skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I believe the bad UX comes from the skeuomorphic design

I can't see a single thing that has its function derived from a real-life object. Maybe I didn't dig deep enough this time, but why not just call it bloat? (Which I think it is - even though it's really butter smooth on Safari)
> Google, Amazon and Starbucks

Not forgetting:-

Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Oracle, Pfizer, Adobe

(amongst others).
What language(s) did you leave .NET for? I'm still stuck on .NET (and I like it) but I know I can't build decent web or mobile applications with it.
Indieconf 2012: Build an Army of Products
Definitely true. The original goal was to have such topics mixed throughout, but a strong case can be made for devoting an "edition" to these topics alone. It's something for me to think about for sure.
DNA Imaged With Electron Microscope for the First Time
These sort of chips have their GPU included as well, don't they? If it's anything like the Mali in the S3, i'd be really really happy.
If your loved one isn't considerate enough to use Ultimate Gift Lists: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4865223
I would be interested to know how you would change the list to facilitate a broader view.
Darrell Issa answers to Reddit after proposing ban on Internet regulation
Loren Brichter: On the future of iOS apps
"So you show me a study"

No, he shows you an anecdote or two. Which isn't worth very much, but it's more than what you had before. It's not like the original measurement had any studies validating it either. But it looks scientific: it has numbers!
I barely find time to do the things I want. I can't conciliate the idea of having to take care of a kid right now.

Perhaps having a kid would make me stop wasting time on useless stuff though.
I guess that the next set of major attacks won't be targetted at pwning someone's PC but rather using their browser as a vehicle to attack web services, do DDOS and steal info from servers.

However I used to run IE6 + Flash on WinXP without any anti-virus and never remember any significant problems with malware on my computer (witnessed a lot on other people's though).
Glad to see him safe.
I wonder if he will eclipse the current top 10 [1] and if priests worldwide will encourage their folks to "follow" him

[1] http://twittercounter.com/pages/100
Dell just released "Project Sputnik", which looks like a beast of Windows ultrabook repurposed for Linux.

http://www.dell.com/us/soho/p/xps-13-linux/pd.aspx

I'm also looking for a developer laptop. I'm not too thrilled about my experience with OS X and I don't really feel compelled to dig through config files to make basic things like the fan work. Sputnik looks interesting, as it's configured with its own PPA for drivers specific to that machine, meaning that someone else is looking at those config files for your specific setup.

You might be stuck with Ubuntu and have to clean out some "instant cloud" features, though.
With apologies---'Program what thou wilt an it harm no one'...
There was excellent thought experiment/one-off drama on how a product like this could affect employment and relationships in the future. "The Entire History of You" aired on British TV last year [1]. It was written by one of Peep Show's [2] writers, a sitcom that uses solely point of view shots.

If you have access to 4OD (by being in the UK or otherwise) you can watch the episode online [3].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Mirror_(TV_series)#3._.22...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peep_Show_(TV_series)

[3] http://www.channel4.com/programmes/black-mirror/episode-guid...
It does, because having a small percentage of the equity accelerates the pace at which the thing becomes "not yours". My only point is that it's almost impossible to grow a complex entity to the point of "bigness" and retain total control. The Iron Law of Oligarchy sets in.

Even if you are a CEO with total control, there are information problems that limit your true power. Sure, you have lieutenants who will furnish you with the answer to any question you desire-- biased and dishonest information. I heard someone once say that the hardest thing about being a CEO is that "everyone is fucking lying to you" and that sounds about right. I would add "... and wants your job" to that.

People talk about "giving up control" as if it were a loss. Even if I built the business from the ground up, I'd rather have control of my life than the business. $10 million would mean that I own my life instead of renting it from a boss. Selling control of a corporate entity and code for someone else's use is easily worth that, from my perspective. I now own my life, you now own (partially) a couple years of my work... seems like a fair trade to me.
Interesting -- this is slower on my iPad.
I thought that this was what lenses was supposed to fix? Being able to switch between a variety of different searches.

