skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Just a few nitpicks:

"After residing in unix-land for almost a year I decided to come back to Mac OSX..."

OS X is a UNIX. A real, actual UNIX.

"...in unix-land no such jokes were pulled."

I am going to guess you were using Linux, which is not, in fact, a UNIX.

For what it's worth, I spent some time in Linux land. Over the course of a year:

1. One update left my system non-booting. After considerable research, I think I discovered it was a grub/kernel incompatibility.

2. An upgrade left my system non-booting. It was an Ubuntu upgrade from one version to the next, which failed with a mysterious and non-helpful error.

3. Another update caused my external monitor to no longer display the desktop correctly. I was forced to use the 1024x600 display on my netbook instead.

I am now very skeptical of Linux (on the desktop) land. All these issues resulted in a considerable time expense for me.

Now I'm thinking I'm happy to pay $x for operating systems like OS X or Windows...
Neuro-Diversity has parallels with physical disability. It's common the hear people say that their disability is not a problem, but the way society reacts is. (For example, someone in a wheelchair may not mind being in the wheelchair until they find a shop that has a step and no ramp. The wheelchair is not the problem; the lack of a ramp is.)

I would tend to agree with that.

I find it harder to agree that addiction is similar. I'm glad that the article points out the serious problems associated with addiction.

I strongly agree that current law-enforcement action for addiction is not working and is probably harmful to society.

The article has a bit of correlation / causation stuff going on. It's hard to know with an individual whether MH problems are being self-treated by drug use, or were caused by drug use, or a bit of both. And it's impossible to say for the population of drug users. When people with problems turn to drugs I think most people would rather solve the problems than allow drug use.
> to the extent that it affects productivity

I believe that's the key. In a similar fashion, we (society) don't want kids to interfere with productivity, so we stuff them in kindergartens and schools so they are out of our way until they reach their 20s and can be regarded as fully productive. And we put old people in nursing homes for the same reason.

I wonder if the current practice of everyone hiring only "the best of the best" is suboptimal for society as a whole, since it leaves a lot of potential productivity on the society table: Someone with a disability might be (say) only 5-10% as productive as the average healthy adult, but add up everyone with some sort of disability and it sums to a nontrivial amount of underutilized capacity.

But I'm not sure. It's a game of numbers: There are administrative costs to hiring and managing (say) 10-20 people to do one person's job. If the "less productive" part of the population is small enough and the productivity difference between "less productive" and "more productive" is large enough, it could be a net productivity win to pay the "less productive" some small amount of money to go away and stop bothering the "more productive".

Which is essentially what we do today.
When I pay more than $100 for an app, I might expect 1 year of support, but for a $10 or $3 app, I don't. Unless you live in the third world, $10 is disposable software.

The contention about the sale last week is just overwrought angst, as it's still a pretty good app, and one that easily pays for itself after a couple of weeks of use, even at full price. From the messaging on the sparrow app store pages, they're still going to be providing bug fixes.
Amanda Palmer Kickstarter Event
Not at all. Did you even read my comment? I said they burned their goodwill.

If it really was enough for them to live on and comfortably leave development, then kudos to them. They don't need that goodwill anymore from us. Assuming they come back with another startup a couple years down the line, which we all know they will, then we'll see if it was a smart decision.
Reification, Macros, Python, and why Lisp still matters
An assembler is a utility with its own dialect regardless of target hardware.
I've been using Postbox, and I couldn't be happier with it.
They did it with reMail (http://www.remail.com/), too.
Wanted: A Smooth Scrolling E-Reader
I'm happy for the Sparrow devs and that they have been able to exit for a (presumably) attractive enough sum. What I do feel sad about is that I think they sold too early. It feels like the Sparrow team stopped on first base, when the ball is sailing out of the park.
I feel the exact opposite. I've had an iPad for a couple of years, and the Nexus 7 for a few days now. I always loved my iPad, but after just a few days with the Nexus 7, I vastly prefer it. The 7in form factor feels much more comfortable to use, while still being big enough to be practical (vs. the smaller form factor of a phone). I'm also loving how customizable Android is. Even just being able to set up a home screen that provides some useful information via a couple of widgets, instead of just a collection of icons is a bonus.
"Mozilla’s consolidated reported revenue (Mozilla Foundation and all subsidiaries) for 2010 was $123 million, up approximately 18 percent from 2009"

