skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Maybe it would be really innovative if they combined this with something like Tactus. <http://www.tactustechnology.com/technology.html>

I'm also skeptical of Tactus. If they would build a similar input pad with embedded actuators that could create the illusion of a click, I would think this could be made more robust. An e-ink display built into the surface, and this would be perfect.

The Microsoft thing is nifty, but it screams "planned obsolescence" to me.
same here. i was skeptical of Niel as well, but with 42 he really showed that he was honest with his intention to change the country's mentality.

i also saw an interview of fleur pellerin the other day and she seems like a "hands in the dirt" person. that's a real change from previous ministers in her position.

that's really the first time i'm optimistic about a state sponsored big project.
I am a programmer, but my diploma says Electrical Engineer. I actually majored in EE because I thought it would help me be a better programmer (and I think it did, but that's a story for another time). I actually did EE work, too, and continue to do so sporadically, but I only tackle tasks where I can't screw up any actual EE's work. I know my fundamentals and have some design experience, but since I spent most of my career doing (admittedly, low-level) programming, I'm no match for someone who spent most of their career doing circuit design.

The whole frame of mind in which I do EE is incredibly different from the one in which I do programming, to the extent that, for much of my early career, there was simply no way I could do both of them efficiently during the same day. The time of context switching was, literally, a good night's sleep. There are marked differences; the ones that spring up immediately are:

1. I spend a lot of time doing actual computation, optimizing my design on paper and attempting to predict interactions that occur due to reality not being quite like its ideal model. Some of the younger engineers frown upon this (mostly because they suck at math and think theory is for bookworms), but it's very productive once you manage to do it right.

2. Even when specifications are complete and respected to the letter, there are still differences between what you specify and what gets built. There are technological variations you must account for.

3. Better yet, you always need to bear in mind the limitations of the manufacturing process for what you design. When I think about how I'll write something, my own ability to code is literally the only limit I have to deal with. There are, of course, hard limits due to the constraints of the platform you work on (e.g. there is some hard limit to how much code you can fit in 16K of flash), but these are of a very different nature compare to manufacturing constraints. Designs must account for the limits of your technological process (e.g. you may not be able to mount some types of components on a PCB), and they must also ensure manufacturing is feasible and scalable (something called DFM -- Design For Manufacturing -- which I have screwed up a couple of times, due to my inexperience).

Overall, there's a huge gap between how much intuition and craftmanship I put in each activity.

I'm not saying this disqualifies programming as an engineering discipline; such differences may also exist between other engineering disciplines I have no idea about.

I, for one, tend to frown upon it being called "software engineering" though, mostly in virtue of these differences. I don't consider the term "software development" demeaning -- in fact, I prefer it, and I always present myself as a programmer and my job title as "software developer", even though I'm legally allowed to call myself an engineer.
They can get away with it because it's their web browser and there are a lot of other choices. If enough people don't like it and switched they would probably change it back.
Regularly disappointed there isn't a better solution on Windows (other than Launchy).

Mind you, regularly disappointed I have to actually use Windows on a daily basis so.
This comment is hilariously shortsighted.

Ten years later:
>> "Guys were being paid $100/hour to get CRUD working through a web framework."

People weren't being paid to write HTML. They were being paid to publish information on the Internet for the first time ever. Like, before W3 schools and NodeJS. Like, back when you got your morning news from the paperboy.

If typesetters were paid a dime back in the 1700s, anyone who could design a webpage in the 90s was certainly worth their weight in gold.

And with time, one day your job will also be super unflattering to talk about.
Xkcd: Privacy Opinions
IIRC, iOS has grouped ratings by version (as show latest by default) for longer than iOS 7. I believe it was introduced in like iOS 4 or 5?
Nice background on low latency news feeds: http://hartmannluggagenews.blogspot.com/2012/01/trade-news-p...
I could see why development service team always want to get more and more information about a project. Open it more, then you get better return. Fun reading.
I take it that you lead by example and have whitelisted internet where you work, as a coder of course, right?
Startup feedback request
> does it also run all Android apps that 4.2.2 runs?

This very much depends on your definition of Android. If you have used any Google Play Services (or any Google-backed APIs within Android itself, prior to migration to Play Services) you will need to switch them over to Amazon's equivalents (where they exist).

Since Google is heavily pushing Play Services to developers, chances are many apps will need to have some changes made to them to enable Kindle Fire support.
Really great advice, would you mind if I put it up on pastie (obviously with attribution to you) so people can bookmark it?
Show HN: I made a Freeware Index for Windows. Hope you guys like it
$25M makes many of the "honest people" not so honest. ;)
The date should not only be taken into account for app RATING, but for app RANKING. I see many apps that haven't been updated in over two years that are ranked higher (due to more downloads) than current releases similarly or higher rated with fewer downloads. I would favor an time-based exponential decay type of factoring of ranking. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_decay)
no, that's sort of why i was asking for details. I'd be interested to know if postgres or some other open source solution could net us the 10-100x performance he's referencing. I've heard great things about postgres, but I've never used it under heavy load.

