skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Of all the companies they are funding, I could totally see Lockitron going viral. Once you have the app on your phone, you have the first key in your keychain. Once the price drops to like $50 a unit, you are in the realm of being super competitive with your standard physical lock, enough so that people would start looking at each key on their keychain as one that can be replaced.
Facebook posts loss despite 32% rise in revenues
Apple hypes their platform specific tools, but there's no reason that at least traditional textbook content can't be provided in an easily cross platform way. Even the more complex content will likely become standardized to some extent in the near future (presenting it in web views is probably viable for a lot of it, especially once there's better support for <audio> tags).
This is a really important perspective I hadn't considered. Money can be a very corrosive incentive. If, say, you have student loans or a family to support, you might decide to trade your personal sanity for a payoff.

Glad the decision to leave is easier, at least.
Do you consider WoW a game?
I am with you on how misplaced the enmity towards --- well, at least Groupon. But there have been well-known public companies that did badly that were essentially scams, such as during the channel stuffing scandals of the late 1990's. So while I sympathize with your irritation at the "Groupon is a Ponzi scheme" meme, the last sentence of your comment is simply wrong; it's wrong directly (a counterexample would be Sanjay Kumar) and it's wrong in what it implies.
Arduino-based, urban aquaponics in Oakland (video)
This surge may not last long as some 250M employee owned shares will flood the market next week.
"Because of this, most Groupon clients (the businesses) end up losing money, and never offer a second or third discount via GroupOn."

That's false.

in Q3/2011, 33% of Groupons merchants were people who were doing it for a second time. That number was up to 56% in Q1 of this year.

The deals are getting less lopsided-- $12 for $24 at a restaurant where it's challenging to eat for anything less than $50 is a pretty good buy for a restauranteur. With most of their costs tied up in fixed costs (real estate, etc), they aren't losing much (if any) on this a deal of this size.

You're also somewhat wrong when you say, "The original idea was that Groupon would team up with a business and provide deep discounts to consumers to encourage them to try out that business."

That was part of the original idea, but there are a few other benefits. 1) Filling empty seats for businesses whose costs are largely already incurred 2) It's an effective cash advance for the business- they recognize the revenue quickly (it's like a Kickstarter campaign).
Another option: it's a niche issue.

Not saying they won't look at it in the future but We have a family iPad and its no problem. My wife can see my email but she's my wife so I honestly don't care. Our neighbours have two between six of them and similarly have no issues.

People with a tech background worry about this more than most people but they also tend to be the sort of people who have their own devices. For normal families the current situation is a relatively minor problem - considerably less of an issue than both kids wanting it at once I suggest.
> With a makerbot, a raspberry Pi, an arduino and a shelf full of components

From recent experience working on a hardware side-project: these are extremely cool and useful development/indie tools. But when you get to the stage of large scale production we are still lacking easy entry.

I've been working on an XBEE home automation project intended to be run from a Rasp Pi "server" (but designed to run from anything that can boot linux and has GPIO). It's looks great, has a nice enclosure and is something any hobbiest could get working with the right plug and play bits.

But.

Packaging this for mainstream, where a user can simply buy "black boxes" and connect them up is tough. Circuit design and fabrication on any scale requires both skill (i.e. in designing the layout - I am an Electronic Engineer but of the solder-stuff-together ilk rather than CAD) Admittedly places such as Batchpcb etc. make prototyping a lot easier, but the hurdles you mention are still there in many forms.

The maker/hacker collective is very well serviced nowadays. Next we need someone to disrupt the small-scale development arena: off hand, a community of PCB designers/hackers available to make bespoke PCB layout which links into a batch production system would rock! I've hacked together my prototypes, but have minimal confidence they will work first time :)
Georges to keynote the innovation of economics, Oct 30 in DC
Venture Capitalists Every Startup Should Know
Small point: Teletext is not the "German" system, it's the generic name for the service. The UK had several Teletext services, such as Ceefax (BBC channels) and Oracle (independent channel). Similarly ARDText and ZDFtext are German Teletext services.
Filepicker.io adds policy based security
He was probably referring to work on power saving and system resource efficiency. Apparently Windows 8 uses less hardware resources than Windows 7, according to article.
There's enough articles that keep repeating the contemplation step. I liked this kind of article the first time I read it. Don't you agree you want to read articles that go past the contemplation step and into implementing a plan to solution?
Don't forget good apples like Valve :(
Founder here. We're excited to be able to begin offering security on Filepicker. Security in Javascript is hard because most of the possibilities (window.location, referrers) are easily bypassed. We've built this system based on a shared secret and signed polices; this method is a good start for us to help you easily enable file uploads while still protecting your storage.

