skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am really sympathetic to Amazon here, but to not be misleading, the right column would need to have items such as does video editing with iMovie or equivalent, has cameras and microphones, runs office productivity suite, runs digital music recording and editing studio (GarageBand), etc. My understanding is that the Kindle doesn't really have much software available for it. If that has changed and the software is now comparable to what is available on iOS, Amazon should make that really clear. Obviously it is a huge issue and not some minor thing that should be left off a comparison chart.

The claim that the iPad is incapable of playing HD movies seems to be false based on commonly accepted definitions of HD as being 720 and up. They should define what they mean so as not to give the appearance of misrepresentation. The TV claim is likewise strange as neither device contain a TV receiver, but both are capable of playing TV shows that are appropriately encoded as video files, or available through streaming from the internet.
Nice concept, but I would definitely consider using something like PJAX (https://github.com/defunkt/jquery-pjax) in place of the javascript loading already in place.

Also, text is really tiny on my iPhone.
Reminds me of Breaking Bad http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AinoCIHHp2M
Very nice analysis, and a good antidote to some of the other reviews floating around.
You are wrong in the UK the first two years of employment are effectively at will - at lot of employment rights only accrue after two years.

And if an employer pulls a fast one and break the rules on they don't get fined by labor courts as they do in the USA.
Selling Form, Not Just Function: What Prada Can Teach Us
They should mention that you pay 199$ for the "Special Offers" version :). Meaning it will load adds on your Kindle.
Agreed. There is much glamour and flash on display on this site that people seem to forget that failure is what teaches you things, not success.
Show HN: Multiplayer Tetris in Mootools, HTML5 and NodeJS (Nearly finished)
It's been about 3 weeks since I dusted off the Multiplayer Tetris game that me and a buddy wrote A year ago and that's been collecting dust since then.

A lot of after work and weekend hours have been pooring into the project since then, and I think it's about time to show the progress

What's been done:

- Preloading
- Completely rewrote layout for desktop / tablet browsers using css3 :target.
- Usage instructions added
(one of the comments I got: "Yeah, it works, but how do I play?" )
- Sending all powerups to other users now works
(click on another user's playfield to send powerup)
- Game over implemented serverside so a mulitplayer game can end.
- Now works on tablets with touch input.
swipe left/right/down for controls, tap another user's playfield for sending powerup.
Tap the powerups bar to apply to self.

What's todo:

- Fix some last bugs in the tetris engine
( Blocks can still move up in rare cases,
T-Spins don't always work in all directions )
- Global online highscores
- 2 player mode with an direct invite url
- Finishing touches, Package the app, and deploy!
- Phone UI in the works

Please come and play and try to overload my little gameserver. If no users are online don't forget to try a game against yourself by opening 2 browser tabs!

Link: http://goo.gl/RJa1f
I believe they would both be infringing. The issue here is intent, and the intent of those two numbers are both to be used to recreate the original number. It's not any different than if one website had the first half and another had the second half.

The alternative here would be if you could somehow find preexisting content whose intent was not to recreate this number. In that case it's trivial that the only infringing content would be something that told you how to recreate it based on those (eg if you just have a website for each digit that is trivially noninfringing, but a website that links to each of those websites in the correct order is infringing).

It's easy to act like this is absurd because of the natural existing of numbers, but the law is generally pragrmatic and not concerned with extreme hypotheticals. You could similarly argue (and plenty have on internet forums) that every mp3 in existence could be found encoded somewhere in pi, which is technically true but absolutely irrelevant in copyright law; if you encode someones content in a novel encoding it's still infringing the other ephemeral protected content.
I'm fairly certain that the non-technical sense by far predates the more narrow technical definition. It's all about context, and there was nothing here that would make helix more correct than spiral.

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=spiral
> fonts generally look worse in Windows than Mac.

This is subjective.

See: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/06/12.html

I prefer the way fonts look on Windows. Other people prefer the way fonts look in MacOS.

> OS X does some magic to smooth out those fonts.

FWIW, it is Windows that is actually doing "magic" (in the sense that it is using a algorithm to fit pixels to grid) whereas MacOS just does a more direct rendering of the actual font curves. Whether or not you like that "magic" is up to you. Until we're using retina-style displays everywhere, I like the Windows "magic".
I'm struck by two things in this story, the expectations Lucas started with, and the lessons learned (or not).

Lucas says "I put three years of my life into building and running Altsie,..." ... "As we approached launch last May" and "Two years building and eight months running "

What are the expectations on a business where you are looking for people to integrate a new thing (going to a bar to catch an indie movie) into their lifestyle? A week? A month? a year? five years? If you look at the restaurant business most seem to require a 3 year 'boot' cycle, the first year nobody knows about them but perhaps the local food critic trys them. The second year they have some foot traffic and perhaps they get written up in a more widely distributed guide, then the third year they have people coming who have read about them in the guide or found them on their phone's 'maps' product and they get to see how successful they are going to be. I can't imagine that any idea which requires people to change their behaviors in the real world could really be tested in less than a year.

