skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here is the deeply weird aspect of our industry: it's not monolithic, but so many people think it is even though they should know better.

I think this is largely because software is effectively invisible. Everything software does happens more or less without our ability to directly perceive it, it's just electrons shuffling around in silicon, and it's very hard to get a sense of the scale of anything because even at the high end of the scale where banks of computers are running, it's still just banks of computers humming along invisibly computing, there aren't tons of Earth being moved or ships crossing across oceans and so forth.

Anyway, our industry is one of the most diverse in the history of industry. It spans scales across factors of not just billions but trillions. And it ranges in complexity and seriousness across similar scales.

Imagine the "container" industry, which spans all the way from someone making wicker baskets in their spare time and selling them on ebay all the way up to perhaps the fuel tanks of orbital launch vehicles or the steel reinforced concrete containment vessel of a nuclear fission reactor. Or consider vehicles, which can be anything from a plastic tricycle all the way up to an aircraft carrier. Nobody would imagine that those industries are monolithic or that the way to run a tricycle factory is necessarily the same as the way you'd run a shipyard.

Yet here we are in 2012 and people who should know better still insist that running a "software company" is a singly story with a single set of best practices and a universal set of advice that applies equally well to every variant. In reality a "software company" is one of hundreds of different types of enormously different endeavors.
I have only recently discovered Gall's law, and was surprised to realize that what I've been doing with my project for about a year actually has a name.

Edit: Forgot the link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gall%27s_law
Yow! Someone's a bit touchy. He was comparing Ruby with Python, which is probably valid.

The whole "opinionated" thing is a bit silly really. Ruby isn't all that opinionated, as the GP poster says. Why Python people would get their bee in a bonnet over "opinionated" code is somewhat beyond me. After all, Python is a language where whitespace is significant...
I just fired up VS2012, created a C# Store (Metro) app and looked in properties. One of the platforms available is ARM.
Probably, but it itself is blocked when something important occurs, e.g. it was blocked (as well as Opera Mini servers) during the unrest after the elections.
TextMaster Raises 1.64M€ to change the translation market
Python is by design a one way to do things language whereas Perl is There is more than one way to do things.

'There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.' from http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0020/ a sentiment that is re-enforced by the python community and even used to pitch python as an easier language since there is only one (right) way.
niiiiice thanks!!
I was baffled by his example of the wikipedia article in both orientations. For me, the portrait mode he spent so long criticizing seemed the clear winner in terms of readability.
The award prizes seem odd with first place winning $25,000 while the other finalists win only $1,000 each. I feel uncomfortable about that "winner takes all" approach as it increases the importance of luck and decreases that of effort. Is it common in the United States?
Fair enough. I'm not too involved in social media (wrong generation :) apart from twitter, and don't feel the need for such live updates but amny perhaps do. I'd rather make a conscious effort to check info feeds e.g email rather than be distracted. It is alreadybad enough at meals for instance when people are constantly checking their mobile.
Ah! And I was careful to clean the tracking noise from the URL and counted on Hacker News to catch if it was previously submitted. They should really add that to the site by default...
Yeah I know the history, I absolutely recommend it as a learning tool and for some professional jobs.
It's just, if that then do this end. Feels like a lot of key pushes to get a result.
Anyway I'm going to run a lua poetry competition on my twitter feed later today if your interested?
@DaveSapien
Mockup-designer: Local-storage based mockup tool
In fact, I think Microsoft is trying to push into that niche with their Office 365 which complies with European Privacy law. An opportunity Google might just have missed.
Loic, any pointers you can give (here or off-list) for the EU providers with way better deals? Thanks!
I meant anti-discrimination as the law that keeps the GP from being fired for admitting he's gay.

As for the number of Brits being religious, I think it's easy to conclude that more than 35% of Brits celebrate Christmas. Given the origin of the poll, I would not be surprised if the question was phrased very narrowly.

