skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Out of all the things to complain about in Windows 8, the splash screen seems to be pretty far back in the list of things. Also, on what apps are you experiencing long load times? I just tried opening Skydrive, Music, and Video and they all loaded very quickly. The only one that took awhile was Netflix, which I assume took a little longer because it had to log in to my account, and even then it was less than 4 seconds.
For anyone who has been following the furor over Twitter's moves to control it's network and infrastructure at the expense of the developers who gave it value (and it's logo!), Clever and LearnSprout should be concerning.

The idea is that School's can integrate their SIS system with Clever's network once, and then have "seamless" integrations with whatever tools operate on that network. This is "free of charge" to the schools.

However, the apps/tools that integrate with Clever must pay them.

It should be noted that Clever's data and API aren't based on any existing or proposed industry standard.

Schools are baited with the idea of a "free" integration. They'll end up paying for it in the long run, though, because those costs will be passed on for every application they use.

What's worse, they'll all be locked into this proprietary standard.

On the surface, this all sounds like a "Great Idea". At the end of the day, it's an attempt at a land grab to try and control the market for student data. Is that even a market that should exist in the first place? Are schools making the right long-term choice when they integrate with a tool such as Clever and LearnSprout, it if means being locked into a proprietary standard down the road?

This sounds exactly like what has happened with the "centralized network" problem we have with Twitter, FB, etc.--and it is.

Yes, the existing toolset in K12 is abysmal. Schools and their vendors should be looking to implement standards such as those offered by IMS in Higher Ed, rather than just adding another proprietary mouth in the trough--especially one that doesn't offer any actual learning tools.

If Clever and LearnSprout issued their data formats under an open license through a standards body, I'd be way more interested. That said, I'm glad to see any kind of shake-up in the Ed space.
Wow, this comments thread is like a poster child for the unconstructive snark trend of HN.

Anyway, I think it's a neat concept. It runs correctly for me in FF (slow, but FF seems to be having problems taking advantage of my hardware in general for 3D stuff).

On Chrome and Midori it's fast, but the swinging effect gets clipped to the straight edges of the menus, and the text only shows up in the menu headings, rather than for the menu items themselves.

If I change the 'line-height' property for '.list dd' to 0, I can just make out the tops of the menu item ext, so I'm guessing that this is a positioning problem.
Thanks for the link! Just sent this:

Dear Amazon,
Your Kindle service has been fantastic so far. I've only purchased a few books but my experience with your content and apps has been great, and I appreciate what you provide.

However I just read the account of one of your users who claims her account was closed, all of her content remotely erased from her device, and she was given no information or recourse regarding the reason for these actions: http://www.bekkelund.net/2012/10/22/outlawed-by-amazon-drm/

I have no idea if this account is true, but if so it would be utterly appalling. The thought of such awful customer service is disturbing, and the idea that content I paid for could simply be revoked (as it was in the case of Orwell's work "1984") is chilling. Tales like this make me worry about purchasing Kindle content because of the risks involved.

Is there any reassurance you can give me regarding:
1. Your content deletion policy
2. Your policies towards giving fair warning and a chance to defend themselves to users before condemning them as some sort of malicious users?
3. Your policies regarding disclosure of the reasons for suspending someone's account? Is it within your policy to refuse to give users information?

Thank you
A new entrant to the market is not actually a bad thing. It validates the usefulness of the offering, and draws attention to the market. There is lots of room for segmentation and specialization in this space. Find something that the competitors are doing poorly and beat them on that. For a certain subset of the market, that feature is vital, and you are the only one doing it right.
How to Let Your Purpose Find You
Hey HN, you can watch this video to see it in action right here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=R...
It does! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox#Operating_system
Scholarly Publishing's Gender Gap
Because people actually know about Weebly, and the interface doesn't scare them away with complexity. I think it's as simple as that.

On those terms, Weebly is quite exemplary.
Sounds to me like they provide an API for "5-minute SIS Integration for Educational Applications" (from their home page) and that an SIS is an "information system [that] capture[s] and store[s] data on students — from class lists and attendance to grades" (from the TC article).
Awesome ideas. I like the sound of "flickr for quotes" a lot. Thanks!
The UK or Ireland.
Tap for Tap Presents "Tap in in to Win"
None, if it locks up your computer while animating at a buttery smooth ~2fps.
Apple Event Checklist
Well my Kindle 3G doesn't work anymore, I was planning on buying the new one...
Now I know I won't.
Thanks for the reminder
Ha. Good point. But even without, the math checks out.
One of the S's in USSR the 'classic' communist country stood for socialist. Granted the Communist party in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is probably what really confused most people.
It is out, in Canada. From what their reps have said they're having supply chains issues surrounding the XGA E-Ink panels (could be the same reason Kindle Paperwhite orders are out 4-6 weeks).

