skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I did the same; taught myself css, php, javascript and quit my FTJ last Christmas. Best thing I ever did.

I also sent the following as advice to someone wanting to get into web dev:

"I was just thinking of 'easy ins' to the world of web development and a good source of information is http://news.ycombinator.com/ there's a lot of information from people who work in the world of tech startups and it's good information.

Also - if you are wanting to do php dev the key things to learn are:
Software engineering techniques and practice - object oriented development and abstract patterns are key to how to think about good development.
Database design and development (1st normal form, third normal form etc) Learn SQL. (SQL for dummies or similar is good for the basic commands and syntax etc.)
Stackoverflow.com - it's the best source of help for software development on the internet.
read books, the ones that come up again and again when people talk about learning to program:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Code-Complete-Practical-Handbook-Con...
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Mythical-Month-Essays-Software-Engin...
http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Pragmatic-Programmer-Andrew-Hunt...

also - look at github.com - that's where programmers keep their source code.

Learn about Object Oriented Programming, Design Patterns, MVC (which is a design pattern) is specifcally useful for web development.

Also - demand for javascript programmers will increase over the coming years because of things like jQuery and Ajax.

That's my starter for ten - if you are interested in a career as a web programmer.

If you want to focus more on the html/css design side you could do worse than focusing on one CMS - such as wordpress and learning it inside out - you could then offer that to clients and it's a good way to provide web sites cheaply with very little effort."
I was being sarcastic. My point was that there are higher proportions of women in those fields than in CS [0], and the reason why might be interesting, but it's definitely not because those fields are easier; I'm not going to engage in a pissing match about which are harder but I think it's safe to say they those fields are just as hard as CS. (medicine is harder, for the reason you pointed out, however that just makes my point stronger, if there's actually more women in pre-med than CS. not sure if that's true and didn't have time to do the research)

Anyway, there's no need to be rude, we're in agreement.

[0] "... women earn only 17 to 18 percent of the bachelor’s degrees in engineering and computer science, and just over 40 percent in the physical sciences and math." http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/06/education/edlife/where-the...
Yes - this is the only reason my Mum is on Facebook.
Well at least she's learnt something.
I still think the iPhone 4 &< had the best screen size for ergonomics. I don't think you can contest that.

The iPhone 5 compromises to make the screen bigger, but only by a little.

I don't think I could use a 4" device like a Nexus 4 (I have a Nexus S which was a good size), on my commute where I need to hold onto a handle of the train, underground with one hand, smartphone in other.
This appears to have been marked as a private youtube video... Not a very productive use of my time :)
I am surprised not to see mentions of SILC here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SILC_(protocol)

Especially when running your own server this would be a more secure alternative.
GROUP TEXT MESSAGES drive me crazy on android (complete rubbish), iOS has nice user experience for this. If there was one thing I wish google would fix ASAP its this.
IRC is nice, but I still like Zephyr, the origonal IM system, better. Except for the little problem with NAT traversal...
Well you can, but you'll have degraded performance and not access to tv/phone services.
Pseudo-Polymorphism in PowerShell
Show HN: Gitori: A Gamified Progressive Metronome to practice music
http://www.gitori.com

As a guitarist I tend to find that there is plenty of 'learning' resources on the internet but what prevents me from being a better musician is the ability to practice consistently and effectively.
Gitori addresses that problem by using a gamified metronome.

Some of my pain-points that it addresses are:

1) Improving on the metronome. The most popular piece of advice I've gotten for improving technique as a musician is to use a metronome and start slowly, gradually increasing tempo.
I did this for many months and found the constant Metronome-tweaking to be annoying. I wanted an auto-pilot Metronome. Gitori is my attempt at an autopilot metronome.

2) I find practicing exercises/scales to be a bit boring. Especially taking the extra effort to practice everything in multiple keys

3) I lack the discipline to fix a minimum warmup period before trying to play faster. Having the whole practice workout laid out in front of me forces me to adhere.