It's not discriminatory to celebrate Christmas by default if your company is in a culture that predominantly observe Christmas. It would be discriminatory to make special arrangement for time off on Christmas, but not accommodating seasonal holiday requests from Muslims on Eid and Hindus on Diwali.
> based on observing mostly-religious states vs. mostly-secular states

Be careful. I think the general consensus about these observations is that what's happening is that less stable and secure societies tend to make people more religious, rather than that religion tends to make societies less stable and secure.
Microsoft Trains for Windows Live Home Premium 8.0
I had the same problem for most of my life, I was unable to stop listening to music in my head.

The solution was surprisingly simple. When I wanted to stop the internal music, I focused on ambient noise. The leaves rustling in the trees. Passing cars: their tires on the pavement, brakes, engine, the exhaust note. There are quite a few things to notice. While focusing, the music stopped.

At first it took great deliberate effort to quiet the music in my head. But eventually it just went away, within a matter of weeks. I no longer need to exert effort, I have conscious control over whether I want to replay a song in my head, or just have silence.

My meditation teacher Gil Fronsdal thought of it. He's a genius.
I haven't seen the Meraki software, but what I have seen of the Ubiquiti software is excellent. The UniFi controller does in fact run in the cloud. Granted they could do more on the cloud front in terms of having something pre-built that you can activate with a click.

I'm not sure I'd want my wireless controller in the cloud though, I like the fact that the UniFi controller runs on anything from an 12 core x64 down to a single core ARM board depending on the size of your installation.
Newry police seize cash and betting slips in illegal betting probe
Indeed, common advice to people attending Black Hat conventions is to take a semi-disposable computer. You install an OS before you go. You reformat when you get back.

That's perhaps paranoid, but a bit of paranoia isn't harmful in such a situation.
The concept of natural human rights is, similar to some kinds of religious belief one of those belief systems that strongly implies people who disagree with it are wrong. Few people who believe in say... freedom of expression and modern democracy are going to accept that imprisoning or murdering one's political opponents is a cultural difference that should be respected, for example.
Memorable and amusing and therefore more effective than either a dry message or possibly even a shock advert
No the name won't affect them.

There are literally zero useful soccer/football websites out there. The world will jump on one that does a good job, regardless of the name.
Yves Behar:Designers should love the process
And I use a graphics tablet with a handful of programmable keys as my primary input device (the keyboard spends most of its time off to the side for very occasional text input and the odd rarely-used one-handed shortcut chord) and have several sets of applications (each of which is best-of-breed for a slightly different purpose) whose names start with the same set of characters (and, in at least one set of similarly-named apps, don't diverge until the tenth character). It is far quicker for me to use the start menu, since typing (or even multitouch gestures) involve putting down the stylus. Not a common use case, perhaps, but one that ought to be accommodated easily. And maybe I can bridge the gap temporarily with a third-party solution, but will that even be possible in the future?
To shut down an app in Windows 8 / RT: Left swipe in / out to get the task list; Select any other app, I use "Desktop" for instance; Left swipe in / out again - this will display the app you "were" in (that you are trying to close) in the left-side task list; Select-hold, drag right and down down to the bottom. The interface will either.. refocus to the app you are trying to close, or will actually close. In practice: Toggling first to desktop helps, and normally allows the app to close; Toggling to the Metro home screen pretty much always does not work, the app ends up not closing and taking focus. And more odd: The active-app you are in is never displayed on the left. My Microsoft friend says you don't need to close apps; that the memory management on the device / OS will "take care of itself". I find that not be the case in that closing helps free up resources, and is the only way to restart tanked apps. Lastly: When you are down to only one running app + the home screen (always running?), you cannot close any apps, you can only toggle between them.
California's Katrina?
Tobacco Companies Secret Business, UK Tobacco Trade
Tobacco Companies Secret Business, UK Tobacco Trade
No, it is not.

