skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I understand it's not final, but it's offputting to novice contributors, and the promptness (literally minutes in this case) means that the contributer will be left confused (in this case thinking the content was completely deleted). Even if this speed is not representative, that it can happen will turn people away. How a community presents itself is incredibly important to growing it. Since that's a goal for the Wikimedia Foundation it's something they need to actively work on improving.
Facebook, is anybody listening?
In the real world 24x7 isn't realistic. As web services become integral to business we need a better SLA. #ha #outage
That's for an enterprise-level license -- the 'professional' license is $399: https://store.xamarin.com/
Actually Android and iOS make an equal amount of money for us. This was not true a year ago, when iOS sales were about 65% of our volume, but today it is almost exactly 50-50.
So MonoMac is going pro? Glad to see it will be supported.

http://www.mono-project.com/MonoMac

> the result of weekend hacking as our day to day work
> revolves around Mono's efforts on Linux servers, Linux
> desktops, Visual Studio integration and our mobile
> efforts. Luckily, it shares some components with MonoTouch.
Just out of curiosity, what is the relevance of this observation?

Are you saying that nations are irrelevant, and ethnicity is what really matters?
Is this a subtle entreaty to focus the brunt of America's educational efforts on specific ethnic subgroups so that the entire nation can have better results?

Instead of blindly downvoting, I really am interested in the point of this statement.
I think a lot of people think like you do, but wasn't that true when Facebook did this too? Weren't people upset for the exact very same reason?

And yet Facebook went ahead and did it, it pissed off a lot of people, and everybody got over it. Most users don't even realize that FB is not showing them everything anymore.

I really hope Twitter will do this, I think it would make their product so much more accessible and user friendly, if they manage to communicate it the right way and switch new users into it.

Nobody's stopping them from offering it as an option, like FB did.
That's specifically why we're moving to Linode + AWS / Rackspace for backups. Hardware is something we're not willing to deal with. My cofounder is good at / likes to deal w/ server software, but hardware is just a dealbreaker for us. We'd rather view the extra spent as an insurance policy on bad hardware.
I used Xamarin's Stripe library a few weeks ago. Super nice stuff.
The primary way you take in information on a site is via copy. You need to take in information in order to consider converting. Without copy, what could possibly get you to convert?

(Videos, yes, also good. But a video on a page without copy around it, telling you what you're going to watch and why you should, won't get clicked / watched nearly as much as one with. When you optimize that copy, you get more views of your video. Copy is huge.)
Yes, I know - that is the whole point of the article. What I meant is that they don't generally have a free team version. It would be better perhaps to have a limited free version for everyone, and then charge educators if they want a more advanced version rather than giving them the crown jewels for free. Just my opinion based on selling a similar offering to this market for over 15 years.
> Do you have a steady job? A mortgage? A family?

Yes, I'm a Googler. No mortgage right now but rent is pretty pricey. Yes, a wife, a toddler, a baby, two dogs, and two cats. Also a one hour commute, each way.

I also have:

https://github.com/munificent/

http://magpie-lang.org/

http://finch.stuffwithstuff.com/

http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/

You'd be surprised how much you can get done if you just throw half an hour a day at it.
For non-production usage (eg staging / development / hobby sites), you can also look Hetzner's "Server bidding". It's where they (dutch) auction off their slightly older servers, and there are some great deals there - currently, for example, there's a 12GB i7 with dual 1.5GB drives for €44 a month(including VAT), which I think is a great price.

The downside to Hetzner is their support is fairly brutal when it's outside their normal parameters: obvious hardware fails are replaced reasonably quickly (eg within an hour) - anything non-obvious and you'll batter your head against their support, or you'll have to pay extra to change hardware if you can't prove that it's their problem.