12.10 seems to take the opinion that every search you do should search everything by default, not even google does that.

If they are going to follow this model with Amazon, there isn't really any reason to believe they won't do it for anyone who offers them a sweet affiliate deal.
That's the thing about slippery slopes. You can generally point to any specific instance and say "but this isn't anything new".
I use .Net and Java stack, I don't want to start a war here but I never felt held back due to any reason for developing web apps in either of the two. For mobile apps, its a different story, I stick to phonegap.
A&A are fantastic. I've recommended them to quite a few people now.
Notch has made a couple of comments on reddit :

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/146v69/how_notc...

Please do NOT write code like this. It was originally written for the Java4k
competition, which focuses on executable code size, and is as a result almost
intentionally poorly written. It got even worse when I ported it to JS.
It was mainly meant as a test for me to see what HTML5/JS can do, and an
exercise in porting code over.

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/146v69/how_notc...

It would run a bit smoother if it was written in C++ (mainly due to not having
to rely on the GC, and having it precompiled gets rid of the warmup time), and
modern OpenGL would help quite a lot as well. A lot of the stuff done in CPU
now could be moved to a shader, which both makes code simpler, and gets rid of
the slow JNI calls required now.
The main reason why Minecraft is slow is mainly 1) There's a LOT of polygons,
combined with 2) The difficulty of making an efficient culling algorithm in a
dynamic world.
If someone solves #2, very interesting things could be made with a game similar
to Minecraft.

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/146v69/how_notc...

No, they don't get merged because the textures are all pulled from the same atlas
to avoid texture swapping. With GLSL, they could be merged, saving quite a lot of
polygons. For a while, I did attempt switching the atlas from a 16 x 16 grid to a
1 x 256 grid and merging horizontal runs of the same texture, but the resulting
texture size was to tall some graphics cards (on low end computers) would
automatically downsample it.
The problem with the occlusion culling is not about knowing what parts are static,
but rather figuring out what occluders there are. It would be very beneficial not
to have to render caves under ground below the player, for example, or not to
render the entire outside when a player is inside a small closed house. Figuring
this out in runtime on the fly as the player moves around is.. expensive.
Kotlin and Maven
I like that Vice is going to be covering this, they are the perfect outlet for this story.
Explorations in Unix
They claim 2000 cameras 'sold' thru their campaign. I thought Kickstarter explicitely says they are not a store? I don't get it.
Well on the one hand it is brain activity - games and code excite the brain, and it can't simply click shut off and sleep.

On the other hand, it's light - the light from your computer screen goes straight into your eyes and to your brain, that tells you "IT'S STILL DAY". The brain / eyes need darkness / dusk to start producing melatonin, the sleep molecule.

So, turn off your screens, don't look at mobile phones, and if possible turn the TV off too, or at the very least dim them to the lowest brightness setting at least an hour before attempting to go to sleep, preferably two.

Software like f.lux will help too; studies show that white/blue lights will wake you up, while red, warm colors will make you sleepier. f.lux will make the screen a nice warm, soft red after sundown, mimicking natural sundown (while making it brighter / 'colder' during the day, keeping you awake while you work).
I think there's a fairly important consideration that he misses, especially if you lack experience. Right after the Series A is when you're most likely to gain useful experience and work on interesting stuff. Before the funding, you're often just in survival mode, and just building the simplest things possible. Later on, job roles become more rigid, and most of the design/architecture has solidified.

Correspondingly, this might be the most fun/interesting time to be at a startup.
Reading this article is surreal, it sounds like it's part of an Ayn Rand tribute novel.
But there are so many ways to mismanage a city! I'm sure that makes it hard to prove one is the 'worst'.
Anyone dismissing this as purely a tax-play doesn't do service to the thriving, vibrant and diversive tech community that Dublin has. Anyone based here for even a few weeks would know that.

Dublin's #1 strength over places like London and Berlin is it's geographic size, which makes meetups accessible, leaders and role models available, and creates a friendly and familiar feel, where we all fee like we are part of something bigger than the startups that are here.

