skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Of course no journalist would ever put in writing "yes, I will promote these things for you in exchange for that free tour" or even suggest as much. It's an obvious career ender.

Thats not the modus operandi nowadays. Good old prussian censors have proven ineffective; they cause too much political fallout and instability for what they can offer. Instead, you hire PR people to spin a story. You stop inviting journalists that write critically of you to events. You stop giving them interviews. You don't give them leads on stories that could benefit you when published. You don't give them the infamous "well informed insider" quotes.

But a journalists' livelihood is directly connected to his ability to write interesting news and reports.
In some places where politics and journalism are (physically) so close and dense, like Berlin, you eventually realize that you have to keep a healthy social relationship with the very people you are supposed to investigate, simply to keep, to do your job.

How do some papers get a reputation for being left leaning (or right, or environmental, or..)? No one puts bias in writing. Journalists just already know what is expected of them. Self-censorship.

(Sorry, this has slipped into some kind of rant. I'm just not very interested in the "look what Samsung did" brouhaha, but the forces at work here)
What about Buddhist monks who live lives of celibacy? You're right, it is frivolous.
Pretty sure Reddit has thousands of tables - last time I looked, it was really hard to see this but this is how it seemed like it was working. It has "thing"/"data" tables for every subreddit - created on the fly (a crime for which any DBA would have you put to death, normally). While I'm honored they use my library (SQLAlchemy) for relational database access, their actual usage of the relational DB couldn't be more...well... let's just say please don't imitate their style. If you want to build a Reddit, use Mongo/Cassandra or something like that. They'd very likely have done so themselves if NoSQL products were mature when they first developed their platform (I am vaguely recalling/guessing here on that one).

Edit: if any reddit devs want to correct me here, feel free, as I found the reddit source extremely difficult to follow back when I looked.
It was also unsuccessful in a great many of those cases.

Prosecutors don't determine whether you're guilty or not -- the issue isn't what they say, but whether juries believe them.

The article was about how prosecutors are very unwilling to accept DNA evidence, not about systematic problems with its interpretation.
SlabText.js
A better article on the Counternotions site, "Why Apple doesn’t do 'Concept Products'"

"Concept products are like essays, musings in 3D. They are incomplete promises. Shipping products, by contrast, are brutally honest deliveries. You get what’s delivered. They live and die by their own design constraints. To the extent they are successful, they do advance the art and science of design and manufacturing by exposing the balance between fantasy and capability."

http://counternotions.com/2008/08/12/concept-products/
That is hardly "Sun" levels of bad journalism; you see similar from most mainstream publications these days.
Fantastic! Now if my Pi just gets here already...
Because the defense must first provide some evidence that a mistake was, or could have been made, in order for the jury to receive such an instruction.
The floating social bar is still there on my iOS, and it's disruptive. Please fix. Great site otherwise.
You make it sound like it was a small change. In PHP4, you had to be careful to use references everywhere to get "proper" behavior. To return an object out of collection in your function, it better be both declared with a reference and to use a reference whenever you do an assignment or you won't get what you expect.

The potential for subtle bugs with this change is massive.

Your example is very simple. I've got objects with other objects as properties (composition), collections of objects, hierarchies of object references, as well as methods that take objects by reference or by value. Not using references everywhere is so much easier in PHP4 that whenever possible, I did just that.
Agree. The link title is not the same as the original article title, so why not add a date as well?
That's not the point (many of the mobile devices already have a USB and HDMI). The point is - Android incompatible architecture put it apart from the rest of the Linux world. And it's a horror to squeeze X.org or Wayland drivers (as well as other Linux drivers) from the mobile manufacturers, when they say "we are too busy with Android".
> I really don't see how anyone who writes software for a living can defend these things and defend the status quo of not even supporting reform.

I agree that it seems like things are a bit screwy right now, but I don't claim to know what the solution is, and I'm not sure that things haven't always been a bit screwy (Alexander Graham Bell got the telephone patent because he was ahead of some other guy in line, Farnsworth died poor having invented TV).

Abolishing software patents is -- in my opinion -- not the solution since -- given the direction technology is headed -- this is going to be disturbingly similar to abolishing patents altogether. Most suggested "reforms" of the patent system seem to satisfy Mencken's criteria ("neat, simple, and wrong")

Note that genetic and chemical-engineering patents are pretty close to software too.

1-click is one of my least favorite patents, but it really comes down to an argument about obviousness -- an argument it appears to have lost in Europe (where the patent was never granted). The patent has been challenged, most of its claims thrown out, and its remaining claims narrowed:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1-Click

I'd suggest that in the end its a question of application not theory. In this case the Europeans have arguably done a better job of applying patent law than the US.
I have the impression that Wittgenstein's musings were of an informal, philosophical nature, and that they are difficult to translate to a practical real world application. That doesn't have to mean that he's necessarily wrong, just that for practical work such as in NLP you are forced to make some rather strong assumptions which are actually just wrong, but which allow us to approximate language to an extent where current technology can do something useful with it.
"the desktop is awful and I much prefer the diversity of Linux DEs [...] OSX got its market share off spoiled 20 year old college kids getting their parents to buy them overpriced trendy hardware."