I'm under the impression that some proprietary databases on expensive hardware can achieve those levels, and some friends that do oracle installations claim that the total cost-per-query is competitive with open source / commodity hardware setups, but I've never really considered using them at my companies, and it seems like a lot of start-ups are in the same boat.
Wow, thanks for all of the great points and counter points on BADGEr! You guys have really looked into it.

When we started brainstorming what we could do for the summit badge, we came up with a few goals:

Should represent and promote Open Design and Collaboration,
Should promote and represent Wyolum projects and process,
Should promote and represent Seeed as a premier implementation partner,
Prominently display or embody the Open Hardware Logo, and finally
Hardware should be be useable for projects after the show (e.g. nice dev platform, preferably arduino compatible)

I think the BADGEr is the best of all /possible/ badges that we could have come up with. A handful of people, spread over the planet, accomplished this with very limited funds. Open Hardware Rules! (pun intended).

Justin Shaw
WyoLum.com
Honestly, basically all of the upsides that he lists can be gained from using contact lenses, which are amazing. Also, with plain old American vision insurance (VSP), I get a year's worth of contacts for free, every year. As a longtime glasses wearer I switched to using primarily contacts a while ago and it's amazing. Contacts have their share of (mostly minor in my experience) issues, but as long as LASIK continues to have bugs like the halo thing OP describes, I'll stick with them.
Technically that cycles through the windows, meaning they all get active and visible at some point. something you can avoid with Witch...
Lots of people use web technologies for other things than "the open web" where browser compatibility is an issue. It could be internal apps, mobile sites, embedded WebViews, etc. For us, flexbox indeed "solves" the problem of CSS layout.
Good luck with that , Django code is massive , and when 1 line of python ~= 5 lines of C++ , without all the sugar, the task is not worth it at all. Let alone all the QA and porting all the legacy code ,which will never be full compatible with a pure C++ implementation unless you know pretty well Python internals.

If you need high performance servers,move to the JVM(Scala) or Go,or use a C++ framework , problem solved. Use the right tool for the job.Disqus did and it works pretty well for them , without having to reinvent the wheel.
You are correct, Ruby and Python plugins add most of RubyMine/PyCharm features to IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate. You may want to have separate IDEs if you need more lightweight environment. RubyMine & PyCharm are in general updated more frequently too.
Pitch your startup in 15 seconds
Well, tech is limited in polling booths which most people agree is a good thing.

Automation in warfare and one-sided removal of the human element for the richest side isn't necesserially bad, but it is bad when we can't trust the governments who have this technology and when they repeatedly act unethically.
Android recording all your moments on Google Map
Like most people outside of North America, I just skip these steps by default since the answer has been "no" for a decade, and in most cases still is.

Also "purchase" should be "non-DRM or single-platform format crippled purchase".

Oh, we now have Netflix in the Netherlands, since a few weeks. The actual selection is a joke. Yes, I understand it's the copyright mafia's doing, but don't ask me to pay the same price as Americans for a fraction of the product.
I cannot wear contacts due to a pretty strong astigmatism, it make them extremely uncomfortable. I've heard that PRK is more proven and though it takes longer to heal it's a more permanent solution since with LASIK the layers never truly heal.
Please don't mix supply with perceived value.

It's deflationary in the sense that with passing time each coin is worth more than before. There is some correlation with money supply, but deflation ultimately means: how much can you buy for a set amount of currency.

The inflation/deflation of the US dollar for instance is measured by statistics like the CPI, which boils down to how much consumer goods you can buy. If you can buy 10 peaces of bread this year for $10 but only 9 peaces of bred next year, you have inflation. If you can buy 11, you have deflation. How the dollar supply (number of existing dollars) changes has a correlation to this (i.e. it influences this), but it's not defining it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_price_index
F-16s are the new drones
FWIW, PostgreSQL is our primary data store. It works well. ;)
It has an iOS app that goes with it, go figure :)

Disclaimer: Just kidding, i am an apple user myself
You don't just throw something together in 10 minutes and call it a startup.

This isn't a startup. It's nothing.
I have a business in both Austin, TX and Paris.

I want to share my experience. France is doomed. Taxes and red tape are harder and harder every month. Just today, they have announced they want to raise a new tax on video games (wtf) and distribute the money to french video game large editor. (wtf) You can't do violent games or game that don't picture well the french culture. (wtf!) If you are an indie game developer in France, you are done.

