skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A great idea + app; but I can't consider using it until an android comes out. I can't rely or assume that the people I meet with have an iPhone.
You mean, important enough for HN to see it and vote on it?
I get that the claims of patents are supposedly very specific, and what I'm asking is if someone can actually explain why and how this particular patent has anything non-obvious in its claims (without all the ridiculous patent jargon).

I've just read claim 19 about 5 times. I also studied Figure 5, which seems to lay out the process in a way that's a little easier to understand.

I have absolutely no idea how what is described in claim 19 is not the "idea" of inertial/bounce-back scrolling.

As far as I can understand, the layperson's explanation of claim 19 goes something like this: drag some content on a touchscreen at the speed that the dragging finger is moving, once you hit the end of the scrollable range, start slowing down the speed at which the item moves, and show a different background to make it clear you've reached the end of the list, once the finger releases move the list back into place.

I'm trying sentence by sentence to translate the words in the patent claim to english that I can understand. And it sounds to me like this is the general idea of this method of scrolling. There are no specifics, no specific easing algorithms, no specific method of tracking the finger's movement, no method of actually implementing this at all.
The article could use some more neutral and left-leaning "Worst argument in the world (TWAITW)" examples. I'm fairly neutral politically, and the piece sounded left-biased to me. Note that I'm not stating my opinion here; the author even apologizes for it in the article.

Perhaps he is simply at a loss for examples? We could help. Here's a neutral one (from the comments):

- "George Washington was a traitor!" (should probably be used BEFORE the Martin Luther King argument; in extremely conservative circles, even mentioning Dr. King's name rings the "ding! ding! liberal!" bells)

Here are some left-leaning "argumentoids" that you sometimes hear and that have elements of TWAITW:

- "But guns kill people!" I realized shortly after reading the article that this is not only an instance of TWAITW, but shows the logic behind the retort "Guns don't kill people, people kill people". This might be rephrased as saying "yes, guns kill people, but not in the way that murderers kill people, which is to say, with malicious intent. That requires a person, so let's concentrate on whether removing guns from the economy will prevent those with malicious intent from obtaining them."

- "Evolution is a fact!" Yes, but maybe not in the "totality of the truth is plain for all to see" perspective. It is true that PARTS of evolution are plain fact, but the creationist has a point that some of the more fantastic parts of evolution are harder to directly observe in the same way as, say, gravity.

- "Reproductive freedom is a choice!" Perhaps, but you can't just dismiss the argument at that point. Choice can mean "choosy moms choose Jiff" or it can mean "the difference between life and death". Saying it is a choice ignores the fact that not all personal "choices" are accepted by society (i.e. it is your choice and you can make one, but sometimes there are consequences).

- "Tax breaks for the rich are unfair!" Perhaps, but there are many levels of unfair. You must argue why tax breaks for the rich are at the same level of unfair as, say, separate water fountains for whites and blacks and not unfair as in "it's unfair that I always have to pull the cookie jar from the top shelf just because I happen to be the tall one."

Note that all of these lean more toward "equivocation" than the author's technical definition of TWAITW. But then, perhaps that's what TWAITW boils down to.

Also, I note in all of these that they are all caricature arguments. They are all cliched. The arguments in the article have a similar nature.

This leads to a disturbing point: it is helpful to have TWAITW as an analytical tool when having a serious debate, but if you are "debating" with a person who shouts soundbites like these in your face, do you really think they are going to understand or care if you try to explain to them that they are using TWAITW? Seems like more preaching to the choir, unfortunately.
It does render a lot faster now.

