skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am a consumer too =)
And i enjoy subscribing to beta versions on all my web products...

I enjoy being pleasantly surprised...and that surprise won't happen unless the app developers have complete control over the eco-system, thereby freeing up experimentation...
If i, as a consumer, am not pleasantly surprised i shall go my own way to the nearest competitor.
But having the "big two" put down rules as to what an app developer should and shouldn't do stifles things.
The app developers want a democracy and the consumers are smart enough to judge what is good and what is rot.
Hence why the rules?
It is necessary that way.

The mouse sends high DPI information to the OS, and the OS sends the applications the mouse info they request.

For drawing the pointer in the GUI, lots of DPIs correspond to moving just one pixel.

However, that's just too low resolution for gaming, where the full DPI information is preferable. Also, for gaming, mouse acceleration should be disabled.

The solution in other games is to read the original high DPI info, instead of the mouse screen coordinates.

Of course you are right about spam, but there's a technical reason for this implementation.
A slight refactoring for Ruby 1.9.3 users, uses Array#sample to grab 3 random words, etc.

ruby -e 'w = File.readlines("/usr/share/dict/words").map { |w| w.chomp }.reject { |w| w !~ /^[A-Za-z]+$/ }; puts w.sample(3).join(" ").downcase'
Not getting everything done? Just make time for everything.
Once you're in single-user mode, there are lots of ways to do this sort of thing. Deleting that file and rebooting is convenient, but actually fairly roundabout: there are more direct methods of adding an account that don't require another reboot.
This is really great!

Years ago when I was still in college (so probably before 2001) I had this exact same idea, but not the skills to implement it. Later, still wanting a searchable archive of pages I bookmarked, I wrote a Perl script that fetched every link in bookmarks.html into a SQLite database and indexed the content. It was very hackish and not very smart (just indexed the raw HTML), but it worked for my needs, kinda...

After a few years switching laptops and using multiple systems, I let it fall by the wayside - copying the DB and scripts from one system to another and keeping them all in sync was just too much of a PITA to be worth it to me... I'm still a rabid bookmarker though, and your service looks like the realization of all the stuff I wanted to do!

If you offer a free-trial (say two weeks) of this service, I am very interested in trying it and would certainly provide plenty of feedback. I'm not yet convinced that I want to pay $3.99/month, but I don't think it's an unreasonable amount at all, especially considering the iOS app, planned cross-browser support, and the very slick-looking interface.

Add to the existing features some mechanism to automatically/transparently sync new bookmarks, and add some assurance that the data is stored securely and encrypted, and only used for new things with my express permission, that $3.99 goes from maybe to deal!

I'm excited for this - I see a viable business in it since I know I'm not the only other data-packrat out there.

EDIT: I just saw the trial voucher and used it. Thanks!
Stop building apps no one wants
Instructions to sign up are right over here http://www.lgprogram.energy.gov/
Outside hospital workers, you'd be hard pressed to find many in the UK that even know what a pager is, let alone someone who has one.
"the big automakers ... could easily come in and be 10 steps ahead of Tesla and provide a vehicle that isn't as sexy but has the same appeal to the electric car market"

Aren't they already trying to do that? Chevy's Volt, Nissan's Leaf, Ford apparently makes a fully PEV Focus now, as does Honda with a version of the Fit, and Toyota's gotta be working on the Prius...
Right now, it's suffering from a 502 Bad Gateway ;).
Previewing Drupal 8
Yes, if you prove you're worth it.
RedMonk’s analytical foundations, part 1: 2003–2005
Sure... Anyone that has the skill and know how to build a company that can build a game changing product like Tesla has...
Companies fight, users lose. Same story, different day.
Yeah, that's me - currently working on some server internals. Will be back soon :)
Google is a company that has produced tremendous benefit to society, in spite of having shareholders.
> It's worth pointing out that length is not important, only entropy is important.

Theoretically yes, as long as you assume the equivalent of a spherical cow in a vacuum.

