skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>The so called studies show people who aren't used to modes are confused when using a modal editor.

"Don't listen to this study, listen to my firmly held belief". That's not how this works. If you want to combat a study you need to do so with another one, not by just saying throwing out untested assumptions.

>From what I have seen, people who leave vim in insert mode are the ones making mode errors. Insert mode isn't the rest mode for vim, normal mode is. You are bound to make errors when starting because out of habit, your mind assumes insert mode as the rest state.

Thanks for the condescension. Have you ever started to type a word and had your hands just finish it for you? Sometimes there will be some relatively large word that I type out commonly enough that when my hands notice the first few letters of it they'll type it out automatically with me having to go back and delete it and type out the similar starting word I meant to write. I even recall having my hands do it again on the correction once.

Having this kind of muscle memory is a killer for vi usage. Lots of times I have intentionally left the editor in insert mode for just a second while I grab some text from, say, a website to paste in. What I didn't realize is that my hands knew to always get back to command mode when changing screens so even though my mind had tried to save keystrokes my hands defeated me. The result? Pasted a huge document into command mode. Great. Similar sync issues came up regularly enough that I typically mashed Esc 2-4 times (in case there was, e.g. a command active that would write in the Esc char) rapidly before starting anything to ensure that I was where I thought I was.

In my experience, I wouldn't get the time savings I should have been getting due to having to slow down for the mode management.
Preventing users who steal content from ever being able to legitimately access content is probably not a shrewd business move. Especially when alternatives exist.
>but of course we live in a society that every single one of us breaks some small law every day.

I never really understood this line. I can say with pretty much 100% certainty that I have broken no laws, no matter how small, at any time within the past week. Traffic, what have you.

It wasn't difficult either. You sacrifice a tiny bit of convenience, but honestly? It's worth it to have a clean conscience.
Phone number portability.
yes, kids download them a lot
That could be a non-launch version of the Lofstrom Loop.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launch_loop

Because it's not subject to the rocket equation, it would basically have the same effect on space access costs as a space elevator.

It is possible in principle for such a device to bring a vehicle up to hypersonic speeds, then regeneratively brake the same vehicle to a stop and recover a fraction of the energy.
I live in the UK and this is the first I hear about this. Interesting how seemingly important law passes so silently.
We use it for the Chartbeat dashboard (demo here: http://chartbeat.com/demo/) and it's been delightful, but we also made the decision while we were already doing a redesign. This meant we weren't just adding another rule to the page which would change everything; we wrote new CSS with this concept in mind.
There is at least one study that talks about this. I'm talking about modal editing. Obviously I'm not against context.

>Could it be that studies about modality were flawed? I think so.

This isn't how we progress. Do you have a study that demonstrates the opposite? Then claiming the study was flawed is meaningless.

>And I had an hard time using Vim before being told how to use it effectively.

Stay classy. I knew how to use it just fine, but mode management slows everything down.
Yes. And, keep in mind, there is an incredible bias in usability tests toward novice users. The UX for an app used one time is completely different from the UX of an app that is meant to be used on a regular basis by the same user. For example, text entry for a date would be a lot more efficient for an experienced user than dropdowns (as presented in this presentation) would be. In fact, the dropdown solution would probably annoy an experienced user. With user experience, context is key.
The Jack-of-all-trades Fallacy
Yeah...the problem with this is that Defcon is not a dating event and women should not have to navigate it as though it were. Eye contact and not having a boyfriend perched on my arm more likely indicate that I'm there because I'm interested in the subject matter of the conference, not that I'm waiting for someone to put the moves on me. Seriously. Grow up.
How to Read a Programming Tutorial
Reddit Code Rendezvous Reveals Few Answers, More Mystery
HN: Please fix the "More" link.
The link breaks down after few minutes and gives the message "Unknown or expired link."
No. Because you are assuming that the person would have made a purchase had it not been free.
You can land limitless Likes leaning on Fiverr gigs: http://fiverr.com/gigs/search?query=facebook+likes - there's loads of people at it.
My biggest gripe with Coderwall is that without comments, there's a lot of stolen content in addition to no way to correct someone when they're off about something or give them a better suggestion.
The more experience I gain, the more I tend to prefer configurable logging over interactive debugging, for much the same reasons that I like automated tests and shell scripts. For a simple, one-off job it’s fine to do things manually, but a small investment in a systematic, repeatable approach quickly pays off.
Facebook's "Like" is surprisingly new; I found a Mashable article[0] from the day it was released in April 2010. Digg, on the other hand, is surprisingly old[1].

