skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>So far we’ve been adding price points with more and more success, so where does it stop? It stops at three. Adding too many is just going to cause confusion.

That's funny. As soon as I saw this, I knew I was going to ask about the Jam study... which after reading further was already mentioned.

Three seems to the magic number. For a project where users are presented with several options (unrelated to price) I had already made the decision to use three. But is there any objective reason three works better than say four? All I have is a gut feeling right now.
Table Stakes Are Dangerous
> Is making DNT opt-out bad?

The common argument is that it is:

1) Advertisers won't give up tracking across the board. It's too lucrative for them.

2) Most users don't care about the setting that much.

3) Enabling it for default for the majority of users will cause present advertisers with a majority of users who they cannot track.

4) Per (1), the advertisers will then elect to ignore DNT.

5) DNT becomes a useless ignored flag and a waste of time.

Instead, if it's opt-in:

1) Most people don't bother turning it on.

2) The advertisers face pressure to comply with the ones who do.

3) People who do turn it on then enjoy the benefits.

Also, the DNT specification explicitly says that DNT should not be turned on by default, for these very reasons.
In which time your program don't exist because your OS/Word processor business doesn't survive on the taxpayer teat.

The problem is for businesses, most customers pay lot for features and new shiny and give a lot of lip service to the security part.

The problem for open source is, most developers spend their time on features and new shiny, and the security ramifications are an afterthought.
Cool, I didn't know about that syntax!

Unfortunately it isn't yet supported in Firefox, but I'm glad something like that is in the works.
Did I just.. appreciate modern art for the first time?
Ok....

So are you saying that the current methods of education can't be improved?

I'm not referring to an intervention, which, like dieting, will not be useful in the long term. I'm giving you credit for hitting upon the idea that education itself can be altered in a manner which is not only far more effective, but evenly distributed improvements across all tested populations.

That's a great idea, and we all look forward to hearing of your progress in this endeavor.
The MonoMacPackager no longer exists, and has not existed for a few months. We basically granted a license for appstore distribution to anyone that requested the license for AppStore distribution, since we did not originally have plans to build a product.

Now that we are launching a product, we offer the license as part of Xamarin.Mac.

I will update the page accordingly.
Coroutines (ability to send values to generators, actually) have been in Python for quite a while, but I'm yet to see a decent use of them... When you add exceptions in the mix things start to get downhill.
not to mention our electronics waste stores [1] (Ctrl-F 'thorium')

http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2012/11/rare-earth-el...
Tumblr just dropped out of DNS
We check for these types of vulnerabilities, and it's free to sign up: https://armorhub.com
> ... creates a sense of transience. You don't feel like you really belong until you have enough money that you don't need to work and (for most) have ceased to be a productive part of society

Very well said, I think you just put a feeling/idea into words that I was having difficulty putting into words.
I saw Alex speak at a Unity meetup in San Francisco on October 17th of this year. He demoed Code Hero, and (I thought) he said it was available for purchase. I thought he came off as passionate about the project. I wasn't convinced that this would necessarily be a good way for noobs to learn programming, but nevertheless I thought it was a pretty impressive demo. Just my 2¢. (I'm not a kickstarter backer of the project, and this is the first I've heard of these allegations.)
I don't understand how people can get excited about phones anymore, it just looks the same as any other phone on the market.

Also in the video the UI looks dull, at least the Windows phone has tried something new.
I was equally confused, from what I found using Google [1] the project had a large amount of backing, was alive for a while and then everything went cold. Gradually the backers have now started turning on the project requesting refunds and now this.

[1]: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/121069-Code-Hero-K...
Probably not. There's a time limit on chargebacks, and Kickstarter is pretty explicit that when you put money into a project promising some result at a future date, you're not actually paying for a committed shipment of that product.
There is no cookie information (CloudFlare, Google, or otherwise) sent for requests to CDNJS resources.
I want to start a company, but I dont know what to start Help
I am a recent graduate, and I want to launch my company. I am excited about startups and have extensive expertise in business strategy and data analytics, but I do not know what to start! I know I have the skills to make a company successful with great access to VCs and entrepreneurship resources from my past projects at MIT. However, I have ye to find an idea that excites me. What do you all think are some of the upcoming areas for entrepreneurship?
I never backed this project, but I did come across the project creator and I did actually watch him and others play what seemed like a functioning version of this game.

I don't know what happened or why the need for a lawsuit, but this could have some very scary implications for crowdfunding. Especially as Kickstarter is now the subject of a few lawsuits (http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/21/3d-systems-sues-3d-printer-...). It is interesting that Kickstarter chose not step in.

I really hope Kickstarter doesn't end up like EBay and Paypal, the go-to marketplace of scammers.
> I don't foresee any backpedaling since few people want to stand up for porn and the principle of filtering search results has been established for years.

