skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have the same age as you. One year ago I was thinking of quitting my job to turn my hobby into a business. I thought of staying in my hometown (cheap but not start-up friendly and family and friends would just see me as 'unemployed'), but I took an offer instead for a more business-oriented role to move abroad. Then one day, as a visitor in a nearby country (cheap and start-up friendly, far away from anyone I know) I saw an advertisement on the street of apartments for sale and it struck me. I now have a plan of moving to this country with cheap cost of living after I finish with my current project.

I always thought of leaving my country as a good way to get me started (leaving next to family would just give me a delusion of security, would make me more complacent and/or I had to deal with discouragement), but cost of living would be a factor for staying anyway.

Why I am saying all this? From just visiting a country as a tourist, a plan came up. And if I hadn't taken that offer maybe I would have quit. Or maybe not. And I am still considering of applying for some jobs abroad in the meantime (more waiting). But at least a more solid long-term plan has formed in the background now.
> AFAIK, the Word .doc also started (and unfortunately continued) as basically a not-so-designed memory dump

This may be true but not the whole story. It's the reason why the MS office team bit the bullet and replaced .doc with .docx about 5 years ago http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML

Docx is basically XML in a zip file. It's a beast and has lots of compromises for backward compatibility, but as a design starting point, "zipped XML" is far far better than a binary dump of the in-memory data.
I'm wondering why prices and descriptions are hidden ? This is marketplace and I think it should provide nice way to compare prices and services.
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The Iliad consists of many scenes. Each scene could probably be a five-ten minute piece. If you read the Iliad it will probably take eight or more hours. Movie's rarely exceed three hours and any movie based on the Iliad would be abridged (director's cut of Troy is just over three hours). It's not clear to me that content dictates length. It seems medium does to a large extent.
Broadband '2,000 times' faster aim of Bangor scientists
When I first read his comment I was sure that I agreed, that we often start side projects without a plan or an agenda which make many of them "fail". Then I read yours and agreed once again. Why does everything have to be about "results." Then I realised that they question is not about either. Its about the motivation and the goal with the side project.

If the motivation is to try something new and the goal is to have fun. It does not matter if you do it for two years and then end up not doing it. But if the goal and the motivation for the side project is to start earning money on it or do start a business, then I think he is right. Then they need well defined goals, a plan and an agenda to succeed.

So it is all about the reason you do it.
[BETA] Testing new Android game Rummified
Anyone interested in testing a new Android game?
He refers to paying customers repeatedly.

None of my side projects even entertain the ideas of being profitable. I can't help but feel this is why I feel better about side projects than the author.
Yahoo and Samsung team up to offer interactive TV
The greatest group of political scientists?! So great that a lot of Americans don't understand how the president gets elected.
Also, they are filled at 100%, which is quite an arbitrary number for relative values.
No? It seems to be working up well enough so far for e.g. ODT, or indeed the web. A file format that might need to be read in 20 years seems like one of the few cases where the super-verbose XML style is actually appropriate.
Well, they will probably shift pretty fast once some RIAA money trickles in. I care a lot more about my daughters right to be in control of her reproductive health than I do about people downloading the new Jay-Z single for free.
>One way in which you could finance your move is by working free-lance for companies via the net. I know a few people doing this right now and they can pretty much work from anywhere in the world.

What exactly do they do as freelance work? Building mobile apps, websites? Where can I get to know more about this?
How I use Git: Extracting Info
Obvious fake.
I'm amazed every day by what we can do with git...
Red Ball 4 Game
Good one. Thanks for sharing.
Hm, interesting. Could you explain why the decision to use (zipped) XML in the current MS Office document formats was a mistake? Those document formats are huge hideous beasts, but that's due to backward compatibility with large feature sets, and I don't think that moving off XML would help.

PS: I fixed the typo in "lesson"
Attempt to halt 'uncertified last-minute changes to Ohio voting machines'
Spoof news website, other headlines involve people dying from doritos overdoes http://www.cheapassgamer.com/forums/showpost.php?p=10101402&...
Can't find any other sources whatsoever (not even copy-pastes) for the claims in this article (which I had to read from the Google Cache thumbnail).

The schedule for LinuxCon Europe seems to show no mention of Newell (or anyone else from Valve) in the first two days:
http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/linuxcon-europe/sch...
Forgive me for criticising, but I'm not all that enamoured with the design. I find it too chunky, too slow, and somewhat adolescent.

I appreciate that the designer has put a huge amount of effort into the template, and has populated it with some excellent demo data, but I would never use this theme in a business application.