[0] http://mashable.com/2010/04/21/facebook-f8-2/

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digg
It's the textbook definition of ridiculous. The entire argument you just made is one big collection of fallacies.

I'm openly and viscerally critical of the government, politicians, etc etc etc on many social media outlets, phone calls, emails, other communications yet I have not been impacted in any way. I have not had any of my rights restricted, abridged, etc.

So either I'm the luckiest guy in the "police state", or you're overreacting.
Apple announce 7” iPad
Shopping analytics app backed by Eric Schmidt
Website: https://www.slice.com/

Headline that prompted my post: http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/12/eric-schmidt-backed-slice-reveals-revamped-ios-and-android-apps/

What do you think of this startup Eric Schmidt is funding? Is their product useful and will they succeed?
The Education of Groupon CEO Andrew Mason
Basically, anything do do with the deep part of the oceans.
I believe this may be an [East?] Asian thing; not just Japanese. I know that Koreans also put great emphasis on blood types[1]. One of the first questions you can expect to answer when meeting new people is "what is your blood type?"

As a westerner, I really find cultural elements like this fascinating.

(edit: I should have read the opening sentence before commenting; sorry about that)

[1]: http://www.koreanwikiproject.com/wiki/index.php?title=Blood_...
Apparently he showers with Siri. So naughty.
I totally agree, the best practice is to validate transactions before delivering content.

It wasn't clear from the article if the method could bypass that. It would have to provide valid transaction ids to the app developer's server. That seems a little too sophisticated or impossible, so you're probably right.

I guess we should really just be surprised this wasn't done sooner.
I bet the code sample was from Apple's demo projects so there were like 100 lines of licensing/copyright at the top of each source file.
The 8 Best Days to Invest in Stocks
LCDs are generally cheap...if you buy them in large quantities. Small quantities are a bit harder, especially when they go in and out of production on short notice like they do.

The other cost factor is building the interface between the LCD and the CPU. Usually you're designing a custom flex ribbon and interface board along with a power supply for the backlight. Not many of these cheap LCDs use LVDS, they're all still on old-school parallel TTL.
Screwing Around With a New Telephone That Can Talk to Rocks
Can we just skip the debate over the definition of stealing? It's tedious and pedantic, and I don't think it's very enlightening for anyone.
Wow.. thats harsh!
In the Jobs interview that Mossberg just released, Jobs said something along the lines of, "People need a symbol to latch onto, which is me."

We may not like that people behave this way, but I take it as a mark of intelligence when someone can accept an unpleasant yet immutable fact rather than fighting it or sweeping it under the rug.

Whether the population of HN is such that our collective behavior is immutable could be the subject of endless debate, of course.
When the Pieces Put Themselves Together
I think that downvotes are also disabled for old comments

Downvotes are disabled for any comment more than 24 hours old, but upvotes are still allowed after more than a day. Emphasize the positive.
I believe there's no restriction on pricing on different platforms. If mostly wealthy people have iOS devices, then I might set app price to a higher value than Android just to encourage purchases on Android. I think no one will ever care.
Interesting - babarock is incredibly wrong from the windows perspective, but from the unix perspective entirely correct. (I work in IT and handle things on both sides.)

Comparatively, the recent and steadily increasing reliance on PS is evidence of microsoft's recognition of the utility of a shell for managing their more complex software.