The other thing that was sad to read was this bit, "I’d signed up to fight on the front lines. I still had a job, which made everything near impossible, that I couldn’t afford to quit. I worked during the day as a report writer, snuck in emails and business calls for Altsie over my lunch, and worked late into the night to take care of hundreds of necessary details to keep the project going."

There is a reason YC and others ask you to quit your job if you're doing a startup. There isn't a lot of excess time. If you have a spouse or partner who can bring in enough income to pay the bills and maybe health care that is one thing, but being both the 'stable income source' and the primary mover of the new venture? Not a good idea as Lucas discovered.

Now the most important thing to do is to capture all of the things you learned into something you can use in the future. What worked? What didn't work? How did you spend your time, could you have out sourced any of that? What were your costs and how did you evaluate the business? What variables did you guess at? Did you guess high or low? People who have been through the ringer are twice as valuable as people who haven't done it yet because they have a better idea of what they need to know to make forward progress.

I hope that Lucas' next venture is a lot less stressful on his health/psyche and much more satisfying overall.
There is some talk about potential major power outages in the east coast. If any of these power outages strike the region where US-EAST is located, it is possible that an outage could happen.

Netflix has spoken and blogged about how they were affected and what changes they made to minimize downtime.

http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/07/lessons-netflix-learned-...
I don't speak binary very well, so correct me if I'm wrong on this subject.
If a number that represents illegal information is formed, that number is illegal. What if there is a larger number that has the illegal number in it?
Example: 10 is illegal. 1000 has the number ten in it. The "10" can be filtered out.. How would this be handled?
There are no ideas involved in the fact that something is locked down.
Auxetic materials
I'm not sure if an alternative competitor is necessarily possible or easy. Google tried an alternative model presumably to address issues with turf wars and credibility with Google Knol, but that burned out pretty quickly even though the model was worth pursuing (giving expert editors incentives to create their own pages in an area they have specialized domain knowledge).
I wasn't dismissing your point of view. Heroku is what I described. AWS, to a certain extent, is what I described. And I said it was a production system, too; you didn't have to over-emphasize what I had already said, as if I didn't just say it. "Costs nothing to maintain" is in comparison to paying to maintain it yourself. But thanks for knee-jerking.
If I recall correctly, you can't call out a competitor by name in UK advertisements. All the tv ads we have here will say "compared to the next leading brand..."

Unless that's changed recently. I moved away 4 years ago.
That's nice, because it pays some attention to alternative means to use energy to sink CO2, which is one way to look at the plant example.
http://www.movii.es - quickly see what movies are now showing, and judge them based on Rotten Tomatoes and Social Media reviews.
I started a project a while ago which was going to be a variant of chess. Basically where you started out normally, but you could upgrade pieces, and earn game credits to buy new pieces with better abilities, as well as make modifications to the board. I got the normal version of chess working, and got a few abilities working, but then got bored with it, I should have started with a 2D game. Lesson learned.

http://www.metalliccloudgames.com/?page_id=8
According to Amazon, 1024x768 is standard definition when in a tablet, but high definition when in a TV. Plasmas that are 720p are almost universally 1024x768 natively.
> So you agree it wouldn't work for specs to be "written as executable reference implementations in a well defined programming language"?

No, then I would be disagreeing with myself. :)

> But sometimes you want to specify performance characteristics.

For a Markdown processor, hardly. But...

> ... cannot tell you what aspects of its behavior are "specified" and which are just implementation details.

That is a fair point indeed. I was merely disagreeing with the linked article in that a spec should be in a natural language, which I still hold to. Such specs generally have problems with under specifying, leaving too much up to implementation, which often ends with a few main implementations sort of becoming the actual practical spec. Look at browsers over the history for many examples. Your point seems to be that reference implementations might overspecify instead. This is true, but is easier to compensate for IMO. For example with clear types, natural language parts or even by conformance test suites being part of the specification.
Thanks mukaiji! Any questions you have, just drop me a mail - alex@snowplowanalytics.com
Are some in the HN community such Apple Fan Boys to label this as "an attack"?
That makes me think of "Scrambled Hackz"[1] in a feedback loop. Very cool stuff but I'm not sure if he ever released the source to the program, sadly.

[1] http://hackaday.com/2006/03/22/scrambled-hackz/
Political Obama Vs. Romney - An Apocalyptic Racial War?
que sera sera.

c'est la vie.

