skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> It requires you to be able to read and comprehend text. That's it. The subject could have been Martian fizzbozzles instead of microscopes.

And therein lies a great fallacy which is still widely believed in our post-Enlightenment world. But the map is not the terrain. A mental model cannot be completely represented with words or pictures, or anything. Words and pictures, even good ones chosen for pedagogical value, are only pale projections of a complex thing onto a flat surface.

>Anyone who can read and comprehend text can answer it with no prior knowledge of the subject.

Without qualification, this statement is strictly false. There may be certain kinds of text that can be comprehended with no prior knowledge of the subject if you assume a certain baseline of internalized knowledge. There are many old parlor games (which have sadly gone out of style) which rely on hacking this qualification. For example, one of them requires that one person follow the instructions of another. One person tries to describe how to draw a particular geometric figure. The person doing the drawing must follow the instruction, but they also are free (in fact encouraged) to ignore the intention of the instruction. It's a game that puts the difference between words and reality up-front and center.
> Diablo 3 has no real reward loop – there is only a frustration loop, which can be temporarily alleviated by using the Auction House.

This is completely wrong, there is a very powerful reward loop. Whenever you find an item that you can sell at the auction house - that's a reward. It's arguably as good as it is in Diablo 2.

I think the real reason why Diablo 3 is less addictive than Diablo 2 is simply because the folks who played Diablo 2 are now 12 years older. There's something about getting older that makes you less prone to being addicted to games.
Opera introduced Speed Dial in 2007. I can't believe that its getting published as a major feature today.

On a side note, I find the Chrome New Tab page much cooler. We can drag and drop favorite sites at the bottom of the new tab page (where it shows "Most Visited" and "Apps") and it creates our own customized group.

Edit: Fixed typo
+ 1 on journal-keeping.

I've been keeping a diary for the last 8 years or so. The act of writing about and reflecting on each day is useful - but it's also very helpful to be able to look back on what your daily life was like in the past. It's easy to forget what you were really thinking about several years ago, and a diary is a great way to give yourself some realistic perspective.

Brief pitch: A big problem I had in getting started with diary keeping was that I'd get busy and not write anything for several days, and then I'd have trouble remembering what I did, say, last Tuesday. Sometimes, to be honest, I forget what I did this morning. I gather this is a common reason for losing the diary-keeping habit.

A few years ago I scratched my own itch on this and built "Remembary": an iPad diary app that collects photos, tweets, Facebook updates, and RSS feeds and organizes them by day, giving you some context to help you remember what you did each day. It's a bit like the iPhone app Momento, but iPad-native and focused more on writing rather than just collecting feeds.

If you're just getting into diary writing or have tried before but have had similar problems getting traction, you might want to check it out. I'm wrapping up a major version 2.0 update that should (hopefully!) be out in a few weeks. You can find out more at http://remembary.com (I'm about to revamp the site too).

It's cheaper than a Moleskine (if you already have an iPad anyhow), is easily searched, and can be backed up to DropBox or email, too.

/pitch
I think one of the big things that comes to mind is something I remember reading with competitive games like Counter Strike and Starcraft- the games where if you are doing poorly against the competition you're not enjoying yourself at all.

The sentiment was "There is a large portion of gamers that do not enjoy playing games, they enjoy winning games."

I think this translates to Diablo 3 very well- everyone was perfectly happy farming Diablo or Baal (previous "final" bosses), yet no one seems to enjoy farming Act 1 or Act 2 inferno. It's the exact same thing, but I believe people are not enjoying it because they are unable to beat the game.

I see a lot of talk about how it's impossible to beat the game just by grinding, and you have to play the AH to get gear from the people that have already beaten the game but it's important to remember that there were people that beat the game for the first time. These people didn't have people to purchase the best stuff of off because they were the furthest of anyone in the world.

