skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So, why not build mobile SAAS apps and charge for them? It seems like companies like Evernote, Remember The Milk, etc. that charge a premium for mobile as a value add are making money there.

My guess is the next big wave of mobile-first startups will be charging monthly subscriptions through IAP to small, but loyal users. Like 37Signals, but mobile.
The New York Times site was why I installed NoScript for the first time.
What do you mean? Are you talking about the amount sold directly to consumers or the amount that get into consumers hands?

The former is uninteresting. The latter would be great, but MS doesn't know this info (and they've never reported it).

And the channel I suspect is pretty efficient when it comes to license acquisition, since you don't need to do runs like you do in HW.
Yes, but I'm ashamed to admit it to my friends.
I like this line of thinking. But it still only reflect a portion of Win8 user as another portion of them will use alternative browser (chrome, ie).
No, I'm suggesting the opposite; that there's no HR decision they can make vis a vis maps, hire or fire, that would be sound to announce during Xmas shopping season. Therefore, if someone at Apple involved in maps was just fired, it probably wasn't discretionary.
+1 here. It's just fiddling around. And it makes me really upset when I highlight some text and it's really low contrast (like on these HN discussion threads).
I'm also curious about this. I had the same idea and spent probably 20 minutes going through a proxy of mine clicking the PROCEED button every few seconds, but eventually gave up.
Yes, completely. Usually to track what I am reading or to change the colour, but sometimes for the same reason I draw random boxes with the selection tool on my desktop.. because I fidget.
What also makes reading a lot more comfortable is the clipr bookmarklet: http://code.google.com/p/clipr/
I highlighted your comment about ten times while I read it. Wow.
> I love listening to music at work, so I did a lot of research and got a nice pair of $150 headphones with a $30 headphone amp.

I was looking into this very same thing yesterday, I'd be very interested in knowing what you decided on for the headphones and amp, or even particularly useful websites for research. (And does an amp make a big difference in your opinion?)

I was looking at a bit of a lower price point, around ~$80 or so in case you happened to accidentally soak up some information about that price point while you were at it, but I'm not really financially constrained at all so if you truly do get noticeably better performance a bit higher up I wouldn't mind spending the money. (Aesthetics are also rather important to me, for no particularly good reason since I'd never leave the house with them.)
Awesome use of C&P to share content and improve the SEO organically.
Yes: OCD.
To be fair, google maps has had vector maps but did not get to implement them in their iOS version.

In any case, Apple is in the Bay Area, where they were presumably testing the product on a continual basis. There's no excuse to have the metro view be a shitshow and tell consumers that they're getting a better product
"Forget crappy streaming systems and primitive, unprotected loose movie file downloads that make your products seem like a joke."

That reminds me of a psychic hotline from the 90s which produced an infomercial featuring Billy Dee Williams and an obviously scripted and professionally shot series of vignettes purportedly about a young woman documenting her experiences with the hotline.

Their very next infomercial opened with these words: "Tired of psychic informercials with phony testimonials and has-been celebrities?"
He even became a citizen.
Major Highlights:

- Python3 support! (supports python2.6.5+ and python3.2+ in the same code base)

- {% verbatim %} (no collision problems with mustache)

- Built-in Partial model saving
If I could flip to a reading mode where the center line is the point of scrolling[1] and puts a little extra separation between the center line and lines above and below, I would not highlight. Maybe a subtle greying of the lines above and below.

[1] instead of stopping the scrolling when the first line is on the top or the last line is on the bottom, it scrolls to the middle before stopping.
I had originally posted a poll with Often/Sometimes/Never answers, but I realized, like you point out, that this poll would have heavy selection bias. So I changed the poll to gather reasons why people select. That's probably more interesting data than Yes/No anyways. :)
I believe it should be a standard feature on browsers to have some identifier or horizontal line so that when scrolling or page-down, you know where to pick up.

I use highlight to mark the current position that i 'm reading, then mouse-scroll up/down to read some text i missed.