I prefer a cleaner, more subtle design (some might say a tad boring?). Here is an example of what I mean: http://envato.stammtec.de/themeforest/peach/login.html
I keep seeing Heroku come up as a viable alternative to... what? That's the part I don't understand.

The value prop seems to be eliminating ops. i.e. we'll take care of it so you don't have to.

But digging deeper, that seems only to be accurate for Rails apps. If I want to - say - deploy a PHP app (god forbid) - then I still need to play sysadmin.

Am I reading things wrong? I would _love_ if that were the case.
A side project doesn't need customers, a side project doesn't need money, a side project just needs to be something that you want to do. If it makes money, great! If not, it doesn't matter because you are doing it for yourself and noone else.
Most people have a hard time with typing stuff into an iPad as it is. While you can probably type easily with a concept like this, getting users to understand the chorded keyboard will be a major challenge. There are folks that don't even get swype and the dictionary keyboard. If you can get over that bump, the product has potential.

I would not hide the keyboard for any reason. It can confuse people pretty easily. If I try to click a button on a website and end up typing a character instead, it can drive me nuts.

Cool concept.
Oh, if only I could downvote this story into oblivion.
Hrm. I see. Will delete post.
For $60 million Imagination is buying the business, some of the patents, and the right to use all the other patents. These other patents are being sold for $350 million to a consortium of tech companies which includes ARM (which is contributing $167.5 million).
Ten arrested over Parliament protest
Announcing Eclipse Day at the Googleplex, 2012 Edition
After the ipad mini introduction video with Ive waxing on about how they redesigned it from scratch for the smaller form factor, it's irritatingly condescending that they report false results back to media queries to prevent designers from doing the same.
> Obviously there are also many which are not.
that's exactly what i am saying.
PHP is the exception, but most things are as deployable as Rails these days.
Time for Welton's Law of Advice: for every bit of trite advice, there's an equal, and opposite bit of trite advice :-)

Although in this case, what it really comes down to is what you hope to achieve. Some side projects are good as an outlet for creativity where you don't have any deadlines or things you want to accomplish or anything else. Others are more focused. The important thing is to be clear about what you want.
Well, to be specific, a lot of Hollywood producers looked at H+ as a test of whether or not people really wanted to watch short episodic content. After the first episode, few people came back. So while we can say "probably" in abstract, in practice short episodic series are hit or miss, for reasons that have nothing to do with length, etc. There's no formula, I guess is my point.
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Is this an ad? This is an ad.
I admire your motives, but I can't offer much encouragement.

My experience is that there is no such thing as preventing fraud in the absolute sense. It's not a binary proposition—maybe general security isn't either, but it's a hell of a lot less gray than credit card fraud. So while I think it's good for general fraud prevention techniques and information to be widely disseminated, I can't in good conscience discuss specifics of techniques that I've employed because those would be easily traceable to companies I've worked for, and thus would impose an undue cost on them. A lot of people who have worked on these issues are probably in similar position where we'd be happy to go into details over a beer but not on public record.
Only four months? ;-)

I think I played Elite nearly every day for a year or so... I'm almost afraid of what would happen if a new one that was any good came along.
I believe different people do side projects for different reasons and they have different goals in their mind :

- Some do it for side income.

- Some do it to learn a new language/framework.

- Some do it because it solves a particular problem they have.

- Some do it to test their ideas.

- Some do it to have some projects in their portfolio.

- Some do it full time and call it a side project hoping it to be a successful startup while playing safe calling it a side project.

Whatever may be the reason, whether it is a side project or a full time project or a startup, the original goal is what matters the most. If the project developer achieves his/her goal by doing this side project, it is successful, else it is a failure with some addition to his experience and knowledge.
Office Hours: Marketing for Startups in India
The idea of it being invisible is stupid. But I like the idea behind chord keyboards.
There better still be Thargoids and Witch Space!

I never made it to 'Elite', I'm ashamed to say - I was stuck on Deadly for a long time. I still have my disk as I vowed to one day return and finish what I started.
I dreamed about a human being
Show HN: BiFluent (Japan-based startup) - progress tracking for English learners
This is gobbledygook. You are still thinking in terms of security, but with credit card fraud there is no security issue or system to be cracked per se. Rather it's an identity and information problem. You can impose additional steps to vet the legitimacy of a transaction, but there is nothing that can ever give you a 100% guarantee. So you have to balance your efforts at vetting the transaction against usability barriers that add friction to your core business function.

