skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That would be expressionism you have in mind, or perhaps surrealism aka Dali. Impressionism is about one's "first" or "direct" impression of things as you look at them, not about how you imagine/idealize them later on. Impressionists took this "first impression" business pretty seriously. Your painting most likely would not be called impressionistic if you painted it your studio, from a photograph, or from memory -- you had to do it en plein air (out in the open, from real life).

The idea prevailing at the time (which partly came from the physiology of vision actually) was that, on one's first impression of something, the brain only perceives patches of color (a 2D image), that are only processed after a split second into something more resembling a 3D representation. Impressionists tried to capture that supposedly "pure" first image. Everyone tried to do it in his/her own way. Seurat, for example developed pointillism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Seurat-La_Parade_detail.jp...).
Why should I go out of my way to fix a broken product? The appropriate response to a phone running broken software is ignore it and buy one built by someone competent. Buying a broken phone only encourages the manufacturer to make more, regardless of what you do with it after they have their $400.
"Not everything can or should cost a buck."

When I talk to many developers they tell me that everything should be free.

How do you recalibrate the consumer's perception of the value of software, when so many developers don't value software either?
And it really is creeping up on us! At work we have moved over from WebEx meetings to Google Hangouts, which we picked up because we moved our business email and calendar to Google Apps... It's kind of scary how dominant they are.
How much would Sparrow have had to sell for in order to make a $25mil offer from Google not seem attractive? Would you have still bought Sparrow at that price?
This is very very true. Their overall top grossing US rank (on iPhone) was stabilizing in the 500-700 range (after generally declining for months[1]), which equates to tens of thousands of dollars per month from my understanding. I'm sure they made some from their Mac app as well. This is GOOD MONEY, don't get me wrong. But you'd have to really love self-employment to take this over a $2M payout and a $200k comp package (stock, benefits, etc).

If I were to guess, these guys were also buried in support from paying customers who felt entitled to it. What are the economics of technical support for a $2.99 app?

[1] Source of the rank data-- requires an account but worth it if you're interested in this stuff: http://www.appannie.com/app/ios/492573565/ranking/history/#v...

Here's a screenshot if you don't want to create an account: https://skitch.com/webwright/eenji/sparrow-rank-history-app-...
I think this is not about the engineers that built the company, but about the VCs that funded it. Usually the contractual conditions put the VCs in control of the situation so they can take an exit when it presents itself. Sometimes the original owners get nothing out of these acquisitions.

Edit: clarification.
Auto-updating templates? Sounds good.
Functional programming in JavaScript ecosystem
If ever the mods should change a title it should be this one. Given the shootings yesterday, and the connection that has via swombat with the bombs on the trains in London, this is a poorly, poorly named article that bears no true relationship with the content.
One worry is since iOS is so dependent/tied to the app store for updates or reinstalls, if the developer pulls the app from the store, you can never redownload it, and you are then stuck trying to maintain a copy that you backed up and hoping you don't lose the file. And if you don't plug in to a PC you wont be able to reinstall the app. This happened to me with smule and "Magic Fiddle".
This is just the Ember.js README from GitHub.
While I'm totally stoked for seeing this concept come to fruition, these are the worst reward tiers I've ever seen on a Kickstarter campaign.

The $5 minimum should be $10 or $15, and there needs to be a tier between this one at the $50 tier.

And the rewards themselves? For $2k, I get "Access to a private forum to influence product direction." For two grand, I can't get a phone call to the CEO? I get access to some forum?
Has SVG not been around a lot longer than HTML5? The article says "This is a HTML5 tag to draw a vector graphics"

And pretty sophisticated JS libraries have been built to make use of this technology in web applications. The best IMHO is d3.js: http://d3js.org/
The reactions across the board are quite disappointing, to be honest.

All you can do as a customer (or as anything, for that matter) is give up the illusion of control.

This is the Sparrow story: A fantastic product was built, and exchanged for money. The people behind the product were recognized, and were acquired for a significant amount.

Everyone is a winner, and customers move on to the next thing.

What's more worrying is our reaction to an email client going under: it's clearly a sign that we don't have enough well designed products for a system that's been in mass use for more than a decade.
That site has a very interesting look.
Asus Turbocharges USB 3.0 With SCSI Technology
Agile is about working with large numbers of people on code that's constantly changing. The examples you use seem like code that gets written once or as part of an individual project. Unit tests gain most when they get run multiple times by different people over the life of a project.
Yes, the Sparrow acquisition is a great illustration of how the whole "you're the product" cult was broken from the start.