4) My exercises and practice material are not organized in the same place. I have an ad-hoc collection of bookmarks/emails/books/CDs/PDFs Gitori allows me to create my own exercises and put all of them in one place.

5) I would like to track my progress by looking at data. I wanna know how many minutes I practiced last week. Was I able to consistently practice 5 days a week last month? Can I play faster than I could a month ago?

Tech stack: Rails/MySql/Redis(points/levels/leaderboard)/HTML5 Web Audio/MIDI-Quicktime

P.S.: I'm a Ruby/Rails developer based in the SF Bay Area looking to change jobs. If you have an opening and can file H-1/H-4 and Green Cards, ping me at info AT gitori.com
are you suggesting there is a mobile os vendor that isn't a patent troll? goog spent 12bn acquiring a failing company just to patent troll
During the last 10+ years I've tried to stay on top of all the latest trends in web design, but I realized the most important things never change:

1) Test browser compatibility. 10 years ago that meant IE and Netscape. Today there are a a lot more browsers, but luckily there are standards now and the browsers mostly stick to them. But you have to test on desktop now, on mobile, and on tablets.

2) Test page load speed. While average broadband speeds have increased considerably in the last 10 years, there are still a lot of users stuck with slow lines. And when you're on mobile, you will have slow connections even if you live in a large city. If you have a Mac, use Network Link Conditioner to test how your website performs on slow or unreliable networks.

3) Progressive Enhancement. Don't rely on Javascript, Flash, Java, HTML5 video etc. Make sure your website is usable with everything turned off. If you want to use awesome animations and videos to present your content, make sure that you provide a simple textual description as an alternative. That's important for search engines, but also for users who can't view your interactive content for whatever reason (missing plugins, slow connection, e-ink display, no speakers connected, etc.)
Another "You asked for my email to start the process so I closed the browser window" user here. And yes, I read your comments on the page:

"... we promise never to spam you or sell your email address to anyone."

Who is this "we"? I don't know you. I've never heard of you. Your promise is meaningless to me. It does not serve to make me feel better or get over the heebie-jeebies about giving up my email in any way whatsoever.

------------------

So I went to Mailinator, got a DEA, and put it in - bam. Now I can at least check it out. Of course, 99.999% of users will not do this but anyway.

I'd think it's "four clicks" is the right number. At some point these users need to feel committed and want this enough to pay. You can't do that on the first page - you just can't. You need page views to build the commitment/excitement that makes someone want to pay:

1) User lands

2) User picks out card

3) User customizes card

4) User pays for card

You could move the email to the "User pays for card" step ("Would you like a receipt?"). You just have to decide on that yourself and go with whatever you select.
Well, you can, but you lose a whole bunch of important functionality, like being able to watch TV over IPTV (source - I work on SFR's STB, and we watch the competition closely :D)
It could be a niche market worth to explore.. :)
iPhoto is not the cloud.
I feel for your friend. But..

HN is not the first line of support helpdesk for apple/facebook etc.

Enough FB engineers have identified themselves on HN that you might try approaching one of them but at the same time I think that you should first exhaust all regular avenues.

Whatever you do make sure that the machine that the data was on gets powered down in case there is still retrievable data on the drive. Likely the photos are all still there, they're just no longer linked. You may have a problem figuring out what is what. Search for 'photo recovery software' for some tools that may help with this.

You may have to move the drive to another machine to get at it but that would have to be in read only mode. Do not write to the disk or even mount it in r/w mode until you have retrieved all the data that you can get.
He also co-owns one of the most famous french newspaper. And was well known for bringing defamation lawsuits to journalists and newpapers. He also got most of his early wealth from running adult services.

In short he is not without controversies.
The graphs in this article border on unreadable. I don't know why you'd post graphs like that unsmoothed unless your goal was for your readers to ignore them completely.

