skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Expand your empire to harness the resources of entire solar systems to create vast armies with which to annihilate enemy planets, destroy rival systems and win the Galactic War!"

It will be interesting to see how that pans out. Star Wars: Empire At War tried a similar thought of thing, but lacked depth.
I recommend not using IDs due to selector specificity and the scenario where you most likely will run into annoying #ID issues and think about using `!important`.

I don't think it's absolute blasphemy to use #ids, but try to never use them. Think of it that way. I tend to use them only for #js-functionality hooks, which is also a good-practice to tell someone "don't freaking change this ID or you break the JS."

Tips from http://www.betterfrontend.com
If you make cities livable, suburbs become obsolete (or densify into cities)
Uh? https://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=223100381057791#How-do-I-...?
How anti-competitive lawsuits by incumbents are killing early stage startups
GitHub down for maintenance
An e-commerce concept I believe could work wonderfully is serving markets "near" those served by traditional shopping. For example, when buying furniture, there is either the traditional way of buying a ready made piece cheaply (e.g. IKEA), or get exactly what you want from an artisan very expensively. What if you could get something that is very much like the ready-made piece, but with something changed, e.g. width, depth, material etc?

One could have a showroom and a ready made collection of items, but allow each customer to do some level of personalization. The parts would then be shipped in IKEA style brown boxes, with the pieces cut automatically to shape with CNC machinery. In that way, you could get to a price point where custom made is competitive.

Similarly one could perhaps sell clothes with similar concepts where the user constructs the piece of clothing online (e.g. pick collar style, change coloring etc.). I at least always find clothes that are great except 1) They don't quite fit 2) I dislike a particular detail, but there is no way to fix this in the brick and mortar model.
Be your client’s client
You could actually scale it if I had have used ems/rems instead of px. But you are right, an image is the way to go for production.
I don't get the difference in pricing.

Do Kindle books involve local publishers like printed books? (e.g A book published by Penguin in USA and TMG in India has different prices)
A huge advantage of PostgreSQL over MySQL is PostGIS (the geospatial extension of PostGIS). I can't believe they don't even mention this.
Isn't $3.99 on the high end of app pricing? Instapaper sells for $4.99 and is considered a premium product.

How long does it take to make a $3.99 app? Do you factor in those development costs?

If it's just one person and you make $50K, that's fine. But what if there's two of you?

What's the probability of getting 50 sales/day and for how long? In the event that you get, let's say 25 sales/day, what's your fallback strategy?

awolf, you may very well be selling hundreds of copies a day of your apps at 10 bucks a piece, but the point is that the vast majority don't.
Seriously? They announced it weeks in advance.
But the ones that don't own bikes can't bike in the rain.
Interesting -- I didn't even know such canopies existed; I've only ever seen the bog-standard rectangular ram-air ones at airshows. Are high-performance canopies restricted to certain levels of licensed proficiency? That's basically how it is with paragliding (although the licenses are basically self-regulated and the restrictions are informal). IIRC, at least one of the skydiving wingsuit manufacturers won't sell to you unless you can prove an advanced level of skydiving experience -- and paragliding in a wing that is above your skill level is highly discouraged.

Glancing at Wikipedia, the higher-performance ones sound like paraglider wings -- more cells, elliptical shape. I guess paragliding wing optimization has come full circle back to skydiving parachutes.
Implementing a command that I've always typed: gti
This game looks amazing!! I can't wait for the release!
The upside of the VB6 IDE, used on a recent computer is that it's amazingly fast and snappy (it was meant to run on 1998's PC's).

That's what I kept telling myself when I had to work on a legacy 600k LoC VB codebase last year. If you ever find yourself in the same situation, use the first paragraph as a mantra to keep your sanity.
Ask HN: How do you use Excel?
Most of the planning work such as forecasting, scheduling, budgeting, etc. happens in excel in most organisations.

We are developing a product which aims to give a compelling alternative to planners of any organisation.

