day spa, or to pay for anything. It is used for small donations, e.g. for podcasts, videos, blog posts etc.

The user knowingly sets the money aside for things he could access for free.
That essay needs updating. It is entirely possible to be a web developer who is a sharecropper these days (see: massive reliance on Facebook integration, Twitter integration, Google APIs, or any other platform that you don't control and couldn't easily replicate).
>within seconds, a serial number for the update was in my inbox.

Emailed serials? Surely that is not a good plan. Email isn't exactly secure.
It's not infinite; it's practically unbounded, meaning it can be increased for a long as humans have an interest in increasing it.
Presentation: Concurrent Programming Using The LMAX Disruptor
Exercise Affects The Brain
right. and it was NOT developed by state.
12,000 kilos = 12 metric tons ; He probably referred to it one way one time and the other way another time and the poster conflated them.
For me learning math wasn't too difficult, I always had an affinity for it. However, I realized that a good story of how many apples and oranges can be bought with any collection of coins was always a lot more fun than some random numbers strewn across the page.
The current scenario is, however, not so. Most systems are still held bent on using the old hammer and nail system to pound all the theories into those little heads.
Kids don't care about theorems, that's why all the greek dudes were old.
An example:
http://hpmor.com/
Look at the latest authors notes (ch 85)
if I would invest that much time into writing software, I would add TOR or i2p connectivity and would connect to hidden service
Multicast is a nightmare over the general internet, from what I hear. It'd need some significant tooling to work properly.
It probably depends, but the cost of creating a heap allocated closure and then running it and deallocating it can be quite high against the cost of 2 context switches.
I agree with your analysis, in principle. However, my formal university education is twenty years ago, and much less relevant to the self-educated Perl programming that I've been doing since. And this format allows me to highlight this relative relevance, so I just mentioned "Business Administration" in the resume icon. I'm hoping people can assess my coding skills by looking at the source code of my open-source projects.
Asus G75VW Specs And Features
You an see an early version of one of these in Barstow, if that's what you're thinking of. There is a functional one in Spain as well (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PS10_solar_power_tower)

Anyway you may be right that the tower concept isn't going to last long, but the troughs have been shown to last decades (see Victorville, California) and obviously they have the same issue of dust... so there must be a known solution for that engineering challenge.
That is the exact thing that crossed my mind. brokep Peter Sunde is not only heavily involved, he is the founder.
You know, I feel like iOS and Android are recapitulating the Mac and PC wars of the '90s. Not exactly, mind you, but it feels like the same struggle between niche beauty and popular pragmatism. Between a controlled experience with a unifying vision, and plug-and-play user freedom.

One major difference is that iOS enjoys an advantage in apps that Mac never had in software. I think that could change, though. There is a positive feedback loop in which the most popular platform attracts developers and hence has the most software and so people buy that platform. I don't perceive that system to be in a stable state at the moment, much like it wasn't in, say, '88. People routinely develop for both platforms. And who knows, perhaps that will be the steady state answer this time; we're a lot better at abstraction than we used to be. But I think it's possible that Android could become popular enough (and perhaps Apple drive enough developers away), that the whole thing could pass a tipping point.

What I'm saying is, I don't think the beauty of the apps is the most powerful force in play here. I think the existence of apps is a lot more powerful. At least, that's what I think happened last time beauty fought pragmatism.
Nice metaphor. Going through the motions of learning seems to be a systemic problem that permeates all levels of our societies, not just primary school's "math" (to use your terms) education. It's just that Math operates on such a high level of abstraction that the motions we go through quickly takes us to the uncanny valley where all bullshit is instantly exposed.
The disconnect is even if I still drove myself 95% of the time I would still find it vary useful to be able to click a 'drive me' button when I know I am not at my peak. So, I would pay money for the feature. Therefore it's just a financial and legal question if I am allowed to buy one and because they would on net reduce accidents I think they will become widely available.

Now, I would probably not buy or afford gen #1, but it would only take a few years of adoption before I would consider it safe enough to use. And I know there are plenty of people willing to test the first 50 billion miles to 'work out the kinks'.