The claims he makes about power consumption certainly seem interesting, but I don't really feel like I can take them without a grain of salt given how hard it is to read a lot of the graphs he's drawing conclusions from.

The general trend of Atom finishing benchmarks earlier without drawing much more power is pretty interesting, at least. I never would have guessed that Atom would be a winner here - it has such a bad reputation.
It's not earth-shattering. This is nothing new; several older models have gone through the same process over the years. It has been happening for a long time. This article is just exaggerating the real news item: firmware can be supplied by nouveau for all available SKUs, including Kepler/Fermi chips.

nouveau is an awesome project, but this is not a huge thing. It's not going to make Linux gaming explode overnight. It's just normal iterative progress, which, don't get me wrong, is great and all, but it's not a big deal like this article suggests.
> iOS 6 already has infrastructure in place to allow for remote view controllers that (in theory) should allow any application to register itself to handle certain data and events.

For those who want more information on that, http://oleb.net/blog/2012/10/remote-view-controllers-in-ios-... (note: it's a 3-part series).

As far as I understand, it doesn't provide for an application "register[ing] itself to handler certain data and events", which would probably be an extension to UIActivityView and UIActivity[0]. Remove View Controllers provide two features of interest, one of which could work with UIActivity for sharing:

* An application or framework providing views to an other one (said view could be invoked by a UIActivity of some sort, so that the Facebook application would provide a "Share on Facebook" remote view and the corresponding activity, a sharing application would invoke the activity view, then display the correct remote view upon selection by the user)

* Isolated cross-process communication between the embedding application and the embedded view, which allows different security settings (and thus things like JIT-ed UIWebView, or more simply a twitter remote viewcontroller being able to use the data the Twitter app has access to without leaking it to third parties)

[0] http://oleb.net/blog/2012/09/the-state-of-sharing-in-ios-6/
DNT doesn't block ads, it prevents tracking (ideally). Other ad-supported businesses (e.g. most TV in the US) seem to get by fine without needing tracking cookies.
Deleted her Facebook account? Sounds like a reason to rejoice.
They managed to transform from a rubber boot company to a hardware one
I think Font Awesome is, well, awesome. I've also been a big fan of what IcoMoon (http://icomoon.io/) is doing, if you want to go a more custom route!
The Samsung S3 / Nexus 4 comparison is interesting. I just sold a Nexus 4 and bought an S3. I do prefer stock android, but no sd card, fragility issues and the unremovable battery were a deal breaker for me.
Keep them coming, please :)
Samsung, Nokia and others hit with fresh patent infringement lawsuit
We all know that Android would have this if it wasn't for patents.

You can't scroll without the page moving... so I don't understand your point.

Plus if you are scrolling slowly and reading as you go, having a litte bit of background show (part of the effect) is little difference from showing a flash of colour.
I've determined independently that a IRC server fills a sweet spot in the collaborative toolset. A basic IM system isn't good enough because it doesn't have channels, it doesn't give you a shared history. Email is heavy and induces people to spend too much time per message.

Sometimes it's good to have a light/noisy feed, and IRC is just fine for that job.
It's hard since so many don't have websites, but think about blue collar service industris (mechanics, plumbers, car washes, etc). Here's a company that kills it selling web based software to auto glass replacement facilities. It looks like it is out of 1995:

http://www.edirectglass.com/default.htm

That's is about as hip and modern as I have seen.
You know there is a huge difference between TV ads an web ones: passivity. TV announcers don't have the possibility to "personalize" ad content according to what they could learn from their audience individual habits.
When you own a huge database of personal information on your users, you should have a lot of responsibility towards your users. Data mining is the business of most advertising companies on the web, that's how they make money, so no wonder ethics become a bit blurred there.

Here are the real questions:

- how can we mitigate the use of tracking, make sure that harnessed data is not misused?