My question to HN community is

1) How do you use excel for planning?
2) What features will make your life easier and are not in excel right now?

Any replies would help us make our product better. Thank you.
There are no charges yet either.

We're deep into "if you repeat it often enough people will believe it's true" territory.
If it should prove possible to wipe Windows and install Android or some flavor of Linux on the Surface, I wouldn't mind in the least.
Honestly, Cook was between a rock and a hard place. They had a real hard time doing something with all that cash that justified holding on to it.
Did the trip span the entire month of October? This seems like a pretty awesome itinerary. I wish you could post the dates too, so people could see how many days they got in each city.
OSS - Developer empowerment
This is a list of the top 10 open source software that have made a huge impact on developers. What would be your list?

For me, Arch sure has been the best teacher.
How is Carbon portable? Carbon doesn't run on Windows, and C code runs on Cocoa. (Not sure about C++).
I thought startups did pretty well in '99 and only started crumbling like dominoes in 2001…?
For those of you who've already read SSRat, SSRat's Revenge, Star Smashers, MRMR and the Deathworlds, try Rebel in Time. I was lucky enough to read this in a version with a blank cover, since most versions can't resist giving the plot away. It's also notable for having that rarest of things, an explicitly black golden age sci-fi hero.

For that matter, they're still pretty rare.
No one wants to buy an authoring tool without a player.
To me your line of code seems a bit too clever and complicates the concept of pointers. But we all learn differently so it's cool if it flips a switch for people who are, perhaps, more philosophical than I. I tend to use more boring examples like a card catalog vs a book when I'm explaining the idea of pointers.
I'm in Canada and this worked for me, $2.99, and is now on my Kindle.

Some other Kindle book prices dropped in price as well.
Is Anyone Blogging Their Startup Experiences? Yes, We Are.
From the C standard:

> The definition of the subscript operator [] is that E1[E2] is identical to (((E1)+(E2))).

So array[2] == (array + 2)
Muting the Distractions
App discovery is a problem for consumers as well. My iPad does not show no more than ~40 games. I don't know if I am not looking hard enough or I just can't browse more than that what the app store app shows. I can search for an app, but I have to know the name of the app for that. So for me, if the app does not show in the app store app links, then the app pretty much does not exist.

If I do want a particular application, I search Google first than the app store. Most probably some one has already gone through the pains of finding an app and has talked about it online.

So discovery problem exists for app consumers as well. And there in lies a startup idea in app discovery but I wonder how Apple/Google would allow that.
"255 classes should be enough for everyone"?
Phil, these are very serious allegations you are claiming as fact.

Phil, have Anna Ardin or Sofia Wilén said the sex was rape?

For two full years now, in multiple discussions about Mr. Assange, you have consistently participated in threads promoting that Assange is a rapist, that women have accused him of rape, and that he is charged with rape. Yet, despite being requested for citations showing your accusations are factual, you have failed to do so for two years now.
I was debugging a piece of code and then suddenly started receiving these "gzip: stdin: not in gzip format"... looks like tarball downloads are also offline when github.com is under maintenance. I should keep a cache with all the buildpacks.
Planned maintenance. Nothing to see here, move along.
LinkedIn uses mostly Oracle with a few MySQL databases scattered about plus a couple large custom systems.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Photoshop

Adobe employees created Photoshop 20 years ago, and was tremendously successful until Flash died in the last five years.

Flash and Dreamweaver were acquisition s.
A couple more things:

- There's nothing special about uninitialized pointers in C. Any uninitialized variable, whether it's a pointer, int, double, etc., contains unpredictable bytes left over from whatever was previously in that memory location, and should not be referenced. Not sure why this belongs in an article that's specifically about pointers.

- You should proofread the whole thing and fix the typos that a spelling checker won't pick up, e.g., "garage" should be "garbage".
VPS website link
I am from germany and grew up in the former DDR - however I can clearly see the difference between a government secretly using extensive surveillance to control people and a feature in a service that everyone is free to opt-out of (street view, not facebook photo tags - you should really have to opt-in to the latter). My argument is not about agreeing or disagrreing with street view though. I'm just disappointed with the widespread misinformation that surrounded the whole issue - some people literally assumed that street view would be a live feed into their homes. The media should have done a better job at educating people.

