skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I got a Lumia 822 (Verizon-only offering) and I have mixed feelings about it. I love the Live Tiles but things like IE10 Mobile really frustrate me. There is no Flash support so I can't go to certain sites (like Beatport Sounds). There are sites that don't render properly and overall the text is rather small and I haven't figured out a way to increase the size yet (not sure if it is the smaller screen size to blame or there is just not a way to increase that size).

One thing that I have found to be an annoyance is the search button on the bottom of the phone. No matter what it will bring me to the Bing search, which is good unless it is hit by accident. There is an archery game that I enjoy that has you press and drag to aim and quite often I'm brought to the search screen because my finger goes out of the screen area and hits the search icon. My fault? Of course, but it is incredibly frustrating.

The other thing I hate is volume control. There are only two. One for in call volume and then one for the ring tone. That seems great, except that the ring tone volume also controls headphone/media volume. If I want my ringtone low then my volume for youtube will be low. If I want to my ringtone to be loud (which I haven't been able to get, even with the volume turned all the way up to 30 out of 30 I can still barely hear it) and so will all my media. I wasn't happy with my previous Android phone (HTC Evo 4G) but at least my volume for media was separate from my volume for ringtone.

Overall, I'm happy with it and some of the addons from Nokia are amazing; such as an app that uses augmented reality and shows various attractions (restaurants, gas stations, etc) in the area while you are holding up your camera. It will mark them on your screen as well as tell you how far you are from that location and the ability to get quick reviews. Plus it shows a compass in the upper right which allows you to know which direction it is in. While there are major issues, in my eyes, that need to be fixed, I still think the phone is better than the Android phone I had before and for only $30 with a new plan (due to $20 trade in credit and just Verizon slashing the price) you can't really go wrong.
Because systems only crash when they're maintained by other people?
insurance can help as well. I'm not sure if they have errors and ommissions for type of business your in. Also, for $350 you can do a patent search which could find potential patents in your area. which could be over kill. Also, a personal liability rider can add a layer of protection. If someone sues they not only do they have to deal with your lawyers but your insurance companies attorneys as well.
They are getting OT/Holiday pay I'm sure. So they will be ok.
A Self-Made Man Looks At How He Made It
Have you been through residency or are you pulling out "4 years ought to be enough" to be a specialist out of thin air?
Were you making jokes at Auschwitz too?
Clearly the work of "The Grinch who Stole Christmas...."
How to convert DVD to WMV with DVDFab DVD Ripper?
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To be fair, many of the folks on this site probably don't much care either. If you've got an Apple developer license, you can put rather a lot on your phone that Apple wouldn't let through the store.

... and of course, if you Jailbreak your phone you can put anything you damn well please on there.
Sounds like an interesting story but the body content is virtually undetectable under the floating sidebar.
But it does make it harder to read.
Best c++ book is "The c++ programming language" by Bjarne.

I own the 3rd special edition: http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/C-Programming-Language-Speci...

and have pre-ordered the 4th edition which includes c++11 info: http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/C-Programming-Language-Bjarn...

I've only probably read like 5 c++ books, but this one kills all the others for explaining how things work, teaching good programming style, and giving you a great all round understanding.
haha. ikr, about a dozen of us went over each other and were clicking for abt a min
Just poking in on this, does anyone have a graph of outages over time? I'm wondering if it has been increasing or decreasing; and therefore if amazon is getting better at managing it's demand. Bonus points if it compares the size of the customer base over time in comparison or relation.
Not many people realize this, but Seattle is the highest latitude major city in the US, at approximately the same latitude as Paris. Most Seattlites also do not have air conditioning. But most everywhere else does. The vast majority of American cities have climates much closer to Madrid or Rome.
I definitely agree, but I have a lot of trouble staying disciplined and focused on one thing. I get distracted and chase the next great idea I have rather than sticking with something and running with it. Thanks for your input.
> many of the folks on this site probably don't much care either.