There are lots of cultural memes in America that aren't in English. You can restrict to "recent pop culture", but even in straight music, 99 luftballoons was big 25 years ago. I'm sure there are many other examples.
> Doesnt that just imply you can not use these types of languages in any mission critical context.

No more so than with C++. There is a relatively high probability of you having left a memory leak in an average C++ server.

> Monitor memory usage, and just restart?

That would work, and is probably a good idea for all servers anyways. I've seen apache take upwards of 60 gigs due to some misconfiguration, so monitoring memory utilization of your programs and alerting or automatically restarting is a good idea.

> What am i missing? How does this not completely destroy anu utility of these languages? Why do people put conservative gc in languages outside of the esoteric or academic context?

There isn't really a good reason as far as I can tell. The only advantages are that its much simpler to implement, particularly when you have C interop. You can annotate Go objects with types to do precise collection, but as soon as you pass them to C, a lot of guarantees the Go typesystem makes go out the window. Other than that, can't think of anything.
I imagine that HN crowd, being very rational and diverse, have adopted world-view perspective, rather than petty nationalistic views. Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot and all that.
Sometimes when I'm feeling innocent and pure, I like to pretend that the world is a place where everyone realizes that "... everything is just zeroes and ones" and thus anything can represent anything else when viewed just the right way. That means everything is illegal, and so nothing is illegal.

"This coke can plays the melody to Funkytown!" ... http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2012/07/26/encoding/

Then I snap out of it. It's right up there with "what if each of your fingernails contained a universe" talk: inevitable, but predictable.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combination#Number_of_combinati...; tells you there are N=10^8+10^6-1 over 10^6 different multisets of 10^6 8-digit numbers (including numbers starting with zero digit(s))

A quick and dirty Python program computing the logarithm in base 2 of N in Python gives me 8093729.48175.

So, one can encode a number in the range [0, N) in 8093730 bits, or 1011717 bytes (possibly a few more due to rounding, but that is far enough from 1MB=1048756 to not worry about that)

Arithmetic coding replaces that [0,N) integer by a floating point number in [0,1) by dividing by 2^(8MB), but that does not make a difference.

So, there is plenty of room to store one such number. That leaves the problem of replacing one such number for K eight-digit numbers by one for K+1 eight-digit numbers. I'll leave that as an exercise :-) because you did not ask for it and because I cannot think of an easy proof.
I think I have to a disagree with your analysis. The verse is in a minor key judging by the looping riff. This is interrupted once in a while by a iv-v-i cadence, and then the verse continues. Then the build-up, which happens in the parallel key III: IV-V-VI-VI IV-V-III-III-III and then back to the minor key for the chorus.
"I would say that if as a CEO you're laying off 5% of your workforce due to poor company performance you should really evaluate your own compensation package, because as a CEO you're meant to stop that kind of crap from happening"

This isn't really true. A CEO is there to make sure the company stays profitable. Sometimes, cutting a percentage of the workforce achieves this goal.
"Storing data and using data are two completely different things."

That is so true. When people ask "How hard can it really be to write a search engine these days?" I have been known to ask them to speculate on how they might go about it and then point out the challenges of knowing what data you have vs what data is asked for. Search is particularly interesting because the more time you spend the better your answer can be, and its always challenging to 'draw the line' between fast and relevant. But that is also what makes it so fun :-)
Steve, when will you update the image that ships on Surface RT devices? I had to download around 600MB of Windows Updates on day one before Office was in it's final usable state. Once updated though, Office is great - I didn't realize Word had a blogging client built in that rivals Windows Live Writer!
http://zachholman.com/talk/git-github-secrets
Show HN: Frankenstorm Tshirts (Sunday project)
Clickable: http://goo.gl/RJa1f
Typical falsehoods from Amazon. They call their display "stunning" but in my experience they ship low quality TFT displays, while Apple uses the latest LCD technology. Calling the iPad display "standard definition" implies it is 480p, which is a lie, as it is closer to 720p. Calling it "low resolution" is a straight up lie.

Ok, they have more pixels per inch, but like the people who focus on gigahertz but ignore how much work gets done, the real question is the quality and color reproduction in the images produced by the display.

"No HD movies or TV". This is a flat out lie. The iPad mini plays HD movies and TV from the iTunes store, or from everywhere else you might want to play them. 720p is only 1280x720, which is not very far from 1024x768... so, the fact is, you CAN watch HD movies and TV on this device. Further, the display is nearly HD, and I've seen "HD" applied regularly to displays simply because they were larger than 480p.

[Edit: Just noticed, this "HD" display on the kindle fire HD is only 720p. That means it is 40 pixels SMALLER in one dimension and 200 pixels BIGGER in another dimension. In other words, roughly the same resolution. Asinine.]

