skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I see two primary problems with this. First is the #doorslam, as the article mentions, which is really just bad user interface. Plus who wants to get an app for a one-off reading of some article on some site? But I also see companies release an app that appears to have some useful features - it looks better on the mobile device, it has better navigation on a mobile device, etc. Why they chose to do it as an app vs. in-browser is another question but whatever, apps are hot so companies think they need/want one, and in my experience people are often happy to have them.

But it turns out that websites are really freaking easy to update, and apps are not. And now you have two completely disparate codebases to maintain. So once something rolls out on the web property, the shiny new app is not so shiny and new, and may be missing critical features. Some companies do this well, Facebook for example finally has an app that more usable than the mobile site IMO. But Facebook has serious resources to dedicate to this type of thing, and it took years for them to get to the point they are at now, their app was barely usable for a long time.

Case in point: I've been using Piazza for a number of classes over the last few years. They have an iOS app, and a lot of people in my classes have expressed that they are glad of this and use it exclusively. But it hasn't been updated for the iPhone 5 so the app display is cropped. Worse yet, there is now a course documents section that some teachers use almost exclusively, that you simply can't get to on the app. And the web page itself does not work terribly well on mobile Safari. So I hardly ever use it on my phone, and my overall impression of Piazza has seriously declined because I've spent so much time cursing the (lack of) usability on my phone. Plus you get the #doorslam every time you try to go to the web site on an iOS device.
Yea, like the asbestos lined "portable classrooms" they packed Canadians into for almost 50 years.
The problem is, if you manage to create the next Facebook, your former employer's lawyers might come up with a claim that your company is based on IP they own...
My boss was huge into OS/2 at the time.

He got it up, and running, at home, and work. Reported (and I recall agreeing after playing with it) that it was a better environment to run windows / DOS applications than was Windows.

Our employer (the US Marines) was not officially interested in the idea ... and so the idea never went past that.
y, n fact they r.
> I think the innovation mostly has to come as entrepreneurship within institutions.

Sometimes it does. We are using LON-CAPA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LON-CAPA) to administer tests to the hordes of first-year students who need to take out classes as part of theit gen.ed. requirement. You couldn't handle them with a roomful of TAs.
What kind of language are you using ?

The most successful implementation of an HTTP parser that I have seen in terms of correctness/time-to-implement was done using Ragel for the mongrel ruby web server (see http://rubygems.org/gems/mongrel ).

I have to look back again but if I remember well, the parser was written and validated with fuzzy testing in a week or so and then was pretty much stable. That was just for the parsing and the rest of the web server took a couple more months to stabilize.
Check with Fastmail, I know they use fast Intel X25-E SSDs for their email backend, but I don't know what they use for their file storage side. Shoot an email to sales@fastmail.fm & ask what you could expect in terms of throughput, I've always had good experience with them, technical & service-wise; but haven't ever had the kind of bandwidth to ever really put the file servers to any speed test before.
The Fable of the Dragon Tyrant: Nick Bostrom on Death
I've had good experiences doing business travel with Airbnb, but it can be disturbingly non-deterministic; it takes a long time to get confirmation for a room that you're already uncertain about, and there's always a fair chance that when you arrive the room won't actually be available.
ZOMG! Nice blog entry! Lots of steam released. :D

And now the question: why do people build apps and shove it down other people's throat?
Most of what they do can be done via a ("mobile") web site. Hell! Most of them are useless without internet connectivity anyway!

So why not make a great web site and just let people bookmark it?!
The swearing is capable of being both non-funny or interesting and not offensive and or detrimental to the point of the article at the same time.

Of course the point of the article is probably more interesting so I agree with you on that point.
Frankly, I think Ubuntu will soon enough have so little of Gnome left in its standard version that you shouldn't worry too much about switching.
yes, @ is used often but it also signifies email.
(#) would represent the Internet or world wide web as a whole. It's supposed to symbolize a interconnected globe.
>> None of the points you make in favour of the Chromebook are exclusive to it, what's exclusive to it though is you can't get access to the vast flexibility of a local system and have to go through NX.

Adding to that working with remote GUI apps simply sucks compared to running them locally, for all kinds of reasons. It's less responsive, applications don't always integrate well with the rest of the OS (think keyboard/language settings, terminal capabilities, reliable copy/paste), you lose things like local search, some applications you rarely use will not be available on the remote, and if your network connection goes down you lose your session. And who's going to set up and maintain the NX service? If having your work in the cloud matters a lot, I would much rather just mount some remote filesystem for storing it, and run all my dev tools locally.

