skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Unfortunately, it looks wonky as hell on Chrome for Mac.

Edit: I'm sorry for my misleading and value-free comment. Allow me to clarify: THIS EXPERIMENT LOOKS LIKE HOT BROKEN GARBAGE ON CHROME FOR MAC, A FACT WHICH MAY BE OF INTEREST TO PERHAPS HALF OF THE HACKER NEWS READERSHIP WHO WILL MOST LIKELY EXPERIENCE THE SAME VISUAL CORRUPTION AT VARIOUS VIEW LEVELS. SOME MAY VIEW THIS AS UNFORTUNATE, AS THE INTENDED EXPERIENCE IS A WORTHY ONE THAT EXERCISES A NUMBER OF CUTTING EDGE WEB PRESENTATION TECHNIQUES THAT ARE LIKELY TO GAIN SIGNIFICANT TRACTION IN THE NEAR FUTURE.
While we're knee-deep into the toilet conversation, you make an interesting observation. I'm originally from France and have lived in California for over 11 years but, to this day, I'm still astonished at how little embarrassment there is in American toilets (my experience is limited to the mens rooms) as far as unpleasant noise goes.
It is obviously a fact of life but, where I come from, denial is king in that department.

My theory is that it's because American public toilets are usually made of 2 thin, low separation walls and a door with sometimes wide gaps which makes it almost inevitable to share the entire experience with everybody in the room.

Still not used to it...
The oficial Quora App is ready for iPhone
Is there a specific reason why pricing is not as transparent as pricing in the US and other regions?
Data Visualization: 10,500 bikeshare rides in Boston
Seems unlikely unless the $2000 was spent in minutes.
California Regulator Issues Citations And Fines Against Uber, Lyft, And SideCar
This pretty much sums up most Hadoop projects I've seen at startups:
http://wavii.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/hadoop_too_big.jpg

(Originally from this Wavii Engineering blog post http://blog.wavii.com/2011/12/29/your-mileage-may-vary/ )
Ask HN: How do I know if I have what it takes?
I've just been reading the following by Jeff Atwood:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/01/how-to-become-a-better-programmer-by-not-programming.html

There's a general theme amongst programmers where you either have what it takes or you don't. The problem is, how do I know if I have what it takes?

I really hate the phrase "you either have it or you don't" when relating to anything. In a lot of cases, it's probably true right now but I really can't bring myself to accept that it'll always be the case for things I set my mind on, especially for things I enjoy doing.

When people mention it, it's always as if they're talking from a "I have what it takes perspective" too. Without reading their code, which most do not have available, it's also hard to tell if they can say those things with such authority.

I know there isn't a clear-cut test for it but I'm just wondering if there's any way to determine?

It doesn't matter too much. If it turns out I don't have what it takes to be a good programmer, I fully believe it's something that can be changed.
1. I hate IDEs for concrete reasons, like being impeded to work with tools for which your IDE does not have a plugin and sometimes it happens even for really mainstream technologies ... how's the C++ support in IntelliJ IDEA these days?

2. Switching between IDEs and editors is a productivity kill, especially if you do that switch a lot - instead of being a creator that bends the tool to your will by customizing it to suit your needs, you're going to be just a casual user that cluelessly clicks around.

That's not so bad, however to be good at what you do you need a certain continuity in the tools you use, otherwise instead of learning about algorithms or design tricks or business, you'll be learning about tools all day; and unfortunately this cannot be applied much to languages and libraries, because these are optimized for different things - although if you worked on the same CRM for the last 5 years I guess it's not that important ... and I don't know in what groups you hang out, but an IDE user that switches a lot or that is familiar with grep/sed is a rare occurrence in my world

3. I love Smalltalk-like environments where the IDE is part of your virtual machine and can see and work with live objects and continuations, but get over it, because your IDE is not like that - yes I would love to escape a little from the text-based world we live in, however the current status-quo of IDEs is still text-based and text-editing isn't even something they do efficiently

4. HN groupthink should be natural, because it has attracted users with similar interests; that's not bad per se, considering that HN users are a small minority and not necessarily because we are smarter, but because we have slightly different interests ... also, I don't see much evidence of groupthink because I always see both sides of the coin in conversations here (you're disproving your own point right now)

5. I never implied that my opinions represents THE truth and I like engaging in such discussions ... instead of reading about the same old farts coming out of tech-darlings of our industry, because in these conversations I might actually learn something
>Is there any particular reason that this technique doesn't work outside of Japan? American construction companies might not care about a wreath, but surely drinking and promises of additional profits would be universally effective.

