skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Nothing at all, and there was nothing wrong with Comic Sans either. However it drives my friends who aspire to be designers into frothing fits of rage.

It was explained to me this way, "Chuck lets say that bubble sorts and bloom filters were these versatile algorithms that worked really well on a few things, but a bunch of cut-n-paste programmers started using them for every program they wrote, hello world with a bubble sort and a bloom filter, a temperature monitor with a bubble sort and a bloom filter, a file system with a bubble sort and a bloom filter, wouldn't it drive you NUTS?"

And I have to admit when I'm being honest with myself that folks who program 'cook book' style (which is to say they re-use code that kinda works and then bodge it into shape with a hack or two) do rub me the wrong way.

Apparently this is how designers feel about things like Comic Sans and the four box table layout and the any number of things that people do to put together web sites that the creator enjoys, but are not actually designed.
> This is something traditional journalists are good at -- knowing when to break a story and when to show a bit of discretion in order to earn people's trust and avoid unnecessarily putting people on the defensive.

I disagree. This is precisely where traditional journalists go bad. It's also where their biases show. (See Obama's Chicago church vs Romney's Mormonism for an example.)

Trading (non) coverage for access is PR.
Thanks. I do not understand why someone other than Apple or Samsung does not make something like this (without the price premium Apple wants for OS X and without the verified boot).
"I have probably told a hundred anecdotes like “I just did an A/B test and increased software sales by 70% with 99% statistical confidence. The change was a two-character configuration tweak that I dismissed on a hunch six years ago.” (That totally happened this May. Ask me for details later.)"

Would now be a good time to ask for details?
The book explicitly mentions PGP which I thought was particularly cool.
Learn to Code By Watching Others Write It
I really don't understand this rant. Lobster is a title font, not a body font. Also unlike Comic Sans, it's actually pretty nice. The argument seems to be that Lobster is "overplayed" which is not only a snobbish, whiny thing to say but completely ignores the fact that Helvetica, Times New Roman, Arial, Georgia, etc. are used much more often. In fact you wouldn't notice Lobster at all except that it replaces the Arial you're used to seeing.
Show HN: My one week project, Comics Headquarters. What do you guys think?
Aa Re Pritam Pyaare Song From Rowdy Rathore - Lyrics & Video Song
After I clip something, I keep clicking the 'saved' green tag expecting it to take me to the new clip. Just a thought.
Even if you receive a plan for an application from a "top-notch" developer, work outputted by low-cost contractors, especially on oDesk or Elance, will still be terrible. If you want a quality application, with care and love put into it, you will have to pay a quality price.

I've personally been involved as a consultant in a job situation like this, and the client eventually just let me develop and program the application after he spent over a thousand dollars getting sub-par results from external developers. Even if you have something beautifully planned out and ready to be executed, like he did, there are still a world of things that could go wrong by hiring a lower cost developer.
Shameless plug:

I've been working on the exact same thing. It works with nodejs out of the box. It's still in beta, but being actively developed.

http://mcleopold.github.com/JavascriptHtmlr/

Someday I'll make it a jquery plugin as well...
Same here. I think the idea of a BSc in Software Development is excellent, and I think some colleges are starting to think along those lines. For instance, the SaaS class from Berkeley on Coursera would have been far more useful to me than the circuit design and formal theory classes I had to take.

However. There is definitely something to be said for SOME kind of structured education for developers. The author's anecdotal evidence notwithstanding, I have met many aspiring self-taught programmers who just don't have it. There seems to me to be a strong correlation between a person's drive to learn something and their willingness to pursue a formal education... not surprising if you think about it.

I also know an absolute genius programmer who is 99% self-taught. But just because people like Wozniak exist doesn't mean they're the norm.
I've always suspected that OSX (and so iOS as well) was loaded with little tricks like this to give the perception of a really snappy interface. I've suspected these kinds of things were built in at the very lowest graphics levels which is why Apple devices graphics always seem so smooth compared to other brands.

