skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
At first thought this seems like a major blow for CodeWeavers and the commercial WINE consultation crowd; Steam and Valve games are among their staples, selling a large number of CrossOver licenses. However, on further consideration, if Valve wanted to make Steam/Linux a more seamless experience, one could see them becoming a major patron of CodeWeavers et al and/or becoming major WINE contributors themselves, in an attempt to ensure that most Steam games work perfectly on WINE.

This makes even more sense if one supposes that Valve ultimately intends to release a "Steambox" console. In such a condition, the question emerges: at what point does Microsoft feel WINE is damaging its profits sufficiently to revoke the free pass its enjoyed for a long while and bring out the legal banhammer? I think a Steambox that relied heavily on WINE would be excellent provocation.
When I try to lookup myself all I get is "Found HN profile..." and that's it.
So we can add this to the incredibly small list of "it's not a bug it's a feature" where it's actually true.
I stand corrected, "youtube" is not even in the description of Video Downloader, that was a lucky guess. Which makes the whole thing even more arcane, as it makes the search highly unintuitive.
DRM in general is terrible, though. It adds no value at all for legitimate consumers, and in fact makes their experience far worse than it is for those that pirate your games (seriously mis-aligned incentives there!)

Steam is DRM, of course, and it definitely causes hassle for some users. Where Steam is different however is that it does actually add value, and for many users (myself included) the trade-off is worth it. I wouldn't dismiss software out of hand because "it's DRM" - there's a whole spectrum of good and bad software within that definition.
Is it easier to develop extensions for chrome than it is for firefox? I'm a firefox user and only find this kind of extensions for chrome. Or are all the cool kids using chrome these days?
Why does this still happen? Aren't security best practices still not wide spread enough to dissuade people form doing this?
Yes did that, the status has been deleted.. But new status can be easily added/changed...

Can you be little more specific with what you meant?
It's actually very good and always was. There were no extensions that were browser specific.

These were, if you check out output out, simply commented out metadata and custom prefixed CSS rules that allowed it to be imported back into Word if required without losing any information that was lost when exporting to HTML. You could remove all these with a text editor (or a regex) and it'd knock perfectly good HTML + CSS out.
I take it you will need 3D if you are in the market for Steam.

I also went through all sorts of hell with proprietary AMD/ATI drivers, and I needed them for OpenCL. To this day my Desktop is a pain to use but OpenCL works fine. Sadly they make the best cards for this purpose by far, otherwise I would get something else.
I didn't install it, even though I like the idea, because it wanted access to 'data on all websites'. I don't know whether Chrome allows more permissive permissions (like only HN), but trust is a rare good and I wouldn't allow a random extension to see everything I browse to.
Despite Assurances Concerns Remain With Ubuntu
I'm a C die-hard as well.

Tell you what I'm doing lately, that makes me less and less interested in the new-school elite, and just generally enjoying a language 'enigma' moment: putting Lua in everything.

That is, I mean to say, Rust is neat and all but we can do it all in Lua, pretty well, too. Table types are fabulous, kids!

And being able to take any collection of C libraries, and glue them together into 'ones own runtime' with a common language framework/boundary, means a lot.

So, yes, of course.. Lua isn't fast, it has weaknesses, there is luaJit and so on: its not about Lua. Its about the fact that you can choose whatever languages are out there, get competent at their adept usage, and win.

I believe that Rust will be a systems programming language when there is a bootable Rust OS that boots to an editor, a shell, a means of interacting with devices, and a Rust compiler sitting there, waiting for input .. until then, it sure is fun to watch the new school language paradigms get all twisty and bent in the rush to school someone on how systems 'should be programmed, instead of the way they are now'. Research in this field is a terrifically interesting social cache.

