skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No disagreements on eBay's terrible design. If you go to 5 different pages on their desktop site you'll get 5 fully different designs.

OK, let's take Amazon (I was going to complain about Google's image search for mobile but I just checked it and it addressed the issues I had with it... still no pinch to zoom, though). On the desktop site, I get a home page filled with images of products that I'm probably interested in based on my previous Amazon habits. On the mobile site, I mostly get text with a small image advertising the Kindle Fire. If I browse to books, I get ~5 list items on the screen at one time, vs the desktop version (on my mobile) that gives me a landing page of bestsellers and books tailored to my interests. There's a whole layer of functionality missing on the mobile version for the sake of formatting that I don't honestly need. The reason why the original iPhone's web browser was so amazing was that it made it comfortable and efficient to browse full desktop web pages on a small screen via the whole pinch to zoom action. On a text heavy page, if I double tap it reflows the whole page to fit text on my screen.

Now, I'm not totally against mobile sites. I've seen some truly wonderfully designed mobile sites like Google's main page and some from design centric companies who don't rely heavily on long lists or grids of items. But I would generally agree with the OP that dedicated mobile sites are largely unnecessary at best and a design nightmare most of the time that actually serves to degrade the expected user experience. Users want to pinch to zoom and drag and double tap.

No I'm asking about click through rates to full sites. As in, what percentage of users choose to stay on the mobile version and what percentage click through to the full desktop site? What percentage of users know how to change their user agent on their mobile browser to only get desktop sites (probably minuscule).
Honestly. I know life is not so obvious but I would just pour every resource I could into moving as far as I could from such a mess.
Article had a way too low signal/noise ratio. Way too verbose.
Bugtracker trolls have been around a while.

When we started using bugzilla for GCC (many years ago now), within the first 100 bug reports, i think there were 5 trolls.

This also isn't very advanced trolling.
Advanced trolling is indistinguishable from the thing they were trying to parody.
I don't think I ever blew into my NES cartridges, but I remember taking them out, giving them a gentle shake with the connector end pointing down, and putting them back in. I expect doing this was as much a placebo as blowing (it's not as if there were chip crumbs stuck in there), but it made me feel like I was doing something productive. :/
Confirmed, like others below. Installed on Ubuntu via APT.

~$ sudo service mongodb start

mongodb start/running, process 7680
That's a great quote. If you get on a bus in Manhattan, you'll see bankers making $5 million/year sitting next to social workers making $40k/year. More than half the people on the island don't even own a car. I think that's progress!
I would like to work on BCI(Brain Computer Interface)[1] and improve it. I have many functional applications in my mind that can be made possible if the technology matures :

1)brain-to-brain communication between people or between animals and people. It will be so wonderful to know what animals are thinking.

2)feeding knowledge directly into brain through skill modules like Martial Arts, Programming, Boxing, Cooking, etc.

3)Direct connection of brain to google or wikipedia or blah.

4)Brain Network.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain%E2%80%93computer_interfac...

P.S. : Like any technology, it can be used for both good and bad. If your brain is connected to a public brain network some evil guy may hack your brain and control you.
New iPhone App encourages Classroom Activity for Stats/Math
The Aakkozzll app is a substitute for throwing dice. Players can see the probability distribution on each throw (unlike dice which have a similar pattern, but you just can't see it).

The app is great for high-school to college level stats and data-management classes, and simple enough to serve as a primer for elementary-aged students. It gives them a physical / visual way to appreciate the normal curve. Can be used in a classroom activity of Craps or even monopoly, using the Aakkozzll instead of dice. Games like Craps will take on a whole new meaning when students can actually see the chances of getting a 7.

Will give students an intuition for the binomial distribution, frequency graphs, and the normal curve. As the balls fall down, they randomly go left or right (its about 50/50) depending on how they land. Its like having a series of 50/50 coin tosses which determines the final position of the balls. Only the red ball actually determines your "roll" (it blinks red).