Ideally, i would like to keep the last 2-3 text selections that I made highlighted.

I also hate Nytimes and PLoS for hijacking my selections
Yes I do it as a tick. In fact I realized I was doing it while reading these comments.
I just randomly select text as I'm reading. In fact I find it annoying when I cannot do so.
Favorite Android tablet apps
No, but I can understand why, based on the responses so far. Makes sense. I'd think they'd be more useful if they were saved somewhere.
Although I still think the contrast & place-tracking stuff is part of it, I'm realizing the want-to-fiddle thing is a big factor for me too. One thing is that when I use a trackpad (makes it sort of cumbersome to select text), I find myself idly playing with the two-finger scroll, pushing the page up and down even though I'm reading something in the middle of the screen. I think it's the same impulse.
You can enjoy the best of both worlds with something like zsh's edit-command-line. I'm very happy with Emacs keys in the shell, unless I need to make a non-trivial edit or type in a multi-line command. In those cases, C-x C-e drops me right into Vim with the current command-line ready for editing.
Show HN: apachefs, file tree served by Apache mounted in your filesystem.
Yes, the New York Times was the worst. In a similar vein, snopes.com also forbids selecting on the page. And when they "fixed" Chrome so that clicking and dragging from within a selection dragged the selection instead of starting a new selection, I died a little inside. Why would I want to drag text on a web page? I guess random clicking and selecting is no more of a useful use case, but I still find myself messing this up.
I'm not sure that your last statement is true:

> But, if you don't grade something, students aren't going to put their full effort into it. Hence, exams.

I'm now in college, but when I went to high school my physics teacher would give us weekly quizes that covered the material we were learning. This quizes weren't graded but were used to assess what we had learned well and what we needed more work on. Everyone seemed to give these quizes a decent effort for pride reasons, they were still graded and handed back by our teacher but the grades were not recorded.

Now part of the success of this approach may have been the quality of the students I went to school with, I attended a selective private school, but I would think you have similarly disciplined and focused students in the CS departments at most universities, so I don't see why this approach wouldn't work there as well.
In addition, people do not even try voting for the best candidate. People usually vote for the candidate whose interests best align with their own interests and if we're talking about that, then we can't avoid talking about compromises.

Which is why it's easy to see why preferences between candidates may be non-transitive, as the space we're talking about is no longer one-dimensional so candidates don't have a natural order.
I don't understand how people do this unless they just read really slowly. It's maddening to try to do and have it actually be where you're reading.

It also kills me that HN seems to embrace this practice, yet is also so incredibly skeptical of SSS and dyslexia.
Yes i use text selection to scroll especially on trackpads : begin selection of text near window edge then scroll while selecting further.
Thank you for bringing several hours of frustration to an end
A couple of years ago I was eighteen, and I needed a job. So I went to a grocery shop and asked if they were hiring, and I got the reply, "We only hire 15 year olds."
And in the real world, people would second guess this, and enough people would tactic vote for C that it would't be a problem.

"But then they can't vote for their prefered candidate which was the whole point"

Well, some people can. D, E, F could still get a few percentage points. More importantly, I don't think we would see convergence to a 2-party system.

Unless I am missing something, it looks like at least 3 parties could be sustained.
where has he said he has an age bias?
Definitely, will contact you on our arrival: I'll DM you my US number. Both @ makarawang and @balou will be with me.
Since this poll will have a heavy selection (ha-ha ;) bias towards people who do select text, I figured the reasons why people select is more interesting data.
Yes, to track my reading position, but only when I'm exhausted.

I doubt I'd have enough brain juice left at this stage to remember to use an add-on.

But it would be nice for very large texts, sparsely read and on normal attention conditions.
How do you order from online.net?

