skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Oh come on, you are making it sound as if it would be a massive investment for Facebook to develop native apps for multiple platforms.

If I can build a Facebook client that covers the most important features within 3 months (at 2 evenings per week after work) then I'd bet that a company like Facebook (with hundreds of developers that are much better than I am) could invest the needed resources (maybe 3-4 developers per platform) to create a truely amazing native experience.

I'd even argue that it is not an option for anyone in their position to even consider going HTML5 just to reuse some code.
That would be just the wrong place to save a few bucks for them, considering that they need to make a transition to mobile pretty soon and failing to do so would be an open invitation for competitors to come and basically kill them.

Additionally I'd like to add that I am not convinced that is even possible (or if so many times harder) to create a content rich application like Facebook with webviews wrapped in native code that feels as fluid and responsive as a full native app.
I have tried this in the beginning with my Facebook client (app link: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.flipster) and failed miserably before stopping this webview nonsense, and so did the Facebook developers.
At 40, I am reminded of how little I knew 2 years after finishing my schooling.
Yet, I had the audacity of believing I had it all figured out...for 5 minutes at a time. Then, I would tell myself "You're foolish, but that's OK, now is your time to be foolish."

When I read articles such as this one, I rejoice at the idea that youth is eternal.
It's unfortunate nobody has made a waterproof electric skateboard yet, it's what makes me stop buying any of them. How would it perform with knobby all terrain tires?
No updates for 18 months. Did they find any patents?
What is the common understanding when people deliberately tack on 5 at the end of HTML? I don't remember people talking about HTML 4 like that.

Is there some expectation that HTML is suddenly a replacement for native apps? That's a rather unexpected (to me, at least) positioning of HTML.
Facebook used HTML5 for a variety of political and technical reasons.

On iOS, using HTML5 decoupled deployment of functional changes from the App Store approval process. They could add a new feature on the servers and have it available on phones immediately. Certain parts of the new app still use HTML to allow new features without updating the whole app.

On Android, HTML5 let them support a large number of phones with fewer special cases to work around old versions of the OS and phone-specific bugs.
> "Where is my bike and is it OK?"

How does the skateboard avoid this? Where do you park it when you go to a restaurant or something?
This sentiment gets echoed all the time here, and I hate to clutter up these comments with a gripe that's relatively unrelated to the actual post, but please make the Backlift logo in the top-left corner link to www.backlift.com instead of blog.backlift.com.

I'd never heard of you guys before, and now that I've checked out what Backlift is I'm super-interested in learning more, but I shouldn't need to manually edit my browser's URL bar just to get to your homepage from your blog so I can find out what your product actually does!
A relatively common OS X based workflow for Ruby development (which could equally apply to Python) is mostly terminal based.

Use a full screen terminal and a multiplexer (screen, tmux) or a tiling window manager (dvtm) to make use of the full screen; emacs or vim as an editor of choice (ease yourself in if unfamiliar, don't go all-in right off the bat); and Unix itself as a development tool for everything else. While you may initially think a plethora of GUI apps is better, your growing experience will slowly but surely push you away from that.

Within the terminal session you are then exposed to tools other people have written that help you handle deployment, testing, continuous integration, etc.

If the CLI is too much for you, OSX has a number of apps that help organise windows (Moom, TylerWM, Divvy), so you can try and keep that under control in any case.

The terminal is definitely your best friend in OSX or Linux, though, and understanding that environment, especially moving away from PHP, has few, if any, disadvantages.
Show HN:Passion.Completely bootstrapping. Seeking help to test and finetune.
Personally, I've found that I no longer think twice about the VS2012 UI (been using it since the beta). I don't know if I'm more or less productive than I was in VS2010, but the difference is likely marginal since I haven't noticed.

