skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't buy the premise of the article at all. It looks to me like someone wondered about this, came with a reasonable hypothesis, but didn't bother testing it at all.

I lived in Romania where until Chrome came along Opera was the second most popular browser (lagging behind Internet Explorer). People used Opera because other people used Opera. It was as simple as that. When you saw someone using Internet Explorer, you installed Opera and told them to use that. Then they saw how it was better, so they did the same with their friends and so on. Only the most technical users considered a non-Opera browser.

Opera is a pretty good browser, and long time ago it was the best browser. If you have a large enough population of Opera users, it's easy to see how it can remain sustainable. The more interesting question is how did Opera became popular in the first place. This a question this article and the previous one on the same subject don't address.

I loved Opera. I bought a license back when it wasn't free. The user interface was fantastic, it was fast, it had minimal, but usable e-mail, bittorrent, and IRC clients, and it came with a decent ad blocker. It also ran on Solaris and OpenBSD. It had sync. At some point Firefox came, which had the potential, but it was slower than Opera, and required configurations to bring it to my liking and extensions to maintain and install. I hated that. I switched to Chrome only about a couple of years ago when a new major release of Opera was really, really unstable on Mac OS X when using flash. I like Chrome because I don't have to configure anything, just like with Opera, but I still feel the order in which Opera displayed tabs was superior and damn I miss the 1-2 key shortcuts for switching between tabs.
Great tip, thanks for that. But I was referring to touch devices which make somewhat difficult to apply custom styles. So we shouldn't give up on our "demands" for better UX.
In a good shop, experience is key, since there is still a lot of domain knowledge like tooling and jigs.
I think the main reason is that it is very hard for a low skill worker to add value to a manufacturing company. There aren't any comparable entry-level positions that allow the employee to learn while still being productive.

And that is an artefact of industry killing on-the-job training and apprenticeships in any meaningful way.

My dad went from sweeping the floor to designing satellite test rigs with on-the-job training. My partner's dad went from painting ships to designing nuclear reactors with on-the-job training.

My dad never went to university. Started off helping out at my granddad's shop. Moved from there to an apprenticeship scheme at a local engineering firm. From there went into the drafting room. From there learned more engineering. When I was in my teens he was designing satellite test rigs for BA. Ended up a very expensive contractor specialising in conveyor systems of all things.

My partner's dad never went to university. Entered an apprenticeship scheme at Chatham Dockyard. Started off painting navy ships during construction. Moved into drafting office. Started doing more engineering work. Became a member of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers as a Chartered Mechanical Engineer in 1966. Worked on the design and building of early UK marine nuclear reactors, nuclear containment facilities, etc. He ended up working in nuclear medicine before he retired.

On the job training is possible. Just nobody in the US and UK seems to want to do it any more ;-(

(Favourite "I wish I knew that at the time and kept it" moment from my youth. My dad always brought home used A1/A0 paper from his design work for me and my brothers to scrawl on. I remember one when I was about seven or eight that was of this massive array of tiny ovals in a mesh of wires. I though the pattern was cool and stared at it for some time, before turning over to try to improve my drawing of Spider-Man. I now know what I was looking at was an A0 schematic of some magnetic-core memory (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic-core_memory). So wish I had that now so I could frame it for the wall ;-)
Great site and lovely with more sites that teaches people code but I have one suggestion. Make it clear what you have to pay for and what you can access for free. At first, I thought the entire site was free but the "Subscribe" page shows that you can pay $10 for something but not what you will pay for. Please make this more obvious.
Britain cracks down on its offshore tax havens
Right now from what I can see it takes 3 votes to get to the homepage (I checked using the Swequity link, it was at 2 and not on the homepage, after one more upvote it was), but those 3 upvotes have to be in a fairly limited timeframe to be effective. 3 points in 5 hours doesn't cut it, but 3 votes in a half hour or so is enough.

How long it will stay there depends on how many votes and flags it gets after that.