Because most of the people on this site aren't actually hackers, they're businessmen who use technology to make money. The "hacker" label is just used to appear hip.
With Ghostery it doesn't even open.
Edit: right click the overlay, inspect element and delete the overlay div.
I don't know the Netflix contract but I've been involved with a few big (telco) SLAs. The penalties are usually calculated with a points-system and a multiplier that raises according to the duration/impact of an outage.

E.g. the first 15 minutes of an outage may cost 1 point per minute, 15-60 minutes 2 points, and so on. You also have multipliers for the severity (partial or full outage, customer impact, affected countries, etc.), time-of-day, and so on.

Collected points may then later be traded in for dollars or a nice lawsuit.

Corporate lawyers love to go nuts on these things, an enterprise SLA can easily span a hundred pages of legalese.
Yes, I think you are right. My language was not precise enough.

I wanted to describe a coder with little experience; tendency to overdesign; tendency to use 'design patterns' with no reason; tendency to build very elaborate designs; tendency to use the same pattern everywhere.

I think that "intelligent fool" and maybe "baby with a hammer" fit that description.

As to spelling errors, I'd suggest to try ignoring these and try to get the gist instead. Quite a few people here (including me) are not native English speakers.
I don't know if it's selection bias at work but I've always felt that this community had a large group of influential and actual hackers. From low level stuff to language maintainers to people who worked on space shuttles. If anything, the fact that I rub e-elbows with these folks is a great feeling. In the company of giants, if you will.
I found it confusing too. Here's the place where it was originally posted to: https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20121222010436-4...
Assumption: Your business uses Amazon's EBS (because heh, you need to store your data somewhere between EC2 instance reboots/creation/destruction). EBS is down. What do you do? Hope AWS engineers get it back up fast? You can't do a damn thing about its reliability; you're stuck with whatever reliability Amazon has decided to deliver (which I think we can agree is much less than a company with revenue can depend on).

When you build your own system, you decide how reliable you want it. Otherwise, you can use Amazon and just live with the continual problems.
Ask HN: MVP for validating intended customers - what is too far?
So I understand the reasoning to MVP things - especially getting validation on your idea. I have heard of people accepting credit cards however not storing, nor charging customers but just getting a proof of intent to purchase on their product - thus offering validation on the idea.

Personally I don't agree with this approach - and that's not even approaching the potential legality of it. What does HN think? Where should you draw the line with an MVP when attempting to validate your product?
Drat. Just got hit by this. PS3 player is totally not working.
In what ways will this be useful? I imagine if a rocket carries a payload into space it wouldn't be able to land vertically like this, or is that the intention?

Either way, very interesting
I was asking myself the same question the other day.

Well, for now if you're using/know Rails, maybe you could take a look at this: https://github.com/RailsApps/rails-recurly-subscription-saas

There are also other great Ruby gems/Rails projects that do Authentication (https://github.com/plataformatec/devise) , E-commerce (https://github.com/spree/spree), etc! That's why I love the Ruby community.
Interesting tooltip too if you mouse over the pic :)

> "Perl, I'm leaving you"
The objective is to have reusable stages. Instead of letting them burn up in the atmosphere, they land vertically to be reused.
> You're basically arguing against the visualization of information.

Not really. The data isn't online. If anything, I'm arguing for keeping it analog?
10 things health foods won’t tell you
"An Idiots Guido to Haskell" ??
I would read that ;-)
Are mass shootings really random events? A look at the US numbers
Technion Nation - Building Israel the Start-Up Nation
As far as I know, they still do this in India. The ethanol that we used in my 12th grade Chemistry lab (back in 2008) was denatured with ~3% methanol.
+1. Sikuli was a dream find a few months ago when I had to upload 100s of images for a rater survey to a locked-down LimeSurvey instance (no ftp allowed). 20 minutes and I had a functioning script that pushed all of the upload buttons and paste the next filename in sequence.
Try Ubuntu 12.10 online
Where is grain alcohol cheaper than denatured?
Come on! They scrapped almost everything because it sucked and everyone knew it. Judging EJBs as a pile of shit is quite deserving. I mean this as a programmer who wrote Java code for a living.

