skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> (The answer is, you don't.)

You do realize that putting words in other people's mouths like this pretty much destroys any chance of having a productive and useful conversation?

What is the point of even asking a question that you're sure you already know the answer to?
Ask HN: Does anybody have experience with paid apps on Ubuntu software center?
I work as a software developer and sell an app on the Mac App Store. It's a great experience, and I think that centralized App Stores are the future of software distribution. Therefore I'm interested to hear how App Stores work on other platforms, especially Ubuntu's store. When I searched for more info about Ubuntu Software Center, I can find only marketing copy and a Wikipedia article. Judging from https://apps.ubuntu.com/cat/ most of the software seem to be free and open source apps.

Does anybody have experience selling apps for Ubuntu? Is the market big enough to make a living?
Great article from one of London's great startups!

Love the line "Most startups aren’t competing with other startups; they’re competing with no one giving a shit."
Play android apps in Facebook itself
Yesterday AppSurfer released a major update for users as well as android developers. Users can now play android apps in the facebook news feed itself. Similar to a youtube video, the android app can be tried, shared, liked on facebook itself.
The point of affirmative action is not to get people out of the farming business. My grandmother took a cruise ship across the atlantic once, but I wouldn't compare that to the second passage.
Great concept and implementation.
Honestly, I'm drooling over the newer model before the battery in any of my phones deteriorates to the point of being useless. I really like the option of induction charging (like on my Palm Pre) and not being able to change the battery doesn't bother me one bit.

Also, I like the fact that a sealed case gives lint/dust/dirt less of a chance to invade my phone. I have a Galaxy Nexus and I have to take the back off every so often to clean the gunk out of the speaker & camera lens.
Municipal water costs in the US average around .0015 cents a gallon. Flushing your toilets with .0075 cents per gallon would not be prohibitive, growing crops with .0075 cents per gallon water would be. However, far more water goes to growing crops than flushing toilets.

PS: There are actually huge swings in water costs in different areas, which does impact water use significantly.
Or, skip all the steps and just use Minefold ;)
There are other graphing frontends now, but also you can check out companies like Librato who have statsd-compatible backends and do all the graphing and storage for you.
JAM with Chrome: Play Live Music With Your Friends Online
In order to achieve the multi-gigabit speeds, the Ocean project at Bangor University in north Wales is using an existing technology from wireless networks and digital broadcasting known as Optical Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing, or OOFDM, to reduce dispersion.

How much change to current infrastructure will be necessary to implement this technology? How will American ISPs react - will they increase capacity, or will they continue to charge us more for less?
Current stable version is 23.
The culture of data science
"I Was a Starter Wife": Inside [Elon Musk's] Divorce
"it does a disservice to the people doing great work at other universities to say things like this."

Totally agree, and I write that as an MIT alum.

This is just Boston Magazine link baiting targeting the MIT and Harvard communities.
This may seem silly, but I found the most difficult part of learning RoR was getting my development environment set up. I tried several times since 2005 to get started, but failed due to a sticking point that for some reason I couldn't get past. It wasn't until a friend with a bunch of RoR experience walked me through the setup of the black box of different parts to run a web app that I actually got it. Comparatively, coding, refactoring, implementing best practices is much easier and enjoyable.

If you view programming as a craft, having mentors/coaches/peers definitely helps you improve much faster.
Storytelling: what story should I tell? Part II
Well the difference is, you can just buy a different Android phone which is just as powerful but doesn't have these 'defects'. The choice is yours. With an iPhone, you either buy one "with no LTE, non-removable battery, no SD card slot and glass front and back" or you don't buy an iPhone at all.
Adaptive Vs. Responsive Layouts And Optimal Form Field Labels
My guess: multi-year contracts.
Sure, though personally I don't want to spend my time rooting my phone. For those who do, awesome. I don't feel like investing the time in that process when I could be doing more productive things (to me) with my day.
I have been wondering this exact same thing myself. I get 16Mbps on HSPA+, and that's more than plenty for everything I do. I could sort of see LTE making sense in tablets (streaming 1080p on HSPA+ is definitely doable, but doesn't leave a lot of extra bandwidth), but I genuinely have no idea why it's (currently) important in phones.
> HN is heavily biased against Apple

This is absurd. HN is not a monolith. Every time Apple has a new product there's plenty of people fawning over it, plenty deriding it, and most people somewhere in between who don't care enough to comment.
Totally agree with your last point.

To your first point, I really wish people would make virtual machine images with dev environments already set up on them.
You can lose robust things as easily as fragile things. Which is a facile point, but still, this all just stuff.
Ask HN: I wish HN switch to a more sophisticated forum software
Hackers news is an excellent place for startups/indes to share ideas and get help. However the list format is kind of primitive and quite disorganized. I wish HN consider moving to a formal forum software that would make us users easier to navigate, search and post. It can also sell ad space to get some revenue to sustain the site too.
However, I think its only supported on Mozilla Firefox.