The original inspiration came from the Galton board, a physical device that was built 150 years ago to demonstrate the central tendency. We've recreated the physics of that device into an easy to use iPhone app so that it's insights can be shared with the world. History of the Bean Machine: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bean_machine)

Why the funny name? The Aakkozzll (pronounced "acausal") demonstrates a paradox that although the result of any one individual cannot be predicted, the general pattern can be. This extends to the real world. The fact that a person falls into poverty is not entirely predictable, but the fact that a society will have a certain distribution of rich and poor (regardless of their particular paths towards riches and poverty) is quite constant, especially when you have a large population.

Educators, we encourage you to share this with your peers!
Unlikely, especially on the GPU side. But let's say Clover Trail is slightly faster than A6. That's not really relevant, because Apple would care much more about using their own chip. It's not like Apple hasn't used slower CPU's than the competition. Heck, for the entirety of the iPhone 4S' and iPad 3's life, both had slower CPU's than the competition. And they didn't care.

Plus, Clover Trail is not used in smartphones for a reason - it uses too much power. That's why they are only using it for $800 Windows 8 tablets with big batteries. So for this chip, the A6X, or whatever they call the chip inside the next iPad, will be its competition anyway.

As for "ARMbooks", I'm pretty sure Apple will wait until they have an 64 bit ARM chip first, but I also wonder if they will make a "higher-end" chip, that uses say 5-10W of power and is specifically made for those ARMbooks - not for iPads or iPhones, while in parallel continuing the development of A7, A8, etc.
My experiences were from the Roadster I had for a month while in the Bay area. I had been considering buying one until this experience with the battery. Your battery must be way better than mine and/or you're much better at driving- neither of which is that unlikely. Based on the mileage stats the car would display, there is NO WAY we could've gone from MV to SF 2x on one charge. Even once was seriously pushing it despite speeding down the 101 or the 280 in the carpool zone.
Well I want a pony, ain't gonna happen. Welcome to the Real World, kid. They want infinite flexibility, I'm sure you can charge for that.
I'd say the same too. An acceptable use for "!important" will be with state classes. "!important" should not be the go to solution as its like using a grenade when careful diplomacy would suffice.
It does make things a bit clearer when put in context, thanks. But these laws don't seem to scale too well on the web, the concept of intermediaries ought to be introduced.
> In particular, a database will not have the following default behavior:

> - return from a write call silently, when the data wasn't written and will not be

There isn't some defined set of rules for how a database should operate. This attitude implies that an asynchronous database should never ever exist. If that's the case, how could I ever use a database for HTTP logging? I can't have every single HTTP request block on a database write, that's absurd. HTTP logging is impossible with MySQL or PostgreSQL for exactly this reason.
Just pushed a fix to not allow blank entires. Sorry again about that :(
That's good to know about ML. I've been happy staying on SL for my personal laptop so far, but am glad there's an upgrade path that'll still give me an all-windows Expose functionality.

Spaces was always the least-used of my hotcorners -- especially after getting a separate work laptop that lives with two external monitors hooked up, plus the internal screen open, which greatly reduces the need for that kind of stuff. It's mostly made me not bugged by it being on Lion.
Sunspider is not an IPC type benchmark, you have to run the same app on both processors. I would assume the browser has changed substantially since the last update. Perhaps they have improved the JIT as well.
Trying to start a new project gives me this error:

Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 404 (NOT FOUND) http://jetstrap.com/api/v1/project/last

After choosing the 'fluid' layout and hitting 'Create'.
If you don't care whether a write succeeds or not then you can get even more performance by not making the call to the DB in the first place!
slightly off topic, but where did you get the background music for the tour video where you walk through how it works and what it is. It has a great apple sounding beat.
"Flat design" is, yes. It's just a horrible label for a much broader concept, which is "form follows function", "clarity", "honesty".

Skeuomorphism is an easy target because it is dishonest by definition. Things that appear "cutting edge" or "high quality" today will, in a few years, seem dated, clunky, and pointless.