A flag counts as multiple downvotes.
Usually there are two skills to have to ship a software project:

- Knowing and using the basic underlying technologies (languages, but also concepts, like machine learning, databases, UI skills or so on)

- Knowing the specific codebase and process for those projects (how the build works, what are the components, what they do, etc).

True, someone knowing the first skillset has an advantage, but a talented person will have no problem doing the second one much faster. For an hire, I would rather factor in the long term. It's about sane finance management and ROI, actually. For any given pool of candidates, you are considerably reducing the chance you hit a talented people, if you interview only 10% of all candidates just based on their previous base skills.
Just a link without a clue what is it about doesn't help too much. All one can see from the link itself is that points to article with id 4801782 on hacker news.
I have to say, the game is cool, and it works fine with my Palemoon(Lots of HTML5 games do not work well with this browser).
The Awkward Transitions of Disneyland
You mean Opera Mini, Opera Mobile is a regular mobile web browser, just as the default Android browser etc.
Thanks for the feedback (I work at C42 Engineering, the programmers collective behind RubyMonk).

I'd never heard of Perl Monks before you mentioned it - it's something we'll keep in mind. I'm not sure how it will influence us, but it's good to know.
Except for being one of the worst-written pieces of science fiction I've ever read in my life, yes. And by "worst-written", I mean that even its so-called "utopia" is in fact a totalitarian state.
What an excellent comparison, I totally see that. I remember playing Doom on my graphing calculator in college! (http://youtu.be/LVMOdZdKuqI). What's the equivalent? Well, I suppose Minecraft on the exact same model of graphing calculator - one area where progress hasn't been marching... (http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/08/what-y...)
In Washington, DC, the independent stores that hang on have a defined community. Kramerbooks at Dupont Circle has the young urban types mostly (I'm probably twice the age of at least a third of people I see in it). Politics and Prose has the settled folk of Chevy Chase and Forest Hills, with their children. Bridge Street Books on the edge of Georgetown--I don't get there often enough to judge, but would guess it to be nearer the Kramerbooks demographic, though the stock makes me wonder. (There are also used bookstores that seem to stay in business.)

So who is your audience? Have you the room to provide a place where people can gather to sip a coffee and use your WiFi, buy their NY Times from you, do the occasional impulse buy? I would emphasize this last. Of the last ten books I've bought, the majority have been unplanned purchases, something on a shelf (Kramerbooks, Second Story) or a table (a local church bazaar) that I didn't know I wanted till I saw it.
Whether or not you're hosting static content would probably play a big factor.

I've got one, and while it is fully functional it is not fast. The network runs over USB, so bandwidth is limited, and latency is never great. Content is stored on the SD card, which is also over USB. Seek times are good but bandwidth is poor.

Me, I'm hoping for a rev2 wherein USB is not used for the system bus and the core is ARMv7 or better. That, or possibly just use NetBSD once it's been fully ported. I've had great luck with BSDs on super-weak hardware.
Opera Mobile is still my primary browser on my iPhone. It is a good[1] browser and fast on 3G.

1] If you don't mind your traffic going through Opera.
Noted. Makes sense, and thanks for the feedback.
how come this site got to the front page? the site been here for over year??
First of all, thanks for sharing your experience and getting back to me.

The thing is I was really good in school because I didn't really know what I wanted to do later on, so I learned pretty much everything I was given. I mean, I guess I always knew it was going to be computers but it's not like I was a really young programmer or anything like that.

Regarding freelancing, I have learned a lot even from client work but I can see your point; lately I've been doing the same repetitive Wordpress coding gigs even though I would really fancy learning Rails.

I can't really say I'm interested in any other domains since I hate math, physics, etc. I do love design though, but I'm not sure how art fits in with what you were thinking.