- if it is not possible, why not enforcing on the web an advertising system similar to the TV one, to get rid of the tracking nightmare we're building? We should seriously think about that fallback solution, because we're going to get it in our face (or some other place) anyway (the mandatory ad spot is becoming a reality on many sites now), and we still have tracking on full speed.
Maybe one day you'll learn something too.

That it's bad form to be gleeful over others misery. Some people don't care about losing a bunch of files, for others it is a disaster. Yes, she should have had back-ups. But that's no reason to be smug.

Looking forward to your call for help about something.
Life and Career Lessons – 2012
Please implement a "collapse" button on all 1st-level comments. In big conversations I want to skip to the next comment when I am not interested. I don't want to scroll slowly down the page to find it.

See: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4982388
'Private litigation' is my new favorite oxymoron.

Litigation cannot exist without your so-called 'conflict resolvers'.
DJANGO PERFORMANCE TUNING
Free (major French ISP) blocks ads for every customer (opt-out)
Group text messages work fine on Android 4.2.
You seem to think that 'allows customisation' and 'defaults that work well' are mutually exclusive for some reason. Note that I was responding to your characterisation of personalisation, which was essentially "give people the ability to personalise and they make it ugly!". Yes, to you. Not to them.

I've also never really understood the toddler argument for 'well-designed'. 'Simple', sure, but not 'well-designed'. We don't consider this for any other thing we do - board games aren't considered poorly designed if a toddler can't play them; music isn't considered poorly put together if it's not in thirds, which young kids are drawn to; food isn't considered poor just because a toddler won't eat it, and neither are the utensils to prepare it considered shoddy because a toddler can't use them easily. 'Simple' and 'well-designed' can co-exist, but 'simple' does not mean 'well-designed'.

I also don't really understand your last paragraph - again, you see to be arguing against customisation because you don't enjoy it, despite other people doing it to have fun. Besides, OS UI designers do so for a generic optimal use-case, and can't possibly satisfy all. Even if it's true that 9 times out of 10 you're making it worse, 10% is still a lot of people to satisfy.
Cool - I added Joel's collapse feature request to that page because I, too, have wanted that feature. I just copy/pasted and left a link back here. Hopefully folks will upvote it.
Ten Tips for New Raspberry Pi Owners
The bad reputation came from the low performance (in low-end Windows machines), and it looks like it will continue to have that now that Cortex A15 is out.

From the power consumption point of view, it was completely unusable for a smartphone or tablet until recently, because when they made it, Atom had a 10W TDP, and for the past 5 years they've mainly tried to get that to 2W, while keeping the performance mostly unchanged. That performance used to be much higher than the high-end ARM chip at the time when they released it, but that's not the case anymore.
> Free, as in Beer

...

> SIL open font license, MIT license for code.

That sounds like free-as-in-freedom to me, not just free-as-in-beer.
How to Build a Columned Room Divider
"would be world-readable because it’s only used for deriving secret keys"

I don't like this.

Otherwise, not a bad exploration.
Android SDK is now proprietary
You don’t want to cloud your learning

And you probably shouldn't start learning with 'the cloud'. Better start with a shared host and learn the foundations than to get spoiled by Heroku's 'easy deployment' and then get hit by Leaky Abstractions.
This is where Facebook's closed-data policy causes trouble. If they allowed backup to other cloud services or to local disk, users could make a habit of this, and tools would be developed.

FB does have a "download your info" service, but they make it difficult, with manual asynchronous confirmation, and they don't give you certain critical parts of the data (like friends' emails).

Any decent backup mechanism must allow for a frequent, automated backup which is complete enough to be fully restorable.
Oh I think it's very contestable. I use my Galaxy Nexus one handed all the time in many situations, including on public transport. Can iPhone users please stop saying that their device has the best ergonomics of all time as if the ratio came down from the heavens. I don't see how people can even think something like a perfect size exists suitable for every human being. To each their own.
IPv6 takes one step forward, IPv4 two steps back in 2012
This is quite interesting... I wonder if anyone 'cracked' it when it was new... :)
> "Why am I holding the thing up to my face like I can look through the thing is beyond me..." hehehe I chuckled as his joke here.

