skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree with you. I think it's better to use transparency to show density-- here's an example from ggplot2: http://had.co.nz/ggplot2/graphics/25464f1f2c009d435b862debca... and the page in general at http://had.co.nz/ggplot2/geom_point.html

And if you do this overplotting with partly transparent data points, you can even continue using scatterplots (which have several benefits over binned color density plots, such as showing the actual data, rather than summaries).
Why the collapse of 38 Studios may be good for Rhode Island
How the hell did they burn through $75 million - and why did they hire 400 people to work on this game? If thats the kind of resources needed for a AAA game these days, somethings seriously gone wrong. That they sold 1.3 million copies and didn't break even shows that they did something very wrong - most games don't even sell that many copies! Certainly very few sell 3 million, which is (according to the article) what they needed to sell to break even.

Ok, so clearly most of that budget (and employees) went towards their MMO project, but history has shown MMO's to be very risky.
Businesses concentrate on providing water to thirsty people, i.e., find something that people want and provide it to them. If they want it enough, nothing much else matters. This is the goal.
Artists concentrate on providing visual joy and passion in the world. Make people enjoy things they normally might not.

You seem to think design is purely about art and aesthetics. This is a very narrow slice of a good design/ux practitioners skill set. Good design/ux folk are much more about the process of finding the thirsty people, understanding why they've missed the water fountain that's right in front of them, and fixing the problem.
The posted article mentions that the base technology is not new, that the problem with the existing variants was infections, and that the reported device is a refinement on this decades-old technology.
Software patents, or patents in general?
I would imagine, at some point, the compromise will happen that the old works are in the public domain, but newer trademark laws protect the characters from being used in other people's new works. That is their biggest fear anyway.
I'm not convinced about the drugs argument, there is plenty of evidence that the chemical and medical industries have worked very well without patents in the past.

See also this about patents in the pharmaceutical industry: http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/papers/ip.ch.9.m1004.pdf

In any case, what is beyond all doubt and all question is that patents in the software industry are a totally insane and extremely harmful thing, and is only getting worse.
Didn't they make a deal with DoJ and the judges from Canada that they won't do something like this, if they get the Nortel patents?
That's a weak analogy. There's a huge difference between buying a taco and buying, say, a piece of heavy equipment or an enterprise software package. Tacos cost little. They have no long-term commitment involved. I won't need follow-up support for a taco, and a taco's advantages or disadvantages compared to other potential pieces of food are relatively apparent.

Also, I would like to know what sources you have backing up your guarantee.
Similarly, does it make sense to be showing off music that's currently the number one song on the Spotify chart? None of the songs so far were ones that I'd have needed help discovering.
You, sir, are clearly thinking like an engineer.
The article has it spot on but it can be simplified into two very important ideas:

1. Keep asking questions until you hit a nerve and find something you have in common with the person. It also works the opposite way. You can find a point of disagreement and talk about that. Nothing heavy, something as simple as "What? You hate country music? I love it! Why don't you like it?" can turn into a full on friendly conversation just the same as "Oh you work with Save the Whales too? How did you like that last event they had?" can.

2. Get a life. If you're a one-dimensional person who's all about one single thing you can't relate to anyone even if they have that one thing in common. I can talk to someone about web development for a long time but eventually talking about the same thing is tiresome. The more life experiences you have the more you can talk about and the easier it is to find things in or not in common with someone else.

The rest on that list are just variations on that theme. If you get a life and ask a lot of questions even the most introverted person can easily turn small talk into large talk (made up term).
The iPad Mini Will Mean The Death of eInk
I noticed that too. A truly clever hack. (I mean hack in a good way.)
Browserling.com
Suchmaschinenoptimierung: Analyse - Konzept - Realisierung
Hahaha. It's funny that you think that prediction sounds so implausible compared to all these other crazy notions like genetically engineered designer babies.
I disagree with the your dichotomy. It isn't whether the end-user likes the design, it is whether the design is useful. So useful that they don't even realize "design" is taking place.
This week a coworker and I (more than 10 years of admin experience each) spent 15 minutes wondering why one internal web server was not reachable from a specific computer. Turned out that we got so used working with Firefox and Chrome that we forgot IE8 doesn't understand an address like IP:port/ if you don't specify the protocol (http://IP:port/).
The whole point of Galt's Gulch is that the world is corrupt and evil and the Randian heroes have to establish a self-sufficient colony where they can support themselves, and stay there until the evil altruistic world collapses under its own weight. That's rather opposed to the concept of having to import everything.
Awesome format, wrong language.

EDIT to downvoters: with 'wrong' I don't mean bad, just a very niche language and it would have been nice to see such a format for a more popular or general purpose language
We'll just have to wait until pschyohistory is invented.
>I just dive right in

Advice dog aside, that part is actually correct. Just dive right in. Say it. Start the conversation you want to have.

