skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a really good point. When I've heard others cite their satisfaction level with desktop displays, I ask them to go through an experiment.

I'll put aside the size portion of the debate since I can't really fathom how anyone could argue against a desktop display that can fill their entire field of view, assuming such a display were available and economically priced. I think those who argue for small displays on the desktop enjoy being contrarians, and they bring up matters of taste and style (such as "I don't want something so large on my desk.").

But in terms of clarity, the argument posed by those satisfied by the status quo usually is composed of these points:

1. Users sit at a distance of 2 to 3 feet from a desktop display.

2. Therefore, high-DPI is not meaningful because the human eye cannot perceive additional clarity at that distance.

3. High-spec IPS LCD screens are good enough.

So the experiment is simple enough:

1. Find an iPhone 5+, Galaxy Nexus+, or Lumia 920+. Something with a high-DPI wide contrast-ratio display. Open up a web site or document or whatever.

2. Do the same on your PC.

3. Hold the phone up side by side at the same distance. Zoom the phone's text to match the text size seen on the desktop display.

4. Behold how the phone's display is considerably more readable. For most combinations of phone versus desktop display, the phone's display will be crisper, have better contrast-ratio, and better color accuracy.

My Lumia 920 (not even an OLED, just a nice high-DPI IPS display) utterly shames my Dell U3014 IPS desktop LCDs.

Reading text rendered with high-DPI, high-quality displays at 2 to 3 feet is an absolute delight. Not only that, you can lean to see greater detail. Yes, 2 to 3 feet is the typical distance, but sometimes I like to get closer to my desktop display to work with fine details.

I would pay a steep premium (but obviously I wouldn't break the bank) for a desktop display that matched the clarity of my phone's display. If I could just tug at the edges of my mobile phone and make it magically grow to fit my desktop, I would be so happy.
I initially thought they bought a town - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braintree,_Essex
Tech Giants fear patent trolls in Europe
Is buying people out of slavery a good idea, or does it just keep more people in slavery?
"Amazon's discounting policies" are the same as every other bookstore, they pay the publisher ~45% of the cover price for each book. Generally speaking, the publisher gets the same $$ whether you buy the book from Amazon or from Quirky-Bookstore-Full-of-Cats or from wherever.

If you buy directly from the publisher, then the publisher does get 100% of the price. And if they donate 50% of that to your local bookstore, they're still making more money than if you'd bought the book from that local bookstore. None of this has anything to do with Amazon.

I get that Amazon is bad for small independent bookstores (and for large chain bookstores too!), and I notice that the author just happens to own a small independent bookstore, so take his other complaints with a large grain of salt.
>If any muslim can answer this question : who was the most moral person in this story. The prophet or the adulterer ?

I doubt you will find any Muslims here who profess 100% faith to the tenets of Islam. Wrong place to ask, I think. More likely you will find cultural Muslims over here. And they themselves struggle with doubts and what-good-to-pick from religion, like their other religion counter parts.

Also its not good to judge some 1400 year old incident with modern day values.
Perhaps on purpose but that is a particularly abusive carousel.
The authors concerns seemed more around making sure his publisher was paid than it was making sure he was paid.

Otherwise, I agree. It would be great if more publishers offered up eBooks directly from them. Even at a highly discounted price, they'd make more per sale than through other channels. (But if it was their only distribution channel, likely less overall.)
This looks really awesome. Funny enough I was just considering moving to Berlin for some startup work when my wife said "Why don't you go to Hacker School for a few months ?" (I had mentioned it earlier this year to her but the timing wasn't right)

So now this gets added to our list of "Why we should consider moving to Berlin". The only thing that has kept us off so far are the rather harsh winters. Was in Berlin about 60 days ago and of course, the summer is amazing and I totally loved the city for being so cheap and alternative... For New Yorkers, it's like Williamsburg, but all over the place ;)

I'll be following this closely. Thanks for taking the initiative to create this!

EDIT: Just told the wife, she says it's a sign - lol :P
Import a Go package from a private git repository
Have you seen how large the heliostats are? They look over 2 meters on each side, and the surface looks like glass or stainless steel. That's several thousand dollars of light engineering right there. Plus shipping to a desert, plus installation crew.

So you're looking at $100-$1000 of motor. Several hundred dollars for the controller board (how do they know where to point? Are they networked or something?), or thousands if you have to design it yourself. Then you have to cable power to it, all of which has to be up to code. The whole thing also has to be weatherproof in a desert and not blow over in the wind.

