skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"But the biggest reason for the site’s success is the use of game mechanics."

No. No no. No. It isn't.

The biggest reason for the site's success is that it provides a really broad range of useful and detailed content in a useable (and search-indexable) format and doesn't charge for it. It helps that there is a community of thousands (millions?) of developers who need this information on a daily basis and keep going back to the site out of necessity.

If the lesson you take from Stack Overflow is "Wow, I should really add game mechanics to my site. That'll do the trick!" you are simply beyond help.
Is Sebastian Thrun's Udacity the future of higher education?
Ce trebuie sa stiti inainte sa va inlocuiti anvelopele?
July 2012: Objective-C Ranked Higher in Popularity than C++
5 Angel Investor Biases That You Can Capitalize On
Funnily enough, updates can still be received if an app is removed from sale or even deleted by the developer.
"Password has to be atleast 6chars and atmost 15chars." - why the 15 max character limit?
Applying 5 Whys To Amazon EC2 Outage
No. Movies are there primarily to entertain. News stories are there to inform. If I wanted the dramatic, drawn-out version, I'd see the "based on a true story!" version.

There are lots of events I could be learning about in a day, and I'd like to be able to get the important stuff out of a new story and go on to the other stuff. In contrast, you can't similarly shorten a movie while sticking to its purpose (usually).
Parts in Google’s “made-in-the-USA” Nexus Q mostly from Asia
Core Location : The Missing Details
This is really great. I (or my employer) would gladly pay for this. I have two suggestions & critiques:

I think that by eschewing video and audio entirely, you're missing out. As apple has demonstrated, animations and transitions are important to the user experience and user understanding. I would definitely allow screenboard creators to import or upload video and audio clips. Perhaps this could be a feature for advanced/paying users.

Audio is pretty important too. Sometimes, explaining things via voice or with sounds are more efficient than writing. You can convey emotion and emphasis through voice that don't come through via a limited text palette. The web audio api part of HTML5 is getting better and I would investigate using this. Again, for advanced/paying users.

But seriously, thanks for building this. I've wanted something like this for a long time.
How To Design Cool Team Pages
The most recent major one I know was the LTS release, in which they seriously broke embedded content like Flash and Java applets.

The issue was known and in the bug tracker several days before the release, yet they went ahead and released anyway. Consequently many sites and browser-hosted user interfaces across the world were broken.

It was then a very long time before another patch was pushed to fix the regression.

I'll leave it to you to decide whether it's worse that such a serious bug could get into the repo in the first place, that they still pushed the update to everyone even though they knew about the problem, or that they allowed sites that rely on these technologies to be broken for so long before correcting their mistake.
No, this was always the case. I never bothered asking any particularly advanced questions, because even the vaguely-advanced questions I asked met with tumbleweed and whistling wind.

But realistically, what else should one expect? The cost/benefit ratio just isn't worth it for the person writing the answer. It won't garner you enough points to be worth the time creating an answer that most readers won't even have the skills or knowledge to assess one way or the other. Far better to throw in your 2p by answering an everyday question with a workaday opinion that's shared by thousands of others. Don't frighten the horses, and wait for the waves of groupthink to buoy your score ;)

(I used to read and answer a fair number of questions in the C++ section, and after a while a definite party line became apparent, presumably due to the same incentives.)
Pangloss.
You can, just hide the tags that you don't want to see. "Ignored Tags", top right on the home page.
Corrupt App Store Updates Giving Developers, Users Headaches
It is remarkably hard to tell especially as your senses get mislead in a plane. This is why there is a very big distinction between VFR and IFR. With VFR (visual) you look out the window and can clearly see the horizon, which way is up etc and cannot fly at night or in weather/visibility conditions.

With IFR (instrument) the training is to ignore your senses because they will mislead you and use your instruments instead even if they seem wrong based on your senses.

