skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm just amazed that this turned into a "we all hate Java" rant. Utterly amazed.

I'm sure if all the worlds banks ran on Perl or Ruby, there'd be no bugs ever and the performance would be awesome, and it would run in the browser, too.

BTW: I agree with the criticism about Oracle not releasing this fix soon enough (assuming that this is true - it's all hearsay at the moment).
True, but there is, I think, a greater concentration of it in business and how companies present themselves to the world, rather than in every day life of ordinary people.

Advertisement in general is a total tip-to-toe agreed lie. Even if everything is true about that new crappy washing machine powder (can it be true though?), then at least the overly happy face of the ad mom is a lie. But we somehow agree to see those lies. We are trained to extract valuable information from it or otherwise just get programmed at the subconscious level.

So, somehow the habit of lying in the commercials is extended to all of the public relations.
<quote>
Heroku is Just Unix

At its core, Heroku is just a simple unix platform; specifically, Ubuntu 10.04 LTS.
</quote>

I just threw up a little
All of a sudden, @jzw's iPad port of xscreensaver turns from "geek-joke" into "prescient foresight"… (assuming the iPad/iPhone retina displays exhibit similar defects…)
Cool! I've now ordered it based on this comment alone.. :-)
You're entitled to your opinion, of course. Personally, I think it's ridiculous for a government to presume to outlaw the means by which you can defend yourself.
Maybe a popular guy/girl, you seem to gain social status by claiming to be friends with other high social status persons.
America is full of liars. The world is full of liars. 90% of all employees are incompetent. Doesn't cancel out your point, however.
If you're willing to toss out another invite my e-mail is on my profile.
> I am continually amazed at the capabilities of kids. Their ability to understand whats presented to them is astounding.

One thing that children have going for them when it comes to learning is that they've not done very much learning, i.e. they've yet to realise that certain kinds of things are "hard" to learn or that they "are no good" at a particular subject.

Children approach new things with a complete lack of intellectual fear, whereas older kids (and adults) have had years of experience of trying and failing to do things.

Older kids and adults also have to risk more intellectual credibility when learning something new. Once you're somewhat socially established it may not be rational to attempt to learn how to do something which may be beyond your capabilities - your friends may laugh and call you stupid.
See Jeff Heer's work on this: http://vis.stanford.edu/color-names/

and the color-name picker application: http://vis.stanford.edu/color-names/dictionary/
How to Add SRT to DVD on Mac
If you want to make a DVD by yourself and add subtitle to the DVD to make it perfect, this article will teach you how to add SRT to DVD at ease.
I support Apple's right to offer you that choice as long as they're not using a broken patent system to take away my choice.
Considering their only support for sharding or replication is their async read-only slaves mechanism, I'm going to assume you don't know what you're talking about and think the difference between "1/10th of an overloaded EC2 machine running postgres" and "a whole slow EC2 machine running postgres" somehow constitutes "scalability".
I was giving it the benefit of the doubt since there wasn't as much platform specific lock-in as GAE.

But yeah, the single-homing is pants-on-head.
Do not Optimize your old pages, going after white hat too
I thought I was very specific...

"There are good uses for singleton classes in single threaded applications that don't use unit tests "

In any case I didn't say that logging was the only use. In gaming, we had used it a lot when sharing single resources across all the game such a config file. And if you can take a peak to Unreal Engine you would see how those guys abuse of them without too many problem.

I do not want to be an advocate of using Singletons. I am aware of the risks and problems it brings with. But sometimes people forget that not every application is multithreaded nor implement unit tests.