(The passive one-axis heliostat does sound interesting for DIY systems, though)
I'm not a big fan of open plan offices, but now 8 people are moving into two offices with no natural light, and 3 people right right next to them. Unless those hallway walls are glass, that feels like an awfully depressing place to work.
I like hilariously meta jokes.
I work in web consulting where we frequently take on a project from scratch (greenfield or otherwise) and ramp it up quickly in 6-18 months then hand off to the client who will likely maintain it for a year or two or three then redesign (nature of the projects, not a result of quality). My company is pushing for more and more sophisticated automated testing at the time that I'm starting to think that automated testing is costing us more effort than it's actually saving. Our bugs are, as you say, predominantly misunderstood requirements. The tests never catch them. Even with correctly understood requirements, unit tests frequently miss edge cases. Something that gets missed in so many of these process debates is that different kinds of work require different processes. If your job is to maintain a massive software product, then automated tests are probably your bread and butter. But for my line of work, they just ain't.
We are only 8 to 9 people in our room here. We have our own conference-space inside this room, without separation. I am siting between editors, but I am a data-wrangler. I do code (ok, ugly code, but code non the less). I try to wrap my head around sql-commands, awk, sed, grep, python and so on.

And absolutely yes, this is the most frustrating and draining environment, I was ever forced to be in.

Productivity is something I do not really know anymore.
The best part is the : Try your query on : AltaVista, Yahaoo!...
> and they removed the email client.

And the IRC client and BitTorrent client?
Something similar I saw in Second Life that I found interesting was people reading comic books - you can get comic books that hover in front of your character's face that you can look at by going into first person, and other players can see the pages too.
Looking forward to my house turning into beachfront property here in Orlando, FL!
The title doesn't say they're launching their first space station; it says they're launching _a_ space station.
Maybe, because that describes his imagines layout/design/feeling best, when it comes to these rooms/offices.
The new Galaxy Note 3 is region-locked
While I say that anything can fit on HN I have a hard time with articles like this, because the threads are usually full of hateful idiots bickering about things they have little knowledge of.

What have I learnt from the comments to this submission?
Earth's Artificial Ring: Project West Ford
I thought I would try that, but I'm probably still not really thinking in Git. I never branch or merge for example, since I never think of doing that. I understand this isn't really normal git usage.
The license of Microsoft's Portable Class Libraries
The scene in the vid where the guy says "I don't care..." with the framed "Faith" sitting besides him, it really pulls that documentary together.
buy my book, oh you haven't heard of it, let me put Amazon in the url and then make up some wonderfully confused reason why buying it there was wrong, but you still must buy it.

really? this comes off more like, here's my book, you haven't heard of it, but if I say something bad about Amazon I have an excuse to tell you of it.

If small publishers don't want to sell their books through Amazon then stay out of the channels where Amazon buys books. How is that not possible?
Plenty of small bookstores use amazon, by putting their inventory online as "used books". I'd be curious how much revenue from amazon actually supports small bookstores these days.
Actually that's one of the things that annoyed me. For quite a while when you try to login at braintreegateway and you clicked Forgot Password it asked you to call them. There are somethings phone calls are good for and I don't think resetting a password is one of them. Maybe they had a good reason for that.

And why the hell doesn't "braintreegateway.com" redirect to the right place?
Sounds Cool!
Who are the residents so far?
We had a caved in office in our last space, and the expected downsides from now having enough casual conversations bit us. Engineering did not know what client services was doing, client services did not talk to sales, and leadership was hard/nonexistent. Our new space is night and day - we have a big open floor plan and enough conference rooms so that you can always find a quiet place to brainstorm. We still have some of the old cultural problems that the old space created, but we are trending upward.
A few months ago, I had a brief exchange over Twitter with an artist from perhaps my favorite band:

https://twitter.com/edwarddroste/status/343418176454926337

"Maybe they're trying to catch your latest tweet?" was the reply that I wanted to send, but I didn't want to come off as cheeky to someone I revered.

Is the article not a distraction in itself? Sure enough, I came upon it this morning while I was browsing Twitter from my bed. The article itself is over 2000 words long; some of those words being a transcript from a 15 minute video. Now here I am commenting on it; taking up additional time from my day to formulate these points rather than attending to other things; reinforcing the dissonant relevance and irony of the points that the article is making. This article on distraction is a distraction in itself, and my viewership was predicated on finding it on a distracting service used from a distracting device. I found it and read it because I didn't have anything subjectively better to do at the time.

I'm OK with this.
Wait so these "all natural" pills contain a cocktail of drugs that are actually approved by the FDA but require a doctor's close motoring sold at a fraction of the price you would pay for them if you went through approved channels.

You know the risk just may be worth it if you can get the same drug at a fraction of the price. Some people can't afford the real thing.
I did read their terms, which is why I posted that. Nowhere does it say that you can't use the free certificate for a company. In fact if you read their FAQ ("The certificate is for my company, what shall I do?") it says "even in case he/she decides to obtain certification as an employee or representative of an organization". So it is specifically saying that you can use it for a company website.