Has anyone done a RustOS? Is there one? I know of a couple LuaOS projects, and it sure seems to me like what was done with Linux on Android could be done to Linux, again, with Lua .. Rust .. and so on. Could be very cute times ahead, in the distribution mecca .. GoboLinux, but instead 100% booted to Lua? Hmm .. bogglethink .
Better charge Apple with abuse of monopoly position in the market when they limit their users' access to software and directly hurt consumers. MS and browser wars are beating dead horse.
Contrast and Meaning in Design
Form a contrast is actually just about everywhere and a part of anything we all notice, carry out, expertise, and fully grasp. Seek out this in your own do the job and outside of.
It does allow permissions for specific site. I'm not sure how it works it might be needed so it can get the data from external sites.
Intel run pretty flawlessly. They're just comparatively underpowered for gaming.
I have twice $19.81 here for both editions (Luxembourg)
I've been using these guy for a long time too, though even though the designs are great, it wasn't enough to out balance my lack of creativity.
Self is a language, Morphic is a GUI toolkit/framework/library. You can play with Morphic implementation in some Smalltalks (I did it in Pharo) and even in JavaScript: http://www.chirp.scratchr.org/blog/?p=34
Just looked at Nokia maps around my work in Central London. The business listings are all wrong and the icons are placed on top of the road names making it very hard to use.
He isn't completely wrong...

TV won't be Apple's undoing but it also isn't obvious that they can win big there.

It is a complicated business with a number of interlocking players at different levels and vested business interests. It is also a global business with rights packaged up at a very national level and sold with exclusive deals.

While the biggest MSO's in each country (cable, satellite and terrestrial operators depending on the market) have the scale to lock in key content/channels to exclusive deals it will be fairly hard to break into the market in a devastating way. At the moment they have the scale and the revenues to do exclusive deals with the content creators (that they don't already own) to keep a large proportion of their customers from leaving. They (not the content creators/owners) are the big bullies in the market and would be hard and expensive to topple.

An AppleTV (including screen) if it does happen will need to be a good enough content offer for most people or it will not be a massive success. If they still have to use their cable box it can't be a game changing user interface because you are looking at the STB interface most of the time.

It's not impossible for Apple but it also won't be easy, particularly to go global. It will cost money to get content which might break Apple's principles and set a bad precedents for them. They also can't go that expensive because while I'm sure the UI will be better Samsung/Sony and some of the others really aren't that bad and the cosmetic designs don't leave that much room for minimalist improvement.

The business case for Apple is far from clear for me at this point but it would be a way to take the war to Samsung that would cost Samsung far more than a billion dollars even for an Apple relative flop. The collateral damage might kill Sharp unless they supplied the panels and would be another knife in Sony/Panasonic/Toshiba that they could do without.
Same reason I didn't install
It's Logitech C100 (http://www.logitech.com/en-my/support/webcams/6424) not sure how old it is, I borrowed it from colleague.
I find this announcement kind of bitter-sweet. It's awesome, amazing and inspiring that a company like Valve has put this much effort in to supporting Linux, no matter what their underlying motives are. At the same time, it's really sad that this is the biggest thing to happen to mainstream Linux gaming since Loki and id/Epic since the early '00s.

As somebody who was briefly caught up in the "convert-all-the-things-to-Linux" evangelism of the early 00's to the "fsck it, I don't care who uses it. I like it." attitude, I sincerely hope this makes an impact. Forget the FLOSS ideals and morals; if this means more 'power users' realize there's a viable Windows alternative for gaming (and more), everybody wins.

I know a lot of 'purists' will inevitably complain about the influx of 'noobs', but, fsck it. No matter what beliefs/philosophies you follow, it's always a good thing to be able to show people that there are other options.

As a long-time follower & sometimes contributer to the free/open Unix scene, this makes me proud.
I've developed extensions/plugins for both browsers. Chrome is way easier, but not as powerful. Firefox is much more obtuse, but also much more powerful.

