skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would add three more lessons (from my failed startup):

1. Cash is King

2. Get feedback early

3. Business = Trust

3.5 Design is just as important as functionality.

The first one I learned the hard way - I put off monetization in the hopes of advertising revenue picking up [See Footnote 1]. The second one I realized was probably more crucial to attract and retain evangelic customers [Footnote 2]. And the third was went my server crashed and I lost everyone's data [3]. The last I learnt a lot more recently when I launched my book: Ice Cream Startups: http://sellfy.com/p/9j2z The reason for this was explained in great length here: http://startupframework.tumblr.com/post/26696517701/design-a... and Joel's take on usability: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/NotJustUsability.html Short version: Affordance is the user being able to intuitively use your software/product through it's shape/design/etc. One example is how horizontal bars on doors suggest a "push" action, and a vertical bar suggests a "pull" action. Developers, myself included, often ignore this only to eventually learn: if a product feature requires a user manual, scrap it.

--

[1] [PDF] Case study on Tivo - Freemium vs Advertising models: http://w4.stern.nyu.edu/emplibrary/ModelingTheEffectsOfAdAvo...

[2] Guy Kawaski's The Art of Being a Mensch - Chapter 11 in The Art of the Start, Richard Branson's advice on freebies: http://www.canadianbusiness.com/article/74952--good-customer... and Zappos: Delivering Happiness: http://deliveringhappiness.com on creating evangelic customers.

[3] Not everyone get's it right: http://www.geek.com/articles/geek-pick/500000-gmail-accounts...
Stellar Wind / "The Program"
The top secret NSA program to construct a data graph of the entire American populace.
The future of online media is annoying parallax effects?
On front page already:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4425989
Perl gained a feature for fixing communication with the Magellan probe
The very idea that you can patent 'Bounce back' tells me that the patent system is broken.
I think the question is _why_ is it important to be semantically correct, not do positioning in the html, and to separate areas of concern. Note - I agree with you, I'm just clarifying the question.

I think the answer is really only two things:

1) Accessibility. A screen reader can probably work better with semantically valid markup. I've not much experience with these, but it's my assumption.

2) Ease of development when making changes. This one is purely for the developer, not the end user. It's probably true, but there are definitely cases where just throwing a table at the problem is simpler than CSS, especially for someone not up on HTML5.

What else?
Images of Rock Icons recreated with their CDs
You can't say President Obama never returned Google's favors.
Undefined Behavior Versus Teaching
There's something about a fountain pen. I have a few, and without fail I write more neatly, and make fewer mistakes, than when using pencil or ball-point. I think it's that they demand slightly more concentration on mechanics to make them work, and that's enough to make a big difference in the writing quality.
The class of all classes not containing themselves
A few friends and I have been talking about renting a house in KC. We'd just come in whenever we want to go focus on hacking and take advantage of the awesome connection and low cost of living.
Mathics links: use the online version at http://mathics.net/, download it and contribute at http://mathics.org/
You are right. As a dropout, I only learned recently how many of my friends were struggling under monthly student loan debt of $50-80k with payments of $500-800. There goes car money, poof, or 20-45% of a mortgage payment for a reasonably nice home in an urban area like Philadelphia.
No matter how you slice the numbers though, the fact remains that if it's economical to pay for someone's car-optimised battery pack, then it must be even more economical to build a giant fixed battery.

(Since we know that the latter isn't economical, then that also indicates a problem with your numbers - I suspect that for one thing, insurance couldn't be economically provided at $12k/pack if all of those packs were being used for daily peaking storage).
With or without side effects, a function call says "go to this other place and do this other thing and bring back the result". That's a kind of goto – a structured kind that's always paired with a return. This is higher level than the old-fashioned GOTO but that doesn't make it complexity-free. It's still possible to create spaghetti with it.

Maybe that sounds pedantic, but I don't think it is, because interaction complexity needs to be minimized just like other kinds of complexity do. When you call a function you are implicitly drawing a line between the caller and the callee. Imagine a picture of your program with all those lines drawn at once. That picture ought to have some order to it.

