skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I submit that we are talking about a physiological issue, not a preference.

Attempting to hit a target in the middle of the screen is more difficult for humans than hitting a target at the very top of the screen.

When you overshoot the target in the middle of the screen, you have to come back around to click on it.

When you overshoot the target at the top of the screen, the pointer is stopped by the border of the display. Stopped right on the target, and you can just click.

It may not feel faster to you-- that's perception.

My point is that it is faster. And I haven't seen an argument for why the two things would be reversed for any specific person.

It's the nature of the latency between our eyes, mind and muscles.
The key thing about things like Twitter and, especially, Facebook that makes them get such hate, I think, is that as a user, you are their product -- not their customer. They don't get money from you, so their interests are not aligned with yours. This leads to a lot of perverse behaviour in the interests of extracting value from your use of their site.

This is in contrast with other services (like Github, which someone mentioned), whose interests are aligned with yours. They want your experience to be good so that you continue to give them money.
I've already got the tethered touchscreen predecessor of this (Vaio VPCJ1) and it's a piece of shit, even with Windows 8 on it. I'd have been seriously angry if I'd bought it but I was given it from someone else who was angry that they'd bought it.

It's heavy, slow, noisy, unreliable, hot and poorly engineered (the stand broke after about a week - 2x cheap self-tapping screws into plastic bearing the ENTIRE weight), the PSU started whistling after a couple of months resulting in a warranty job.

The kids use it as their "I don't care if they break it" computer.

Excuse the cynicism, but I doubt this will be any better.
It's [406] "not acceptable" to register more than one view per haxx!
This is massive! Folks were just asking me if this was possible 2 days ago and I said "No one is doing it", I was wrong for 1 day... Looking forward to trying it!
Ask HN: What if we provide an easy way to make your users promote your app
Hi,<p>A friend and I are building mobile apps, (me for iOS, and my friend for Android) we are looking for traction for our apps and we find that if we make our users tell their friends that our app are great it will be awesome.
So we might develop the whole stuff for us but I think there might be a market since there are a lot of developer who want to make their app more used.
I would like to know if someone is interested in our idea ?
Thx
Kn0thing jumped in to confirm it too.
He answered questions on these topics:

1. Space Race
2. Internet Freedom
3. Favorite Basketball Player
4. Small-Business tax breaks
5. First Activity on Nov 7
6. Most Difficult Decision
7. Money in Politics
8. White House Beer Recipe
9. Jobs
10. Work/Life Balance

Hard hitting stuff there
I've been on eMusic for a decade. Found untold amounts of underground stuff, and bought albums I would have never knew existed. Spotify has ended all this -- I can't justify buying a 256kbits copy for $4.99/album when I can stream 320kbps with my premium Spotify account. Meanwhile I never bought less than 3-10 CDs per month in the past decade. But with Spotify on my iPhone, iPad, laptop, and work computer... it seems utterly TOO MUCH effort to carefully peel the sticker, rip to FLAC when I will manually have to type the song names because online databases never have the CDs I get, and then somehow find a way to get the music on to each device in limited space... when it was already ready for me EVERYWHERE on the day of release on Spotify.

The only reason every record store out there isn't already shut down is that it is incredibly hard to convince friends to try Spotify and understand the new way.
Our own startup, testingbot.com has been offering the same OS X + iOS Selenium testing for a couple of months. Turns out the iOS simulator has a couple of quirks, the weirdest thing being it very rarely renders an iPhone view inside the iPad simulator. It's a lot of work to get this stuff work stable all the time.
haha, I see how he's saying that the value of music is dying but that's not Spotify, that's just downloading music in general. But to spread all that music freely everywhere is a blessing. It's definitely not killing it. I love all kinds of music in many different styles and genres because of music providers like spotify.
I noted this as well. I would have expected it to at least be a 1920x1080 panel since at 20" that is pretty cheap glass these days.

Surprised no one has done one of these with a 27" hires IPS panel.
I think it's because even power users enjoy doing "regular user" stuff sometimes and it's nice to be able to do it all on one machine without resorting to dual boots or VMs.

Having a bigger market share means that hardware/software vendors are more likely to consider supporting Linux to at least some degree.

For example I like to listen to music while programming, so it's nice that Spotify is available on my dev machine.
Please ignore Icaza.
As for the famous death of Linux on the desktop let me tell you something: IT NEVER HAPPENED.
What are those people smoking?

I've been using Linux for the last decade and every year it gets better, more polished, more integrated, featuring a better design; I hear more & more people talking about it and using it. Linux is more alive than ever on the desktop!

Depending on your needs, Linux can make an exceptional desktop. Yes, true, it is not for _everyone_, but then again neither are Windows or MacosX.
Have you tried CouchBase? The built in admin panel is a dream. Adding and removing servers to a cluster is super easy.

http://www.couchbase.com/docs/couchbase-manual-2.0/couchbase...
Why ask it if you know it's stupid?

