skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I once used Quickoffice on a Symbian S60 phone. I should say, it's capabilities were pretty impressive. Especially with the meager resources available on those old so-called smart phones.

I hope this helps Google build better native Office apps. Obviously, will also be a big addition to their Docs back-end. But it has always puzzled me, with the infinite resources Google has, it still has not been able to develop a seamless import of MS Office files. Is it really that hard?
Here's a more sympathetic perspective, including comments from former employees:

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/169444/38_Studios_Downfal...

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/169444/38_Studios_Downfal...
Ask HN: Which do you read on HN first (article or comments)?
Depending on the title of an article, I can sometimes guess the opinion of the author and so I'm more interested in the HN commentary. If the article is something I know very little about, I will read that first.
Ask HN: Best Name for an App website
What is the best name website which hosts a baking/cooking app? PerfectCrumbs, SugarDrone, Fahrenheit351, OvenMade, OvenMaid, or OvenBuzz. How do you decide?
Long distant relationships. My family and close friends are mostly in Texas while I'm in the Bay Area. I like keeping track of their lives...
Manufactered in China, but designed and prototyped in the US. Which would you rather have your kids doing?
I also live in a small place, but I want my child to have the experience of building and using tools. Fortunately, just a couple blocks from my home is perhaps the most wonderful place I have ever been in my life. http://artisansasylum.com/?page_id=1336

I have read about other similar places in New York, and I'm certain there must be stuff like this in the Bay Area. So if you're lucky enough to have something like this nearby, take advantage. I'm not sure what the kid policy is, but I'm really hoping they have or will create children's classes.
seems there are some wannabe be big quick companies hanging here ... that did not get the message ...
The "enjoyment graphs" might explain why I like D3 more than D2, despite the fact that according to many in the D3 forums it is a horrible game.

I played D2 back when I was a college student, so I had the time to spend in those long troughs between finding awesome items. Well, I didn't actually play D2 that much because I didn't find it fun -- and perhaps this article explains why. But for the people who want D3 to have the same addictive feel of D2, I speculate that part of it has to do with being able to commit a lot of time to get those rare spikes of joy upon getting a fantastic drop. All the serious D2 gamers knew all of the best items and finding them was a big part of the game for them (or perhaps it WAS the game?)

For me, I'd rather have a game where the combat is fun, and that's where I think D3 is a huge improvement upon D2. Blizzard's own stats show that people are playing with a wide variety of skills. That's a lot different than D2, where many skills were useless, there were only a handful of worthwhile builds, and everybody lusted after the same items.

At first I didn't understand why a randomly generated magic item could be better than a "legendary" item, but now it makes sense. If a person gets a legendary item, they know they've gotten something that will be good for most players, but it won't be the best. As such, people still have the ability to grow and get better items instead of thinking, "Well, I've gotten Sword of Awesome, no need to do anything more." To me, that makes the game more interesting, and it enhances replayability for when I sign on and play with friends. I guess things might be different for people who only play alone, though.

I'm sure the Auction House plays a big role in all of this, and many want to ascribe "evil" motives to Blizzard. Certainly the item economy will take time for them to fully understand. But even if there wasn't an AH, I think that the way they went with items (and the way skills play off of them) was the right choice for creating a game that is consistently fun. At least until Inferno -- which was meant to be ridiculous anyways!
its a rhetorical technique

whether its effective seems situational

"sorry if this is insulting" won't be effective if what you follow it with is truly insulting

we all know thin skinned people though, sometimes the best way to get them to hear a benign (or neutral, or even constructive critism) comment that they might dismiss is to procede it with "sorry if this is insulting"

so there are certain scenarios where I'd say those phrases are ok (this board with their sometimes quick downvoting, seems like an ok use to me)
No. In fact, git doesn't even swap individual files atomically (which is what I had expected it to do): during updates the files momentarily disappear, which caused serious issues for my site and made me move back to rsync deployment recently (which has the other security advantage of not keeping the entire history of the website on the edge servers).
There are many practical consequences of this, in terms of the design of individual language constructs, and in how the language is used generally.

That's interesting. Can you say what some of these consequences are?
I think facebook should charge 75 cents per month to use it.

This will weed out users who just don't care; it will give more information to advertisers as well.

Oh and what's that? 75 cents per month actually ends up tripling their income! (if they now get $9 per year off the seventy-five cents, plus the same four in ad revenue.)

Anyway if even 75 cents per month is too much, then they can go ahead and make OEM deals etc for a facebook sticker and do like Microsoft did. Or give it away with cans of coke. One in twenty wins a year of facebook.

Or, you know, do what people expect and roll into the price of a cell phone.

Just some thoughts...
"I’m really tired of the f*cking old “just use the keyboard shortcuts” crap."