Generally there is a lot of bias against Google over here. This goes as far as publishers and newspapers heavy lobbying for a law that would force Google to pay for indexing content excerpts in Google News. And they almost got away with it. Of course as a publisher you were able to configure how and if Google should index your content (Headline only, headline + excerpt, full content or no indexing at all). However as you can imagine publishers weren't interested in that but preferred Google to pay for referring users to their content. It's insane.

The picture of Google that is painted here doesn't feel fair at all. Of course it's ok to disagree with Google's data collecting behaviour - you're free to use alternative services, there are enough options. But selling targeted ads simply is their business. Think about the alternative: Let's assume Google didn't collect that data - they still need to display ads though. Ads are still ads, but now they are a lot less relevant to you and simply guessing what you might be interested in.
> That was a mistake. Use the default drivers and only install the stuff that's missing. On most of my systems (I installed on 3 different computers at this point), virtually everything already had drivers installed except for stuff like biometric sensors.

for the record, i updated the drivers because it was choppy, and it didn't update anything that could have helped anyhow

> I haven't had this happen even once. Everything is much smoother and cleaner.

are you testing on a T400?

> My laptop boots in 3 seconds. Seriously.

please tell me what magical laptop even has a POST time of 3 seconds.

> Installing 3rd party stuff isn't necessary.

many people will disagree with you. Win8 did not fix practically anything that Teracopy, XYPlorer, Ultramon, Classic Shell, and 7+ taskbar tweaker can add to a desktop experience.

I dont intend to use metro on a non-touch device. period. if you think it's just a matter of getting used to it, i invite you to see how many people have come to love Unity on Ubuntu.
If you're running under Hyper-V, Alt+Home is the same thing as pressing the start button. Otherwise it's highly impractical trying to hit the bottom left corner in a floating window.

You can also turn off all animations in Windows, which may speed up things in a VM (or on an older desktop):

Control Panel | Ease of Access | Optimize visual display | "Turn off all unnecessary animations (when possible)" = on | OK

There's also the "adjust for better performance/appearance" radio buttons that do similar stuff that might help you.
That piece is by the artist Jeff Koons, not Damien Hirst.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Koons#Puppy
I did read it and we're doing this exact thing right now, hope to have the update submitted tomorrow.

-Greg
I might think the same but I'm probably unusual among geeks by being into high end fashion, haute couture and urban planning, and digging the Japan-meets-Scandinavia culture montage Monocle almost exclusively focuses on. There's certainly an air of well meaning but unspoken pretention about it.

All that aside, though, if you skip the fashion and 'the third world's problems can all be fixed using the Scandinavian approach' stuff, there's a lot of great business reading in there.
The Foolproof Dock Connector
"In his 1992 book Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson described a protective airbag technology for bikers and skateboarders."

Below quote courtesy http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=1824 :

"At the same time, she jerks the manual release on her cervical collar and goes into full Michelin Man mode as tiny gas cartridges detonate in several strategic locations around her bod. The biggest one goes off like an M-80 at the nape of her neck, unfurling the coverall's collar into a cylindrical gasbag that shoots straight up and encases her entire head. Other airbags go off around her torso and pelvis, paying lots of attention to that spinal column."
Those problems have almost nothing to do with Flash and everything to do with complex desktop apps not running on mobile. It is possible to write light Flash and heavy DHTML (hello Gmail).
We didn't. We were homeless! ;)
I remember reading a draft of it in high school, and finding a typo, in 2004 I think? Led to my first email interaction with Bob, 'twas my first real correspondence with a professional computer scientist! It led to some very very fun reading PLT reading recommendations that kept me busy! :)

That said, this master tome is not light reading, but I really should take a week this fall to work through it!
Improving Drupal Administration Interface
Start-ups find help from the big guy
Never take advice from someone who thinks it's meaningful to talk in terms of "what women want", as if there's this undifferentiated mass with a unanimous set of values.

