skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You seem to be taking it as given that the size of stuff should match between different displays, but you don't give any reason why that's desirable. I understand the argument for 1:1 WYSIWYG in DTP, but not for UI. I haven't been doing much DTP in the last decade.

Some people prefer larger UI and some prefer smaller — partly due to differences in vision and partly just preference — and today's industry lets them choose. Your proposal takes away that choice and thus is guaranteed to anger people.
Github repo as blog post?!?! Hows that for some transparency in your edits:

https://github.com/kickingvegas/12pt-should-be-the-same-ever...
I could not agree more. I use a MacBook at work, Windows at home, and various Linux machines (mostly through ssh). I find each one has it's own pros and cons and I'm comfortable working with any of them.
It was going downhill long before v4 IMO.
Show HN: Mobile friendly Hacker News reader, with built-in memory
it makes sense from the perspective of the patent system and it's goals, but it's contradictory to the "patents bad" attitude that is common in the open source community.
"That's what we are always looking for, someone who just can't sleep because they want to fix something that isn't working in their world and have been trying for a long time to fix it."

I'm so mixed on this. I've run in to a number of people who've spent months and sometimes years trying to 'fix something that isn't working in their world', and it's usually because they don't really understand the industry, or how people really work, or they've not investigated the options out there which already exist (or which have already failed).

Not saying Brewster necessarily falls in to that camp, and I get that you'd want to fund people with passion, but... sometimes spending a lot of time fixing problems that keep you up at night just... isn't a good use of your time. It's generally only in hindsight that you can make that judgement, but writing this sort of stuff seems to encourage that sort of behaviour.
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I'm extremely skeptic of the proposed solutions. I haven't yet seen a solution that would be a clear net win for society after summing the pros vs cons. It seems to me that fixing patents is a mathematical impossibility. Trying to come up with a system that forces most inventors to pay a few inventors, while at the same time not punishing most inventors. Sounds like trying to come up with a number that is less than 2, while at the same time greater than 1000. It's mathematically impossible.﻿

The optimistic in me would love to believe there's a brilliant solution, which is way over my head. The realistic in me, can only see paradoxes and no obvious solution. Maybe I'm just too dumb to solve this problem myself.

I believe the right path is to look back at what the vision behind patents are in the first place (incentives for invention), and think from the ground up how we can implement this without the modern "necessary" dogmas (such as licensing or IP). Then I can actually think of plenty of solutions. But none of them even remotely resembles what we know today as a patent.
There are some apps it makes sense with, like video, or music, or drawing/painting, or 3D modeling. Or even two-page spreads in Preview.
This is an ultrasound machine, not a tablet. You're going to get a reference implementation which you'll integrate (or rewrite completely) into your own software according to the exacting processes specified for medical devices. It's not like licensing Android from Google.

As for competition... I don't understand the dichotomy you're creating. That "vast amount" of simple code (the UI, etc), is protected by a different government-ranted monopoly: copyright. That's the only reason A can compete with B on that basis. But why is a large body of simple UI code worth copyright protection, while the small but complicated imaging algorithm isn't worth patent protection?

And your example doesn't address the specialization issue. Why do we want experts in ultrasonic imaging competing on UI and updates/support? Isn't it better for them to be able to focus on new imaging algorithms (their core competency), and sell those to someone who has an expertise in medical UIs?

I use this example a lot, but think about ARM. Aren't they a perfect example of the patent system working correctly? Isn't it great that they can sell their IP and let NVIDIA integrate it with a graphics core for consumer devices, etc, without forcing ARM to go into the business of manufacturing every type of microprocessor people might need?
As a long time Mac user, I've really only started to become annoyed with OS X with the release of Lion. And by "started", I mean it's so severe that I'm probably going to switch to another OS after Mountain Lion is released.

I feel like Apple is just trying to screw devs and power users over in a desperate attempt to pull in the iOS crowd. Simple things like crippling Exposé and Spaces, which would easily allow to me see all windows and quickly switch between them, to combine it in Mission Control (which is all flash and no substance), was the first thing that annoyed me. Seeing them push the App Store to the point that they're going to make it more difficult for developers to distribute their apps outside it is also worrying.

Also, I seriously never had a single crash or freeze before Lion, and I've been using OS X for a good 7 years or more. Since installing Lion, I've had frequent lockups with many so bad that I've had to force a shutdown countless times. As a whole, everything is obviously much slower and/or crippled with worthless glitter thrown on top.

One of their main selling points in Lion was trackpad gestures, which are definitely great on their laptops, but completely worthless when you want to use a decent mouse with your desktop. Thankfully I kept Snow Leopard on my iMac and it's my main work machine.

