skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You hit on a huge key point: context. For me, that can include:

- Selected text

- Current scroll position

- Partially-filled form fields (I try to avoid this, but it happens sometimes anyway)

- Pages with unbookmarkable modal popups

- The back-stack (and forward-stack), or the "trajectory" as you aptly put it

None of those are retained when you bookmark and close a tab. (In fact, not all of them are consistently retained when you restart the browser, either.)

When I leave a tab open for a long time, I almost always have a reason in mind for doing so. However, I can't always remember exactly what that reason was when I return to it, especially if it's been a while. That's the kind of information I'd like to store in a bookmark.

Because of this and other problems, I've often imagined some sort of non-linear visualization of your browsing history. This might look something like a git commit tree, with branches indicating when you opened a new tab from a link, along with other information and "tags" along the way. (One important aspect of this is that just like a VCS, you wouldn't lose your history stack when you hit back a few times and then click on another link within that same tab.) Theoretically, this could even store page states that normally aren't stored in a browser's history, e.g. filling form fields, scroll position, and so on. You could then view your bookmarks, tags, etc in that same interface, with a robust system for filtering and searching of course. Something like this could revolutionize the way I save and recall things online. Plus, I think it'd be pretty cool to be able to see your entire browsing history visualized like that.
Hmm that's not a very good argument. Why should search page on Google be encrypted then? Youtube has search function too.
As fast as WiFi? I'd hope it is faster. My home internet is 15mbps, this phone does 21, LTE does 70 or something. Do you really need to download a song in 0.5 seconds? Isn't 2 seconds fast enough?

With the LTE speed of 70mbps, you could use up your 6GB in 11 minutes.
It's really nice to hear a really genuine story about this process. The long list of "hacks" strike me as orthogonal to the simplicity of the application. This is the story I had hoped to hear about the YC process: simple, humane and honest.
How do you know, if you are a system geek, that you are indeed breaking DRM vs just doing complicated stuff with a firmware?

It seems obvious if there's PKI in there somewhere. But aside that, how do you tell the difference?
Hmm, sounds like the Apple variation of the 3 envelopes joke. I expect the Scott is going take a lot of the heat here as the designated person but with most things I expect the story is more nuanced.

This account is written to portray Scott as the bad guy, one could speculate that perhaps he had been arguing all along that there needed to be a different option, which no one accepted, and when the choice to ship turned out to be a poor one and he was asked to take the blame for it, he might have said "No way, I told you we shouldn't ship it, you overrode me, you sign it."

The version with Scott as the hero, refusing to compromise his principles, also fits all the 'known' facts (maps kinda sucks, Tim signed the apology) and might be communicated by nameless "people familiar with the matter" who liked Scott.

But we won't know. Some folks will know, and some folks will think they know, but having been high enough in the food chain to directly witness some executive shifts like this first hand, and to see how they got spun to the public and to others. the one thing I know is that those of us out here in the peanut gallery, we don't have an ice cube's chance in hell of knowing the 'real' story.
Apple Siri Developer Becomes Military Game-Changer
You were hoping for transparency from Linode? I've been a long time Linode customer (and don't have any plans to change that any time soon), but Linode has never been great about transparency, and that has only gotten worse over the past few years...
I'm no YC dude, but if I were a betting man, I'd give them money due to:

1. History of shipping stuff
2. Huge ass market
3. Solving a real pain point for indie game devs out there
4. Simple, easily understood, business model
5. Domain experience
I actually like to use it for the calendar and the notes.
Thoughts on possible and perceived income inequality, and its mismeasurement
I believe that all of our signups came from outside of HN.
One day the workers will be billionaires and at that point they want to be able to tread upon their underlings as they themselves were tread upon?
But likewise, indicating "tape reels" in a recording app is a clear affordance that you can record audio.

This is a slippery slope. There's no hard boundary between skeumorphism and visual affordance, even though you'd like there to be.
heh, http://www.explosm.net/comics/2959/
I've avoided signing up because I couldn't find a price.

Just saying its free / there is no pricing plans yet etc would have let me sign up, or an actual pricing list.

I won't try a service without knowing whether I can actually use it going forward (I'm time poor) so the lack of pricing information anywhere makes me leave the page.
But I've never thought LTE was necessary, even in the iPhone. Not something I want/need.
I'd argue that it already does. There are plenty of games that run on Linux (hardly as many on windows, but you can easily say the drivers are "there").

No it doesnt. The problem is actually NOT that games have to run on average drivers, but rather that drivers dont work on the OS.

For example, I'm constantly hindered by ATI and Nvidia drivers affecting suspend/resume, HDMI out and power consumption. And quite often, I get drivers that screw with X.

You give me a 30% hit in game performance, but dont let it affect core OS issues, I'll be more than happy. However, I dont think thats the status quo.