Wikipedia lists "western" examples because western canon is very well documented, and this documentation is reliable and extensive enough to quote from.

My readings of Indian history have led me to accept that the freedom of thought and speech have existed, formally and legally, for at least a thousand years - particularly, read up on the times of Asoka's rule.
I cannot even tolerate rain... I need noise: http://simplynoise.com/
It's unlikely an entire race "sucks at programming." It's a skill like any other and can be learned to varying degrees.
Hell no! Fight them back with better ideas, respect, and equality. But first of all, you have to understand what you're up against, study what they say, find cracks in their logic, and show that you're both on the same side. It's all a matter of perspective.
Rapid Single Page Application development with typescript, couchdb and domo
Nothing special, just a nice combination of techniques. I'm looking for a nice and rapid playground for testing client side app ideas and I this is one of the best yet.
For a more detailed comparison, see: Is Joyent Really 14X Faster than EC2 and Azure the "Fastest Cloud"? (tl;dr - EC2 isn't that bad)
http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2011/11/many-are-skeptical-of-c...

To me, the weakest part of AWS is always on the technical support - you have no right to create a ticket to them unless you pay for the support fee (as contrast to Joyent /Rackspace/Linode), even you have discovered a bug in their system!

On the other hand, I also agree with @latchkey that SmartOS /Ubuntu is an important factor when we are choosing the platform - for a lot of people, ease of use and larger community is more important than cutting edge features like dtrace and zfs.
True. French/Swiss trains are my absolute favourite place for work. On the other hand, they make the worst audience for rock concerts.
I'm not a developer. I've been considering paying someone to develop an iOS app for an upcoming project I've been working on which is based around subscription to a magazine-like service. The application would need to:

* Be built around the Newsstand APIs to display text content

* Allow in-app subscription with a free trial

* Display text content with appealing and highly readable typography

That's pretty much it. Is the $1-$5k range reasonable for an app like this? From my perspective, it would be about as simple as an application could be (displaying simple pushed text content) but I realize that as a non-developer I'm not really qualified to make that call.
In my limited experience, packaging works very well with Flask: http://flask.pocoo.org/docs/patterns/distribute/

You just need a quickly whipped up Fabric script, and then you deploy remotely from the command line.
Excel is years ahead of OpenOffice spreadsheet. Having struggled with OpenOffice spreadsheet, and then reluctantly moving to Excel, I can tell you categorically that Excel is just not replaceable by OpenOffice Spreadsheet.
Only 29% say organic search drives most conversions
"So no, complaining about the lack of non-white people is not racist."

Implying that all white people are the same and that there is no internal diversity within white people is racist.
Yet, ECC on consumer hardware ranges from exotic to non-existent.
Interesting use of "U.S. Multinationals".

A US citizen has to file a tax return, and pay taxes if appropriate, in the US every year - even if they are not living in the US.

Are these "US multinationals" filing and paying taxes in the US?
Give us feedback and win T-shirt.
And maybe create a honeypot in a VM just in case

Have some important looking documents in an open SMB share for example (or put a password for those past security 101)

Have a WiFi AP 'free' (or maybe with a simple password) see who tries to use it, log connections, maybe even try to MITM some popular sites (this may be illegal)
Which iOS device do you have? Search works great for me on the iPhone 5, and click on an email search result definitely takes me to the email.
No, the single thing that will keep people using w3schools is that they have managed to permanently glue themselves to the top of any Google search related to HTML or JS. Back when Google's site-blocking feature was enabled, they used mirrored domains to keep themselves in your results if you tried to block them. That is, you'd block "www.w3schools.com", and then your searches would have "wwww.w3schools.com" right up at the top.

It's really surprising to me, with abusive tactics like that, that Google hasn't penalized their page rank.
The original did remind me of this -

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=entremanure
as a kid I did - it was worst with family - caused a lot of bad feelings. as an adult, i can basically just walk away or leave the room, or try to compensate by controlling the conversation or doing something else to distract myself for a few moments.