The difference between publishing your techniques (even with specific variables hidden) and often the difference between attackers being able to iteratively determine the minimum work around to get desired results and having to dedicate orders of magnitude more effort than necessary to ensure they are flying under the radar.
Virtual Users And Domains With Postfix/Courier/MySQL/SquirrelMail (Ubuntu 12.10)
OP here. We went live with the site last week and emailed it to a few people we know in our target market. Feedback is in and we are doing a horrible job of explaining what the site is, the benefits of the site and how to actually use the site. One thing we are planning to do is create a ~1 minute video. Other than that though, I would love your feedback/ideas on how to make our onboarding process suck less.

Also, if anyone will be attending the Tokyo Hacker News Meetup tomorrow night, feel free to give me your feedback in person.
I'm going to guess that you mainly use version control for your own projects or in a small team of 2.

While the idea of a "Time Machine" style history is probably quite desirable when working on your own, it's totally useless for practice of checking in self contained "features", having them reviewed and potentially rolling them back even after many other "features" have been added that you want to keep.
Ask HN: Which startups are providing services to professional photographers?
What are some startups/companies/side-projects that are serving the needs of professional photographers?

What are some of the top sites that professional photographers use to upload/show/share their photographs or build their portfolio?

and if you are a photographer are you happy with existing offerings or do you need a better solution?
Not related to the current leak, but I found the following passages particularly interesting:

> The Anonymous-affiliated hacker claimed the information came from China National Electronics Import and Export (CEIEC), an engineering and electronics company outfit.

> An Indian hacktivist crew called the Lords of Dharmaraja claimed they lifted Symantec's source code from systems belonging to the Indian government.

Why do foreign governments have access to the source code of proprietary software made by privately owned American companies? Do software vendors routinely disclose their source code to governments, whether foreign or domestic? Or does it only happen in special cases where a contract to supply software for the government requires handing the source code over, too?

Does the Chinese government have the full source code of Windows 8 that they can analyze at leisure to look for 0-day vulnerabilities? Does NSA have the full source code of the latest iOS?
The Valley votes like a pious Democrat. But it thinks like a ruthless Republican
Get a text message from NASA when the Intnl Space Station flies over your house
Not in the UK. The defendant must prove that the statement is true[1]. This is why the UK is a prime libel tourism destination, as the cost of defending the statement is often prohibitive to an individual.

Being a statement on the internet, I believe this case could be tried in the UK, hence the tourism aspect.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_defamation_law#Burden_o...
Yes, Microsoft lets government agencies examine its source code.

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sharedsource/default.aspx
Or use TwISSt:
https://twitter.com/twisst

Or indeed, go to the actual source that this rag is quoting from:
http://spotthestation.nasa.gov/
"It seems that the disagreement is over the percentage model that Motorola wants. Motorola wants 2.25% of the full retail price of the device. So, if you make a dumbphone for $35, you pay 79cents. If you make a 16GB iPhone 5, you pay $14.63. Somewhat ridiculously, if you make a 64GB iPhone 5, you'd pay $19.13."

There is a simple solution: Sell iPhones w/ little memory and sell the memory separately. Of course, then other people can also sell that memory, probably at a cheaper price. If you want to charge a premium on memory, then you should let Motorola charge a premium, too.
NASA - Spot The Station
Do you mean the login form or something that comes after it?
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I seriously wish society placed less importance on the famous. I will concede that at least this article discusses celebrities who have done something worth celebrating rather than the latest reality TV star than many young people are so smitten with. However I still have to question why anyone would want to spend so much energy stalking public figures.

I prefer to live by the philosophy of "doing your own thing and do it so well that people will come to you" and thus leave the stalking to those who have fewer skills in life.
You can work just fine with out of the box experience, there's even customization wizard now.
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Sergey Brin takes to Google+ to call for an end to party politics
The Good, the Bad and the Employee
would it be possible to do it by using one of these two approaches after the first general iPad user agent check?

-using a full screen image and getting an useful parameter from that via javascript

-uploading a screenshot of a graphics element via javascript/canvas for a server to evaluate
How to build a killer content marketing strategy
Why not just follow Apple's iOS control sizing guidelines

Because that is completely missing the point and leaving out every device not made by Apple (which is most devices in the market).

Your aim should be to have an overall strategy for how to handle the incredible amount of devices and variations out there. And to be honest, the iPad Mini adds nothing new to this mix.

We already had the form factor, we already had the size, we already has the DPI.

If you are making web-pages, make them work on anything reasonably capable, not just iGadgets. Anything else is a big "fuck you" to Tim Berner Lee.

Do you really want to tell mister world wide web to fuck of? Do you?

Besides, optimizing for iOS-devices seems passé and counter-productive. It's currently the minority-platform and its market-share is diminishing year by year now.