My fear with that is when people forget why it was bad on first place (just like it happened with the goto keyword).
Interesting that I once purchase $50 of AppSumo credit for $25 and ended up using most of it to purchase a 3-year Hacker Monthly subscription as most of the stuff on sale didn't appeal to me!
DASH-ing Move by Sony–D.A.S.H. Goes Open Source
Cool. I love BJ and did his bootcamp last summer. We use his B=MAT model all the time to describe Lift and the world of behavior change.
INTERESTED IN LOW PAY, LONG HOURS, TERRIBLE LEADERSHIP, RIDICULOUS PRODUCT TO BE THE NEXT FACEBOOK. MUST KNOW ASSEMBLER C C++ PYTHON RUBY LINUX KERNEL LINUX IO SUBSYSTEMS CSS JAVASCRIPT COFFEESCRIPT LESS VIM TMUX. CALL ASAP
I tried Lift out, and though it does seem that there it has a place for a some audiences, unfortunately I am not one of them. A few gripes (I understand that Lift.do just released, so some of these concerns may be premature)

1. It's binary - in that you workout or you don't, you sleep 8 hours or you don't. My needs are a bit different - I want to be able to log how much I do of something. For e.g. drinking water - I want to track that I drink enough water. The only solution I had was to use a habit titled "Drink 8 glasses of water" - For me, that doesn't work (I have to keep count of how many glasses of water I drank in the day). I want to "check in" every time I do something - if it's a workout, then a check-in a day suffices - if I want to sleep 8 hours but only manage 7, well, there's no way to manage that.

2. Export functionality - I want to export my data out of Lift.

The only app I have come across that let's me do this right is Dayta (free for iOS) - Unfortunately it has not seen any movement lately but it's very close to what I need. What Dayta does not get right is

1. No defaults. If I don't make an entry for a day, it does not assume 0

2. Only numeric data - For e.g Workout (in my case) is either a 1 or a 0 - It would be nice to have a Boolean switch

3. Dayta exports nicely - to CSV via email. I export on a month to month basis which means I usually go back in and have to delete the entries for the past month. Dayta gives you no way to "bulk delete" - You have to swipe each entry and delete.

4. Lift.do gets this right - Notes on a check-in. After a workout I want to know how I felt. Perhaps I did not hit the 6 mile marker - Was I sick? Or injured? Or just being lazy?

Along with all this it would be nice to

1. Plot a habit that has a scheduled interval. For e.g workout every other day (Perhaps a reminder or a gentle nudge)

2. Identify habits you aren't doing so well at.

I am currently using a mix of apps to track my progress - Momento (Journal app), Dayta, and Fitocracy (to log workouts in detail).

FWIW, Lift.do is a gorgeous app. I really like the way it looks, feels and works. The social element is a nice touch too.

Good luck guys. I am keeping an eye on you - Perhaps soon I will change my mind.

[Updated to add a 4th point and for some clarification]
Digg Archive lets you download your old data
I'd suspect two causes behind this. 1) as the manufacturing experience increases, the defect rate will (probably) drop. And 2) there is now an established market for minorly defected LCD panels in cut-price no-brand-name monitors, so panels sold to brand names can afford to have QA tightened up more by selling marginal panels into the secondary supply chain instead of just shipping or junking them, allowing the "brand name ship" cutoff point to be somewhat higher.
I'd argue that while the word Retina happens to be a marketing term, in this context it is just as relavant. What we're really discussing is "do the pixels disappear?" - the reason they used the term retina display is that they are indistinguishable to your retina.

"315ppi" or "super high ppi" is meaningless to me even as a techie because for me the gold standard for text clarity is 600dpi on laser printed paper, so even though it's adequate for the screen, it wouldn't impress me unless I saw it.

"Looks like glossy magazine print" makes sense to any consumer. Again, yes in this case Retina happens to coincide with the trademark, but it's also a functional property, one that's relavant to the discussion.
It'd be nice if you could pay users so you don't just become another bothersome mosquito in their pocket.

For example: Say I need something from the county records of some place far from me but I need them quickly. I place a human.io call to pay $50 to whomever takes a picture of a series of documents first. That could be huge.
These changes do not break any existing functionality, Field Expansion is an addition to the API. Field Expansion is basically support for very simple joins.