This is actually why I think (flames welcome) that Valve should focus more on the Linux core first and then on the Steam app as such. I was half expecting them to come up with this distro using Wayland, seamless Linux audio (!!) and a new driver infrastructure.
thanks! I actually wanted to remove the pointer/cursor but forgot. Will update this shortly.
Windows 8 upgrade - consumer confusion regarding installation options
Ask PG: Delay YC app deadline ~1 day for NorthEast weather?
Many without power in NYC and elsewhere in the north east, would be great to have an extra day or two to submit apps to avoid having to scramble for cell service, etc, find a way to submit by tomorrows deadline. Would definitely be appreciated by many I believe.
Because programming languages is so tedious to write. Actually, what you are referring to is PLT, which is a bit different from PL implementation and/or design. Implementation is usually associated with compiler, although these days it could be garbage collection, palatalization optimizations, or something else. PL design are the people who design programming languages, like say Hinkley, Mats, Pike, ...and tons of lesser known people.
I'm in India. Server not found.
"Show HN: Review Signal - Real web hosting reviews based on social media comments" http://reviewsignal.com/webhosting

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4570393

Been just over a month since launch. Traffic has been slowly growing. Feedback has been pretty good. It's a marketing problem at the moment. Also working on trying to apply the technology to other industries. So hopefully I will launch another niche before the year is over.
I don't want to go dredging up all my own boring/painful stories but my experiences at Google were very much like yours. I do want to chime in on this one though, and warn anyone with experience that before you take a job at Google -- be aware that as far as they're concerned you know absolutely nothing. The main thing they care about on your resume is your GPA whether it was last year or 20 years ago.
While the majority of people seem to be cheering Forstall's departure, I personally think this is a really bad sign.

Software just doesn't get enough respect, and there are few people who realize how important it is. Steve Jobs was one of them, as was proved when he was running NeXT. When things started to go downhill, he made the right decision to turn NeXT into a software company. He knew that software was the most important thing.

He brought the best software people over to Apple, including Forstall, who was the key figure behind one of the most important business decisions that Apple ever made -- using OSX as the basis for the iPhone.

Software needs to have a strong advocate inside of a company, and there's no substitute for having someone like Forstall -- a real programmer who can fight for the Right Thing, instead of having the developers overrun by the other units of the company.

When software stops being so important, the other parts of the company overrule the developers and make bad decisions, like releasing software before its ready (eg. iOS6 maps).

Now that the future of Apple is being lead by the hardware people like Cook and Ive, I think we're going to see less innovation on the software side. We're going to see more hardware-only product launches like the iPad mini. More shinier and thinnier cases, and fewer killer apps.

What we might end up with is the old post-Jobs Apple, which launched a plethora of new product lines while letting the software stagnate to the point where Microsoft almost killed them.
Yegge infamously posted a rant publicly on G+ without intending to. I don't think I'd bet my life on circles, especially after watching how Facebook put in similar features and then capriciously violated the intent of many users.
I thought Apple did licence Tom Tom data? The problem with maps is not the app, but quality of the data, which came from other sources.
I think that right now mobiles Achilles heel is input. Input is, as you put it "fantastically horrible". And software must be redesigned to deal with it's awfulness. Don't lose hope, I feel your pain as well.
If your concern is to ensure that you're not getting a coding bozo, I think that your tests are designed incorrectly.

Instead of having a 'simple test', just find some random, buggy sub-optimal code sample online (shouldn't be hard) and ask them to identify the problems with it and refactor.

I can almost guarantee you that bozos won't see half the problems, and they definitely won't know how to fix them.

Asking someone to code up simple examples on a board ends up just testing a dude's ability to code up simple coding questions. Bug finding/fixing, creating readable and elegant code and the ability to refactor are all much more relevant and important than asking if someone can implement a sorting algorithm or parse a custom data structure.

In the end, I think that by testing candidates this way it'll make it more likely that the people you hire actually have skills that are important to their daily work.
Fun? How?
Caveman Republicans, Take Your Rape Religion & Politics & Shove Off
I flagged this content-free spec "article".
Unfortunately, there isn't any distinction between the two yet. I would posit that very few people graduating with a bachelors of science in computer science are actually doing computer science work. I would posit that the vast majority of them are doing software engineering work. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like software engineering is a bachelor's level degree (I know of a few M.S. Software Engineering programs, but none at the bachelor's level), there really isn't much of the way in formal software engineering education for someone who wants to go to school for a few years and then get a job.
Here you go :)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4640269
This brings us back to the enterprise. People are going to be finagling a way to get the company to pay for their $1000 tablet.
I've seen tablets used as a household appliance akin to a TV or family computer. I'm not saying this would never be useful on phones, just that it's more obviously useful on tablets and TechCrunch seems to ignore this in favor of a more scandalous conclusion.
Why I Program in Erlang
If you're starting today: userfox is much faster to get integrated and sending email than MailChimp (or anything else.)