It does work outside of Japan.

The relationship of "enterprise" software company to partner VAR to enterprise works much the same way, drinks and all.
This is a terrific idea. I'm looking for a realtor now. Asking around for references doesn't work well - each individual will either refer someone they know (not useful), or someone they worked with once or twice (no comparison data).
On Focus & How to Keep It
Yes! We're going to let it simmer in production a bit before we do a writeup on it, but at some point we'll definitely do a breakdown of what we're doing and why we did it.

It's been a fun build, so we're looking forward to that. :)
Same, on a Mac Mini.
Metamucil is definitely my favorite lifehack. Not to be crude, but having no-wipe number 2s is amazing.
Toyota Recalling 670,000 Prius Hybrids in U.S.
I see I'm not the only one here who was reminded of Spore when they saw this...
Some Thoughts and Musings About Making Things for the Web
I am an eternal optimist, and this looks hugely powerful. Have they released any data about possible catches? Any Maluuba-ers out there can give us some guidance for implementation limitations?
Apparently the atmospheric absorption of infrared is pretty decent for ground-based observation. Atmospheric seeing in the near-infrared is still a concern though.
Right, I find that a more likely end, if it's not already being employed.
Yep, I bought an HTC One S with the same issues. I've learnt my lesson- my first Android phone was a Nexus One so I didn't know how annoying it is. I'm buying a Nexus 4 and selling the One S.
Incidentally, I've had someone (judging from the last name I get to see in the email, a Chinese person) use one of my email addresses to register a WoW account. You don't actually need to verify the email address, so they don't need access.

What's interesting is after spending 30min or so clicking around Blizzard's site there is no way to actually contact support without having an account. You also can't claim the account, because you need a first and last name along with the email address, and I only have one of their names.

In the end I just left it, it was an old account and there is no evidence that they had real access, and as it was a legacy account I'd securified it anyway (creating a massive 32character random password and storing it in a password manager, just to close off any loose ends).
Topcoder is famous for pure computer science competitions - probably, they just don't care about captcha ))
Another reason why simple code is not always better is that in a typical project there are LOTS of simple decisions that need to be made. If you let them for later, they will become: hard to find, hard to integrate with other "simple" decisions you made, etc.
This is what EVE Online's map ought to look like. :)

Works fine in Safari.
I used to think, if kidnapped by interstellar travelers, I might be able to find my way home. Now I know I never could, not in a million years.
Yog lets you schedule runs with friends and strangers around the world
haha, the first two "recommend its" I saw were incredibly lame.

The best single less [sic] we own for our Canon SLR, bar none!

I assume the person meant lens but even then its a total failure of a recommendation.

and:

My daughter just got this for her birthday and its one of her favorite toys! She also gets scared of it! It's pretty funny!

what kind of parent finds it funny to scare their child.

Next!
Domain Driven Design Quickly
Here's another similar product http://www.naturesplatform.com/
Try not to worry about it. Because seriously, no matter how good you are, there will always be room to doubt yourself. Software development is full of people who will always be available close at hand to make you feel like you're not good enough. You'll never be good enough. People even tell Rob Pike he's doing it wrong, all the time.

Focus on getting things done, and keeping an open mind, and learning. And try not to let the possible negative vibes get you down.
While that may be a tad arkward, it isn't as bad as it sounds. If I had one of these, I'd still leave toilet paper on the side for those who were uncomfortable with the concept of a Washlet.