Regarding college, moving abroad is exactly what I plan to do, but I can't say I have everything planned out yet, but I'm not sure how helpful a CS degree would be in my case.
OpenVDB, an open source C++ library for volumetric data
I upvoted the post due to the technical content (it is a pretty good and very clear description of the full process of reverse engineering and consumer product modding. It wasn't arduously difficult or technically demanding, but that is a better starting point for competent software hackers getting into hardware.)

The sexual content (in a place like HN) made me uncomfortable; if it had been a post of normal quality I would have flagged it.
I'm not sure (and I'm not complaining about the publicity :)) - but this is the third time we've made it to HN. Yes, RubyMonk was launched in August 2011, so we've been around for over a year.
I don't feel like a college degree in CS would really make that much of a difference to a good programmer, most companies are looking for experience and not degrees. Am I right?
Reflections on today's Kickstarter
Why you might want to detest Rand personally may include her "saying European colonists had the right to take land from American Indians" (see wikipedia) or her hypocritical cult-of-personality/adultery (google for Nathanial Branden).
I see both pretty evenly, I prefer the RT way personally, but both work for sure.
Foundation support would be great. What else do you currently use with foundation?
Fan blades are definitely not all 'single crystals of metal', though that is one method of manufacturing them.

Usually they are simply cast and then reworked, which produces a blade of lesser quality than the single crystal ones but they are still quite usable (and a lot cheaper!).
The models with 512MB RAM could store a small site on a ramdisk.
If you want to confirm/disprove your hypothesis you can use a tool I built for just this usecase:

http://rewindhn.com

It also has an API if you want to play with the raw data yourself.
You don't happen to have some pictures or a blog entry about that lying around do you? Sounds fascinating!
Of course, but I wasn't talking about SpaceX specifically, just refuting the point put forward by robbiep.
"If someone really thinks their ideas are true and right, then they should have the confidence to see those ideas tried and tested in the real world, against all the alternatives."

My idea is that dropping a bomb on you would immeasurably improve the world. Care for me to try that, or are you ready to admit that some ideas shouldn't be tested?
Time travel from the fifties, learn computers, and make an HN account. That's pretty damn cool if you ask me.
5 Military Lessons For Entrepreneurs Raising Money
How did you see the hellbanned post?
I've been interviewed at a few large tech companies in the past 15 years, and the HR guys were... well, guys. And not remarkably good looking. I'm afraid that your opinion is just that, your opinion. And it's a sexist one with that.
where did you get this from? i've not heard anything about improving things - it's "always" been the case that you don't bribe here (and not just police - the only time in ten years i bribed anyone was one guy who sold bus tickets, and that was kind-of creepy). do you have any reference for this improvement work (if you're right i'm curious to read about it; corruption has been in the news quite a bit the last few years)?
I don't see much potential here.

Airport car rental is mostly grunt work. Moving cars, storing them, valeting them, maintaining them, filling them with gas, sorting out insurance, customer service, screening customers, chasing late returns, pursuing people for damages, so on and so forth. 5% booking interface, 95% on the ground work.

There is already healthy competition in the market, and the incumbents do a pretty good job. There are lots of moving parts, so things often go wrong, but it's hard to do better.

Who cares about a shiny iPhone app? The existing companies already have passable online interfaces, and if they don't already have iPhone apps they have the capital to roll one out in a matter of weeks and crush any looming competition.

I give both of these startups 12-24 months, and the end won't be pretty.
During quiet periods it's easier to hit the front page. A lot of stories get on the front page during the European daytime and get a second round of voting when the US east coast gets to work.
In Belarus (and I think in Russia as well), about 5 years ago, there used to be a promotion from mobile telecom providers, that if you used Opera on your cell-phone (i.e. Symbian, J2ME) you would get a free internet trafic. Ads were aired on radio, among other mediums. I dont remember details of those promotions though…
Among other reasons, this made quite a substantial contribution to Opera's current popularity.

Take this into account when thinking of a marketing strategy for your next hitech product ;)
Love Windows 8, need more apps!
Read Tony Hsieh's Delivering Happiness, goes through the story of Zappos development and ethos.