I used to support it on my media sites when Mozilla was topdog, but since the share is split between Chrome/IE I no longer do so.
You can use your keyboard too.
I would like chicken to have a programming interface so I could write automated scripts. For example, if an event is sensed that an egg is coming, then walk to my boiler and tweet. By tweet, I mean tweet like a chicken, or if you like, tweet like a chicken and tweet through the Internet.
I enjoyed "The Map That Changed The World", which is the story of how the study of geology developed during the Industrial period of England. It's the story of William Smith, one of the first people to identify strata formations in coal mines and canal trenches and use them to predict patterns elsewhere.

http://amzn.com/0061767905

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Smith_(geologist)
The internet of animals?
I would be putting words in someone's mouth if I wrote, "You said X..." when they did not say X, but rather something that I think (rightly or wrongly) implies X.

What I did is something different, but I agree that it's not obvious how this is conducive to productive and useful conversation. I know, it looks like I'm just trying to "score points." So, let me explain myself.

This kind of dialogue actually is productive and useful.

People reading my comment who were taken by a logical fallacy (including the person who wrote it) get to see that and learn something.

The person who wrote my comment (me) gets to practice writing clearly and concisely, and will get instant feedback if there was a failure or mistake. (Either in exposition or logic - and I readily admit I make logical mistakes all the time.)

As further evidence that what I said is useful, I submit that I have a double digit number of upvotes.

I wish there had been a way to indicate I wasn't just being snarky/trying to score points, but it's hard to convey that online, short of saying "BTW, I'm not just being snarky here, I actually think this is important." Maybe I should have done that. I'm open to suggestions here.
You can also have action buttons in notifications. See, for example, http://minus.com/lbpCsG which is a minimal MPD client written as a notification for gnome-shell. In gnome 3.6, you can interact with it using only the keyboard (<Super>M, left/right to select the notification, up, left/right to select the button and then enter to activate it), which you can't do with the usual status icons unless the app is programmed to behave like that, and which I think you can't do either with indicators like those used in Unity (though I haven't used that in a while, so I might be wrong).
HipHop is adding Generics and some other cool things to PHP
Why can't we just try to remedy those ills directly? Why does there need to be an association with race?

I'm not denying that these are a result of the U.S's past action, and that we have a responsibility to fix them, but I have doubts that associating them with race is necessary or helpful in any way.
Ask HN: Resources to teach programming to my 10yr old brother
Over the past year I've seen a handful of what looked to be really great resources for teaching younger kids how to program, but I never took the time to save any of them away. But now, I recently asked my little brother if he would want to learn, and he seemed genuinely interested. Would HN help me out in aggregating resources I can use to teach him?
No, THE INTERNET. I mean post to twitter...
AngularJS and SEO
Optimizing response times of an ambulance corp: short-term versus average
That is exactly what the video shows.

EDIT: When I read photosynth, I was thinking of Microsoft Photosynth[1], which sketches pictures into panoramas. I should have read the parent comment a little more closely.

1: http://photosynth.net/
I believe HN was written by PG as a project to learn Arc...so maybe it doesn't receive the amount of attention that we wish it would?

HN is partially an advertising space for YC companies, so it's already paid for I think.
Are you implying that tethering is different on the Nexus 4?
"How would you avoid the impeding PETA backlash" is another good question...
Cute, but it would be more honest to give some context for the 100,000 - what is that as a proportion of the current unemployed?
Agreed. Gnome 3 may have a lot of problems, but it's probably the most elegant and "quiet" desktop environment.
Thanks for taking the time to read and think about my comment. I myself didn't take my uncle's advice seriously at the time, which is all the more reason I can still remember it now (over a decade later). To clarify it slightly: I enjoy my work, perhaps even more than I did school, but when I think back to meaningful events in my life the months I worked are a blur around the memorable parts.

If there's any interesting life lesson I've learned in my few years it's this: just because you're different from the people immediately around you (due to intelligence, drive, etc.) it doesn't mean your broad needs in life (e.g. human companionship, time to unwind) are going to be significantly different than the billions of humans that came before you. That's not dooming you to mediocrity, that's just stats -- that's the intelligent read of the data we have. But despite a million cliche stories of the powerful magnate whose only life regret is that they had spent more time with their children (even Steve Jobs, perhaps: http://technology.gather.com/viewArticle.action?articleId=28... ), it may just be a lesson you can only learn from experience.
The historic chinatowns of San Francisco, New York, and LA are still predominantly populated with ethnic Chinese. At a bigger scale: China is still predominantly populated with ethnic Chinese.