I had an EX4S and after a month I terminated it because it kept failing on a minimal Ubuntu install and they refused to do anything without proof or money, but have been very happy with a cheap 8GB dual core Athlon server I got through the Server Bidding process.
Oddly enough, there aren't that many (statistically significant) African Americans anywhere outside of America either... :)
The weirdest, wackiest and coolest sci/tech stories of 2012
I tried version 6 a few month ago because the small company I work for wanted to buy an ERP and I wanted to show them the ones available. I would like to warn anyone trying to use OpenERP. It's a mess, install it and try for yourself for a week or two before deciding on going for it. It's full of bugs. Their forum sucks, the community is made of people that don't want to share their solutions because they want to sell them, but that backfires cause I needed to show it to management but couldnt because all the errors. All that javascript interface is slow and as soon as you try to do something a bit out of the expected it starts giving lots of error for which you wont find a solution searching on the web. It's a crappy software they try to sell and rape you later with tech support.
Cool! We were an early user of stripe, launching with it on our store in July of 2011. Stripe is great.
Avengers footage, rotoscoped to look like a comic ;)
Similar to having a bag with lots of different people's hair and skin cells to dust over a crime scene.
Dereccion.gif is one.
Interesting. I'll admit, my draw to the platform is a 50/50 split between disliking Objective C (/XCode) and the possibility of sharing code between Android and iOS versions of an app. I guess more people are with you for the latter than the former these days.
The anti-intellectualism in this country is infuriating!

And it reaches to the highest levels, with creationist congressman and even anti-vaccination nuts like Dan Brown.

Only in America do people scoff at the work of science and academicians and put air quotes around the word "expert".
We've been surprised to discover some customers running Java code on iOS devices uses iKVM and Xamarin. So it seems to work.
>> and this is not even in the TOP 10, and the nº1 is Facebook followed by BBB12.

You will have to wait for the competition to make that video. It will be aptly titled "search bubbles zeitgeist" 2012 ;-) (semi joking, ... I have witnessed the "search bubble" and I love the fact that there are companies like DDG, Lycos and Blekko providing search and curated results! Wish them all well)

I know what you mean though. It is definitely a sign of our times. Huxley won and Orwell lost the crystal ball gazing contest. 1984 is gone (well, not entirely IMO) and we are all living in the Brave new world now. ;-P
The bigger problem is verifiability via citations to third-party sources, not really notability. If you can cite a good reference, in some kind of scholarly or otherwise decent source, and not written by the actual subject of the article, it typically stays in. I've written articles on some very obscure things, but they were well-cited, so nobody challenged them. My usual methodology is actually to start from a good source: pick up a book like Knuth's TAOCP, find algorithms he discusses that have no article, do a little searching to find a 2nd or 3rd source on the algorithm, then write a little article cited to those 2-3 sources. Haven't run into any problems doing things that way.

There didn't used to be as much emphasis on citations, but a mixture of hoaxes, libel controversies, and an influx of fringe-physics people led to a significant clampdown on unverified material around 2005-06. The good side of it is that the previous focus on notability is mostly gone: if you have good sources, it's ipso-facto notable, due to having, in fact, been noted in good sources. This is quite nice when I write articles on obscure subjects which will get only a handful of visits, but which are well-referenced. The downside is that subjects which are notable but for which there isn't good material to cite end up in an awkward place. I wrote a bit on that shift last year: http://www.kmjn.org/notes/wikipedia_notability_verifiability...
The initial data is fake.

Proof: http://o7.no/Z0huP7

I get emailed by them for every startup I'm involved with and that first email is mostly the same every time as you can see in that screenshot. (Compare it with the one posted in the article and you'll see).

They seem to be targeting startups and make it look like some big VC firms are visiting your site to get you interested. I'm not sure how they come up with the 'search terms', but I guess they could just look at your META-tags or make them up.

In their email they do say it's a "mock example", but still I find it very deceptive.
Yes, but (sorry to be immature) maybe register a different TLD so the product name doesn't sound so much like diarrhea?
I just launched a code snippet website, any suggestions?
Putnam is just a US competition.