Coming from windows, I always felt like when I dragged a window around that the buttons were likely to fall off! On OSX it's so smooth that I suspected they did things like take a screenshot while the window is in motion and use blurs, etc, so that all of the objects are not moving independently. I'm not sure that's actually true but what is obvious is that Apple has always been very obsessive about using visual tricks to make the UI seem very responsive and smooth.
NASA is (more or less) using the same technique with the Mars Science Lab, currently en route to Mars. The only differences are that the rover is smaller and that they use a sky crane (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4boyXQuUIw&feature=relat...). Landing on Earth however is always done by parachute, as we have enough atmosphere to slow down the lander. So you can say it's a new advancement for landing on earth. As we have quite a lot of gravity here (compared to Mars or the Moon) SpaceX will probably have to sigificantly improve the technology required for a powered landing, especially when they intend to land their first stage (http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v...).
I have always considered mathematics to be a part of philosophy and not a separate science.
People who believe in the magic of smart appliances should read the tale of the Breakfast Food Cooker: http://www.ridgenet.net/~do_while/toaster.htm

Nevertheless, I think I would appreciate an oven that let me toss a pizza in there, say "Pizza" and it would preheat the elements, expose the pizza to heat for a set time, then shut off automatically. We have this for microwaves today, and even though popcorn bags sternly warn "Do not use the popcorn button", the popcorn button works just about every time.
It might still be relevant. Aren't there still some issues with collecting personal information from minors, given some of the absurd "think of the children" internet laws that were pushed though?
Looks like the most simplest wordpress template to me. I'd appreciate any thought over no thought when it comes to design.
Wow, I'm no expert but you're right. That header image is rather fugly.
Thats what I figure - which is why I think a carefully tempered response is the right one at first.

But even if all you want is a size 6 mention, and he doesn't acknowledge or give you credit for your work, you should be prepared to make sure he does not make a habit of this kind of thing.
Actually, Matt and I are are both independently saying that OO does magically solve this, because it has. It doesn't look like either of us have made it clear enough for you that this is the case, but it isn't a matter of debate: the codebase I work on at work has greatly benefited from it, and this fact isn't really vulnerable to your conception of why it must be the same amount of work. You're not seeing that it isn't. This is a communication problem.
I was impressed with the idea in the video, I have signed up, and tried to clip a picture on Quora with Chrome plug-in. I selected rectangular area. Alas, my clip is empty on Clipboard.com :(. You lost a user.
Show HN: My Android App - Quotes
朔州房产网 朔州楼盘 租房售房
Does anyone feel like this is sort of an apples to oranges table? It compares reading one item from L1 cache to reading 1M byte from memory, without adjusting for the amount of data being read (10^6 more). It looks like the data was chosen to minimize the number of digits in the right column.
Indeed - it is a very nice font. Unfortunately we're ALL using it in our projects, and it can make projects look lazy or "me too".

It's sad, because it was a very nice font, but it's just overused.
This depends heavily on the school. When I got my CS degree from a liberal arts school in 2002, my experience was similar. I had lots of discrete math, linear algebra, data structures, algorithms, and language theory courses.
I tried lucid dreaming a few years ago. Initially, the main problem that I was having was to wake up as soon as I realized I was in the middle of a dream. It took me almost no time to go back to sleep but I "was missing" the dream every time I woke up.

After a few days, I was able to control most of my dreams. I never had full control of those (there was a moment where something got out of control) but I liked the experience. I think the best experience I had dreaming was flying.

In any case, I always woke up fully rested (which might have to do with not being able to control it 100%).
How do you delete an account?
Hahaha, touche. The 5in5NYC design needs some serious work :) It's absolutely on my todo.
Have you ever opened your eyes during a sleep paralysis incident? I did it once and what happened was so scary that I always close my eyes and let it pass from then on.
Show HN: PathScrollbarMenu - A Javascript, Path inspired scrollbar menu
Hey HN!