We've tried to be careful and meticulous about how we approached the problem and tried to balance usability, clarity, and security. We've reached out to friends who do this kind of work at MIT, within our batch at YC, and with some beta customers.

Keeping our developers buckets safe and our user's files safe is one of our company's principles so feel free to email me at liyan@filepicker.io or post here; I'll stick around to answer questions or respond to comments.
Apple’s Fusion Drive
I mostly agree with what you write. However, I have to say that, even 2 years ago, based on my somewhat limited knowledge of Zynga, I would have needed to be EXTREMELY desperate to an accept an offer from them. I left MS because I couldn't find a single product they made, aside from XBox, that I had any passion around, whatsoever. I know that I need to be fairly enthusiastic about the products or services that work on every day - the promise of a possible payout would not have been enough to get me to join an organization led by team that seems deceptive, unoriginal and unscrupulous.
Click through and read the LA Times article.

When bond broker Willard May of Round Rock, Texas, was forced into retirement after a run-in with federal securities regulators in the early 1990s, he turned to his trusty AAirpass to generate income. Using his companion ticket, he began shuttling a Dallas couple back and forth to Europe for $2,000 a month.

"For years, that was all the flying I did," said May, 81. "It's how I got the bills paid."
>I've been using Windows 8 since the Developer previews, and while some things have taken a while to get used to(like the hot corners)

Out of curiosity, is there anything the hot corners can do that you can't do using the Windows key launcher?
While http://dragonmount.com is a Wheel of Time community they sell the entire range of DRM free TOR science fiction novels (among others). Definitely a good place to shop.
Yes, that's my point exactly. By claiming the absolute right to force upon the counterparty anything they have not explicitly forbidden by contract, you require them to create absurdly lengthy and unnecessarily expansive agreements that enumerate every possible circumstance and give them almost unlimited leeway in the event of a dispute. And then people complain that EULAs are too long and make unnecessary power grabs.
How many customers asked you for a network block device? I can't think of anyone who uses raw block devices these days. Qmail? Some db storage engines?

I'd posit that what most consumers actually want is a persistent filesystem. Clear consistency semantics is probably a bonus at this point.

Vending a fs shim to your domus eliminates a whole mess of abstractions.
Physical things are great. They just haven't been as great a way to start a rapidly growing business as software.

The same issue applied to software not all that long ago. As with software, the wide availability of consumer-level, cheap or even free tools to make stuff is driving a renaissance for hardware.

And with so much hardware hacking then, as with software, some will see explosive growth.

It's good to see in my mind because hardware can be infinitely more important/useful than software.
Presumably (at least if you accept the Efficient Market Hypothesis), predictable information like that is already priced in to the stock.
Seeing the words "Athlon 64" reminds me of the halcyon days of the 4400+, one of the greatest innovations at its price point in the consumer-grade processor market. It really does bring a tear to the eye.
I watched the Amazing Spiderman trailer[1] in 720p in both formats - using youtube-dl - and I honestly couldn't tell the difference. The webM file is ~16% larger, though.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atCfTRMyjGU
You don't have to move to click the little start menu preview, you don't even have to wait for the preview to show up, you just bring your mouse to the corner and click. There's no aiming, just "throw mouse to corner and click". as commented by sukuriant
I for one love LibreOffice Writer and find it to be much more intuitive and configurable than Word. Draw and Calc leave something to be desired, but the needs they fill are better served by Adobe products and R respectively, imho.
Shameless plug for a stupid little web-app I wrote for exactly this purpose... years ago. It was my first foray into Django, and it's open-source:

http://finisht.com
http://github.com/nicksergeant/finisht
>I use OSX, Ubuntu, and now Windows 8 daily and I think they have all gotten to a state where if you like your hands to rarely leave the keyboard you can work within all 3 very well.

Yes, this. I love that all are converging on a keyboard-centric UI. This is sort an unreported event, overshadowed by the Metro and Unity rucus, and probably not important to the mainstream, but as a power user I'm really glad to see it finally happening.
Author here,
I wasn't aware of that. I'll add an addendum shortly.

Thank you
I can't believe they upgraded the iPad to version 4? This seems like only yesterday that the iPad 3 was announced.

Also Marco says at one point about the six different versions of the macbook pro for only 3 different size points. Is this a sign of the Jobs touch being lost?

The iPad mini is different in that the Nexus 7 was the first sub ipad size tablet to make a mark before Apple. This won't make a huge difference to mini sales, but it does reek off Apple chasing tails.
That key by itself becomes a valid access token.

If someone snarfs your key from local storage, they are you. They don't need a 2nd secret (the passphrase) to unlock the key.

If you use methods such as ssh-agent, you get all the convenience of a passwordless key (save the entering the passphrase into the agent) without the security risks.