Similarly, there are people progressing (albeit slowly) through inferno hardcore where there are probably less than ~100 people in the world. There's very little gear on the market and there are still people progressing by farming gear themselves.
QuickOffice was definitely one of Symbian's very few truly great third party software - so congrats for having been a big part part of this!
I'm ninety-five percent sure this is satire.
Today we’re excited to launch Airtime, the first live video network.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but this is flatly inaccurate, isn't it? Justin.tv has been doing live video for a while now.
They hit the ceiling, I would like to know how this little plot will develop over the next 2 quarters:

http://www.google.com/trends/?q=facebook
Note: if you're upgrading Firefox and you didn't have SPDY enabled already you'll have to enable it manually.

(about:config, network.http.spdy.enabled = true)
I agree. That's why I said I just want to have the option, but I don't care about its initial state :) I wouldn't even care if it were only available in about:config.

I just wanted to mention my viewpoint (started writing it before I saw the other replies), since I find it an important improvement. For example, I won't use Chromium regularly besides testing things in it, because it would be way too painful for me.
There's a difference between a sandboxed web page, and a web app that you want to install and use as a trusted application.

If UDP, TCP and POSIX were possible in the browser, with a simple permissions dialog, web apps would be competitive with native apps. As Douglas Crockford said, HTML5 has become everything but the kitchen sink.

It's not more high-level APIs that web apps need. It's three brilliant low-level APIs implemented properly in Chrome and Firefox and Opera and Safari with simple permissions. UDP, TCP, POSIX. Node has already done the work of providing a cross-platform implementation and reasonably well-accepted interface for these, that vendors could adopt. With these basic building blocks in place, the community would be able to do the rest.

There's no reason why a web app should by definition not be able to do anything that a native app can do.
Demo video: https://www.airtime.com/about
Google's driverless cars have had a lot of PR recently, with some pretty decent coverage of how they actually work.

The cars don't follow predetermined routes. At present they do learn routes, but not using Google Street View data. Actually, the opposite is true, the intention is for the diver-less cars to generate 3d data for street view.
I wonder just how much I'm overreacting by feeling disgusted about the way that Asperger's, ADD and stuff like that are suddenly a thing of fashion. It seems to be a trendy thing for journalists to discuss and a sort of a fashion statement for geeks.

Maybe I'm wrong, but to me this is a rather simple matter: there are great people who happen to have Asperger's syndrome, ADD, dyslexia, autism or what have you, but unless someone proves some sort of link between their greatness and things they were diagnosed with, then that's just what it is -- people who happen to be both great and have one of the above.
It wasn't forced upon the employees; they were free to choose to take the cure or not. Personally, I think Moon's portrayal of the protagonist was overly dark and depressing (probably to shed some light into the kind of nasty shit that can happen to an autistic). Given the choice, I'd refuse the "cure".
It's probably better to think "everything that isn't nil or false is true".
Think about what happens to PC hardware vendors if windows8 tanks. Windows8 could destroy the PC and PC gaming by forcing everyone to consoles, mobiles or Macs.
Very true. And a few remaining A+ devs ended up with high job security since there were some systems they were very slow to redo and they were afraid something might break.
The issue was that Microsoft left behind the ability to sign code with a Microsoft certificate by mistake.

The entire reason the attackers could use the certificate was because Microsoft left behind that functionality in the suite of software that allows enterprise customers to license their instances of Terminal Servers.

I am not railing against cryptographic signing as a concept -- what happened was Microsoft played fast and loose with their certificate chain in order to provide their customers with a way to prove that they had paid for software.

The certificate chain could have been a lot cleaner if that licensing bit wasn't necessary.
Translating these kinds of addiction studies (mostly in animals for ethical reasons) to making games more addictive (but always referred to as making them more engaging) is a pretty established industry at this point.

It's not my field, and I don't know if the analysis in the blog post was flawed or not, but there are plenty of people trained in the field who work in the video game industry (and the gambling industry) and they definitely show results with pretty solid metrics under well controlled conditions. Balance the reward cycle and tune the levels of challenge and frustration properly and you get players to spend more time in the game.