Side note: To anyone here on HN visiting Dublin in the future, feel free to connect with us, you'd be very welcome -- @ me on Twitter... @EamonLeonard
> Which historical state of nature does it refer to?

Hobbes' state of nature is probably an ahistorical argument. That all men used to live under a state of nature is not necessary to Hobbes' argument. It is a thought experiment, showing the consequences of there not being a state, and allowing him to infer the rights of the people within the state. In terms of history, Hobbes would have had in mind cases contemporary to him when state authority collapsed and violent chaos took hold -- the English Civil War etc.

He is not arguing from history, and to dismiss his argument on that ground alone might risk disengaging from what Hobbes' was trying to get at.
Using MySQL as NoSQL
Anyone dismissing[1] this as purely a tax-play[2] doesn't do service to the thriving, vibrant and diversive tech community that Dublin has. Anyone based here for even a few weeks would know that.

Dublin's #1 strength over places like London and Berlin is it's geographic size, which makes meetups accessible, leaders and role models available, and creates a friendly and familiar feel, where we all fee like we are part of something bigger than the startups that are here.

Side note: To anyone here on HN visiting Dublin in the future, feel free to connect with us, you'd be very welcome -- @ me on Twitter... @EamonLeonard

[1] http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/12/03/dropbox-announces-f...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4864190
It is indeed a contradiction.

However - as an unrelated point - wouldn't "unfree" licenses be better (given the theoretical case we can decide with some certainty what is good or evil)?
The Growing Complexity of Everyday Life
Yeah; most web apps, only their mother could love. Because of all that. Seems it always performs better (or even adequately) when using platform features, rather than to cobble a feature together using javascript etc.
What's the most cutting edge weather product?
After the third timeout trying to log in to weather.com, it's time for me to seek an alternative.
Is there a special reason why you chose ASP.NET for this project?
I would personally think that the USP that they have on the Ubuntu desktop is something that non-technical folk quite like to use. From what I've seen they've done that very well. From what you can see on their design approach from the outside I don't think they'll mess that up.

Time will tell.
I stopped reading it when Mike A got all dramatic and made it all about himself. Haven't gone back but I'd imagine it can't be any worse than it was then.
The Pirate Bay people didn't create the Pirate Party. There isn't a lot of overlap between the (publicly known admins of) the Pirate Bay, the (no longer existing) Pirate Bureau that gave rise to it and the Pirate Party. This is true both in terms of people, and also frankly terms of politics, beyond the basic realisation that the status quo is untenable.
Wrote a Response here -

http://statspotting.com/2012/12/read-techcrunch-daily/
I think he was referring to Scroll combined with blurred preview of item your hovering over. I could be wrong but it was designed to give a feel of driving in your car through a street full of houses or something.
I agree with this so much I upvoted this post before I even read the article
What made you want to finish your education in the end?
Here is the code in an App Studio project:

http://blog.nsbasic.com/?p=1060

Runs fine on an iPhone 5!
Show HN: (Weekend Project) The Smartphone as a Universal UI for Physical Devices
I am not the coder, my friend is - I will let him answer you. From my limited knowledge I know that my friends skills lie with this technology and therefore he built something using a technology he is comfortable with. As I say he'll answer you properly in a bit..cheers
Linky: http://www.ted.com/talks/david_blaine_how_i_held_my_breath_f...
Something I've been thinking about for a while that I finally got into over the weekend. I'll post a cookbook howto if anyone's interested in building something similar for themselves.
Consuming a Sharepoint Web Service - Introduction to MS SharePoint with .Net
Who knows? But the problem of licenses is inherently practical, so no theoretical cases apply :)
Actually, there's around half the number of native Chinese speakers (~60k) as there is native Irish speakers (~120k).
Quite so. Richard Murphy put together a set of definitions that might be of interest: http://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2010/07/07/tax-avoidance-...