Edit: After reading the other comments, it is apparent that this is probably a good idea for primary users too. Makes sure the job is done right.
Voting is really hard too. I just don't bother voting anymore on iDevices until there is at least a 40x40 button I can use with my stubby fingers.
Both shattafs and bidets (which is the whole separate ceramic apparatus, not just the spray) are common here in Brazil. I always though it was because of bigger French/Islamic influence.
I think that the news here is that is has been determined that it is not a brown dwarf. See the paper[1] for more details. Though I'm not sure why the distinction between giant planet vs cold tiny star is so important.

[1] http://arxiv.org/abs/1210.0305
Just my 2cts, I really didn't link the email you sent to all the "early adopters" encouraging them to download and rate / recommends /share the apps.

But Good luck with the launch!
After "The Next Big Thing"'s bulletin: Internet Eats Up Guy Fieri's Awesomely Bad NYT Restaurant Review it just stops, leaving me to scroll just two columns, with a blank in the middle.

Is this an error?
It would take a proper user interaction study to find out, but I don't think that I am wrong. Imagine a photograph on a table that you want to see better (make larger). Your natural motion is to touch and pull, which is dragging down.
What's with the affiliate link (littdidd-20)?
Spanish here. I agree, we use the bidets basically for washing our feet too.

The original purpose was for women and their period... those kind of things on a time in witch using large quantities of water inside the building(for shower) was not that common(shower needs high water pressure too).
Eh, they're not popular in Europe either.
There are a bunch more that we hope to share soon. Glad you like this stuff!
Building a search engine? The most important feature you can add
One of my favorite parts of watching allang write this post was proof that there is some hope for us developers out there. :)
Sorry about that, we wanted to try something a bit different from the usual glossy HTML-based email we've done for launches in the past. Maybe that's better though.
Steve Wozniak says Microsoft is more innovative than Apple
This whole thing is an experiment by Google to see how people will use the Internet in the future, when people can actually get gigabit/s connections. I think the point is to see how end users use it, not to host a lot of content.

I think that's the wrong view, though. Maybe what happens when people get that much bandwidth is, they will naturally start running more servers!
Googling ‘Binary’ Returns Count of Results In Binary
Ah, could have sworn the headline said cyanogenmod.com.

Anyway, the current headline is now more misleading, since it omits what makes the story interesting, and they aim to get the original domain back in any case. (This is the case even though the blog post has that same title.)
Most of the mobile browsers don't have a size setting, and zooming is problematic since they don't reflow. So you can't practically zoom more than one line's width, or you will be panning constantly.
Lots of static-site generators to choose from. Jekyll's the most popular choice. Link: http://jekyllrb.com
Thanks Paul - that's exactly why we created it. Let us know if you have any feedback on the site. Feel free to contact us at (800) 862-5815 for white glove service and to leave any comments.
Watch the washlet industry sweep across the Bay Area now.
Sorry Mark Cuban, Facebook isn't driving this brand away
C'mon kids. Not again.

Tools in your toolbox. Use them as you wish based on whatever criteria fits the moment and the project.

I made hundreds of thousands of dollars with a program I wrote in 8051 assembler. To be fair, it was part of a larger hardware solution. Still, the UI portion of the code was all assembly language.

It wasn't until well after the product was in the market and selling very well that I converted it to C. I did so mainly to make it easier to maintain and expand.

Could this have benefited from OO? Who cares?

To add insult to injury, the workstation portion of the solution was written in --sit down-- Visual Basic! Yeah! VB. Did it matter that it wasn't Visual C++? Nope. Was it ever converted to VC++. Are you friggin kidding me? Nope. It was making plenty of money as it was.

Plenty of other projects were done using other languages, such as APL, Forth, Lisp and, yes, C++.

My point is that none of this really matters. People have gone to the moon without OO. Whole banking systems have been run without OO. OO has its place. And, when applied correctly, it can be a lot of fun to work with.

Digging through one of the links in the posted article there's an article that suggests new programmers should be taught Python without the OO stuff. What? Crazy.