Somehow I bet the mono speaker in the iPad sounds better than the "dual stereo" in the kindle, but we'll have to see. Certainly a device made out of machined aluminum is going to rattle a lot less than one made out of plastic.

Finally they say "Ultra fast MIMO Wi-Fi". Then leave the spot blank for the iPad, implying it doesn't have it. This is, again, a blatent lie. The iPad has 802.11n, and uses MIMO, and is "ultra fast". (unless they've decided to redefine what "MIMO" means to be something magical that only they have.) They never say the specs of what the WIFI is on the kindle page, so I can't tell for sure.... but the implication that the iPad has no WIFI is typically dishonest.

[Edit: I see now that they claim a, b, g, compatibility, but one of the things Apple has done really well with their devices is make them interoperable, and support more esoteric situations.... I'm dubious that an independant test wouldn't find the iPad WiFi to be faster.]

When you have to lie about the competition like this, well, it says alot about your product, but also what kind of company you are.

Having worked at Amazon, where lying is a key survival trait, I'm not surprised to see this at all.

Frankly, this company is pathological. From the first announcement of AWS (where they lied and claimed Amazon.com ran on AWS infrastructure) to this latest example, I see Amazon constantly lying... and getting away with it. It's a shame. For instance, notice how people think the Kindle is a success, yet Amazon never gives actual sales numbers? (At least in a report that where they would get in trouble with the SEC... they have their PR flacks spread all kinds of lies about it.)

It's shameful.
I think it would be mindblowingly difficult to cause this DOS. If you think it possible, you can setup a demo on appengine. You even get to upload the source code, so you have that advantage, that you wouldn't ordinarily have.

Gist of the task at hand: you'd have to arrange for data passed into your target application to point to structures in memory, causing them to be pinned. Ideally, these structures should be big, to maximize impact of the attack. Further, you'd have to ensure that the data you passed in isn't garbage collected, as this would allow the target structures to be collected.
How many "hahaha that's funny"s make a Like?
I think the difference with your example of bold and italic text is different because they are occasional, so they are more signal than noise. They stand out as different because they are.

I see quite a few color themes where everything seems to be a different color -- the signal of color almost gets lost in the noise.

So I think I disagree with the author of the linked article to the extent he takes it. However, the article has made me wonder if a much simpler color scheme that highlighted strings and syntax errors only, would be a bit more straightforward and more signal than noise.
The main problem with "illegal numbers" seems to be that for any illegal number a, which represents someone's intellectual property or trade secret A, I can easily create two original pieces of intellectual property B and C so that b + c = a.
Amazon has a great case for the Fire vs Mini, but saying the Mini has an SD display hurts the credibility of the ad. Honestly, that Samsung vs iPhone 5 ad was much fairer.
I like small apps like this. They do their job and they don't try to reach outside of their domain.

However, I felt like the article was misrepresented by it's title. No real talking about what was learned, more talking about what the app can and what happened when released.
Kudos to the journalist for linking back to the comments.
For me it's a toss-up between Obama (voting /against/ Romney) or Johnson (supporting third-party candidates).

I is hacker :3.
This was a great story and I have a lot of respect for Lucas after reading it, but there are a few things that I want to notice.

First, Altsie is a pretty awesome idea! I really like the idea of going to a bar to watch an indie movie, I'm sure producers would love to get their film shown, and bars want extra customers coming in. This is something that definitely could have worked.

Second, the technology behind this product is trivial, a 2 year build is a huge warning sign. I cannot find on the site or in this description anything that should be hard to put together, and the fact that Lucas spent a few years building this in his spare time instead of hiring someone to do it in a (few) week(s) shows a dangerous prioritization of money over time.

Third, it takes a strong presence of mind (or maybe just good communication with your partner) to realize that what you're doing isn't making you happy. Kudos on letting it go.
Then the VP is not doing his/her job correctly. Someone needs to be aware of the budget for salaries and be responsible for ensuring it isn't exceeded (and held accountable if it is).

It's also very backwards (government-level!) thinking to be playing the hiring quota game like that. I'd much rather hire a few members in a kick-ass team than participate in a headcount battle.
In the real world, this is just called marketing, not "an attack." I know HN is pretty much a punchline anymore but seriously, moral outrage over an ad comparing the product it's advertising against a competitor while casting the competitor in an unflattering/unfair light?

That's all advertising ever, why in the holy hell does this matter to anyone here?

edit: Thank god, it was removed from the front page.
Welcome back: SpaceX Dragon capsule splashes down in the Pacific
That first chart really bugs me. You're showing us an apparent asymptote, a totally reasonable thing to do to prove your point.. but then I notice it's a log plot. That isn't showing us anything, number of seconds would make the same shape of plot.