Amen. This is the same bullshit you hear from Apple apologists whenever they're confronted with some glaring functionality omission in the Mac UI (or keyboard, as in the case of Apple's missing Delete keys).
I really like Stripe, but Braintree is a great company too. I think both companies are pulling the industry forward.

I would still seriously consider setting up a US business in most cases, since it makes everything else easier, if you want to take investment, enter the us market, etc.
I love the idea, but I'm not so keen on the name.

The mission statement gives examples of how this is a great idea for musicians, coffee shop owners, and other generally smart people ("genius grants for the rest of us"). On the other hand: the name, the required GitHub authentication, and the list of suggested tippees all strongly imply that this is solely for programmers. This says to me that the grand plan is to start out by focusing on programers (which makes sense, since it's a group of people who are on the whole really good at recognizing and rewarding people and projects that make their jobs easier), and to eventually expand from there.

The problem with this is that 'Gittip' is an incredibly technically-focused name; it makes perfect sense in context of tipping your favorite GitHub contributors, but not so much when your average non-engineer Joe wants to give money to the guy who makes his coffee every morning.
Actually, the "Facebook is boring" numbers starting showing up before the IPO. Now they are just getting more attention. The problem is a real one for Facebook, whether it gets in the press and on blogs or not.
Kickass!
no。 $13
> The backend for Google Docs right now is a patchy patchwork mess that was originally based on OpenOffice (many many years ago).

Any reason to believe this is still the case?
Morgan Stanley used a variant of APL called A+. It was used quite extensively in parts of the firm. They open-sourced it a while back. http://www.aplusdev.org/
I've used ORM tools such as the one in Django, Active::Record and DBIx::Class.

I do not have the issues you mentioned ... I always remember the API calls I need to make and performance has not been an issue (granted, I'm fairly familiar with all issues that can come up, so I know when or where to optimize in general).

the ORM usually pulls in the full object model for each student

Here's how to do it in Django (and note this is off the top of my head):

for row in Student.objects.values_list("gpa"):
print row[0]

You're really talking about shitty ORMs or APIs you haven't had the patience to become familiar with.

by the time you figure out the right
incantation you may as well have written the
SQL yourself

That's not true. On complex filtering, you often want to add or subtract filters based on certain conditions. With plain SQL you end up doing really ugly string concatenations, whereas with a good ORM the queries are composable.
Zuckenberg Sued
Haha, I guess that's the difference, I don't care enough to follow anyone's life.
Behind the Scenes of the Amazon Appstore Test Drive
> i.e. Pivotal

OK, so what you call Pivotal, I call Scrum.

> The key is: just try to keep people out of your project and company who have absolutely no clue about tech/Internet/online.

I'll try, thanks. As I said with non-technical people, some sort of process (call it what you like) helps.
Thanks for the information, I didn't know they are the owners. That's even better, it shows how a serious and successful games production company can promote DRM free approach. They used to rely on DRM before, but I guess they reconsidered at some point, and turned it completely around.
The article said they use Jackson for parsing json. A great library by the way.
Comments, to see if the article is worth reading.

It's not uncommon to find an article that is little more than some glib anecdotal observation and all the interesting content is in the comments.
RJSON not only compresses data of any structure but keeps it in JSON format that is huge advantage over gzip/7z and other binary compression algorithms. You can compress 1M of JSON to 300Kb of gzipped JSON but then you will to parse 1Mb of JSON on client anyway. With RJSON you can compress 1Mb of JSON to 500Kb of RJSON, then gzip it down to 200Kb and parse only 500Kb of JSON. Then you can analyze some core properties of parsed RJSON document and unpack it on demand.
For example you may send to client collection of 20 documents, parse each and show title of each document to the client, then fully unpack only selected by client document.

I agree with Too that specialized protocol will always win, but RJSON IMO decreases structural entropy almost to 0 without need to debugging own protocol.
As cynicalkane said, you say this because you haven't met people who are very serious affected by these illnesses. These people will greatly disagree with you: yes, they are interesting and clever, but they do _suffer_ from their afflictions. Saying that these conditions do not exist discourages those individuals from seeking diagnosis and accommodations for their conditions.

For example, an individual with ADD [1] might be very intelligent but will be unable to focus on timed tests and will suffer from worse academic performance. If they're unaware of their ADD diagnosis they and others around them will think they are lazy and/or stupid; this becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.

Being diagnosed with ADD doesn't just mean a prescription for medicine, it can instead mean being allowed to take more time on a test or to take the test in a closed office. This can mean they have a chance to be admitted to a university and be exposed to intellectually stimulating material (whether it's computer science, physics, economics, or philosophy).
One-way Ticket to Mars: Startup Plans Red Planet Colony in 2023
Does it matter? "Regular" people won't pick up on the reference to git, but it's still a nice short domain name, easy to spell and pronounce, and git is a slang spelling for get. I think the name works well.
>>> it sounds like you are referring mostly to higher education, right?