Side effects are a different kind of complexity. If pure function calls are like going camping and leaving nothing behind, then function calls with side effects are like going camping and burning a fire or littering or what have you.
Integrating input[type="file"] with the Filesystem API
They don't care about keeping the country safe, they know _they_ won't be safe if everyone knew all the shit they've been up to.
It's humorous to me how many people attempt to turn anything remotely criticized into a positive by justifying it with effort. Since you escalated into name-calling so fast, I can confidently say that you don't have one hundred times more respect for anyone or anything, you are simply under the false notion that those you support actually try harder.
That doesn't explain sustainability now.
It all makes sense when you realize that tech/startup media is Cosmo and People for nerds.
Refactoring can't create functionality. What you are saying is not compatible with the theory if entropy.
Eclipse is a high level language running on the JVM, and not a bad one.
Six Useful Sites to Learn Programming in PHP
In a way I find this kind of manipulation tragically sad, but in reality the true tragedy is the cognitive decline associated with Alzheimer's. I'm glad nursing homes have figured out a way to mitigate some of the problems until scientists can cure or prevent Alzheimer's for good.
The quest for perfection may be futile.

Agreed, and I think it's easy to observe that fact with nothing more than your DNA example. In biology, perfection will always be outcompeted by "good enough."
Even if he's misguided, he's trying to contribute. His description of someone finding a problem with his code could be written by someone who is a poor coder and doesn't understand why. However, it also doesn't sound like the people who rejected his pulls were very convincing at explaining why.

I think the point of the article is that the pull requests he's made came to nothing other than rejection. Nothing about the experience led him to believe he should make pull requests in the future. Even if he's a poor coder, I think that's a poor result and is worth talking about.
Armstrong Drops Fight Against Doping Charges
As terrible, sad and somewhat terrifying as it is, I find Alzheimer's disease quite fascinating. For those who want to find out more, Louis Theroux's documentary on the subject is very insightful.
I put my money on it being a Back To The Future 3-style letter from the past
Google+ for the iPad is amazing - buttery smooth, big beautiful images and easy navigation.
A Student's Smart Microsoft Rebranding Is Better Than The Real Thing
Funny how that works. There are no shortage of people who would like to talk to you. Heck, if you're ever in the Los Angeles area, drop me a line. I'm btilly@gmail.com.

For me the best moment was when I met pg at SXSW in 2010, said my name, and he knew who I was. I've been reading his stuff since before Hacker News existed, so that was a thrill.
Java's heavy syntax for anonymous classes and immutables actually discourages functional programming even when that's a strongly desired approach by the programmer.
Typo: "break a lease" I'm assuming?
Hacking the AR Drone
Your mashup is so 2007 Let APIs to developers
To take your increase in traditional unemployment numbers and build on it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_incarceration_timeline-...

Incarceration rates: it's a hockey stick! Incarcerated people are all unemployed, and most of them, if in the job pool, are likely to be in the minimum wage or similar bracket.

The equivalent of a $3.80 minimum wage in 1980 is also nearly $9 today with inflation, so the group of true "minimum wage" workers is much larger for yet another reason.
It is a compassionate approach.
If Livestrong dies, that's a setback in our war on cancer, right? Not exactly.
Thanks for the review - saved me from even going to their website.

I have the attention span of a 12 year old without their Ritalin for all these "YC app du jour" sites these days.
Eh… I have one I use daily (a Pilot/Namiki retractable nib) and it certainly hasn't made my handwriting any better. It is nicer than a regular pen though.
I used both fountain pens and pencils when I was in school and I had similar results, regardless of the tool. Though my writing wasn't exactly beautiful, but it was pretty readable.

Regarding the ball-point pen, when I switched to it, I had to write fast, so the writing might have deteriorated from both the speed and the tool.
Gson solves that problem by parsing Json to objects or untyped hashmaps. It's OK to mix a mini language into your program.

ImmutableMap.Builder gives you almost syntax-free hash map creation.

You can use constructors in a loop or Lists.transfrom for data-driven construction. Not exactly like JavaScript, but gets close.
That's probably true. I imagine it would also be true to say anyone using a new search engine would be those throwing unique queries at it most of the time too.

