skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I find it implausible that IE earned Microsoft half a billion euros in net revenue over the course of 18 months. It has been many years since bundling IE with Windows has provided a strategic business advantage - making IE the default simply streamlines their support costs by avoiding the finger pointing that occurs between browser vendors and Redmond when something doesn't work quite right...such as security.
This is nice; I like how the background updates to show the level-state.

I recently started porting my native iOS game to HTML5. After Xcode/Objective-C, HTML5 development is just so refreshing for the 1) instant reload, 2) succinctness of Javascript. I'm kicking myself for not starting sooner.

Here's a link to my HTML5 game: http://noisytyping.com/NCT6745/index.html (work in progress!)

edit: I just realized I haven't put in a tutorial yet. It's an Arukone implementation: connect all number-pairs, and fill the grid.
I couldn't agree more.

It seems that whenever computers become able to do something that we previously used to define consciousness, we just create a new definition of what it means to be human/conscious that doesn't include that new capability.

Essentially we're continuously redefining consciousness as "that which humans can that machines can't."

My guess is that we'll keep expanding that until human consciousness is just "the version that operates in flesh and blood rather than silicon".
This isn't an "Arduino (clone)" by any measure. It's an ATMEGA on a breadboard. The advantage of the Arduino as sold is that it's an all-in-one package (USB interface, handy headers broken out for access to PINs, LEDs, voltage regulation, serial port, etc.) and it is very useful for _prototyping_.

Once you've prototyped using an Arduino you can then go select the minimal set of components you need using the smallest appropriate ATMEGA for your application and get it under $5.
Here's one more: treat them well enough so they don't feel that they need to leave.
It appears crowdresearch.org has yet to research how to handle a crowd.
Saying something is "broken" because it no longer fits in the domain of your current application is like saying a butter knife is "broken" because it can't cut a steak.
Amazon UK and US links

Big Questions From Little People Answered By Some Very Big People:
(http://www.amazon.co.uk/Questions-From-Little-People-Answere...) (http://www.amazon.com/Big-Questions-Little-People-Answers/dp...)

Wonderful Life With The Elements: The Periodic Table Personified: An Adventure through the Periodic Table: (http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1593274238/ref=ox_sc_act_...) (http://www.amazon.com/Wonderful-Life-Elements-Periodic-Perso...)

The Where, the Why, and the How: 75 Artists Illustrate Wondrous Mysteries of Science (http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Where-Why-How-Illustrate/dp/1452...) (http://www.amazon.com/The-Where-Why-How-Illustrate/dp/145210...)
If you have Spotify, I made a playlist that puts me into beast mode:

http://open.spotify.com/user/notmarkus/playlist/6pehPUR4xsO5...

Note that Port St. Willow's album "Holiday" should come right after Tim Hecker's "Ravedeath, 1972".

Holiday isn't on Spotify currently, but it'll be back on in April. If you can find it, give it a listen. On its own, it's great as work music.
This is a fantastic article. Many people underestimate how difficult it is to speed up webpages. It is complicated. But the results are tremendous. Better user experience means higher conversion.
LiveNinja is currently hiring and looking for a full-time Node.js developer
You can do this if you use Chrome on your phone, and are signed in with sync enabled. The tabs on your phone are accessible from the 'New Tab' page on you desktop and vice versa. On desktop Chrome, there's a little 'Other Devices' drop down at the bottom; on Chrome for Android, there's a button with a pair of arrows at the bottom right.
Actually this is not true on windows phone 8 and windows RT. The only requirement is that you use the native API which means the browser back end will need to be ported to it.

This may be or may not be hard work.
I had high hopes for Windows 8 and honestly believed the hybrid experience of desktop and tiles wouldn't be all that bad. What I fool am I. Since spending more time with it I can't believe just how frustrating the experience of constantly needing to switch between the two is.

To add insult to this injury is how badly thought out so many of the little details of Windows 8 seem to be. From creating your user account (forced to choose a password hint?) to using the system search everything feels clunky and always involved an unnecessary extra step.