Here for example is a plane rolling while tea is being poured. If you couldn't see out the window you wouldn't even know what was going on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xp2Uc9XvmjY

There have been crashes where VFR pilots have flown into instrument conditions and ask which was is up. It sounds incredulous to us on the ground but it really does happen.

The net effect is that the passengers and crew on the plane would not have felt as if anything is wrong.
Maybe the blockade of Pirate Bay has caused much publicity of BitTorrent; that is why traffic increased.
Whether the system is fair or not is orthogonal to the skill of the participants.
Take a long weekend, go get drunk, walk along a beach, climb a hill.

Don't touch a laptop or a iphone till Monday.

On monday, walk into the room with all your team, and brainstorm. They will have ideas. You will have ideas.
Some you might like. By Lunchtime Monday, choose one and run with it. Get the 'enter your email' site up by Monday 9pm, and post a link here.

Here is one for free. :

Dealer app.

You 'throw' yout iphone in a mechanics grip like you are really dealing cards. THe card flicks out of the iphone display and 'lands' on the display of the other iphone sitting on the table across from you. Repeat to the phone on his left etc. Sell the engine to poker sites.

That idea is feasible, but its probably not right for you. But the main thing is get your of your head, you are probably a little burnt out. Get any idea that excites you and release something - you need the endorphins.
Does anyone else find this quite a creepy concept?
They're going to shut it down towards the end of the year, refurbish it, and boost the energy level significantly.

http://press.web.cern.ch/press/PressReleases/Releases2012/PR...
Point 7 is a new idea to me: "Post-accident attribution accident to a ‘root cause’ is fundamentally wrong."
That HN submission links to a Popular Mechanics article that goes over the last 10-12 minutes of AF447's voice recorder, line by line. It's a very detailed read and worth the time. It will also chill you to the bone.
Some people get motion sickness from the e-ink page transitions -- my daughter has this problem. (I do too, a little, but it's less of a problem for me.) Whereas, reading books on the Kindle Fire doesn't bother her.
>If you redefine any word into a fine enough mist, you can make it mean anything you want.

Yea, that's my point.

>So does cream spreading out in a cup of coffee. Is that teleological, too?

Absolutely. Otherwise my previous juxtaposition of entropy and biological systems wouldn't make sense.
Ironically I see this the day after I've decided to quit Stack Overflow due to interacting with moderators.

For the last few months I've been in the habit of searching for algorithm questions, and answering them for fun. And then http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11314077/algorithm-for-ex... came along. It was the most fun algorithm question that I had seen in the last week. I put a fair amount of effort into rewriting a response I learned a nice trick from into a response that programmers with no theoretical background should be able to understand. But 4 moderators decided that it should be closed despite multiple votes, stars, and so on.

I then asked at http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/138678/can-we-please... and the immediate response was that I got downvoted into oblivion, the question got deleted by clearly senior members of the community (it since has become undeleted, but there is no question what the "wise elders" think should have happened), and I got a lesson in what they really do and do not want to see on their site.

I understand what they are aiming for, and clearly what I find fun is simply not a fit for what they want on their site. The site that they'd like me to go to instead is http://http://cs.stackexchange.com/. I looked. It is practically dead in comparison. What little does appear there seems strongly geared towards computer science students. Given that I'm self-taught in CS, I doubt I'll stay there.

So, goodbye Stack Overflow. I wonder how many other people you don't see there any more.
Actually, it says to me "functional languages are unfamiliar, therefore they're bad". Particularly the crux of the essay:

Any halfway decent programmer can quickly glean the general intent of most imperative code — even in a language he or she has never seen. While you can certainly figure out what functional routines do by looking at them, it may not be possible in a glance. Unlike imperative code, functional code doesn’t map to simple language constructs. Rather, it maps to mathematical constructs.

What's actually the case is: any decent imperative programmer can quickly glean the general intent of most imperative code; equally, any decent functional programmer can quickly glean the general intent of most functional code. Furthermore, anyone with a decent grounding in merely algebra can quickly glean the general intent of well-written functional code. The same cannot be said of imperative code.