I'm not sure what conclusions you can reasonably draw from this, especially WRT affirmative action.
One major point not addressed in the article is that the Dutch media aren't afraid to call out politicians on their lies. When a politician is caught in a gross lie the media turn up the heat until the politician publicly apologizes (or at the least ceases to spread misinformation). Politicians are forced to answer tough questions whenever they appear on TV and in addition they get cross-examined during debates. So the blatant dishonesty displayed in the US election won't work here.

So it's a strong cultural thing. There are no mainstream politicians here who hold scientifically untenable positions about evolution, global warming, vaccinations/autism, abortion, and so on. They'd get ridiculed, and rightly so.

This does not mean that rationality prevails in the Netherlands, unfortunately. Austerity measures are seen as the obviously responsible thing to do, even though economists don't agree. As a result we're looking at an economic recovery significantly worse than the one in the US. The GDP growth is projected at a meager 1.5% per year until 2017.
> undo bad things that happened long ago with other injustices

First, you are implying that affirmative action is unjust, which it is not. Affirmative action does not mean that an unqualified worker replaces a qualified worker because of race. Affirmative action means that equally qualified workers are then selected to be as representative of the population as possible. This has the added benefit of making sure civil servants (ie our government) are more accurately representing the dynamics of the population as a whole.

Whether it actually works is a difficult question, and I've only done a little bit of reading on the issue (I have friends who are activists and explained the details to me, but I wasn't able to commit a lot of the specific details and studies to memory). A summary: it's complicated, there's pros and cons, but the pros can outweigh the cons depending on implementation. A quick Google search reveals a few interesting things. A study from Princeton indicated that ending affirmative action would result in a sharp decline in minority students, but it wouldn't actually raise the acceptance rate for non-minority students significantly. But there are also some studies that indicate the opposite (an analysis of law schools, for example, revealed that there would potentially be more black lawyers if affirmative action was not in place).

As always, make the evaluation for yourself, but asking someone to validate affirmative action on HN is quite a task, isn't it? But to reframe the discussion a little bit: it's not a question of whether it's just or fair -- it's a question of whether it's an effective approach to inequality. The idea of "reverse racism" is baloney, and I can explain that opinion further if necessary.
Ask HN: Who created Metro theme?
I feel there must be one person behind it and I am curious to know who.
love the article. I would add that simplicity is just the right amount of abstraction. a little more becomes complex. a little less becomes incomprehensible.
Puerto Ricans Favor Statehood for the First Time
Thanks for the feedback. Our goal is to make all the world's art freely accessible and so in the short-term we are more focused on building our database and the Art Genome Project than a particular audience. In the long-term we intend Art.sy to be a tool for collectors to more easily discover new artists and galleries, and more easily purchase art. This commercial activity will ensure that Art.sy remains free for the 99.9% of people out there who will never buy art, but don't currently have access to it, particularly lower income and rural demographics who live outside of major city centers.

The collection feature is just for saving your favorites. Although expect some major upgrades to that soon.

Also, I wouldn't be a good founder if I didn't mention that we are looking for interaction + visual designers (we believe in bringing both together), software engineers, and art world professionals:

art.sy/jobs

We're also really into open-source. You can check out our projects here: http://artsy.github.com/open-source/
> For example, you haven't addressed whether it's worth trying to undo bad things that happened long ago...

Um, I hate to break it to you, but racism didn't magically end "long ago", but is alive and well today and is both personal and systemic in western society.

>...with other injustices

Providing help in getting people of color who are actively prohibited from accessing higher education is not an injustice.
I used it several times also, both to give and ask for help.

The idea is great and people are really willing to help :).
Apple quietly pulls apology-hiding code from U.K. site
Hacker news is something different than typical forum. I come here to read interesting news, and list format is usefull for this.

I really hate your idea.
But it supports Syrian dictator. See

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/foreigners/2012/08/...
Apple iPhone turns table top into full-sized invisible keyboard
The Marketing Doctor Is In: Prescriptions for All of Your Consumerist Woes
Autodesk’s new 123D Design app turns everyone into 3D modellers
Crowdfunding Campuses Interviews a Platform Aggregator
Saying 'Hi' Through A Dream: How The Internet Could Make Sleeping More Social
Who said anything about the most expensive? Price doesn't always correlate with quality, especially when talking about brands as you mentioned.