Every new programmer needs to start with C. In fact, I am convinced that every new programmer needs to start with C and be tasked with writing an RTOS on a small memory-limited 8 bit processor. And then write several applications that run within that RTOS.

Then give them a budget of n clock cycles and m memory bytes and have them create a solution for a particular problem that barely fits within these constraints.

I would then expose them to Forth and ask that the re-write the same RTOS and applications.

Then I'd move them up to Lisp.

From there move into one of the OO languages. My first OO language was C++, but I suppose today I might opt to teach someone Java or something like that. Definitely not Objective-C. Keep it simple.

The above progression will expose a new programmer to tons of really valuable ideas and approaches to solving problems.

Then I'd get serious and ask them to write something like a genetic solver on a workstation in all of these languages and optimize each solution for absolute top performance (generations per second) first and absolute minimal memory footprint as second batch. Lots of invaluable lessons in that exercise.

Now you have a programmer that can identify which technology to use under what circumstance and for what reason. This is a programmer who knows how to get a 100x or 1000x performance gain out of a piece of code or how to get something done 10x faster at the expense of raw performance. Here's a programmer who understands exactly what is happening behind the code.

And, in the end the most important thing still is data representation. You can make a program 100 times harder to write if you choose the wrong representation for the problem being solved. Just like the first article points out: search a small table and the "hacker" solution is almost trivial.
TIL Kodak had a working digital camera prototype in 1975.
Something I posted on this thread which is related: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4712392

Incidentally, feeling like it's too hard for you and that you're not smart enough just goes with the territory. Also try to ignore the temptation to feel like it is all very easy for everyone else. I find that the feeling of failure is often its worst right before I make a breakthrough. After about the fifth time of thinking this is too hard for me, I can't do it, then doing it, I realized this is a pattern for me and learned to ignore the feeling of it being too hard.
This. As I said before: there is a lot that is a library elsewhere that's built-in in Mathematica. And that's why I think Mathematica is very good at rapid prototyping.
Powerful Quote by James Weldon Johnson
yeah makes us feel small.
Flock - Grouping photos from different users by time and place
This is REALLY COOL!

Could someone explain how this is built or give an overview of how it works? In the 'about' page http://www.chromeexperiments.com/detail/100000-stars/ it says WebGL and CSS3D, but I'm wondering how they fit together and what does what.

Is there a better way to view the source than just 'view source' in chrome?

I know a number of programming languages and I'd like to learn more about how this project works. [Saw the link to book on graphic programming in other comments below http://www.arcsynthesis.org/gltut/index.html, but how to "take apart and study" this project? ] Kudos to anyone who can point me in the right direction. Thanks!
>WOW, that is amazing. I'm always blown away by stuff like this, where you can actually get a sense of how small we all are and how distant even the closest neighbor stars are.

Same.

If you don't already own a pair, I'd recommend getting a basic pair of binoculars and doing some backyard astronomy. You'd be amazed how much more you can see with even a basic 10x50 pair, even in thoroughly light-polluted skies.

Also SpaceRip [1] collects hundreds of interesting, easily digestible and pretty timely videos.

1: http://www.youtube.com/user/SpaceRip
People tend to have strong preferences about things they don't like in their current place. Like the kitchen layout, or the appliances, or the showerhead. People don't really have that much of a beef with a normal American Standard toilet, so they don't care.
Mark Cuban Effect: Facebook to roll out dedicated "Pages Feed"
I'm guessing for your edit that you feel you're being downvoted for a negative comment about a cool demo. However, you're being downvoted for not giving any actionable information, or even a screenshot; you're not making it possible for the author to make the project better, you're just making a valueless comment (and making it worse with your edit).
United States’ Formula One (F1) in Schools World Championship Team
This is great.

Realtors have nothing but information. They are but a middle-man. They have played the game so well leeching money from both sides of the table. Unfortunately, even with the advent of the internet, it hasn't levelled the playing field enough for the middle man to completely disappear.

This is a good step towards a better model. Pokerfaced phoneys can't hide their history of quick-bucks anymore and are forced to deal with their reputation on the line.