As for ugly syntax... well, I don't know Erlang, but that Haskell is incredibly badly mangled. Haskell can be beautiful -- substantially more so than most languages, I'd say. The same code, reformatted:

-- file: ch05/Prettify.hs
pretty width x = best 0 [x] where
best col [] = ""
best col (d:ds) = case d of
Empty -> best col ds
Char c -> c : best (col + 1) ds
Text s -> s ++ best (col + length s) ds
Line -> '\n' : best 0 ds
a `Concat` b -> best col (a:b:ds)
a `Union` b -> nicest col (best col (a:ds)) (best col (b:ds))

nicest col a b | (width - least) `fits` a = a
| otherwise = b
where least = min width col

There. Lovely.
I have a Kobo [1] that was an impulse purchase at deep discount when a Borders I was dragged to was having their close-out sale.

It's fine -- very convenient -- for "standard" reading.

Load an O'Reilly text, and the code examples extend off the right end of the display. Which doesn't scroll (perhaps "pan" is the better word).

I also favor others' comments, that when reading some texts you want to "flip" back and forth for reference.

I've waited for years for something mainstream to come along with e.g. a PixelQ display. That's what I'd prefer: Reflective, preferably with a higher DPI, but quick enough to enable convenient scrolling, panning, flipping, etc.

Yes, I could have been more proactive in acquiring something, personally. Nonetheless, herewith my major dissatisfaction with current "e-paper" e-readers.

I'll probably end up getting a Nexus 7. I just wish it had a microSD slot. But I can work around that. (And, I'll buy the 16 GB model.)

It looks to be good enough, without spending $500 and having a super-obvious, "look at me"/"steal me" device.

I also hope it's jailbroken. I want a device that does precisely and only what I want it to. The security problems people are having cause me worry, but so does the corporate over-lording that is being extended to locked down platforms.

--

[1] The Kobo does have a fairly open, Linux-based firmware. It's modified from another upstream company's. That company's version now offers a landscape mode; however, Kobo only does landscape in PDF mode (dog slow, by the way) but not in ePub mode.

Some people claim to have wedged the other company's firmware onto the Kobo. There's also the possibility of modifying their too-large font selection for [code] text. But... that all involved more steps than I was willing to go through at the time.
Apartment renting - CL sucks, it is filled with spammers. Brokers charge heavily, and in general, I don't feel like paying a lot of money to a broker, as I don't think they add too much value (it is different when buying a property though)
I totally avoid any kind of tutorials for our products because I'm using Camtasia and it takes me all freaking day to do a 2 minute recording. This is a way better solution for me. Going to give it a try for sure!
The parody startup hipster: Brad Bradstone, CEO of Yellow Yellow: http://doublestealth.blogspot.com/
Parascript was a Russian company, but they moved en masse to Boulder in 1994 (IIRC). They are (were?) a group of very smart engineers, very strong in DSP.
Has lots of potential. Congrats you are onto something here.
Don't play games with this one. If I were in your shoes, I'd pull my binary, too.

You do not want to be waiting on the App Store Review team to fix this. I'm one of the developers in Marco's post; it's been 24 hours and all I've gotten is a boilerplate response from the App Review team.
BYOD, Virtualization, Mobile Will Make 45% of Networks Obsolete by 2016
Unfortunately, this web app reliably crashes Mobile Safari on my iPad 3. Perhaps the logic is done clientside over the set of all my ~1000 friends?
It's what Facebook was originally built for and then failed at making it easy to use...
The Benefits and Risks of Exercising in Polluted Air
Just intonation vs equal temperament: a simple contrast
The only reason I didn't try this is because when you use these apps it shows up as "so-and-so is using relationbook" and I don't want everybody to see that. I know there's a way to hide it, but I never trust that it hides it completely.
The patent reform law included restructuring of joinder rules, which will prevent patent trolls from casting a huge net over tens or hundreds of companies (like Lodsys did) and dragging them all out to Texas in a single suit. Instead, trolls like Lodsys will have to sue each target one- by- one, at much greater expense, and in each suit will have to make a case for venue; many patent lawsuits will probably now occur in venues favorable to the defendant (if only for logistical reasons).