I think the term is hyperacusis, but that now seems to general. I'd found a more specific term for this condition I think I have, but haven't been able to find any doctors or therapists willing to deal with it.

in my case I'm not sure I get physical discomfort - it's more mental, or at least, that's how I register it.
I am using iAuth library and is quite powerful those days. You may check it right here: https://github.com/benedmunds/CodeIgniter-Ion-Auth
And this is exactly why I wonder who decided 16:9 was better than 16:10 for laptops/tablets/etc... Even just that little bit of extra vertical space makes it so much more comfortable in portrait mode (when I rotate my computer monitor, which is an old TN LCD panel since low response 16:10 monitors are pretty much non-existent now).
The question was "Are you religious?", and 65% answered negatively. You can't really frame something as fundamental as that.

I personally think the 35% figure is inflated by people who identify with Christianity but don't practice it, or people who do practice it but out of fear more than faith.

Britain is no longer a Christian country, and that's not a bad thing. Give it another two generations and Christians will be a small minority (5-10%)

> It's not discriminatory to celebrate Christmas by default if your company is in a culture that predominantly observe Christmas. It would be discriminatory to make special arrangement for time off on Christmas, but not accommodating seasonal holiday requests from Muslims on Eid and Hindus on Diwali.

You can't justify discriminatory actions by deferring to the culture in which they take place. Suppose we replace religion with race. Christmas is now a racial festival celebrating white culture. Is it appropriate to foist these celebrations on black people in the office? Of course not.

Does the fact the company operates in a predominantly white culture justify the practice? Of course not.
Why I switched from LESS to Sass
I wrote comments on this topic several times and I think the reason why Opera is popular in Centra/Eastern Europe is quite simple. I'll rewrite it once again:

It was the best browser out there for a long time without a doubt. While in west people used IE since it was free, people in east didn't care whether software is paid or not, they just used cracked versions[sidenote 1]. If copy of Office was about as expensive as your monthly income, it's understandable. So it was normal there, and not really frowned upon. Even when FF came out, the Opera was much better[sidenote 2]. But Firefox erupted in the west and as it evolved it found its way to the east. Opera stayed popular in many countries because a) it was still great b) people were used to it c) it still spread by a word of mouth. But as the "Internet" hit new generations, Firefox slowly took over. Fast forward to Chrome and its never ending multi-billion campaign. Ads in TV, radio. Billboards and posters all over the place. Banners (or even feature blocking) on most visited sites out there (.google.com/, youtube.com, ...). All that with comeback of ie5+ only sites (now for chrome of course) meant that Opera's user base slowly evaporates.

It's quite sad really, especially when I see it here on HN since Chrome is dumb-dumb browser meant for people who use the Internet for the first time while Opera is probably the most configurable, hackable and feature-full browser out there. Not better (when you consider the extensibility of FF/Chrome) but one would think it would appeal to "hackers".

PS: Of course the "turbo" aspect played its role but I think it was just a side thin on desktop.

PPS: Firefox had unreasonable amount of money in advertising as well, but I think it mostly hurt IE, not Opera.

sidenote 1: Cracked software meant an easy way to spread viruses. One of the biggest/best antivirus vendors that still exists are from that place and era (Avast, AVG, ESET, Kaspersky).

sidenote 2: If Opera had become free before Firefox was released, I think it would have dominated the west market as well (at that time at least).
Show HN: Streetball, dribbble 1-on-1
I had the idea for something like this floating in my head for a little while, then I saw GitBattle on HN recently and decided to go ahead and sit down and make it. It takes two dribbble accounts and compares their "stats" side-by-side. If you have any feedback I'd love to hear it. Thank you.
Wii U Review: The Future Is in Good Hands
noticed this 110% percent - I started wearing earplugs pumping whitenoise a few years back to help sleep - I need these things all the time now - I have whitenoise running probably 18 hours per day now (except when I'm driving).
Microsoft Office do not produce or read Office Open XML files as defined in the OOXML ISO standard. They produce something that looks similar but not quite right. The same thing happens with the older formats, they are not produced or read in the way it is written in the published specifications.