Are you using any plugins like W3TotalCache for WordPress? I'd recommend it, if only until this story falls off the frontpage.
idea for improvement: Use colspan to cut down on the number of cells
I would definitely prefer a text over a video.
I recall a good pg opinion somewhere that reflects a sort of inverse of this point. We should reject abstract categories for our identities because once we do define ourselves by them, we start reconstructing our thoughts and beliefs to actually fit the stereotype for that abstract category. Much better to focus on the actual specific beliefs without committing to a tribal identity, both for your sake and so that other people are less likely to commit the submitted article's fallacy against you.
Things to know when starting out as a sysadmin
Cool idea. :-)

Clearly not aiming for smallest representation though. ;-)
https://github.com/discountgenius/pixeltable/blob/master/pix...

First off, the p class should just go on the table instead of every pixel. Then use a descendant combinator "table.p td".

Next, I would probably index the image (like a gif) down to a few hundred colors, create a style for each, and then use a base62 (0-9A-Za-z) representation of the index as a class name.

You can further reduce the content size if you can use ids instead of classes, but even with classes, you don't need the quotes around the class names.

There are probably more ways as well, like using a fixed-width div container and filling it with floating <b> tags instead of using a table.
See also this news posting:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4438373

Walter Zorn made a drawing library that churns out pixel sized DIVs.
also consider using css classes as a colour palette
Great post. Whenever I remember, I try to thank people who criticize me, so they'll be willing to do it again. They really are taking a risk.
More improvement: Use that with "background: linear-gradient(...)" and you've got the makings of a truly baroque image format.
It's possible you might end up with an equivalently effective person, but I think it'd be easier to transition from coder->marketer. I suspect that the knowledge required to be useful is about 70-30, or maybe 85-15, heavily on the coder side.

To pick up some marketing ideas that will start moving the needle on your startup, read a small book. You'd probably already know enough to start iterating on 3 or more techniques.

To get a marketer to pick up the most basic coding skills, start with flow control and variables. It could be a month before you're useful, in one language only. Then understand HTML, SQL, the server-side language, maybe jQuery, plus maybe security so you don't start adding lots of useful but dangerous code. Understand performance, so you don't kill the server with a loop in customer-facing code. Not just be able to click a "add new test" button, but integrate ABingo without hassling the rest of the team (if that's the best tool for the job). The point is: whatever it takes. You need to know enough technical concepts to be fast and loose with whatever will move the needle best. You're making few marketing decisions, but many technical ones.

So: fully agreed with your other comment. Marketers will be well-served by getting into some of the code, because it'll enable them greatly. But if I were hiring a marketer->coder, I'd be a lot more wary.

Up until today, I've disliked the growth hacker "thing". But these posts have clarified it for me. I'm generally irritated at the non-bschool vibe around here, but on this issue I'll lean heavily on the coder side.
This is adorably cute, but Yahoo! won't be a great place to work until they begin creating great products again.
Is any of that still true today? This isn't 2009, TC is a factory now and they are pushing out 2 - 3 dozen pieces a day on mainstream tech news and what giant "startups" and corporations are doing.

The last part I guess is the same as it always was but the volume is so big now you'd have to be falling down the front page before you even realize you're on it, and VCs must have better things to do than check back every 30 minutes for the next article.
Fashion items, along with things like recipes and the plots of novels, are categorically excluded from patent protection, including design patents. You can copy that handbag all you want, as long as you don't violate the trademark on the label.

Software, being a fundamentally creative enterprise, should be included. It doesn't fit into the patent system for the same reason that granting a monopoly on a plot twist makes no sense.
That's what my mom has been telling me for the past 3 years, with the most recent reminder over the phone tonight.
Nobody seems to have mentioned
- Kapow/OpenKapow - http://kapowsoftware.com
- Dapper - http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/dapper_quest_to_unlock_...

I remember giving up on YPipes back then because it was always down (or denied access). Did more with Dapper and OK
Thanks!

Yeah, this was more of a proof-of-concept. I haven't really looked into optimizing yet.
So what happens if you simply refuse to play along, and give your superior an intelligent argument as to why you're doing so?

From the stories I've heard from friends at MS, there does really seem to be a sense of office-politics-gone-insane there.