With that in mind, and with the tech world generally driving adoption of players in the search space I can't see the approach working. Nobody would switch when the queries are massively slower, even if they were 99% accurate.
Manjaro Linux: Arch Linux For Newbies
ثورة 24 اغسطس اليوم فيديو وصور لأهم واخر اخبار الثورة
I watched without the subtitles and had no idea what it was about; nonetheless, i got to listen for 5 minutes to a language i never heard before and it was beautiful!
Why ? It is distinctive, unique and definitely non-intuitive. We have had scrollable lists on the desktop for decades and not once has anyone designed the entire scrollview bounce back when you reached the top/bottom.

It's also not the only way to implement this concept as the newer Samsungs, LGs and HTCs all have their own version of it.
Or you can do that, proposing a trivial enhancement, and have

1) The maintainer tell you "that isn't the designed behavior" (no kidding it doesn't do that now, that's why I want to enhance it!)

2) It marked it as a duplicate of the last handful of people that wanted similar features

3) The ticket closed

I'm looking at you, jquery-ui
Siri Is The New Clippy
I mentioned that in my second footnote.
Take it from this gringo, you can tell he's being at least a little facetious even just watching it cold with no knowledge of Korean language or culture, let alone the artist's discography. The only question is how much of it is skewering a group he's not a part of versus how much he's including himself in the group being lampooned. I'm assuming it's at least a little of both.
It does appear that the patents that Apple is guilty of infringing are actually standards essential (FRAND) which does not bode well for anyone.
George Orwell is 'too Left-wing’ for a statue, BBC tells Joan Bakewell
Sheldan Nidle says"RPlanet's Truth is Emerging" 08/23
Like others, I found this quite light on information. The best writeup I've seen of how to integrate machine learning into an actual infrastructure of code, machines, and people is this: http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-keys-to-operationalizing-a...

Full disclosure: I was impressed enough upon reading this post that I messaged Brandon (the author) and am now interning at the startup he cofounded that solves problems that heavily involve machine learning.
There was a good radiolab podcast about this:

http://www.radiolab.org/blogs/radiolab-blog/2010/mar/23/the-...
Is this loophole on wireless net neutrality the same issue a that Google got pilloried for caving in to Verizon about last year?
Engineers achieve longstanding goal of stable nanocrystalline metals
The cool ones, at least.
I second the fiverr reply..and I will buy your first gig on there..
The birther thing is straight up racism, not education. Maybe a little of both, I suppose.
Plugins in C
Surprisingly restrictive, as (last I recall) Brazil has a tit-for-tat policy against the US: restrictions the US puts on Brazilians coming to the US Brazil likewise imposes on Americans going to Brazil. You can, however, buy citizenship for $100,000 (At least I recall researching this. I can't find a reference for at the moment).
It happens every hour on partisan "news" shows.
A fountain pen is generally more expressive, but it takes a lot of time to control and you can't rush it.
New SEO Toolbar For Chrome « Sunburnt SEO
Can you go into more detail? Specifically, how does this differ from the second page if the article, where it discusses (somewhat refutes) learned concepts that override naive concepts taking longer just because the pathways aren't as strongly connected?

I have no idea what System 1 vs System 2 thinking is, much less how it applies in this case.
Video with English subtitles: http://www.vg.no/nyheter/utrolige-historier/artikkel.php?art...

Article in English: http://www.vg.no/nyheter/utrolige-historier/artikkel.php?art...

Live stream tomorrow: http://www.vgtv.no/#!id=55544
Why ?

Because it's obvious. No person skilled in the art would ever have to refer to the teachings of the patent in order to implement a bouncing scrollable list.
I usually give constructive feedback on pull requests I can't accept and then they either drop the request or fix it. Seems to be a pretty common pattern for projects in active development.
Facebook develops their main site in PHP. They even wrote their own PHP compiler[1], and various other pieces of infrastructure (e.g. [2]). I'm not a huge fan of PHP, but compared to other PHP projects I've worked on their infrastructure looks nice and modern.