By contrast, pick up a copy of Die Neue Typography and see how well not just Tschichold's designs, but his ideas, hold up today. Skeuomorphism is a symbol of the Old UI. What we need is the New UI.
Food Fight 28 - Big Data in the Small
I'm not trying to defend Mongo, but the reason it doesn't tell you is because you didn't ask for it. If you care about the data (i.e. it's not a log or something that's not very important), you ought to always use "getLastError" to see if your data was actually stored or not (some drivers, like mongoose (for Node.js), just let you specify a simple flag ("safe:true") that does this automatically).

A shitty default, no doubt. But it can be changed easily. And "most" drivers offer that. And you usually connect to MongoDB using a driver.

http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/getLastError+Command
All that construction on the 401 makes it suck sometimes, but it keeps us from having this. That and there's the 407 for those so economically inclined.
lambda asked the same question I had, which is, simply: what is the point you're trying to make? You're making a lot of side comments about minor points, but I'm not sure what your thesis is.
Just updated my 4S and run Sunspider before (2150) and after (1864). So a bit of the improvement is iOS 6 and not the new hardware alone.
Business opportunity: Run around on a bicycle selling snack foods and other products to people stuck in traffic.
What makes you think Apple would have more luck competing with Intel on speed this time around than they+IBM/Moto did in the past, or than AMD has had?
The trick that always worked for me was to insert the cartridge and then pull it out just enough to where the near edge of the cartridge would just barely scrape against the console as it was pushed down. This was far more effective than blowing on the cartridge.
YAGNI Applies to Usability
http://www.r-bloggers.com/

make sure you look at some older posts
The article didn't include any pictures of Famicom carts, but basically, they're about half as tall as NES cartridges. I haven't popped open any NES games, but I'd have to guess most, if not all NES games just used a Famicom sized board to simplify manufacturing. Here's a comparison shot of the NES and Famicom versions of Super Mario Bros. 3:

http://www.vintagecomputing.com/wp-content/images/smb3j_labe...

While most later systems featured mostly standardized cartridge designs, Famicom carts wildly vary in color and design from publisher to publisher. They're quite pleasing to look at:

http://famicomblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/aesthetics-of-famico...

Another piece of trivia: The Famicom had a 60 pin cartridge port, while the NES had a 72 pin cartridge port (iirc they removed a few pins, relocated a few from the Famicom's bottom port, and added pins for the lockout chips). A few early games literally consisted of a Famicom game board plugged into an internal 60-to-72 pin adapter. So, for a while, the cheapest way to get a Famicom converter was to rip apart a cheap game like Gyromite and hope it was part of a certain run. You can see the converter clearly here:

http://www.vintagecomputing.com/wp-content/gyro/gyro7_big.jp...

As for technical details, you're mostly on the dot, but most later games also featured mapper circuitry to allow the NES to address more memory. Some boards used simple 7400 series, while others used customs ICs, some of which were fairly expensive, to expand the system's capabilities. Simpler ones just allowed for more complex bank switching schemes, while the most expensive ones featured things like interrupt generators and additional sound generating hardware. The sky is the limit for what you can stuff in a game cartridge, so the NES and SNES were designed to be very expandable through their cartridge ports. That's part of what makes cartridge-based games special to me; they're not just data on a disc, they're full-fledged hardware extensions of their host console.
Humans really want to leave their mark behind when they die, huh? ;)
PostgreSQL allows you to select this behavior on a per-transaction basis using the synchronous_commit variable: the default (which what we are discussing here) is "don't return until the data hits disk", but you can set it as strict as "don't return until the data has not only hit a local disk but has been acknowledged by a standby slave" or as lax as "return immediately: sync my data when you get around to it, it isn't important"; (so, don't claim something is impossible with someone's tool without first looking into it deeply).
Indeed, An Almost Entirely Bootstrapped Job Search Giant, Gets A Monster Exit
Of course a salt will not make a single password harder to attack. A salt will however force you to attack passwords "one at a time" by making precomputed hashes useless.
Since the PIN space with 4 digits is pretty small, it would be tougher to harden against brute force attacks, I'd think.
Moved to Portland from Austin a little over a year ago.