Sigh. Stop stating your opinion as fact. Personally, I use OSX because it's a *nix OS that actually has a coherent UI, and it's paired with the best hardware available right now. Saying that it's popular because it's trendy is wildly misguided- how do you explain all the developers that use it?
It's a very refined implementation of an idea. Try pinch and zoom on an iPad and then try it on an Android device.
The point was that it was cited as an example of similar fraudulent claims of athletic prowress, which is directly relevant to the linked article. Whether the article itself is pertinent to HN is beside the point; emmi_guy's comment was pertinent to the discussion of the article.
Of course, all of what you say is true.

But I think it's difficult to quantify quality differences like that. For instance, when watching the movie Jiro Dreams of Sushi, I had a hard time thinking that a sushi meal could be worth more than $400 (starting price). It would certainly be wasted money on me, since I'm not a big sushi fan. But to the reviewers, apparently it was worth a dedicated trip to just eat there, so they would probably say yes if asked if it was 10x better than a $40 sushi meal.
I've generated over $200k in the past 6 years with a website I started in high school in 1997 called hawkee.com. It's always just been a coding playground for me to experiment with new technologies and to hone my coding skills. I coded a product price comparison to help pay for the server costs and it has more than paid for the server costs over the years.

I do freelance coding, but I do come back to the site every couple months to play with new technologies and improve the user experience.
The funny part, considering how everyone complains about not really getting to "own" their device, is bringing up AT&T as a good guy. The company who literally would not let anyone own a telephone.
Reddit actually does use Cassandra, and you can read about their adventures and such with it here: http://blog.reddit.com/search/label/Cassandra
Passive income means you built a method of generating income while you're doing minimal to zero work, example, built a website that require maybe an hour of work per week/month, or built a biz where operations have been/can be delegated to someone else.

Having income from a "job" is active income where you actively have to work (or pretend to work if your work can actually be automated and you've managed to fool your boss otherwise).
Users like what's comfortable and functional to use. But those who create it - are developers. Regular mobile Linux has hard time presenting existing software solutions to the user because of the hardware barrier reason. And not because they are in any way inferior to the Android user experience (if anything - they are superior).

I.e. there are practically no manufacturers which provide closed Linux drivers or open specs (so open source drivers could be created). They mostly only care to provide Android drivers. Hopefully Jolla and Plasma Active will help to break through somehow.

This situation is caused by Android's historic roots, since it started as a proprietary project, and didn't take in account any interests of the Linux community. The fact that it was open sourced later didn't really change anything - it's de facto completely separate from the Linux desktop as well as from the mobile Linux varieties which share the effort with the desktop distros. Wayland was created with collaboration in mind. Android architecture - was not.
ARTEMIS Spaceship Bridge Simulator
Perhaps they are worried about reverse-engineering, so don't want to release any until they have scaled up manufacturing.
> Because the defense must first provide some evidence that a mistake was, or could have been made ...

No, they only need to describe the statistical probability of an error -- they don't need to uncover specific evidence that an error was made in a particular case. And they can empanel expert witnesses to describe the kinds of errors that are typical of the method, but again, without having to uncover evidence unique to the present case.
It's not as bad as it sounds. It's targeted toward students that are tech-savvy. You get a free trip to an international destination that you otherwise most likely wouldn't have a chance to travel to with people that share your passion.

It can be a lot of fun if you know what you're signing up for.
Regarding the expense of clinical trials, it's important to note that the scientific results of a clinical trial are not protected by either patent or copyright. Pure research data cannot be restricted under any form of IP. Factual data without a creative element is explicitly exempted from both the patent and copyright system.

A published paper on the results of a trial may fall under copyright, but the factual observations and conclusions cannot be.

The "clinical trials are expensive" argument is incredibly disingenuous.
You are right, but Apple's definition of marketing doesnt end with the billboards or the tv commercials.

Every time you see someone wearing those white earbuds, that's marketing. When your mom is always on her ipad, despite 20 years of lessons from you on how to use a computer, that's marketing. When you are sitting in an airport and you notice the glow of the Apple logo on the back of someone's Macbook Air, that's marketing. When the same dude is still using his macbook, 6 hours into a flight without a powercord, that's marketing. When you walk into an Apple store, and you feel the aluminum unibody... when you unwrap the sturdy yet smooth packaging and the bottom slides out to reveal the device... when computer boots directly to a gray apple logo on a white screen, instead of a DOS prompt for a few seconds, that's marketing.