I tend to agree I don't see the point here, since when is a cheap machine to SSH to some other box anything special, let alone a viable replacement for a dev system? I did stuff like this (SSH-ing to a remote host, editing webpages there, viewing the result locally) literally 10 years ago on a Pentium-233 laptop you couldn't even give away for free today because no-one would want to have it. For $250 there's a lot of decent notebooks that would do everything a Chromebook does, and adequately run a modern linux distro to boot.
$1000 is an exaggeration, but chromebooks really are significantly cheaper than netbooks/laptops: $250 ARM and $199 Celeron.

But you know, just now considering the restrictions that Apple, Google and Microsoft put on their mobile machines, because they can, creates a real opportunity for Firefox OS (and yes ubuntu). Though niche, as most consumers won't care... unless the restrictions go too far.
Apparently knowledge of basic physics isn't a prerequisite for being president of a major corporation. Who knew?
Delicious irony: http://i.imgur.com/1NS9s7L.png
Finished is better than perfect, every time.

I say this constantly to creative people who struggle with your problem. I've solved it myself by making "finished" a hard goal and habit, and leaving a trail of completed projects behind me.

Here's the thing... smart, creative people generate ideas at an appalling rate. Each new idea is a temptation. The trick is to sort through them, learn to ignore ideas that don't REALLY grab you. Go back and work on the existing ideas, the ones that have already grabbed you. Keep working on them even when they're frustrating or boring or seem impossible.

Next trick... have an exit strategy. Have a clearly defined "done" point. You won't finish if you don't know what "finished" means.

Next trick... deadlines. Set deadlines for interim goals, and interim goals small enough to feel reachable. Learn from Agile development techniques. You can do Agile even as a one-person shop.
I found ditching WP very simple, and unlike adding redis, you can even ditch your host and stick your files on S3. My quality of life improved dramatically once I didn't have to keep patching wordpress, breaking all my plugins every 6 weeks, and still getting hacked once in awhile anyway.
Great article and perfect timing - I have just submitted my first app to the Mac store. Two questions:

You mention in the article that some of your customers amended bad reviews - did they do that on their own volition or did you encourage them to do so.

Is there any way of contacting people who give you bad reviews, so you can help them with the problems they are having, and hopefully get them to give you a better review?
What the logo is doesn't matter. We just all need to grab one out of the hat, say "that's good!", and move on.

The question really is, as Skoofoo says, why exactly we need a logo.
It would be a neutral symbol for the Internet. Do an image search for "internet logo" or "world wide web logo". You'll mostly find the Internet Explorer or Firefox icon or some weird icons that been around since the AOL era. These are used on countless websites and presentations every day due to a lack of a neutral alternative.
I think integrating wordpress-like administration systems with static publishing systems should be a major goal. That's how movable-type used to work in the old days, and it was great. Now that we have client-side plugins like Disqus for dynamic interactivity features, there's no need for published content to be dynamically rendered. It's all downside and no upside, other than, "wordpress exists".
Celsius is more intuitive for cooking.
Been playing with Zim. I like it a lot. The equation editor, unfortunately, is having some issues with Miktex, but I'm sure I can iron those out
The three most difficult things in programming: naming, cache invalidation, one and threadoff errors safety.
When we say "startup" around here, we're specifically talking about a pretty narrow economic model... angel/venture funded software companies targeting $10M-$100M+ annual sales in less than a decade.

That may be your definition, it may even be a popular definition, but it is by NO means "the" definition of "startup" here. I don't see, for example, any evidence that everyone here thinks of angel/venture funding as being a requirement to be a startup.

I believe you will find any posters here to like @sgblank's definition of a startup as "a temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model".

Anyway, if you put aside the absolute requirement for hockey-stick growth curves, you liberate yourself to pursue things in different ways, and follow a different tack. And if what TFA suggests is true, this might be a good idea for education startups. If you're counting on broad changes in thinking at the level of society-at-large, you probably don't want to be in a hurry. Being under the gun from a VC is probably counter-productive in that case.
Right. The problem is that you used the American spelling of the f-word. My guess is that if you had spelled it with an English accent, everyone would have thought it charming, quaint, positively British, and blooody brilliant.
Those were some incredible sample photos. It would be amazing to see a larger selection of them.
Gore Vidal made a similar comment insulting, I am pretty sure, Norman Mailer. I can't remember it though.
Not really useful for my note-taking needs, but totally awesome brainstorming tool. Thanks for sharing!
No that's all the distribution I was talking about. It seems like there's a pets.com aspect to the whole situation. Where
Are you seriously arguing that a programmer, who surely has more than a passing familiarity with how to search for things on the internet, would forget how to look up documentation after using an IDE for some time period? The art of programming is not masted by mindless repetition of laborious documentation lookups. Searching documentation isn't an advanced skill that requires constant practice to remain capable. Generally there are still plenty of things to look up (has somebody solved this before, is there a library to do this, has somebody already figured out a workaround for this bug in library/framework X that I'm using etc etc).