I will agree that the only thing that does feel decent and well thought out is the touch experience. After trying it out on a surface if you simply use the tiles and IE10 the experience is actually quite fluid and nice. However the problem remains, Windows 8 is still meant to be the next major version of Windows and not just some tablet OS. On a desktop (even a touch desktop) and in the hands of a power user it's an abject failure.
I think it is funny that these types of comments always come up in threads about EU rulings but are never made when it is the US government.
Imagine the conversation at Apple or Google:

"We can bring a tablet to market that has file extensions in the user's face, and a command line, and part of the UI needs a pointing device."

"lolwut? You're serious? Get out of here!"

Microsoft is still dragging too much untablety legacy tail to make a successful tablet.

Courier was the right idea. Windows everywhere isn't. The result wll be a rearguard that only slightly slows the decline of the PC by dressing it up as a tablet, and leaves Microsoft without a competitive tablet product. You can see this in sharp relief in the market failure of the ARM-based, neither-fish-nor-fowl Surface.
You can also tell it doesn't seem to do it when you move the mouse back to the original menu item.
"Error establishing a database connection" -- a surprising bit of advice. Here's the google cache:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:VK2HEZZ...
"... when ..."

Do you really consider Microsoft to currently have a monopoly as a desktop OS? IMO that is no longer the case.
Its actually "easier" for enduser devices to connect to a (private?) cloud than to try to do stuff themselves. So that's the more likely hybrid model.

It depends on the latency tolerance that a use case might have. Why not have all of these above?
What does "who" mean in this context?
Yeah, with the users point of view, 8 is stunning!!!

But what about the developers and power users? Think about those AAA game development studios, Large budget software houses? Will they develop high end software by touch?

This will sound a little off-topic, but I would like to bring this to notice, anyway... -- GNOME 3 --

Yes, the open source community made a similar move like metro some days ago... And to be honest, I will not like to use a touch based UI for development until someone forces me with iron fists!!!
India's largest online hacking challenge
Fulltext Search on Jekyll Site
Just came across this on Twitter. Thought of sharing as those interested could apply.
Agree on your 2nd & 3rd bullets, but I would have so very little faith in the 1st happening with any good success

What drove me to mac was the little bugs here and there when trying to do things with cygwin

What drove me to linux (both ubuntu and debian) was the little bugs here and there when trying to do things with ports/brew

I'm back on windows now (because the linux desktop is just lagging behind in areas) only I'm using a VM to run linux shell. Now I get all the nice gui but can still run shell with no hiccups. (I could have gone back to mac and done VM too, but I just prefer windows)
With the exception of Maxthon, which claims of "unsurpassed speed" I find very dubious, they only claim to be "fast" rather than the fastest.
Windows does:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/bb77...
Reminds me of the (confirmed) reason why US mission http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter hit the planet at the wrong angle and desintegrated in the atmosphere - there was a mix-up in imperial and SI units.
I think the review author means physical in-your-face "perceptual recognition." Thought remembering is a weaker form of physical recognition, but you're right -- it works mostly the same as far as recall is concerned.

With physical recognition (touch, temperature, smell, taste, sound, sight), all the details are instantly available to our perception and recall/memory access is easier. It's difficult to fully remember the feeling of a childhood holiday only from your memory. You get a much richer recall experience if you go back to the place/time of year you lived it. Little things will trigger your memory you didn't even know you remembered.

The review author would be less confused if "pattern recognition" was replaced with "memories linked to what you're thinking about." Saying "pattern recognition" of London doesn't make sense to non-tech people. Saying "You remember things attached to London in your mind" helps out more, right?

I like that we are kinda strange.
For Good or Ill, Chávez Altered How Venezuela Views Itself
Makes me want to create an open source, but free version of nice Xcode UI templates with documentation.
Microsoft may be bringing innovative UI to the market. They may even have a technically mature infrastructure. But how are they going to regain the trust they lost by breaking API and promises time after time in the last twenty years ?
Starting in the 90s up until today, the CPU surged ahead of everything else: disk, memory, and network. Today we have very, very fast chips that are bound by the speed of their connection to their memory, disk, and each other (the Internet).