IMO is international. And while the US does well, we haven't won since the mid-90s. In that same period of time China has won it like 15 times.

And the last time the US won the ACM Programming Contest is probably equally as long. And there we typically will only place one or two schools in the top 10 at best (although it's not a collection of our best programmers -- it is by school).
Did you skip my second paragraph? I completely agree with your point that observing a behavior now does not imply that it is optimal.

Of course I don't believe there is a "Monarchy" gene any more than I believe there is a juggling gene. These behaviors are too complex to be determined by any given gene. But probabilities and predispositions come into play. Genes that influence behaviors that create predispositions for certain complex behaviors in certain environments will still have selective pressure exerted on that 'ultimate cause' gene.
Yup, I assume that's the idea. I can't imagine many consumer banking accounts are hacked via hardware keylogger though. Presumably if you have physical access to a computer, you can usually install software on it anyway. A well positioned webcam could probably see what you're clicking on with the onscreen password prompt as well.
> if I actually need something that dynamic - which is almost never

The classic case of someone criticizing a screwdriver for not being a chisel. (And then saying, "Oh, look, see how well my chisel chisels?")
The functionality is definitely better, but I would have to agree, the design needs some serious help. It has become pretty clear lately that people don't like using ugly websites, even if they work better than their pretty counterparts...
Raspberry Rockets
Your criticism reads a bit like "This kitchen knife says it cuts amazingly fast and clean, but as a lumberjack, I have to say I find it's horrible at cutting."
This is exactly the problem...

Forking is one solution but wikimedia could spin up forks of its own with different standards and pull from the different sources. Ideally, you could make a wikipedia account and maybe configure which subwikis you wanted to pull from.
I use the free community version of rallydev to manage all my stories and defects. It's definitely a fully featured agile project management tool and may be more UI than you are looking for. I have found it useful because I can clearly track progress, involve friends if need be and have one place for everything.
Assassins Creed 3 A lot of game action and adventure
"our site can't be hacked, it has an SSL cert!"
Astronomers locate a miniature quasar in Andromeda
Lately I've been using embedded chromium to solve the write once/run anywhere/look great everywhere problem. While java isn't going away anytime soon, it's nice to see it incrementally lose applicability.
Maybe I'm a whiny edge case but this drives me nuts because gists don't show up in google reader or when I use readability.
Why not bump the price up to what you'd consider a non-crummy margin, factoring in those additional prices?
This sales-letter style seems more prevalent in eBook/video downloads than SaaS (though we've all seen 37signals' A/B tests). Reeks of a 'PAY $200 TO SEE HOW TO LOSE 100LBS IN 2 WEEKS'.

edit: actually, with no offence intended - your book's website is one of the ones I was thinking of. I was seriously considering buying it from the HN title but was totally put off by the website. I'm sure it's a fantastic book and I'm sure I'd benefit from it, but the website left a bad taste in my mouth.
Faster Rails partial rendering and caching. 78% improvement of test application
Internet Explorer vulnerability lets hackers track your mouse movements
[Moved comment to other thread...]
and this surprises you? you forgot porn
There are mentions in the public ally available meetings of the C++ committee.
if you dont like itdont use, mother fucker
The highest jump in history a crazy thing
Startin' to look like Java (with its fluent-interface pattern) :). Keep it up!

thumbs up
That was supposed to be my line too.

Seconded ;-)

P.S: I am actually semi-serious in a way. I have actually witnessed the search bubble on colleagues' PC vs. mine so, I'm all for it.
>It costs $399 for an individual license, so there is a cost barrier.

Well, being free never made Java on the Desktop go anywhere, anyway.
Or you could go direct to the Google page [0] and hover over the coloured stripe at the bottom.