OTOH, the servlet API is nice.
What is an "AZ"? Availability Zone? "AZ" is not a very Google-friendly acronym. <:)
No worries, I just wanted to let you know that we vent about the same things! It drives us nuts that we can't move as fast as more consumer focused tech companies.

Re: the iPhone meter - we designed it to have its own battery and display, so even if your iPhone dies, the meter has enough charge to last 10 or so days, and a separate power cord to charge it for more. There was no way we'd tether a person's ability to test to a failing phone battery:)
Interesting, but a useless exercise.
What area of programming are you into?
Except this poisoning was due to people trying to get around the government's required bitterant content.
I was (am) having the same problem, so recently I've decided to join other people to see if that helps me commit to an idea (wasn't even my own). And it does!

IMHO I think you should struggle some more with your discipline problem, and then join an institution such as a start-up, HackerSchool, etc. Internships and programs are great because of the experience you'll get, knowledge and so on, but your lack of discipline when nobody's watching you will still probably be there afterwards. But that's just my opinion!
Thanks for the feedback. I've been hearing similar things of late: that early-on, Codecademy didn't really cut it but that now, they've really picked up their game.
Netflix is down because Amazon is down, so we had to watch shows on Amazon (prime) instead. Funny how that works!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_syphilis_experiment

40 years! I will never wrap my brain around this one. And no, I don't mean to say "that's just as bad as the Nazis". But still. 40 years. So much for rather hideous crap being impossible to keep secret, right? I can't help but think, if something like this can stay secret for 40 years, real horrid geopolitical stuff involving sending people to war based on deception, and pluging a country into debt to fleece them, would stay secret for much longer EZ PZ. Which doesn't prove anything of course, other than that "something like this is impossible to keep secret" seems to be wishful thinking.
For the people who don't have access to a terminal with Python (for whatever reason), it opens up this web comic:

http://xkcd.com/353/
It is important to keep in mind that the fuel costs for bringing a stage back down are far lower than the cost to put it up there, since most of the mass (fuel) will be burnt off before the return leg starts.

Since fuel is the cheap part anyway, Space X is betting that they can make it economically sound to launch a bit more fuel than they would normally need to if it means they can get the (expensive) rocket stage back.
sp - Entrepreneurship

Thanks for the collection.
Ask HN: ways to enable gifting in your app?
'tis the holiday season, and many of us might like to integrate gifting in our products. Bonus points if it is something that can be integrated in a day.

ps: although all ideas or showcasing how your app enables gifting are welcome, for my demo i'm actually interested in a p2p api where personA can gift money to personB to buy a product my app recommends, without getting me involved in the t'xion

happy holdays
~B
Fantastic story. I would love to hear some first-hand accounts / comments from any Kenyans on HN. Is there anyone here currently in Kenya and involved in startups?
Most aspiring entrepreneurs are convinced their life will be 100x better when they get funding and "make it." This is because they do not spend enough time thinking it through. If they did, they'd puzzle out that having a big chunk of money land in their lap solves few of their main problems, and creates a bunch more.

So yes, thinking it through once or twice is a good idea, and something most people don't do.
I was born and have lived in Brazil for the last 25 years. I was never able to tolerate the heat. I live in the south, were the winters are cold (it gets to 0C in some years) but the summers are ridiculously hot and humid (35C+ most of the time, sometimes the "feels like" is 45C). Most people here have a hard time with the heat, despite having lived here all their lives. Sometimes it's so incredibly hot that setting air condition to the lowest possible temperature only prevents it from getting hotter and hotter inside the house, but it still feels damn hot all day.

Personally, heat makes me literally sick. My blood pressure plummets (even though I have very good health), I can't think straight (productivity drops to like 10% of what I'm able to accomplish in winter), and I feel extremely stressed. I also get skin rashes and abdominal pain frequently.

