skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd hate to see icons disappear in favor of textual labels. Then my phone's app drawer would just be a page of words, which would blend themselves into a giant morass of meaningless letters, making it difficult indeed to find the app I'm seeking. Likewise, I'd hate to see labels disappear in favor of icons--I'd never figure out what some of these things are. What's that tri-colored Slow Moving Vehicle sign supposed to mean? Oh! it's Google Drive! Of course!

I depend on the labels when I've just installed a new app on my phone. After a while, when I've learned to visually associate the icon with the app, I depend on the icon to locate the app more quickly than scanning the labels. The app's position within the app drawer changes frequently, so eidetic memory doesn't serve me well there.

I'd say there should be a setting within every app that allows you to display or hide the label, but even as I consider that, I reject it, because it gives the app drawer an inconsistent look. And if I stop using an app for a while, I might forget what its icon looks like, and have to fall back on the labels again.
I really like this series of posts--it's a great introduction to options.

The little aside in one of the notes made me curious: what is the logic behind trading options on their expiry date? I can't think of any obvious reason to do that, but I'm not terribly experienced with finance. That's why I'm curious about it, I suppose.
For those unaware, Chad Etzel is behind this, founded the much-loved Notifo (YC backed).
Praises? Color was vilified in the Valley because of their excessive funding.

Care to show proof of people praising Color?
I sent you an email on this matter...please read
+1 to this please. This could be a new standard even?
I'd post a reply there but there's really no point with the volume of comments already. Most likely he simply has a corrupt binary on one of his games. The "quick" way to resolve this is actually go through and launch all of the games and see if any fail. Delete the ones that fail and then try the transfer. I would bet 99% that that's the problem.
Good CTO, bad CTO
Hello Hacker News and thanks for the post about Chirpsy, KT9.

I've been a long-time reader of HN, but this is my first post. :-)

I'm the founder and CEO of Chirpsy. I would be happy to answer anyone's questions about Chirpsy and how we manage our crowdsourced workforce.
Be sure to double-check on whether you can get California's extended COBRA if you were working for a large company.

I was lazy about getting my company's own insurance and contacted my former employer (Activision Blizzard) about how to get Cal-COBRA coverage.

Turns out I wasn't eligible, since their health plan is self-insured. Whoops, I didn't know that — who would?

I managed to line up coverage to avoid a gap, but I imagine a lot of people are caught by surprise by this exclusion. Details here:

http://www.insurance.ca.gov/0100-consumers/0060-information-...
Knuckles, fingernail and fingertips sensing from Qeexo Touchscreen Technology
Chris Dixon Joins Andreessen Horowitz
The vilification was a response to the fountains of praise before it launched. I didn't think to keep links handy.
When I tell people what I do, they ask me if I do it because I couldn't get a real job.

Also, I can't help but think Zuckerberg's sister's reality show is a kind of meta/ironic commentary against the hipness of being an entrepreneur.
>> Can "Sun" be protected?

> Yes. Why do you think it can't?

Because it cannot be protected, not that an agency won't issue a document to that effect. A company that expects to use a common word as a trademark can expect to have a public-relations nightmare on their their hands as they try to keep people from using the "protected" word for any other purpose. Examples abound -- even words that aren't everyday words lose protection over time. How successful has Xerox been in getting people to say "dry electrostatic copy"? How successful has Johnson & Johnson been in getting people to say "adhesive compress" instead of "Band-Aid?

This isn't about law, it's about reality. Reality trumps law. The present controversy over software patents shows the degree to which people in the legal profession think they can prevail over reality. They can't -- not for long, anyway.
I wonder if this suit will be enough to derail the acquisition...
I admire people who can execute this consultative approach (and, it should go without saying, I admire Amy Hoy's work in particular). If you can make $500/hr/person for talking sessions, I think you should do that.

