skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
[this is a digression on learning styles]

Ah. The VAK model. I looked briefly for scientific support for this "theory" on the Internet, but I couldn't really find any. Wikipedia suggested it's a theory with little to no support, and other locations didn't show ANYTHING that would convince me such a thing as "visual" or "auditory" learners exist. Below is a bit of my thinking on the subject.

I am inclined to think that these "learning styles" are bogus, that every person can and will learn in many different "styles" depending on the situation, specifically it's been shown that every normal (and even very young) human can learn just by observing other people's behavior. (One of the classics - Bandura: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observational_learning)

I met many people (mostly in the soft skills training circles, same people who tend to work in psychodynamic therapy systems but went to business training for the money) who claim that "there are people of different learning styles and you should take that into account when instructing them/teaching them", but when I ask about details, nobody can explain what's the difference between these learning styles, and what is the belief that they even exist based on (e.g. a "source" :).

I could go on, but I think you get the point :)

While I do understand people may consciously prefer certain learning _settings_ (much more than a "style"), I doubt it's the categorization of a learner that makes or breakes such a complicated topic as "changing a habit" or "making a change in life" [based on a book / other 'intervention'].

[edit: read up the Criticism section on this Wikipedia page if you are interested in the validity of auditory/visual/kinesthetic model - VAK: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_styles]
I agree that it is unreasonable, and is a bit shocked that there are countries where receiving an sms can cost you money... But a reasonable solution to incoming data is to enable NAT, it isn't much of a hinder for a tech savvy user and is otherwise better for the 99.99% of the users.

My phone (Nexus S) always responds to the pings I send. Which kind of makes sense, the default is to have a constant connection to google anyway (so that it can receive any push messages). Apparently google already made the decision that it is worth the battery drain. And android has already gotten plenty of bad reputation for applications misbehaving. While I'm sure some telcos are misbehaving in all ways imaginable as well it is probably nothing compared to the apps users gladly install for themselves.
I wish he had succeed. Digital, not just email, encryption is a threat to national security.
I am not sure I understand what you mean. Word-splitting is performed by the "for x in y" construct, using the IFS variable, so by default if you have a file called "foo bar.mp4" the command line from the article:

for i in *.mp4; do ffmpeg -i "$i" "${i%.mp4}.mp3"; done

will result in executing:

ffmpeg -i foo foo.mp3
ffmpeg -i bar.mp4 bar.mp3

Which is obviously not what was meant. So it's a good habit to learn to loop over files in a directory in a different way.
> well-formedness is ultimately determined on a gradient
> scale

So you're willing to admit there's a scale. That's great. Use stylistic rules as a guide for where you are on that scale; they're a brilliant heuristic. After all, it's not all relative.

Once you've accumulated sufficient experience, you'll know when to ignore a rule.
The framing of the site as overly picky is brilliant. I disagreed with maybe 90% of the suggestions it made on some example text. But no matter how silly the errors and suggested fixes are, the criticism can be defused by noting that the site stated up-front it was going to be nitpicking.

(That said, I can't imagine actually using this except for the humor value of seeing suggestions like replacing "half" in "half a year" with "one-half" or "moiety".)
The Copyright Monopoly Is A Legal Featherweight Compared To Property Rights
Perhaps your rxvt is statically linked? Mine is 104K (Ubuntu 12.04, x86_64) vs. 424K for xterm.
See my reply to StavrosK below
I think Google Wallet will solve this problem: https://developers.google.com/commerce/wallet/online/

It makes the shopping experience as frictionless as when buying an app.
You're right, their sales haven't quadrupled, but to be fair, across the company they haven't remained stagnant either. The best proxy I could find for sales was annual revenue, and that shows 3.2x growth for the 12 year period:

FY 2000: $22.96 billion
FY 2012: $73.72 billion

Now, I'm sure financial geeks will pick holes in this simple comparison. And of course I realize that company revenue is heavily weighted by Windows and Office, and increasingly servers and tools, and much less so by direct consumer purchases.