We've (the security community) become very good at enforcing password schemes that are hard for users to remember and easier for computers to crack. While you could correctly assert that a 30 character long lower case letter only phrase has less entropy than a 15 character sequence of randomly generated numbers, letters of mixed case and punctuation, it makes no odds to me - I'm getting neither of them in a reasonable timeframe.

The reason for this is that if you look at the way web site passwords and company passwords are compromised it's not a single account that's hacked. It's going to be the domain or the database of password hashes. Because you're running all of these through a cracker at once you can't (as an attacker) generally afford to waste the time going through combinations of dictionary words with permutations, especially if you know that if you crack a big enough percentage of passwords you've got the access you need and can move on.

Cracking one 10 character random password with alphanumeric and special characters is a problem of scale with the password generaton algorithm. Depending on the algorithm used you can wait for appropriate rainbow tables to appear to increase your chances, for a cryptographic flaw in the algorithm or for moore's law to catch up. Trying to exhaust the same keyspace for a 30 character password (bearing in mind that the attacker is unlikely to know whether or not your password is high or low entropy, especially if other cracked passwords imply a high entropy policy is in place) is going to be much harder, and will only likely take place if no results of value have been found earlier on.
I don't think its intended as outright superiority, I think its a reaction to it. CSS3 came out and suddenly everywhere everything is rounded corners, gradient colors and shadowed text. It was cool and useful in places, but with the popularization of Bootstrap the internet feels flooded with the concepts. And it did feel like it was pushed into a lot of designs where it wasn't a good fit.

I suspect many people dislike those design choices and are happy to see a counter-push for 'simple' design - flat colors, no gradients, etc.
Just for future reference, what's the benchmark for calling Romney's prediction accurate? Do they have to liquidate or is it enough that they fail to be able to continue to independently deliver cars to the market?

I'd love it if Tesla would succeed sheerly because their product seems so slick, but I agree with Romney that the government is a lousy institution to be picking companies that "should" get half-billion dollar loans/guarantees.
This sort of thing never appealed to me. It seems sort of superfluous: with good tagging and organization, you should be able to retrieve bookmarks with ease. Paying for a service just seems wasteful, and I certainly have no intention of subscribing to a service like this (even if I could afford it, which I can't).

Moreover, it's fairly expensive as bookmarking services go. Pinboard offers identical functionality for significantly less money. A few bookmarking services offer search for free. I just can't comprehend how this product can compete on price.
ErlangDC 2013: A One-Day Erlang Conference in Washington, DC
Thanks - no plans to start charging as I essentially want it to grow into a community-based search engine.

Largely a proof of concept for now, maybe one day in the future might charge for indexing of private bookmarks, PDFs, etc, but those features aren't currently implemented due to technical complexity.

On a related note I'm interested to see how www.lumi.do does as this is one of the future feature possibilities I was thinking of for bkmrx...
I really enjoy DZone's refcardz. There are a lot of exceptional cheat sheets.

DZone was my Hacker News until I found Hacker News. Haha
It Is Always About The Product
The simple answer is they'll make a Model S but smaller, but that might be dependent on battery tech improving so they can fit the batteries into the reduced space. FWIW the Model S is at a reasonably decent price for what it is, and I don't think they're too worried about going mass market until the market is ready in terms of infrastructure, acceptance etc.
Are you not noticing where it says "Searching within 25 miles of [your ZIP code]" on the results page?
You can be great at some things, and suck at others.

Just because they screwed this one doesn't mean they're not (or can't be) innovative at other things. And just because they claim they're the most innovative company in the world does not mean that they are.
If you read the link dherman points to up-thread, I explain why I think PLT is a bad name, even independent of the confusion with my research group.
Less than 1% of the sites get more than 99% of the traffic
Insanely cool and it actually WORKS. Amazing job!
Show HN: Attach a poll to a tweet with PollAll.me
http://www.pollall.me/

Often we receive tweets with which we don't agree and we want to poll our followers about their opinions. Ideally we should be able to attach a poll to a tweet without leaving Twitter. With this thoughts in mind I made PollAll.me. It allows to attach a poll to a tweet as easy as send a tweet.