Memory has improved with DDR technology. (What are we up to now... DDR4?) Disk is improving with SSDs, which offer a huge speed improvement. If you've never used a box with a SSD in it, it must be seen to be believed.

But the real bottleneck I think is the Internet. Imagine what we could do with gigabit peer-to-peer IPv6 networks in areas like games, collaborative development tools, teleconferencing, etc. Things like virtual reality "metaverses" could really arrive, etc. These in turn would require more CPU power and parallelism. Super-fast gigabit+ WANs would deliver the killer apps that we need to keep pushing the speed barrier.

Once again, it is the Internet carriers that are the barrier to all progress. Breaking the telco oligopolies is the thing that must happen to unlock the future. Everything-- maybe even the continuation of Moore's Law-- depends on that. The telcos, cable companies, and wireless carriers are the trolls guarding the bridge to the future.
That's what open source is all about my friend! First distro I ever used was Debian, only as a live CD though because those were back in my WinXP days. But I immediately fell in love with apt. Then about 2 years ago I moved to Ubuntu, its nice but I didn't love Unity (didn't hate it either, just different). A friend recommended Mint, and I have been hooked ever since.
Show HN: In-store ads - ads for your store, on your own store
Hi HN,
Would love your feedback on in-store ads that we just launched. In-store ads are just like display ads, they are ads for your store, on your own store. Let us know what you think about it.
url: http://www.nudgespot.com/instoreads
If you want to see Moore's Law in action today you really need to look at GPUs rather than CPUs. Increased performance in recent years has mostly come from increased parallelization which has limiting returns on the CPU( quad cores anyone?) but does wonders for computer graphics.
Ask HN: What is "next" for the internet?
Purely as a technological tool for human interaction, the internet allows human interaction at a level which is slightly below in-person face to face communication.

Now, imagine for a moment that all we're doing right now is using this technological tool purely for enjoyment. Just hanging out, kicking back, chatting with each other.

But what if we wanted to get to work? If we needed to work together on the important stuff - learning, teaching, working to make the future something we want to live in? Technology has an amazing ability to empower individuals; how might we harness and guide this ability?

So, how would we design a system/co-operative/community that would enable us to empower ourselves and others to enact a real positive change in the world?

I've been thinking about this, and believe an online-based co-operative business might be a possible solution. I have my thoughts, but I'm looking for a discussion on the topic. What solutions do you think there are for enabling positive change in the world, and how might we go about implementing them?
How to protect yourself from debit-card fraud
I find this entire premise odd. The question ought to be "Why aren't you consistently hiring people better than yourself?". That is a big part of the reason you hire somebody in the first place. If I were brilliant at every imaginable task I suppose I could do everything myself given enough time. When I get a chance to bring in talent I go out and try to get people that I know are more brilliant, more focused, and more experienced than myself.
StreamClock (https://play.google.com/store/search?q=streamclock) It is an alarm clock that wakes you up with either a Last.fm radio station, or a Spotify track. I'm about 3/4 of the way through the v1.1 update, which will include Google Music, volume controls and a few other things. Feedback would be great!

PS previous HN discussion http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5304128
Knowing When to Fold ‘Em (as an entrepreneur)
Nice!

It took me a tries to figure out how to play, but once I got it I liked it. Very nice gameplay, very clean, addictive.

I'd add a few basic instructions on page to get folks started, even something simple like "Use your mouse to draw a line between 2 numbers".

Ah, just saw your edit - perfect!
That's great! Thank you.
> The author, Colin McGinn, states his only credentials as a psychology student in the 70s.

He is just being humble.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_McGinn
Hey there, George. Very sorry we missed you this morning. I'll be in touch by email shortly.