You're not alone in your frustration.
Eh, maybe. I know a guy who was a patent troll. He did everything on contingency. (And he made tens of millions doing it.)
For embedded computing, the thing that makes a board nice to work with is good documentation (board schematics and full datasheets/reference manuals), access to the hardware, and consistent behavior. In the $20-$200 range, there's lots of choices with more power than an Arduino. I understand there's excitement about Raspberry Pi because it's particular performance is closer to what ~$200 range boards were delivering for Raspberry's @25/$35. That's really a very nice achievement, but I'm cautious to see what degree of access to hardware will be possible over time. It might be well worth an extra cost, or giving up some performance if I'm getting additional time to do cool stuff vs. spending time reverse engineering capability that could have been accessed by reading datasheets.
What was he expecting? Surely he must have realized that Apple would be upset that he secretly installed software on their computers to spy on their employees and customers. Surely he must have understood that many of his subjects would be weird-ed out as well. I don't understand what he thought would happen. He doesn't seem to have any empathy at all. Hopefully this encounter has woken him up a little.
I think a way to bridge Arduino shields up to a normal general purpose computing environment at a reasonable cost (e.g. http://omer.me/2012/05/introducing-ponte/) will be the true killer app for hardware hacking. Being able to write lua/python/ruby/etc to talk directly to hardware & sensors will be incredibly powerful

There's no way long-term Arduino is going to stay at it's current specs & environment, any more than TI-89 calculators could
Well the people who made the decisions "took money off the table" and (eventually) left the company. Seems to fit your phrase well.
I'm sure the fun and novelty wears off quickly....for the user as well as the ice cream truck.
Amazon Hiring Aggressively in Canada to Develop Silk Web Browser
Great play on Filepicker's part. Having used their service on the web, it's a no brainer to include their service in future mobile apps.
Interesting read, but I can't say I agree.

> ... Back then, virtually everyone dutifully typed http://www.pepsi.com/ into Mosaic or Netscape to see just what it was that Pepsi had put online. These days, many people will just type in www.pepsi.com or even pepsi.com or, believe it or not, just pepsi.

URI's will never go away. Search is just getting better.

> The source of this confusion is the simple fact that users today don’t understand two things. First, they don’t understand why the www. is (or isn’t) there, and second, they don’t understand that the Web is not the whole of the Internet.

I don't understand why it's there. It's a bit redundant given all the arguments of the no-www folks.

(edited for formatting)
Twilio has many, many more HN users as customers than all of those other companies so naturally the collective will be more interested in it. Also, while I was there we worked really hard to be active contributors to HN so the company has a good reputation here.

I love how you felt the need to create a sockpuppet account for this complaint. If you hate HN, the internet is a big place.
The $99 Ouya game console: Exciting, innovative — and probably doomed
switching between desktops is slower. It eases as a much slower rate at beginning and end. I've also noticed that you cannot cancel a desktop switch until the previous is complete, and thus cannot cancel a desktop move.
Moving to vim from TextMate, I found that I missed TextMate's autocompletion.

In Vim you have to specify whether the word you're looking for is above or below the cusror (using C-P or C-N). IIRC, TextMate just looks for the closest matching word, no matter where it is.

I wrote a little plugin to do make it exactly that:

https://github.com/sirdavidoff/vim-nearest-complete

Disclaimer: totally rough and not (yet) very customisable
Microsoft Officially Launches Its New Angel Fund And Incubator Program
> The News.me team will take Digg back to its essence: the best place to find, read and share the stories the internet is talking about. Right now.

With my cynicism hat on nice and tight, it seems a bit late for that. Digg WAS, in its heyday, the best place to find and share online content. But as the management undertook on iffy decision after another, and as imitators sprung up left right and centre, it lost its place in the online world. Sad.

We have plenty of content aggregators now. The kind of people Digg 5.0 (?!) will target are probably more than happy finding their entertainment through Twitter, Facebook, and dare I say it, Reddit.

Having said that, I for one wish the new team all the luck in the world in trying to get the site back to its former glory, and I look forward to trying it out.
Digg is ranked 192 on Alexa. Its Google Page Rank is 8. And the name is very popular and it used to have a huge following. Once the media get's a hold of this story (well it already has), tons of people will visit it just to see what they do with it. Plus, they still have a ton of traffic, of course not as much as they used to.
We’ve been testing Filepicker.io at Bugly almost from day one, and using it officially for a couple of weeks now, and it’s been very solid. It’s always a little frightening to rely on an external service for important functionality, but this is a pretty big deal for our users, so in this case we decided to take a chance and become early adopters. No regrets so far.
https://www.google.com/#hl=en&output=search&sclient=...

Gives back a list of interesting people.