PS: Over 5 years there is millions of people would literally gain than 5k in direct utility from the I am drunk drive me home button even if that's the only thing it did. But, while less common and far more important is the it's 2am I am tired just get me home. Both of which pale in comparison to the I am still sleepy drive me to work button.
Seems more like a re-render than a re-design...
China publishes a human rights record of the USA
This is pretty old, but I constantly run into "hackers" who have never met it. It happened again today, and hence the submission.

It's like the "Story of Mel", or the "Hotel Soap Saga", these are stories hackers should know.

Or am I just too old now?

Added in edit: Looks like there are a few people who think it's inappropriate for HN - already got a number of flags. <fx: Shrug>
Interesting.. shaving that yak allows us to be lazy as it moves us to meaningless and simple(r) tasks than comprimising on some things and attacking the real problem. Now that I'm conscious about this I need to stop shaving that yak!
Hey, who you calling paranoid? Whatever you say big brother.
No, it isn't always the case. It is only the case when all employees are fully 100% utilized at all stages of the product, which rarely happens. There are often bottlenecks where one group is blocked by deliverables from another group, and in a perfect world one could make the process more efficient by scheduling so that when those developers would be blocked they are working on the other project. Even accounting for the context switches, having the two projects worked on in parallel would be preferable here if the deadlocking blocks are sufficiently long enough.

Having said all of that, doing such scheduling well is damn near impossible in the real-world, as far as I've seen.
"What will future civilizations think of Manhattan Island when they dig it up and find a carefully laid out network of streets and avenues? Surely the grid would be presumed to have astronomical significance, just as we have found for the pre-historic circle of large vertical rocks known as Stonehenge, in the Salisbury Plain of England. For Stonehenge, the special day is the summer solstice, when the Sun rises in perfect alignment with several of the stones, signaling the change of season."

No, if they notice this they'll go: "Any grid on the Earth's surface has the same effect, it's just question of the angle" and then they'll be quiet about it. Stonehenge is interesting because its alignment is specific to the solstice so anyone digging it up can see that it was built for a purpose. Manhattan on the other hand doesn't seem to have any specific purpose from an astronomical perspective and if you look at the shape of the island you'll see that the avenues were built parallel to the long 'sides' of it. So, I hope future people will be sensible and not start looking for some astronomical significance to Manhattan.
Batman Nokia Lumia 900: Limited edition phone on its way
What would it mean to boycott a company which has already refused to market their app?
I was disagreeing with this line: "Public transportation is a million times better in San Francisco. Not once have I ever felt like a car was necessary in the ~5 years I've lived here."
Nigeria to ban use of foreign IT products to promote homegrown industry
But there will be an opportunity to use newer better machines / robots, that can cope with more complicated structures than monoculture.
He was part of the conversation, not a speaker, so he wasn't necessarily talking about one theme.
Keurig B60 Special Edition Gourmet Home Brewing System. My K Cup | MY K CUP
Maybe worth noting that there isn't actually a "hotel" pictogram -- rather it's the "hotel information" pictogram with the information part cut out.
> What do you specifically do that makes your code better than the other guys?

Nothing specific, I'm just saying I value my code well-structured and readable, as well as DRY and straightforward. The proof is in the pudding (my open-source software), of course.
African Startup wins Silicon Valley’s attention barely a fortnight after launch
yes, without compression. Everything you said is covered in SPDY. But SPDY takes a step further and improves the current state of HTTP as well to better transfer documents.
Facebook Phone mockups
I love the juxtaposition of this facility with the absurd desert golf resort. A good contrast of America's disastrous 20th century with a glimmer of hope for the future.
I used to hate maths. I am a relatively intelligent 18 year old and things like science, business and history come easily to me. About a year ago halfway through my IB diploma with me failing the maths part of it a number of things happened which have completely changed my perspective of maths. I started loving maths, reading about it outside of school and doing extremely well in the subject. The things that happened which caused this 180 degree turn:

a) My teacher sat down with me and explained the WHY. It wasn't just formulas and rules but actual explanations that allowed me to approach problem questions with logic rather than a formula book.

b) Khan Academy. The ability for me to go back to the very start and become proficient in the very basics of maths without looking like and idiot and at my own pace was amazing. Some people laughed when I started at the very bottom in khan academy and worked through most of the program but the things that I have learnt and were never taught to me (or I ignored them when they were taught) was just astounding.

c) Choosing physics as my main science where I had to use maths to solve real world problems. When I discovered that maths could actually be used in real life to solve real problems I extremely motivated to read more about the formulas and their deeper roots.