If you don't agree with a tweet, just type @pollall ? in your reply and receive a poll with default question and quotation of the replied tweet. Or you can provide your own questions and answers for a poll, just reply with a tweet like:

@pollall Will Java replace C in 5 years: Yes, No, Never?

PollAll.me runs on Google App Engine. I deployed three projects on GAE already and I like it very much for the robustness and stability. Server side is wrote on Python with Jinja2 as template engine. On client-side I use JQuery, Bootstrap and CanJS, fantastic JavaScript framework to which I switched after using Backbone.js.

Blog post: http://www.cliws.com/e/aIqkK7ZknDeBkM4JbatPpQ/
Wayland and Weston. A MetroWest Boston thing?
Plus:

- They don't link from the blog to the site from their logo. Marketing 101 here, folks.

- Here is their pitch:

We allow startups to get the right exposure to media while bloggers are able to filter the stories they get.

Huh?

- Thier tagline:

The matchmaking platform for startups and bloggers

Unless the business is aiming at selling to bloggers, this line is not quite clear.

- I have to click on an image of a button to find out you have not launched and are just asking for my email. Double huh?

It is obvious there has not been a test run in this landing page. Which reminds me of rule #1 of landing page: Continually Test Everything.

Good luck to the Press42 team.
Those are some good basics.

Tracking user actions can be very useful: I use it on movieterminals.com to see everything that gets typed into each console. The theory being that (one day?) I'll use that to enhance the scripts to work how people expect.

Tracking an event per page 404 or 500 can also be very helpful. If you aren't already using something more robust to track errors you could even setup alerts to watch for those events and contact you.

Goals are good, although funnels are even better.

Finally: if you can afford it I've found that Clicky offers many great advantages over google analytics. More helpful default reports, a better realtime view, etc.
Thank you that was a great episode, the only thing I would have wished they showed more of was how they finally got the Lego structure to hold.
http://www.revoluza-signup.com/
When you are done, shoot me an email.
couldnt of said this better myself

- simon -
http://www.revoluza-signup.com/
I think twitter nowadays is far from being an unimportant account.
Governments for the most part can take long term(ish) views on things, whereas other investors might be more bullish about seeing a return a lot quicker, for better or for worse. Even traditional bank based investment wouldn't have worked, so it's unlikely something like Tesla would be able to get off the ground and get running.

If Tesla does succeed the US Government gets a nice feather in the cap as well, if it goes horrifyingly wrong then, well, there's already a couple of trillion in the hole, what's another half a billion between friends.
great slideshare! A lot of interesting and informative numbers -- really reminds you of the continous intertwining between business and technology
All praise to the LittleSparkVT! Though I could just view stuf f in IE8 ;)
Yep, me and like 3 other guys I know actually do look at kernel minidumps and have a big pagefile for that reason.
As others have noted, _trackPageLoadTime is depreciated.

However, Google Analytics only automatically samples the page load time for 1% of visitors.

To change this call

_gaq.push([‘_setSiteSpeedSampleRate’, 100]);

before tracking the pageview. This will sample 100% of users for the site load time.

https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection...
It might be a good mixture for bootstrapped startups. The technical founder (who often has no knowledge of SEO/marketing) has to perform some of that role - and share it with a non-technical co-founder.
> According to current theory of physics, every computation needs at least a certain amount of energy.

This is not, strictly speaking, true. You are talking, I believe, about Lanadauer's principle [1]. This states that it is the destruction of entropy that costs energy. There are computational methods that can theoretically avoid these energy losses [2]. In fact, Lanadaer theorized about reversible computing in his original paper [3].

Bremmerman's limit, mentioned below, is more applicable.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing
3. http://www.cc.gatech.edu/computing/nano/documents/Bennett%20...
Curated eh?
Quote:
He'd worked at the NDB for eight years but was reportedly disgruntled at his job and felt management were ignoring his suggestions on systems management.