I agree that it's a stretch to conclude that D3 is less addictive than D2 but I took it as interesting speculation based on actual science.
What does this DAU indicate, actually - are these pageviews on a facebook.com website that are associated with potential advertising?

Or are they related to the numerous and growing uses of FB as an identity provider?
Which "fact" do you speak of? You can get a free authenticator which (almost) guarantees you will be safe. The only "fact" is that too many people fail to use authenticators and re-use passwords on diablo fan sites.
I feel like it's the textual equivalent of a filmed press conference, i.e., "hello, here we are and this is what we have to say."
Take today off
Very impressive app. Love the "It's cheaper than a Moleskin" tagline, haha. Once I get another iPad, I'll check it out. I use Evernote (which has a terrible UI), but I have so much data it's next to impossible to import it into any other system.
It is annoying that facebook login is required.
Donuts Raises $100M-Plus To Deliver ‘Dot-Anything-You-Want’ Domain Names
The original article put "scientific" in quotes. I suggest this title should've kept it, because there is nothing scientific about it. Stating a hypothesis doesn't make it science. It might make for an interesting read though.
Well, Chatroulette validated the idea that people are naturally curious to meet other random people, but the execution was poor.

To me Airtime seems like Chatroulette done right -- user authentication, tools to interact with eachother, harder to post nudies... Now to see if it catches on...
If you don't want too much infrastructure complexity in Java - go for Tomcat or Jetty - If you want advanced enterprise functionality go for JBOSS or another J2EE server. If you want asynchronous io, go for netty. Javaland is full of options that offer best performance.
Misinterpretations of Einstein
What You Can Do On Venus Transit 2012
> "However, it's only a matter of time until these minor issues are fixed"

"Give me an API flexible enough and a repl in which to hack it, and I shall move the world."
I would say that Facebook positioned themselves as a news outlet, not a generic communications medium. In the beginning, the news was fresh, you were learning all kinds of interesting things about your friends; many of whom you had previously lost touch with. That was exciting and interesting.

After some time passes, you've learned everything you want to know about said people and the information starts to become stale and repetitive. Combined with others feeling the same way and pulling back, a feedback loop emerges where good content starts to dwindle even quicker, worsening the problem.

If I came to HN six months from now and all of the articles were still about the Facebook IPO, I think I would probably say that HN has become boring too. That is where, I believe, the sentiment is coming from.
As a side note - I can tell Slate A/B tests their headlines because I originally read this on a mobile device with one header, then opened it on my desktop and it had a different header. The subheader was constant so I chose that as the title for this submission.
Private student loan market charges as much as credit card loans
I'm so sorry for being such a pedant, but I have to get it out somewhere:

"Whom." Not "that."
"First Round Capital, A16Z, NEA, KPCB, Sequoia and Khosla all raised new funds very recently for a total of several billion dollars. Early seed stage doesn’t look bad either with 500 Startups, Lowercase Capital, etc. all raising new capital."

I think OP hit the nail. I'm no expert or angel investor. But availability of capital is not a problem. May be the market for uncapped notes and massive seed rounds has stabilized.
Blah blah blah blah.
"To avoid crushing the glass slide when focusing, begin with the microscope close to the specimen and then gradually back off to focus."
Blah blah blah blah.

Utterly incomprehensible!
Sorry, typed in haste. Undercover Assassins, see this: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/09/12/...
Campaign manager - Ad startup seeks real-time bidding wizard
We're an unannounced YC company working on dynamic advertising. We're making it seamless and painless to show the right message to the right person. We're serving up several million impressions a month right now and are looking for a campaign manager to make sure the campaigns run smoothly and advertiser goals are met. So far the founders have been doing this and it's time to bring in someone experienced to run this piece.