In practice, I found developing for Chrome much more enjoyable. Developing for Chrome felt like modern development whereas developing for Firefox felt very heavy, verbose and overall frustrating.
Pin.js - node.js module for Pin (Australian payment gateway)
I think something like YouView has the most potential. It needs a few more years of development, but it could be bundled into TVs and resold to broadcasters in other countries as a state broadcasting standard.
you can allow access to finite set of websites in manifest.json while developing the chrome plugin.
I recently re-read his book Literary Machines after first reading it in the late 80s, and it struck me how simultaneously visionary and impractical his ideas were. His version of the web was centralized(), with the organisation running it covering its costs by franchising-out access points. yes, it had transclusion and versioning, but it also had rights management and automatic billing for quoting (transcluding) other people's work - all imposed by a central authority that owned the entire "web".

( it had to be centralised, otherwise the contract necessary for transclusion would not work in the real world)

Nelson is a very smart visionary, but I'm glad we ended-up with the messy, decentralised web we have today.

Obligatory link to The Curse of Xanadu at Wired, back in the day: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.06/xanadu.html. A real hacker nightmare story.
35M * 4.36% / 1000 = 1526

The first "Humble Bundle" got approximately 20000 Linux purchases. I'd imagine Steam would get significantly more than that at release.
Terabit Ethernet is Dead, for Now
What are some things that you can do in Firefox but not in Chrome?
You can always read the extension's source to see what exact data it's using and where it sends it to.
They may not do the manufacturing themselves, but it's clear that they see a future market for some form of Linux based games system for which they will be the main supplier of software.

It's either that or they are predicting a sharp upsurge in Linux usage after Windows 8 which seems like a very scary predication to make.
That's a fantastic story. Now that the research is done, open sourcing this data could allow many people especially in poorer places of the world (once they can access the right tools, which might be a severe stumbling block) to create similar machines and gain power.

I wouldn't have thought that creating a windmill is such a difficult thing. Always cool to learn something new from an unknown domain.
الجزيرة الرياضية
The SOLID principles of software development and how to apply them
> Apple's rejection of Google's superior maps is an obvious example

Also, they never "rejected" Google's maps. They simply chose not to distribute it as a default app anymore and now Google has not yet gotten their new Map App ready.

Just one of the many examples where the author clearly twists and distorts reality in the article to fit into a very loose chain of arguments.
All READMEs in English, all code in Portuguese? Really?
I found myself strongly agreeing with him about fill() specifically. Fill what? It's a verb that performs no action, and is really shorthand for setFillColor, which sets invisible global state. It's not at all obvious from the name what fill() actually does, nor what it's parameters are. Only through previous familiarity with graphics APIs and RGB triplets can I infer the meaning, and in a learning environment it's silly to expect that familiarity.
I suppose there's a risk that Steam becomes the defacto way to ship software for Linux which would in effect just assimilate it into being a closed platform.

OTOH that seems unlikely, hopefully it will be more like OSX with a healthy commercial ecosystem and an open source system living side by side on the same OS.
Really awesome article @jacquesm, I love these intricate, in-depth, long struggling-for-a-labour-of-love stories.

In fact, not to wax overly lyrical, I think a lot of stories that appeal to people in general follow that pattern. Something about the best aspects of humanity in that kind of endeavour.
It would be nice to have an easier way to view your own profile (I expected this when I went to my profile page, but it didn't happen).
This doesn't belong on HN.
Is there any evidence that this article actually informed or inspired the pioneering work on hypertext systems (Xanadu, HES, Intermedia, etc)? Or was it brought in later to add historical credibility to the idea? IN would be intersting to see a citation history.

Its a great article, though, and Vannevar Bush was an impressive guy.
Ask HN: In the mobile app world, is field testing &gt; unit testing?
I have a general software dev question, since I'm new to mobile development.

Overall, it seems that with any mobile app, you have to dedicate a significant portion of time to conducting extensive field testing of your app on a variety of devices.

On top of that, if you follow TDD, you need to write unit tests for as much of your app as possible.

But as an indie developer, lots of field testing is really costly, but so is writing test cases for everything.

So my question to fellow hackers is:

Is it appropriate to trade off unit testing, in favour of more field testing? OR is it better to have a balance?