It keeps on saying:

Erreur : Vous ne pouvez accéder à cette page tant que la console est en phase de beta.
Economic Impact Of Startup Accelerators: $1.6B+ Raised, 4,800+ Jobs Created
Yep, it's one of the things I miss when I'm reading on a multi-touch screen - that extra tool of interaction with the page.
Maybe a controversial thing to say, but I doubt illegal in the same way it's not illegal to decide you won't let people of a certain ethnicity into your home.
You all are nuts.
This worked for me twice. I had two windows open in chrome (one incognito) with two different google accounts, one for the 16 GB, one for the 8 GB. The 8 GB went after about 7 minutes, the 16 GB took until about 15 minutes.

Now to cancel the 8 GB.

Thanks for the tip!
A very small percentage of Windows is software-only; something like 10%. And sales to consumers represents a smallish fraction of revenue & profits compared to enterprise sales.

So the lower price for upgrades will not have a huge impact on MS's revenue (or profit).
If you're still looking to buy one and don't want to use the JS hacks, just tab over to the Proceed button and hold down the enter key (I'm guessing this starts making continuous ajax requests) - took me about 30-45 seconds of holding it down but the checkout/payment screen popped up.

HT: https://twitter.com/TomDanTheRock/status/273546858289303554
I personally don't like that feature, for I often select a portion of the email (eg a name or an address to google it) and then when I hit reply I notice only the highlighted text remains!
Most of those are probably OEM licenses which are sold at a pretty steep discount to manufacturers and I believe make up the lions share of any windows release in terms of raw license "sales"...e.g. Dell may purchase a block a 5 million OEM licenses at some sort of discount...50-60% off of retail.
I used to do this for scrolling. Weird habit, actually.
Twitter hashtag '#1ReasonWhy' exposes sexism in game industry
I understand that must be frustrating as a seller, and perhaps the balance has shifted too far, but consumer history has taught us that having this relationship tilted in favour of the buyer is a good thing.
> I don't see how they are different.

"I think this is the way we should proceed" is qualitatively different from "I think this is the best choice".

> The author never said that candidates have to be people. Substitute the word "alternatives" if you prefer.

Substitute it in place of what? Where did I require that the candidates must be people?
Totally agree, super annoying. I will highlight and re-highlight a paragraph over and over as I read through it. I'm not sure why I do it, maybe it's my impulse to go faster that I can satisfy by moving my cursor rather than reading more rapidly.
Testacular - Spectacular Test Runner for JavaScript
And the winner for The Most Ambiguous Title of the Year Award is...
I had some background in programming before taking the intro CS course at my college, but not much. This intro class is done in C and most students who take it seriously, myself included, think this is a good choice. I think C probably seems more difficult than it is to those who are used to high level languages because they are accustomed to concise programs while C requires many more lines of code. Someone new to coding isn't used to the concision of other programming languages so this doesn't bother them.

And aside from pointers, there really isn't anything in C that is harder than any other programming language. I personally found pointers easy to learn, which I think was the result of having them explained clearly and then being forced to use them in my code.
I wonder how these new plans will affect existing users. My plan falls directly between two of these simplified plans. The prices seem the same still, so it would cost me $15 more a month to increase to closest new package.
Quora does a similar thing, it's beyond annoying for a fellow compulsive text-selector.
Guide to Finding A Web Host
Show HN: Gist with a paywall
I have a co-worker that constantly selects and re-selects text in everything from web pages to Sublime Text. I think he's developed some weird form of subconscious text-selection syndrome. He literally cannot stop doing it even when we bring it up to him.

It's really bad doing remote screensharing because the screen has to constantly redraw.

I've never seen the behavior before. It's quite odd. I never select text except for copy/cut operations.
This worked for me:

Once the phone is in your basket, hit tab until the focus is on the proceed button. Then hold enter until finally it succeeds (took about 30s for me).

Now just a "6-7 week" wait for delivery. In other words, the phone can no longer be given as a Christmas present. Disastrous launch all round.
To be totally honest, it's part tracking my reading position and part to settle my idle hands & pacify my ocd tendencies
What I really want to know is whether this is a recent (last 15 years -- e.g. the internet boom years) phenomenon or whether "Silicon Valley" has been this way since, say, the 70's.