What makes you think I spend lots of time "thinking so much about this worthless rubbish"? I rarely purchase non-consumables. When I do I spend a reasonable amount of time based on the use and cost. I spent a lot of time researching laptops before buying mine since it's such an important item. I spent about 30 minutes reading about pens before buying some (in case you're not aware there are many sites dedicated to them). You could probably learn about flatware in the same amount of time.
I have Chrome 23 and a pretty good computer.
> those that cared may have decided "on the balance, in this flawed democratic system where I have to vote on this as a single unit, I think the result is better despite this consequence"

They would be wrong. Anyone who has enough resources to get a proposition on the ballot has enough resources to get the legislature to pay attention to them. And something like prop 35 would pass in the legislature for the same reason it passed at the ballot box. But the legislature can make amendments.
similar to the internet of things...
Considering that the Galaxy Nexus doesn't have Gorilla Glass, the fact that this doesn't happen to most people speaks to its quality construction.

IIRC, you couldn't get curved Gorilla Glass back then so Google decided to go with regular glass rather than give up the subtle curve.
Working on a cross-platform Java-based command line shell that aims to be better than the powershell's available and bring the goodness of user prompts to commands.
yes, how much for this kind of tutoring lessons?
talking to users is an incredibly important exercise, though its not exactly straight forward how to approach it - i.e. what questions to ask to get to those "golden nuggets" of their problem or way they look at your product or service...

Great start delving into this topic, it would be great to see your thoughts about how to approach the user exploration more!
Maybe I'm leaning too much on the 'benefit of the doubt' side, but I parsed the prior post to mean that all those things existed, but they weren't considered problems by, say, white people, or people in power, prior to the 1960s.

The alternative is that some (presumably intelligent) poster on HN stating something completely at odds with the facts, and perhaps even informally suggesting that affirmative action was likely to have caused black people to live in poor, squalid, crime-filled ghettoes.
Ubuntu One's killer app is Tomboy[1] which can use it to synchronize across computers and Androids[2] and is consistently the app I use the most after the terminal and browser. For everything: scribbling, grocery/shopping/todo lists, things to remember, personal wiki articles...

[1] http://projects.gnome.org/tomboy/features.html
[2] https://launchpad.net/tomdroid (use the beta provided as an .apk in the sidebar)
Apple stops hiding Samsung apology on its UK site
I'd be more worried about the impending backlash from God.
Interestingly, with the vast majority of that (especially so once you factor out some portion of the contributions that had been made to multiple simultaneous campaigns, which ballotpedia can't separate), came from a single person: Chris Kelly (former Chief Privacy Officer of Facebook).
With bluetooth and induction charging, can we now make beautiful, fast phones with no flaps to cover the ports? I've had two phones broken through water damage; surely the time has come for a manufacturer to add such an obvious feature to its high-end devices?
FWIW I've given up on a dedicated device for that use case; my 11" ultrabook-like (Samsung NP900X1B) can play a much wider range of videos (and also games, coding etc.) and is small enough to be comfortable on a plane. There's a very small space where I'd want a 7-inch-type device (on my way to/from a club is pretty much the only use case I can think of), but I'm not sure there are 7-inch screens much better than a big phone screen.

(personal experience, probably different for other people)
That's definitely a great topic. I'll write a piece on that too :) Thanks!
This. Is. Cool. Technology.
I wish the best to these guys.
I see your point and it is perfectly valid. I am happy that GNOME tries come up with something new since there are still some good DEs like XFCE which propose a solid and classic user experience. Choice is there for everyone to be happy.
I think GNOME shell's extension mechanism actually provides developers with more customization possibilities than GNOME 2 did, only it is javascript, therefore not accessible to everyone, and not as easy and straightforward as the options we used to have 2 years ago.
A neighboring town's motto was, "The blackest soil and the whitest people."

Despite people's assurances that "white" in this case simply means "good", I always had mixed feelings about it.
ShrimpDB: a powerful embedded database in 227 lines of Python
if you take a 10 million actively looking for jobs unemployment number, 100,000 is 1 Percent!
App is not in Cydia or anywhere yet.
Is very low fat necessarily optimal? I think excessively fatty birds are a problem, but depending on use, I suspect a non-zero percentage of fat is desirable. Though I have no idea what the optimal amount would be. But in plenty of food applications, grease is good.
for example, last Monday from 10 to 11 AM, 30% of submissions reached
the frontpage and so it was, in effect, a great time to post.

But it might also mean that less people see your post, which is still better than not making the frontpage at all, but not the same as getting there on "prime time", this should also be taken into account.
Same here; for me, comments tend to be a good indicator of article quality. Lower quality articles (linkbait, non-original content, etc.) need not get all the pageviews.
The problem with affirmative action is that it is based on race. It is racist. In fact it isn't just based on race, it is based on skin colour - since some mixed black-white people with white skin can be discriminated against.

America needs to put race on the sidelines and start thinking in terms of class. You should help the disadvantaged or poor regardless of their great great grandparent's struggles.

Affirmative action should exist; but it should be entirely based on parental income, growing up in a poor area, or other disadvantaged indicators. Not race, not ethnicity, and not gender. These things don't prove you're poor or disadvantaged.