No, PHP+Varnish can not always scale. You're forgeting the most important important factor in this equation, the database. Varnish is simply for caching and you won't find any large site that doesn't have it. PHP is a scripting language and the runtime performance differences to other common web application languages (i.e. Python, Java) is negligible since you're using caching anyway. Here's what you should worry about if you want scaling: Your database, your data structures and your code quality.
God knows the first thing I do when deciding whether to shop at a supermarket is find out whether it's unionized, and avoid it if it is.
HN is not a single mind. It's composed of different users with different opinions. Some like Twitter, others hate it, and some others like me are just very much indifferent towards it.
Well, this wasn't going to be a forum to influence future policy. I think it's pretty cool that this happened - even now my Mom might know what the "AMA" stands for.

And great timing to do it during the RNC and steal some buzz away.
Yesterday's announcement was about mobile web testing. Of course, native app testing is important, too, and high on our radar. In the native app space, automated testing tools are not as mature as they are for the web. For iOS native app testing, I'm investigating tools written on top of Apple's UIAutomation API -- specifically the "ios-auto" project by Dan Cuellar at Zoosk. It lets you write your tests in any language (he uses C#!), and then proxies commands to the Instruments app. https://github.com/penguinho/ios-auto
The goal is to let you test using the Selenium WebDriver API, but with Instruments/UIAutomation seamlessly running as the test's backend.

[edit: grammar]
Linux by no means should be limited to power users. It should be (and is) a universal OS.
I've never seen so many positive up-votes before. What do you think of this as a move? Do you think it makes him accesible or will it be seen as pandering?
It is absolutely opinion.

For a start, it precludes a sane implementation of focus-follows-mouse.

Secondly, for frequently used commands, keyboard shortcuts will be faster anyway (I'm aware of the study you're probably going to mention, but plenty of other studies have had different conclusions).

Lastly, and this is pure conjecture on my part, wouldn't having the menu bar at the top of the screen result in a much narrower arc from the current mouse position to the desired entry? The theory also seems to ignore the fact that in most cases you'd want to move the mouse back to the original window, or hit some specific (and often quite small) target in that window. Which is now made more difficult by the mouse being farther away. Just some idle wonderings, they were quite possibly addressed in that study.

I know that you started your post with "Whether people like it or not isn't really relevant. It's that this is the correct way to do it.", and thus are unlikely to be swayed from your opinions; it's worth considering though that every choice has pros and cons, and sometimes the total value of each side very much depends on the person.

(although I share your "Screw the people, this is /correct/!" view when it comes to tau: no-one's perfect)
Maybe you're right, but I think I'm done with this site.
In my experience, being "in review" for a very long time means that something in your app has triggered an internal discussion.

This!

My first iOS app for my previous startup got stuck in the review process for almost a month. In the end, Apple's review team called me about some clarifications. Turned out, they were trying to decide whether they wanted to approve some of the things our app was doing. After a couple of calls, they approved it.

For my current startup, we've again been stuck in the review process for almost a month. I can see from our logs that different reviewers have tried the app over the last month. Yesterday, Apple's review team informed me that they need to talk to me about the app. Let's see what the hold-up is this time.

In any case, I'm just glad that they reach out to us to resolve the issues/get clarifications instead of just rejecting the apps.
Braintree's Payments Platform Launches Across Europe And Canada
Nothing "killed the Linux desktop"; it still thrives for those that want it, and it's steadily improving. It never came to dominate the market, and one can argue about the reasons it never displaced Macintosh (still less Windows). It probably has a lot to do with lack of a single, unified vision, and the market fragmentation caused by the different distros, and the lack of market pressure to ship, as it relies on volunteer labor, but I'm not going to presume.

Personally, I've been primarily a Mac user since the Mississippian superperiod, but I used an X-11 Windows(™) environment (on top of FreeBSD) for years at work. I don't miss it, even one iota, but I know plenty of smart people who prefer that sort of thing. De gustibus non disputandum est and all that.
> To each his own, but would someone really want to keep cleaning professionally even if they were wealthy? I could easily seeing less-than-profitable but creative hobbies being way more interesting for hypothetical cleaners who were wealthy and wanted to stay busy.

I felt the same way until I actually met a wealthy cleaner. All I can say is never underestimate the power of habit and the difficulty of breaking routines.

I used to intern at a small investment manager years ago where one of the clients was a cleaning lady. Every couple weeks she would come into the office to deposit a portion of her modest housecleaning income into her investment account. I didn't think much of it until I found out she was actually a multi-millionaire. This cleaner had been investing with the investment manager for years and (at ~20% annual returns) her small contributions compounded into millions of dollars. It was pretty mind blowing. Why didn't she just retire!? She just loved her job and the routine...