> Tax avoidance is seeking to minimise a tax bill without deliberate deception (which would be tax evasion) but contrary to the spirit of the law. It therefore involves the exploitation of loopholes and gaps in tax and other legislation in ways not anticipated by the law. Those loopholes may be in domestic tax law alone, but they may also be between domestic tax law and company law or between domestic tax law and accounting regulations, for example. The process can also seek to exploit gaps that exist between domestic tax law and the law of other countries when undertaking international transactions.

(I'm a former tax accountant, at KPMG - these definitions are uncontroversial AFAIK)
I recently spoke to a group of aspiring founders (not that I'm anything to aspire to, but they needed speakers!) and one of my slides was, 'recognise distortion fields'.

Techcrunch was my main example. A great resource, but needs to be absorbed with the right amount of perspective.
That may be true. Let's say that it is. In that case, the article could be improved by distinguishing between the two cases of an author with a niche brand of some sort and an author without. If you have a niche brand, some of the other marketplaces may offer advantages such as lower costs or more flexibility.
You know what measures outcomes exceptionally well? The free market. Turns out, if you suck at what you do, or a project is mismanaged, it fails. When there isn't a constant source of revenue via taxes, people suddenly start to care whether or not money is being spent wisely. And wouldn't you know it, they come up with all sorts of sophisticated ways to determine whether or not they're likely to fail and adjust accordingly.
Now IE is not batshit insane, the biggest problem is that is has a very slow release cycle. The second being that MS shuts out all its users on their older OS-s.
How I ended up with so much Hacker News karma
Well, except Irish ;)
Ha, you have evaded my trick question well.
I also like the sense of accomplishment in finishing a class with a high grade and time constraints. It's like beating a video game on hard :).
I hope this simplified version helps. I removed texture mapping and camera rotation, plus simplified a few unusual constructs.

https://gist.github.com/4195130
Introducing Kindle Fire Apps
Haha, us hustler's work is never through. Like the different approach.
What is better code?
Hosting a Silverlight Application inside Sharepoint Web Site
"better profit" but only in the eyes of accountants, for a while.

The money you've paid less tax on is still offshore. If you want to bring it back to your country then you have to pay tax on it (minus what you've paid already overseas) so it's not just a simple scheme to minimise tax. If you need the money to maintain cash flow then you've got no real choice but to pay full whack on it to get it back into the US.

What many US companies are doing is hoarding huge piles of it overseas in the hope that the US will have another tax amnesty (like 2004) and they can bring it back in to the US without paying as much tax as they would have had they just paid it in the US in the first place.

Here's a simplified example based roughly on real figures.

Take a US company that makes a $1bn profit in a year. They would have to pay 35% tax on that if they kept it in the US.

Using a Double Irish Agreement and paying a $1bn fee to those foreign entities in Ireland/Cayman Islands they make $0 profit in the US and pay $0 corporation tax. In Ireland they pay 12.5% tax on that money, so Ireland get $125m.

Meanwhile the cash sits overseas and the US company can't use it. If they wanted to bring it back to the UK they'd need to pay a $225m tax bill (35% tax on $1bn minus what is paid overseas); it's unsurprisingly more complicated than that but we'll leave it simple. It's also earning interest overseas but we'll ignore that for this example.

What they can do is bung this $225m on the balance sheet as a future tax liability, since if the worst happens and they run in to cash flow problems they'd have to bring all of the original money back into the US and pay remaining tax on it. Ironically, this means they can offset even more profits against this liability.

Anyway, they wait until the US has a tax amnesty for bringing back money from overseas (last one in 2004) and then pay a fraction of the tax they would have originally. The current campaign is for an amnesty rate of just 5.25%

How much is this used, and on what scale?

If you believe the numbers in this article: http://news.yahoo.com/apples-phantom-taxes-hide-billions-pro... then Apple has $74bn in cash accounts overseas.
This is true, and it isn't just holidays. They usually start surge pricing on weekends after the T (subway for non-Bostonians) shuts down for the evening (around 12:30-1AM) and it continues until demand drops. That being said, if you try to request a pickup during a surge pricing period, there's a pop-up on the app that warns you about it and it gives you the option to cancel. It isn't something they tack on at the end, so surge pricing shouldn't come as a surprise to anybody.
Does anyone know what do they refer with "Iberian language"? https://www.dropbox.com/position?jvi=o92YWfwP,Job

I mean, as they are referring before to Spanish, I guess it is Portuguese, maybe?