[1]: https://github.com/facebook/hiphop-php

[2]: https://github.com/facebook/xhp
Hope they hired a good lawyer to review the IP transfer agreements they signed in the previous sale.
The problem is not relative dates in context. Relative dates in context are extremely useful! Would I rather have to parse "4:50pm January 10th, 2012" or "5 minutes ago".

---

The real problems:

1. Old relative dates aren't useful.

- Instead of "1 year ago" give me a real date. I can figure that out for myself. OR give me the option of getting a real date easily (hover, or click, or something).

2. Relative dates are shared statically.

- Listen for print-screen commands and swap things to relative dates. (I have no idea if this is possible. I actually would bet that it isn't, but maybe it should be.)

- Make embedding real HTML much easier so when people think about embedding tweets they don't choose images just because they are easier.

- Make embedding real HTML much more advantageous (real retweet button, view conversation button, etc.) so that people want to use it instead of static (read: lame) images.
With A Budget Almost Cut In Half And 40 Percent Staff Cuts Can The RIAA Survive?
Resurrect ADOM development ($50k roguelike crowdfunded)
I'll show up at 18:46 if I can get my hands on a Makey Makey
Good stuff, been reading through "the joy of sets" on my commute. I think it's a shame that more formal set theory and topology aren't taught as part of the standard comp sci curriculum.

I remember an interviewer who specialized in machine learning looking at me like I was crazy for asking which distance function he wanted me to use. But d = max(Si) seems like it would be faster to calculate that d = sq( Sum (Si^2) )
The hoax in question prays as much on discrimination and "the other" as the birther movement.
People tend to be very receptive to things that confirm what they already believe. I don't know if stupidity or gullibility have as much to do with it, those are just people whose juju is different than yours or mine.
It's a patent on behavior, rather than on implementation. Patenting a particular steering mechanism is reasonable; patenting the concept of steering is not.

The original purpose of patents was to serve as an alternative to trade secrets for the benefit of society, not merely to reward whoever can think of the most "non-obvious" concepts. Behavior patents such as elastic-overscroll or one-click-purchase do not serve this purpose.
This is awesome! Not part of the SE class, but current UW eng student nonetheless.
I read a venturebeat article on the LinkedIn app, seems like they used some Node.js, a bunch of work arounds and A LOT of domain expertise to get it to work as well as it does. I personally found the article interesting as I'm trying to figure out native vs. HTML5. seems like, barring incredible expertise about the quirks of html/js, native is the way to go.
Of course FRAND doesn't mean you can use patents without a license, it means that they have to be offered for licensing under FRAND terms. Presumably you are supposed to go to court if you believe you aren't being offered FRAND terms, Apple just went ahead with no licence at all.
I don't know how or where to draw the line, but it has to be drawn somewhere.

What if someone decided to patent text fields? Or dropdown menus? It gets so crazy if absolutely every design feature becomes patentable.
Yes. I ironically I've seen this contributor's sentiment shared internally in Google too (about many projects).

The real scaling challenge is in managing precisely this problem. It's not easy to solve.
Desktops don't use direct manipulation, so they're not particularly relevant. It's far more likely that we haven't seen bounce-back scrolling on desktops because it's a bad idea - nothing more than superfluous animation. On a touch-screen, it actually serves a purpose.
You know what? They're not causing harm and they're helping these patients be in a safe environment so that they do not hurt themselves or others.

I don't find this sad at all, I find it innovating. This is actually a great 'hack' that seems to work and only has positive results.
They also have these in the US. My grandfather was in a home that had a whole 1940s small town-type setting in the backyard area complete with bus stop, sidewalk, and a little bit of fake street.
Lance Armstrong stripped of all 7 titles, banned for life.
I think the student put in a lot of hard work on that project but I wouldn't say the logo is better.

I'm not a huge fan of our new logo either although I think win8 one is pretty good.
"'In three months, if we can get 10 startups onboard, then every 3 months we can get 10 more,'Barreth added."