Don't worry about what they may think, or preamble, or leading up to it, or any of that.

If you've got something interesting to say, most people will appreciate that you just took the bull by the horns and started talking about it.

And even if not, most people appreciate someone who can steer away from awkward silences and boring small talk, no matter which direction they actually go with it.
These are helpful for me.
http://www.amazon.com/Imak-Computer-Glove-EACH/dp/B000FEVWU8
Just a note, but you're using awfully small hexes and large points there. The two plots approach each other asymptotically, especially if you switch to a monochromatic colormap like some here have argued for.

Histograms tend to work best when the data is well understood, while scatterplots are better for samples from an unknown distribution (incl. lattices, multimodals or even double exponentials).

Try also small samples. When the piecewise uniform prior (on both the data and the intensity) is approximately accurate, histograms are far better, as they guide the eye away from nonexistent patterns. But the bandwidth needs to be judiciously set, and often the data transformed.

Clustering is hard to automate.
Then just start talking about stuff that's interesting to you. Maybe it will be interesting to them too.
The most important conversation of my life (as it led directly to my eventual marriage) started out with a total stranger (girl) walking up to me (guy) and saying

I see you have awesome stuff in your pants.

Referring, of course, to the multiple sets of poi equipment I had stuffed into my pockets. This started a conversation with the instigator and another girl next to me. Once the instigator left (after about 30 seconds), my continuing happiness was ensured by the exceptionally suave line

So... do you wanna keep talking or what?

So, ridiculousness is proven to work in real-life situations. :) You may just end up making somebody else's life.
It's not just surfing the web, caving and watching TV. Doing household chores, cooking, laundry, and completing other errands aren't necessarily productive either. Also the billing, expense tracking, and bank reconciliation. You may not be able to eliminate them completely. My original message was find a way to automate and delegate those responsibilities so that you can focus on the highly-productive tasks.
'Fair and square' pricing? That'll never work, JC Penney. We like being shafted
I'm guessing most businesses do NOT want to be seen the low end type.

That totally depends on the market the business wants. If you're selling low-price office supplies then you want to look like you're selling low end office supplies. If you have a classy expensive brand to your site, then your customers will be more likely to think you're selling a classy and expensive product. If you're money is in supporting the low-end then this is a very bad move.

You brand yourself for your market. Burger King don't want to look like a four-star steak restaurant. And vice versa.
I don't know any better than you, but it looks a lot like it's intended to harass Google (edit: without dragging down Apple's brand)
As the Zen of Python says, explicit is better than implicit.
I've never been a fan of video tutorials myself. They always seem to move too slow, too fast, or some of both. Obviously videos do have some advantages over written tutorials, but if I had a choice, I'd pick written.

I didn't actually watch any of the R tutorials, so nothing that I said above is implying they are too fast/slow etc.
Why early-stage investors should be pumping up their startups with data
How do you go about proving that (either way) ?
I think zacharyvoase's point was that it might either emphasize or deemphasize how much hotter or colder something was. Because the eye doesn't see blue->yellow->red hue changes consistently, what looks like a "big" change on the graph might actually be fairly small.
Joey, I love ikiwiki! Good luck, this project sounds great.
We're creating a culture of distraction
Since everyone loves tortured analogies, MIT/BSD is like handing out free pencil sharpeners. "Enjoy! Just don't misrepresent where you got it from." GPL is like handing out free pencil sharpeners but requiring that everyone share everything they write using any pencil that was sharpened with it.
PDF Link for the lazy: http://lintool.github.com/MapReduceAlgorithms/MapReduce-book...
The good designer knows how to get the client to understand that the end-user is the one who needs to value the design :-)

[Top tip - never ask the client "What do you think of X?" instead ask "What would your customers think of X?". You'll be amazed at the different kind of responses you get.]
With less than 20 non-overlapping points on the graph, I doubt that I would want to use anything else.

Furthermore, if my data has two outliers that are near each other, they may well be indistinguishable in the hexplot from one (or five) clustered outliers.

Your post was very interesting and your examples are great. I'll definitely use hexplots in the future. But I will still default to scatterplots. It's just easier to see if there's something wrong with the data, and they require less interpretation.
It appears to be fixed. Yay!
But that made Motorola interesting for Google in the first place.
I recommend reading everything by Paul Fussel, who never got over his rage at being exploited in war and seeing his best friend killed in France, and used his lifelong career in English literature as an instrument to communicate it.
Quite easy:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxoAF0Jvhqc
http://mashable.com/2012/04/05/steve-jobs-larry-page/
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-57409917-37/steve-jobs-rea...

etc etc etc
Disclaimer: I am a web designer.