Batch Request support has existed for some time and allowed similar result sets to be retrieved. Batch Requests are significantly more complex to construct and are not well supported by tools like Facebook's Developer Open Graph Explorer.
CSS The Missing Manual by David McFarland is a good start.

http://www.amazon.com/CSS-Missing-David-Sawyer-McFarland/dp/...
Thanks for the perspective. It's much appreciated!
And dumping 500 caltrops off an overpass would likely have the exact same effect. Worrying about someone actively attacking this kind of system using theoretical jammers that could seize up multiple lanes of traffic (without easy line of sight!) and operate for hundreds of feet at this point seems premature.
One man's "predatory and misleading" is another man's gospel truth. Putting the authority to decide who is right and wrong on these matters in the hands of a single, all-powerful arbiter is just begging for abuse.
The Great Internet TV Battle, Apple vs Google vs Microsoft vs Sony vs Amazon
Sort of.

There is an endless array of divs which is absolutely positioned, ie:

<div id="container" style="top: -2920px">
<!-- endless array of divs -->
</div>

The actual scrolling is performed by a 'dummy' div, has the same overflow. Some javascript will be listening to scroll events on this div, and updating the position of the above div.

This is typically done as scrolling 'floating' images on most browsers isn't smooth, & to 'jump' the scroll the correct amount to achieve the effect.
> there wasn't as much platform specific lock-in as GAE

You can always host your App Engine application on top of an AppScale or Typhoonae install.

I wish they were easier to set up, but, if your Google bill starts getting high, you can dedicate the resources required to do it. And multi-homing them is a whole different game.
I usually stay on topic while on HN, but I have to say that the phrase "crushing it" is extremely annoying, and I wish people would stop saying it.
Just tried it on my clearly LG panel. Did not have the problem you mentioned. I've had the machine for a week, from CDW running 10.8.1 so perhaps they've figured it out?
As we discussed in the comments of the post, I think I simply blur the definition of "lying". Stretching the truth, or purposely omitting the other side of the story is a form of lying if you ask me. Am I completely wrong here?
Oh, right on. The landing page needs to be optimized, but Joshua didn't do an Ask HN: post so he never got our amazing feedback :-)
Right, I wasn't being facetious.

It's genuinely impressive how they successfully put together all the things that you mention and at least a handful more while others juggle incredibly cumbersome, abstract names.

The power of these things seem obvious to me, but the fact that only Apple pulls it off suggests that I'm nuts.
Nope. As quoted directly in the article:

The Cupertino company says the content is “objectionable and crude,” according to Apple’s latest rejection letter.
That languages we speak have an impact on how we group and categorise things?
CRT burn-in never got classified as a "contract of sale voiding defect".

Is the retina display "defect" a significantly different thing? (I can't tell from any of the commentary I've heard whether its a "permanent, irreversible screen change", or a temporary "ghosting" of previous display only persistent over a few second/minute/hours timescale.)
Thanks for pointing that out. Oversight on my part. Originally I thought that permission was required to be able to add a future star/unstar functionality from GitStars but turns out that is not required.
But that's exactly the problem with the benevolent dictatorship model. Sooner or later this kind of absolute power is used unwisely or outright abused and you have no recourse.

This is why almost every country in the world has abandoned monarchy. It's ultimately too error-prone and inefficient.
Isn't that Zaarly?
Growth Hack: how to contact the CEO
ActiveRecord: attr-translatable
My Ph.D. thesis advisor and I are trying to combat this trend in our field. We are working to develop a suite of benchmarks to evaluate and compare different methods/algorithms. The goal is to require everyone to run their code against a set of accepted standard problems in the field and obtain a fair comparison. As reviewers of papers we can and must hold authors accountable to their claims. You can't just claim that your algorithm is superior without comparing it to the work of others on a set of community agreed upon benchmark problems. The scientific review process needs to hold authors accountable for their claims. It isn't an easy task, but with some work it is possible to establish fair metrics. Once these metrics are in place it should no longer be possible to present your ideas in an biased light.
Clearly suing obvious copycat products is what broke the patent system.
It is through criticism like this that we continue to hone the message. Thank you.