If things have changed, then why?
If anything was "clear" from a non-randomly sampled poll, we wouldn't need randomly sampled polls.
While readers here might be familiar with many of the stuff on this chart, I think people who are looking for their first web host could find it very helpful.
I'm not sure why it should be a "dirty secret" that the tech world is predominantly driven by younger people who may at times be wont to push older people aside as suits their needs. Welcome to our capacity to be jerks if we indulge ourselves in that direction, as many will. It works the other way too, as all too many younger people can attest as they have occasionally been treated like dirt by those who are older.

Is this good or fair when it does happen? No.

Is it illegal? Sometimes, but making formal proof is daunting at best and usually not possible.

Thus, it comes down to this: treat others as you yourself would want to be treated. If a workplace reflects that ethic, it will be a place where old and young alike will want to work and where older workers will receive their due as befits their experience, skills, and performance, good or bad; if it does not reflect that ethic, it is a place to avoid if at all possible.

While Silicon Valley may represent the ageism problem in a particularly acute way owing to its youth culture, it really is no different from anywhere else. There is the good and the bad, and we each need to do what we can to uphold a high standard of common decency for ourselves and to make sure others do the same. It may not be a complete answer but it can help a lot in our immediate work environments and that will go a lot farther toward solving the problem than the law ever can.
That is a very interesting concept! Can you share how publishers use the text selection feedback to optimize their websites or editorial content? Does Markerly gather all text selection or just text "shared" through Markerly's social tooltip? The former could have privacy or security implications.
As luck would have it, I had the compromised version. First time trying out Piwik as well ;) Oh well, c'est la vie.
For me, it helps me pick up where I left off reading when scrolling down the page.
caker (the CEO) mentioned in IRC that current users will be able to resize in to those plans for the times being, they just won't be able to add new Linodes with those plans.
Pointless for what purpose?
I hope that Django 1.5 (or 1.6) will be a major milestone in the process of Py3 adoption, hopefully other libraries (and people) will follow!
Why would I want to drag text on a web page

I drag selected text to between tabs to create a new tab with a Google search for that text. I do that a lot.
Script for clicking Proceed button at Google Play cart every 4sec to buy Nexus
It really helps, my friend just got his Nexus 4 order with this script. In Google Chrome press Ctrl+Shift+J, paste the script to Console, and hit Enter.

setInterval( function() { var buttons = document.getElementsByClassName( 'buy-button-price' ); for ( var i = 0; i < buttons.length; i++ ) { if ( buttons[i].value === 'Proceed' ) { buttons[i].click(); console.log("click") } } }, 4000);
I didn't know there were so many others that did this too. My girlfriend always wonders what the hell I'm doing when I do this.
Studio Axioms. Starting and running a software design studio
Deconstructor of Fun: How Rage of Bahamut Monetizes
Truly don't worry, if you are at the recruiter filter stage. If you really think it'll filter you out of the conversation for a position you are otherwise qualified for, attach a code sample (something substantial). Then, ask them to have the hiring manager review it, if the recruiter might think there might be some concerns over the lack of a degree.
There's a better trick. Tab until the proceed button has keyboard focus, then hold down Enter.
Django is definitely my reason for not moving over to Python3.
> but the idea that 25 years of experience automatically makes you a better programmer is wrong

No one is suggesting that it does. However, to dismiss 25 years of experience as nothing is equally, if not more wrong. Consider that all other things being equal, the person with 25 years of experience will be better than the person with 0.

> Good developers are able to learn and adapt quickly, and often older developers can't do that.

What you are saying here is: Often, older developers aren't good. Maybe that's not what you mean, but that is what you are saying.