Design is more than just pretty pictures. Organization of information and communicating the right messages are more important than presentation. Craigslist looks like POS but it's organized to be useful.

"So why do companies stick with, pardon my language, P.O.S. websites?"

The answer to that question has a few different roots. The three most common that I've seen are:

a) As patio11 said, the website isn't a critical ingredient in the sales cycle.

b) The competition is doing a terrible job with info organization and communication. If competition communicates horribly but has pretty pictures and you have ugly site but it communicates in a way that connects with their pains, fears and desires, you're probably going to win the sale unless design is important to what they are going to deliver for you.

c) If a website is working well (even though it's hideous), making drastic changes may result in killing the formula that was working. This happens because a lot of times when designers redesign a site, they don't think/experiment through what is already working and what isn't. Business owner gets new design, launches, sees sales go down and reverts back to old hideous design. Eventually they get to a "if it ain't broken, why fix it" mentality.

Now we've done tests where we took terribly designed sites that were working well, revamped the design while keeping the same layout, content & flow, and it increased overall conversions.

The key with improving anything that is making one change at a time and letting the numbers guide you with the decision making.

With all that said, I have launched substantial redesigns of my own site countless times and reverted back to the current version. This is because incremental changes give you less and less increases over time. Sometimes a drastic redesign can give you a relatively gigantic boost. That's how we discovered our current design. But you want to be making singular changes to test impact most of time.
How many Apple IDs should your family have?
That $160 includes the royalty. It's the decision of each photographer whether to ask for one. If you don't like that, google for "royalty free stock photos", which is the much more popular way of licencing photos.

Even Getty has such a section: http://www.gettyimages.ch/creativeimages/royaltyfree

Of course, the really great looking photos often are not royalty free, which is why Getty features those on that page.
I'll remember you as a pleasant person but not the most interesting one. I've found that the most interesting people tend to talk a bit more because they always have something interesting to say, either stories or insights, and people want them to speak more.
I clicked the link thinking it would be a REPL for Smalltalk :)
That was my first thought as well, but Rockstar is not just going after Google but carpet-bombing the entire technology world (phones, routers, etc - anything). So why would Apple be on board with that?
Maybe it’s time to rethink how we fund broadband
Oh, was it Steve's anger about Android copying iOS? I could see that sort of bitterness making a company behave in a way that would otherwise be out of character.

Is that the consensus about why Apple did this?

If it is, could Apple undo the damage now that it's in more moderate hands? Or have they effectively set off a giant, evil autonomous robot that can't be stopped?
Croudsourcing Dentistry
2038

Older computers are at risk of experiencing major software malfunctions

The Year 2038 problem (also known as "Y2K38" by analogy to the Y2K Millennium bug) gains considerable public and media attention this year. It affects programs written in the C programming language. These were relatively immune to the earlier Y2K problem, but suffer instead from the Year 2038 problem. They use a library of routines called the standard time library. This takes a stored, 32-bit integer and interprets the current value as the number of seconds which have passed since 00:00:00 UTC on Thursday, 1st January 1970.

Because of the limited number of possible values that can be derived from this 32-bit integer, the farthest time that can be represented in this way is 03:14:07 UTC on Tuesday, 19th January 2038. Any times beyond this point will "wrap around" and be stored internally as a negative number, which these systems interpret as a date from 1901, rather than 2038. This is called integer overflow.

For older computers that still use this system, major problems begin to arise with file systems and databases, due to erroneous calculations. Fortunately, most systems have been upgraded by now, and little overall damage is done.
The best conversations I've had tend to have very few questions, and more comments going back and forth. Almost all conversations start with questions but the goal should be to reach a point where you aren't asking any questions at all.
My knee-jerk response was "an escalation of Apple's holy war on Android," but perhaps this is the first phase in a deescalation. Tim Cook has said he prefers to settle rather than battle, and what better way to bring HTC and Samsung to the table than with the acquisition of a not-so-subtle guillotine forged from key LTE patents?
I was very hesitant as well, but eventually determined it was a relevant link (a screencast with impressive video quality, but less impressive content).

GP's comment could certainly be improved.
HN is primarily about programming because the majority of its users are programmers. The majority of hackers are programmers. The majority of hacks are program-related.

Lately, there's been way, way too much content that's horribly recycled, unfounded punditry and speculation, and a variety of very loosely business-related articles, like this one, that are terribly written. I'm perfectly content to use "programming related" as a first tier filter for content.