It's the kind of thing that, after a week or two, our brains will incorporate and ignore, even if we consciously hate it at first.
Not sure whether to be upset about this or proud of the technical achievement
The problem is that they never develop firmware updates so if those DSPs don't support yet another open codec on release day, they never will.
That is nifty. Does anyone know of any high performance time series-orientated databases (closed source or not) which support flexible/advanced querying (like being able to find patterns) ?
Just had a reminder of that this morning...
Was doing a bit of routine maintenance on the server at work when I noticed repeated ssh login attempts appearing in the system logs... with usernames that clearly don't exist. Tracing the source ip address sent me to Beijing somewhere, so someone there was trying a port scan and random ssh login attempts.

I've never really looked for this kind of interaction before, and I wonder just how common it is these days - but I'd say that you can now pretty much guarantee that it will happen at some stage, and you'd better hope your security is up to the task.
Its not really not that different. Its not the simplification that Cloud9 has done, and its nothing wild like LightTable is attempting. Actually, 2012 is very conservative, they polished the UI, but its still basically the same IDE as it was in 2005.

I'm very excited to see new kinds of IDEs coming to market, Cloud9...and even LightTable. I think we are almost at the end of the line for SmallTalk-ish IDEs like Visual Studio or Eclipse.
According to comScore, Yahoo Mail is the third largest mail provider with over 300 million users.

Kicker:

> in the U.S., Yahoo is No. 1, with 96.6 million active users

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13772_3-20114975-52/microsoft-aimi...
@idoh - awesome job. 1.8million users a day is fantastic!

if you want, feel free to link us to the app. would love to see it.

keep us posted if you work on another great app like that.
Pozium.com : 100-story-building Elevator Pitch
Pozium.com aims to be the world’s tome of wisdom, a website that collates life’s best stories, truths, and intellectual concepts, and enables us to share our intellegacy (intellectual legacy) with the world and with posterity.

Pozium in seven words: intellectual discussion with entertainment, wit, and fun.

One feature will be our “Best Practices” content, guides anyone can use in order to self-educate and self-improve. Imagine how many people are mired in ineffective practices or beliefs, and the untapped gains. The possibilities are unimaginable. Pozium will be like an updated bible, or a provincial version of HHGTG.

Other feature: Author Pages
Each author, intellectual, writer, artist, or joe has his own page, which functions as “intellectual network” homebase: their blog posts, authored books, essays, papers, CV, academic and professional credentials. Each author can maintain an open-ended Q&A, similar to reddit’s IAMA sessions.

How is Pozium different from Wikipedia? Quora?
Pozium serves a different niche - those who can’t contribute to Wikipedia or can’t and won’t join Quora. Pozium is for both the expert and the layman. And whereas Pozium’s authors can display their insights on their own pages, Wikipedia’s contributors labor anonymously. Much of the character and humor is lost in Wikipedia’s editing process. Pozium’s content will have a more human side to it, which can further cement the content or advice in a reader’s head.

Who am I?
I am just a man with a vision. Nothing more, but not less.

Why should you join me on this quest?
You should join me if you value the chance to be part of something bigger than ourselves, worthy of looking back upon with pride. Currently, I am seeking members of the founding team. Developers, designers, content-writers- anyone who wishes to contribute.

If you are interested or have any comments to offer, please join the thread.
I am ready to discuss pozium.
I have the training to build a computer from scratch (computer engineering degree). Anymore, I find it absolutely exhausting to talk to anyone about technology. Nobody seems to understand that all I need are living expenses. Please, just leave me alone, give me a place to live and food, and I will make whatever you need.

Anymore though, the gap between earning room and board and signing your life away to a soul sucking corporate atmosphere is so vast that I've opted to just go it alone and live as a starving artist.

I wish there was an in-between, but I've become disillusioned with the startup culture that is devolving towards 90s era bubble think. I think of it as, hackers have not yet declared independence from the power elite. Until that happens, I fear that we'll suffer indefinitely.
@alpb - Your wish is my command!
http://www.quora.com/Startups/Which-Quora-members-were-able-....