[2000] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/press/2000/jul00/q00-4e...

[2012] http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/press/2012/jul12/07-19fy...
I didn't see this as the takeaway from the article. If anything, I think his point was that you shouldn't get a liberal arts degree with no real plan and expect to find a job out of school. Certainly with additional work and effort, as I'm sure you did, you'll find a job; but just like you, it'll involve an employable skill rather than a sheet of paper that says "bachelor of arts" on it.

I think his point with tech degrees is that you can get one of those, have no real plan, and still get a job straight out of school.
Debian Testing. Prior to this I used Ubuntu 12.04. I didn't upgrade to Ubuntu 12.10 because I decided I didn't want to give my support to a distro which leaks private data on purpose, by default, without warning, for money.
Flashing a Kindle Fire with CyanogenMod
An interesting point he talks about is that growing up at the intersection between science and art lead him towards mindfulness. This reminded me of pgs Hackers and Painters connection.
Maybe people will start to refactor the worst offenders. It takes more than a slight improvement to displace software that's widely used, but I'm sure there are things that we use that could be an order of magnitude better (according to some metric). Gmail was able to win converts because it was an order of magnitude better than the competition.
Yes. Although I am in favor of life extension, I worry about the consequences for politics if people like Fidel Castro or Kim Jong Il were to live for 500 years. Or for that matter, for tech if Steve Jobs or Larry Ellison lived that long.
Yeah it's mentioned in the article, sorry.
Google, for a company that reputes to perform
services, is probably the single most consumer-
unfriendly company on the planet.

They're really not. This is overstated.

Try dealing with some kind of loss-making monopoly, where the people who work there don't care or may even have a perverse grudge against customers and want to cause them harm.

Look at the way united airlines treated a passenger whos guitar they busted up: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YGc4zOqozo

There are companies who wage campaigns against their customers. They have a policy of not paying credit notes except under extreme pressure. But they might also have call centre staff with no job tracking system call you to chase you for your bill, where the staff don't even know whether you've paid it or not. Why? Because some stats somewhere said that bullied customers are more likely to pay.

Google is flawed but has some endearing things going for it: the employees are intelligent people, they tend to be caring types.
Would be great to hear some metrics and your next steps. What did the MVP invalidate/validate? Has your initial assumptions changed?
“The Tinkerers”: How corporations kill creativity
> At the risk of being slightly cynical I'd like to point out you can actually phone and talk to someone if you're having problems paying them (i.e payments via Google Wallet) just not after they've taken your money.

Two Nexus 7s I ordered for Christmas were not delivered and then returned to sender without contacting me. Google not only sorted this out within a day or so, I spoke to people on the phone and by email with a quick turnaround.

I've heard many horror stories, but I just wanted to add that they're definitely not universal. The fault was not with Google but they still sorted it out to the best of their abilities within a day or two.
Saudi Arabia Stakes a Claim on the Nile
I think the biggest problem here is that your target market isn't willing to pay for this problem to be solved.

I'm not sure exactly what your app does from the screenshots, but it looks like it's a way to email a receipt for a purchase to a customer? Wouldn't the business owner probably want this feature integrated with their Point of Sale system or something else, rather than retype everything into their iPhone or iPad? Or is this meant to replace a Point of Sale system?
Quad-core Sony Xperia Z with 1080p display
Alright. Least vague response ever.

http://marlowesf.com/ <- EAT THERE
I would be very surprised if it wasn't possible to compile the kernel using Clang.

Hmm. Does anyone know if someone has tried to make a Linux dist based on the similar tools the BSD world have?

I realize they probably would have to be modified quite heavily considering the architechture of BSD, but I've seen stranger things done in computing :)
Someone posts a really neat language tool, and the top-voted post is not talking about the technical merits or interest of the tool, but is instead a pretentious rant about how real language is what ordinary people speak and understand. You know, phrases like "Cartesian attitudes" and "identical system using shared constructions". This is the descriptivist-approved language for the masses. Using 'whereas' instead of 'while' is an elitist habit that must be stopped, whereas name-dropping dead philosophers out of context is the mark of a humanist.