If you're already using MailChimp: send me a note and I'll show you our beta "variables" feature that allows you to say things like "send this welcome email unless this_custom_data equals that." launching soon.
Wow. Okay, thanks for the information. Is there an open bug for this already? :(
+1. The app should have never been created in the first place. The old podcast functionality was basic, but was better than having to switch back-and-forth between two different apps as it is now.
I write tail-recursive functions in C using gotos sometimes. I figure why bother with recursion when the function call would be two jmps, register spills, and stack growth?

I'd say you are doing it right, it's just too bad the companies you had these experiences with don't understand you are a solid candidate.
Show HN: Hey Who should I vote for? (Our Sandy-day-off project)
Poll: Should we push the YC deadline back by a day because of the storm?
I have no idea what the situation is like on the east coast, but it's no problem to push the deadline back by a day if it's necessary. Let us know.
The notion that we should just ignore the defensive mechanism of penetration testing is born from the same stupidity that has given us the TSA security theatre and the notion of security through obscurity.
"Ask HN: Review my startup - pinad.com.au"

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4614632

Made this as a self-study on how to use metadata to describe objects in dynamic way - general classifieds are a good area for such a study. I'm currently working on a new UI, more user friendly I hope. Never had any feedback on HN.
I wish I understood the arguments against testing more clearly.

It seems as if the claim is that testing doesn't correlate with knowledge, since some kids "test well," or "test poorly," so it's a waste of time.

I've known lots of folks who claim to know a subject well, but test poorly in it. I've never been able to verify it though, because the followup discussions about the concepts involved left me... uncertain at best. I'm not sure undemonstrable knowledge is really any kind of knowledge at all.

But say we granted that an individual student's tests have a wide margin of error. Wouldn't the aggregate of tests for a given classroom or school still provide some information on whether or not a school was well or poorly run? (Assuming you use moving averages or something to soften noise.)

Do standardized tests really have no value, no redeeming benefits?
not really - my experience with submitting posts to hn is that they pretty much get ignored. assuming i'm reasonably typical, and don't have an intrinsic knack for being the only person on all of hn to find something interesting, i can definitely see why some people would be driven to hack whatever external factors they feel are leading their posts to be likewise dead-on-arrival.

then again, i don't read the new queue either, so i guess i can't complain. maybe reddit's system of posting a different article from "new" in a box at the top of the page every time you refresh it would help fix the problem.
Again, YMMV. I was hired as a UI SWE, told my manager (repeatedly) that I wanted to do more backend algorithmic work, eventually refused to do any more UI work, then taught myself enough about Google Search's backend systems that I became known as a full-stack engineer that knows everything. It probably delayed my promotion by about a year, but it was worth it, and it's not like anyone stopped me.

I'm now doing basically product-manager type work, despite officially being a SWE. Again, nobody stops me. I've found that if you're producing stuff of value, you can basically move into another role simply by doing the work entailed by that role. I know two other SWEs that are de-facto PMs, and one SRE who became a SWE (and core LLVM contributor in the process).
I haven't heard much about the Skype pre-interview. Does anyone know more about that? Are they common?
who edited the title of this submission? thanks for using the proper em dash, but userfox is supposed to be lowercase.
That sort of error should be picked up by the lint now. Still, not ideal. Keep in mind that a lot of the android design decisions were made in order to get good performance on G1-vintage hardware with no JIT compilation.
will update the link. good spot. the correct link is http://www.userfox.com/about/

sorry it isn't more exciting. I'll make it cool tomorrow.
Microsoft is offering a Windows 8 upgrade for £25 in the UK.

There's some confusion over installation options, and process. Especially when one wants to do a clean install.

I have Debian and Vista sharing a partition on my laptop. I boot Vista rarely. I am frustrated as is, that I have the 32bit version installed, which can't take advantage of all of my memory.

I did think about upgrading Vista from 32bit to 64bit but Lenovo pulled their Windows images from the support site. And I didn't get any recovery/installation disks with my Thinkpad.

A while back I'd heard there would be an affordable upgrade option available for Windows 8. So figured I'd just hang on.

Looking at this page though - it would seem that Microsoft are not encouraging upgrading from 32bit to 64 bit OSs via this path. There must be a bunch of people wanting to upgrade from say 32bit XP/Vista, to 64bit Windows 8.

There are work arounds / hacks for the install - but lots of confusion in the forums about how people should attempt a clean installation.

It shouldn't be this hard (or this confusing.) Why can't it be as simple as downloading an ISO and burning it to disk/usb? Activation could occur later by submitting your new product key (that you just bought) - and if necessary your old one.
I'd do until Friday (if not next week!) rather than tomorrow -- some places seemed a lot more disrupted than just a day.
For anyone else wondering ConEd is Consolidated Edison Inc, a power company.