The lesson, as always: don't mess with the BOFH.
I was not aware of the `git config` option for wrapping long files, worth the price of admission just for that for me.

Edit: there's a `git diff` tip in there, but this comes up a few times so if anyone needs to do patches from git for svn repos do `git patch --prefix=none $DIFF1 $DIFF2 > some.patch` share and apply with `patch -p0 < some.patch`.
Are the startups themselves any good?
3 wise men appear over egypt
Swimming robot reaches Australia
Thanks for the comment, good to know you can see the potential.

You can use the voucher code HNTRIAL for a two month free trial, please let us know what you think.

About the price. We've kept it high while we wait for Google App Engine to announce their pricing for the text search feature we use. We do expect to be able to charge less once we know their pricing (hopefully 25% to 50% less) at which point we can announce our price drop.
The Internet Giveth, And Taketh Away
Not to mention European car makers that aren't well known in the US such as Renault and Peugeot Citroën.

Renault have a small electric hatchback going on sale in the spring in the UK at £13,650 (including a grant):

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/car-manufacturers/renaul...

Personally, I'd be far more likely to buy a small electric hatchback than any of the Tesla models.
IntelliJ IDEA 12 Released
I pretty much left my programming job to come to HS. As i'm in the current batch, i'm entering the nob market around now. While I don't know about average salary or job placement rates, if you are a professional programmer before hacker school you'll only be a much better professional programmer after hacker school, and that means it won't be too difficult to get a job.

But Hacker School is not a job placement program. It is a place for people who love programming to come to become better at their craft. That this results in increase job opportunities afterwards is often a beneficial side effect, but not the primary motivator for people to come here.
42Floors Founder: Make Something People Want
Facebook Is Still Trying To Figure Out How To Best Create Value Out Of Instagram
I could almost hear the presenter in my head as I read through the slides.
I love our Medicare system (Canadian) because it creates a peaceful feeling of reassurance. You show your Medicare card and you are good to go, no paperwork, no bills, nothing. It's hard to explain that feeling, the hospital is not a scary place, it is a safe place. It's there to help you. You just go to the doctor when you are sick, no big deal.

On average, we pay roughly 30-40% Income Tax. The less you make, the less you are taxed. If you make less than $38,000 in my province, you would pay something like 24% (15% federal tax + 9% provincial tax - http://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/tx/ndvdls/fq/txrts-eng.html). And if you make more you get taxed more, but it's reasonable.

Honestly, when you grow up here, you just get used to it. It comes off the paycheck just like retirement savings and employment insurance, and you don't think about it.

I'm a proud Canadian, equal healthcare for everyone is a value we share and I think it's worth paying for.
The Spanish web site I think he's referring to has an English version: http://greenmomit.es/en/ , but the link is buried at the bottom of the page instead of at the top. The sarcasm of the author is a put off for me, like startups in an international competition didn't know about having pages in English.

Criticizing is easy, for example: a media company should know better than using grey fonts over a black background.
Was just looking at the Quake 3 demo and noticed the FPS was locked to 60. Wondering if this is a limitation of the demo or of the browser (FF nightly in my case).

If so that may turn out to be a bit short sighted in the long term.
My Natural Language Systems professor just went through that topic yesterday -- that in the case of all machine translation applications, the ultimate goal is to get as high up in a 'natural language pyramid' where the tip is a single universal language. So we get the most use out of elements of any two given languages that have as much in common with each other as possible; these common elements could then be applied to other similar languages.

Interestingly, he also proposed that the closest thing we have right now to that 'tip' language is sanskrit.
I like the fixed grid. It forces the user to not have a mess out of it. As for the connections, maybe the "metro map" style would work (with rounded corners).
so i can't link this to my last.fm account... what's the point?
At the risk of going off topic, a question about sampling and sampling rates. If I set sampling to 1%, will the visitor totals in the Google Analytics dashboards reflect 1% of my true values or do they compensate/extrapolate out to 100% based on the sampling rate?
Fair point. Which free bookmarking services do you know that provide full content search?
I've always heard that was because medical debt was legally very difficult to collect, true?
> If you are good at design, you wouldn't need to start from Bootstrap. If you are not so good at design, Bootstrap is a great framework,

Just to nitpick, even if you're 'good' at design, Bootstrap is nice if you just don't want to spend the time for a prototype or small project, and also want to be able to drop-in different themes easily to test them out (ie, Bootswatch).