I find languages with poor tooling irritating to use, in the same way that I find other language deficiencies irritating. I usually wish I was back using something more powerful. For example, it's the feeling I get when working with strings in C, or using a language without lambdas. I am irritated at my time being wasted when using languages where the compiler doesn't warn me about simple mistakes, or when I have to manually filter out false positives when renaming something with a tool that doesn't understand the code beyond doing find/replace/regex on a stream of unicode characters. None of this means that I can't get work done with 'blub' language and tooling, but the fact that something better exists is always in the back of my mind, and knowing I have mastered a worse tool doesn't give me much satisfaction.

The idea that more modern and better tools are a crutch is hardly unique to software development. In just about any field you can find people advocating for the 'character developing' tedium of the old ways. The irony of course is that the same arguments nearly always apply to the older methods being advocated: they once were new, and the hard won knowledge of the even older method became redundant. See: punchcards, assemblers, compilers, build automation tools, version control software, syntax highlighting, documentation being a big physical book with an index, compiler errors and warnings, images, refactoring tools, automated testing. Just about all of those have been described as a crutch that prevents people achieving real deep understanding of the computer or their code. Does it make you feel inadequate as a programmer to know that you couldn't do your job using punchcards, or as you put it, to be 'beholden to a text editor to the point where you can't program without one'.
No! Is the new monkey business..
I didn't say it can't be a source of entertainment, I said it doesn't have to be. I take great please in many meals; but food is fuel and I require "just" fuel most of the time, every meal isn't an experience and doesn't need to be. Most meals are just fuel. That doesn't mean I don't take pleasure in meals intended for taking pleasure in; it isn't that black and white.
I would be all for a GM strain of wheat that has more lysine in its gluten, making it a complete protein. The lack of complete plant proteins in this modern age of biological hacking is appalling (although I do get that it's because the vegetarian and anti-GM crowds overlap so much).
Have a look at http://www.flickr.com/groups/onthestreet/pool/ to get a feel for this style of photography and what good looks like.
IOS 7 Concept: Welcome to the future of the iPhone
Have you TRIED it? You can try things like a Kanban (Trello is awesome) to roll work forward out of your backlog. Or a to-do list.

But the simple fact is, you will always have more work to do than you have bandwidth to do it, if you're a remotely interesting person. So sure, some things will "disappear". That's okay. If they DON'T disappear, other things won't get done.
There's a language called SIMPL+ I think, where you program touchpanels for integrated audiovisual automation systems, where you have a motorized projector screen drop out of the cieling and a projector come online & a few video routers switch to certain I/O presets & maybe some table mics with feedback eliminator presets come online via I/O interfaces.

The predominant manufacturer for these systems is Crestron, but another is called AMX, and these guys make AV automation systems for uber high end home theater & corporate conferencing systems. These are also used in corporate NOC (Network Operation Command) rooms, where you have video walls & rows & rows of PC interfaces with control systems managing which PC desktops get which way onto the video walls.

I installed a few of these in the dot-com boom, for the likes of Sun Microsystems & other such dotcom industry leaders way back when, but haven't been into it for years.
Startups and Moms
How Colleges Are Selling Out the Poor to Court the Rich
I go back and fourth between booking directly with the hotel by calling them, or through the hotel's websites. Mostly I prefer to call to try and negotiate a rate, unless its one of those places that has told me that they just don't do that.
a while back I bookmarked this website and will use it again because its an aggrevator and coupons are easy to search for on there too: http://www.besttraveldealsomg.com/
What I want is a Chromebook that can use a Nexus 10 (or two), or Nexus 7 as an additional display.
I don't understand what you mean. Would you mind expanding on that?
The mobile market has been exploding. Even if you did a lot of stuff wrong it's almost impossible to not have had a growth curve. My feeling is that most content-driven apps would have been more successful as mobile sites, but that it's impossible to derive this from statistics due to the unstable pattern of the market as a whole.
This has been the norm re:NK for a long time. Lots of bluster, bullying & bravado amounting to nothing.