No matter how much you are (or aren't) paying you are always both the customer and the product. Even Apple, who gets plenty of money from their customers directly, is willing to pimp out their customers as "400 million active credit cards" in the right context. At the other extreme, Google devotes an immense amount of effort to continuously improving search. They know that they live and die based on how happy you are as a search customer, even though they aren't paid even a nickel from searches directly.

I'll say it again: we're always both the customer and the product. There's no escaping that. Our only option is to decide which vendors' tradeoffs we are and aren't willing to live with. And black-and-white moralizing about whether or not "you're the product" gets in the way of picking the shades of gray that work for you.
Lots of interesting stuff in that blog, be sure to check it.
Stop distribution? With what, magic? Hasn't everyone learned by now that you can't stop distribution of digital data?
I completely agree with the fact that there are no well designed products for email, now that Sparrow stopped developing new features - hopefully someone gets a cool idea and puts it on the app store soonish.
Google Adsense Approval Hack 2012
Wow, these are some great examples to work with. Thanks for this :)
In recent memory, I haven't needed a knife to open an apple box easily. (Not counting brown outer shipping boxes.)
> Suggest they flash a non broken version of android onto their phone

They would have no idea what that even means.
You mean like the Astronaut MMO that got all the press earlier this year, and now even the forums are gone?

Yes, that is the risk with Kickstarter and any other investment. It's just there seems to be less visibility into the viability of the company or person behind the project than most investments. Since I rarely go beyond the $20 range, I only feel mildly burned on the ones that don't go anywhere. For folks who hit the maximum (I've seen some with $10K options), I suspect the hurt is a little more real.
The Droid 1 was stock, and it was a great phone. I'm sorry Motorola started skinning it.
How will new face recognition technology discriminate between identical twins?
How can a European company sue a European company in ... Texas? If I were the judge I'd kick it out of court on shear lunacy.
I blame Google. They are spending way too much time on the JavaScript for what should be basically a static HTML page. Why isn't my spacebar working to pagedown? It's amazing they're getting adoption from techies.
> This is another big factor. I tell anyone who's interested in Linux that the best laptop for Linux is a ThinkPad. Everything works flawlessly out of the box.

I wonder what Linus Torvalds uses as a laptop ... Oh noes !!!

http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/19/an-interview-with-millenium...
I have an idea: how about a "this is interesting, save it for later" button on ads? So if something comes up that's useful, you can minimize the distraction for now. Maybe it would wait a while to put another ad up. Advertisers still pay per click in the "looking at it later" phase.

Of course you would need a natural way to put them back in front of the user. Some of my app ideas already have a natural "deal with it later" mode. I'm sure Facebook could come up with something.

Thoughts?
If you’re not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.

I don't think it has 'failed', as the article states. Paying for the software is necessary but no guarantee. If we slide back to everything being free, things will be worse. But even if we do pay, we cannot forget one very important thing: We are dealing with very small companies and all of the volatility that comes with them. The situation is simply exacerbated when the employees of that company are highly sought after.

It doesn't take Google to buy out a little company. They can just choose to get other jobs or spend their time other ways, get bored with the product, have a falling out, anything. Sparrow could have just as well said, "We're stopping all development on the email client today. 100% of future effort will be on games". And that's why boring enterprise software from MegaCorp still generates huge revenue, because they can go tell a GE, Chase, Honda or McDonalds something LittleCo can't. They can tell the customer that they can expect a specific level of support and life from the product, and here's 20 years of history to prove it, and that they're signing on with a $5 billion company that's not easily bought out. The cool stuff on the bleeding edge may also be fleeting. Large companies want stability, and I guess people using certain software do too.

Side-note: FOSS is a very different animal with interesting characteristics.
I could barely get through this. It's just overflowing with arrogance and cockiness. This kid is probably unbearable to be around.
Lessons Learned from Accelerator Applications
Domain seizure?
I like to use jQuery to animate elements with good cross-browser support, its syntax for selecting and manipulating elements is more convenient than the standard method, and jQuery load() and ajax() are extremely convenient. Combined with Backbone.js and Underscore.js, the sky is the limit, and the code produced is even relatively readable.
Perhaps, but in past times you would live your life in a small community of people who would "know" you and would know all kinds of both positive and negative things about you.

What you are looking at in the future is the possibility of having people all over the world who don't really know you at all making judgements about you based on incomplete (even if still comprehensive) and possibly out of context information.

For example "cyber bullying" where what would once be bullying from perhaps a small group of people at a school can be escalated into cases of kids having thousands of hateful messages from people who they have never met posted on their facebook wall or their pictures turned into memes or whatever. For example the "star wars kid".