You may find it necessary to use passwordless keys for some server processes, say, Nagios authentication or running remote jobs between servers. So long as you isolate these keys, restrict access to known hosts / IP ranges, etc., you're fairly well covered. Forced commands are another option to reduce the risk of such keys, though these aren't always appropriate.
First of all, direct multi monitor support is handled in a different layer than the window manager. At best, maybe you meant the overall desktop environment, but again, I don't know how you can make such absurd, outlandish claims.

Please, name something you can do in Windows or Mac and I'll tell you how easy it is to accomplish with my setup in Linux.

And also, how is Windows better than Mac in this regard? You have a massive problem with "my opinion is obviously objectively right".
Asus Transformer TF300T is perfectly usable with keyboard docked; it looks and feels like a good netbook then.
Thank you :)

It's still in the experimental MVP stage, but I hope you enjoy it.
Totally agree:
http://youtu.be/H7PJ1oeEyGg?t=34s
Can't watch the videos on linux. Nice.
"Rothstein made 3,009 reservations in less than four years, almost always booking two seats, but canceled 2,523 of them."

Sounds like he was not actually using the ticket to, you know, fly places.
Does Asus Transformer TF300T (with Android 4.1) qualify? That's what I got, and I find it awesome in use (except of being generally a bit useless, of which I wrote above).
I'll ask you the same thing, how? How is it "better"? It has a feature? Waving your hands around and laundry listing things without any explanation is wildly unconvincing.

You like utilitarian and flexible and you're really sitting there telling me Windows is the sweet spot for that? Are you being intentionally ironic? That's the posterboy slogan for Linux if I've ever heard it. I guarantee there's no way that the Windows WM is "more flexible" than any linux WM. And utilitarian? I assume you have workspaces in Windows? You can activate/deactivate stick edges easily? You can do any dimensional grid system you like? You can have floating windows?

Those are features I use every single day. I feel like I've at least offered why I don't see how Windows's WM could possibly be "better" but then again I'm not the one making that claim. So far it's just you and other guy acting like it should be obvious why Windows' is superior.
Except one of the claims that I've seen about the US patent examiners is that US patent examiners are likely to leave after only a few years, whereas the EU patent examiners are far more likely to be lifers. Bringing in a ton more people with no experience would only make that much worse.
Appears to be limited to 8GB of RAM? If so, disappointing.
Thanks you. I felt it was important to convey the energy and possibilities of it.
usually when you take CC up front you also automatically charge at the end of the trial. It's a good way to reduce tire kickers in your app, but can result in lost users at the top of the funnel.
I love the idea, but my big problem with this is they don't reference any papers or experiments behind their work.

What makes this watch more effective than a reminder to meditate every morning?
Show HN: My Responsive Design Development Setup
Meh. It's not like Zynga's employees didn't know what Zynga was doing. And they still got a salary and (probably) benefits, which is all they should really expect anyway. Counting on stock options is a bad idea. And the job market for software developers is really good right now.

Yeah, it's a bummer they'll have to find new jobs, but I don't feel particularly bad for them.
Help me out: Surely FEC over wireless can't be new. Why is this worth writing about?
What are they Thinkling? Video Interview with Thinkling Apps
I wish I had enough karma to downvote this useless comment. At least have the decency to tell us why you think this is so awful. I for one love seeing things like this on HN. One of my favorite things about this site is it's not just news. On any given day, I might find a new tool, language, function, or just another way of looking at things that I hadn't considered before. This is why hacker news is awesome. You're why it's terrible.
Three simple steps.

1. Read Douglas Crockford's Javascript: The Good Parts (Alternatively you can watch his lectures on Yahoo Theater)

2. Read Nicholas Zakas' Maintainable Javascript and Scalable Javascript.

Trust be both these books will make a great difference to the way you write your javascript code.

The next step should be to contribute to some open source JS frameworks. I will suggest jQuery or YUI. You need not always write code, you can begin with improvements to the documentation and later move on to submitting actual code.
Good thing that never happens on HN
I'm surprised to see so many people suggesting that Zynga's problems are purely moral. I think that gives them too much credit. I personally have no problem with their business practices from a strictly moral point of view. Caveat Emptor.

No, for me the problem is much simpler. Its a shitty business run by very poor business minds. That may sound dramatic and sensational, but let's consider the facts: they paid $250 million for a company of 15 developers whose most valuable asset was a mobile version of Pictionary that had been on the market for just three months. Completely unprofitable, they built a multilmillion dollar state of the art office in San Francisco. That's something you do when you are wildly successful, maybe. I work for a company many orders of magnitude more successful than Zynga and our office looks like a dungeon. So what? That's being wise with cashflow. That's a company I want to invest in. Finally, a friend of mine works for Zynga and he was regularly taking all expense paid trips. For his one year anniversary he was sent to England and Ireland as a reward.