No real news details yet but photos and tweets are being aggregated here:
http://gothamist.com/2012/10/29/lower_manhattan_loses_power_...
True, that one situation has caused me to switch on WiFi. However the rest of my office building and city is blanketed in pretty decent LTE coverage.

Latency is as low as 2ms. I never have latency problems on LTE.
Not really. I worded it that way because I was not sure if other civil defense bureaucrats might have made pronouncements. The article mentions only the one, but it does not claim to be comprehensive.
Ask HN: Looking for an Accountability Partner
I'm a copywriter who's work is 100% remote. While the freedom of working at home is great, I hate how easy it is to waste a big chunk of the day.

I'd like to connect with someone who's interested in exchanging quick check-in emails during the workday.

If you feel like this arrangement would help boost your productivity as well, my email is tyler358 [at] me dot com

*Just for reference, I'm in the Midwest (CST).
I think figuring out how to let third-party addons talk to Heroku in multiple regions (given that there's no internal-to-AWS load balancing/elastic IP type solution) is the hard part with that, although I have no specific knowledge of Heroku to base that on.
> Apple retail head is one of the most desirable executive positions on the planet. Why couldn't they recruit a true superstar?

I think the problem is identifying the superstar in the first place. Quite frankly, there is no company whose retail comes close to Apple, and so there isn't anyone who has a track record of being able to do the SVP Retail job.

In addition, the Apple SVP Retail job is different from head of retail at other companies (e.g. s/he doesn't have control over inventory [1]), and so when it comes down to the end of the day, it's really hard to find someone who has done a similar job in the past, let alone done that job well.

In all likelihood, Tim Cook had some idea of the downfalls of hiring Browett, but decided to bet on it. I would also guess that given the worries around that time that Cook wouldn't be able to handle the CEO job also made the hiring rather more urgent that it should have been.

[1]: http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/08/25/how-apple-works-insid...
Preparing Rackspace Data Centers for Hurricane Sandy
How about a day for each day the market remains closed.
offer bonus points for disaster preparedness/public safety startups :)
They are using the exynos 5 because it's the only SOC out right now that can support a screen with that resolution. The A15 cores should run very well, I suspect it'll be faster than the nexus 4 for most tasks.
The entire eastern seaboard from Richmond, VA to Maine is flooding/expecting flooding. Chicago and Michigan are also expecting to have some issues with storm surge.

An extra day isn't going to change anything. I'd say push it by a week or don't bother changing the date.
What is the most impressive hack you've accomplished?

We had to hack our way in a storm to submit our YC application.

* Note for application reviewers: Email is in my profile, thanks.
How much effort could possibly be saved by neglecting to implement this for things with smaller screens? Almost seems like more work to exclude phones.
I don't cheer it. I agree with everything you said.
Forstall has a track record. He's done well.

Forstall has a track record, and the iOS is the best of the products out there compared to similar devices from other companies. So he did _SOMETHING_ right. As a developer, I love the developer environment as well - compare to say BlackBerry, Android and its eclipse and etc.
Lessons learned from an (Unsuccessful) YC Pitch
I remember reading a story about when Bill Clinton had a drink in a UK pub, the Secret Service smashed the pint glass he used as soon as he had finished.
Huh, I read it as "what is that way to measure school quality absent standardized tests?"

While I think you read it as "What's a better way to run schools?"

Your answer, roll back to before NCLB.

That could be true, but we still wouldn't have an answer to the other question. Absent standardized tests, how can we measure school quality? Hopefully something slightly more rigorous than testimonials from stakeholders... (ie, teachers claiming they like or dislike their school).

If there's a better way to get some standardized measure of student / teacher performance, I'm curious to hear it. I'm not pro-test, I just don't know the alternative metrics advocated by the anti-test community.
Before and after pics of FDR @54th St, 1pm and 10pm pic.twitter.com/wqwkTXoK

I would say yes.
"Don't blame Forstall for not signing the letter if you don't know the cockup was his fault"

Sometimes you have to take the fall for something that's not your fault. This is particularly true at high levels of management - or rather, it should be.

It doesn't matter whether it was his personal fault - Scott Forstall was in charge of iOS, full stop. iOS was his remit, maps included.
... and note that making the deadline while being hit by a massive hurricane is a powerful litmus test. Of course, the question is: A litmus test for what?

Hope y'all are safe out there.
I'm guessing it wasn't a literal "signing", but rather he refused to put his name on it, probably because he disagreed with it in principle.

It would have been signed by Tim Cook on behalf of everyone at Apple, but my guess is that Forstall wasn't on board, regardless of whether his name appeared on the public announcement or not.
I don't know the answers, but I tend to side with those that criticize the increased focus on tests. My experience as a programmer leads me to believe that the most effective work is done when you give passionate professionals the tools they need and then get out of the way.