But I want to take yet another opportunity to stab wildly at the idea that only people who can execute at this level are "consultants", and the rest "freelancers". Though I find the terminology a little silly, let's stipulate that those are the two words. Then: a consultant is simply someone who pitches projects with value-based pricing, and a freelancer is someone who pitches market- or cost- based pricing.

Start pitching value-based deals now. Don't wait until you feel like you're at Amy Hoy's caliber of delivery. That is literally the only thing you probably need to change in your practice to start transitioning towards being a high-value "consultant".

The only thing it takes to move from market- to value- driven pricing is a positioning change. You're stuck with market-pricing when you're doing something lots of other people do. So pick specialty practices or practice focus areas; it doesn't hurt if you pick focus areas that are "closer to the money" (conversion optimization is an obvious example), but even that's not necessary if you can drive your practice towards a desirable and underserved niche.

It's fine to deliver Rails or iOS contract software projects for market-based rates (they're pretty high right now), but that doesn't have to be all you do.
Chris Dixon Joins Andreessen Horowitz As General Partner
I actually love that feature, allows me to find contacts and lesser used apps very quickly.

Btw.: On phones that have hardware buttons (but no dedicated search button, like the European version of SGS2) you can open search by long pressing the menu button on the home screen.
The decision making in the Ruby world seems to be fairly centralized and not very inclusive. To see that one of core devs of one of the biggest Ruby implementations thinks it's a bad idea is really confusing to me. I really wish there had been more discussion about it before it happened.

Cause now not only do we have that confusing feature which very few people seem to like, it also underlines a worrying trend where the different parts of the Ruby world don't reach a consensus before going in radical directions.

No one summed it up better than Brian Ford at his RubyConf talk really: http://www.confreaks.com/videos/1278-rubyconf2012-toward-a-d...

It's a must-see.
As part of the linked article, it was revealed that many people who are not white, or not male, but who were prominent and very qualified to speak, and available to speak, simply weren't invited in the initial list of 15.

In other words, they sat down to draw up a list, and out of a large and diverse community of Rubyists, invited only the white male ones. No one is saying they did it consciously or deliberately, but they did it, and got some push back on it, and /ragequit their own conference. So, no, you wouldn't have been given the opportunity to talk.

(And btw, fuck you for the phrase "white people's collective guilt" ;)
4Chan Founder Moot Sends Cease and Desist Letter to Startup Moot.It
Cue DHH tweetbombs.
Have you tried thinking about the process of breathing ?

Ask yourself, "how do I know I am breathing?": there is some physical sensation that tells you that you're breathing, whether it's a whistling noise in your nose, the feeling of air rushing past the tip of your nose or the back of your throat, the feeling of wanting to return to the neutral position that your ribs give you during a deep breath.

For a lot of people, just one of these sensations is the most dominant one. If you can pick one, just lie quietly and concentrate on it and notice it every time you take a breath.

This process is more about noticing sensation than doing any kind of cognition, so I find it very useful when trying to take a mid-day nap (I haven't had trouble sleeping at the end of the day since I had children, funny that).
The annoying trick once you have an HSA is that you basically need to put $3k balance into it to keep from paying recurring fees on a decent savings account (HSA or Sterling, I think), or you have to have over a certain amount to then be allowed to use it to either buy funds (often overpriced) or do self-directed trading (also usually on subpar terms).

It's essentially a Roth IRA; it actually makes sense, due to compounding, to pay cash for anything your insurance doesn't cover, and max out your HSA every year, keeping it in there, and reinvesting. Well, it makes sense if 1) you have enough income or assets to want to shift an extra $3k/yr into Roth IRA equivalent and 2) you don't fear the law will change before you retire or need lots of uninsured health care money.
Chris is a giant in the NYC tech community, and his machine learning at Hunch has been a personal inspiration. He's a brilliant addition to a16z.
Ironically, that question stops when you get funding, it seems ;)
Hi flyinglizard, I'd love to pick your brain about consulting on ARM/embedded stuff as it's a field I'm interested in. Do you have an email address that I can send a few specific questions to (that I promise won't take more than a few minutes to answer)? Thanks in advance.
Gmail In Cherokee
[String Matching] Notes on Genome Assembly
I'm not so sure about the right-of-way issue, since we are talking about a permanent structure. The case law that weakened the old "Cuius est solum, eius est usque ad coelum et ad inferos" ("for whoever owns the soil, it is theirs all the way up to Heaven and down to Hell") rule, as far as I've seen, all involved aircraft passing over land. I'd not be surprised if a court considered that case law irrelevant when it comes to permanent structures overhanging someone's land.
Thankfully, someone already did. It's short and sweet.