At some point, it seems there has to be a backlash.
Here's the bit i never understood with this 'growth hacker' meme: if you're working on or for an early stage startup then everyone is a 'growth hacker', right? if your people aren't working to grow your product/service/community then what the hell are they doing?

To the self-proclaimed and aggrandized 'growth hackers' - the OP is right: You're a marketer who took (and absorbed) a stats class. Stop being so fucking pretentious. Joining facebook (or whatever) after the inflection point and claiming responsibility for its growth is like joining apple four years ago and claiming responsibility for tripling the share price.
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I found pipes/YQL very useful for doing some ajaxy things with sites and services that are not on your domain (since most browsers don't allow for cross-domain ajax calls, you can request a JSON version of a site's markup via YQL). However I didn't find the service 100% reliable. It will be great to have more services like this out there.
The internet seems to be a fan of being overreaching in proclaiming fallacies in my experience. Sometimes it feels like you can find at least one misuse of "ad hominem" on every comment thread on reasonably popular sites. Similarly, many people like to dismiss arguments by just saying "slippery slope" and moving on.

As you mentioned, slippery slopes are not inherently invalid. In fact, the real fallacious use of a slippery slope is hardly related to it being a slippery slope at all!

Assume a slope A->B->...->Z. Further, assume that each step of this chain is known to be true with 100% accuracy. That is to say that we can perfectly predict that if A happens then B will happen and if Q happens R will happen. Thus, simple transitivity shows that if A will happen Z will definitely happen. If Z is complete destruction of the Earth you probably won't find many people saying that it will be perfectly okay if we do A because slippery slopes are invalid.

However, slippery slope arguments often have a much smaller probability of occurring at each step of the chain. You often get things like "if we don't have a death penalty then people won't be afraid of killing people so murder rates will go up so you'll get pregnant and die". Clearly there is no part of this chain that occurs with probability 1 (except, as Mean Girls tells us, getting pregnant->death). In fact, most of the chain is fairly low probability and composing them as such makes it even smaller.

To make this a bit clearer again, let's take our A->B->...->Z chain and make each step of the chain have a .9 probability. If A happens, B will occur with .75 chance and if Q happens, R will occur with .75 chance. Since there are 25 hops on this we can see that the probability of Z occurring given A is actually .75^25 = .00075 (ish). Even if each individual step seems reasonable (I mean, hey, it will happen 3 out of 4 times!) the full composition is just laughably unlikely.

However, it seems that GP was actually talking about a continuum fallacy rather than a slippery slope as we've discussed.
I definitely agree that long term follow-ups are important.

For me the best productivity hacks aren't adderall/redbull/caffiene pills, sleep cycling, standing up or locking myself in a hotel room. And it's not knocks on those methods per se, its just that I have a very hard time doing them with enough regularity to be relevant.

The best productivity hacks in my experience are still simply staying positive[1] and hiring interns.

[1] which includes things like adequate exercise and rest, but nothing outlandish.
PG: is this going down this year?
What I do is invert the colors on the iPad at night and turn the brightness all the way down. The screen on/screen off button can be programmed to be the trigger. When I press it 3 times quickly it inverts the colors. No need to jailbreak for this hack.
On windows I use a combination of flux and prefbar on Firefox to turn toggle the standard colors on and off, with a custom windows color theme.

On linux I use the "negative" plugin to compiz, with a keystroke (win+n) the whole window goes negative. Great for reading hacker news at night.
So lets call it a quantitative marketer then?
It describes the role more precisely and it sounds cool.
I know almost nothing about her, but Marissa Mayer doesn't come off as a Steve Jobs or Elon Musk-like "visionary" who will drive Yahoo to unexplored and unexpected market openings. Her approach seems to be to make Yahoo a great place to work, attract and empower talent, and let said talent churn out great products. Some would say that she should focus on changing the market direction of the company, and that's certainly one of her responsibilities. At the same time, I think what she's doing is admirable and valuable. It's certainly putting Yahoo on the map in the communities that matter. Let's hope Yahoo can ride this momentum and make something of it!
Apparently they do send a text link.