The patent reform bill didn't fix everything, or even most of the problems, but it's not accurate to say it "barely changed anything".
Functional View and Controller Testing with RubyMotion
Higgs boson found
When did you see Youtube comments the last time?

Anyway, you are wrong. Five of that ten comments would be about how their authors hate Russia and are eager to abandon it.

And you are wrong twice because both kinds of comments seem to originate from real people. This is much more sad than any propaganda machine.
Maybe it's just me, but I find the e-paper Kindles to be absolutely terrible reading experiences. The text is still relatively low contrast, but the real deal killer is the refresh flash. It's jarring and disruptive and it is nothing like a page turn.
I don't see your problem.

They are trying to put specific questions to specific stackexchange subsites. So, there is http://programmers.stackexchange.com for conceptual questions , http://cs.stackexchange.com/ for "easy" computer science and http://cstheory.stackexchange.com/ for "hard" computer science.

I don't see the problem in trying to split the horde of questions into more subsites.
"At CloudFlare TTFB is not a significant metric."
People might think that this article is written to educate masses.
The thing is - if you take webpagetest.org and run speed tests with and without Cloudflare, in MANY cases 'Load time' will actually be slower WITH CloudFlare. And the biggest difference will be in TTFB.

Why does it happen? Cloudflare works as a proxy, taking HTML from your server and returning it to a user in optimized form. Because all requests go through their servers - there's one additional hop. With this hop TTFB increases significantly.

Although I agree that TTFB is actually not that important from end user's perspective, the reason why Cloudflare wrote this article is strictly marketing.
Is it any different than going through all your friends' pages one-by-one?

If it matched it with outside data (like Foursquare to see how often or when single friends go to bars or even identify which ones at which times), that would definitely be creepy.

The problem with the similar "Girls Around Me" app from a few months ago was it used all public Facebook and Foursquare profiles. As far as I can tell, this is limited to your own friends.
I'm most excited about automated agriculture, they've already successfully prototyped many robots that can do things like pick fruit /vegetables, milk cows and so on. It could be as soon as 20 - 30 years that we see food costs in first world countries drop to 1/10th of what they are today. As the cost of goods is just raw resources + human energy and when the raw resources is only the cost of the land (+ setup costs and maintenance which will eventually be dirt cheap too) the final product cost will drop dramatically.
I think you're completely missing the point.

This is the system, and it isn't fair.

The outcome of a criminal trial being strongly correlated with your bank balance is pretty much the definition of an unfair legal system.
Has anyone done a comparative review of sqlmap vs skipfish?
It's exact same thing that happened when the mainstream found out about iOS 5's notification system - there was a big hullabaloo about how revolutionary it was, despite it having been present in Android in a more complete form for almost 3 years.

It's probably going to happen again with turn-by-turn navigation when iOS 6 is released.
If you set it as "only me" no one will see it.
Thanks, on it...
If you click over to my profile, there's an Amazon reading list I made up to answer the question "what should I read up on to get better at appsec". I think WAHH is #2 or #3 on it.

If you're a talented programming (we especially like talking to people who are good in C, but we're happy to meet anyone) and you're seriously interested in working from Chicago, NYC, or SFBA doing appsec, but don't feel like you have the background, drop me a line. My usual next step for people who I think would be ready to interview with us but for some web app knowledge is to shoot them a copy of that book. Infinite free books is a small perk here.
Are you measuring your social media buttons?
I think the problem here is the motivation for reading. I enjoy reading fiction, love watching movies etc. But I clicked the link to the Wired article to learn something new. If I get entertained too, it's just a bonus, but it's entirely optional. Journalism even has a term for what I ask for, they call it "inverted pyramid"[1]. All the petty details intended to spice-up a story are welcome, but they should be placed appropriately, and should be easy to skim over. And this article is a perfect counter-example.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid
our applet doesnt play nice with linux...but its in the works
http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"Don't abuse the text field in the submission form to add commentary to links. The text field is for starting discussions. If you're submitting a link, put it in the url field. If you want to add initial commentary on the link, write a blog post about it and submit that instead."