http://www.amazon.com/Small-Step-Change-Your-Life/dp/0761129...
Apple purchase of Color Labs verified in bizarre lawsuit
Anything in particular about Reddit Enhancement Suite you're after? (I'm not overly familiar with RES.) For HN, I use StyleBot and Tom Moor's HackerNew Chrome extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hackernew/lgoghlnd...
The challenge for Microsoft is that Google essentially gives Android away for free. How can Microsoft compete in the cheap phone space, which you admit is a large part of Google's success, when Microsoft keeps charging for their OS?
PHP is for the backend too.
What type of web development do you plan to do. Many people are moving away from Rails and PHP for web app development and moving towards JS toolkits and HTML5. With Require.js, Backbone.js and jQuery being some of the big ones (Though I personally prefer to use Backbone.js and Dojo). Then they set up REST services using something like Rails, PHP or Node.js. This is widely considered the future of modern web apps and how they will be built. Now for more website focused site, you still see a lot of the server side frameworks, but personally if I am building out a more traditional site, I prefer to use a CMS like Wordpress and if I am building out an ecommerce site I prefer Magento. Each of these have their "correct" or "best" practices. So it really comes down to what you want to do, but if web apps are where you want to go, you should really consider investing your time in the JavaScript toolkits and frameworks.
For what it's worth, I checked Newrelic's gem (which is what I use to monitor my GC), and it does clean up after itself by invoking GC::Profiler::clear after a run.

Still though, that's ugly. There are a number of places where Ruby as a systems scripting language (small scripts, short runtime) really clashes with Ruby as an application language (large apps, long runtime), and the GC seems to be at the heart of most of them.
I believe the common theory is that there are strong network effects in the mobile OS market. iOS is still an attractive platform for app developers but if the Apple share of the smartphone market keeps shrinking, developers will focus on Android instead.
I gave you three examples of single common word marks that are currently protected and have been defended without courts declaring them generic words, which is the danger you're hinting at. How can you seriously write this response while ignoring three counterexamples already given?

Do you know of any companies successfully selling their products under the Xerox and Band-Aid brands other than Xerox and J&J? In 'reality', as you put it, both companies have successfully had law enforcement intercept, destroy and file charges against counterfeiters of their products. A mark is effective 'in reality' as long as the courts are willing to defend it, and unlike those few high-profile software patent cases, a totally different area of law, these marks have all been upheld in court.

It's really non-constructive to compare trademarks to software patents, too. There are no "trademark trolls", as a mark cannot exist without continual use in commerce. There are no uses of trademarks as proxy wars for attaining licensing agreements without running afoul of antitrust laws as the mobile phone industry is doing with patents right now.
Good point. For all practical purposes, for now, one can get the text of his speech. But it's probably not legal.
The bible on this subject, fyi:

http://www.amazon.com/Options-Futures-Other-Derivatives-Edit...
Bill Nguyen seems like a relatively young guy who would seem to have more punches left in him in the form of starting more companies. But given these allegations, are investors actually going to back him in the future?

Maybe this is just who I am, but if I were a VC, I'd have serious reservations about investing in a man who has demonstrated serious character issues and is known to create a dysfunctional corporate culture. In fact, I would never invest in anyone who bullies or torments their team members no matter how much of a track record he has. I wonder if thinking like this automatically disqualifies me from ever acting in such a capacity.
Yes, if I understand what you are saying and what mimo is selling, that would seem to be what I want.