This is PathScrollbarMenu, a javascript implementation of the neat little scrollbar indicator that you can see on Path's mobile apps. It allows the developer to center any content on the scrollbars of a site.

We implemented it at Jetsetter so we could allow users to jump between sections, but still give them the largest content area possible.

GitHub: http://jetsetter.github.com/PathScrollbarMenu/

There is an example page in the project but you can also check it out in action on our new homepage: www.jetsetter.com/?via=hackernewsos
As I understand it, the "life + x" idea came from Europe.

The situation in Germany: It's not possible to preemptively put works in the public domain here (except by publishing anonymously and making sure no-one manages to associate that art with the artist).

Our "Urheberrecht" (author's rights) is more along the notion of art being an expression of the author's personality, and thus needing appropriate protection. "copyright" (the right to commercially exploit these works) is merely a part of it.

Under this model, it makes sense to protect works for life time + X years. (+ X years to make sure that things can settle down, instead of controversial art flaring up right after the artist's death).

A good compromise could have been to restrict commercial value to 15 years after publication (or whatever) while keeping certain non-monetary rights to the author for life (recognition, the right to forfeit recognition, ...).
Wouldn't it be better to have email notifications turned off as default? That could get very annoying...
"Some cases I know about from personal observation involve disturbing sleep cycles so much in pursuit of lucid dreams that the young people failed in work environments or crashed and burned in their university studies."

That is laughable ignorance my friend. The Wake Back To Bed method might mess your sleep schedule up a little, but you're only supposed to be up for about 30 minutes or so then you go back to sleep. That's not even the most common way of lucid dreaming. To say people have ruined their lives trying to lucid dream is, frankly, completely ridiculous and I'm embarrassed for the HN community for upvoting this post.
NASA was doing this for the first time. They needed resources to deal with unpredictable failures and mistakes. Some NASA capsules missed their target by a hundred miles or more. One sank. Either of those problems would have been far worse if they had been Lean.
Which compared to the highest percentage cited at 24%, is quite high.
I enjoyed the entire post, but I especially like the point that all finances are open. Even without the "set your own salary" bit, with finances being open it enables more of a team culture. It is almost like a score, and without it, without a scoreboard during a game, only the coach knows the exact score.
Not for a while. From my VW service manual (model years 1999-2005), p. 28b-3:

"Preglowing is not linked to operation of the driver's door as in some earlier VW diesel systems."

In my experience, it's got to be pretty cold (well below freezing) for the warm-up time to be over 1 second.
I'm not sure why bad documentation seems to be the open-source domain. I'm equally surprised to find useful documentation in both open and closed software really.

The main difference is that open-source docs are usually lacking in general, while closed-source docs are there in large quantities (if someone figured out auto-generation, there's hundreds of pages) but still don't tell you anything important. The only part that changes is that someone was forced by contract to produce something - but it doesn't need to be usable.

I think these days I actually prefer to just look at the code to see what's going on rather than hope that on page 2xx I'll find something useful. Only the first source will never lie.
I think using OO properly would solve this. You have a carbs class that you can instantiate (and update) with two arguments: value and units. This gets converted into whatever representation you use internally, and then whenever you want to access the value, you would do carbs.grams() or carbs.breadUnits() or whatever other units are needed. I don't see a need for a convert() method (maybe as a static function if you want to be able to convert units without instantiating a carbs object, but now we're moving away from the discussion at hand).
You're correct, we missed that when I updated the blog to a new look last night. We've already rolled out a fix. Sorry about that!
"Contact Lens" by Haruka Kojin
In my experience the pretending changes, not masks, your real emotions. You start by smiling because you're pretending to be a happy person, and you end up genuinely happier.
For me the comments are most valuable. That's why I'm linking and sharing them always (via Twitter). Is there this option where I can share the comment link via Twitter?
> Have you ever heard the phrase “You can’t judge a book by its cover”? (...) it is an empirically observable fact that most people, when presented with a book, will judge it by its cover.