Anyway, I'm primarily interested in hacking, not in seeing some angry nerd on the Internet make excuses to take down someone else's technically challenging work.
i really just want intellij compatability. sbt doesnt offer that. it's incremental compiling is not useful because I do my java dev in intellij. So SBT offered me nothing that maven didnt already have, minus a few weirdo things (like putting the scala version in the name/version of a scala library).

To me, I had to give up scala due to lack of tool support. Maybe if you are used to an emacs/gcc paradigm, but I've gotten quite productive in intellij, as much or more than any C++-styled development. Why have another window with compiler output when you could have it inline with the code and using the typographic features?

I could go either way, but with Java, intellij I have 'develop and run anywhere' going on. Sure there are some super edge causes at the highest performance profiles, but that is always hardware specific, and unless you are developing on the same server class boxes you wont find it.
For modern desktop-related tasks, a desktop UI certainly should be better than a commandline, sure. (I still prefer CLI for servers though.)

And if there weren't already better GUIs available, then Unity would certainly be a revelation.

The complaints though are coming from people who are already accustomed to other better windowing interfaces, including (in some cases) previous versions of Gnome, which arguably makes Unity one giant UI regression.

I'd like to deftly sidestep that whole flamewar though and merely say, "KDE is nice."
"[...] who says entertainment has to be free?"

I would: just think about busking. You get the service first, and you leave a gratuity afterwards in an amount you believe is appropriate, but you decide if, and what, to pay.

At a strip club you might pay a cover charge, and the dancer gratuities.

The cover charge, in this case, is basically your own ISP and equipment costs, as well as any costs of physical media you are copying. If you copy and transmit bits based on that media, at your expense, to a friend, that friend is now in the position to give a gratuity that they weren't before. Copying isn't theft, it's the best advertisement possible: word-of-mouth.

As much as we want to, we can't prevent side-viewing: listening to other people's TVs, seeing their lap-dances, or copies of DVDs that were on the Internet, etc, or saving anything on the Internet for later... (Trying costs rights.) The one-time fees (cover charges) have already been paid in all those cases (the opportunity for side-viewing wouldn't exist otherwise), and the ephemeral copies on the Internet are now strictly opportunities for gratuity income: 7 billion of them... Great!

This is about more than entertainment. Copyright just keeps people's heads in the mud, in the same way patents are used as an excuse to withhold life-saving medicine, and worst of all: it keeps creator income at it's lowest possible level, albeit it's least risky... But a guaranteed $1/month is still worst than (7 billion * Probability of gratuity)/month.

The moral arguments aside, IMHO, we are moving from a pay-first reality for intangibles to a gratuity reality. I don't think copyright is even needed for the latter, and I think it's a win, so IMHO, any moral arguments about getting entertainment for free are moot.
Except when the hormone storm hits, you will rationalize to yourself exactly why you need to reverse those decisions with the greatest ease, if that's what fits best.

Hormones control a substantial part of your life, no matter whether you like it or not, and they influence and control a large part of the decision you think you made rationally.
A workaround that I like a little more: http://javascriptisawesome.blogspot.com/2011/11/setinterval-...
A colleague of mine was a finance major and said in one of his higher level finance classes on the first day the professor asked, "Who wants to make a million dollars?". Of course, everyone raised their hands and he responded, "ok, go write a book."
> I said we wouldn't have big budget Hollywood films.[...]Well, it's the copyright system that makes those products viable.

You'd have a tough time coming up with empirical data to support that hypothesis.
"Please note that precompiled third-party packages are not available for 9.1-RELEASE at the time of release. See the Availability section below for further details."

"With the exception of systems relating to the building and testing of packages, all FreeBSD.org infrastructure has now been brought back online. A full audit of the third party package build infrastructure code ("pointyhat") and package testing infrastructure ("redports") continues, and neither system will be brought back online until audits are complete."
The college experience is still pretty worthwhile, but the consequences of taking out loans in order to attend college are gettin uglier.