Actually, no. The qualifications for becoming a professor are generally: doctoral degree in subject + publications to name. At least where I live, the requirements for becoming a teacher are generally: approved course of study (in education, not necessarily subject areas) + baccalaureate degree + teaching certificate.

>>> I just want them to know how to deliver information to my child in the most efficient way possible.

Then what you want is Google, or Wikipedia, or a good textbook. When, however, it comes time to teach your child how to find the information, how to assess it critically, how to reason about it, and how to use it effectively, then you need a teacher.

Also, teachers play the important role of exposing students to ideas and information that they would not otherwise be searching for, and thus to cultivate previously unknown interests and foster an appreciation for learning.
I've never understood who exactly is the target audience of Gnome 3 (and, to a lesser extent, Unity). It seems like these things would be great on an iPad or something like that, but what Linux users are really running Fedora or Debian on a touch device?

Not only that, I think many of these designs don't make sense to novice users either. I recently let me wife try a few live discs to see which one she liked best (she is very non-technical but was sick of Windows running like maple syrup). She ended up liking Mint's LXDE remix the most because it was simple and very fast. Unity's unifed menus and Gnome's app-not-windows design just confused her. Granted, she's just one person, but if it's not for me (the nerd) and it's not for her (the non-techie), who is supposed to be using Gnome 3?

What confuses me is that Gnome is community driven, and somehow a consensus of intelligent developers decided that this is the direction they want to take the project, despite Gnome's poor track record on mobile platforms and that the design paradigms don't accurately reflect the hardware on which the software is run. You'd think someone might have raised a hand and said "um, this design makes more sense on cell phones, which people are not running our product on."
I think you're underestimating people. If they do decide to pay up, and then they notice that they haven't really used it in 3 months, they will stop paying even that 75 cents a month. This will lead to a lot more than 20-30% of users quitting over time.

The 30% will start using a Facebook alternative, and then once they're all settled in, they will start poaching everyone else from Facebook, and get them to use this new "cooler" social network. When companies lose their early adopters, it's over. They just don't know it until a few years later when the negative numbers start showing up, and it's too late to fix the problem.
9 Ways To Be Leaner, Stronger, Faster, & Happier (Outside the Gym)
It should be noted that airtime has been in development over 2 years so...
Obligatory:

Release Notes: http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/13.0/releasenotes/

Complete list of changes: http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/13.0/releasenotes/bugli...

This gotta get me some karma!
Sorry but terrible idea. Not even 1% of facebook users would stick around. And before you argue that 1% of the current user base would be great, the usefulness of a social network is greatly diminished if your friends aren't there, making eventually even the last 1% leave.
Actually, to be fair to Microsoft, Dynamics AX 2012 is actually fairly reasonable looking.
The problem is that these are bullshit "rights" to things that are not supposed to be patentable.

A patent does not define "intellectual property", especially today.
Thesis: Concurrent Programming for Scalable Web Architectures
After attending the Seattle Mini Maker Faire this past weekend, all I can say is that I agree 100% with OP. You internalize the lessons much more thoroughly when you actively (rather than passively) participate in the learning process.

The kids were the happiest people at the Faire, because they hadn't convinced themselves yet that they couldn't build these things. They were excited. It was great to see.

Pessimism is for suckers :)
The skill thing isn't a very fair comparison, since you were skill locked and couldn't respec which left you having to build to the small subset of builds that could work all the way through hell. Now you can consider what you expect to work with what you are about to encounter and build towards that, making niche skills viable.
First edition of Spain.js (Madrid)
The first edition of the International Conference on JavaScript, Spain.js will take place on 5, 6 and 7 July in Madrid. Here we can enjoy such prominent developers as Jeremy Ashkenas (creator of CoffeeScript and Backbone.js), Alex MacCaw (creator of Spine.js), Vicent Marti (Github) and Karolina Szczur (Nodejistsu) among many others. This event is to give a boost to a language that has always been a minor consideration for programmers, but it is increasingly present in our day to day.
There Is a Link between Genius and Insanity
I use email to keep in touch with family and close friends. I don't see what Facebook would do to improve on that.
ASUS’s Sexist Twitter Gaffe Angers Followers
This is the first release with SPDY enabled by default. Once most Firefox users have updated, about half of all web traffic will be from SPDY-enabled browsers.
> I get the feeling that if you have a group of highly talented people around, it really pays off to give them much freedom.

Reading in economics once, I hit the phrase 'all economics is coordination problems', and it seemed exactly true to me: why do businesses have all these managers and infrastructure and stuff? Because of principal-agent problems and similar issues, all of which can be construed as coordination problems. Why do we need them? Because there are so many heterogenous people involved, all differing in various ways with different interests, and they need to be hammered into a coherent force.