Because if they refer to Old Iberian (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iberian_language), it is going to be difficult to find anyone :-D
Looping back over if anyone doesn't get what the description is referring to: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4864978

Two takes on overlapping (albeit, first world) problems.
"Wow, that's ground-breaking research."

Just because everybody believes it doesn't make it true. Every once in a while people do a study on something that's widely believed and it turns out that the wide belief was wrong. One example: sugar makes kids hyper.[1] Yet studies show that the two aren't well correlated.

1: http://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=52...
I've seen Ads in Chrome I haven't seen in years. Nasty popups also. I am not the only one with the experience so I guess we two are just not surfing the same pages but belive me: it is not as good as the one for FireFox.
Even if I don't understand why...
Preserving Patent Ownership (Practice Tips for Startups Series)
Just when I thought things couldn't get more bizarre, Vice magazine get involved...
I wouldn't say salaries are that low, Ireland has (or had until recently) one of the highest minimum wage and average industrial wages in the world. The recession has brought wages down somewhat, but you can't compare Ireland to India with regards to pay.
It got upvoted, that seems like justification enough.
It appears I was right:

http://betabeat.com/2012/12/anonymous-launches-ophunthunter-...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4862779
"The Iron Law of Oligarchy sets in"

Mentioning the Iron Law of Oligarchy in a comments thread about Techcrunch and fundraising gets you a vote up from me.

For those who didn't study sociology or political science at some point, the Iron Law of Oligarchy describes the apparently inevitable tendency of organizations to centralize power towards leaders by a process of increasing bureaucratization, decentralization and specialization. It was developed primarily to study political parties, but it is believed to apply to all organizations.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Law_of_Oligarchy
LG’s own ARM-based chip could debut in January 2013
"Korea Times has inside word that LG will show off its own ARM-based chip at next month’s Consumer Electronics Show. The first such chip is anticipated for web-based television sets and future chips could be used for LG smartphones and tablets. LG reportedly has 550 engineers working chip designs for mobile devices. Engadget notes that TSMC is reportedly making the chips for LG; good for the chip-maker, which could also make Apple’s mobile chips soon."
I guess they mean a language spoken on Ibearian Peninsula – Spanish and Portugese as major ones and Catalan, Basque, Galician as regional ones in Spain. No idea about Portugal's local languages.
> I've realized I can learn pretty much anything on demand. So I find interesting problems and try to solve them, rather than spend alot of time learning frameworks and languages and hope to apply them.

I find this to be a very good approach and it applies to me as well.

Everything I know about "programming" I learned because I needed something done. 10+ years ago I wanted a website, so I learned HTML. Then I wanted a dynamic website, so I learned ASP and SQL. Then I needed some cool interactions, so I learned JavaScript. Then I wanted to create a web app, so I learned Python & Django. When the time comes to build a chat application, I'll learn Node.

This approach enabled me to have much more time to learn new stuff and learn them well enough so as to build production-ready stuff, because that's the goal at the end of day.

The downside is that I rarely have time or energy to just experiment with something new just for the fun of it. It evens out though because I have fun at work learning and doing stuff I actually need to be doing.
Have you found a reason for the difference in the average karma that you calculated and the one on your actual profile?
9 Social Media Marketing Tips to Turn your Online Shop into a Huge Success.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riesz%E2%80%93Fischer_theorem
The 61 Countries a Mad Despot Could Instantly Unplug From the Internet
Thanks for linking back.
The man is quite likely guilty of murder. I know we all like rooting for the underdog, but this might not be the right underdog.
IME they just means Spanish (European) and Portuguese.

They could include Catalan and French (because of Andorra) but unlikely.
Is the UK government too scared of Google, Amazon and Starbucks?