For example: Imagine going for a job interview in another country and having the interviewer say "you're that idiot who did X" because that is basically how you are known to the world despite your meaningful work in some unrelated area.
Okay, one last thing. Richard Branson, a business genius, said "Praise people and they flower; criticize them and they wilt." So praise and cheerlead and mentor relentlessly. And, like the best baseball managers, put people in positions where they can succeed. I could go on... :>)
At their scale, even statistical advantages pay off.
The real problem is that most acqui-hire teams disappear into BigCo never to be heard from again until they resign a few years later.
Out of interest have you tried Etherpad Lite? It has video conferencing from tokbox (only supports 4 people tho).
Indeed it is not obvious. For example there are clearly cases where there are solutions with the same worst case and different worst cases. And in the slight variation where the cost of dropping an egg is the height at which you drop it, the solutions that reduce worst cost and average cost tend to be different.
Suspension of disbelief: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspension_of_disbelief

"This is a math puzzle plain and simple."

You're being asked to accept that it's possible for an egg, or some other fragile object like, say, a baby, to survive a drop from the first or any other floor, and proceed to solve the math problem.
SlySoft does a good of this.
For me it's Etherpad (But I'm biased)!
Skype/MS should just make it fully open source then, for the betterment of the web, instead of using it for potential silly legal fights in the future.
> iOS users should be able to download and use any app prior to purchasing it.

Apple already does this. But only in Taiwan: "Apple Offering 7-Day Refund Policy on App Store Apps in Taiwan" (June 2011)

http://www.macrumors.com/2011/06/27/apple-offering-7-day-ref...

> my gut feeling is that Apple makes a ton of money from crap apps that go for $0.99

They barely make a profit on the App Store. They make money selling hardware. The software is just an appetizer.
I wish people would stop comparing G+ and Facebook. Even though Google+ has a social network app, G+ is really the identity and behavior-tracking glue of a horizontally integrated system. I wouldn't be surprised if G+ the social network remained a niche product and was viewed as a failure, while G+ the identity and behavior aggregator became a shashing success.
I'm stuck with Google Mail, but I too am moving away slowly from Google. I hate how Google makes it difficult to have more than one account. Although this is mostly because my primary account is banned from YouTube (without explanation), and also from Google Play/Checkout/Wallet (failed debit card transaction??), and also from Google Checkout for Merchants (without explanation).

I hate being unable to buy Android apps :(

Edit: I just bought an email account from Namecheap.
You can never stop the determined. But the courts could certainly pull the app from the Android store.
I've mentioned this elsewhere in the comments, but you're extremely unlikely to ever see a non-native speaker write "greater then" rather than "greater than." It's a pseudo-homophone (they really are pronounced differently) that just doesn't exist to anyone picking up English as another language. More than that, it's confusing as hell for them to read because it's a form that makes no sense. "would of" and "would've" is another that comes to mind. Mixing "lose" and "loose" up seems fairly common nowadays, too.

You're right in that those not fluent in English make mistakes that seem odd, but I don't think I've ever come across a case where the error wasn't with a different tense or form of the verb. I.e., the sentence is structured a bit oddly, but it largely makes sense. The same cannot be said of "would of."
I love your words "...five lines of algorithmically beautiful code..."; this beautiful functional minimalism is what engineering is really all about; and it solves problems not only in the present but also in the future. And code that isn't there runs really fast and never has any bugs...
The variation I do on this is cycles of train and forget. So I look at a problem, read up on it, have a good hack around the edges of it, then deliberately go away from it and leave it be and either focus on another unrelated problem, or just go and have fun, or whatever. Then, once I have left the problem alone for a while, I go back to it, often starting right at the beginning again, but with a much quicker learning curve and a deeper understanding the second time around and many solutions seemingly at my fingertips. Repetition of this process seems to be one of the best approaches to problem solving and learning that I have found and it also lets me retain information for far longer compared to the same time being used in constant study.
Incentive Pay Considered Harmful
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000070.html
I am sorry if I came off as disagreeing with your main points because I actually don't. Just to say a couple of things: At least from looking at such cross-functional bio/c.s. teams work here in Grad. school, I have seen two types:

1. Where the bio (in this case wildlife) people have extremely limited ideas about what happens during a simulation or modeling experiment, this leads to ridiculous attempts to say develop multi-agent models for hyena cooperation which if you read the paper make so many ridiculous assumptions that it doesn't really make sure what if any utility can be obtained as inferences from those models.

2. The other much more rarer situation where the bio people have a keen understanding of the basics of both C.S. and Math and are well aware of the limitations of what they are getting into. Such collaborations usually turn into using a C.S./Math (usually grad. student) person in order to delve deep into the technical specifics which the bio guy could understand with some help.