The problem is that what we have built is very, very broad, so narrowing it is difficult.

The platform lets you send people little bundles of UI and have them interact. That's incredibly broad and vague!

So here are some examples: You could get them to take pictures of all the storefronts in a town. You could send them realtime surveys to go along with a television show. You could have them rate sessions at a conference. You could have someone be notified when they walk onto a car dealership and offer them the chance to look up car prices.

Explaining this with one line has been very difficult so far. My favorites so far are: 1) Turn a passive audience into engaged particpants. 2) Turn your audience int your army.
Someone talked to a lawyer.
It's just a fucking phone, for Christ's sake.

There's a lot more at stake here than that. These kinds of devices are quickly becoming the primary or even the only means of accessing the internet for a lot of people.
This is an plain webapp where the data is coming from the photohunt app on human.io...
> This may be paranoia. But there are 3 patents that were taken out in my name by a previous employer that have wound up in the RPX portfolio. I am somewhat worried that they will eventually wind up being used to sue companies.

This is why we have to make it not-socially-acceptable for programmers to play along with the patent games.

From now on programmers should know that if they have (new) patents in their name, they will be considered part of the problem.

And as I'm sure you are well aware, now you(or your current employer) could end up being sued for a patent you yourself invented.

John Carmack had it right all along: just say no to patents.
Well you neglected to mention the aspect of it being a large number of shares in your last post. Congress doesn't know who my friends are and I should be able to loan out a movie to a handful of people over time if I want to.
I think that there are plenty of options that have yet to be explored in education.

I'm honestly not surprised that there have not been groups of parents with children around the same age getting together to "time-share" teaching their collective group of kids skills according to their abilities as adults. It's a very different experience to learn something from somebody with a passion for subject X than someone who is paid to teach subject X. Were I a parent, I would rather find 5-10 other talented/smart/skilled parents that each have unique passions and share in the effort of teaching my kid and theirs whatever it is that is in my ability to share.

The good teachers in school are those that are passionate enough that you as a student forget that they are being paid to be there and impart knowledge upon you.

TBH, the closest thing we have to such an arrangement today is Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts. It would be great if a similar program arrangement occupied 6-8 hours of a kids day.
Hellbanning can be really disturbing. This guy's been leaving comments for a year now with no idea that almost no one sees them.

That feels almost like a form of psychological torment to me. I recognise the value of hellbanning as a way to trap griefers, but I do think it's overused on HackerNews.
That is not the point of the one-on-one. The one-on-one is a time for the employee to speak his/her mind, express concerns, etc. Read the link to Rands' post somewhere else on this thread. The entire book is great, and I think every manager should read it.
Agreed. We are circling in on better explanations.

(FWIW it took a few YEARS before I was able to explain tagging and group behavior on delicious cogently. This process is not surprising.)

So, yes, it's a bit like mechanical turk. Hopefully some of the usage will be driven by participatory urges rather than getting 5c per transaction (though we will probably empower that sort of payment, and more. Offers etc.)
And your response is akin to someone being concerned about the words of a person from the 1700's reading about cell phones and asking what all the fuss is about, and maybe even stating he does not need one.

Why would you care about that? How could this person from antiquity know anything useful?

Interesting.
There's not a thing wrong with it. But it got the school's attention and so they had to Do Something.
Or taskrabbit.

Think of human.io as more of the platform you might build one of these on. We're not reselling a labor pool, we're making it possible to stay engaged with one, especially for folks that have large audiences that aren't particularly engaged (newspapers, etc.)
> The "Some things you can do" part of the homepage was the most useful part for me. Emphasize that more?

That's a good idea, thanks. I'll move the section up higher.