Benefits:

- natural surroundings are gorgeous, not surrounded by the rest of Texas, have seen more breathtaking scenery than at any other point in my life

- better coffee, beer, restaurants, food carts

- no sales tax is great while making a transition to a new place if you aren't bringing in any income yet, cost of living isn't very high

- it seems to be a good place to live for an introvert like myself. people are friendly, the neighborhood bars on the East Side are low key/don't have the loud fratty types, and people seem to keep to themselves a bit more.

- no 4-5 months of 100+ temperatures, or extreme temperatures at all

- lots of small live music venues with shows that rarely sell out, such as Doug Fir Lounge and Mississippi Studios

- There are many affordable local conferences such as Open Source Bridge. And the Portland Digital Experience + MusicFestNW badge is a steal.

- Very walkable/bikable, I don't have a car and plenty of access to great coffee/beer/entertainment. Love the neighborhood/small town feel.

- Powell's, Board Game Night at Lucky Lab, Ground Kontrol, Backspace, music video night at Beulahland, love it.

Drawbacks:

- January - March the cloudiness/drizzle gets a bit old. I personally enjoy the transition to Spring/Fall when the flowers come out, and the leaves turn colors, so after being here a year I wouldn't say the weather sucks 9 months out of the year, but maybe 4 months.

- Haven't really formed much of a social circle, many of the people I have met have moved away already because of the weather or go back to keeping to themselves and don't see them again.

- I hear the developer pay is lower

- high state income tax (vs. no state income tax in Texas), losing 9% of your income is much worse than paying no sales tax, and the cost of living is a little higher than in Austin.
>It would be like a weather app with ads in the middle of the sun icon.

The analogy is just awesome!! Thanks a ton for bringing a smile on a gloomy day :)
> Not long ago, another judge tried to blackout Facebook for 24hrs too, don't remember why...

It was for similar reasons. Someone trash talked a politician on Facebook, the politician ordered it to be taken down, Facebook failed to comply and was ordered to blackout for 24 hours.

It's worth noting that Brazil is the number 1 country in number of takedown requests to Google. Almost all of them are because of politicians feeling offended.
The US Is Becoming The Most Competitive Exporter In The Developed World
Laying Bricks (why you’ll start seeing more posts from me)
You can only use the supercharger on the 60 or 85kwh versions of the Model S. It's an upgrade on the 60kwh. You can not use it on the 40kwh versions. No word on whether or not the 'Supercharger' stations will have "level 2" charger or not. Also, highly doubtful that this could be used by other electric vehicles than the Tesla. So, you can only use this if you spend $65k or greater.
Why the hell is anybody still driving then? Surely after sitting in traffic for half a dozen hours a couple of times inspiration strikes and you buy a motorbike?
I wrote a fairly elaborate newsletter regarding the lessons I learned from responsive design. There are no absolutes when it comes to this. The decision varies from site to site.

If you believe that all websites should be responsive, then please read my newsletter. How my revenues went from $25k to $19k / month average when we redesigned and went responsive. How changing it back has now boosted the revenues even higher than before.

http://eepurl.com/przMX
Which colleges help grads snare top salaries?
Yep-there are already some journals where that is the main business model.
Interesting and I am glad he is flexible about choosing his tools. BTW, I am fairly certain that Guy Kawasaki was the guy at Apple in 1984 who paid for a full page Scientific American advertisement for the little Mac application I wrote while at SAIC. I made sure that everyone in my management hierarchy saw the ad :-)
I am making some assumptions here absolutely, but because 40% is a large effect you don't need as many samples to be confident.