Lawyers, bankers, accountants, doctors.. any profession could benefit from this model?
How a mathematical phenomenon can help CPAs uncover fraud
I can appreciate a mobile version when the site has a lot of art assets and I'm on a cellular connection.
A buying opportunity.
SSL decryption: 1 sure way to freak out employees
I use three seashells. They're the best!
My first thought upon seeing your site (which looks really good), was "what do I type in the search box?" Are you looking for location? Type of property? Both? Something else? Show an example search.
I was initially upset about this, but I have to admit the Nexus S is fairly behind what most would consider modern smartphone hardware to be. Single core CPU, no GPU, barely any RAM to speak of, it's no surprise that Android has progressed to the point where it simply could not run well on such a device. Besides that, there is documentation available (though not widely advertised) that states that Nexus devices have an 18 month support lifecycle and the Nexus S hit that back in July.

I'll just have to accept my fate, and pick up a Nexus 4 when I'm able.
Actually, I have an impression that I relate very good to most of things Perl, I use it very often for small programs. I believe that most serious Perl people have a sense of humor, if you know what I mean. And exactly because of that bias, I've first believed that the article absolutely must be a very successful joke, and didn't understand why Rob isn't sure. Only after seeing the rest of the material, I wasn't sure myself. Maybe somebody should actually ask the authors.

Do read the paper! Note that I would consider an elegant solution this (string literals replaced with the names of them):

static void judge()
{
String s = System.getProperty( p );
if ( s.equals( t11 ) || s.equals( t12 ) ) {
return m1;
} else if ( s.equals( t21 ) || s.equals( t22 ) ) {
return m2;
}
return m3;
}

public static void pjudge()
{ System.out.println( judge() ); }

Then read what they produced instead.
I'm going to go out on a limb and assume you have an Intel or nvidia chip set in your mac. See http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=159275 (which references http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=137303 but we can't see)

There is a security issue in the OSX drivers for certain chipsets, and AA is broken. Google Chrome has taken the step to disable AA on these systems to prevent an exploit of the OS.
It doesn't work at all for me in Chrome on Win XP.
"which he posts as videos online"

Does anyone know of similar videos in English?
Very nice sketches. But I want to point out that if you don't sketch you shouldn't feel like you're "doing it wrong".

Sketching is not a required step. Starting straight in Photoshop (or even in the browser) are both valid methods too.
Am I the only one that likes Unity ?
I'm a die hard desktop user: KDE, XFCE, Tiling WMs... but I find Unity quite good.
Great point! This makes sense for techies - I tried hard to give Bing a good run, but found myself hitting google.com too often (after looking at the results). " !g" would have definitely made Bing sticky for me!

I used to work on a search product. Interestingly, a lot of layman users don't even realize which search they use. So this would not help for any real gain in numbers for the search engines adopting it (other than in the tech community).

There was a time when mywebsearch (or some such search engine) had its stats very close to the numbers of a very popular torrent client. Needless to say, a mini-survey revealed the users did not even realize their browser's home page had been hijacked (when they installed the torrent client)! They thought they were "googling" (results might have been powered by Google, but thats not the point.)
Feedback on first impression:

1. a mobile app? hmm, not much to see here, about to close page 2 seconds later, then I think, hmm, a tiny video thumbnail down here.

2. opened vimeo video, when I see the duration 2mins and something, fast forward to random parts, closed video, saw glimpses of people taking photos, meh. closed video.

3. Wished I had been able to see a 30 second explanation with the killer feature of your app, then if I wanted I could've chosen to see the longer feature film you guys created (if you put so much work into a 2 minute video, why the hell is the thumb so little? most people won't see it)

4. Give me a way to randomly see more screenshots of your app, when you have people bouncing off the page in less than 5 seconds that slideshow on the phone is not very effective.

5. if you're not going to have anything happen when you click on the phone on the center of the page, you might as well take me straight to the app store. Most people are visual and that phone is a natural call to action.

my 2 cents.
good luck!