http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2010/fa...
What is so bad about Singletons?
I don't have a problem, I never need to send HTML emails on my 2.3.6 Gingerbread phone with atrocious battery life (thanks, Samsung!)
I think its worth pointing out that regardless of how you setup your photo recognition/face identification settings, what happens behind the scene is entirely different thing.

I can see FB user turning all those recognition features off, but yet when FB is given a photo and asked by LE for help with finding you in FB network, FB can choose to comply with that and quickly find you in a stack of 100 billions of photos, providing LE with array of all your photos organized by time and place.

edit: also, I believe there will be more way of abusing photos recognition in the future. Just like Federalies are using Google Earth Maps to find who has a swimming pool and match this information against resident's taxes (whether they paid pool taxes or not) and acting accordingly if they haven't paid, I can see IRS tapping (or at least wanting to tap) into FB photos stream and find folks that bought luxury stuff and did not claim it tax-wise.
It's not JavaScript itself that is the problem IMO, it's just there's too much of it and I think they're bundling a ton of frameworks in with it.
I would say the focus on "addiction" in the article doesn't seem right. Maybe "addictive personalities" would be a better fit, since if you're talking about people's innate neuro-type(?) it doesn't have anything to do with addiction to a specific drug or World of Warcraft or whatever.
Show HN: HN Timeline - A cool way to read Hacker News Chronologically
I imagine there will be something similar coming from Google in the future..
http://www.apple.com/support/mac/app-store/contact/, submit a "Billing - Other" issue, and you'll hear back quite quickly. I've always had good experiences with them.
Binomial coefficient trick
You don't change people, even loved ones.
Personally, I'm glad Adobe are dropping Flash support on Android. Flash screws up page rendering on my PC, requires me to use Chrome just to be able to view net videos, is relied on by advertisers, is slow, crashes, etc.

I'm just sad Microsoft back-peddled on no plugins in IE10.
Hi, I am the creator. You can also slide through time by using Shift + Mouse wheel. I works pretty well on Android devices (not tested in iOS). Hope you guys like it.
The problem isn't whittling down the pool, it is finding signals in noise.
IIRC, Scott Thompson had an open-door policy as well. I remember because in the leaked email he mentioned it after acknowledging layoffs.
Yeah, but the market is tiny

A better email client can only go so far:

- Gmail is already a great email client, I just plug other accounts into it

- I really want a good email client. For Linux

- Outlook/Thunderbird/Evolution may be bad, but they're usually good enough
It's not the device-maker, it's a fault of the GMail app.

Ironic.

The people who would know and care about this stuff are exactly the kind of people who would have wrote the app: programmers.
Dude is in Greece, so no Kickstarter for dude.
1. Install Trueblock plus + cookie monster and disable third-party cookies.
2. You just broke google/facebooks business model. Haha.

goog/fb are relying on peoples stupidity and not going to tools>adons and installing ad-blockers.
> You bought the app in its current state for $10.

I bought many apps on my system for around $10-$20. Some of them have been around for decades. The cost is near irrelevant. If you altered your workflow to incorporate the app, you invested in it.

They abandoned the product, and as such abandoned their users. Devs are welcome to write out long lists of excuses as to why this is incorrect. Doesn't change how their abandoned customers feel about what they did. If anything it just makes it worse.

> new features is nice but not something you are entitled to.