Seems exactly like what you want to replicate.
Here's what you do:

Gather as many friends as you can and get an idea of where the toilet is when the room is vacant. Wait off to the side until the restroom is occupied, ideally by someone who looks like they had to settle.

Completely surround the room and stare towards the toilet. Make sure some of you are licking their lips, raising their eyebrows or slowly groping themselves. Bonus points if occupant is not actually on toilet.

The cameras? Oh yeah, I forgot that we care about privacy.
Porter Square Books has a good model. The owner sublets a part of the store to a coffee shop business, so they have guaranteed income and a steady supply of casual browsers.

Harvard Square Books can't be making money with rhat custom printer. I've never seen that thing in operation. It must be the delivery model he has in place that you might want to consider.
But less clever to turn it in to a meth lab.
Reading this and trying to decide if Brazil is third world.
Have you seen Aloha Editor(http://aloha-editor.org)? Its behavior is built on `contenteditable`.
Find the nearest American embassy, and then either ask them and follow directions, or go to the nearest mall and see if there's a Taco Bell / Pizza Hut place at the food court. This Taco Bell will not necessarily comply with the most stringent, culturally-sensitive rules of Mexican cuisine, but I still think you'll quite enjoy it.

Or, next time you're in Spain, you can find a taco place there. There are a lot of Latin Americans there (mostly Ecuadorians, though), and they'll probably be able to serve you excellent tacos.
Good read, it reminds me of the lessons talked about in the four steps to the epiphany.
You can just include this in your views...no need to wait for a gem.
Jeri Ellsworth and Limor Fried (ladyada) write similarly to this, are both female, and tend to be awesome. And Joanna from Blue Pill. Plus a bunch of female phd students, university post docs, and industry people.

I think what you read as "masculine tech writing" is just competence. True, there are a lot of incompetent female tech people who write, but 3-7x more incompetent men who write (due to overall prevalence of men in tech).
May be, but it lets luck play a bigger role and looks like an abusable feature.
Just because something is touted as 'better' doesn't mean it is, remember Microsoft Bob? If these UIs really are more useful you will see people being more productive with them, and you can mimic their usage. Otherwise don't burn brain cycles trying to 'get' the latest interface.
Opera was number one, two, or number three in Russia and in most of the CIS countries. I think the major reason was that it was pretty fast, and at that time most people had Internet access through a 56k modem. It was ad-supported, but nobody gave a bear about ads because of the extreme levels of piracy.
Would be great if it worked on iOS devices. Strange enough, the keyboard doesn't show up when touching a text field.
It took me ages that you mean a file called CONTRIBUTING at the root of your project repository. It just looked like you were shouting.
It depends entirely on what kind of system you're building.

A common system design is to have a database, a RESTful API, and then a bunch of clients which interact with the API in order to do whatever they need to do.

The method of integration between the different parts of your system are up to you, but having an API to manage the ultimate state of your system is easy to think about and pretty simple to implement too.

Without knowing more about what kind of system you're trying to build, it's difficult to give you any more concrete advice. Different components will require different things.
This is very cool, thanks for sharing.
While I agree that installing Dovecot, and perhaps Postfix, and some other tools can be rather trivial, I switched to Google Apps when I was world-travelling with my family and my VPS provider back in 2008 basically disintegrated off the face of the earth.

Google Apps to the rescue. I created a Google Apps account, update my MX records and mail was restored in about 15 minutes (plus any DNS propogation time). This made Google Apps a huge win for me. It was supposed to be temporary, but am still using to this day.

But, I still have a Linux box or 2 that could handle email within 5 minutes if needed.
Beta tester here. Unable to think of any significant negative points about the software, it works, it works well. Huge expense savings for character animation production.
A comment on the reddit version of this discussion points out that the approach the article uses to combine Gaussians has numerical stability issues: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/13r2mh/gaussian...
Vitamin B12 Injections
Vitamin B12 injections are an effective and tested cure for patients suffering from a deficiency of the vitamin.
Is the site down for anyone else? I haven't been able to access it for ~ 24 hours.
For anyone else wondering for what ZRTP is the acronym, apparently it isn't one. It is SRTP [1] with the S replaced with Z since it was developed by the Zfone Project [2].