Thank God I'm moving to Seattle next month :) I know it can get very hot in the summer there, but at least they get short summers. Our summer lasts 4-5 months.
Instagram's New Arbitration Clause and How to Opt Out
I'm sorry but I have to assume your experience is that of an outlier. I grew up with many black friends and even those that were poor knew what a computer, mouse, etc... was, how to use one, etc... I can't imagine your experience speaking for the norm although I have no statistic to back your experience versus that of another peer in your age group.
Amazon is currently reporting simultaneous issues in ELB, Cloudsearch, and Elastic Beanstalk. I suspect they use some common underlying service which is the root of the failure in all three, but I don't know what service that might be. (The usual suspect, EBS, is not reporting issues right now)
Saw a TIL Reddit thread recently that stated Indians make up 1% of the population but account for 40% of engineering jobs or something (paraphrasing as I don't remember the exact numbers and didn't read the article linked).
Which Python version, on which platform?

("We're not shipping your computer.")
Finally somebody with the guts to actually say it.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig5/mercola23.1.html

"When you sleep, your body’s internal temperature actually drops to its lowest level, generally about four hours after you fall asleep. Scientists believe a cooler bedroom may therefore be most conducive to sleep, since it mimics your body’s natural temperature drop."
Are there places where one can open their windows at night when it's hot? In Brazil you get instantly covered by all sorts of insects if you do that.
Whoop, thanks; Edited.

For those inclined, I also created a 'best of' for podcasts on web development: http://flapcast.com/playlist/16
Python alternatives for PHP functions
I'm not a Rails dev at all, but I do use Python, PHP, and now Grails with Sass.
Far from it; if anyone's able to take inspiration, or bring success to themselves or those around them, it is of great use.
What would you do if you aren't a founder with limited control but you've noticed it growing among the company?
I like end-of-year lists as much as the next person, but 45? Life's too short. Pick 5 good ones, if you can't get it below 45 then you aren't cut out for editorial comment. Sure, I could listen to them next year, if I skip next year's podcasts.
Original on LinkedIn (OP's link is all but unreadable).
http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20121222010436-40...
In other news... today the first user files class lawsuit against Instagram.
Ron Paul on NRA safety plan: Government security just another kind of violence
Thanks. I will try these. However, I use python/flask and I prefer resources that are language/framework agnostic so that anyone can learn from it and implement it in his preferred language/framework.
Christmas Hacker News
Well, you can't deny that it does stop the abuse.

Really poor implementation though.
While the Tuskegee experiment followed the natural progression of syphilis in those already infected, in Guatemala [US Public Health Service] doctors deliberately infected healthy people (having just defeated the Nazis).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guatemala_syphilis_experiment
The only downside is per-capita carbon usage higher than nearly every other country in the world:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dio...
You rarely hear of Google outages

http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/10/gmail-experiences-a-widespr...

,or iTunes

http://appleinsider.com/articles/12/11/19/itunes-match-down-...

,or Youtube

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/technology/2012/10/youtube-goes-...

Everyone goes down, but EC2 has been buggy as hell from what I can tell.

And before everyone says Netflix should `just` move or add more bandwidth...

http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/technolog/netflix-uses-32-...

They represent a huuuge amount of bandwidth usage!
Flash is the Legent on mobile devices. Even Adobe the builder they have dropped Flash on mobile platform, so let's forget about Flash. Even on my Web browsers, I can't tolerate without Flash Block add-on.

And, I think Nokia's phone is good, for in so short time left. They just need time to improve
I knew armadillo was doing some impressive work, but wow. That was really cool.
Facebook's 2012
How was WSJ able to connect from every US zipcode? Through tor? Something similar?
Like the other commenters gave said, landing vertically is very much their intention. The rationale is that sea landings make repair work much harder.
Hacker News has a Christmas color scheme
Maybe a user-creatable discount/coupon code and e-mail field for the friend?