Who is talking about entitlement? I don't think I deserve it innately. I just want it because other companies can provide it. If this group considers an app lifespan of over a year and a half to be "entitlement" then I won't be supporting them anymore. I'll take that money to a dev that just considers supporting their customers part of the deal instead of a fringe benefit.

I'm also not looking for free new features, I just want the app to have a future. If that involves a price increase or paid upgrades I'm on board. The $10 is negligible. The time spent unlearning that app and relearning a new one isn't.
Everyone is addicted to food. Most people are addicted to food substances that are completely non-essential, such as sugar, salt, butter and caffeine. In places where drugs aren't available people get addicted to certain spices to a point where they feel hungry if their daily intake lacks a certain spice.

Some people get addicted to exercise. They feel incomplete if they can't do their nightly run. Exercise alters your internal chemical composition. Just like food and other ingested substances. And coffee, mountain dew, beer, rum, mojito, etc. In the case of some of these its an extreme mix of all sugar, caffeine and alcohol - think JD and Coke.
"Everything works flawlessly out of the box."

It has come a long way then.
> When did we all start pining for everything to be the same forever?

Since time immemorial... it’s one of the few constants of human nature that does stay the same.
Cool! It maybe useful in those times when I miss a day or two of updates.

Would be awesome to have a Mail.app-like link previewer in an overlay.
My post was on the front page for a few minutes, then suddenly dropped down to page 10. Presumably one or more people flagged it -- I'm not sure why, but it happens sometimes.
Got the exact same problem. Actually using Windows Live Mail right now. Really hoping Panos finishes it and releases it!
Context. Their preferences, friends they hang out with, brands they identify with, writing style, etc. will probably be different. These are things that Facebook can see.
A refreshing perspective. I think we really need to identify the "levers" here, like you might be more focused but more likely to be OCD or addictive; you might be great at computation but suck at subtle interaction, etc. I really like the focus on concentrating on emphasizing strengths rather than muting weaknesses - I'd much rather have great focus AND know how to deal with addictive behaviors than just wipe out that characteristic.
That's a great idea. How often do you go back and read through your notes? Does the actual journaling help the most or reviewing the notes later?
He's got a point, but it feels like nutpicking to me, and a bit of attacking a straw man.

I don't think sensible people are arguing that the Sparrow team don't have a legal right to shut down or sell their company as they please. The discussion is over something subtler.

When I'm building something for my users, I see myself as in collaboration with them. And it feels the same to me on the user side. I'm not legally obligated to take an hour to write up a good bug report for a product I like. And I'm certainly not entitled to my usual hourly rate when I file the bug report. I do it because we're up to something together; capitalism is just the mechanism by which we make that sustainable and equitable.

I'm not a Mac user, so I've never even seen Sparrow, much less used it. But in their shoes, I wouldn't have just left my users in the lurch. I would have tried to find somebody to take over the product, or open-sourced it. Not because I was obligated, but because service to the users was the spirit in which I would have started the project.
I hear you on that, and it can be annoying when people knowingly pretend not to know what you are talking about. However, the most groundbreaking things are often not so much the discovery of clever solutions as the recognition of what the actual problem is. In my work creating custom workflow apps, discovering the question is by far the most difficult part.
Judge OKs Nudity at TSA Checkpoint
Some parts already are Open Sourced. Mainly helper libs tho ( https://github.com/everydaypanos/Peacock ).
It might be that they feel Windows is a "real OS" for "real computers", not for phones. Similarly to how iPad versions of apps are sometimes more expensive than their iPhone/iPod touch counterparts, if separate.
How many months of FTE salary are you hoping to bank before you hire? What multiple of an FTE salary are you hoping to get to in monthly rev before you hire?

(I know it depends on the kind of FTE you're planning to hire, but I'm deliberately not putting a stick in the sand because I'm not trying to figure out how much you make).
The original Xbox launched in 2001 and the business unit lost money consistently until it's first profitable year in FY 2007/8 [1]. This is the business unit remember so includes all income including royalties from games and so on.