In general, we are usually in chat several hours earlier than the posted times, but list those hours to make sure we're setting proper expectations. We're working to officially increase the coverage to be sure we're always there for you.
That's very true, this would be useful to seasoned Arduino hackers, but not the broke college kid trying to get into Arduino for less than the 30$ and can't wait for the holidays...

author: please proofread the post... i'm no Grammar Nazi, but the plethora of errors in that post made me cringe...
And bear in mind that having a monopoly is not illegal. Abusing the monopoly to severely disadvantage competitors is.
It does now: http://m.tech2.com/news/android/beta-for-operas-webkitbased-...
From my point of view, the min-heap is appropriate to pop/peek the min value (O(1)), but how do you 'peek' the first 5 values for instance?

This is a valid min-heap: (5 ((7 (9, 10)), (8 (11, 12)))). Where in (a (b, c)) b and c are children of a.
If you want to peek(5) you have to:

1. peek 5

2. peek the min of 7 and 8 (7)

3. now you have to peek the min of 9, 10 and 8.

4. it's 8, now you have to peek the min of 9,10,11 and 12

The thing is, the only guarantee you have is that a root node of a tree or subtree is smaller than its children. You know nothing of a sibling subtree.

I think maintaining a simple list is the simplest way of doing that, and to speed up lookups for existing items, an index (map item->index) can be maintained. Or the other way around, keep the objects in a map and the keys in the order list. Considering a size n=5 it might even be reasonable to do everything with a simple array and iterate over it.
I think you may want to tweak your copy a bit. So many uses of the words "ad" and "store" that I didn't know what you were talking about by the end of your spiel.
What It's Like to Be on Huffington Post Live
Angry judge calls porn troll’s bluff, orders entire firm to court
You mean, you don't understand why a peon with such pitiable credentials is reviewing the book of the great genius Kurzweil.

I am unsurprised to encounter this reaction.
Looks cool. What exactly does the Xcode project consists of though?
Ops, yea. I was thinking about there estimate of the cost of changing the regulation was high not the exponent.
Been reading around your site but I'm sorry that I don't quite get it, is it functionally similar to phpmyadmin? Or is it something else?
Taking some pain out of Python logging
All 3 of these are great points.
site's gone... any cache?
Homeland security drones to be capable of intercepting cell signals
That's one of those clever things people seem to bring up -- "oh, we used to think playing checkers required consciousness, but it doesn't."

At no point did someone think a computer would wake up, sing Hallelujah, and start composing public policy when it finished playing checkers.

Consciousness is clearly: the ability to have directed agency in the world (i.e. "wanting" to do something), following an action path to create a desirable outcome, and forming opinions/judgements/actions based on prior experience ("memories"). Fun thought experiment: when does a baby become conscious and not just a bundle of predefined cry-poop-eat behaviors?

Every animal walking around in the world is consciousness (if you can "turn off agency" in the form of sedation during surgery, the thing was consciousness), but human-level intelligence consciousness only forms in our squishy brains at this point in our world line.
Testing Company Names with Mechanical Turk
People who document the "how", or worse, the "what", generally do so because they're bad at reading code. I work with a few people that do this and they readily admit that that is the reason why they feel the need for comments of the form...

// set the user data
var userData = {

The thing that grates with me is that this is apparently an acceptable stance on the issue. These people don't see this inability to read plain code as a flaw, or something they should work on.
Thank you. I will. Let me try to rephrase the text a bit.
McGinn is quite an interesting philosopher. Mainly, a pessimist regarding the mind-body problem; his position was that its solution is beyond human grasp, last time I checked. So he is at the very oposite pole to people like Kurzweil.

The problem isn't only about human intelligence, it is about human mentality. McGinn's point is that pattern recognition is not essential to it; it very well might be true that pattern recognition is essential to intelligence, but that means nothing to the problem of mentality unless you reduce mentality into intelligence.
Valve To Begin Steam Box Tests In Coming Months
I don't know, if you accept the premise of the article that old/cheap PC hardware is good enough for most applications then what do you gain by having a docking station vs a desktop PC?