Anyway, the best part is she refers her high net worth customers all the time to the fund and they all sheepishly try to explain how they heard about the fund from their cleaning lady. Little did they know that their house cleaner was actually richer than them.
Aaaaaand the top post is a shitty watercolour as I look at the page right now, http://i.imgur.com/Ju94o.png

Never change Reddit, never change.
I think experience can actually become a liability. Things have changed and you don't have to write assembly code to optimize your program. Compilers will probably do a better job than you. And if you have a lot of experience writing JavaScript for IE6, you may actually be wasting time optimizing in ways no longer relevant.
Which leaves your point unexplained. So, let me reply in an equally enigmatic fashion:

There are many reasons for which a thing can be loved.
As stated in the reddit thread... He's currently out and about in Virginia - So this is a staffer pretending to be him.

Sad.
Thanks HN
I've learnt a lot from all you people and got a lot of inspiration to do new things in life.

I won't be able to participate much any more. But just want to say thanks for everything.
Ask Mozilla how they manage to distribute their tarballs which work on all major distros.
Good luck wherever you're off to!
That's not so hard to figure out. As the hiring manager you are told by upper management that there's no budget for a new hire. But we need this guy you plead. He's awesome, will be worth his weight in salary, etc.

The politicking gets done, and then the hire (you) fails to materialize. What happens to the hiring manager then?
According to their Kickstarter page, MSRP for the Pixate engine is $299. It is included as part of the $69 Kickstarter tier.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pixate/beautiful-native-...
Yup, simulators do have quirks. So just in case, that's why I built this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABiTxApuLLU
Grammar-naziism is a part of reddit culture, and one of the reasons they still have relatively erudite discourse given the size of their userbase. I think it's a net positive, and only natural that it would come out in this AMA.
"it seems in Windows API all drawing is hardcoded, so the dialog also comes with the old style buttons etc.
"

IIRC, the particular style allows applications to paint on top of the system dialogs, add controls, etc. The API call cannot know when or where drawing will take place (or whether it will happen at all), so it cannot use any other screen real estate than what it always used. That means controls must stay the same size and exact location. That rules out shadows, font changes, etc, so the control must forever stay as it was in the dark ages.

On the positive side: I understand that the Windows 3.1 "Add Font" dialog is gone in Windows 7. Unfortunately, not everybody seems to be happy about it: http://www.sevenforums.com/backup-restore/42035-restore-inst...
We actually just launched in Canada and today. https://www.braintreepayments.com/tour/international
Is there actually some video proof that he is actually there?

Or is it just some assistant yelling from the other room "should I rephrase our standard answer on campaign reform" and his answer is "yes".
No Android please! Linux desktop is shifting from X.org to Wayland, and Wayland is making inroads into mobile as well. Android is really a completely side thing for conventional Linux.
Im going to make an anti-patent comment hopefully without mistakes.

Sticking to patents there are clearly real problems with the thicket of patents where many things can be infringing without realising it (while patents are public they are impractical to study or to get an idea of all the patents in an area like touch UIs and even if you could it is hard to correctly understand and interpret the claims to work around them).

The cost of the legal actions is a real problem (for small companies) in itself partially caused by the weakness of the initial examination that means that many of the existing patents will be found invalid if ever tested in court.

The lack of certainty over validity also harms patent holders who cannot really assume that really do have a valid patent and this will harm them in negotiations.

If patents are to be kept (and the economic case isn't clear to me although it may be there) then if the primary examination cannot be improved then there should be a second and more in depth (and more expensive) examination that should be required before legal action is brought (or optionally to strengthen their negotiating position). After this phase it should weed out sufficient invalid patents so that there is an 80-90% chance it will be found valid in court.
Debuggers are more efficient at locating and fixing specific bugs. However when you debug with print statements you get the opportunity to review the code and find bigger design problems that need to be fixed.

Furthermore, and more controversially, if you debug with debuggers, you will be driven to use programming techniques that are friendly to your debugger. But when you debug with print statements, you are free to use whatever programming techniques are best for human comprehension.

Now before you raise your keyboard and rush to disagree, consider carefully that the position I just described is agreed with by well-known programmers such as Linus Torvalds and Larry Wall. There are equally well-known programmers who disagree.

The true merits of the case are hard to determine. But if you think that one side is trivially wrong, then you should view this as a learning opportunity. Because you're certainly mistaken.

See http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0009.0/1148.h... and http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=48495 for more background on this topic.
Sony is never great for the battery life
PulseAudio doesn't depend on GDM, you just need to create a config for it; What I do (on fedora) is move the default.pa from /var/lib/gdm/.pulse/default.pa to ~/.pulse...