Please?
Doesn't iOS 6 add delta updates for apps? Or was that still only for system updates?
TRUE STORY:
Today I walked in dreadfully into the office because this is the day we start planning, designing and building training materials for a very large $1 million+ enterprise software implementation I've been leading for over a year. Before I start my day I go online to get my daily dose of HN stories and SHAZAM! Like a miracle out of IT Heaven this amazing tool comes out out of nowhere to punch my daunting work burden in the nuts! My work just got so much easier!!
When are you guys enabling the premium features to export to PPT and PDF?? I need those PRONTO!

Keep up the good work guys!
Awesome! get some pricing info up there so those of use that want to use it can get in early on a good deal.

feedback: Have a native English speaker (english major, english professors, someone that likes to debate the finer points of our pitiful English language) read through all text facing the user. I have found several type-o's that are distracting and take away from the quality of product.

an example: "the caption text will be _empt_ and you will" should be _empty_ .

awesome job!
Face Book Song http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92zTigbWnME&feature=plcp
you mis-spelled RelationBook as RelatiobBook in the authorization dialog
The article features a picture of japanese phone screen.
But why not achieve that filtering in app? After all I'm not interested in Android development or Cocoa questions but they still appear in the feed - I simply learn to ignore them or add filters. Could this not support these questions as well?

Clearly the question and answer was useful to someone, code related, interesting to others (upvotes), so excluding it only serves to discourage great contributors, with the proposed solution being division of the audience.
Improve Your Home Cleaning - OnToplist.com
The reasoning given, that font vendors don't want people linking to their fonts, seems pretty wrong headed. This is just another stupid standard making life harder and hurting productivity for web developers.

I've never managed to fully understand the purpose of any cross-domain rules on the browser. So many can be easily (relatively) circumvented, why waste people's time at all?
Whilst the situation in Russia is undoubtedly horrific, let's not pretend that corruption isn't endemic in the rest of the world; some counties have just legalized it to some extent.

Every time there's a discussion of corruption, people make this statement, and it bothers me (I'm originally from India, which has a lot of corruption too). You cannot just equate the two. Corruption as described by the GP is like a cancer which has metastasized all over the body; corruption in the West is like an isolated blotch of melanoma on the skin.

So yes, there is corruption everywhere I guess ( perhaps even in Sweden and Norway and Switzerland); but it's not at the same level as that in Somalia and Russia.

The thing that draws entrepreneurs from all over the world to the US is that it is almost trivial to register and start a business here; and even if you're wildly successful, your "corruption overhead" is minimal (the occasional $35K dinner for $PRESIDENTIAL_CANDIDATE notwithstanding). This may not be the case in ALL industries, but in general it's true.

Consider for example Google. Till a few years ago, despite revenue in the billions, Google didn't even have a lobbying presence in DC.

This is not to say that we should not be alert. The way lobbying (i.e. corruption) is playing out in DC is a troubling trend. If things are left unchecked, there could come a time when, for example, instead of putting a competitor in jail (as in the article), companies would just get laws passed which kneecapped the competitor. We're not there yet (there might be exceptions), but we have to be vigilant.
If this had audio capabilities my company would also gladly pay for it to create tutorials of our web product offerings for our user base. Looks amazing, I'll be following this project closely, keep up the good work!
Open source is best when it comes to mobile app analytics
Mag+ Now Allows One-Push Publishing to Multiple Platforms