Example of red tapes (someone asked):

- You can't fire anyone.
- To hire someone, you have to face a handful of fake applications. (People who don't want to get the job but are afraid of losing their allocations)
- You have to publish your statement of income every year. Even if you are full private LLC!
- You can't do online banking.
- You have to declare every websites you own to the gov.
- Some crazy BS about keeping access logs of your websites for an insane amount of time.

Example of taxes:

- To pay an employee 1,000 Euros, you are paying 2,000.
- They have a commission to monitor the evolution of work time and you have to pay them directly. Not even a scam.
- You have to huge pay a tax on your server SSDs for P2P piracy even if you have a business that nothing to do with that.
- VAT taxes are a painful process.
- You have to pay 30% of your total assets if you want to live abroad, even if it's only for a few years.

Sure, this project seems great but it's again gov. money (Caisse des Dépots) wasted and it will only profit to some BS/political companies, so scr0w them.
> Rather than people being the casualties, infrastructure and drones may be what is being destroyed.

When you say people, you mean the humans who are fortunate to be on the side of the richest team
I have been using Microsoft technologies for many years, and I don't believe I will change it. Microsoft technologies are quite mature.
I get similar halos in the dark and I have no vision problems at all, maybe it's exaggerated by LASIK but it's certainly not something that 'normal' vision is immune to.
I wore contacts for a long time but then my eyes started going dry after coding all day. I guess one blinks less when staring at a monitor. Anyway, it took a few weeks of glasses to recover from the effects of the dryness. After a few attempts, it's glasses all the time.
I can't really see any halo in the O picture even how hard I try. Is it supposed to be photo manipulated?

Anyone having a link to the original?
That's in Quebec, the french-speaking Canadian area, not France
The halo effect took a lot longer to go away for me then a few months, but it eventually did go away. Same with the dry eyes, it took maybe a year for me to get over the dry eyes. I am going on 10 years now and I have no lasting side effects, and I would no doubt do it again.
Since the update, when I open the browser it goes to google.com now. New tabs after that bring up the new tab interface.

I don't understand why this is happening.

The "On Startup" setting is set to "Open the New Tab page", yet it doesn't.

Anybody know a way to fix this?
Mr Niel is also the largest personnal capital investor in France.
I was wondering about this and asked someone born with 20/20 vision before and they claimed no halos. Would be interesting to hear more opinions on this.

So people born with "perfect" vision. If you stand outside on a dark night and stare at a street light, is the separation between darkness and the light completely crisp, or is there a halo or a starburst of some sort?
Icons being thin-lined isn't bad per se, I'd rather say them being tiny and not obvious and inconsistent with buttons in other applications, especially for buttons that you'll use so often, is the problem. It's like the HN 'reply' link would be flat 5pt text right aligned at the same height as the comment header.
The flip side of this is that when stakeholders/customers don't know what they really want or need, you can labor in the "requirements phase" for months. My team spent 900 hours last year just getting a functional spec and high level SRS together for a project that hasn't happened yet. Why hasn't it happened? Because at the end of the 900 hours, we presented our estimate (about 1100hrs) to the customer and he balked at the cost & time. Then my boss bitched at us for spending so much time on requirements in the first place.

<8 months pass>

Now we're looking at commercial solutions in an attempt to not have to build this thing and deal with this department anymore.

I agree with you 100%, but the number of people astute and experienced enough to quickly and deeply understand the problem to be solved (and the quirks of the customer) are few and far between. In my experience, perhaps 5-10% of any large IT organization fall into this category -- everyone knows who the superstars are and their time is always at a premium. Drives me bonkers.
Yes, it has been manipulated to add in a halo that corresponds to my post-lasik halo.

It is not that strong, but you can check with a color picker app or with a paint program that yes there really is one there.
There's a greenish halo around it, but it's very subtle.
"We are all in the time-killing business"
I prefer down-top approaches like YCombinator than top-down, central planning effort.

Ycombinator grew organically, as an experiment. This sounds to me like yet another bureaucratic effort to replicate Silicon Valley.

Politicians always think big, they don't want to fix holes in the roads, they want to make new super highways so everybody could see how great they are.

As European and entrepreneur I avoid France for any of my business work. Every French person enjoys life, wants to work the less they could and they feel entitled for everything. More than half the people there work for the government and are more worried about their rights than what they could do.

They could care less about competing with the world, they are living by increasing their debt, and believe that this is going to last forever, that probably Germany will support their lifestyle.

Don't get me wrong, I love France, speak French fluently, have lots of friends there.
I dunno - my parents would never stop using such a service - it's easier than googling your problem, and they find new tech problems on a weekly basis, and they aren't great at pattern matching to solve those new problems. God help them if the device auto updates into software that looks any different....