I'd still love to hear if anyone here at hackernews has any tips or stories.
Current speculation is that most of the 88 bytes of data in the existing watermark is an error-correcting code that hasn't been reverse-engineered yet, so in practice it has less actual non-redundant data than that.
I am sorry to see any negative publicity for HTML5 adoption but I understand that FB is a special case. Saving money on mobile development is not a priority for them.

I think the situation is different for small companies and apps that have many fewer users: saving money on app development frees resources for content production.
What does this even mean and why should I sign in with Github?
Hacker Rank - A competitive league for hackers  to solve interesting challenges
I used to think as you do, and I still think that too much emphasis is placed on patterns, and too many poor coders stitch them together in complex ways to achieve exceedingly simple tasks.

However, when part of your design begins to take a form similar to a well-known pattern, there is a good reason to convert your design to use the specific pattern if possible: communicating with other programmers (including yourself, six weeks later). It means that instead of bogging down in documentation of exactly how that component works, you can just say "it's this pattern", and everyone familiar with the pattern will instantly know how it works, minus a few details.

In addition, knowing about patterns and seeing how they're used in practice (rather than toy examples that make them seem masturbatory) can help you to reason about problems in the future. Not because you necessarily use those specific patterns, but because you have understood how they achieve what they achieve.
Canada Creates New Class of Visa to Attract Tech Entrepreneurs
Give the poster a break, idiots could refer to whoever at Microsoft said that (as they were correctly not well informed nor had any special information).

Office and Visual Studio are of the new "metro-inspired" UIs that, for very good reasons, cannot migrate away from desktop right now. I'm sure we'll eventually see some of these apps move to more Metro UIs (Office?), but for some they will always be desktop (Visual Studio).

Disclaimer: work for Microsoft, but nowhere near these teams.
YourMechanic (YC W12) launches in South Bay (at TC Disrupt)
How is HN being a sharing node not "true virality"? I think you don't quite understand "viral".
Probably not. It looks like this might be doing something clever and possibly relatively robust in the frequency domain, though the details haven't been reverse engineered yet.
What kinds of advanced things are you wanting to accomplish?
We are working over four months on it. We have to work a lot more. Now we are in developer preview stage. We want to make the project more fantastic with your feedbacks.
Word choice absolutely does affect how people think. Terms like "intelligent design" exploit this by cloaking nonsense in the guise of logic, and if you explain to a kid that a lightbulb or an electric skateboard works by "magic" that's a lot less inspiring than saying "a kid just like you studied how things work and invented it."
I'd assume that you'd have a rad over the bottom of the board and the motor housing that uses the air going by as it moves to dump the heat. At least that's my first idea, since I'm not a skateboard engineer it's probably not even close.
Gotcha. Thanks for correcting me.
"More than 49,000 pedalcyclists have died in traffic crashes in the United States since 1932 — the first year in which estimates of pedalcyclist fatalities were recorded. In 2005, 784 pedalcyclists were killed and an additional 45,000 were injured in traffic crashes." http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/810617.pdf

That's a huge number. By one source cyclists are 10x more likely to die per each mile traveled than motorists.

Should bike makers be "rightly" sued out of existence? Should we ban bikes completely?
Agreed.

On the scale of Facebook's resources, building well-functioning apps just isn't a hard problem. Not saying it's not hard, just saying it's not hard on the scale of Facebook's resources.
Naive, me? You have got to be kidding.

I don't know you ... I didn't mean to insult you personally. Just engaging in vigorous debate, is all.

That said, I do think it's absurd to imply that having a NYC real estate mogul worth hundreds of millions of dollars for a father wasn't helpful to Donald in becoming, well, a NYC real estate mogul worth hundreds of millions of dollars. If that isn't naïve, it's ... something.

Trump's father did not bankroll him and certainly in no significant way.