> using flat, all-square UI elements can cause some problems, you may be unaware of.

Remember that, in "true" Metro, all titles and elements are clickable, so the concept of affordance and discoverability is almost moot - its mere existence signals that it can be clicked on.

This is a a paradigm shift from what we've been using all our lives, so naturally people will need to adjust to it a bit, but I don't think it's fundamentally different from adjusting to clicking on rounded rectangles with dark edges instead of pressing a physical button.
Broken in android for me too. (htc desire, gingerbread, Browser)

Not all of us are on the iphone. I guess the audience is being selected.
> I just worry that the big automakers with their massive distribution and infrastructures already in place could easily come in and be 10 steps ahead of Tesla and provide a vehicle that isn't as sexy but has the same appeal to the electric car market.

I really doubt this. This is the classic innovators dilemma. The investments in electric don't look good enough yet for the car companies to go "all in". Their entire supply chain is built around making and selling cars that run on gas engines. Tesla isn't beholden to any kind of entrenched thinking and thus can build up an advantage here that is going to take the big car companies a while to catch up to once electric cars go mainstream. (http://dl.dropbox.com/u/120/Screenshots/innovators_dilemma_c...)
I'm afraid you are overstating the importance of alphabets. For example, try this: http://nedhardy.com/2012/04/25/learn-korean-in-15-minutes-ye... It's not really hard to learn alphabets.

I feel the traditional notation achieves a good tradeoff between clarity and conciseness. I don't want to write the string "integral(sin(x),0,1,x)" on paper - 22 symbols - traditional notation is much more concise. I hate to write parens in (a+b)/c; traditional fractions are clearer. On the other extreme, think about programming in APL.

Also see http://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/there%E2%80%99s-...
Mars has as much land area as Earth. So 1) we are nowhere near done searching it with robots, and 2) we will never search it completely with robots.

We really need to have humans on Mars to search for life.
You just gave me my new app's strategy for subscriptions to avoid this issue. Thanks!
http://blog.kissmetrics.com/landing-page-design-infographic/ is a great start. Just focusing on 1, 2, 4, 5, 6 and 8 will put you ahead of the game.
Ah yes, I remember that 6 months of Moore's law where my Windows XP32 machine had 4GB of RAM. My code project grew to need the /3GB switch in order to compile successfully (until we just moved to 64 bit dev boxes).
We are using GA to track mobile apps. The local queuing and dispatch of hits to GA is covered here[1]. We've found it to be pretty reliable. You can also modify the dispatch time for testing, etc.

[1]https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection...
This is a new project we'll be building at DarwinApps.

I'd love to hear feedback/criticisms/advice from the HN community!
Your users are going to be non-technical such as managers not software developers. The message is misleading. It is talking about screen size not screen resolution.

Moreover, why shouldn’t I be able to use this at 1024x768?
Thanks Mark, I'm glad you like it! (I'm the creator).
I came across a malicious android app, i wanted to leave a review and point out what's wrong. google wanted me to have a g+ account. I refused, even tho I'm using a dummy account.
The Future of Internet Freedom
"In a forthcoming book, they argue that the collapse of advanced-country growth is not merely a result of the financial crisis; at its root, they argue, these countries’ weakness reflects secular stagnation in technology and innovation."

I'd argue it's a result of artificially low interest rates which effectively increased societal time preference. In short, we spent the last 40 years or so eating our future. We've run out of future to borrow from.

I'm glad to see Thiel is kind of in agreement. :)
Check out another good project that is trying to re-invent the survey/form space http://www.typeform.com