The other way of looking at it is that maybe it's actually 35% or 45% but either way, that's still interesting, even with a rougher approximation of the actual "answer". If, for some reason, you needed to know if it was 40% or 40.01% because that mattered to you then you would absolutely be annoyed at the small sample size.

If the finding was 2% then we would care about the uncertainty of +/- 5% since the finding is dwarfed by the error rate. That's a smaller effect size so you would need more samples to separate reality from the noise.

I am, by the way, pulling all of these numbers out my ass. Your stats 101 class will teach you the formulas to calculate the actual error bars at work here as well as the assumptions you need to make about the distribution of the data to use those formulas.
Normally people look at logs when things go wrong. Do you look at the log anytime something starts successfully and seems to be working? You must spend lots of time looking at logs.

This is a message that MUST be displayed on the console when you install the server for the first time. It's too important.

Also, you learn a tool before going into production. I never went into "production" with mongodb. All I did was experiment with a toy project. I never needed to look at the log.
Chromium Blog: Enabling new classes of applications with Pointer Lock
Oh ray tracing, the nuclear fusion of computer graphics. It's coming! It's amazing! Meanwhile the industry still keeps burning coal.

For applications that deal in perfect lighting, yes it's probably a useful technique that would benefit from hardware support. But where is the real-world benefit for the rest of us? For most consumers, lighting provides about 2% of a game's value and 0% of everything else.
Measuring iPhone demand
Here's an example of a page designed for our open-source repository, along with a link to download the PSD: https://layervault.com/permalink/t64izx8Jae
Python/Django: Using Celery with Social Networks
> Unless you're claiming that evolution is the only explanation for complex systems, that's not enough.

You misunderstand me totally.

> I believe in evolution, but most arguments offered by evolutionists against creationism are crap.

Except for the part where evolution has all the evidence on its side, right?
We got it at Audio Jungle. It cost about $14 I think.
I'd take that further. Is there any good reason for anyone to run an FTP server (public or otherwise) in 2012?
Most of people in "the world" do not even have a car.
No offense, but you should probably read at least the sections you're commenting on. Your reasoning is pretty correct but your conclusion is opposite the truth. The full quote:

"Generally, logic blocks are automagically laid out with the use of advanced computer software. However, it looks like the ARM core blocks were laid out manually—as in, by hand. A manual layout will usually result in faster processing speeds, but it is much more expensive and time consuming. The manual layout of the ARM processors lends much credence to the rumor that Apple designed a custom processor of the same caliber as the all-new Cortex-A15, and it just might be the only manual layout in a chip to hit the market in several years." (emphasis mine)
Couldn't the links expire to prevent most of these issues?
Thanks Kris :)
Great writeup on the best city on Earth. It's a blessing to live here.
> My basic claim though is that atheism doesn't just mean that you believe there is no god, it means that you believe there is no theistic god.

As the term is actually used, atheism is the lack of faith in the supernatural. Look up 'dictionary atheist' on Google sometime.
Which pushes people to mass transit, lowers overall consumption of gasoline, decreases revenue from car registration and gas taxes and bankrupts the transit system.

Edit #1: I'm being intentionally glib, but the point is that it's not as simple as "raise taxes" or "take the bus."

Edit #2: I'd love to hear a counterpoint instead of just downvotes. Please explain to me how the spirit of what I said is incorrect.
The 404 is okay (we use that to check if you had an existing project loaded in your session), are you seeing an issue?
SolarFlower: an open source solar energy collector
Two hours to go ten miles? Ridiculous! You might as well get out and walk. Riding a bicycle would cut that in half, easily, even in a place like Sao Paolo.

This reminds me of reading about a practice in the epic traffic jams around Beijing and Shanghai. Two guys on a scooter will cut through the traffic jam and one will offer to "car sit" for you while the guy with the scooter drives you to work.

http://gizmodo.com/5738525/chinese-motorists-are-paying-peop...
Apple Co-Founder Wants to Be Australian Citizen