The mimo site is a bit too timecube for me to quickly parse -- it is a very expensive touchpad at $329.99 but perhaps there is something similar for less. :)

But yes, I really don't want people touching my expensive, clean screens, I don't want my finger to obscure the detail of what I am drawing, and I don't want to swing my arms through six feet of three 24" monitors.
This reads like an onion article.
Why Google should buy Uber
I bet Team Romney / Orca would have paid handsomely for this at zero-hour, despite all the cost-cutting they did up front.
Big congrats to both Chris and AH. But why not have Chris open up a NYC office? With more and more VC funds opening up satellite offices in New York, it seems silly to move one of the city's best to Silicon Valley.
That doesn't break very fast. My girlfriend loves e-cigarettes, but it's all fun until the endpoint (*-mizer, whatever they call it) burns out, which it does every week or three, and then there is a battery that tends to fail after around two to three months of usage. </anecdotal-evidence>
Tested Advertising Methods by John Caples.

It's an oldie but a goodie. It talks a lot about split testing from the print days -- catalogs, newspaper classifieds, etc. Writing headlines gets its own chapter. Really great book. Really easy to read and understand. The current edition is the 5th edition. You can get it from Amazon.
The agreement found at http://www.nintendo.com/consumer/systems/wiiu/en_na/account_... excludes two cases:

1) protection of intellectual property rights (by either party)

2) small claims court

So if you just want your money back for your games it shouldn't be a problem to get it.

The exception for intellectual property claims is perhaps more interesting. Nintendo insists on stacking the deck and forcing anyone they've screwed to individually go through their rigged kangaroo court(1), except when enforcing their own intellectual property rights. I wonder how effective they would be pursuing pirates with mandatory binding arbitration, which the pirates haven't agreed to in any case, rather than filing DMCA complaints.

Perhaps though, if you've purchased licenses to their games and now you can't play them, that could be considered to be an intellectual property related dispute: interference with your right to use your legal licenses of their intellectual property.

(1)Not hyperbole, mandatory arbitration clauses are patently unfair and should be illegal, or legally made to have the effect of optional arbitration clauses.
I wish this post had more specifics about the coding or design. As is, it's screenshots and generic descriptions of difficulty. It would be good to hear why you made specific design decisions, why you didn't want to use IB, breakthroughs you had creating custom UIAlertViews etc.
Who says that anyone was spying? It's not a disgusting attitude but rather a legitimate come back to someone who is behaving as if they have something to hide.
I recently moved to California and was surprised to find that HSA were not deductible here, although federally it is considered a deduction. Wouldn't be the first time California as bucked Federal rules though. =)

http://www.benefitscafe.com/hsa/articles.html
Company Plans "Revolutionary" Eavesdropping Technology for Skype Chats
As far as bias goes the type of people who rushed out to buy a Surface early are probably the ones least likely to admit its buggy or slow. So there's that. I don't own one so I don't know. I have watched some YouTube videos though and was not impressed. In one the person doing the video actually says 'apps load quickly' while he's showing an app opening very slowly. So it depends a lot on your expectations. 5-10 seconds to open the mail client on the Surface may be fast compared to the 20-30 seconds Outlook on Windows can sometimes take to open but it's dirt slow compared to opening mail clients on iOS or Android. (instant or damn close to it)
Chris Dixon Leaving New York to Join Andreessen Horowitz
Studying the Brains of Mediums
That was a waste of time. Hacker news seems to be drawn to controversy. links like this are just feeding the least interesting aspect of our industry: controversy created by wanna-be journalists that have nothing substantial to say.
Using Wordpress to Create a Landing Page
What are you're thoughts on using wordpress for my landing page vs the other big names such as unbounce and launchrock? Note, I'm not a coder, so I need something that easily allows me to embed video and social media widgets, which launchrock does not allow me to do.<p>Appreciate the advice<p>Fouad
Founder@DateMapps.com
I think it is just a wrong interpretation, really, because people present it as if "even" Sartre said all people are hell, whenever they are feeling reclusive or disappointed in humanity.