Absolutely, good point. I suppose why I'm so riled up about this is that I can't think of a single plausible development that could have as effectively induced opposition to these things as this... and the story doesn't seem to be catching. It had a chance, it was starting to gain momentum, but...

One of the largest organized places without this stigma, and one of the few places which wider opposition or outrage could have very quickly formed around; which all major news organizations regularly plumb for content, and which serves as one of the primary canonical barometers for (knee-jerk) public reaction to political technology issues -- Reddit -- has had its two largest initial threads on the subject removed from public visibility. Both of which were at the top of the default front page at the time of their removal, with 2200 comments between them.

I'm not sure of the actual mechanism for removing them from their previous places on their respective subreddits' and the collective front page. The threads still exist and are active, but are not readily discoverable. I'm successfully fighting the natural reaction attributing this to a malicious conspiracy: most likely, each was removed for breaking its respective subreddit's rules on editorialized headlines, self-posting, and subject matter -- r/wtf, the host for the larger of the two, explicitly forbids political content.

But, as of the posting of this comment, those two threads were the only place I've found on the internet where anywhere near as large a discussion as this warrants was happening (seriously, how is this very HN thread still so dead? 3 posts as of an hour+ on the front page). And no other discussion yet, even within Reddit, has taken their place. This is still very niche news, barely known even to communities whose bread-and-butter is outrage over far less extreme instances of creeping... however you want to characterize this.

Very unfortunate decision on the part of whichever moderators removed those threads. I hope this comment will be an embarrassing overreaction I'll wish desperately I could wipe from my HN history, but if nothing else picks up their momentum while this story is still fresh, that could be a decision that has subtle consequences on a historical scale.

At the very least, I've not seen, in any of the conversations I've read so far, a moderating voice of reason explain why this story isn't as big a deal as the common reaction to it, among people aware of it at all, seems to be (which is something that usually emerges from the froth). Can anyone help frame this as something less important than I seem to see it as?
I'm in the same boat. It's a love-hate relationship. If I've had a particularly rough day or just don't feel like working, it's nice to just say "screw it" and drink a beer, play with the dog and talk to my girlfriend. I don't feel particularly bad because there is always tomorrow. If you take the long timeline perspective, it doesn't really matter much if you slack a little today.

On the other hand, it's easy to become complacent and lose motivation to keep toiling away. Maintaining a steady regimen of working, even just a little, each night seems to be the best way to not lose interest. Otherwise it's easy to continually say to yourself "well, I'll work on it tomorrow" for the hundredth time in a row.
and it sure won't be the last ...
For many of the backers, it seems to me like that's just the risk of investing in new products/companies. If they didn't receive the promised reward for their level of contribution, that seems like a problem though.
Prefacing this, I'm largely with Jason Scott on this (and most issues). That said:

The deletionist argument is not and has never been been that it's going to save storage or bandwidth. (Generally, it's about it being difficult to keep up the average quality of the encyclopedia when there's a lot of less notable stuff. Which is absolutely true.) You should at least try to understand the argument for the opposition before you make up your mind.

Policy debates should not appear one sided, etc, etc.
These are cool examples, but I'm not convinced of the utility here. Using a git history as a tutorial feels like trying to shim a wrench into a hammer.

What is needed is a form of CMS which can link some content to a patch, and I feel like there are better options out there for accomplishing that. It seems like maintaining this documentation going forward would be very challenging as git is not designed around making editing the past easy.
For anyone confused about the meaning of the word 'copy' as used here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copy_%28written%29
That's not really true, is a huge difference between using Sodium vs Lead vs light water vs heavy water vs gas for the primary coolant loop.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_water_reactor

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_water_reactor

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_metal_cooled_reactor

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead-cooled_fast_reactor

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas-cooled_reactor

The real link has a lot more to due with how cheap uranium was to mine / refine and how much refined uranium was needed for weapons programs. At this point we could stop all uranium mining for the next 50+ years without any problems and by changing designs that could stretch out to something like 1000 years. Fuel is simply not the problem.
If you didn't get it from my previous comment, the reason I;m still on 11.04 is because it's the last version of Ubuntu shipped with GNOME 2, i.e. the last decent desktop environment...
We found this by using the Tinfoil Security scanner, and it's free to sign up with us too - we check for this and quite a bit more. :)

Sign up for free at https://www.tinfoilsecurity.com
Why founders shouldn't be the developers
Welcome back to Chicago! We're a great city from which to operate tech companies. I still remember moving back to Chicago from San Francisco and how good it felt to be back where the leaves change color and every coffeshop in the city isn't filled with people talking about tech products.
Web analytics just got meta
Yeah this is a nice advantage of Javascript over Python:

send() is equivalent to send(undefined) which is equivalent to next().