[0] http://www.google.com/zeitgeist/2012/#maia-signature
I did not know that. (My only experience here is that the Dropbox SDK's login screen used to link to the website, which linked to the subscription page, and our app was rejected until the Dropbox SDK removed that link.) Thanks!
They're getting a little wise, but that didn't stop me from receiving spam to "else@example.com" a few weeks ago.
True, I could save my text, and try to merge it into the much larger and older C++ page. My suspicion is that such a large addition to the general C++ page would not last long.
>The other problem is the lack of linux support for their SDK. Seems rather odd, considering Mono's roots.

Didn't Mono get a lot of hate and vitriol from the Linux crowd over their support for C# and .NET on Linux and then was pulled from Ubuntu's default install because of it? I can understand why they would be shy about support if all they got were brickbats and hate mail.

http://np237.livejournal.com/24065.html

http://techrights.org/2008/03/24/mono-danger-to-linux/

http://techrights.org/2011/11/04/uds-on-mono/

http://www.itworld.com/it-managementstrategy/222227/bansheeg...

http://linux.slashdot.org/story/09/06/15/1251228/Mono-Squeez...

The first link is a very entertaining read.
>Alpha Males are by definition strong providers, since they get preferential access to food

That doesn't follow. The male gets preferential access, but that doesn't mean he shares that access with his offspring. And even if he did, he would still have a larger than average number of offspring thus the amount each one gets may still be lower than the beta male's offerings to his own.

Of course in practice whether the alpha is the best provider is determined by how the community is organized. In a alpha-male-with-harem setup, the alpha is the best provider. In other arrangements this isn't always the case.
Code as Craft: Design for Continuous Experimentation with Dan McKinley
Show HN: Flash Sales site for Designers and Developers
Yep. NIF is such an old project that it was used as the "digitizer" in the original TRON movie. Still no progress.
Unbelievable. :-D! Even PSY wouldn't have imagined this kind of success for that song. Although I suspect, a lot had to do with the spontaneity of the accompanying music video.
People have a need to feel superior to other people. I mean, I get it, you're super smart because you're able to critique programming languages. But at the end of the day, this guy was trying to learn a little about coding and did. And that's pretty cool.

People have lost their sense of wonder, and it's been replaced with cynicism and egomania. C'est la vie.
Reminds me that INTERCAL rejects programs that use too few PLEASES (program is "insufficiently polite") or too many (program is "excessively polite").
25% of All New Queries on Lean Domain Search Have Never Been Searched For Before
Speaking purely from the server-side of things, Java (the ecosystem) has great libraries and frameworks for webapps and middleware. It also has OSGi, which solves a unique set of problems that aren't addressed by any other language ecosystem that I know of.

This is all in spite of Java the language, which is kind of a lame duck. Java 8 should improve things if it ever gets released.
Microsoft Holds All Possibilities To Bury Google And Apple
This year iPhone is trending on Twitter (http://2012.twitter.com/en/trends.html) and Facebook (http://www.theverge.com/2012/12/12/3758102/facebook-stories-...) but not on Google. Something is not right.
http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=iphone%205,%20samsung...
Pretty sure it's comprehensive...
It's the quality of the experience, GUI, not just the resource-hoging of Java Desktop app.

And even for that "It runs for day's on end without being a significant burden to the rest of the system" is hardly something to write home about.
SparkleShare, an open source Dropbox alternative, sees first release
The video started playing automatically for me, no interaction required.

shrug
facts know no ethnicity
Use re:me and stop forgetting about important text messages
How do you deal with hardware failure when you have a dedicated box at Hetzner? Specifically if/when something fails are there spares etc?

Just to play devil's advocate, it's not unknown for large VPS providers to have major issues. This is something you need to consider regardless of whether you're using dedicated or VPS.
It would be nice is someone would open source some of these cloud measurement applications. There are so many these days that do exactly the same thing. Open sourcing this could help make it the de-facto leader.
So actual collaboration to create content should take place outside of the context of the canonical wiki, and the wiki itself should only be used for quasi-final drafts? How is that consistent with the nature of a wiki?