For what it's worth, the NY Daily News obit of Fred Trump literally begins with:

Fred Trump, who amassed a fortune building middle-class houses and apartments in Brooklyn and Queens, then helped bankroll son Donald's glamorous foray into Manhattan real estate ....
The mere threat is enough to keep people from investing much in these "alternatives." E.g., Steve Jobs wrote:

"All video codecs are covered by patents," Jobs wrote from his iPad. "A patent pool is being assembled to go after Theora and other 'open source' codecs now. Unfortunately, just because something is open source, it doesn’t mean or guarantee that it doesn’t infringe on others patents. An open standard is different from being royalty free or open source."

You can bet that if Theora ever got traction and seriously interrupted MPLA's revenue stream, there would be suits. Before that time it'd be pointless for them to sue.
OSX 10.9 Name Revealed
The next version of OSX 10.9
Mark Zuckerberg full interview at TC Disrupt
CTO here: I'm with Spitfire.

> I'm a young programmer and don't trust my own code as a matter of course

This attitude gets you an instant interview at any company I work for.
That, however, is not taking a large pre-existing desktop site and converting it to mobile.
Ok that sounds good.

So, in concluding...what would you say - based on your analysis here - about the assertion that this may have been caused by a 'controlled demolition'.

If you can just summarize your findings here, into a succinct statement that would be greatly appreciated :)

E.g. "The theories don't make sense, because as we saw here....X, Y & Z." or "The theories DO make sense, because Z, Y & X".
IPhone 2012 Election
Interview with Tanya Huang - from techchick to naughty ties
50? It's more than 50 million if I am not wrong. Get your facts right.
I hate to refute everything you've just said, but sadly what you've described has not been the case my (tiny) 7 years working in IT..

I really hope you're right about the future though.
If your old MacBook didn't have an SSD, that is probably what most of the difference is.

Or do you mean that the retina screen makes you perform better? :)
No I haven't, but that's exactly my point.

These companies are spending crazyass amounts on lawyers, lobbying, campaigns, etc. all the while mis-valuing a single download as an enormous profit loss (up to $22,000 for a single song if you believe the hype).

What I'm interested in knowing is:

(a) Does illegal file sharing of music/movies truly result in lost profits or does the exposure to said media actually drive sales?

(b) If (a) does result in a net loss, how much is it?

and the main thing:

(c) What is the amount of (b) compared to the amount of money the RIAA et al. spend on their unwinnable war against piracy? Is it profitable? Is it a wash? Or is it (my uneducated guess) negative equity resulting from a ignorant knee-jerk reaction to something they initially failed to adopt out of lack of understanding and now can't help but rail against like Cuchulain with the invulnerable tide?

Of course it's likely we'll never know, but these are the sort of questions that fascinate me. :o)
All these strange professions always wave the fact that they are registered in my face. It means nothing to me. I don't care if my nurse is registered or not. I can't tell the difference. This is a bit of a tongue in cheek app.

You sign in with Github to prove that you are a developer. It also means I don't have to make you fill out a CAPTCHA or ask you for your email. I ask for the lowest permission (read your public stuff), so don't worry about my trying to do harm to your Github account.
Habit, Shmabit & Gamification
X = {voip, videoconferencing}

Say you wanted to write a live audio chat app to talk to your friends. If you'd chosen the Speex codec, then voice would come over fine, but trying to show off your new guitar skills would fail because what they heard would sound horrible.

If you'd chosen the Vorbis codec, then everything would sound great, but there'd be a weird "lag" between participants, as if one of them were on the moon. Also, adding too many listeners would severely strain your internet connection's capacity.

Opus has latencies as good as Speex, and can be high-, medium-, or low-quality depending on bandwidth needs.
FlashBlock extension is pretty good for this (if of course the music/video is flash based)
Me too... their mobile site is better than their native app on android. the only drawbavck is qhe I try to share a photo it uses the native app.
Sounds like you've never ridden a skateboard or done so for only a very short time.
Zuckerberg forecasts mobile will pull Facebook out of its stock market hole
When a pebble hits underneath my skateboard the reason the skateboard stops and I continue is because ME moving was why the skateboard was moving. In the case of a powered wheel I'll hit the pebble and keep going and keep going, sense the wheel itself is still turning.