This equivalence is true in Python as well, but you have to explicitly call send(None) which is annoying.
How about the armless, who can't turn the crank? Sounds like a job discrimination case waiting to happen.
clearly, he doesn't need the money
Pendleton Ward Gives Solid Advice to Fans that Applies to Everyone
From Dustin Deckard (the class suit organiser) -

"Alex Peake seems to have run out of money ($170k) after spending it recklessly, and doesn't plan on continuing with this project.

There are well over 1000 backers out there who pledged for physical rewards. And, tragically, 6 backers who pledged at the $1k level who thought their money would be well spent on an educational tool for schools."
I've never heard of them....and I'm far from a spring chicken. What guarantees can you give that they don't do something like that today -- other than anecdotal evidence as a complete outsider?

Regardless, my concern is still there and I will still refuse to use it. To each his own, I'm not trying to campaign against them, just sharing my opinion.
Wirelessly control an Arduino with NodeJS over Bluetooth
I hate this title. I understand that it is designed to draw attention and curiosity (coming from a site called THINKTRAFFIC, it's probably expected), but the title and other titles from the "popular articles" section just scream "headline tricks to draw clicks".

An informed title would probably be "Useful pricing techniques" or "Have multiple price points", although it really is a balance between headline accuracy and user interest. I suppose what I hate the most is that this less accurate title works better, and that's our fault.
In addition the reason to host this on single domain vs your own site is that the users only have to download the resource once it once for all the sites they visit.
Show HN: An app for middle school students, made by a middle school student.
Both. (I'll play devil's advocate, if that's ok.)

What matters most? "Computing operating systems" or "desktop market share"?

I believe both are vital to the long-term success of any competitor, Microsoft, Google, Apple, or "other."

If Google or Apple did not deliver a good UX on Windows Desktops, the resulting lost opportunities would severely curb their success in "computing operating systems."

Meanwhile, Microsoft owns the platform they deliver on. Can Microsoft use that to their advantage? Logically they can, but the ethics of their actions may result in US DOJ antitrust action.

If Microsoft does not deliver a good UX in mobile, tablet, and ultrabook markets, their future relevance on the desktop is threatened. This is where I think you and I disconnect: I believe Microsoft is now waging a two-front war and is being squeezed by the resulting pincer attack. Microsoft has to simultaneously innovate in new, fast-moving markets like mobile and tablet, while acting like a benevolent 800-lb gorilla in the desktop OS market.

It's not impossible to do, but it requires a combination of finesse and balls that Microsoft seems to be lacking, based solely on the stock price history for the 2002-2012 timespan.
In this case the experience looks slightly different but works pretty much as expected. In other terms, the Java apps tend not to be the ones that piss me off on a regular basis.
But what you don't see is the line of people outside the door, whose labour is worth less than $7.25 per hour, but who can't find (legal) work because of the minimum wage laws.
Chris Anderson on Makers, Manufacturing and His DIY Drones Startup [AUDIO]
If I could give advice to myself when I started writing production code in MonoTouch without any experience with it, it would be: “Don't Guess. Profile.”

For example, I spent a lot of time making sure I don't load heavy .NET objects, but most memory crashes went away when I started using JPG instead of PNG pictures in a picture-heavy app.

Then it got a lot better when I took time to learn about best iOS practices such as keeping a pool of about ten reusable views and re-filling them with new content as they go offscreen when the user is scrolling, instead of creating hundreds of views at once. What is really nice, iOS6 UICollectionView class enforces this memory usage pattern by providing a neat API with view pool. Use it instead of rolling out your own collection view.

Another hard lesson was to never block UI thread and do any computational intensive stuff such as parsing JSON in .NET Tasks on another thread. This is obvious in retrospect, but I thought parsing JSON wasn't intensive. It was.

Finally, if your app crashes randomly, it's most probably your fault! I really need to stress it because I fell into this trap, thinking MonoTouch is buggy when my app crashed every minute. Turned out, it had insane memory leaks and aggressively allocated large amounts of memory at once—but I didn't bother to learn about “right” techniques until it was too late. Learn to profile early so you don't panic later.
I'd love to see Xamarin grow enough to offer the dev-tools for free. Obviously that'd mean making money off of something other than dev-tool sales. I can think of lots of ways you could use Mono to break out of that market. Any plans to move in this direction?
I'm curious about the two people who pledged 10,000 to this project. That seems like a pretty ridiculous amount for a game like this, even if you really do believe in the cause.

Maybe the guy has a couple of reallly rich friends?

I've also heard speculation that, if a project is near it's funding goal but looks like it won't quite make it, the people running it might pitch in the rest.
It is, in particular, from several years of experience, much easier to recruit in Chicago. We have offices in NYC, Chicago, and Mountain View, all of comparable excellence.