There is only a small cost saving since the expensive thing is going to be the peripherals and screen and you now have to deal with problems like employees taking the tablets home and losing/breaking them , getting malware on them or filling them up with personal stuff.

The cost of having a few computer components nailed to the desk is probably less than the loss of productivity when somebody can't work because their tablet is broken.

Are there many companies who are doing full on bring your own hardware apart from maybe startups etc who can't afford to provide extra computers to staff?
Cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:crowdre...
"the statistical outliers who do not follow this are not worth focusing policy on"

This is a great idea that 37signals keeps coming back to, i.e. don't shape HR policies based on outliners and exceptions.
Thanks for the comment about grammer: Fixed that now (I think). This post is meant for non EE people, to explain how to use the ATMEGA for a lower price.
This is a good point and does actually show that allowing hrefs in any tag could be a solution where an anchor won't do. Also you cannot simulate right click options as you'll either get a new tab or a new window at best.
Thanks, fixed now. Clickable link:

http://www.nudgespot.com/instoreads
"I know we tell each other that failing is ok. I know that there are books and blogs written about the importance of failure. But that didn’t mean that I didn’t think it wasn’t because of me."

What a super difficult topic to discuss - props to @micah for his honesty.
I went to the science museum (don't know what is it called exactly) in Barcelona and there they have demonstrations of many laws of physics, such as if you are spinning and extend your hands, you will slow down and vice versa.

There were descriptions for each of the demonstration and yet I saw parents with kids who just went from one to the next, didn't bother to understand or read about the demonstration and in general were completely useless in teaching their kids.

It was awful.
From TFA: '"To me, the fragmentation of Linux as a platform, the multiple incompatible distros, and the incompatibilities across versions of the same distro were my Three Mile Island/Chernobyl," he writes.'

And its from The Register, known for a certain sense of humor. Title as is from article, minus the caps shouting.
EC hits Microsoft with EUR 561 million fine over web browsers
On glancing at the thread as its developed, there is one point which is valid - it would be nice to be able to make any element behave as a link, but this doesn't make links broken so much as in need of a new, simple feature.
Show HN: Point of News (Google news reader) for Android
You need something requires low latency as well as power, otherwise it usually makes more sense to offload the extra work onto a server (with the added bonus that it's difficult to pirate something when there is code isn't running on a client machine, e.g the new Sim City).

So the most common example would be games, with the new console refresh we might see a bump in technical requirements for PC games in order to keep up.
I'm curious on why 140 seconds? 140 seems to be the special number nowadays because of Twitter's influence of 140 characters. I guess it bodes well with a "Social Media Manager."
That site also looks pretty unfriendly.
"Being a slacker is not an innate human quality"

I really can't swallow this. Laziness is /the/ primary motivator for invention. People want to do the least possible to attain their goals - this isn't a negative quality - but in the context of earning a paycheque it hurts the employer.

I've noticed the larger the company i've worked at, the more people treading water and hiding inbetween people who actually do work.

On the other hand I do broadly agree that window dressing is not enough. We end up judging employers by actions more than words by nature...
I'd say you're witnessing the rise of what seems to be WooThemes for iOS and calling it useless.

It's probably not for you, but I would be surprised if this isn't highly valuable to a lot of people.
>It is not just that 'old is good enough', in last years PCs are actually getting worse. I would love to spend money, but there is no stuff to buy.

So true, and it applies to Macs too!

Long ago, I was looking forward to a 17" MBP but Apple discontinued it.

My 2008 15" MBP has an Intel SSD plus a 2nd large spinning drive (optibay), mate display and a removable battery.

Sometimes I wish I could just keep buying spare parts for it forever. Too bad you can't upgrade the CPU too.
That sounds awesome! Looking forward to it
Thanks very much :) It's cool that you figured out the rules!

I'm definitely sold on HTML5. For the kind of games I want to make, there's no reason not to bypass native and put them on as many platforms as possible. A month ago I wouldn't have considered anything but native.