If you are passionate and experienced with trafficking and optimizing complex digital ad campaigns, this is a great opportunity to leave whatever agency, DSP, or media buyer you're at, and come be INDISPENSABLE at a fast-moving startup with a small team. We offer equity, full-benefits, and market salaries. We can cover relocation but are open to people working remotely.

If you're awesome at this, then sky's the limit.

------------------------------

You will be:

- Responsible for hitting client goals and advising account managers and sales reps on what's achievable

- Designing intricate digital ad campaigns that use dozens of data sources and dynamic content to generate ROI

- Living in our software: setting up campaigns, optimizing them, monitoring performance. If a campaign goes South overnight. It's you on the hotseat.

- Knowing what we can deliver and what we can't

- Generating reports and working with account managers and sales to make sense of them for clients

- Working closely with developers in implementing design choices in our products

------------------------------

You already have:

- Worked at a DSP, DMP, or ad network that uses RTB in a hands-on campaign management capacity

- Expertise in trafficking, optimizing, and monitoring large-scale display campaigns

- Experience working with account managers to deliver ROI on digital display campaigns

- Hands-on experience with Turn, Triggit, Invite, AppNexus, or some other RTB solution

- A passion for structure, delivering results, and efficiency

-------------------------------

If this sounds like you, we'd love to talk. Please e-mail us at ads.can.be.rad@gmail.com with a little info about yourself.

If you KNOW someone who this describes, please forward it to them. We know it's mostly hackers reading HN, but every Hacker knows some technical people working in the ad world.
How Jason Calacanis Pivoted Mahalo
Starcraft II was one of the best reproductions in a successor, IMO.

But I play them both significantly less, but frankly, I've changed more over those 12 years then Starcraft, seems to be a more likely culprit.
There are a number of players doing live video, but I believe what they're arguing more on is the networking aspect.
The main difference is that you can write a JavaScript snippet that is pushed to your phone and executes.

The JavaScript can register on device triggers and you can control the logic to do whatever you like. You can code it to be very specific in contrast to other rule based platform which have to be broad to cover main scenarios.

You still have pre-coded recipes which you can choose and quickly configure and install, and one of the coolest things is that you can actual see the recipe's code and hack it to your own profit :)
Very true, but the Facebook IPO was the signal for the tech industry of the coming contraction for early stage startups regardless of the "outside tech" market.
Having worked at Quickoffice years ago on the spreadsheet team, I can tell you that yes, it is really, really hard to do well.

People expect when they open their spreadsheet that the formulas they wrote on the desktop will provide the results they see on the desktop. Ok, well it's just math right? Yes, and no. Excel actually has a lot of bugs with the execution of their formulas, so to be accurate you have to emulate all the mistakes they make. You also have to discover these bugs yourself, as they are not conveniently documented somewhere.

I ended up writing a unit test framework using generated Excel spreadsheets containing permutations of formulas with every possible input, just so I could identify where these bugs might be happening. Then you have to reverse engineer WHY they happen in the first place, and also find out if this was something the Excel team fixed in later releases, or left in because they themselves could not break backwards compatibility.

And this was what I would consider a small problem for us back then. The biggest problem was always round-tripping of unsupported data. The Office file format is large, complex, and full of crap you wouldn't imagine supporting in a mobile product. However, your users expect that if they open a spreadsheet to change a number on their phone, when they save it and re-open it on the desktop all the fancy formatting and pivot tables still work and haven't been lost.

Anyways, this is a great purchase for Google and I congratulate all the guys who have put in the hard work to make Quickoffice the amazing product it is today.
Wasn't this exactly what color.com was supposed to be?
Ping: What went wrong
I think he's making a different point. He's talking about what capabilities web apps should have, not necessarily about the UI. The user will have to give it those permissions; it's irrelevant to this discussion whether the user understands those details and if these are defined one-by-one or by a combination of trusting the app store and clicking "install".
Use Java to Access MongoDB, CouchDB, Redis, Riak and Cassandra
Locale is no longer free though correct? I downloaded it in beta and tried some things but it was a little overwhelming, not sure if it has "simple" mastered.
The point of that is partially true. You're the first of these people to begin to regain the power that comes from your origins. Eventually others will too, but you are the first.