Yuri's article is interesting and while I do agree that some cross pollination of ideas (such as is happening in systems biology) is useful. I am not so sure I am that enthusiastic as he is about drawing so much hope from the engineering analogy (because there is an element of silver bulletism to it:).
Same here, I wanted to buy one then found out it had no USB device support.
Tarsnap is a dream job. :-)
It is an obvious foregone conclusion that a copyrighted image is going to be used less than one that is in the public domain.

Given the administrative hassles of getting a permission, not to mention having to make royalties payments, all ensure that this is the case. Surely, to stop people using the image or whatever is the very purpose of copyright in the first place?

Where is the utility and novelty in 'research' like this?
GuiA means that you are currently profitable, and if things work well for you, the company will continue to be profitable. I was only suggesting talent acquisition as a safety net for the day when thing don't go so well. If it never happens, we are all happy for you!
Not that it would have prevented this, but the App stores really need to work on an paid upgrade process. It's hard making $10 a head on software, especially when that's all you're ever going to make. I can't believe paid upgrades aren't a part of at least the Mac App store yet.
From the FAQ:

'No, CCC is no longer donationware. In order to grow our support and development team, we have made the transition to a commercial product. This will allow us to to continue offering frequent updates to our software, including new features. This will also enable our stellar customer support to remain that way. Transitioning from donationware to a commercial offering underscores our commitment to deliver the best Mac OS X cloning and backup utility on the market.'

http://help.bombich.com/kb/overview/ccc-license-registration...

From the release history:

'If you have not "donated" to Bombich Software in the past, this version of CCC will impose a 30-day trial. In order to grow our support and development team, we have made the transition to a commercial product. This will allow us to to continue offering frequent updates to our software, including new features. This will also enable our stellar customer support to remain that way. Transitioning from donationware to a commercial offering underscores our commitment to deliver the best Mac OS X cloning and backup utility on the market. […]'

http://help.bombich.com/kb/overview/release-history
The only time I've ever used a function key (F1, F2) in a Mac application was in Photoshop. Most Mac applications use Cmd+? shortcuts. So in effect, the volume/brightness controls have their own dedicated keys.
>What do you think of museum and art curators?

I see curation as a necessary evil given that museums and galleries have limited space and funds. So I don't see the curators as pretentious; the job has to be done by someone, it wouldn't be feasible to let each viewer choose for themselves. And AIUI the curators are usually hired by a museum rather than self-appointed.

>Do you think all 'designers' are pretentious?

No, I exaggerated; there are good, humble designers out there. But a large proportion of both the HN crowd and designers in general seem to have a very inflated view of the importance of design, and their own abilities. If everything designers said here was true, amazon.com would have about 1/8th of a user.

> Maybe the person does have better taste than you in some regards? What's so wrong with that?

Something about this particular instance seems to cross my mental line between recommending me things to read (which I like) and telling me what to read. I think it's just that the policy seems unnecessarily exclusive; publishing a cool theme for anyone to use would be great, as would "here's a list of good blogs you might want to follow". But the undertone I'm picking up is "svbtle will contain everything worth reading". Maybe I'm reading too much into it.
Ahh..the good old "Let us step back and stare at the problem" trick that my learning theory professor used. Not sure what is particularly profound about it, external observation of it always (to me at least) made it sound somewhat mystical. I feel like the "hack here" is to have so much intuition for the problem that you defocus slightly and approach the problem using your "peripheral vision" (Using terminology from Paul Zeitz's excellent book on problem solving :).
dd isn't for everybody. I had for example no idea how I could get features such as scheduling and archiving of backups with dd.

Sure, if you know're a shell, dd etc. guy, CCC might not be for you.
Everything valid - but as time passes there is sometimes just no way around upgrading your software. The fact that there could be an immediate problem was ignored by me, that's true.

Since they want to keep it alive (in its current state) I believe they'd fix something critical.
Ex-NSA worker Bill Binney claimed that intercepted domestic communications were privacy controlled and anonymized with encryption to comply with the law until a warrant was issued, but later the anonymization protection was removed.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/23/110523fa_fact_...
If Sparrow would be your only option to access your mails this would be true.
I agree with the overall thrust, though the printf debugging technique is much more suitable for a relatively deterministic program like a compiler or command line tool than for many interesting programs like OSes and network services.
Privacy from family members and privacy from strangers are not the same thing and I venture say that people value the latter much more than the former.

Edit: And besides, in small knit societies the lack of privacy is reciprocal. It's not the same thing as having a small group of people who control massive data centers and have the capability to pick up on some dirt on anyone within hours of requesting it.
When it comes to group problem-solving, actually, this seems to be a benefit of using online collaboration instead of in-person. When people's mouths aren't running, there are less things proposed, and they are overall higher quality. (http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=159763)
Unions are evil evil things.