Thoughts?
Wow, either the author has a serious grudge against them, or isn't willing to at least fact-check their response.

- The app checks your email on your behalf.

- You need the actual password to log into an IMAP server
(android also stores your email passwords in clear text if you aren't using gmail http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=10809).

- They clearly state this in their response, which the article completely ignores. They try to use OAuth where possible.

- They store the passwords encrypted via S3. Personally, I'd prefer that to MySQL on a VPS somewhere.

- See also: https://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/PlainTextPasswords
Call with your iPod or iPad
Being online all the time is not something insurmountable. My mobile plan came with data included. I have 3G connectivity all the time, for really good prices too, both on my phone and on my iPad and I live in Romania, not the U.S. or some other country that's in the top countries when it comes to Internet connectivity.

And I'm seeing people living in the country-side, on farms, talking through Skype to their relatives that live abroad, using an USB stick that's connecting them through 3G, or using a broadband 50-100 Mbps connection exposed through Wifi. It's totally shocking, given that some of those places do not have access to cable TV (only through satellite) or to basic utilities such as marsh gas pipes, yet they have Internet access.

Of course, right now Internet access is a problem, even for us sometimes. The costs of my 3G connection is enormous when in roaming. Sometimes you lack the signal and 3G connectivity is not available everywhere, etc... but in 5 years from now I believe it will be a non-issue.

And Chromebook is designed for the long-run and I hope they won't cancel it in the wake of Android's success.

There are Chrome apps that are designed to also have functionality when offline, albeit limited. For instance there is a GMail app in the Chrome store that's designed to work in offline mode [1]. It's really basic and not something I would use, being more like a demo at this time.

I was also sad to hear that Google Reader is not working in offline mode anymore, so now for my iPad I'm searching for a replacement, and because what I've found in the store seems to suck, I may even code one myself - although I may just forward new items to my email address and do some filtering in my email client.

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ejidjjhkpiempkbhmp...
OP (or whoever authored the app), open your manifest.json file, go to line 20, and edit the permissions line to remove the all-domain permissions. Here are your current permissions:

"permissions": [ "http://news.ycombinator.com/", "http://news.ycombinator.org/", "https://news.ycombinator.com/", "https://news.ycombinator.org/", "https://*/*", "http://*/*" ],

FTFY:

"permissions": [ "http://news.ycombinator.com/, "http://news.ycombinator.org/, "https://news.ycombinator.com/, "https://news.ycombinator.org/],

I'm not going to read through all of your js to figure out what other domains you really need. Kudos on the idea -- I like it. Just not ideal to ship an app to this audience with the unnecessary security nail-biter during install. Fix and push and you should be good to go.

EDIT: Format
> This looks very similar to [...] www.site44.com.

That was my first thought (site44 is pretty awesome btw). Will Harp do anything more than serve content from a Dropbox folder?
> I don't think these are coincidences

Those are not. Just selection bias.
A slightly strange conclusion. You don't need to blame somebody or something to grieve. I understand the point of blame in the court case, but the author is talking about 'somebody must be to blame [for this loss in the prime of life]'. Blaming someone can make grieving easier, but that doesn't mean that there has to be blame.
It lacks the most important advice: charge more.

> I will give a lower price to a customer who I believe to have good character, and I would hike up the price if he is a demanding or difficult to deal with type

Please don't. Your beliefs don't matter. Even the coolest guy can come out as a PITA or a scammer. Or even if he's cool, he can have partners who will make your life a living hell. In the end, it's all about the money. Just charge what you're worth, so you don't regret it.
How do you find the time?

This is actually a serious question - for the various makers on HN, is it sacrificing other things, older (or no) children, flexible jobs, independant income. Or just really awesome time management?

I would like to know so either I stop beating myself up for bad time management, or improve it.
New Zealand admits illegally spying on Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom
Vi(m) keybindings and features for Xcode
I'm the author.

1) The app downloads your emails into their server.