Not that I think it matters if you use Vim or anything particular for that matter.
The only reason it's $500k and not $0 is to save a small amount of face. Digg is losing money, and has never made money in its entire history, so it's going to cost Betaworks a lot more than $500k to take it over.
Betaworks Acquires Digg
Oh damn, if they integrate that into news.me, they've shot themselves with a $500,000 proverbial bullet in the proverbial foot.

At this point Reddit can probably not be killed. The only hope that betaworks could have at success is a vanilla relaunch of Digg, minus the gaming problems and "advertising for hire" functionality. Remember Digg when Dragon Age: Origins came out?
Unfortunately, its been rolled back, as most are noting: https://twitter.com/jasonlong/status/223501975004774400

I did get the chance to see it and it was awesome. Looking forward to when they roll it back out.
the later... support scientific research
That's the source engine default behavior and it works really well. Even better when running in window mode with no borders.
$500K? I cant still remember the first time I saw this cover: http://workbench.cadenhead.org/media/businessweek-kevin-rose...
There is of course an alternative explanation for all of this which is that they don't give a shit about this being a "success" in any commercial or "market share" sense and simply wanted to hack together a cool piece of hardware that they wanted themselves and thought they could make that a reality if enough likeminded people wanted it too.

That could explain why they asked for $1M on kickstarter rather than taking a chunk of investment the usual way.
Yahoo! have confirmed the breach: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-57471178-83/yahoos-password...
Every piece of Node code I've seen has looked like a giant mess, for the reason you state. I agree, it doesn't have to be this way.
$500K is a steal for a well-known brand, and 2M-4M monthly US visitors (funny how Compete reports higher traffic vs. Reddit while Quantcast reports 1/4x the traffic of Reddit)
Not to mention that they're making $50k a head working "days/nights/weekends" - a bit extreme!

For comparison, doing software consulting at only $50/hour, you can make $50k working just 19 hours a week...
I can tell you now that it's extremely reliable - we store a lot of data in our mongodb - several million documents a day. As mentioned, it would be because journalling wasn't enabled which would mean possible corruption on non-clean shutdown. That's history.
I used to love digg in the early days. People point to the v4 revision as being the final nail, but they started wavering and losing the magic literal years before that.

FWIW, Pligg (the digg clone CMS) looks like it's getting a twitter bootstrap upgrade. I've been wanting to roll my own "digg/reddit/HN" for ages. Maybe now's the time.
http://www.pligg.com/demo/
Digg and Betaworks
it's not just capital intensive -- it's hugely time-intensive. i work for a nanotech company that has been trying to scale up its proprietary process in some form or another for 16 years. if i'm quick, i can run maybe a dozen experiments in a day and get results back on 5 of them by the morning.

i also do some work with a company that does plasma coatings, also with a proprietary process that the owner (co-)invented. and it's a 4 person shop right now.

both people have done very smart work and made processes that have many compelling advantages over the existing state-of-the-art, with cost being a huge one, but it just takes a long-ass time to iterate and get good results from real, physical tests.
I was there at four; didn't see anything interesting happen, aside from us mobbing an old, scruffy looking guy wearing all blue.

Stream is still going, though; the original poster is supposed to show up soon. (I think he just did.)
Don't worry, Kevin took plenty of money. It's just the regular employees that don't get shit.

edit: nobody knows the number for sure, but he had enough to do angel investments in foursquare and twitter. See also crunchbase [1]. There was a $28mm series C and the speculation seems to be a bunch went into his pockets.

edit2: after thinking for a couple minutes, there's something just really unseemly about founders getting millions and employees plus investors getting zilch, particularly in the context of a failed business. I think the idea of founders cashing out a bit to free the company to swing for the fences is probably good, but still. There's something about this result that just doesn't sit well.

[1] http://www.crunchbase.com/person/kevin-rose
Nice work guys! Can't wait to use filepicker in my iphone app.
I'm not sure I follow. Are you agreeing with the things I mentioned, or claiming they are not valid?
Focus - The key to being productive
Last I heard computer intrusion was felony with broad conditions that can be met fairly easily - when you use a computer without permission or when you overstep the implicit or explicit permission you have to use said computer (apologies if I'm wrong but didn't he install his app without explicit permission?).

Thus I wouldn't be at all certain that the artist here hasn't gone over the lines of legality.

I'm hardly a fan of Apple policies in general but it seems to me that here that sending the Secret Service after this guy is a both legal and appropriate act.

I disagree with the parent's claim that legal boundaries are the hard boundaries. Many legal boundaries are extraordinarily fuzzy, often to the detriment of civil liberties ("disorderly conduct" is a real crime for example). Oddly enough, here is a situation where a somewhat fuzzy law seems somewhat appropriate.
Rare as it may be, one of the best things I ever bought was the Microsoft adapter to use wireless XBOX360 controllers on my PC.