Edit: also, the piece itself was about management. What management, if not management of programmers, is relevant on HN? I would give allowance if it were an insightful piece on being a technical person managing creative or business types in a startup environment, but it wasn't.
Software patents, but not necessarily the current implementation of software patents. For instance is the patent office is really bad at examining software applications, that's not a problem with the patents concept, but a problem with the people in charge.
I went a few times and had a great time at each occasion. Jason and Paul are great hosts, and there has always been q quite diverse crowd (not just e.g. entrepreneurs or hard core hackers).
Did a Stuck Quote Prevent a Facebook Opening Day Pop?
Identity thieves steal $10 billion a year from IRS
How do you validate an email address from a mobile app
What is the best way to validate a user's email address during signup in a mobile app without sending them a confirmation email that has to be opened in mobile browser
How to get 3GB of Free Dropbox space for life
Click through gets you at http://mathworld.wolfram.com/HoneycombConjecture.html, which shows it is not a conjecture anymore. It was proven in 1999-2001 (I do not know whether the ArXiv version needed improvements)
>I am. It's pretty amazing. All performance benefits of C, none of the language drawbacks. (No offense to C.)

Actually the "all performance benefits of C" is not quite true. Go ranks slightly slower than Java, and 2-3X the speed of C/C++.
"You're going to love my nuts"
The competition is doing a terrible job with info organization and communication

This is an often overlooked one. I once talked my way out of some work after doing some usability testing on a bunch of recruiting sites. The client chose not to fix some of the issues that we discovered not because they didn't consider them important - but because the competition was so much worse (e.g. in one case only 1/5 people could register!).
I don't think carries actually own the towers. They rent them from companies like American Tower Corp I believe.
Exactly.

I hate how the author automatically assumes the worst about Cook and that it has to do with taxes (even if it did, I'm pretty sure 75 million - (whatever taxes incurred) is still quite a few million).

I think it makes sense and is a solid move that he recognizes that he's issuing the dividends and that taking them could appear as a conflict of interest. If I was an Apple employee, I would be impressed.
4 Tips to Find the Best Sports Uniforms
Whether you’re hitting the gridiron, the court, or the diamond, good sports uniforms share some very important qualities. You’ll be able to find the very best uniforms by following these 4 tips:
https://github.com/defnull/bottle
do not bother too much to others. they may have more important things to do than talking on a topic with someone. its waste of time. concentrate and do your job instead of trying to trap and do bs. do some serious business guys.
Like everything : it depends !
If you are let's say a paper company, you can afford to have a shitty website. Your business depends on sales people and the website is just a note out there that you exist.

But if you are an Ecommerce company your website is your business.

Now people, me included, will most likely trust a well designed website over a crappy one. Why ? because it shows that you care about it.

Look at the scams we get by email. The more well designed they are, the more likely we are to trust them. Thank god they're mainly plain text.
For these images, the content creator is Getty ("they" didn't press the shutter button, but they paid for the shoot and own the images) - and they certainly care more about monetization than attribution.
A bit of disagreement with your last paragraph: The (Common) Lisp macro processor is Turing-complete trivially because it invokes a Turing-complete language along the way, not because of power inherent in its expansion strategy.

Common Lisp macro bodies are written in Common Lisp, i.e. written in a Turing-complete language — they would still be Turing-complete even if we wrote them in the subset Lisp-without-macros. The C preprocessor, on the other hand, does not invoke a Turing-complete language to compute a macro's expansion.
Portal game in CoffeeScript
Worst-case? Learn to convincingly feign genuine interest. The key is to fool yourself. If you aren't buying it, they aren't either.

The cool thing is when you get somebody to really open up about their interests like this, you sometimes discover it really is interesting, after all.
I don't know. But how often do you "not have time to make breakfast", but have a peeled hard boiled egg, washed topped and tailed green onion and unpacked chopped ham ready?

Or you "hate making salad", but right there - peeled washed topped and tailed carrots, topped tailed and washed radishes, prepared celery. And no leaves.

The chopping and mixing bit is a fun bit of making salad, it's all the washing and preparing which takes the majority of the time.
You don't really need a higher entropy. It's enough to have a strong enough shade, so the shaded part loses enough color information that when you undo the shade that part looks posterized. That way an "attacker" needs to work a lot more on the picture, as it's not easy to add the lost color information again without adding a blur to that part.
Don't miss Nicholson Baker's Human Smoke, far and away the best introduction to a cynical interpretation of WWII.
2019 is a mere 7 years away. With the resources Disney has (IP, cash, mindshare, etc) they will still be going strong in 2019, even if only through momentum.
I accidentally downvoted you due to sausage-like fingers being incompatible with my phone touchscreen, so I'm just letting you know that your story delighted me.
Since 1981 the real wages have risen with 65 % in Norway, i.e. people can buy 65 % more stuff now than back in 1981. However, if the growth in buying power instead of being used to fulfill materialistic 'wants' was translated into leisure time, that would mean three day working weeks. That put things in perspective, albeit might be considered to be a fallacy since the growth would probably not be as great if people did not increase their consumption since 1981.