It takes a lot of work to do Apple style marketing.
Left Alone by Its Owner, Reddit Soars
I wish I read this article a year ago before I started developing my latest app. I have that exact problem, where adding a column to a 10M+ row table takes over an hour. So instead I end up with "things" tables all over the place.

Sigh.
Samsung, Vivante, others join the HSA Foundation
I've been looking for a long-term use for my pi, and now I have it: experimental os dev!
On one hand I think this comment makes a fair point that this isn't a very useful app. The app's creator himself admits that. He didn't expect it to be downloaded much.

On the other hand, I think this comment and Apple's rejection have both made the app creator's point very well. Not only do people want to ignore drone strikes, they actually resent the idea that other people would want to know about them. In Apple's case they state that customers would find it "objectionable." In this comment's case, the only conceivable reason anyone would want to know about drone strikes is so they could feign interest in order to feel enlightened or worldly.

This is fascinating to me. If we'd had a referendum at some point about whether to grant the U.S. military the power to kill anyone, anytime, anywhere with no checks & balances, no oversight, and no due process, according to it's judgement about what best serves the interest of national security, who do you think would've voted for it? I can't think of any significant political coalition that would've thought that was a good idea. Yet now that it is a reality, you're crazy or a traitor or insincere if you want to make it an issue.

I feel that it's related to peoples' perceived inability to do anything about it. If somebody powerful does something bad, blame the messenger for troubling your mind with it, since there is nothing you can do about somebody powerful.
People like you are not a large market, unfortunately.

> There's nothing the iPad can do that my open, unlocked hardware cannot do.
Your open, unlocked hardware, cannot survive two days with my mother.
Help My Startup Get 300 Likes on Facebook?
We're creating communities of people centered around interests! We're hoping to get 300 likes on Facebook from people in the tech scene.
For people wanting to then use this solution, the detailed explanation is that you 1) make the column without a default; 2) modify your application logic as you would otherwise already have to fill in the column during insert and maintain it during update, but not to rely on or use the column for updating other data; 3) alter the column to add the default, to be used for new rows past that point (you do this after step #2, as otherwise you won't know which values should be defaulted in step #4 and which values need special attention); and finally 4) update, in reasonably-sized batches, all of the old rows that are still null to the "correct value" (which might be the default, but might be a calculation based on other data).

(edit, as I forgot the conclusion:) At this point you will have all of your data filled in correctly, so you alter the column to add a not null constraint (if you had wanted that, which you probably did as otherwise you likely wouldn't have needed a non-null default in the first place) and then go back to into your application and go about business as usual using your new column in ways that would affect other data.
Great work, the effect is stunning !

Really nice that it's automatically disabled when displayed on a small screen than viewport defined.
What about "0 click buy"? Sounds better :)
> These Four Horsemen of the Android Apocalypse are patents for what Apple claims are “key” product features -- “Slide to Unlock,” “Text Correction,” “Unified Search,” and “Special Text Detection.

Wasn't "Slide to Unlock" invalidated in the process against HTC?
I also find this really annoying
I agree, this is really sweet. Is there some sort of CSS2 option that is heavier on the images for things like shadows and gradients, and a CSS3 mode which exports as much in the stylesheet as possible?

Also, an "export sprites" option would be amazing. It would spit out the image file and corresponding stylesheet?
> I think Canonical had a chance to make a real impact here but they essentially blew it.

I keep seeing claims being made, and mostly by (former?) Linux superusers, that Canonical and Ubuntu are "doomed". Could someone point me to some numbers that show signs of this?

I know when the Unity desktop came out, a lot of people were flaming. I didn't install it on my laptop (I'm still on 10.04 LTS), but I did on a colleague's desktop. From time to time, I have to assist him with code he's writing. During those sessions I have to interact with it and to be honest I'm not pleased, but each time I ask him if he wouldn't be interested in switching to Gnome or maybe installing Mint or something, he keeps saying it's not that bad. I'm sitting next to him and frustrated because I can't find where everything is and how to bring stuff up, but when I ask, he just presses a few keys and whatever we need shows up on screen.

When Miguel de Icaza's post came out last week and I saw claims on the doom of Ubuntu, I started looking for evidence. I couldn't find anything that in fact confirmed this. I found a lot of people who complained about Unity last year when it first came out, but fast forward in 2012 and there are also more and more posts of people going I use to hate it with a passion, but I have to admit, it's now growing on me. Not everything is perfect, but with a bit of work I think they're on to something. Also interesting to me was that I had a sense that the most positive reviews came from people with no prior Linux experience. So much so that I'm getting more and more curious about it and I'm slowly mentally preparing to make a switch to it.