I thought the OUYA was a great idea after seeing the Kickstarter video, but I'm glad there are enough skeptics around to mention that pesky reality.
scary... my experience is that the more platforms try to get this kind of thing right, the more they get it wrong.

back in the 90's, photoshop would try to do all sorts of gamma correction on images you were editing with the consequence that, if you didn't turn it off and make sure it was always turned off, you'd get your colors wrong 100% of the time.

a system like that working requires that all the pieces be correctly configured, and the consequence is that instead of having something that's 4.1 inches on one platform and 5.2 on another, you have something that's 12.7 inches on one platform and 1.4 on another.
In general, this is tactic is called Cloaking: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloaking

I believe that Google Search frowns upon this practice. Though, one can argue that there are different shades of gray, especially when supporting different display types and sizes, or when presenting different pages depending on the referrer.
Yahoo’s 450,000-Account Security Breach: Whose Fault Was It?
HTML/CSS is a small piece of a stack that is fairly easy to pick up. There are hardly ever reasons to hire someone who is FE only (at small companies) and I often find that people who are FE only don't have the kind foundation that would allow them to venture into complicated JS code.

The author seems to be implying that SEs given front end responsibilities will struggle with them but that's only true in the way that they struggle with anything else new (the struggle is short lived because we're talking about markup with quirks).

Also, OP, if you read this, your footnotes link to the original text but it's covered by your huge fixed header.
And if you want to get really fancy, there's Github Pages -- http://pages.github.com/. So, you get all of the benefits of the repo approach, but your pages can be all sexy and stylish.
You're saying that just because someone doesn't have a specific set of domain knowledge they can't be an 'A player' in the domain they do have knowledge in. This simply isn't true.

Using an analogy, even though Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan play golf, Michael Jordan can't be an 'A player' in basketball even though that's his domain, not golf.

Are backend developers that have only a cursory domain knowledge of the front end not 'A players'?
GFX - a 3D CSS3 animation library for jQuery
"None of Digg's remaining employees will join
Betaworks as part of the acquisition."

what did they acually buy? The know how? The technology? None of that is revolutionary today. And there is no community on digg right now whatsoever (unlike /. which still lives its own life).

Maybe the name is worth something, but I don't really think that it matters that much.
I use the multiple desktops/spaces on lion quite a bit on my MBP 13". Mainly due to screen size. I find the new expose/spaces combo to be pretty good.

I keep a lot of apps open at the same time, and I like to keep each one on it's own desktop with a couple minor exceptions.

I don't like the All-In-One version of xcode... not friendly with a small screen at all. Xcode 3, I would keep the doc window on it's own desktop, Interface Builder on it's own, etc... xcode 4 I lost that ability.

I use "fullscreen" mode occasionally; when I do it's usually a web browser or a terminal window. I'd use it more but even in fullscreen mode, I still want to be able to open a terminal window and keep it on top of the fullscreen app. Like for copying an example from the web.

It's too frustrating to do that if I am having to swipe back and forth between desktops...
I Believe in Gittip
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That strikes me as shockingly low.

For context, KillerStartups bought the domain "startups.com" 4 years ago for $500,000. No IP, no brand recognition. The domain.
You're mixing up copyright, patents, and trade secrets.

The Phoenix BIOS case was a copyright infringement case--IBM wasn't claiming that there was anything about the "how it works" of the BIOS itself that was protected, but that Phoenix must have copied the actual code.

Should clean room implementations be allowed when the "how it works" is the interesting part? Say I spent years developing an ultrasound imaging algorithm. I sell an ultrasound machine with that algorithm. A competitor comes along and says "gee, these work really well, I wonder how they work?" So they reverse-engineer my design, and do a clean room implementation of it, instead of coming up with their own design.
For me pragmatism wins the day. Vim has been installed on every machine I've ever ssh'ed into. Not true for emacs or even nano or pico.
I've found that, due to the prevalence of race conditions in the codebase I'm working in (due to lots and lots of async calls; it's Javascript), the debugger often exacerbates and hides the problem more than it illuminates. As a result, the debugger has ended up as a desperation tool rather than as a first-choice... and even then often doesn't tell me anything useful.
That is not correct, at least in the US. In many states it's the driver and not the owner who is liable.

http://www.ghsa.org/html/stateinfo/laws/auto_enforce.html
I don't doubt that something can be done with it, but I'm dubious of Digg as a brand these days. Similar to MySpace, it's lost all the credibility it once had.
You Can Get a Better Job If You Just Ask
That's the thing with Veblen goods. At some point, they go from being the means to an end to being an end themselves.
I wrote a response to this (http://tech.puredanger.com/2012/07/12/conference-expectation...) but I think mikeal's comment here gets at the heart of it better: https://gist.github.com/3098860#gistcomment-370439