My wife and I are both working in service fields - I am a teacher, and she is a counselor. We are both good at what we do. But we are at our income ceilings. We are paying as much in student loan payments as we are in housing costs. some of my colleagues will be in debt for the rest of their lives.

Going to college is not the same straightforward decision it used to be.
you can edit the pom.xml file, and have your project adjusted immediately. intellij will download and add the new jar to the classpath... BAM

intellij is really a much better experience in developing than eclipse. Lots of fit and finish things, also intellij is very keyboard-centric, so whereas eclipse had lots of graphical widgety things, intellij has all your normal day to day stuff fully keyboard accessible. It's the closest to emacs in an IDE I've ever seen.
Ask HN: Trademarking your Startup
I am in the final throws of launching my startup. A name has been chosen (which I have grown quite attached to), and now its time to address trademarking. Its a bootstrapped startup, using what time and money I can save from my day job, and $18k+ with single-class global registration is so far out of my league I was wondering:

1) Is a trademark important in this day and age? I already hold the domain - isn't that enough?

2) If i DONT have the trademark, could someone else register it and stop me trading under that name?

3) As a generic web application, what classes and communities should I be targeting to get good coverage for the least expense?

4) What sort of protection do other HN startups tend to go for when launching their products?
I read it too. You can shoot me an email if you want, I'd be interested in knowing what you find special in that book.
gnome-terminal does it and probably the others based on the VTE widget also do.
A Fracking Surprise in Texas
Why blog? Ten things I learned about blogging this year
Do any of you just avoid 'this' and write your Javascript like infix Scheme? You can define objects via JSON literals with function values, and the result seems both simpler to think about and more pleasant to read. (JS engines are tuned for thissy code instead, I think unfortunately, but you can fall back to using prototypes where it makes a difference.)
Maybe you should give a try at pentadactyl (vimish behavior of firefox) http://5digits.org/pentadactyl/
No kvm virtio drivers?
I actually tried the Cinnamon Mint boot CD last night. It seems like a nice mix between the 2. It's not as extreme on the effects as KDE while still having enough to smooth out the experience. I'll quite probably be trying Cinnamon as my primary desktop environment in a few days.
Was using an input tag for the demo. changed it to button. Thanks for informing.
I am not sure that's quite what you want. Declaring x as a 'var' does not make it a property on the global object. Your example will return an 'undefined'.

I think this is what you want

"use strict";
this.x = 1;

var ret = (function() {
"use strict";
return this.x;
}).call(this);

console.log(ret); //returns 1
Has this actually ever happened to anyone?
Pretty nice feature list, for a point release.
Make sure you check out the new stuff coming in FreeBSD 10: http://wiki.freebsd.org/FreeBSD10
Thanks for the link!

I had to go to the mirror and try the little experiment described in the intro.

Not totally convinced yet, gotta try with someone as witness. ;)
Question, doesn't the full configuration require you to put your config stuff in multiple files? A lot of files?

The sbt 'directory of configuration' was always a bummer for me. The single pom.xml is a nice mechanism. Also maven has good CI compatibility.

The way I think of it is that maven has a good way of specifying a build. The mvn command is the slow, but complete, way of building. The normal development lifecycle is to load your maven model into an IDE then go from there, using IntelliJ's incremental build support, etc.

SBT in other words, solves a problem I don't have.

The other major problem is last year, SBT was a fucking train wreck between 0.7, 0.8, 0.9 and 0.10. Now that we are a YEAR out from that yeah sure maybe it's a lot better. I'd give it another year before I'd seriously try it again.

In the mean time, I am more interested in kotlin for sane static typed JVM languages, and clojure for real functional sauce. Scala is too slow for me :-/
Seriously, this post again? These are not black and white issues like every article on HN would lead you to believe.
There is something similar to the "straight up or down vote" mentality many people take towards media

I think while in lawmaking, it's crazy to think you can do that, I think it's crazy to expect people to accept a copyright regime that supports bundling and timeshifting.
Hate it with a passion, even to the point where now I make a note of them and try to use a competitor, assuming anything ever sees the light of day.