Is it possible that Canonical is actually moving away from Gnome and taking things in-house to avoid exactly the problems that Miguel de Icaza is underlining?
If by just works you mean that you have to deal with abominations like MacPorts or Homebrew, then yeah, but personally I cannot deal with all that crap, so Ubuntu is the one that just works for me.
> The problem with a “just build a great product” strategy is that it assumes that all created value can be captured.

Well, really it assumes that enough created value can be captured.
Hey the_bear, I really like The Yummy Life. Just wanted to let you know I added it as a default subscription to the NewsBlur iPad app. This just means that if new users subscribe to the Food category, they'll get TYL. There's only 8 categories, so I'm sure this will net some new readers.
Sure you can do that but the programmer is FORCED to make the choice to write that.
Also the code _looks_ wrong like that.

Furthermore if the dev just wraps the entire process in that silent catch then the lion doesn't get poked!
I agree with you, my SO is fine with it also. I'm talking about the design process. I really like the direction that Ubuntu is going. It's being designed for the masses, but the pressure on ubuntu is from the power user crowd.

I think it will go nowhere because the current linux user base will be holding it back. Gnome3 and Unity are fighting this tide also.

I don't think the state of the linux desktop should be, "Copy XP and put a real shell behind it".
Carbon -> Cocoa was a massive change. So was PPC -> x86.

There are also massive API compatibility issues even between those two enormous shifts -- witness the sudden breakage of all SDL games due to raw surface access in CoreGraphics moving to IOSurface, just to name one.

The difference is, I think, that Apple has conditioned developers to expect massive breakage, and the OS X app industry has structural differences from the Linux desktop app community that make it more likely for apps to get fixed quickly.
And didn't Google devise a workaround for Unified Search in a week or so?
Using Akamai CDN to improve SaaS Performance
Reflecting on the past weeks interviews with startup founders
Every Sunday we reflect on a couple of great companies that we spoke to over the past week. Here we will be restating some of the best responses to questions around writing a business plan, applying to an accelerator program and starting a company.
I must disagree with this assessment. I have read dozens of news stories from "mainstream publications" in the past few days and not one of them had the singular lack of sourcing found in this article.

Regardless of whether "everyone does it" (which, again, is not true), it's irrelevant to trying to have higher standards for links from Hacker News.
This is smart. Kudos.
I built something similar to this back in 2007 and while it did ok for a few years it eventually fell off of a cliff. It's difficult to compete now against free alternatives and cheap mobile apps.
Daily social coding trends
This reminds me why I hate comments. They tell you what someone once thought the code did. They don't actually tell you what the code does. You should always trust actual code and actual measurements above comments.

The original author of this comment (not me, I just imported the code) believed that it improved performance on a given server-side workload.

The person who removed the sleep, Geoff Garen (a colleague and a friend), is a good programmer. I am confident that he read the comment before deleting it. However, his actual performance measurement trumps the comment.

BTW, here is Geoff's snarky response on reading the posts here that mention the comment above the sleep() call: <http://www.quickmeme.com/meme/3qqgwz/>. I agree with him.
How to install apps in Open webOS
Reminds me of "the speedup loop": http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The-Speedup-Loop.aspx
If you need to relate you process the data offline with something like Pig, Hive or one of many other data analysis tools built on top of Hadoop.
I don't think Samsung Moblers threatened to strand bloggers at Berlin
Reports (eg "In the Plex") have said she reviewed every UI change, above a fairly low bar. For instance, multiple meetings about exactly which shade of blue to use for various controls.

Some people say she brought a valuable discipline and consistency to Google products and held back the worst "designed by engineers" proposals. Other people say she slowed down launches, relied too much on non-scalable personal gut feel, and was arbitrary. I don't know. But if someone previously so central to UI launches leaves, things will at least be different.
somehow Apple reminded me of monsanto. Maintain your dominant position on the market by agressively suing everybody.
I think much of our community actually does argue that you can't be innovative with UI (see wintermute's post above).

In any case, the notion that UX is important and innovative in no way justifies the gross abuse of IP law we've seen up till now from everyone involved.

Which leads to...

> "We're just saying that most/all of it isn't worthy of patent protection."

There's a false separation here. IMO almost nothing we do in the software industry is worthy of patent protection, UI-related or otherwise. To point at UI patents and scream foul, while giving a free pass to "real" patents (ones with academic papers behind them) seems misguided.
$700 to $3000 a month running 2 job boards. UXJobs and MusicGigs.

http://uxjobs.org - this is a site I've had for about 4 years and slowly dominated the search term "UX Jobs". It's powered by SimplyHired (jobamatic) but using my own framework for pulling in jobs. The revenue from this site is 60% job postings and 40% clicking on other SimplyHired jobs.

MusicGigs http://musicgigs.org is using the standalone jobamatic platform. It's revenues are 80% simplyhired clicks and 20% job postings.

No advertising, just a good SEO strategy and time.