[1] http://techrights.org/2010/05/31/formats-red-herring/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML#Application_su...
Real world filter app InstaCRT gets full color support using channels
Configuring OS X Mountain Lion Time Machine to work with CIFS (SMB) share
Elon Musk has a great and relaxed manner about him. I love how he is thinking big and didn't just take his fortune and retire to an island. Irrespective of what he does from now I think he can be an inspiration to anyone of trying to live their dreams. Not sure if I'm going to be unpopular saying this but the posts on HN about making a few thousand dollars a month (and there are certain people on here who are well known for this) are dwarfed by people like this who truly try to make a difference. I personally would rather talk about the next Apple, the next Microsoft, the next Ford than talk about split-testing my app and achieving $10k/month of sales.
Statistically, religious people are worse educated, poorer and less rational than not particularily religious ones.

And still they think of themselves as an example for everyone to live up to.
The judge's name is Markandey Katju. I'm not sure how politics and political warfare works in India. Maybe someone who knows about that can enlighten us?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markandey_Katju
Great article, and a big improvement on the loud debate we've been hearing in recent comments. When you look at the basic points, pg and Ryan Carson and Mark Suster actually agree with each other. But a big debate gets fired up because of semantics (different views around meaning of "cofounder", extremist statements like possible/impossible). Perhaps the biggest source of friction is that most people don't write as carefully as pg.

In contrast, this write up is really balanced. He's acknowledging there's a grey scale of what's possible depending on your situation, and gives a lucid explanation of the benefits of cofounders and/or a strong initial team.

Nice work.
How the HNews tech community helped us rethink our fashion startup
And yet OS X, the OS that is lauded by many around here to have an excellent UX, has so many hidden controls that nobody could possibly remember them all.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1343
This isn't constructive topic. Don't feed the troll.
You can still click at the lower left corner of your screen to switch to the start page (exactly as you would open the start menu in Win7); then if you organized your favorite apps icons on the left of this page you should still be able to open the app you want with a second click.
If you live in the Bay Area, there's not a whole lot of travel which can't be done in your car. That's the whole point of being in the capital. Maybe it's different if you're in LA.

I go to Vegas a couple times a year for conferences (which I could skip, but I enjoy them), and have met with investors and BD partners in Seattle, but if I had to do a business without going more than 10 miles from I-280 in the Bay Area, it could be done. (I'm curious if you could do it without leaving MV/PA/MP!)

(with enterprise or b2b, maybe there's a little bit more call to go to DC, maybe Boston, NYC, maybe a few other cities, but absolutely not for consumer, and if you don't enjoy travel, you could probably get away with no travel.)
> I have no respect for the small attempts to modernise the OS

Maybe I'm getting old, but I like the slower pace that Apple has taken. Unity Shell and Windows 8 both strike me as highly ambitious but poorly executed attempts to dramatically re-imagine the desktop. Apple's approach has been more measured, and I hope it stays that way.

Maybe I'm just pessimistic about the future of touch-enabled desktop computers. I owned a tablet PC back in the day, and it was truly terrible. I have a 22 inch Cintiq which is great for art, but makes me feel like my arm is going to fall off after 20 minutes of web browsing. Touch makes perfect sense on tablets and phones, but I think that's where it ends. Only time will tell who's right.

As for clunkiness, I recommend a combination of Alfred and Moom for OS X. With a few keystrokes I can launch a half dozen applications and have them perfectly tiled across multiple desktops. Far from being slow and clunky, I've never felt more efficient!
Sorry, but that just reads like a sales pitch / marketing copy for windows 8.
Anonymous Claims They Hacked into Karl Rove, ORCA and Stopped Vote-Switching