I think this is really awesome. It seems so rare to see these types of fun and inviting (and what I would call) success stories around the web, when it comes to accessibility.

Hopefully more videos like this surface so that other developers/designers see why it's worth going the extra mile with accessibility! And that doing so, means all types of users can use your app, even people you thought never would!
I tried with "Apple hypnotized the Google founder with a magic wand, end with..." :-)

http://translate.google.com.mx/?hl=en#en/fr/Apple%20hypnotiz....

Apparently happens with all the statements suffixed with "end with"
MDN (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/) seems to be a pretty solid source when needing a reference to browser-based based web technologies.
I have read otherwise recently, although I forget where (possibly Kahnemann - Thinking Fast and Slow, although I don't think so).

I don't have sources to hand, but a quick google suggests the following:

Although people subjectively rate their performances better than an objective observer would (see, e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overconfidence_effect), being overconfident can actually lead you to increase your perfomance, at least according to http://econpapers.repec.org/paper/lmumuenec/11885.htm

"Abstract: This paper suggests a potential rationale for the recent empirical finding that overconfident agents tend to self-select into more competitive environments (e.g. Dohmen and Falk, forthcoming). In particular, it shows that moderate overconfidence in a contest can improve the agent's performance relative to an unbiased opponent and can even lead to an advantage for the overconfident agent in absolute terms."

So that isn't overwhelming evidence, but it does suggest that what you wrote might not be correct.
Please explain the security implications. If you make the key readable only by some users then it requires more deployment-time setup to get things right.
iPhoto isn't what she trusted with all her pictures.
I love how you keep falling back on name dropping as if I'm supposed to suddenly be ashamed and let go of my own long held opinion because it goes against that of rich/famous people.

You could tell me that literally every other person on the planet (never mind people who are wealthy and successful in tech) thinks Kurzweil is the second coming, and it would not change my opinion of him.

Now why is that? Is it just because I'm obstinate?

No. It's because I've been reading his asinine screeds for decades and reading the fawning baloney that comes from talking heads like those you've listed, and adoring groupies like yourself as well. And it's all a bunch of horseapples.

If anyone were doing what he's been doing for the last 20+ years and getting the same response from the press and public, I would be annoyed. It doesn't matter who it is.

It's the act of spewing out a bunch of half baked theories as if they are revolutionary and thought provoking when it's really a bunch of trite garbage which wouldn't even pass for a low grade scifi novel. Then the fact that a number of people -- including the poorly informed general media which you expect to be gullible -- most disappointingly, some tech folks, treat it seriously is beyond obnoxious.

Anyway, clearly I'm not going to change your mind. You're very convinced by the sheer fact that other rich and famous people think he's great, so I'm not going to waste my time any further. You're not going to convince me either (since the only thing that would convince me is Kurzweil actually putting out something thoughtful and well considered), so let's let it go.
Great question but dont assume speed of unlocking is what everyone based their decision on. I can tell you my mom would rather use facial recognition than entering a pin even if the latter was faster.

She did point out quirks like if her hair isn't brushed it may not work etc. It could well be that the technology isn't polished enough for Apple's standard but I know when I see an Android user use it, I walk away impressed and questioning why my iPhone can't do that.
Google spent $25 million lobbying during the FTC probe, and it worked
ErlangDC conference speakers announced
The first batch of speakers for ErlangDC has been announced. ErlangDC is a one day conference on Erlang to be held in the DC metro area.
This is valuable advice that I appreciate. I want to know who I can trust to do business with. Where else can I find this stuff out?
I am saying the ergonomics are worse on the iPhone 5 for me and I believe I have slightly larger than average hands.

Perhaps you have large hands, and loved the original XBox controller, but you would be in a minority.