What, exactly, is the problem with having work-in-progress articles present in the main wiki? What argument is there for delitionism other than some obsessive-compulsive desire to hold the wiki to some arbitrary standard of orderliness?
It's not a sign of catching on, but of using an old email validation pattern from the days of Matt's Script Archive (seemingly). It's the sign of a website that has used cargo-code programmers. You're probably just seeing it more because you're trying to use plus-addressing more often (confirmation bias), but it's been this way for years and years. It's actually better now than it used to be.
Yes, Microsoft Could Muscle-Out Apple And Google In Mobile OS Market
The Difference Between Advertising And Branding
Depp to Star as a Supercomputer in Christopher Nolan Film About the Singularity
Mobile layouts or an app would be really nice for on the go purposes.
Map of all Stack Exchange sites (except the 3 biggest)
I agree with your point that it is a good thing it doesn't take hundreds of moderators to delete a Wikipedia article.

However, while the actual state of Wikipedia is much better than your alternate future, what we have right now is also extremely dangerous and misleading. Today it is composed of accurate, well-written sentences and inaccurate, self-aggrandizing, or just schizophrenic sentences. But they're all intermingled.

Pick any article, say block cipher modes, CTR in particular:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cipher_block_chaining#Counter_....

It starts off ok, but then heads off the weeds with "Nevertheless, there are specialized attacks like a Hardware Fault Attack that is based on the usage of a simple counter function as input.[14]" This is a reference to a minor paper in a conference I've never heard of, likely added by the authors themselves.

"Fix it yourself", comes the cry. But without some sort of educated review board, you end up having to explain the background of the field in order to get around to why a given reference is not noteworthy. Often, the choice comes down to who spends more time on Wikipedia. Guess who doesn't?

Meanwhile, a generation is growing up with this as their only example of an "encyclopedia".
Yes, but that's my point. What is the reward here, and do you still achieve it if you cheat?

If the cheater who fails to learn anything is rewarded with a successful career, what does that say about the real value of the material he didn't learn? If he gets a job based on his credential and then performs well, then the material really didn't matter, and so we as a society are wasting vast amounts of time and money subsidizing education that doesn't matter.

On the other hand, if the cheater is going to get found out by his lack of skill, he won't achieve a reward and his cheating is irrational and self-defeating, and not something we need to worry about. It's self-punishing behavior.
It would be really useful if you could run both PHP 5.x and hypothetical PHP 6 code in the same interpreter process, so everyone wouldn't need to move over to the “more correct” version at once. I wonder just how hard that is to do. The approach doesn't seem to have been considered for Python 3, but, if possible, it would have saved lots of hassle.
Phablet, yes. Definitely a strong niche.

Stylus No. I have 3 co workers who have Galaxy Notes (or Note II) and none of them use the stylus while I've seen them. They all say it's nice, but none admit to it being key or even useful.

There is no killer app for the stylus, when an onscreen-keyboard or finger would do just as well. Even finger-based signatures are pretty easy with modern smartphones' capacative touchscreens.

The only thing a stylus allows is for UI elements and hit areas to be smaller - and not many folks (other than Win8 geeks it seems) are clamoring for that on their smartphone or tablet. In fact, I know folks who run iPhone apps on their iPad because the hit area is 4x larger and much more easy to operate.
Video tour of space station by commander
I have no problem at all, whether they track mouse movement or anything else.

You know why? because I use Chrome.
To be pedantic, ObjFW is an alternative framework, not an alternative runtime. They do include a runtime for architectures that do not have a native ObjC runtime, but that runtime is API compatible with Apple's. Since they use the same compilers (clang and gcc) they have the same inlining limitations and the compiler will generate calls into the runtime in the exact same places.
True, I did miss that. At some point I started glazing over reading that block of text at the top of the page.

While there may well be good reasons not to, I have long been surprised wikipedia has not moved to all new pages living in a starter section, until they are ready to be promoted to the full site. Multi layering would also give somewhere for less well researched topics to live.