None of that is in the original quote since it is way more specific and context-oriented.
I have absolutely no idea how people start consulting. How old are they? Did they work something else before? Did they major in anything? Are they all independent or work at consulting companies?
U.S. Representative crowdsources a domain name seizure legislative proposal
Also, I always keep in mind that at some positions; there are people who want to spend more money if they can. Spending more this year might mean a bigger budget next year. Sometimes power at the company is somewhat stacked by who manages a larger spend each year. And sometimes perception of quality has to do with what you spend. A $60k consultant must be better than a $6k consultant right?
> That's a pipe dream. For private industry to do this there has to be a profit motive, and in this case there isn't.

A ridiculous proposition. Anyone who can not think of a potential profit motive for going to Mars isn't thinking very big or very long. Making a list is left as an exercise to the reader.

> When Elon Musk says Mars is the goal, he means he's intent on providing a capability the rest of us will be expected to pay for.

For colonization, yes. But that's fair - and it ties to a profit motive ("Live on Mars, for the price of a middle-class home!" the ad campaigns may go). But for the initial trip, whereby he proves his company and technology? Surely not.

> Even beyond the obvious engineering problems there are still a lot of things we just don't know how to do in the constraints of the vessel. We have no practical way of protecting the crew from the radiation they'll be exposed to, for example. We don't know how to build an environmental system that guaranteed (more or less) to work for five years. We don't know how to keep astronauts in good physical and mental condition over those kinds of time frames. The list is endless.

That's what the $50 billion and more-than-a-decade is for.

> Mars is like Apollo in the same way an Everest ascent is like camping in your back yard.

I'm not going to even answer that. So absurd.

> You are grossly underestimating the difficulty of what you're proposing, which is why you find your tiny cost estimate credible.

You are the only one on the planet who I have heard of who suggests the cost would approach anything near $1T. It is you who is way off the mark when compared to professional estimates.
The Simplest way to explain NoSQL database management systems
Not just bullying employees, but the suit outlines Nguyen going to great lengths stalking and plotting against Witherspoon's children, in ways that left a massive paper and witness trail and are quite verifiable if true.
Startups may be famous for not punishing failure, but I think this is such an exceptional case that I don't see the same rules applying here. I would not trust someone who squandered this much wealth, and certainly would not trust them if any of these allegations are even remotely true.
YHM
What you are describing are "problems with manned spaceflight to Mars", but not "problems with manned spaceflight to Mars.. that would be solved by political involvement, and could only be solved with political involvement."
Great great stuff.

One thing that i would love to see is the ability to run the embeded php web server with something like

ph7 scripts/hello_world.php -h localhost:80
Yes,

Twenty years after they appeared with the Macintosh, it's becoming clearer they icons are not a particularly useful UI device.

I would assert that icons, like skeuomorphs, remain in the graph vocabulary not because of their utility or because they create beautiful designs but because the user a feeling of comfort and familiarity (which is sort-of a design concern but not always a necessary design concern). Further, I don't think this consideration is going to go away once enough electronic "things" replace their physical equivalents - a typewriter is still strong as a symbol even in a world where no one uses a typewriter. Because an electronic "thing" is never going to be "ready-at-hand", it will forever need a ready-at-hand physical object to give a comforting sense of realness.
This is the most biased and unscientific statement. Where the hell is the downvote button? How does using Intel chips make Google products unsuccessful? Apple has been using Intel chips for several years (although they want to move to ARM soon), and Apple products are/were very successful. The scientific explaination to the failure of ChroomBook is a revolutionary idea. People want to access their data even on the train.What makes you think a cloud-based OS will win? Duh. Wifi sucks. Home Internet sucks too. TV? Apple TV sucks too, why would Google TV be any different? Netflix works with TV vendors and embedded webapp into TV. That's included in the TV price. More useful than an extra box.
Heroes of Science Fiction action figures