Should there be war, Seoul would take some damage and NK would fold in about an hour.
but I see a lot of statements that try to compress a complex set of issues and questions into a single metric

This needs to be posted over and over again under each posting pretending to know how "things" work. Social life is incredibly complex, and anyone pretending to have found the single, all explaining causality is flat out dishonest.
Wow, that's some nontrivial Ruby, some explanation of this code would be nice, I program in Ruby for some 6 years now and I still had to do a lot of head-scratching to more or less figure this out. I had no idea Ruby allows overloading of prefix operators, for example.
Where does this place "education" companies like ClassDojo and Code Academy? The author says education companies don't experience consumer-product level growth but both of them have definitely done that. Is that because they are more "consumerized" in that they don't always target schools directly? Is it because they are free? Or is it something else?
I wonder if the excessive levels of alcohol consumption in U.S. universities correlates to their lack of a good sleep as well?
Sorry, but here on HN, you can't defend irrationality or people simply being undereducated here. There's simply too large a crowd of people who think that anyone who makes any gut decision is a moron, and they're particularly active on threads like these, and will downvote you into oblivion.

Never mind that you were explicitly talking about the people who simply cannot know better yet try the best they can. They should know better, and if they don't they're morons.
I'm not sure if this is meant as a refutation or an orthogonal comment, but yes, the typeface selected affects how people perceive content. Each typeface has a history and certain associations. It is the job of a graphic designer to align the history and associations of the typeface with the content.

This is not really an empirical matter. Serif type might make something appear more credible, but this is only by association to other things that seem credible. In this particular case, the association is to the early Renaissance, and to some extent the early 20th century, which I think now both have a somewhat mixed reputation when it comes to credibility.
Apps like that are really idiotic as concept. Why the fuck do we have mobile view ffs? Can't you do your mobile version of the site looking the same as your idiotic app ? Why do I need to have 77 entrances to the same thing?
Very cool stuff. However, I think you might get more people to use it if everything was web-based (instead of having to download the .iso).
Can you link to this notebook you're talking about? I'd love a $200 notebook that's better than a Chromebook.
I feel this way about random advertisements I see on sites (mainly intrusive ones- well don't we all) . especially on the Forbes website. forbes can have interesting information (mixed with too much opinion maybe) but the writing is good...shitty site though because of ads and millions of click throughs to read an article .
Not quite the same thing, but you can get a Bluetooth keyboard for your Nexus 10.
It's unlikely, despite all the rhetoric: http://www.ph.ucla.edu/epi/bioter/seoulsvulnerability.html (while that article is 10 years old, all the same factors remain in play).
You're on to something here. The reason why "fuck" is not used as much in the U.S. is most educated Americans think you should be able to express yourself well without profanity. And "fuck" is the most overused swearword of them all. IMHO, "shitty" would be a better word in this case.

It really takes a skilled person to give the tired-old swearwords some zip. The insane sorority letter that went viral a month ago was remarkable not only because of sheer quantity, but also the quality of the swearing (for example, the verb "cuntpunt.")
I would hazard a guess that you inadvertently kicked yourself into ketosis. If you've been limiting your total carb intake to under 50g a day, it's possible this happened. There's a ton of good info on ketosis, a couple of great podcasts by Steve Gibson on it, and a good subreddit http://reddit.com/r/keto.
11 Essential features that Visual Analysis tools should have
Why is my homedir wide open?
Why does the default mode of adduser is to create a home directory that is wide open for anyone to change into?

I'm curious how that decision was made.
this video is actually just the exception that proves the point. Because this was so controversial, it was so popular.
lazy people like me are now a step closer to having good photo editing skills.
It seems wrong to use a symbol for something that's already pervasive. It would almost make more sense to create a symbol for "not the internet".
Yes, but when humanist type was invented, humanist script had already been used in illuminated manuscript. Thanks for the provocation though – it prompted me to take a closer look at the history and I think I may have been wrong to bring up the association to early Christianity. Indeed blackletter is the script of early Christianity and humanist script more indicative of the return to antiquity and the resulting cultural revolutions. So, there are actually 3 periods that are evoked by such typefaces – the late Roman and Carolingian eras, the early Renaissance, and the early 20th century's recontextualization of that aesthetic.
Like this: http://www.doaj.org/

It's up to academica to choose where to publish.