But isn't the phrase "You shouldn't judge a book by its cover"? (And even when "can't" is used, what's meant is often "shouldn't").

Of course people judge books by their cover; they also judge people by the clothes they wear, their height or skin color. Should they?

It depends. Prejudice is our own little Bayesian filtering; it works sometimes but it's not "pure": it tends to have a strong effect on reality (for example, CEOs are mostly of above-average height: not because being tall makes you a good CEO but because we expect tall people to be leaders).

> 99% of geeks will report never having buying anything as a result of an email

bought (just to show that I read at least this far!)
Agreed, but the difference in scale is so extreme.

Looking out my office window, I can see a fairly major sea port. The Navy can't get 1 ship off the dock without a half dozen tug boats, plus several security boats, etc. The flotilla SpaceX sent out is smaller than what it takes to undock 1 ship, and a carrier battle group consists of 20+ ships.

I just find the contrast really illustrative of why SpaceX was able to do this for a fraction of the cost.
What service do you use to send the emails?
"Someone has to spend money for me to make money"

That's the part where I get stuck, because that's not true.

I can also invest my money and you could work for a company dependent on that investment.

I'd like to step away from money for a minute, and look at the way the goods themselves flow. If I grow extra grain, I could either:

(a) Make beer, and consume it.
(b) Give it to you, so that you don't have to grow anything, and you can instead spend your time improving farm equipment.

If I choose (b), I may have less beer to enjoy today, but many benefits in the following years. Maybe the next year I will have so much extra grain I can start to make other improvements, and so on, until we are all very prosperous.

It seems like (b) is the choice we should encourage, and (a) is the choice we should discourage. (b) seems like the one that actually creates economic activity, and (a) is the one that dampens it.
I think the larger point there is "does any of that matter"? I don't think it does. It's possible to be a lazy programmer and a lazy designer and still be entirely successful. Understandable that it irritates programmers and designers, but it's a fact of life.
LaBerge proved that people can have lucid dreams at will as part of his doctoral research at Stanford. Even if you haven't mastered the at-will inductions like MILD or WILD (see Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming by LaBerge or consult Google), you can increase your frequency of lucid dreams (once or twice a week for me in my third year of high school) by using critical state testing, which practitioners of Tibetan dream yoga have supposedly been doing for hundreds of years. The idea is twofold.

First, it's usually very easy to tell if you're dreaming. If you're sober and you even have to think about whether you're dreaming then you can safely say you are. That's hard for some people to do, so you might want to use a more tangible method. If you pinch your nose and try to breathe through it, you will be able to breathe in almost all dreams (you can never 100% prove awakeness, but we only care about proving asleepness), and you will never be able to breathe if you're awake. So if you find you can breathe through a pinched nose, you know you're dreaming. If you don't want to pinch your nose in public all the time, you could look at your hand instead. Count the number of fingers and ask yourself if they are straight or deformed. The dreaming mind is really bad about accurately generating five-fingered realistic hands, but we never notice unless we deliberately look at our hands in a dream. This method is almost as surefire as the nose method.

The second part of the method is that if you make it a habit to check to see if you're dreaming whenever a certain kind of event comes up, let's say whenever you walk through a doorway, that behavior will carry over to your dreams once it has become a habit. Once you walk through a doorway in your dream, you will do the nose or hand test and discover that you're dreaming. It's fine to be skeptical of science when it sounds too good to be true, but seriously give it a try. Lucid dreaming is a lot of fun, and there are also a lot of practical benefits. One that comes to mind is being able to literally work out problems in your sleep. It's sometimes hard to keep text constant on a dream whiteboard, but you have the advantage of being able to manipulate text with the snap of your fingers--something that you can't even do yet with vim or emacs. Another advantage of lucid dreaming is nutrition and weight loss. It's a lot easier to say no to that piece of cake now if you'll have the opportunity to eat it while you sleep. Dream food tastes about the same as real food.