Stateside, none of their listed retailers have anything available. Best Buy comes closest, by actually having them listed on their online store as "coming soon". Currently, a quick jaunt across the border is an option but who knows how Kobo will handle potential warranty issues?
The gradient mesh and drop shadow were exported as an embedded image by Illustrator, so it was never tried to do it via pure SVG.

But I guess the author doesn't have much experience with SVG's feature set and instead just fiddled around with Illustrator, looking at the export results and drawing conclusions for SVG.
Been wondering if something like this existed. Looks like they found a new customer if it works like I think it does. :) Now.. they'll get my fees once I hit 10K users. :)
Most of the SVGs of this page don't test at all the described features, they're just PNGs or JPEGs embedded in SVG files. The author didn't even open its SVGs generated by Illustrator: a drop shadow in Illustrator does not mean a drop shadow in the generated SVG!

For example, look at the source of the "mesh" test, it's a beautiful embedded base64 PNG: http://voormedia.com/blog/2012/10/creating-svg-vector-graphi...
Mobile payments: A solution in search of a problem?
>in this case they had the sole source of the item (for a time)

And this my friends is why artificial monopolies (created by vendor lock-in, proprietary devices, patents, or other perversions of the legal system) are inherently detrimental. Adam Smith, in his foundational work on Capitalism: The Wealth of Nations, rails against the practices that make monopolies possible. This market is not a free market.
Yes affiliate advertising, media buying, SEO.

I wouldnt say black hat, moreso grey hat or trying to game the system. I probably wouldn't have pursued anything like cookie stuffing or anything malicious.

Edit: If youre talking about the campaigns within the last 3 years, most were whitehat.. one of them on the way seedier side of things though, but still nothing that would harm a users computer, or had anything to do with fraudulent traffic.
How to work with Hibernate Lazy Loading
But 100MB of data is about perfect for emergency use. If you're like most people, 99% of the time you are somewhere with WIFI, but it's the 1% that you aren't when you really need it. Combine the 100MB a month with a very occasional $10 day pass and most people would be covered.
I've come to the conclusion that a big problem with todays extremely anonymized and impersonal customer service of large corporations is that there is nobody (or at least nobody with the competence to do anything), that you can shout at till things get fixed...

Essentially, as a customer one is often limited to submitting requests through web forms and receiving boilerplate answers (if at all) that lead nowhere if the case at hand is somewhat nonstandard, or to spend endless hours circulating through similarly scripted phone support hotlines, without ever reaching somebody that can actually fix the problem.

Kafka would be hard pressed to top some of those customer support experiences.
Why stop there - why not put "God" on trial and call in the church to do defense?
Observations: this is really neat and HN commenters are jerks in this thread.
Sure, if you encode cleverly. That is the essential difficulty of the problem which he glosses over (note that he explicitly says that he will store the differences as 4 byte numbers). Getting it under 1.5MB (or even 1.1MB) is probably easy, but I have yet to see an encoding which is sufficiently compact to fit in 1MB.
Yeah I guess their target audience would know what those things are. That's why I hedged my comment. I'm glad they're doing well, obviously doesn't seem to be a problem for them.
Working on It - Karma
They provided a "vertical network" for K-12 Education data (your kids' test and homework scores), similar to what companies like Ariba and CommerceOne provided for manufacturers and what Facebook and Twitter provide for Advertisers.
Dutch Propose Powers For Police To Compromise Computers Around the World
What do you think is an appropriate punishment, if any, for a scientific/governmental body that exercises authority over people, particularly in instances of fear due to natural disasters, when it makes statements that have people stay in their homes even though the natural disaster happens anyway?
My site is long long gone. I think about a year ago I tried to find anything related to it and all I found was a gif logo I made hosted somewhere. I can't even find it on my harddrive anymore.. so who knows maybe my site is 100% vanished into the ether.. maybe theres a copy of it somewhere in a dark corner of the world on a dusty unix box, but who knows.

And yes I'm probably biased, but at least if I would have tried back then and failed -- I would have had lessons to learn from and would still be better off. Without never having tried during those early golden years though I just feel like a fool.

As for examples of other ideas...

I know a few domainers who bought up a whole slew of domain names back then and now are sitting on a fortune.

Look at any affiliate marketer that is well known and chances are they started during that period when you could keyword stuff, game SEO extremely easily, buy ads on a site and making a fortune, etc. Lots of blood sweat and tears is required with online marketing (which is why I no longer pursue it), but compared to now, back then was a cakewalk.
I have a kid, a life, and I running my start-up and still there is enough time for pet projects. I do pet projects mainly on weekends, not the entire day, but a few hours of it. I also do a few hours at night, but that is rare.

You don't need many hours, you need to make a good use of the hours you get.

For example, I know that I will have only 3-4 hours on Saturday and Sunday. If I don't do what I need to do, I will have to wait another week. As a result, I am really focused on the core of my pet project.