The same article also mentions that the year before the unit lost $1.9bn (the red ring of death issues hitting it hard).

You'd have hoped that once it turned profit it would have been upwards from there but while it remained profitable in 2009, the figures dropped 66% to a $169m [2]. In 2010 profits were up to $618m and then in 2011 $1.32bn which is obviously great but even if you add those four profitable years together you're only $500m or so over the loss from 2007.

Against that you've got all the development costs in the run up to the launch of the 360 in 2005 and the entire loss making life of the original Xbox (launched 2001 but would have been running up development costs for a couple of years before that at least).

The success recently and the launch of Kinnect will have likely increased it's profitability since 2011, but while I don't have links (though I have gone through it before, I just don't have the time now) I don't believe it's come close to wiping out those original losses.

[1] http://kotaku.com/5026559/xbox-division-finally-reports-prof...
[2] http://kotaku.com/5321559/xbox-division-sees-66-percent-slid...
If $10 is disposable software, then I intend to stop paying for any software except games.

The problem isn't the amount of money I spend, it's the amount of time I spend mastering the software, and building it into my workflow.
To me, it boils down to this: Sparrow is a success story because its acquisition will make tens of teams try to imitate it and innovate further and we'll end up with some even more amazing email clients. (hopefully some of them open source :)
iOS in-app purchase hack extended to Mac App Store desktop apps
Bay Area CA Considers Taxing Drivers
Not paying a judgement against you is not contempt of court.

In the Yahoo Article, the woman arrested failed to show up to multiple court hearings, despite receive notice at the proper address. The fact that the court hearings related to a debt was incidental. Blame shoddy journalism.

The second one, is a blog post, which actually talks about something entirely different from a debtor's prison. It refers to a "debtor's exam", which is a fancy way of saying that your finances are examined to see if you can afford to pay the debt. No prison time involved. Intrusive maybe, but warranted if you haven't paid the debt at issue.
Nokia Asha 311: innovative 3.0 inches Touchscreen Mobile Phone with Pre-loaded
Sinapp a free wordpress theme to promote your app
> That totally depends on your available toolset and experience.

That's either ignorant or boastful (or both). Any decent programmer will admit that they can't build a good and scalable anything in a week from scratch.

If you count your "toolset" as an entire framework that does what you want already, then sure, maybe it's possible. Otherwise you're just being foolish.
Something doesn't make sense. From the ambiguity of your description, it sounds as though you own the code, and that you had no formal business relationship with Sparrow, and that you accepted no money from Sparrow (it is really strange that Sparrow would even encourage you into such a position, and that you would put yourself there --- you left them in the situation where they could turn your work down, and develop their own Windows client). If that is all true, then the code is yours, and you can turn it into a Sparrow replacement. But you are giving off a sense of finality, as if what you wrote is useless. This confuses me. Think like an entrepreneur, not an employee. If you have roadblocks to selling the e-mail client yourself, overcome them (e.g., if you are worried about UI copyright, then change your UI, and then sell it). Once you earn money from it, move to writing a Mac version, an iOS version, etc.
Now, that's a really good idea. But... on the flipside I just wonder where the incentive would be for people to eventually remove the ads.
The DMCA isn't a problem; feel is hard to copyright. And if Google now owns the IP, they don't give two shits about suing somebody making a copycat app of something they abandoned.

The problem is that good UI takes an absurd amount of work. It's the difference between painting a wall and painting a mural. With Sparrow to copy you'd have a good start, but you have to be enough of a UI devotee to even notice what makes a UI strong, and you'll still have to do a lot of user testing and polish.
Big list of incubators
I was in a similar position a few months ago. Then I said fuckit, I'm learning to code. I am definitely not at the level of a $80k/year dev with a BS in CS, but I can make some thing out of nothing now. Try thenewboston.com/mit python/stackexchange.
Wow. This guy is a real jerk.