2) Yes, they store that actual password. Which is ridiculous.

3) Yes, good for them for that, but still there are others where they store passwords. And that is not acceptable.

4) But that also means that they outsource the security part of things. Which doesn't lend faith to the idea that they know about security. And if someone realises how to control their application, all the passwords will be hacked.

5) Pidgin is stored locally. There's a difference. Not that I support it, but it's still better than someone storing my passwords.
Unusual Indian Ocean earthquakes hint at tectonic breakup
Amazon startup challenge 2012: more prizes
until it silently automatically updates
This article addresses GUI design pretty well.

But it does nothing about what's below, what actually makes that GUI possible, backend and all that.

In that sense, I believe Bret is addressing something on another level entirely, something that _is_ the future, i.e. a dev environment for people who design stuff.

Not a failed half-step up from C, like java,lisp, or all the existing programming language.

An unbreakable waterproof abstraction that will enable the less skilled to create awesome stuff.

Then we will be able to take all the <insert any 1.x levels of abstraction language here, from java to ruby> programmers, and send them to a layer where they belong, instead of leaving them to rot in a system that is both inadequate for speed and inadequate for productivity.
Same problem here, although I can find your profile now. I wonder if it's relying on an external service and it takes time to generate. Maybe my name will work in a few minutes.

edit: oh, maybe the problem is to do with the logged in users profile is different (inputs vs. display) and because it's fetching locally it's seeing the edit fields?

edit edit: I think that's it! I logged out and I can fetch my profile fine.
My sales seems to have dropped but I really think we need more time to know for sure.

With only 3 days of sales data since the iOS 6 launch (according to iTunes Connect Mobile) how are any of you able to say for sure one way or the other that the discovery is actually worse?

Here are my sales: https://twitter.com/tsteil/status/251273647262691328/photo/1...
The past 3 days I've only had 1 sale per day. The last time I had 1 sale per day for 3 days was back in May.

My other app: https://twitter.com/tsteil/status/251275489241624577/photo/1...
Only 2 sales this week (Sep 17 - Sep 23). In the past 26 weeks there have only been 2 weeks where I had 2 or less sales.

So, both of my apps have seen their sales go down but that is with only 3 days worth of sales data.

(fwiw I made these 2 apps in my spare time over 3 years ago and haven't updated them since)
hackerne.ws should also be whitelisted.
Show HN: Speak Through Images (Fun app to use)
It's not perfect, because you need to do more scrolling,

The fixed interval animation used while scrolling trough apps is quite ridiculous. Scrolling back to the first app once you got to 4th or 5th takes more time than searching the same thing again.

Other than that I agree that things improved. I'm not an iOS developer though.
All the cool kids are using chrome. I believe it recently overtook firefox in overall marketshare too.
Jim Mortram's Small Town Inertia
Agreed on this.

Also just adding a comment to test this plugin out (requires hovering over a username)
When you developed for Firefox, have you tried the new Addons SDK[1]? My understanding is that its model resembles Chrome's.

[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/developers/docs/sdk/latest/
Was the 600K deposited as bitcoins? :-)
Just being pedantic, but shouldn't it be called a wind turbine, not windmill? After all, it's outputting electricity and you're not grinding down grains or corn. Either way, this was very interesting. Good work.
It's probably just running a single instance that has a set limit of maximum connections. Unlike a big MMO where you connect and you get "forwarded" to one of their hundreds of servers with free spots.
You didn't note the abstracted component connectivity bit, where buttons got hooked up to other components and used as commanders?
Sparqlight: Enterprise social review
"GOG.com will also be announcing that it is bringing best PC games from throughout history to a new operating system."

Source: http://en.thewitcher.com/community/entry/296 about a Special Event on the 18th of October

Though, that will probably be OS X.
It all compiled ok, but didn't seem to create the executable in the build/ folder..
Hovering over yours kills this page for me in chrome for some reason. Asks me to kill the page or wait, every time.
And? They are making games for linux now. That's a win.