This works for me. I know people that prefer doing it a few hours a night, but I rarely can. At end it is just a question of focus and organization. If you do those two things well I am sure you will find the right amount of time for your projects.
Realtime analytics for Sales Presentations, for free
Most good Android tablets, are atleast as much as the iPad when considering cost, however you could then posibly get away with using off the rack MSR or barcode readers, provided, that the Android device features USB.

The bonus of using iOS, is predictable behavior, sleek design, better custom accesories (iPad msr) , percieved value of the customer, but also the ability to get a replacement device, with ease.

If you go with Acer X, you have no idea of availabilty 2-3 months later, let alone a year or two.
I have an Acre Liquid somethingorother I picked up for $200 or so when my phone died last spring. It's been 14 hours since I took it off charging, and in that time I've made a few phone calls, listened to a couple of hours of mp3s, read a dozen web sites or so, checked my email a couple of times and played a simple game for about 15 minutes and my battery is at 63%.
That is ridiculous. Any reasonably intelligent person knows that the science of predicting earthquakes is terrible. If you are smart you would take reasonable precautions to something like that. You live in an non-reinforced brick house from the 1500's and you feel a tremor; maybe it's time to get out of town for a while. The scientists didn't do the bending.
Clever is an SIS: student information system. The SIS we use at my school is a web app that integrates all the database functions you might associate with schools: scheduling, grading, attendance, discipline, etc.

Ours is ugly but functional.

edit: Apparently I misunderstood what I read. Sorry.
How to Resurrect your Customers
>It most likely offers nowhere near the experience of an LCD device.

But "nowhere near" doesn't have to mean inferior. For people who would rather read than play games or watch videos, this will be superior to an LCD phone as a time passing device. If you communicate mostly by email and text message, it will even be superior as a phone.
Dell, at various times, has offered Ubuntu machines (their latest offering is an Ubuntu XPS laptop). I don't know if they've offered them in the UK or outside of the US at all, but they've always been discontinued shortly after appearing. If they were discontinued because of Microsoft objecting, Dell wouldn't have done it at all (and wouldn't keep trying every couple of years). My guess is that they've been discontinued due to not selling in enough quantities.

Dell also offered FreeDOS as an option. Looking online, Acer has offered FreeDOS in the UK, at least in the past. These computers are usually advertised as "No OS Installed" or something similar.
One of the major pains in the butt for a teacher is getting students set up on a learning web app. Either you spend a bunch of your own time making an account for each student (which is time you could spend doing something more important) or you spend a bunch of class time having students sign up for the accounts during your teaching period (which is time you and they could spend doing something more important).

If a web app had a secure API to include all of my class lists automatically, I'd be much more likely to use it.
Off-topic, but a heads up to the Mixpanel team: your announcement email sucked. A single big image containing all text? Come on. You guys can do better than that.
You should watch some average users use the computer some time. Multi-tasking is very much a power-user feature, most people maximize everything - even things that have no business being maximized. Users will maximize a browser window, and then complain about all the white-space to either side of a column of text. And then they'll maximize their skype contacts list or something similarly narrow, and complain about how they can't see both skype and a webpage. By forcing fullscreen, microsoft is forcing app makers to design for the most common use case.
Facebook launches Messenger for Firefox, taps into the Social API
Mozilla Blog post: https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2012/10/22/help-us-test-the-social-api-with-facebook-messenger-for-firefox/
Thank you for the clarification, guys. I hadn't realized Nature was British/UK.
I actually think Chile's current success has more to do with Pinochet's purging of so called "corrupted politicians" by having them killed or exiled from the country. He had so much control he had a new Constitution written which tied things so much, it made politics almost irrelevant.
I love this. In fact, I love everything Mixpanel recently did. They introduced Flow which made Google Analytics obsolete for us. Then they introduced People tracking which replaced our admin dashboard with various tables and graphs about

They also did something that wasn't really announced: you can now drill down into every single event a user has ever triggered and look at all the properties. It always baffled me that this wasn't possible in the stream view or when segmenting down to individual events. I use mixpanel not only for reporting but also as a first aid resource when something breaks for a user. It's great to be able to see what they did when exactly and under what circumstances.

I think it's brilliant that Mixpanel lets you measure the impact of email campaigns without having to track opens and send them to mixpanel as events. If there was a way to send emails in response to certain events (such as purchased item X) and then to refer back to those events from within the email, I'd remove all lifecycle emails from my code and just use Mixpanel for that. Can we get that, Suhail? Please? :)
Varnish sometimes fails but doesn’t tell... length fo backend name matter
My claim is that the definition of 'fair share' is codified by the laws on taxation. If the people don't agree with that code they should change it. An example that was local to me was California changing their laws on taxation such that citizens buying from Amazon would not be able to avoid paying local sales tax. Amazon did however threaten to not sell to anyone in California (which is kind of a hollow threat since California is huge market). Californians now pay sales tax on their Amazon purchases.
You can tell yajoe is an Amazon employee by his use of "SeanDav@" and "randartie@".
Win a Spring Training seat worth $2,500
You have to be running an exploit program while you play with the USB stick.
Sweet. Now I can sue the weatherman the next time I get caught in the rain.