Why in the world is it wrong for people to feel bad when something they like is cancelled?
If there is no place to go back to (i.e., you just opened the app), back takes you to the home screen.

Besides, just as you can't hide a hardware back button, you can't hide the wasted space sitting to the left and right the iPhone's "go home or randomly open Siri" button.
yeikes.. i was not sure.
oups. sorry guys didnt notice
Some advice for Marissa Mayer
Code Us Some Roguelike in Haskell(Part 2)
I will check it out!
Release it in the wild!
Pride!? As far as I'm concerned, my ADHD can go f&&k itself! I don't know how many times I cursed and cried because I just couldn't focus on what I need to do, instead finding myself doing some BS that didn't matter. I'm more easily distracted than a rabbit, and sometimes am amazed at how little I give a crap about anything that doesn't matter to me in the short run.

There are many factors at play, though, and maybe some people like their "neurodiversity". The way I see it, it's just a way to cope with the fact that these diseases are (currently) for the most part untreatable.
Sparrow bled the product dry a week ago by having a sale and then doing this. It seems underhanded.

This is implies that either (1) the profit made from selling the app a week ago was distributed to the old shareholders before the sale went through or (2) the profit made was a factor in Google deciding to acquire. Otherwise, how could this benefit the Sparrow guys in any way?

Neither of those seems likely. I would guess the Sparrow guys did what everyone advises in this situation: Assume the sale will fall through, until they sign on the dotted line. In the meantime, do what you were going to do anyway.
Chrome OS: Auto 2-Step Verification via Bluetooth
Ask HN: outline for the development of a simple piece of software
Suppose I have an idea for the development of a simple utility -- this could be a program which monitors input from a sensor, processes it, and outputs messages using some communication method, say email.

I know that nowadays there must be many frameworks whereby I can focus on writing the core part of the program in my favourite language, say python, and then once the basic functionality is working, I can throw it in the black box, throw in various user interfaces which the black box requires, and out pops an "app" for download on any platform, a web app, or even an embedded cpu gizmo which functions as a standalone appliance, such as a smoke alarm.

What are some of the best such frameworks, or "full stack toolsets" which are relatively future-proof and popular? In particular, are there any toolsets which accept many languages?

Basically I am asking about the most modern, useful, and fun ways to develop relatively simple programs nowadays and get them out there on several different kinds of platforms.
Reminder - the AngelPad application deadline is TODAY. They're a great program, definitely worth trying for.
Yes, I'm an edge case. I seek out a quality laptop that I can get work done on. That's what we are discussing, no?

As for "saving space", huh? A thinkpad is the same size as a macbook - both are as wide as their screen plus a little extra. The thinkpad is just covered with ugly buttons instead of pretty metallic empty space.
Twitter Bootstrap Accessibility Hack Day
Does Canada Even Need a Technology Sector?
It's an ID10T error, though (IIRC) it's more tech supprot/sysadmin jargon.
One of my biggest complaints about the current state of patents is that it reverses the process of innovation. I have not heard of anyone reading existing patents to get new ideas for software. Instead, we invariably invent first, usually oblivious to the existence, or not, of relevant patents. Then we search (or are informed) that our new product falls within the scope of an existing patent and decide whether to license it or iteratively re-invent to find a solution that does not infringe.

Consider the various compositions of linked lists that are patented (http://www.google.com/patents/US7028023), any of which would be casually "re-invented" by any competent developer. The USPTO should give the world more credit for "obviousness". I propose that the closure of established concepts under the algebra of established compositional operations shall be considered "obvious", in which case we can all go about applying those compositional operations without worrying about stumbling over patented combinations.
What do you mean by update vs. upgrade? Update = bug fixes only vs. upgrade = more features? Or something else?
OP here. Well, it just worked out that I found my "solution" to my problem that afternoon. But I was thinking/researching the problem for many weeks at different levels. And I was finally coming to a deadline.

I agree though, it takes a long time sometimes to solve really difficult problems.