Now I have graduated high school and when ever younger kids ask me what they should do and focus on I tell them that they should focus on maths and make sure they understand everything when its taught because learning it later when you are on more advanced topics is extremely painful.

I think the biggest problem school's today in relation to maths is that we are allowing people to move on in the curriculum with a maths score of 50%. In other subjects it doesn't matter because the content next year isnt based completely on the content of this year but in maths it does. If only I had been told in year 6,7,8,9,10 "You are going to have to repeat this year unless you improve you maths score".

All it takes with maths is practice and giving kids a reason to learn it other than "you have to". Maths is one of the most amazing things I have ever come across in my (short) life and once I truly understood its power, my view of the world was never the same. Maybe my experience is unique but it truly think that many kids are suffering the problems as i had.
It clearly carries a certain meaning, the same meaning as if a news story referred to "the country of Africa" or "Pablo Picasso, a well-known classical composer": its meaning is that the person who uttered it is too innocent of reality to be a reliable source of information on the topic.
Not just kids in school - you can get to grad school in science with lectures that consist of:

What's an eigenvector?

It's the solution to an eigenfuction!

What's an eigenfunction?

It's an equation that has an eigenvector as the solution - now goto the next chapter...
Push Level Agreement
Thanks for the report, you gave us some interesting comments in there!
There should be a tutorial tab, below the main screen. Probably as it is now it's not enough visible..
It isn't just Flattr: I encounter this issue regularly when being linked to startup blogs. Having one sentence or one link on every page that succinctly describes what you do just seems like a good idea. The web is made for linking, and not everybody will walk through the front door.
Report: Samsung is already working on Galaxy Note 2
I don't think descriptive variable names would be useful in math. The thing in math is that "x" you see can be repeated 20 times in a set of equations. Having to read "running_total" 20 times instead is a hindrance here rather than a benefit.

The difference between math and code is the number of variables. A piece of code can have an order of magnitude more variables than a set of math equations. But in math, a few variables will usually be repeated many times. You're simply optimizing different usage profiles.

So the benefit in descriptive names in code is being able to distinguish easily the many different variables. The benefit in single letter variable names in math is that you're able to write the information in a more compact, digestible manner.

The reason this latter point is important is for the same reason short, compact programming languages are a boon to comprehension. The faster you can read a set of related items, the more of it is in your working memory at any given time and thus the better you're able to understand it. I fully believe the time it takes to input a chunk of information through your visual system is inversely related to one's understanding of it. To put it another way, working memory's decay function is parameterized by time.
If everything is the same every year, though,

> Future anthropologists might conclude that, via the Sun, the people who called themselves Americans worshiped War and Baseball.

doesn't seem entirely implausible to me. (Of course, the anthropologists would be in error, it's just vaguely reasonable if you haven't seen anything else.)
VOID by GamersGate Lets You Play Free Games
There is a finite number of things to do which create value and which humans are willing to pay for

Ridiculous.

This reminds me of the story of the patent commissioner in the late 1800s who suggested closing the patent office because everything had already been invented that could be.

We are on the cusp of an explosion in new ways for people to create value. I don't understand how someone who has been around HN as long as you have can't see that. Look at YC -- both the endless variety of startups it's funding, and the business itself, which was extremely creative in its inception. And that's just one nexus of activity; there are many.
Again, why do you believe this?
Link to the article http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/the-best-android-phones

God damn blogspam
The difference is that I'm sure that Manhattan is well documented. Where Stonehenge is not.
Not sure what you mean by bubbling. Are you referring to google's Evil Magic which does such a frustratingly good job of predict my intent? Yes, it is a double edged sword indeed.
The guy must be damn sure about how cool his projects are, because there's a situation where your project is cool enough for company to use but they won't because of GPL. It would probably work with startups (they're flexible and in a hurry — they'll take the coolest thing around without a second thought), but it may not work with bigger companies. Quite contrary, I believe that big companies tend to use software licensed under BSD, though I have no personal experience with that.

I also want to express my gratitude for a different view of startups — I definitely never thought of them as a bunch of guys who would take as much open source software as possible but hide the fact, all in a name of perceived smartness, innovativeness and productivity.