Cost of living is lower in Chicago, there's less intense competition in Chicago (in particular, there's no equivalent of Google looming over every Chicago team member), and people in Chicago tend to live here because they want (or need) to live here; they're "stickier".
Code hero has had a rocky past; It was an indie darling, after a cool looking demo, but along the way the creator has done all the classic scam-artist things - Gone dark for a significant amount of time, been unclear on status in updates, gave strange and only half believable excuses for lack of progress. These are all trademarks of inexperienced devs, too, which is why it's hard to prove malfeasance.

There was a demo at PAX, which I saw; It looked okay, but barely more than the unity dev tools. There was something slightly off about the person I talked to at the booth, they seemed oddly desperate, but I'd put it down to it being a slow day for them.

I'm glad to see this fail, actually, if it fails - It was ambitious, and would have been cool, but if it fails it's a good wake-up call that these are, in fact, attempts - Not guarantees. I feel sorry for the ~20 people who put $1k+ into this for essentially nothing, but caveat emptor.
Here you are: http://www.masswerk.at/google60/?q=*lace
This looks amazing.

Once available, a live sample of someone using it for a specific purposes would be even more amazing / would help show just how awesome this is.
From the guy who seems to be leading the Class Action charge:

"Guys, I want to love you so badly... I met you at PAX and was worried how the exchange was going to go, considering we're so far behind schedule, updates are very insufficient, and I pledged at a high level ($313). You were very apologetic and assured me that things were going to take off right after PAX, but that is another commitment that hasn't been met. I'll be happiest if I can get my money back, but I doubt that's a possibility. I had time and energy to dive into this stuff earlier this year. Now I'm married, working different hours, and have a very different life. Lots has changed since the estimated delivery date flew by."

You were funding a product that you were told may or may not meet with success. You're now going to need to show in a civil court that there was wilful recklessness in the use of funds.

Kickstarter sits on the fence, too - it states that the creater is obliged to deliver pledges or refund, but that it hopes requests for refund will only be used for bad faith projects.

Given that he gave a video interview in November stating he felt the project had a year to go, and that the pledges specify "Estimated Delivery" only, I think that's a hard road to plow, leaving aside the fact that a malicious, or even unlucky/ill-planned project could keep pushing out the dates.

Some investments fail. Too many people view Kickstarter as an online store.
How Josh got 5000 real Twitterfollowers since yesterday
This was exactly my experience living both in SOMA and in Noe Valley at two different times in San Francisco. There was never any sense that the place we lived would be the place we'd be living 5 years from then. There was no realistic chance we'd ever raise kids there.
Wow, I just watched movie last week and my 14 year old watches this once a week along with Indie Game.

Anyone know about the turnout thus far?
Seems it started with just a normal outage: http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/12/12/tumblr-confirms-use...
Would template rendering benefit from a C extension like JSON encoding does?
Should be fun to see what happens when you get them to automatically blacklist their own sites... ;)
I'm a fan of sending myself chrome links I find on my phone to my tablet over NFC. There are other ways to do it... but that is by far the most gratifying.
to be fair, i don't think there were any evidence that Alex "recklessly" spent the money.
a lot of things could've happened for his disappearance: health issue, gf problems, family problems, got lost in the mountain, etc etc
Yes, they do. OpenERP might complex and buggy but my understanding is SAP, Oracle EBS are as bad or worse and cost bazillions.

Look at this recent ERP disaster for the AirForce .. DEAMS.

One billion spent, then scrapped.

Dod Audit report: [edit] correct one here: http://www.dodig.mil/audit/reports/fy12/DODIG-2012-140.pdf

News report: http://www.dailytech.com/USAF+Staff+Appalled+at+Wasting+1B+U...
You've described what's happened with me recently. My DFA light is flashing and it's time to get out of the rat race and control my own time. That's worth far more than the tiny chance at the jackpot.

I do, however, still hold onto the romantic notion that if you find a way to earn a living while doing what you love, the chances of hitting that jackpot are significantly higher.
I feel sorry for people who have built their careers around the fine art of crank turning, it is only a matter of time before their jobs are automated away.
Show HN: CallingVault, Google Voice for non-nerds
> Vector art is not often the holy grail as it seems. Take fonts, for instance. Even though formats like TrueType stores the data in vector format, numerous resolution-dependent "hints" have to be added to make it more readable.

While true, font hinting is thankfully finally going the way of the dodo. Cell phones and other handheld devices has very crisp fonts without any aliasing and hinting thanks to their high pixel density. The magic threshold is at about 150 dpi which when passed makes hinting redundant. Desktop displays are getting there, albeit slowly. To slowly for my taste. OS X already doesn't use hinting which is why if you are used to Windows fonts, os x fonts can look blurry. But with then new retina displays os x's text rendering simply looks amazing.
"unless the Project Creator is
unable or unwilling to fulfill the reward."

Read that again. If they haven't fulfilled their explicit promises, a refund is required.
This is just terrifying.