Android on the other hand, with its 75% and increasing market-share, now that sounds like an audience you do want to make sure you reach. If your website works well on a variety of Android-devices, you can be reasonably sure it will work on other platforms as well, iOS included.
That is awesome. Adding you to Skype you as I am typing this.
Remind HN: Vote
Okay my fellow American hacker knuckleheads. As citizens we are not supposed to do a lot of things, but being an informed voter is one of them.

I know that Erlang innards is way more interesting than the usual partisan nonsense that goes on, and I know that as smart folks you've probably already realized that your vote, especially in places overwhelmingly one-party, won't decide anything.

None of that matters. Voting is a civic duty. It's a rite. It's a shared ritual. It's not a game where we're trying to get our way. It's an shared obligation where we all agree that this is the way to make decisions instead of guns and clubs in the street.

So no matter who you like or dislike, get out and vote. Please. We need you.
Yes, my main grievance with git add -p as well; someone fix this.
All the important "bits" of NetHack are handcrafted though, much in the same way d3 is.
Remember: should the funding succeed, the game is due march 2014. 16 months.

Seek cetacean counselling before holding your breath.
most things are as deployable as Rails these days.

I really, really don't want to seem dense. But I don't understand what that means.

Let's forget about PHP, and consider Clojure. Reading http://blog.heroku.com/archives/2011/7/5/clojure_on_heroku/ I don't see the part that says SysAdmins are no longer needed.

But maybe I am dense, and just don't get what Heroku offers...
You get that option in the native browser, though perhaps it's less fiddly in this "Dolphin".
> But here's what Silicon Valley doesn’t get about Hollywood: No matter how much it bothers you, people do like to entertain themselves with a "lean back" experience. As humans we like story telling. And we like to be entertained.

Spot on. I'll bookmark this and link to it every time I hear somebody claim that books and movies are dead because gaming (or whatever interactive technology they're currently into) is so much better.

Yes, I am fully aware that if you play a game, you can actually be the hero instead of simply following the hero, and you can actually write a story instead of simply consuming somebody else's. But does this mean that the future of entertainment is going to be all interactive? No, I don't feel like blowing shit up myself tonight, I want to sit back and watch Bruce Willis blow shit up.
Thanks for this note! I actually agree - our current marketing message is overselling the current features. We'll try to polish it further. We are also designing a few new features that would reduce the gap between us and full blown website generators.
A few typical "global" layouts would be nice! Like the famous "off canvas layout" http://www.zurb.com/playground/off-canvas-layouts
Agree 100%. Even if your vote doesn't matter, spend a tiny portion of your day to be counted.
It might be my eyes, but the video is too blurry to be of much use. A couple of paragraphs would have been preferable.
I'm all for super-verbosity in useful information and flexible structure, but XML is also super-verbose in terms of redundant markup. Compression helps a bit, but it still costs processing power for no real reason. See the good ol' S-expressions vs. XML discussion, recently reincarnated as JSON vs. XML.
This is pretty much IFF:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interchange_File_Format

I suspect that's where it originated.
Don't re-invent the wheel, Use a CMS - Content Managements Systems
The deicision was a big step forward; however, moving off XML to an equivalent but less verbose (in number of meaningless bytes) format wouldn't hurt. All else being equal, it would be less electricity wasted on reading and sending things over the wire, and also more human-readable format. See also: SEXP vs. XML.

This argument applies the more, the bigger markup-to-data ratio is.
Show HN: jFactory - easy object factories for Java
Don't know about RIFF, but IFF files are/can be a big tree - the outer chunk must be one of FORM, LIST or CAT, and many chunk types contain additional chunks, so depending on the file you might get structures of arbitrary depth.
I just chanced it: username 'demo' and password 'demo'.

Saying that, the theme appears to suffer from exactly the same problems the OP was complaining about
Good people are not hard to hire. If you don't believe me, take it from David "Pardo" Keppel:

There's no shortage of smart, hardworking engineers. There's a shortage of smart, hardworking engineers willing to work for very little money.

If you're having trouble hiring, it's because you're not paying enough. It turns out that talented people are worth paying a lot for.
Nothing, in fact the bootstrap site itself is hosted on gh pages.
Google decline China falls to 4th place, maps to 6th
Here is a Wing Commander equivalent on Kickstarter, by Chris Roberts.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cig/star-citizen
The Heroku offering is about providing a stack that you don't need to know anything about in order to look after a decent application. You deploy with Git, give it the resources it needs and forget about it. You've no need to learn UNIX, or anything about packaging, or security, or networking and so on. You just need to care about your application.

Saying this, there's lots of things deployable to Heroku right now, and even more via the Buildpacks system. Yes, at first Heroku was just Ruby, but those days are long gone, most modern platforms that run on UNIX are deployable to Heroku in just a few minutes.