P.S. The experience of astral projection (in the sense of having a highly real-feeling dream in which you can roll out of your physical body and walk around your room, which looks virtually identical to how it does in real life) is actually a real phenomenon that's rather easy to induce using a variation of wake-initiated lucid dreaming (WILD). The vast majority of people who claim to achieve this are telling the truth. While there is no reason to accept the non-scientific explanation that they're actually leaving their body in some astral plane in real life, the actual experience they're reporting is very real.
> There are "job hoppers" out there who seek a new environment and a pay raise every 9 months

These exist in all industries because there is too little growth for young employees who stay at a company for any time, even if loved and show promise.
Lovely sign up UI. And a very neat web app.
And if Earth is this basketball, and the Odyssey CM is this baseball, they have to hit a re-entry interface no thicker than this piece of computer paper.

(At least that's what Apollo 13 [the movie] said.)
Or death.
This is quite an awesome app. Although, I've been using Springboard service for quite sometime and has served it's purpose for me. Although the UI components can be a bit clunky at times, it definitely is not that bad...
I practiced archery for about 5 years in my mis-spent youth, and it sure didn't seem right. If she spent 6 months on that, she didn't have good instructors, or she paid no attention at all.

(It wasn't horrible, but it was not worth 6 months of learning)
If no programming experience required, What are the other prerequisites for this course? Can anyone without a collage degree join ? Do you think person with zero programming experience with just 9 weeks of study get $80k salary ?
It's all down to definitions.

You could argue that mathematics is philosophy done right: With rigour.
Sounds great. Any thought being given into an online course using some kind of conferencing for student interaction.
Humble Indie Bundle 5: pay what you want for video games
Looks great, especially the iPad version.
We didn't believe it either until we put a logic analyzer on the bus and found that the numbers were spot with respect to the number of cycles. I don't remember how far off they were but it wasn't much, all the hardware dudes were amazed that software could get that close.

tl;dr: the numbers were accurate to the # of cycles, might have been as much as 1/2 of 1 cycle off.

Edit: I should add this was almost 20 years ago, I dunno how well it works today. Sec, lemme go test on a local machine.

OK, I ran on a Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3930K CPU @ 3.20GHz (I think that's a Sandy Bridge) that is overclocked to 4289 MHz according to mhz, and it looks to me like that machine takes 4 cycles to do a L1 load. That sound right? lmbench says 4.05 cycles.

I poked a little more and I get

L1 4 cycles, ~48K
L2 12 cycles, ~256K
L3 16 cycles, ~6M

Off to google and see how far off I am. Whoops, work is calling, will check back later.
I agree it is cool, the Soyuz actually does have a return to earth capability, its the Progress modules that don't. Now in their defense the Russians would be happy to return stuff in a Progress module but often they have trash in them and up until recently you could always bring things back in the shuttle.

All of that aside, SpaceX has hit one right out of the park here. They have effectively re-done all of the Mercury goals and most of the Gemini goals (the last being the whole man in space part). For comparison that took the Chinese 10 years [1] (some western observers would tell you it actually took them 20 years to get to the level that SpaceX is now but we'll give them the benefit of the doubt, and NASA couldn't talk to them.)

I am super excited about having someone who is commercially motivated to step into adjacent markets with space flight capability. It makes talking about doing things in orbit a much more serious thing than it was.

[1] http://www.sinomania.com/CHINANEWS/China_Space_Program.html
So what's the difference in this and the iPen? I mean what is going to make this project better to support than just getting the iPen right now? On the products page of Collusion you say, "Why are we doing this? Nobody has stepped up to own the problem of digital writing and drawing on the iPad"

I think you ought to say in the site somewhere, "Where the iPen is successful in this...we are doing this"

It's got to be differentiated somehow.
For me it was the fact that it did not work without third party cookies.