We're trying to tell two stories on that page. The developer story: an easy way to write simple apps and target them at specific people via some criteria. The user story: join interesting activities by companies and developers you enjoy or want to help out.
I like the idea, but it isn't clear to me what motivates the users to participate. Can the developer offer some sort of financial incentive to the users?
That is good feedback. We will work on it more. Thank you.
(we did Show HN round once before. we did a bunch of polishing based on the feedback, and have more to do.)
I just did those same calculations and got the same somewhat boggling numbers (actually, I only assume 24bit pixels at the panel and got ~24MB frames).

I then wondered how the OS & Window Manager & Applications & video driver & memory bus & pci bus & video card deal with the respective parts of their chunks of a data stream that big… (Then managed to realize I've got work to do before heading down the google-research-of-interesting-thing rabbit hole…)
Feedback appreciated on my new start-up
Hi, YC - I've just launched a new startup www.votable.com and would love to get your feedback. Votable is a free online social polling app that where you can voice your opinion on things that matter most to you and see how the rest of the world thinks.

How is that any different from other polling apps? We feel the current limitation of most online polling models is that the results are limited to the poll creator or are limited to one action (vote, then you’re done). Instead, Votable brings a social aspect to polls that allow users to answer their initial poll of interest, then discover related topics and opportunities to make their voice heard. We are doing a push for the RNC/DNC conventions to help get momentum for the site and would love to hear your thoughts on how to make the site better. Specifically:

Is it clear what the site is for? Is it easy to create accounts / get started? *Any suggestions for functionality to include?

Thanks!
I'm not on a tear to get stuff like this killed, but I worry about how much stuff like it is out there if we let it in. It's getting close to imgur territory.
> Turn a passive audience into engaged particpants. 2) Turn
> your audience int your army.

That's marketing speak.

How about: "Let's say you want to build a website that shows the different rates for parking garages around San Francisco, but you don't have the pricing data. Human.io can help you get hoards of strangers to run around the city, snapping pictures of pricing signs at garages, and uploading the pictures to you. Viola, now you have the data."

Is that vaguely what human.io can do?
I think there are going to be different kinds of users and different kinds of task publishers. Each will utilize different motivations around what they do. We are working on a way to allow this. I think that payments are good, but there's also coupons/offers, gamification or social standing, participatory privilege, etc.

I worry that if we do micropayments for microtasks we'll end up in a very specific pigeonhole that isn't insanely interesting.
This really resonates, having felt the pressure to bullshit since arriving in SV. But, I strongly believe succumbing to all that, would ultimately make me miserable..

Also therein lies opportunity, to stand out, to leave a lasting impression. While my network is still small, and I'm not known by many people yet, they trust me, and know they will get honest feedback, without the BS. If someone asks hows it going? I say: "I'm not really sure, today" or I "slept all day haha" or sometimes positive stuff too "super productive week", because it's ups and downs. If they don't understand that, or think I'm a loser, so be it.

Have nothing to prove or forced to say anything that isn't true. And maybe that's a luxury, so not saying this path will work for everyone, or that it's the 'best'. It's just a strategy, and so are lies, deception, inflation which I will try my hardest to avoid at all costs, because it goes against my core values.

YMMV
I also had to switch from Chrome to Firefox to get it to work (in addition to all of the above).
That's an interesting approach that I do think can improve some things, but I think the underlying problem is that incentives need to be changed. It's not only metrics, but just giving honest opinions: what use-cases do you really think your algorithm is suited for, not looking at it in the most optimistic possible light? If academia weren't as ultra-competitive as it's become in the past two decades or so, I think there would be more chances of getting honest and useful answers to such questions in papers. One still finds them sometimes in papers of people who don't have to play "the game" anymore: papers by senior full-professor types are often quite interesting because of how they can say what they really think.
I think it's up to Apple whether they want to make updates to their OS that lock it down like iOS.

I think it would be a clear mistake for them to do it now.

I also think eventually there is little doubt they will do it but we're at least 3-4 years away from that.

What does "should" even mean here? For Apple's best interest or your's and mine? Clearly Apple should buy us all ponies for xmas, it's not like they can't afford it. Man, who doesn't want a free pony?