As for your assertion that good developers are able to learn and adapt quickly, I'm not sure what you mean (not sure of the context here).
Not really. Voting only avoids violence and conflict when the possible combatants may actually participate in the vote.
Has anyone else noticed that any pro Microsoft news gets immediately flagged off the front page? The Hackernews hivemind really is creating its own little bubble.

http://hnrankings.info/4839043/
I never consciously asked myself why I select text, until now. As a result, it wasn't something I did. Fascinating question. It is purely a mouse-driven habit, too, by the way.

I now wonder if all my years selecting text in old versions of Internet Explorer (to see how pages were built in HTML) was partly to blame? This technique was useful to see where clear gifs and other artifacts were often hiding.
> I don't understand why having less information is better (theoreticaly).

A ranked-choice ballot only encodes the orders the candidates against one another, whereas approval and score votes also encode the candidates' positions within the voter's range of subjective preferences. That is, if we have 3 candidates (A, B, C) and a few voters which each voters has a range from love to hate for each candidate, like so:

Love Hate
|-A--B-------------------C-|
|-A-------------B-----C----|
|-------------------A-B-C--|
|-A-B---C------------------|

Under ranked choice voting, every one of these voters' ballots would look the same:

1)A, 2)B, 3)C

Ranked choice voting encodes the ordering of the preferences, but the intensity of those preferences is lost when the ballot is cast. Whereas under approval and score voting, every one of these voters represents their preferences differently, because they're reflecting their personal response to each candidate:

Approval | Disapproval
|-A--B-----|-------------C-|
|-A--------|----B-----C----|
|----------|--------A-B-C--|
|-A-B---C--|---------------|

Of course, some information is lost in the fact that we only have 2 values approval/disapproval to encode positional preferences. But I would argue this information is already more meaningful than a fully-expressed ranked ballot. And if necessary, score voting can capture more of that information by offering > 2 levels to divide the candidates into.
Complicating the picture is that "licenses" includes upgrades and OEM copies. If I had to hazard a guess, I'd imagine that the OEMs represented a modest bump over Windows 7 - basically just reflecting the expansion in the market for PC's - but that the bargain basement upgrade price convinced a lot of enthusiasts to upgrade on day one.

Anecdotal, but even the dyed in wool Windows guys I know (gamers, .net programmers, etc.) were slow to upgrade to Vista and Windows 7. $120-$300 upgrades that didn't improve performance were hard to justify - the money was probably better spent on graphics cards and games.
Review my startup
We connect individual stores to one checkout. Any feedback would be great.
Well put. I called it a "tic" in the other thread; this is much more charitable!
I was teaching all non-CS majors, and it was a summer course. Most of my students either had jobs or were taking other classes. I have no data to back it up, but my intuition is that if the exam had not been graded, they would have, rationally, not put their full effort into it.
I don't mean to bust your balls here, because I really like HTML5 and believe that there's some potential there for making apps, but I just installed it, and when offline, the app does nothing besides showing me interface and a loading spinner. Forms will even work, but the view isn't updated and nothing really works.

When I have a connection on it works, but the app asked me for my location, I thought it would give me my currency based on my location, but instead it gave me nothing at all. So I tell you my exact location and get nothing back? Why did I allowed it then?

Overall it's not a really good experience, the modals are cool and the buttons are usable by the fingers, but can't ever mistake it for a native one.

PS: I tried to comment on the blog this exact comment here and the comments were already closed. Maybe too bad comments?
I'd guess most ageism is probably imaginary

Then you'd guess wrong. Take it from somebody in their forties - and I'm fortunate enough to be mistaken for being in my 30s quite often (the fat hides the wrinkles ;-)

I'm pretty skeptical that many startup entrepreneurs have a "if you're over 40 we don't want to talk to you policy" but instead decide based on 50 year olds coming into their door telling them in their interview how relational databases were figured out in the 70's

And there is the problem in a nutshell. That is ageism.

The assumption is that they're saying it because they are old. Not because their an idiot (or not ;-). It's http://xkcd.com/385/ - but for age not sex.

There are older developers who suck. But it's not because they're old. It's because they suck.