Virtually none of them have. After a few naive sign-ups I've learned better and never will again. Total waste of my time.

Does that answer your question?
These are WAY better than Font Awesome, thank you.
Conflicts that kill startups - Infographic
Nope. Either way, speech synthesis isn't the hard part; having natural cadences and useful things being said is.

The less your animatronic creature does, the greater you project your own emotions onto it, and more likely you are to find it realistic or compelling or interesting or natural. Poor robotic speech instantly kills that empathy. Think about R2-D2's nonsensical beeps (that express emotion tonally) versus C3-PO's obnoxious prattling.

If you're trying to make it be "helpful" by telling you status information, how many times have you been frustrated when someone gives you directions, or is telling you about a problem narratively instead of in terms of reproducible steps? Speech is very inefficient, but for empathizing, Furbish was great.
> Supporting Linux is bothersome to the point that Red Hat run a lucrative business doing so.

I'm not sure what you're trying to say with this.

Supporting Windows is bothersome, to the point that thousands of companies run lucrative businesses doing so.

My personal experience is that supporting Linux in a business setting can be done with far fewer people than supporting Windows, and that seems to be a common experience.
Not just "science-y" imaging gear.

I'm scanning slides today with a Nikon Coolscan 5000ED, and it's a full 16 bits per channel of R, G, and B, and 16 bits of infrared (48 bits + 16 bits). The "raw" TIFFs are 182 MB, while the final JPEGs range between 2.2 and 6.9 MB.
Worse examples have never ever been a good excuse.
I wish I spent the time trying to learn vIm learning something which is actually productive instead of hoping to have a better editing/writing flow with some deprecated, obscure CLI editor with a way too steep learning curve.
"Going to college is not the same straightforward decision it used to be."

Honestly, (and you've basically said this), taking out significant loans to go to college is not the same straightforward decision it used to be.

I understand that for some people it's simply not possible to go to college without taking on debt. I don't think this is the case for the vast majority of people. If someone would have made 18 year old me more aware of the burden that not going to a state school and working a job or two during my four years was going to be, I would have been a lot less likely to do it. Sure, I had fun, and I ended up without a lot of debt anyway, but it wasn't worth paying interest on for the better part of a decade.
YouTube Ban Lifted in Pakistan, for 3 Minutes
Your blog post is all over the place.
I've been programming since I was 7
Each hat is independently red-blue 50/50.
First Android Rom with Kurdish Language - Hacker News
Why? A hyphen isn't necessary there. It's just apposition: a checker of style of language.
I understand what they mean, but that does not make it right. I actually like uzbl, but it is neither lightweight, nor does it follow the "Unix philosophy". By their standards, you could say that MS Word follows the Unix philosophy because, well, it does only one thing (editing texts) and some even say it does a good job at it.
Yes, I am exaggerating, but an important aspect of the "Unix philosophy" is that this "one thing" a tool does should not be easily decomposable. For instance, 'cat' does actually several things (it opens a file, reads a stream, outputs it, closes the file, etc.), but it wouldn't make sense to decompose it further. "Rendering a webpage" is not one simple task, but requires hundreds of steps which actually could be splitted into separate tools. Now, such a toolset, which separately deals with stuff like ECMAscript, CSS, HTML,etc., that would interest me very much.
I had eagerly tried MATE for a while now. Only when I tried it last night (1.4) did it work well. I am a happy camper and feel much more at home with GNOME 2.
When you look at the problems our democracy has, probably the biggest one is the "low information voter." The ignorant electorate that says they want government out of our lives, but keep your hands off Medicare and Social Security, for example.

== Puhleeeeeeez.
If someone is using an Android phone as a glorified feature phone, does that still count as "computing"?
The suckless community are die hard fans of the good old UNIX and C. They only release projects written in C and RC(a bourne shell clone ported from plan9).