How does that work?
Apple and Samsung Should Fight in the Marketplace, not the Courtroom
>- Listen for print-screen commands and swap things to relative dates. (I have no idea if this is possible. I actually would be that it isn't, but maybe it should be.)

If it were, a lot of people would immediately (ab)use it to make screenshots impossible. You might consider that a positive or a negative, depending on your perspective.
"sound scientific principles that have been repeatedly tested and verified"

I'm worried about how many studies aren't subjected to repeated testing. Of course, it varies by field, but I'd like to get an idea of how many journal-published articles show results that can be reproduced independently.

Or am I misinformed?
>>Because it's obvious.

I'm going to get downvoted for this, but Jonathan Ive said it best: great design makes the solution seem obvious in hindsight. This is why so many people (wrongly) take issue with Apple's patents: they seem obvious. But the fact is that if they were so obvious, then how come Apple was (in many cases) the first to successfully implement them?
1. The desktop isn't the same. Bouncing is helpful to combat overscrolling, which isn't a problem on the desktop. That's why you haven't seen it. (On a desktop you have to actually click the scrollbar, or use your finger on the mousewheel - both of which make it pretty obvious that you've reached the limit of the container).

2. Real world things bounce. Copying the way something works in the real world and emulating that in software and sticking an Apple logo on it is not inventing something. That's just... building things.

3. I don't mean to misrepresent the first part of your argument, but "it's a good idea" doesn't cut it for patenting consumer software / hardware. There are real criteria (mentioned by others) that this doesn't meet.

Changing topic slightly, how is a jury supposed to decide "non obvious to a person skilled in the art", anyway? Does the jury consist only of hardware engineers? Because that would be the only way it would be fair. I can no more wonder what would be obvious or not to a doctor, teacher, lawyer, fireman etc. as they could wonder what would be obvious to an engineer.
Gender, mood, and age detection features are added to ReKognition API
A Complete Simulation of the Solar System with all spacecraft
So in Chrome for Android the problem comes only when you zoom in by double-tapping. Your site is quite readable without zooming so it's mostly fine, but it does definitely break.

For your pleasure, some screenshots:

* Chrome: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/1853222/dan/Screenshot_2012-08-24-1...

* Chrome zoomed: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/1853222/dan/Screenshot_2012-08-24-1...

* Browser: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/1853222/dan/Screenshot_2012-08-24-1...

* Browser zoomed: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/1853222/dan/Screenshot_2012-08-24-1...

For reference: Galazy S running Cyanogen10
Very true.

Edit: although, on a Mac if you listened for `Cmd` or `Shift` you'd catch the print screen command. And I don't think anyone would complain that the dates changed on Ctrl press.

Of course you might still be screwed on other OSes.
Handwriting is an amazing thing.

But please for heaven's sake do not consider great handwriting to be a sign of intelligence or greatness as a value in itself. This sort of thing destroys kids in their early days. During my days in school(In India). Good handwriting was considered a mandatory trait of good, brilliant and hard working students. Any body who didn't have good hand writing was automatically considered a bad student.

The net result was kids with genuine brilliance, appetite for hard work but with a bad handwriting struggled. Some times forced to imitate their class mates in a bad way. I was a big victim of it. In fact the head mistress called my mom and told her, every thing was brilliant about me and if only I could have great handwriting I could score higher than everybody else. The worst part of it was I took it seriously, I had convinced myself no matter how hardworking or intelligent I was I didn't deserve to score well as I didn't have a good handwriting.

It was not until a couple of years later. During my pre university days. My uncle cleared my mind of all this. He convinced me that good handwriting discipline is nothing great in itself. Although its good to have one. But greatness lies in what you write and not how you write it.

Later I developed how to write in script with separate letters without joining them as in cursive writing. It greatly increased readability. But people around me used to find that strange and some even suicidal for a student.

Its basically what Leo Tolstoy said:

What a strange illusion it is to suppose that beauty is goodness.
Are there any UX or usability studies regarding date time formats to use on the web? I'd be interested in knowing more than this feels right to me. :)
I'm curious about your take on why kpop has not broken into the western market. Could you elaborate?