I repeat, the wheel is turning, not being turned by inertia and friction.

As for the breaking, I can train myself to lean back when I hit the break, and lean forward when I hit the accelerator. It's not that hard.

PS: I would hope to Jebus that someone would be wearing a helmet and other protective gear with this.
Segways are actually pretty hard to ride if you've ever ridden a standard skateboard. The stability control gain needs to be super high because it's so tippy, so you can easily get it to oscillate if you're not used to riding a self-balancing vehicle.

The acceleration stability problem for electric longboards is actually totally solvable (and solved, just not in a commercially-available machine) by detecting the rider's weight distribution.

I built a prototype back in '06 that (unlike the zboard) had the weight sensing system distributed over the entire deck, so there was no fiddly stance that you had to maintain.

It was super intuitive to ride, even for beginners, and had just an on-off switch as a controller (I used a little car-alarm-style key fob).

I teamed up with a buddy in Vancouver to improve it, and we converted it from a single rear hub motor to dual front hub motors (so no belts or anything to wear out or break). We showed it off at the Bay Area Maker Faire in '07.

On the trip back our prototype got stolen, and real life intruded, and we haven't done much with it since. I'd love to get another unit put together soon though.

http://3wdm.blogspot.com/ for more info.
I've seen this pop up a few times on HN now, seems a good candidate for this type of setup.

Tomorrow on HN: "Hi, we're Stump! It's like Bump for messaging but with the encryption of STEED!"
SF actually has streets that reach over 30 deg incline.
HackerRank Launches A New Social Platform For Coders Based Around Puzzles
The part about braking just isn't true. Sure, there is a stopping limit for any braked device - a bicycle cannot stop any faster than it's wheels can hold friction. I've crashed bikes several times from emergency stops (bikes don't have abs). You can stop any type of board-device and stay on, as long as the friction between the board and the rider is greater than the wheels and the road. You don't automatically flip off the end of a board while braking any more than you flip over the handlebars on a bike - that's because you adjust your position when braking, and more so when braking hard.
> When they invent some good web technology. Oh, wait, they totally did... You heard of AJAX?

Presumably your first sentence is incorrect, then, yes?
It has a name because it's been an issue in technology for thousands of years. I first heard the term back in the 1970s when I was in college. Popped up all the time in architecture, engineering, and art history classes. By the late 1970s I was even hearing it used in discussions about software. If you don't understand how skeuomorphism works and effects design, you won't be very good at it.
Can Evolutionary Stories Explain the Human Mind?
Guess what he's actually saying is that if you want to created "walled gardens" and locking-in users HTML5 is not the way.

So if you want to collect fees from publishers, don't own the browser or the OS (and are not the content creator) - use a closed app.

From the viewpoint of FB this might be (a short-sighted) way forward. It's not in the interest of the publishers and content providers - but again that seemingly doesn't bother FB.
The scroll bar on the right doesn't work for me, but other than that, it's cool!
How does Opus compare to Celt, its direct predecessor?
a competent coder will not build a person's turd-trading platform in five-minute increments for $60 per 12.
Dismissing people based on a few basic demographics (age, location, education, skill set) doesn't really make you someone interesting to talk or work with either... =)
I believe the GP's point is that email should be designed such that it doesn't require all that crap.
I searched for those tweets mentioned in the Techcrunch article (first from GoDaddy and first from AnonymousOwn3r on this topic) and the time stamps are:

* GoDaddy: 10:35 AM - 10 Sep 12

* AnonymousOwn3r: 11:57 AM - 10 Sep 12

So, AnonymousOwn3r does not seem to have announced the attack before it happened.

Links to tweets:

* https://twitter.com/GoDaddy/status/245213898683318272

* https://twitter.com/AnonymousOwn3r/status/245234582205652992
Avatar generator in three.js and coffee script
“The Math”
I use chrome