skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree, developers need to vote with their feet if they want any chance to influence Apple's policies.
I'm with you on "the snow thing" but every other critique makes it sound like your definition of a livable city is one in which you and your friends can reliably get hammered every night.
Show HN: An open source website preview generator tool using webkit (live demo)
I believe it was fairly late in the book, but I'll look up the exact line when I get home this evening.
This is difficult because when you're looking in from the outside you can't see the pain and problems due to all the complexity and context blindness.

The easiest way is to look to your own field or industry. This is somewhat difficult if you're a programmer but there are tons of opportunities even for us - just take a look at Light Table over at Kickstarter [1] for a recent example or the multitude of software development tools, libraries, addons and frameworks that put food on the tables of many developers [2].

But what if you don't have a field?

In that case you can deep emerge yourself in one. Pick an industry/sector where there is money and volume, lots of resource slack, where society's Big Huge Problems are solved, etc.

How to feel the pain? Start by reading periodicals and other publications. These tend to constantly write about current problems and future challenges/opportunities in a plain and easy to understand language.

Nothing beats going straight to the source so you might want to get in touch with practitioners and associations and pick their brains, follow them around at work, etc. It's important to reflect on the things you see, put them in a larger context, ask yourself how parts of a business could be improved (for a lightweight aid, use the business model canvas [3]).

Asking professionals what their problems are, however, is a problematic approach because practitioners often don't know what they know, what they don't know or the root cause of problems [4] [5]. Casual conversations can still give you valuable information and guidance. At the very least it contributes to giving you a better understanding of the context you're emerging yourself in.

Research papers can be useful because they are often problem-solution oriented, and even dedicate a section to Future Work. The research data can also be useful to build a convincing argumentation for any future solutions. The most exiting ideas tend to grow at the boundaries between different disciplines and where science meets art/entertainment, so any opportunity where you get to see your industry in a new or alien light should be cherished.

Colleges and other educational institutions tend to be the place where practice and theory collide, resulting in all kinds of wonderful ideas. Often these educational institutions have good relationships with commercial and industrial life and can tell you the pains of the industry.

Basically the more effort you invest in emerging yourself in a industry or specific sector and the closer you are to the knowledge, the greater your chances are to find the systemic problems on which you can build multi billion dollar businesses.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Model_Canvas

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_open_source_applicat...

[3] http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ibdknox/light-table

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_knowledge

[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bounded_rationality
> ETA: I see you do have a link to your company, which is a web development service provider. Why not point people there rather than the location you posted here?

Here, 'I' am the product. On the company website, 'web business solutions' is the product. It's a different approach to the same end: me finding people to create nice things for.
E32k is not bad for Spain in general tbh.
I've got a Mu plug. I'm quite impressed by it; while it probably is less robust than a regular plug, my gut feeling is you'd have to hit it side-on with a hammer to stand a chance of breaking it while it was in a socket. The fold-out shield around the pins is reinforced and angled to deflect side-impacts. A USB cable seated in it pulls out long before it can exert enough leverage or force to pull the Mu's pins out of a socket. The rotating pin arrangement feels solidly built.

While I think it's a bit gimmicky at this point (and: £25 for a USB charger?!?) it's better designed than a lot of the crappy kit you see out there, and shows promise for something better to come.
On anticipation
Last- minute Egypte: paradijs voor zonnekloppers en archeologen
Stumbling on the Escalator: An Article About Progressive Enhancement
>You are correct that humans may feel more charitable towards each other than towards horses.

If History (and PETA) are any evidence, probably the opposite.
> You bring up education a few times. Given the length of his work history, is it even important at this point? Why are you so interested in it?

Education is (we hope) the rigorous, dedicated, examined and measured study of some subject. On Peter's resume, he mentions that he is an expert Perl programmer. I have no way to measure this without giving him a coding question. However, if he had he has a such-and-such GPA in the CS program at Stanford, then I have some way of measuring his expertise in the curriculum there (BTW - I go so far as to review curricula of various programs when it comes time of the year to do college grad interviews)

I fully admit that not all people need degrees. It's like saying that everyone in the factory must have a mechanical engineering degree. They don't need it... but if they do, I'd like to know quickly.

It also is not saying that someone cannot learn these things on their own. It's also not saying that someone without that study can be smarter and more capable than someone with those years of study. Both happen, a lot. And also a lot of dropouts I've known are more capable than their graduating counterparts. [OT: all of this is why I've been advocating apprenticeships out of high school for some time now, especially in games, which I used to work on.]