What's stupid is that the majority of Act 1 is CAUSED by "the fallen star".

All in all the plot isn't horrid but it's not a gothic Diablo plot but more of a fantasy plot in the Diablo universe.
IPhone 5 With Lasers
Google acquires Quickoffice
QuicKaddy, the future of organizing your toolbox
How do you get buttons to occupy a percentage of the screen

In a LinearLayout take a look at layout_weight -- it is the key (or rather, one of the keys) to goodness. It really is an onion, and if you can get through the crying the flexibility comes in the layers.
Naw man. I played D2 like just months ago and it was still more addictive than D3 at the end game. There's a different feeling to it. The reward mechanism is unique and better imo.
Nice to see someone who actually created a large volume site discuss their learnings vs. theoretical works discussing how stuff (c|s)hould be done without real experience.

Would love to see a chapter list!
Robotics labs aren't expensive: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dap...
Interesting.

Putting in the work to just improve the speed is the hard fix usually. But I guess firefox and chrome are fairly optimized for loading already.

However, some good heuristics might help. Things like number of tabs, most common tabs used, active tab, time to load and responsiveness(frame rate, latency etc) would be good indicators.

I'm not sure how good hard coding stuff in like number of tabs would be. Whilst just loading up to 8 tabs would probably work, these numbers seem to change over time. Like the oldIE 4 connections limit for example. But! With frequent automatic updates, this value could be tweaked later if needed.

Cpu, and IO could be set based on the indicators as well.
Thanks! By the way, the upcoming version will also work on iPhone/iPod Touch.

I'm currently in that crazy-making pixel-perfect OCD design polish phase that takes so long in iOS apps. If the design gods and the testing gods smile on me, it should be out before the end of the month.
Stats on the CEO's of Canada's fastest growing companies
BrowserID

OpenID

A dedicated account (my preference)

If you require Facebook then you're locking me out when I'm at work.
What about Native Client? If he wants "web apps" to be as powerful as native apps, isn't that a good direction?
This isn't true. If you had the pref set to the default value before, it should change to the new default value when you upgrade.

[Note: I am a Firefox developer.]
Sounds like the ideal would be: preload the most recent N (configurable?) tabs.
I think that D2 needed to better balance the niche skills, but D3 drops the ball with the rune system.

It really doesn't go far to push samey builds, and despite Blizzard's deceptively generic statements from my experience I have a hard time believing that people are doing much of anything.

It was posed that Inferno's secondary purpose was to find and see the broken builds as they arose via people rocketing through this near-cheaply difficult mode.
I just told a co-worker that AirTime was like 'Chatroulette with pants".
Looks like chat roulette with added social networking features.
"He seemed sure" is not data.

You said "late stage and secondary markets is drying up." You need actual data (even if it is a few months old) to back that up.

What actually happened in the case of Facebook is that the price was run up so high on the secondary markets that the public markets missed out. That's not the same thing as drying up. It could lead to that in the future but I think it's still premature to say it is happening now (especially with no data).
Rapid Mobile App Development with Tiggzi, jQuery Mobile, and the FullContact API
I am saying that the bubble saw its reflection in the mirror with the Facebook IPO and is contracting to "reflect" that understanding of self.

What this means for early stage startups is that they will have to be built upon solid small business cash flow business models while the market is contracting.

If they do this and are dependent of investment they will likely attract the attention of investors.

This contracting will filter out the startups that lack a business model that works in the "real world" (aka small business).
0 is true too. I think that's actually brilliant.

[1,2,3].index(1)
# => 0
[1,2,3].index(4)
# => nil
What Paul Graham and Fred Wilson are Really Saying