On the other hand, the fact that PS doesn't have it's own readline yet (it's just a wrapper for the cripplingly ancient CMD) and its incredible lack of basic features (just try managing AD users in PowerShell - sure its easy once you've written your own custom script or mapped it to a web interface or something, but there's no built in equivalent for adduser or about a billion other basic UNIX commands).

It all depends on your perspective. I'm glad to see MS moving away from their decade of GUI dependence.
Even though I've been programming for 20 years and it seems very mundane now, I am still regularly sometimes struck by the amazement when I'm reminded about how much code I still have out there running, and how much actual work it continues to get done despite the world changing around it and the now-obvious-to-me engineering deficiencies. Digital computers and software are truly an amazing achievement that transcend humanity's inherent ability to create systems.
These are remembered figures from the 1990s.

If astronomy has inflected I would be shocked. Because that was a pretty extreme field back then. Biology related fields were mostly women.
There's nothing as permanent as a temporary solution. :-D
Welcome to the human race. This is how it works. :(
4 Startup SEO Issues to Be Aware Of
On being a slightly different person, I also speak two other languages which I learned from 18 yrs old and onwards. While I wouldn't say I'm a different person in either of the three, I would say I'm not quite me in the second and third. All the nuances, humor, etc that a person shows in their first language can be lost in translation and therefore being yourself isn't as easy. People are likely to think you are quieter than you normally are (in your own language), basically that you are less of everything you actually are.

It takes a long time, I find, to reach a comfort level in another language that rivals that of how you express yourself in your mother tongue. I've been speaking Portuguese (my 3rd language) at least 50% of the time for the past 7 years or so and I'm still not able to hit my mark, as if it were my own...but I'm close. Btw, these last few years, I speak it 80% of the time.

If I were to venture a guess as to why 'hitting my mark' isn't so easy, I'd say that with most language learners, there's a certain point in your learning where you say to yourself, "I'm fluent enough". Reading and writing, I'm in the 95 percentile in Portuguese but with speaking (seemingly no matter how much I speak), I stay at around 85%.
How to Compete Locally in a Competitive City
Fresh Off Legal Victory, Aereo Eyes Expanded Streaming. First take Manhattan…
Lessons on Team Coding
Just in time to use it for ICFP!
Hallo.js - Distraction-free Rich Text Editor for the Web
Can the digital revolution rescue Greece from economic crisis?
Nvidia  Developer Forums Hacked
MtGox transfer limit maxed out: 40,000 BTC + 40,000 US$.

At current BTC valuation ($7.66) that's 346,400 US$.

By the way, the full Bitcoinica trading platform source code is posted there: http://depositfiles.com/files/2p6zvadzs
Gibraltar: "World's First Wikipedia City"
Empirically, when I tested sort algorithms, Safari makes fewer calls to the comparison function than either Firefox or Chrome, and all of the sorts are definitely O(n log n) in the average case. http://trac.webkit.org/browser/trunk/Source/JavaScriptCore/r... seems to be the real algorithm. Since Safari's sort is stable, I'm guessing that merge sort is being used.

Chrome uses quicksort + insertion sort, as mentioned in another comment. Firefox uses merge sort + insertion sort (https://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/js/src/jsarra...).

As a side note, Firefox's sort implementation slows down drastically when you use a custom comparison function because it has to call from C++ back out to JS (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=715181). Chrome's sort is presumably implemented in JS for this reason.
His HN profile immediately talks about running Reddit's servers. And he's using the same recognizable username. I don't know how more obvious it could have been.
You could potentially detect it in Javascript (if there's no better way) by measuring the width of an off-screen element -- especially if you added a ridiculously-wide glyph to your icon font. Like "if this div isn't at least 3 times as wide as it is tall, my icons aren't rendering properly."
"Almost every CV I see at Empirical Magic highlights the candidates ability to develop Android and iOS Apps. These almost always end up getting deleted."