Back to the original question, going to the extreme end of the spectrum, would you take a Ph.D. seriously on someone's resume, or not? I do. Even years later, it means they dedicated years of time to the study of that subject.
Year after year, this 2003 essay by Tim Bray continues to be true:

> I’ve been following some discussions about the future of software applications, and a phrase that came up in my dinner with Robb Beal has been echoing in my mind.What it comes down to is this: if you want to develop software, you can build for the Web and/or Unix and/or OSS platforms; or alternatively, you can be a sharecropper. Your choice, but I think it’s an easy one. Especially since the users out there want you to do the right thing.

> What Robb actually said, in a conversation about Mac software outputs like Ranchero and Watson and his own Spring, was that building for the Apple OS feels like being a sharecropper.

http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/07/12/WebsThePla...
The island photo is pretty synonymous with package holiday in the UK, which flight + hotel approximates in this case.
He won't be tortured. At worst he'll face life imprisonment for violating laws against espionage, but he explicitly signed on to obey those laws when he joined the Army in the first place.
For what it's worth, a lot of what they print on the book machine isn't one-offs from Google books; instead, it's small print runs for self-published authors, professors' course materials, and the like. As to seeing the machine in use, it depends when you show up, but on weekdays during academic sessions, they're pretty active with it...
I've never even heard of ranker.com before. I must not be searching for terms they rank for.
Their photos are stored in a CDN as static files, not served using a script. Hence, by design, it is not possible to block photo URLs to a subset of people.
I don't think the model is too bad. You have to get hold of a pretty complex URL, so only those who can see it in the first place can share it. A static CDN model makes scaling easier.

Ultimately, it means the user has to share content with only those he can trust, and I think that's fair.
I felt uncomfortable watching the video, mostly due to the way they played the sex fantasy card.

"I can be used for just about anything, I can sing what you want, dress the way you want, and be.. just about anything you want me to be * blink *"
1st gen iPad prototype for sale on eBay 2x 30pin slots
Sidenote: I'm pretty sure the author is Paul Asmuth, not Paula Smuth.
You could still have the jump button on a game hooked up to flattr your app, taking more of the users monies.

It's a valid point.
Assange is the one who inserted his own narcissism into the question. Believe it or not, some people actually do commit rape. There's no epidemic of false accusations--hell, even true accusations bear an enormous emotional cost for the victim.
>The same can be said about code: you assume your reader has a certain level
of understanding of the domain that you're modelling through code.

No, this is not at all the same. Code can be read without understanding
everything if it is well documented. Yes, code should be short and simple, too.
But not terse and cryptic - and that's what so many math texts do. So yea,
cool, you can compress half a page of written English into half a line of
mumbo-jumbo. Great. You have gained nothing.

I'm not saying that the half page of written English is better. Not at all. But
there's something somewhere between those two where math should be. And not at
the cryptic end of the scale.

Take just simple things such as meaningful variable naming. There are tons
of good reasons why we do this in programming. I can't count the number of
times I've tried to decipher math texts and had to look up over and over and
over again what some x or f or lambda or phi is actually supposed to
represent. It gets worse when they start making distinctions based on the
bloody way a symbol is typeset (x vs x).

It's perfectly fine to do this in quick calculations on paper (just as it is
fine to use one character variables in quick one-off scripts). But if you are
writing a prolonged mathematical text, then take the time to give variables
meaningful names. It's not that hard, and would go a long way for improving
readability.
>They will become a little more freer from the tyranny of the rich and their whims and fancies... but it is unlikely that their standard of living will improve at all.

That's enough of an improvement for our standard of living for me.

We need more freedom from the "tyranny of the rich and their whims and fancies" and less toys and consumer products...
This is a ridiculous article. Assuming the problem exists, he notes the obvious and correct solution of reducing the time we spend working. Then he inexplicably abandons that and insists that we deliberately limit our productivity, so we can keep the holy 40+ hour work week.

What sense does it make to ask our teachers to teach ever bigger classes?

I learned way more in Sebastian Thrun's online courses than most of my college courses.

Our doctors to treat more and more patients per hour?

If that doesn't compromise quality, then it will lower costs and increase availability of medical care.

The care and concern of one human being for another is a peculiar “commodity.” It can’t be stockpiled. It becomes degraded through trade.

And humans will have more time to care for each other if we aren't forced to work unnecessarily long hours by well-meaning social engineers.
Also, what happens when donations turn into plums? Apple may see the donations concept as a trojan horse, which it most likely is.
Just to clarify - I'm not advocating 'never use Rails' or even 'Sinatra should be used more often than Rails'. There are trade-offs, to be sure. I definitely agree with your points about 'limited resources' and 'saving time'.

I just feel that people tend to pick these big frameworks, even when they don't need them. They just don't think about it and often dismiss these simpler tools. This talk came from someone saying to me 'oh, I started writing this <small-app>...'. And he spent the whole weekend basically just configuring all his chosen tools.
A Survey of Recent Image Sensor Pixel Structures
Not a troll, I've been in asian big cities (Bangkok for example), and I know it can be much worse.