>> A web link is sent as a text message to anyone that does not have the app so they don't miss out. http://hipvite.com/learnmore
Nothing has changed. The people who want to tell stories, tell them.

But for all the complaints about short-form internet media like texts and tumblr, twitter and facebook status updates, at least people are writing. That's a lot more than can be said for the time before all of these things existed. Before social media, texting, and blogging, you could go weeks or months without writing a damn thing other than what you had to write for school or work (which often amounted to nothing at all).

Now we have a way for everyone to discover for themselves whether or not they are interested in longer-form storytelling. You can't tell me we don't have many more storytellers telling many more stories today than we did in the time before writing became something that suddenly everyone regardless of social status did for themselves every single day.
The Guinness Book of Computer Records [1976]
As humans, we can do better than a compiler that gives up at the first missing semicolon. We can keep reading and respond to the rest of the comment with more than a link to the wikipedia article on ad hominem.
How to make email fun again
this is interesting, http://www.h3manth.com/content/convert-any-image-html5-canva...
An example:
http://www.osctools.net/jsbin/milbthqo/1/edit#javascript,htm...
There was the unintended XSS on level02 - granted, you could only XSS yourself, but having a space in the filename you could inject whatever you wanted. :)
Tim Cook continues to chip away at the Apple empire.

R.I.P. Steve Jobs.
The Pipes/IFTTT concept screams for a more open solution, it's too important to be proprietary. I'm always frustrated when I want to use IFTTT but they don't support the services I need.

A simple protocol based on HTTP, JSON, and WebHooks could be pretty slick.
So basically, this is saying "don't generalise". Or am I just generalising?
I've worked at a few companies where a fresh CEO asked the rank and file for a list of problems, suggestions, ideas, etc. But I've never seen it make much of a difference. I fear Marissa Meyer is already toast -- just like Yahoo.
> TC coverage won't make or break you.

I've often heard the opposite (in reference to Twitter's success for example).

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/05/business/media/michael-arr...

http://www.sfgate.com/technology/businessinsider/article/Mee...

Perhaps things have changed since then.
Actually, I wouldn't be terribly happy if my company gave me a daily free lunch. It would be a disincentive to get out of the office and away from my co-workers once a day, which is something that I think makes me happier and more productive. (I work in a big city, where diverse types of food are a short walk away. If you work in an office park in Silicon Valley, I can see why a free lunch might be more appealing.)

Also, having a cell phone paid for by my employer might give my employer the idea that I'm always available to them, which I don't want to encourage. Since I'm a developer of software that doesn't get deployed to the web in real time, it isn't likely that an issue can't wait until the next work day. For dire emergencies, they have my home number.
I don't know why this fixation with Instagram or Pinterest.

There's nothing new on photos. We're doing this since the 50's. You had 36 exposures per roll to tell a story, then make a photo album or a series of slides. And you had to make each photo count. Given with Instagram is so easy to upload a photo, it's actually a bad exercise in storytelling: it's full of mundane pics of people shooting themselves at the bathroom mirror.

I'm can't reason why Pinterest is in this article either. A big portion of the content on their site is not original, just products and wishlists.
Here are the things that are proven to make you happier
I think I've been following the project on github for over a year. Is this new?
Qt supports CSS stylesheets: http://doc.qt.nokia.com/4.7-snapshot/stylesheet-examples.htm...

Qt has also QML, which gives developing "native" apps bit web feel.
Sure. The main point I took from the article was a frustration with the way people feel a euphemism is needed for "marketer" (which does seem rather elitist), and that avoids that, and also sounds less trend-following-buzzword-happy than "growth hacker" (which to me always makes we wish I could hack another few inches of height on so that I could dunk a basketball).
Is there any evidence to go along with any of this dude's claims? He makes three points:

Point 1 isn't about Google fiber.
Point 2 has been self-evident since the day the product was announced.
Point 3 is incorrect. Google's promise on wiring public libraries and schools has never changed.