I agree 100% to be wary of "Jack-of-all-trades", but it's perfectly reasonable for someone to specialize in mobile development... i.e. native iOS and Android mobile development. Now, if they load up their resume with a bunch of other crap then I'd push it aside.
Like all things Facebook I'm sure it wasn't always this way (and won't always be), but these days you can claim any Facebook URL you want for a new page if it isn't already taken, regardless of "Likes".
Well that's only correct if the user and app are in isolated environments. If the purchase is currency in a competitive multiplayer game, then the game experience of others suffer. If there are hosted elements like server-side data to run, store and maintain, than the developer takes on those additional costs without compensation as well.
LibreOffice for Android advances, document viewer is on the way
…not to mention installing an alternate root CA.
>>Io is a mash up of languages with speed similar to lua...

Please provide some examples that show Io speed similar to Lua.
Korean company’s $129 quad-core ARM Linux computer packs a punch
This is a sublime comment. Thank you for writing it.
And you're assuming that the person would not make the purchase were it to cost money. The fact is that the developer is being deprived a) their exclusive right to their content b) the possibility of making a future sale (which is of some non-zero probabilistic value).
Elon Musk's Hyperloop tunnel - reinventing transport
Those groups would spend 95% of time in redundant discussions.

There is a reason why Linux and other large projects came up with the "BDFL" to cut discussion short at some point and actually get things done.
> getting help is tedious, and options are often very long.

This is what bothered me the most when I last worked on MS systems (maybe 7 years ago now). As much as people complain about manpages, having a quick reference, with some verbosity, right at hand is immensely helpful. Maybe not knowing my way around the MS ecosystem handicapped me, but it was always so much more difficult to find a useful quick reference for what I needed in windows.
I wonder what popular iOS Frameworks don't validate in app purchase receipts :)
Fórmula 1 nas ruas de Londres
Bernie Ecclestone garante que o Grande Prémio de Fórmula 1 nas ruas de Londres é mesmo para avançar. O projecto foi apresentado mas há quem ache que é demasiado ambicioso e que não se realizará. Mesmo assim, o" patrão" da fórmula 1 confirma que é mesmo para avançar e que vai acontecer. Ecclestone quer mesmo ver os carros a acelerar em algumas das zonas mais emblemáticas da capital inglesa, como o Piccadilly Circus ou Trafalgar Square. Saiba mais sobre esta novidade em http://www.autoportal.iol.pt
That operating system you are using violates 27 of my company's patents, but I'm not telling you which ones.

Reading that book outloud to your children violates the T&C

You do calculate and pay local sales tax on anything you order from out of state?
Beyond that, the answer to "is copying equivalent to stealing?" is "no", because stealing involves depriving a person of their property and thus preventing them from selling it to a party that would pay.

If I steal a snickers bar from a shelf, the store owner has one less snickers bar regardless of whether I might have paid for it were I not able to steal it.

But copying doesn't deprive the owner of their property at all. It simply creates a new copy of it. If I copy an mp3, the record label and artist aren't deprived of anything.

And, thus, the law makes a distinction.
This is the living proof that the "web app market" is really stratified and the value perception within each customer group varies immensely. Who would tell that a 4 year old scope of features could keep a product alive? Who could possible agree that a system that supports thousands of accounts could survive without "hygienical" processes like OS/DB maintenance, bug fixing etc.? Who could imagine a product with a growing adoption/acceptance not having paid options included as plans to leverage revenue in the long run? Uff, this is all mind bogging to me. Congrats to the author though, this is an incredible story!
This is part of the reason why I ported Vladimir Yaroslavskiy's dual-pivot quicksort to JavaScript (https://github.com/square/crossfilter/blob/master/src/quicks...) for Crossfilter (http://square.github.com/crossfilter). It is much, much faster than the native sort. I would guess that WebKit uses this slower algorithm because it's an easy way to implement stable sort. If I recall, Chrome was one of the earlier browsers to implement a non-stable sorting algorithm for JavaScript and it broke various pages that assumed stable sort (such as tables that let you sort by multiple columns).