I also know it can be much better.
Customer Experience Leadership or Customer Service Management?
> What is the correct way to do this? The original designers ... should have been mentoring the next generation of developers at the company on site.

... and then being fired? Great piece of advice!
Poonam Pandey posed Nude for Shah Rukh Khan’s KKR
Well if Assange's lawyer thinks the Swedish prosecutor has no case, he must be right!

I don't really like it either, but there's a rationale for rape trials to be secret. One of the biggest reasons rape victims don't press charges is because they don't want to face the enormous public scrutiny into their personal lives that always comes with a rape trial. At least in America, the most common legal defense against rape is to attack the victim's credibility and publicly brand her a slut. It's emotional blackmail but it works, which is why most rapes go completely unreported and why Kobe Bryant, for instance, is still a free man.

If Assange was going to be framed by the authorities, it wouldn't be in Sweden of all places, and it would be for something like tax evasion, not rape. It's way easier to go after troublesome public figures on tax charges.
How Not to build long-term brand equity.
<soapbox>
Most who read this will likely not "get" the gist of this post. That is, until three (3) OS versions from now when Apple decides your meager 64-bit hardware unworthy of their latest 128-bit feline-named release.

Trying to update my wife's circa 2005 aluminum 15" MacBook Pro, it appears that the App Store does not know that there are Core Duo (not Core2Duo) machines that can STILL run Snow Leopard, but are 32-bit.

Many of the apps that she had purchased before cannot be updated until she spends another $2500 for hardware with a 2 or an "i" in the CPU name.

Imagine if Microsoft had done this, forcing hundreds of millions of users to upgrade their hardware to use a senselessly 64-bit-only note taking application. They'd be out of business or at least in much worse shape than they are now...

Yeah, it's me, again griping about how Apple has disenfranchised me yet again, blah, blah, blah.

Seriously, though. Imagine if your car company wouldn't work on your car, even under warranty, because your engine was "old architecture". Why does Apple get away with this and NOBODY else does? This hardware is perfectly good, and it would take all of 12 seconds for developers to provide 32-bit versions of their apps for "legacy" users.

I'm writing this more to open a discussion about why Windows and Linux users never see this sort of "architecturism", to coin a word if I might, and yet we blindly accept it from Apple.

Three grand in cash out the window on this Apple laptop that works perfectly well, just because some bonehead at Apple decided it wasn't worth supporting.

Sheesh...
</soapbox>

Ok.. all done whining now. I know it' my fault, but it's so purdy... Waaaaiiiitt... Linux Mint 13 with KDE is out???? Wha?????
considered brokep from the pirate bay is heavily involved in flattr, i'm a little bit disappointed the site went down
Personally, I think this is the most ridiculous concept. I have not seen the math but in order to achieve any meaningful scale it needs to be huge, but on the flip side the farther you get from the center the efficiency reduces drastically.

Moreover, this is a dusty desert, what are their plans for cleaning those mirrors, at such a huge scale. The only guy who will make money in this is the one with that contract.

The inventor had tried this earlier, I believe in Israel, but that had failed.

Oh well, with federal loan guarantees that it has, we have another Solyndra on our hands.
Death to banking, I'm going to become a Web Designer
Damn.. too late.. .just shaved mine.
Mobile browser quirks
In human society, there are a practically unbounded number of things that humans can do that other humans would be willing to pay for. The same cannot be said for horses, which have zero ability in human society to find new ways to create value for humans and thereby for themselves.

To use your notation, when N_horse slumps toward zero, no horse can do anything about it. But when N_human declines, the displaced humans can. Humans can increase their N, horses cannot.
Hi, author of the post here.

What mojo..?

This may have been before your time, but believe it or not, at one point (late '80s through the '90s) Microsoft was feared. A standard question VCs would ask new software startups was "what is your Redmond Strategy?" -- meaning "what will you do if/when Microsoft decides your market segment is interesting and decides to take it for themselves?"

because a MS monopoly is really really good.

I don't want a Microsoft monopoly to come back -- one of the most liberating things about the Internet as a platform is how it let you skip the need for a Redmond Strategy -- but it would be good for everyone who buys/uses tech to have Microsoft as a healthy competitor on a level playing field. More choices equals more competition equals more innovation.
Now submitted as a separate item:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4034034

I wonder if it will fare better than this one, which was flagged into oblivion quite quickly. The Godin article at least makes explicit the connection with startups, which I thought would be obvious enough for people to make the connection. Clearly I was wrong.
I always get frustrated when people refer to any random pseudo-3D gimmick as a hologram. A hologram is a specific type of technology which records interference patterns from which an approximation of the original light field can be reconstructed, such that you can look at it from different angles and see the original scene from different angles.