Crap article. (Disclaimer: I work at Google, not on Fiber).
It's still a marketer.
The article links to a great article about that too.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/ase/schelling_fences_on_slippery_slo...

Personally, I feel slippery slope is among the worst rebuttals to an argument and brought out way too frequently on HN. "Y is wrong, and X comes before Y, therefore X is wrong too."
It's different in a way that growth hacking looks at retention and marketing doesnt.
I don't think it should be baked into the language. With a good macro or compiler plugin system, you can implement composition as a library. This is already the case for languages like Haskell, Racket, and Scala.

The more general ideas that underpin a composition implementation are the abilities to access class/interface metadata at compile time and to generate code programmatically at compile time.
I'm a sucker for these types of "resume websites," so I clicked over. Some thoughts:

1) I literally have no idea what your app does. At a minimum, add one sentence about the app itself!

2) Is the aim of the site to really get featured by TechCrunch or do you actually want it to go viral amongst HN types? I ask because you give no reason for TechCrunch (or anyone else) to cover your app. What is special about it? Why would TechCrunch's audience be interested? Most of these types of websites have some type of "intro letter" explaining the benefits to the intended audience, which you are currently lacking.

3) Your video is pretty good (and helps me figure out what the app actually does!)...so why do you have it hidden in the bottom corner of the website and behind an additional click at that? Put it above the fold and make it easy for people to actually watch it! This could also solve point #1 mentioned earlier.

4) This is more of a personal thing, but I took issue with the line "we even made this better looking than our site!" Why should this random microsite be "better" than your app's real website? It made me curious, so I started looking for a link to the main website. I didn't find anything immediately and only then realized I had to click on the logo. So I clicked over and I think your "real" website is actually much better. You don't have flashy slide-in graphics like on the microsite, but you have a good concise description of the app and then a well-made link to the App Store. Might want to take some inspiration from that for this microsite.

Hope this helps and good luck!
Calories are a measure of heat. Not Energy. You measure calories buy burning the food in question and measuring how hot it raises the temperature of a given amount of water.

Magnesium burns a lot hotter than corn therefore it has far more calories than corn yet eating a pound of magnesium a day is not going to make you as fat as a pound of corn a day.

So please stop with the "calories in, calories out" simplification.
Yes, once I used Dapper more than Pipes http://open.dapper.net/
> Would you prefer a proprietary black box to do your layout for you?

How many times have you look into webkit or gecko source code to fix layout problems?

If you think a layout engine is complex enough that need to be open sourced, you are doing it wrong.

Layouts should be simple and intuitive. Not a cluster fuck of div's and hacks.

> You can embed webkit and gecko in a desktop app.

Which is basically an html5 app right?

> I'm guessing you've never actually written a layout engine before. They're notoriously hard to get right.

Yes I have never written anything like that, but I can tell you native app development (Visual Studio, XCode) layouts are much simpler and more powerful. The problem with HTML and CSS is that they are eigher document flow based or absolute position. It's hard to do relative or responsive layouts right. It's easier to do it right in native ways. There are much richer containers, control groups and docking options.

> a pre-processor (such as LESS) for the placement of Box A, or if its position is a dynamic property then you can set it using JS.

Oh wow, Javascript for layout, right.
Can someone explain why Fibre isn't being released in Silicon Valley first, where they would almost certainly find buyers? If its a case of scaling it up, they could release it community by community, couldn't they?
Used to before I started doing it professionally.
As long as you say that this what you are doing, I agree. Too often, however, people content themselves with just pointing out the flaw or fallacy. This gives the impression that they mean to argue with the central point.
Scala vs. Java: Just as fast, less code, harder to program (regardless of skill)
What makes you say that she's not a visionary?