Personally, I'm not surprised at this stupidity. I also won't be surprised if from now on every single report offered suggests that an earthquake will occur tomorrow, making the entire exercise meaningless and probably costing lives in the future.
Same, bad, aliasing issues in Chrome (Ubuntu).

"No problems so far. The SVG looks good in all modern browsers." Not so much.
Show HN: My weekend project - a tent.io application
In general, I get excited about learning new things. Regarding monads, I've made several efforts to grasp them over the course of multiple years now. I no longer get excited about trying to understand them. I'm currently taking Odersky's functional programming class at Coursera, and that has been coming naturally to me. But monads seem to inhabit a magical space which my mind cannot enter.
Need something that hacks Amazon's control of Kindles.
Ask HN: RoR or Node.js or Go
I come from .net background and been wanting to learn one of these hot techs for building my side project. The project itself doesn't have a need for anything more specific and could be built using either of them (I played around with all 3).
I am interested in learning a technology that is more promising and could eventually help me make a smooth shift from .net and survive even if my side project is a complete failure. Any suggestions?
While I have to believe that this will die through appeals, the long-term implications are enormous.

As nxswolf points out, it not only will scare off future scientists interested in working in Italy, but any official/expert tasked with preventing tragedies.

The fallout is that, with each possibility, worst-case scenarios will be the norm to avoid culpability over reasoned approach. Not to say that worst-case should not be considered, but dialling up to 11 is never an appropriate public response.

Finally, today it is seismologists, tomorrow it could easily be network security folks, application engineers, CTO/CSO's etc. Basically, any situation where the sum-total parts are so large and multi-faceted that no one person/agency could be seen as the expert.

Terrible tragedy, terrible fallout. The optimist in me hopes that this is dropped at the next appeal.
It is a very nice site, clean and elegant. Can you share the technology behind this?
For the fellows currently downrating this comment, the title was Are content management systems dead?, and has just been edited to Web agencies should do more than just hand over a set of templates a few minutes ago.
This looks pretty great, just one thing I wanted to share is that advanced segmentation and re-marketing in the enterprise email world has been the norm for more than a few years. I used to work at Bronto (one of many enterprise email marketing software companies) and one of our key features was an advanced segmentation/workflow engine to let customers easily set up things like this:

1) Automatically send a 10% off coupon to people 5 days after they put an item in their shopping cart but didn't buy it

2) If they convert from that coupon and buy what they initially planned to buy 5 days ago we add them to a list of "win-back buyers"

3) If they convert from that coupon and add additional items we add them to a list of "win-back buyers plus"

4) Wait 3 days and then kick-off a multi-month custom email marketing campaign with various deals, offers and products tailored to what they've bought in the past, their average purchase price, geographic location, sex, age and any of dozens of other metrics we'd have for that user

5) Ask if they want to opt-in to coupons via SMS, send those coupons out the next time they log into the e-commerce website, browsing around before purchase

...and it just goes on from there. This type of long-term marketing/re-marketing, segmentation and advanced campaign management is precisely what email marketers do every day. Most people running email marketing campaigns for ecommerce and brick-and-mortar retailers have been doing customer lifecycle management across various channels (email, direct mail, online advertising, social and more) for awhile and they're very good at it. When you get an email in your inbox from a big retailer you've shopped at before, you may not know why you got the email but there's a good chance you were targeted via specific segmentation and targeting engines across over a dozen datapoints about your past behavior.

And one scary thing most people may not be aware of is that at the very high-end of enterprise email marketing systems, they have "data augmentation" features so that if you only know someone's email address you can pay other companies to give you the rest of their marketing profile, like name, address, age, ethnicity, purchasing behavior (like when you scan VIP cards at supermarkets or use gift cards), and even your full credit profile including credit scores, credit card types, previous addresses, loans you have, what type of car you drive, how big your mortgage is, etc. In fact, CheetahMail, which is the Rolls Royce of email marketing software used by all the largest companies in the world, is actually owned by Experian the company that has all your credit information. http://www.experian.com/cheetahmail/index.html
The title of this article is poor. It's as if Kickstarter was asking them to use the site. No.. Kickstarter is a platform and you can choose to use them or another platform. That's like saying I decided to sell my used car and saying that I turned down eBay because I decided to sell it on Craigslist.
A preview of a new SQL low-latency database for Hadoop
HackRF Jawbreaker Could Bring Low-Cost Wireless Hacking to the Masses