[1]: http://duckduckgo.com/Secure_Real-time_Transport_Protocol

[2]: http://www.zfoneproject.com/

[3]: ZRTP spec: http://zfone.com/docs/ietf/rfc6189bis.html
Flycut: Tool für die Zwischenablage mit Dropbox-Synchronisation
Aloha editor is 1MB in size..
It's a known issue with the js code editor we're using and is something that we need to fix.

Thanks for the heads up!
Previous discussions:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1781013

http://amix.dk/blog/post/19574

The simplified algorithm is

Score = (P-1) / (T+2)^G

where,
P = points of an item (and -1 is to negate submitters vote)
T = time since submission (in hours)
G = Gravity, defaults to 1.8 in news.arc

The updated algorithm posted by pg has other factors, but those are related to quality control. If the same algorithm is still deployed, stories decline with time. So, during quiet periods, the new stories with far lesser number of votes rank higher than old stories with high number of votes.
Er... something's terribly wrong in this explanation. because the essential forgotten fact is that, as much as F# is also Gb, C is also B#, F is E#, B is Cb and E is Fb. So the G# scale exists and is perfectly valid, it reads

G# A# B# C# D# E# F##

And it is a very important point, because each scale on the circle of fifth has one more sharp than the previous one when turning in one direction, and one more flat in the other one.

Another point is that there is actually a comma between F# and Gb, and between F## and G, because the chromatic semi-tone is one comma shorter than the diatonic semi-tone -- Though of course the distinction isn't done on a tempered instrument such as a piano or a guitar.

It is all actually quite simple, but not /that/ simple :)
You do realize that many of the people who speak out against GNOME 3 the loudest are long-time GNOME users who suddenly found their productive and usable desktop environment had been torn apart and replaced with an inefficient, tablet-oriented mess, correct?

I think that they do represent GNOME's users extremely well. The fact that the GNOME project is currently trying to reach out to less-technical users shows that they don't make up an important part of the GNOME user base.

Driving away the most advanced GNOME powerusers, especially those who have the abilities necessary to contribute to its continuing development, is one of the worst things the GNOME project is doing these days.
yeah! I remember easy cache control was a popular feature. Many people would make sure that all pictures are cached and not reloaded. Especially in times when social networks with tons of photos came along… And this was a typical thing that many ppl were aware of and using, not even counting geeks.
The main reason was the sharing mechanism. When you share your list with someone, you can type in their email even if they don't have a Gift Tracker account. What will then happen is an account will be created for them with no password. When they end up following through on the share link and viewing the list, they'll be using their newly created account.

Near the top of the page, a message will appear suggesting that they lock down their account with a password.

So to answer your question, nothing but knowing the user's email address stops someone from logging into their account.
We are run out of Music?
I just stumbled across this site browsing from some other ruby site, and thought it looked nice and others might enjoy, didn't know the makers where on HN - great job @kaiwren :)
Nice try Google Apps marketing team. Did you even bother to read the article?
Health Benefits of Black Pepper
The Universe At Extreme Scale: Multi-Petaflop Sky Simulation
I may or may not have some insider info on this service, and I can tell you that they are still losing money on the machine. It's cool and it makes them seem different, but the demand isn't big enough to make them actual money.
It's running OpenVPN so I get VPN access to my home.
I'm not sure about this.

When I was at my startup, I hired a guy with no Django experience and minimal python. He made his first bug fix within 24 hours of showing up and was productive within a week.

Maybe RoR has a much steeper learning curve, or maybe the people doing the hiring just don't get it.
No worries, jfaucett. As a bootstrapped startup with no investors and no connections, we need all the PR we can get :)

So thank you for posting this!