Other forms of pseudo-3D, like these human-shaped rear projections screens or people spliced into a scene using chroma keying and multiple camera angles (as CNN's "holographic interview" works), are not holograms.

There are people at MIT who are working on real holographic video, but of course, the technology has some substantial limitations: http://obm.media.mit.edu/

There's nothing wrong with alternative forms of presenting pseudo-3D imagery and video. But I wish people didn't call it all "holograms", because that leads to confusion rather than clarifying what's going on.
Ask HN: Please check our project - MiBuzz.tv
Hi Everyone,
This is the first time that I've submitted anything here, but I lurk and read HN. My partner Ramiro and I just launched a social network for video fanatics and we wd really love your feedback:

www.mibuzz.tv
Why I use GPL - Zed Shaw
They were doing this in 2001 the movie - and that was 1968.
It's also very, very old. Perhaps not worthy of HN at all ;) At least the catb one didn't have a timestamp. The SG one kinda pokes it in your face.
Totally agree with you and the original poster that the Google car is probably not driving as well as many people think.

If it was nearly near it,Google would sell that tech in any way, because that would make them probably the most valuable company in the world.

I can't imagine how an self driving car would, for instance, know how to drive into my garage (hint: it's not at all straight ahead & flat). How does the car know where it is allowed to park on a private parking? There are lots of huge challenges here.

A friend of mine knowning the automotive R&D much better than me also confirmed that view. We won't see them before years and years.

What I could well imagine soon, though, are for instance specially prepared highways that would allow to drive driverless on given sections. Probably increasing the overall throughput and so the CO2 emissions etc.
RaviMobiles
Flattr is fundamentally a web company, competing with Google's +1 button and Facebook's Like button more than than Paypal donations, even if users are spending real money. This is just a potential new arena for Flattr, and not their core business.
Best Android Phones Available Today
True, but I constantly run into "hackers" who don't know the term. It happened again today, and that's why I sought it out and submitted it.
Explain to me, exactly, step-by-step. How forcing little suzy to click 2 times by having to use safari, instead of 1 click inside the app. Would stop the problem you're mentioning.

You're confusing two completely separate things. One is preventing fraud (what you think apple is doing). The other is force a possible fraud to take 2 seconds longer (what they actually are accomplishing). They have the same amount of control to prevent fraud within the app as within safari. If they want to prevent fraud, they could ban fraudulent apps. Not just add unnecessary roadblocks to apps that just happen to not be paying them app store share for donations.
Umm, no they didn't. What you're talking about was a particular brand, Blåvitt[1], owned by the Konsum chain of stores. It was a very concious (and successful) marketing strategy, and not some generic non-brand.

[1] http://emmaskok.blogg.se/images/2011/blvitt2_149458969.jpg)
Well, the purpose of constructing an abstraction is at least as much about DRY and SRP as about providing extensible base classes in an object-oriented language.

I think we tend to agree given that you prefer 'concise coding' which I'll take to mean DRY and 'straightforward' rather than 'clever'.

But by 'picked over', I literally meant 'changed to meet changing requirements' rather than 'read for comprehension'. In that sense, the fact that one guy on the team considers the code he writes to be 'clean' is rather meaningless when many hands might work in that pathway. Composable approaches tend to be more resilient to regressions, well, in my experience anyway, YMMV.

I guess my problem with 'clean code' is that it's too open to interpretation. What do you specifically do that makes your code better than the other guys?
Digg Like URL Submitter Using jQuery and PHP with Demo
Google Apps receives ISO 27001 certification
Rejected by Apple and the 'Paypal suxx' on their desk. Tough luck
If you can't pick it up and throw it out of the window it's a mainframe.
Which is, realistically, the stage Google is at now. The car seems to be able to drive just fine until an outlier condition arises.

What makes the Kinze system interesting is that they must feel confident enough about the safety/obstacle avoidance features to ready it for mass consumption. Again, the complexity of monitoring a field is not to the level of the road, but it does show that a lot of progress is happening in the study.

It does show promise for Google to be able to pull it off on the road too.
The real problem is the disconnect between math and "math".

"math" is the game of rote memorization that kids play in school where they try to memorize arcane rules that seemed to have been pulled from some greek dudes ass with no explanation.

Math is a legendary construct whispered about as a hypothetical possibility in high school classrooms. A problem solving exercise that has you think, with a logical progression from base rules and assumptions.

"Math" and Math both use the same language and the same symbols, with a lot of the same concepts. I've never seen Math, and only know of it's existence through hear say from mathematicians, but been through a lot of "Math". Imagine if we tried to teach English this way. It would look a lot like memorizing words out of the dictionary. And then playing ad-libs with out of context sentences.
In human society, there are a practically unbounded number of things that humans can do that other humans would be willing to pay for.

Could you explain this statement further? Why do you believe the number of things humans can do is best modeled as being infinite?