Fun side-note: you can use a matrix diagram to visualize how your browser sorts, letting you determine your browser's sort algorithm visually. For example, Chrome uses median-of-3 quicksort, and Firefox uses mergesort. See for yourself!

http://bost.ocks.org/mike/shuffle/compare.html

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mbostock/sets/72157628971703067...
Zombie projects are fun. I created this in 2006 and haven't changed any of the code since, other than the copyright date (in 2010 - I guess I should update that).

http://passwordchart.com/

I didn't add Google Analytics until 2008 but here are the stats since then:

Visits: 304,619
Unique Visitors: 246,368
Pageviews: 361,097
Pages / Visit: 1.19
Avg. Visit Duration: 00:00:41
Bounce Rate: 84.44%
% New Visits: 80.87%

I get one or two thank yous a year from people that get my email from my whois entry.
Overclocked Raspberry Pi running Raspbian OS is lightning quick
They want this sort of problem on http://programmers.stackexchange.com/. It is much more clear cut than what happened to me.

See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4203350 for my quitting stack overflow due to bad moderation.
Where are you on the global fat scale?
>It wasn't clear from the article if the method could bypass that. It would have to provide valid transaction ids to the app developer's server.

Even if this method does manage to bypass Apple's validation, then it is Apple's problem and they will fix it quickly. But it is much more likely that developers just haven't bothered to validate receipts.
You do understand that the decisions made in Lion probably weren't made by Tim Cook? I'm frankly tired of hearing "OH APPLE IS BURNING, IT'S COOK'S FAULT". If everything he's done has been a disappointment why are Apple making more money than ever?

And apparently people were clamouring for it, just you weren't.
Yeah, because of all those people that "review forms" after filling them in!
Reformatted:

me: so what were the reasons that nobody ever used typestate? was it just too cumbersome?

graydon: combination of incomplete and wound up not often able to benefit from much code-path-distance between site of check and site of constraint-enforcement.

graydon: I'm still unconvinced that could not be overcome

graydon: but the result is that using it has effectively caused all callers to do checks just before they call, which isn't much of a win

me: graydon: was typestate the whole reason you started rust in the first place? I'd be really interested to read a retrospective :)

graydon: no, I started rust because I was sick of hacking in C++ and wanted something with a saner compilation model, grammar, safety properties, concurrency properties ...

graydon: I'd used lots of other languages and kept not being able to use them in an industrial setting, because they failed to be similar-enough to C++ in important ways, usually.

graydon: typestate was just a property that hermes had that I liked because it looked like a way to statically optimize DBC, which I like in languages that have it

graydon: (sather, eiffel, some of the C# derivatives)

graydon: I tend to program over-defensively when left to my own devices. make copies of every datum to be local. make everything const. run a lot of internal consistency self-checks. etc. etc.

graydon: (the one habit I hadn't picked up yet, which I'm still trying to, is adequate unit testing and fuzzing ... sigh)

me: graydon: so are you confident yet that even if someone was forcing you to write rust, you would't be sick of it? :)

graydon: my experiences writing rust so far have been pretty positive. it has a number of the parts I like in other languages. the grammar is simpler, the compilation model is better, it's AOT and static, it has algebraic types, clear integer types, is eager and reasonably fast, doesn't force OO style...

graydon: and crucially: doesn't need to allocate / GC like crazy, so can close that residual gap on inner loops without having to hit the FFI

graydon: there are still odd bits we need to whittle down

graydon: oh also the safe references are lovely. and getting better.
Credit Card Fees May Be Put in Place at Retailers
Doesn't work in IE7, at least not the last time I needed to draw variably sized triangles on a page.
I'm not sure you have to update the copyright every year for any particular reason. Anyone know?
>Can we just skip the debate over the definition of stealing?

Sure. But can we all agree developers are free to choose how they license their work?
Interestingly, these are the issues that people have been complaining about on Windows for decades and apparently have been the reason for people moving to Macs. But now they are creeping up there, too. Has OS X gotten worse, or was it just the enjoyment of using something new that made people not see these problems on Mac?