I agree that it's a response to poor engagement, but if that's the case, I think they're trying to solve a usability problem by throwing people at it. Apple's biggest selling point for the last 4 years was "It doesn't come with a manual because it's so simple". Amazon seems to have given up on simple, and on manuals - their equivalent phrase would be "it's so complex that we've hired people to help you use it, 24/7".

I think that although this service is a small step forward for currently confused users, it's likely a huge leap backwards, because it'll leave those people confused forever, and dependent on the "amazon lady" to use their tablet for them. On the surface, this seems too ridiculously obvious, so I have to imagine that they've got an awesome game plan that is yet to be revealed.
I had wavefront-guided all-laser LASIK (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lasiks#Wavefront-guided_LASIK) 6 years ago and the 'problems' I have with my eyesight are completely comparable to 'problems' I had when I wore glasses and/or contact lenses: that is, I have minor 'problems' that aren't worth writing a blog post about.

I go see the eye doctor once a year for a regular check up. My vision remains 6/3 (UK scale) which is 20/10 on the US scale.

I was about to recommend the doctor who performed my surgery. I Googled him only to find that he died a few months ago of cancer.

RIP Professor Joseph Colin: http://www.aao.org/member/obituaries.cfm
The easiest way in this case looks to be somewhere with cheaper electricity than the average person.
Nice read! thanks for sharing!
Mendeley's new iOS app
Glad you are happy with contacts. I found using them a bit annoying, and figured it would be nicer to just "get it over with" and fix the issue once.

The halo thing honestly isn't a big issue, but I didn't want to hide the whole truth when writing that post.
I agree, the building is beautiful, but it seems that there are no private office, so you are required to pick up all your stuff everyday, you can't have a good chair, or work on something other that a laptop. What do you do of your inevitable paper work, taxes, etc... We have a whole cabinet of these here for a 10 people shop. It's all fashion.
A tidied up and finished off version is here, in case it's useful to anyone: https://gist.github.com/corford/6697919
Online advertisers: unwittingly funding cybercriminals since 2011
Google is rubbish, im a noob at css and html... i couldnt find at all the difference between class and id... hmmm DUCKDUCKGO TIME!!!!!!! QUACK QUACK
Kinda reminds me of the OTHER major cryptanalysis feat of the time! The breaking of the enigma! (but they built a computer for that) so this story is way more awesome!
Clang is destined to change that.

http://clang.llvm.org/features.html#applications
This seems perfeclty timed as in 3 years the first 1000 student of 42.fr will graduate.

This incubator is finance by the same guys who financed 42.fr
That's great to hear, so there still is a chance it might go away. I had more trouble with eye dryness with contacts actually and never really noticed such a problem after the surgery.
So basically you're obliged to commend the quality of your comments? :P

Heh, I kid I kid. I'm glad you've got a good community there.
Contacts aren't an option for people with very dry eyes. My spouse and I both have the same problem, so contacts can only be used sparingly (once a week or less). It has nothing to do with computer use either, as my spouse doesn't stare at a screen all day.
I'm not sure, even if this was true (which is being denied) what the problem is here. It's not as though paid platform exclusivity periods are anything new; they seem to be relatively common on consoles.
Hello Moto, you’ve got a nice vulnerability in your backdoor.
Yeah, actually I agree with you and the point of this blog post was there is no reason not to do the operation based on this 6 month experience.
Even if you'd known that the exchange rate would eventually rise to $100, once the cost of electricity exceeded the current market price of the bitcoins produced the rational thing to do would have been to turn off the rig and use the money to buy bitcoins on the open market instead of mining them.
Pinterest rolls out revamped pins for articles, aims to grab more bookmarks
A talent for writing comments that read like brazen astroturfing? The first time I read it, that's what I thought it was. I'm still not sure that it isn't.
Because that's when the creation started. ;-)
>I'd use the system java/browser which has an extension available, no need to scan.
System java? Which OS (barring Oracle Linux) ships with JRE pre-installed? Browser extension for Java? I assume your familiarity about the Java ecosystem has not been updated since HotJava (or whatever it was called).
Hah, not even in Britain does it get that bad :)
http://www.withouthotair.com/c6/page_38.shtml - see fig 6.2
Yes, I was shocked how bad it looks, considering Microsoft has some really good font designers.
As a german, I feel your pain... It is really an issue. These are my requirements:

- DRM-free download for later use in XBMC (no iTunes, no streaming due to limited bandwidth)
- 720p or better
- original english audio track

Of course this is nowhere to be found in Germany.
A keyboard in turn has limitations over game controllers. Why not provide a game controller interface for your tablet instead so that manufacturers can provide arbitrary controllers instead of just flat ones the same size and shape as the tablet?

iOS 7 for better or worse is doing that instead:

http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/09/19/gamecase-the-first-co...

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-57589649-37/ios-7-ready-ga...
The Future of Diagnostics: Consumer Driven Medicine