Never underestimate the power of generalization. Women are shorter than men. Women are slower than men. Women are physically weaker than men. These generalizations allow for individual exceptions, of course, but they are true in an important statistical sense. They allow us to predict that, for example, most top basketball players, powerlifters, and sprinters will be men. Indeed, it's no coincidence that the recently completed Olympics had separate competitions not only for physically disabled athletes (the Paralympics), but also for women. They could not in general compete otherwise.

Returning to your point, I doubt you really believe that it's meaningless to talk in terms of "what women want".
Despite variation in individual tastes, in general women are attracted to charming, confident men. Moreover, I'm sure you could add a few more adjectives to that list. QED.

How about if we correct that to: "when the girl responds positively to the guy, and he keeps going, it's flirting, but when she responds negatively (or tries to avoid him) and he keeps going anyway, it's creepy/sexual harassment".

I wish you were right. Much of the time, men have no slack in this regard—in today's hypersensitive environment, it's often "one strike and you're out". The costs of being accused of sexual harassment are high, while the costs of making false accusations are low; this leads to predictable results.
As RegEx implies, pointer arithmetic implicitly includes the sizeof(<array type>) term, i.e. given

int* array;

then

array + 1

points to the next int, not the next byte. And so array[2] == *(array + 2). (The fact that addition commutes means that using 2[array] instead is valid and works in C.)
Rob Pike: The Best Programming Advice I Ever Got.
Don't forget MS.
>People here trust the government and distrust companies.

Still haven't learned much have they.
I saw a complaint once that helmets were not perfect -- namely, they could protect your head, but could increase your risk of neck injuries. Apparently, this is only "soft or no-shell helmets", though[1] -- which IMO are junk for that reason -- and frankly, risking your head to "protect" your neck is pretty idiotic reasoning anyway.

[1]: http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00036941.htm
I never really had much of a problem with the syntax, but the point at which the behavior of pointers really clicked for me (after a night of many segfaults of course) was when I realized that when you pass a pointer to a function, you're sending a copy of that pointer, just like with any other primitive type. E.g:

void foo(int *p)
{
/* assignment won't be persistent after foo() returns; need to send **p */
p = (int *)malloc(1024 * sizeof(int));
}

Not sure why my brain had decided to make an exception for pointers for the rule that all variables are passed as copies when I first learned C, but after that I never had any problems.
Managing A Headless VirtualBox Installation With phpvirtualbox (Fedora 17)
Just as with pointer arithmetic (because that's what this actually is) you don't multiply by the size of its elements. This:

array[2]

is the same as this:

*(array + 2)

The compiler knows what the type of data the pointer refers to and can produce the byte offset itself. Also:

"...it's always pointing at the first element of the the array"

Eh... an array can degrade into a pointer when needed, but what does the following produce?

char arr[10];
??? x = &arr;

Is "x" a pointer to pointer to char? From your assessment it would seem so, but in reality the type of "x" is

char (*)[10]

i.e., pointer to array of char 10. An array is an array, and arrays can degrade into pointer types.
I'd wager a good number of people don't want to use C because many intro tutorials are too pedantic, too clever, and/or too intimidating. C doesn't have to be hard. I agree that the OP should work to retain 100% accuracy in his article, but I disagree that he should fledge out "the truth" to its fullest extent for a beginner. There's always a level deeper you can go in learning how pointers/memory/hardware/transistors work. Deciding the extent of information you wish to impart before letting the beginner do some programming is a very delicate decision.
Should the public really be funding almost $1 million for a game created by a private company?
Could this be why vasodilators like vimpocetine improve mental performance? Maybe it's half about getting more nutrients to the brain and half improving the garbage collector?
Required reading for anyone learning Python
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Wrong.html You have to read a bit, hungarian notation doesn't really show up until maybe 4/5 of the way through.
I'm surprised to see that our research made it to HN. If you'd like more details, have a look at the derivations [1] and some supplementary case studies [2] that were not published.