You can't expect everything to work when you tear out components then fail to configure things properly...
We put together a blog post and screencast to explain some of the 'extras' for mobile: http://sauceio.com/index.php/2012/08/testing-your-site-with-...
Ah, gotcha. Did you catch what the downvotes were for each question?
Nice work on the big cats :)
I think this post focuses a little too much on the SEO aspect of this blog commenting strategy. While it is a good strategy for SEO, and it does work, I think the real benefit comes from becoming part of the community that is focused on whatever your startup is involved in. That exposure helps create customers/evangelists that will then help promote your product/service to others within their sphere of influence. The SEO is just an added benefit.
Great feedback, I truly appreciate it.

Please feel free to contact me directly: case (at) protopattern (dot) com We really want to work with early customers to make sure that our app does what their apps need.
In this day and age there's nothing to stop people running Adblock if they really don't want to see ads. This would be easier in the longer term for the person anyway (haxxly proxying to CNN is slower than going to CNN directly w/ Adblock).

Regardless, I'll cross that bridge if/when it comes up. Site terms are here: http://www.haxx.ly/terms
lifestyle businesses are great. but to make real money you need to scale -- I think this stuff is okay for the size of business they are aiming for but if you want to build something that can be acquired for 500m+ or IPO then you need to do some more strategic thinking.
In my experience, Linux works great with standards-compliant hardware. Linux is typically the first platform with support for a new standard. The problem is there is so much hardware that is not standards-compliant.

Your comment looks about as asinine to me as the as the parent comment does to you.
I love reddit but I still don't get the appeal of his posts.
This isn't exclusive or indicative to startups. I have friends who work at large companies (Apple in particular) who work 90 hour work weeks and are completely miserable.
"Energy" in the sense of "I have a lot of energy today" is only tangentially related to "energy" in the sense of "the energy content of this candy bar is 250 calories".
This is absolutely nothing like a MacBook Air
The problem is that if another site has the same listings as Craigslist and provides a better user experience, people looking to rent an apartment will start visiting that site instead of Craigslist. Over time, people looking to list apartments that want an audience of renters would start listing on that site directly instead of Craigslist, since that is now the best place to find renters.
But if you're seeding the movie to others, wouldn't that be saying "yes, you can have the part of the movie that I gave to you." A thoughtful user could even strongly encourage their bit-torrent client to only download from, for example, Universal Studios Antipiracy Bot 1.2.

Did they acquire that movie illegally, now?
Show HN: Match.com meets LinkedIn for Professional Networking
Hi guys,

I'm a longtime lurker but not often enough commenter. I'm the co-founder of OpenDoor Meetings (www.opendoormeetings.com), which just launched and facilitates in-person introductions between business professionals with common interests and similar professional goals. You can think of us as Match.com meets LinkedIn.

We're an NYC based company focused on helping make in-person networking easier and more efficient to do. We make it simple to search and find relevant people in your field who have an "open door" policy to network with, and then through the site you can schedule time for a coffee or drink with them.

We fill the void left by LinkedIn which is great once you've met someone -- but how can you find relevant people to meet that you don't already know?

We're focused on three verticals to start with: financial services, law, and real estate. During our beta we signed up members from firms such as Goldman, Morgan, BlackRock, Deloitte, Weil Gotsal, Davis Polk, and more.

It'd be great to get any feedback on our site. If anyone is interested in testing it out, shoot me a note to jon@opendoormeetings.com and I'll get you immediate access after you sign up for an invite code. For our launch, we're focusing just on NYC, but then plan to expand to other cities.

Thanks for your time and feedback!
I find that while a neighborhood filter gets the job done, its usability isn't great, for a number of reasons:

* You have to roughly know the boundaries of all the neighborhoods for the list of names to be useful

* A one-dimensional arrangement of names doesn't correspond well to the 2D relationships you probably care about.

* Many neighborhoods don't map well to regions I care about. I often find myself selecting Bernal Heights, Mission District, and Noe Valley to capture the idea of "the area around 24th and Valencia", for example.
Post it then.
I know this is Github, but... Rather than use the Github API, wouldn't it be more efficient to interact with Git directly? Libgit2 maybe?
Cute story, but I'd put money on people doing cleaning work, statistically, being happier doing their hobby rather than cleaning.

Not all cleaning people work for investment managers that cut them in on sweet deals. Truth be told, I would guess that those are probably a minority.
Since it's 2.8 series it should have single-window mode, no?
It's a stupid question because the particular dialect of assembler this was written in is completely irrelevant for performance considerations.

You've been brainwashed by the idiotic pop culture language wars that pretend a question like Ruby vs Python vs whatever has any meaning. These are debates over buzzwords, not reality.

All that matters is the database configuration and associated architecture. Not some buzzword drama.
A friend of mine wrote this a few months back:

http://blog.engineering.kiip.me/post/20988881092/a-year-with...

Almost all of it is still valid. "To be fair, the global write lock is now JUST a DB level write lock. Living in the future guys."
Judas Priest should be charged for making foul music.