I don't think of Zynga's management as sinister evildoers. I think of them as immature and completely unfit to manage a company. I say good riddance but I do hope those laid off find better opportunities soon.
Do you use much of the other org-mode bells and whistles when you do this?
Willpower is depletable? Not so fast...
Yes, but he can cash in and quit. Why hasn't he? I've never run a public company but I know some who did during the first dot-com crash and it was not pleasant.
Yeah, and it's not like anyone who works for Amazon reads HN! Oh, wait...

Most likely, a few engineers from Amazon saw the story and forwarded it to the right person. That sort of thing is fairly common even in large companies; I ask friends who work at Facebook for favors all the time, for example.
Well, I don't know. Suppose all those engineers were working for a company like IBM or Google, doing research. Much of their work would go to waste, too, as most research does not turn into successful products.

I think this is an interesting cultural change rather than a loss. Engineers are willing to sacrifice job security for a small chance for a big payoff. The winner-takes-all approach has long been part of the American ethos, only now its working its way down from the capitalists to the workers. I just think it's interesting.

You could say, though, and I think I've written it before, that its the workers (i.e., startup employees) that lose. If the theory is correct, then Big Tech is exploiting the workers' naive preference for promises of big rewards over regular, secure, pay. But, again, I don't know if that desire is naive; most startup folks understand the chances well, and still choose as they do. Maybe the excitement and perceived freedom are worth more than money to them. They sure are to me.
Just wait a year and there will probably be a new iPad mini with a retina screen and updated processor.

(iPad 3 was launched with the retina screen a year after the iPad 2. And 2 years after the iPad 1)
s/girl/person
Doesn't it say in Valve's handbook (the one released earlier this year) that it doesn't actually consider itself to be a gaming company?
A few ways:

1) Brand that consumers associate with high-quality consumer goods. (Most Android devices carry the brand of their maker and not Google. Asus is not widely considered a high-quality brand.)

2) Channel availability. iPad Minis will be in the stores where consumers are shopping. Google has historically done a bad job here. For example: as of this writing, Target doesn't even carry the Nexus 7, but they do carry iPads. Wal-Mart bills the Nexus 7 as "The new $249 tablet from Google", effectively reducing the price differential at the largest U.S. retailer.

3) Apps, apps, apps. Note that Google Play isn't 100% available in many countries where the iTunes app store is available.

In the end, both will likely sell tons of units. Note also that Apple is supply-constrained; they typically cannot make iPads fast enough to satisfy demand at their current price points. The corollary of this is that lowering the price would do nothing to increase actual sales, but would simply lead to them earning less money on each sale for no upside.

Finally, if Apple follows the template they have been using since the launch of the iPod 11 years ago, the price of the iPad Mini will begin dropping right after the holiday quarter. This will likely coincide with them tightening up production and improving yields. It will also allow them to more effectively use the 100% of production capacity even after the holidays end. They've done this on pretty much every consumer product they've released for the last 10+ years, and I'd be surprised to see the iPad Mini selling for > $299 come March.
I've been wondering what the big deal is since these games just reminded me of Tycoons anyways, but you have a point with the "slot machine mechanics" bit...though the Tycoons could get pretty slot machiney. I think a lot of the backlash is the fact that these are popular with casual or non-gamers, so they have an image problem with "real" gamers.

You're the first person I've "met" who got SimIsle. Maybe I need to give it another try...
You should try installing it directly the hardware of the same machine, I'd be interested to know whether it's VirtualBox issue or something else.
Thanks for the feedback! How the filters are set up right now is that the grey ones in the top right are the available ones for you choose from, and the orange ones below are the actual ones you've added and are active.

However, as I've said elsewhere, improving the usability of those controls is a big issue for us, we're looking at all the comments we get. Thanks for your suggestions around this.

>>What's your source of train time data? Are transfer times taken into account?
Train time data comes from the government's Naptan data set (http://data.gov.uk/dataset/naptan). Transfer times not yet fully accurate, it's on our to-do list.
MAGIC GOALS - The picture behind
The travesty is, it's still better than the Red Button service you get with brand new digital TVs (as far as reading text goes, anyway).
The retina MacBook is heavier than I expected. Appreciate chopping out an optical drive doesn't magically shave 1kg off but I'm still slightly disappointed, despite placing an order regardless.
Apple will exchange iPad 3's for the new ones if purchased within 30 days.
"The Mac Pro will continue to lose customers to the iMac and Retina MacBook Pros"

I suppose that's true, but the point that appears lost on Apple is the number of customers that they're losing to other PC manufacturers altogether.

I really do wish they'd either kill the product so that we all know it's not part of their landscape moving forward, or upgrade it already.