Groxx is right: what we're doing is quite simple conceptually, but we did spend a lot of time figuring out what the right system model was (it had to be both widely applicable and tractable). For example, some subtle variations of the current model are very hard to solve.

--

[1]http://www.pedropinto.org.s3.amazonaws.com/publications/loca...

[2]http://www.pedropinto.org.s3.amazonaws.com/publications/loca...
Is it a must for every programmer to learn regular expressions?
DakaRand 1.0: Revisiting clock drift for entropy generation
Div with opacity <1 , that is an overlay, isn't it?
Ask your local webdev. Restaurant owners love Flash. They insist on it.
I follow the same line of thought to an extent. I like to put an id on the body tag for global navigation purposes, but aside from that I keep the id for js work.
This article tells us that the lawsuits are killing startups, but not so much how they're doing so. I guess we can sort of fill in the blanks, but then why read the article?
, it's often difficult to find a hands-on environment to interact with and fully exploit these vulnerabilities

Well, Google had a good introduction on web exploits, with a sandboxed environment for you to try it: http://google-gruyere.appspot.com/

A bit older, but good nonetheless: Hack this site[1]

[1] http://www.hackthissite.org/
Why is an ad for mobile apps written on a 1500px wide page and 6pt font and style hardcodes that break zooming?
That would be awesome. In a game with such a big scope it would be nice if you didn't have to micromanage every unit.
Stop Listening to Your Customers
Moving reference checks to the start of the recruitment cycle
I guess the true reasoning behind the lawsuit is only known by Fab, but I don't think they're making baseless claims. Whether it's "fair" for them to sue for something like this, I don't know, but this page is absolutely copied from Fab.com: http://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/tomofab2...

Also their statement doesn't address the actual claims, they spend 3 paragraphs talking about how they're better than Fab and how Fab is bigger than them, one paragraph is mentions the accusations "All of our design elements utilize open source frameworks and are developed in-house." but doesn't address the issue either...
> The other alleged victim claims that she...woke up later in the night to find Assange having sex with her, without her consent and without a condom.

Emphasis added. Source: http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2010/12/the_p...

Please note that "having sex with [someone] without [their] consent" is the definition of rape.
Street Dance Classes
Nice tutorial!

Maybe it shows my age, but I am yet to understand why so many developers nowadays have such a hard time grasping pointers, regardless of the language being used to teach them.
Yes you can use a fake US address and set your Kindle country to the US, but Amazon monitors the IPs (and credit cards) you are buying from and after a few purchaes to your fake US address, they'll start sending you letters asking for proof you live there and eventually lock you out (force you to change back to your real country) if you can't provide them.
It's definitely a great museum, I went during a quiet time and didn't get to see the gadgets do their thing. They even put Tesla on the money, I still got a couple Tesla-100's left.
7 Ways To Market Content For Search Domination
While I do think there was almost certainly some loose copying that happened (from the little I know of such, not enough to cause trade-dress problems, however), your link is a bad example. That could just as well be The Standard E-Commerce Theme. About 90% of e-commerce shops have the exact same elements on every page.
I don't know if this is rare or not, but e-ink hurts my eyes with every page turn (when the page gets erased and re-displayed). On the other hand, I find reading on the iPad a pleasure, and the mini's dimensions seem to be a great fit.
Visual C++ in Visual Studio 2012
When printfing pointers you need to cast them to (void\). %p only prints void\ and there is no guarantee two pointer types have the same size. And I can't figure out how to write an astrix.

I also think it is a mistake to bring up memory addresses so early. The first paragraph is incredibly confuses.

A pointer is simple. It's a variable that points at something. You can change where it points and you can change the value that it is pointing to. (&) is the pointer-to operator and gives you a pointer to something.

I think that is roughly all that needs to be said. The all of locations, memory, addresses is just confusion.