E.g., something like: "Hi, your friend [Jane Smith] is a user of [Service XYZ] and is inviting you to use it! Use the following coupon code to get started! www.yourservice.com/random-hash/
Reminds me of this old thread, which has timoreilly's only post:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2477960
150 years ago, horse-drawn transport was the primary means of non-human-powered land transport... and had been for over 4,000 years. But by 50 years ago, not so much.

When a truly new technology arrives, things change a lot in just a few generations, with 'generation' meaning the 20-30 year average gap from birth to being a child-rearing adult.
>Especially one as trivial as Netflix which is largely read-only.

I stopped reading after this, since you obviously dont understand how complex their architecture really is.
Honolulu Startup / Entrepreneur / Marketing Networking or Meetup Groups?
Hey HN,

I just moved to Honolulu, Hawaii. Is there a weekly/bi-weekly/monthly startup / entrepreneurs / marketing meetup?

I'd love to meet some cool HN users & entrepreneurs over here in Honolulu. Let me know if there are any events I should check out!

Kai

p.s., if you're in Honolulu and would like to get coffee, shoot me an email at kai@kaisdavis.com. I'll buy.
Would you consider working in a country that is not yours and preferably where you do not speak the language? It keeps all your senses sharp and in a twisted way, your work is the only one that will be familiar to you, and hence you will dabble in it more. Just a thought.
We used this to automate UI tests on an iOS app a couple of years ago (before they added the UI automation stuff). Seemed to work pretty well, though it was a fair bit of work to get it set up.
I have to weigh in here. It does not stop the abuse. Separating opiates from acetaminophen is extremely simple (look up cold water extraction). All it does is kill people who aren't aware of the danger or the alternatives.

There are many good reasons not to abuse oxycodone. The government doesn't need to add to the damage of people who are only hurting themselves.
I think that this article basically his the nail on the head in most respects. I agree with his complaints as well as his thoughts on why it's good. I currently own a WP7 device but am looking to pick up a 920 or 8X in February when I get an upgrade available.

In the end I think he really nails it in the last paragraph: overall this is a solid offering that is hindered by lack of apps which is due to a lack of consumers (...which is largely due to a lack of apps?). If more people take the plunge, then the apps will come and this will become a non issue.

Time will tell, I guess!
The big difference is that the services are also delivered by phone. With Lyft, Uber, Exec, etc etc, the people providing the services are not employees of the startup but independent contractors using the app to get referred to customers. Instead of going into work, having some guy tell them who their customer is and taking a cut, they have the app tell them who their customer is and take a smaller cut.

That is the big difference.
This may be the wrong venue to rant about this, but has anyone really benefited from reading about entrepreneurship (in terms of becoming a better entrepreneur or building a company)? I equate it to reading a biography on the beatles versus writing your own music. Studying other people's success is like studying other people's lucky chain of events. Nowhere in their biographies do you hear anything like "Successful person X was heavily influenced by books about lean startups and lucky entrepreneurs"
I agree. Users have until January 19th to opt out of arbitration only! We wrote a blog post tonight about how to opt-out. I'm more upset about that clause then their intent to sell pics. AT&T does the same thing to their customers and I witnessed first-hand how far they will go to make sure you do NOT go class-action. http://blog.publikdemand.com/instagrams-new-arbitration-clau...
Lol, people are not looking to read about work.
Have they fixed the back button? I had a wp7 phone for a while and this userflow breaks the back button:

1. Open IE and browse the web a little
2. Press the home button, read your text messages or some bullshit
3. Press the home button again, open IE. Now try and browse back one page in your history (e.g., you're returning to hacker news after reading a story). The physical back button takes you back to the home page. There is no "soft" back button, so I have to pull up my history and use that.

Horrible!!!!!! Maybe Android is this way but it seems horrendously stupid to not even give me the option of a soft button.
Next-gen iPad said to arrive in March with iPad mini-like design
So which is it? Is Douglas Crockford a god or a superhero?