Why not just select similar people, eliminate this massive overhead of coordination, and just let them work on stuff? Well... there's only so many energetic skilled young techies. But when you can cluster enough of them in one homogenous company, you get something like Github.

Until it keeps growing, heterogenity builds up, and problems with coordination start happening...
Orvillecopter: The dead cat turned into a helicopter Photos
You are voluntarily interacting twice a day and feel like you are constraining yourself. Other sites wish they could have such "unengaged" users!
Yeah, it's pretty hard. Microsoft's spec (for the OOXML formats) is over 6,000 pages long, and extremely hard to follow by all accounts. And no, that's not a 10-page specification followed by 5,990 pages of examples. The Office apps have incredibly complex functionality, and then factor in decades of revisions, upgrades, overlays, and general complexity creep.

Also bear in mind that while Google does have large (not infinite!) resources, they also have large responsibilities. Like anything, it comes down to economics: they could hire or repurpose 500 engineers to work on Office file formats, but it's not the optimal thing for them to do.
Great stuff. Value++ for PaaS.
Every data model is just a degenerate special case of every other data model ;)
Interesting perspective! I agree that the article leaves out multiplayer which represents a huge source of fun. Plus, one thing you can more easily do with a group of friends is agree to skip the AH on those particular characters, relying on drops alone, which makes item drops rewarding again. With enough players you get a decent chance that one of you will find a nice fist weapon or Wizard hat and be able to share that with the monk or Wizard in your party and have it be an upgrade.
You know, I thought the same thing. The idea started as a tipjar for Github and I bought Gittip.com, but then I realized it was much bigger, so I decided to use Logstown.com, a domain I already own. But then I was talking to my bro-in-law this past weekend, a non-technical musician, and he was like "Logstown makes me think I'm taking a dump. I like Gittip a lot better." So I renamed it back.

He has no idea what git and github are, so the name gittip to him is just a nice, symmetrical name that has "tip" in it and evocations of "gift."

Go figure.

Look at the way that "bit" and "wiki" have evolved beyond BitTorrent and the WikiWikiWeb. I console myself by hoping that with gittip, the same is maybe happening to "git."
It doesn't matter. Even if order of keys will be changed somewhere in the middle during JSON.strigify, as schema id will be always used keys sorted alphabetically and object values are always stored in the same order as keys sorted:
https://github.com/dogada/RJSON/blob/master/rjson.js#L213
Bill Murray on taking chances and saying "No"
Are you familiar with the following phrase?

> If you're not paying for it, then you're not the customer; you're the product.

Facebook's product is it's database of user information. If the actual customers, which currently consist mostly of ad companies, aren't interested, then they have a serious problem indeed.
What he said. :-)
I think one thing thats often missed in posts like this is the memetic effect if Y-Combinator were to stop growing its class size. Its irrelevant whether or not YC's continued growth is reasonable or not because they don't have a choice in the matter at this point.

YC is for a very large portion of people an indicator of the health of the industry. Were YC to cease growing, or worse reverse its class size, dozens of articles would appear about how this means the "popping of the bubble".

Regardless whether thats the actual reason, it would have a detrimental effect on the startup world as a whole. I'm pretty sure PG is aware of this fact.
Tokaido Status Update: Implementation Details
Article, to see what it's about, before getting into the debate/discussion.
Asserting that the decline in Facebook's stock price post-IPO has generalizable implications for early stage companies is helping the tail to wag the dog.

I agree with Fred Wilson that Facebook's present valuation should be a thrill to its early investors, not a chill http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2012/06/some-perspective.html.

It is natural to see personal meaning in well known events. Venus is passing in front of the Sun right now. Seems like a good time to call some investors.
Under the ABA's Model Rules of Professional Conduct, providing legal advice without a license potentially could be considered "practicing law without a license" or, for licensed attorneys, the creation of an attorney-client relationship, which creates duties for the attorney.
No. If someone bought all the traded shares of overstock.com at a particular point in time, they would've bought 107% of the available shares. So it would be impossible for all their shares to get delivered.
I think you are right, but I don't think Windows 8 or Windows Phone 8 will help this situation. The fact is, users like to assume that if a company builds an app, it will be available on their phone. This is true for users of iPhones and, to a lesser extent, Android phones. This is far form true for users of Windows Phone. Regardless of all the bells and whistles added to WP8, this platform will remain an also-ran to the duopoly established between iOS and Android.
I thought the same thing. If there's anything a good programmer shouldn't be doing, it's repetitive tasks. If you're coding the same thing over and over again, you're doing it wrong.
Firefox 13 Released; Download to fix Security problem