Also it doesn't say in policy.pdf that you can't use it for banking. It just says you can't have a subdomain with the word "bank" or similar in it. So you could use the free certificate for an online bank, although it's probably not the best idea :)

Please don't downvote me just because you didn't read the terms properly. My comment above was correct.
"This time, I looked up, and all 10 or so of the people waiting in the show were literally buried, absorbed in their smart phones, and the shop stood stark silence. The people on their own, the kids, the parents, the couples, the whole damn lot."

Little bit of a shameless plug, and I apologize, but I wrote a piece recently about how this phenomenon is starting to have some very interesting effects in public places (supermarkets, for instance):

http://priceonomics.com/are-smartphones-making-us-less-impul...

Everywhere I go, I see the same thing: people's heads buried in their phones. I hear the same thing: the continual pitter-patter of push notifications and texting. It is indeed creepy, but it's the new normal. And I wonder what things will look and sound like when wearable devices become the new normal.

Another link, this time not a plug:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/09/130920094627.ht...

Endless stimulation and distraction -- whether from phones, from idle web surfing, etc. -- might have some really bad consequences for the brain. It turns out that the brain is unable to clear its cache, so to speak, when it's in a state of constant stimulation.
Boo! Paypal sucks and is a terrible company. I only use it when I'm forced to because I do not have access to international credit cards here in South America (where I live).

Too bad.
Direct link (RTF): http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=313707

Some gems in there:

BACKUP COPY. You may make one backup copy of the software. You may use it only to reinstall the software.

DOCUMENTATION. Any person that has valid access to your computer or internal network may copy and use the documentation for your internal, reference purposes.

You may not: ... distribute Distributable Code to run on a platform other than the Windows platform;
Open offices are a line-item cost cutting measure and nothing more than that. While they destroy the ability to write code and ergo engineering productivity, they are providing important data on the minimal environment from which productive results can be obtained.

Call this the Sweatshop Event Horizon.

I'd ask why oh why should anyone have to wear noise-cancelling headphones and/or install white noise generators just to get work done, but why bother? This is an intangible loss so the MBAs and management consultants behind this can claim they saved big bucks and then blame you for your lost productivity at your next review.

Finally, the worst part is when the HR department starts citing this morale-mashing pox as a perk:

http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_24032940/old-school-t...

That said, if all you want to do is play foosball and talk to your co-workers all day whilst whittling away someone else's VC money, it seems like an excellent approach to doing so.
It is even worse for the people who have bleeding disorders and can't take things like aspirin.

I've found Vicodin helped with the pain from my teeth (pulling) but didn't do anything (except make me drowsy) when I scratched my cornea.
I know it's an anecdote but it always left me confused as to whether it was the pain being so much worse with the eye or myself reacting differently the medication.
With how subjective pain is it's amazing that we find stuff that works for so many people really.
Don't buy any books from Amazon.

http://www.stallman.org/amazon.html
Giant Carnivorous Plant Discovered in Silicon Valley
Nothing wrong with calling them out and telling them they are being very rude. You don't have to be rude about it yourself.
I agree, I hope Stripe continues to prosper and grow as a great company.
Why we spy on Brazil
Dolphin Emulator and OpenGL drivers - Hall of Fame/Shame
Smartphone are still quite new for a lot of people.. Hopefully after a while it will become social awkward to be glued to your phone all the time.
Why r u decrypting your private encrypted key? To use for csr request? Can't u do car request with private encrypted key? And why point nginx/apache/watevr at the decrypted private key? Sounds unsecure?
I think it makes sense, but is simply unrealistic. Like when community members protest the opening of a Wal-Mart, pleading with people to support small businesses that provide fewer choices for more money. Then the Wal-Mart opens and everyone is actually happier. Well at least they must be, because they start shopping at Wal-Mart all the time.
Nice proof of concept.

One bug I noticed: Accidentally clicking the submit button when trying to drag it will submit a form and cause you to lose your work.
The official fact sheet http://www.bechtel.com/assets/files/Renewable_%202013_Ivanpa... makes no mention of molten salt, just a regular boiler on top of the tower.
For me, cycling sort of clears my mind by grabbing my attention. So it's great if I'm angry, frustrated, or depressed. But the attention grab also works against thought, so I simply cannot daydream or think about stuff while cycling, even if I wanted to. And I would love to. It's a shame really, because I love cycling. I also love being deep in thought, which happens mostly when I'm walking, sometimes in the shower.

EDIT: The attention grab isn't because of traffic. I can ride an empty road in the middle of nowhere and the action of pedalling and looking down the road just grabs me.
Orbital space debris is a real problem. I hope China will be a little more responsible than they have in the past.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/michaelpaukner/4314987544/sizes...

http://www.space.com/3415-china-anti-satellite-test-worrisom...

http://www.space.com/20138-russian-satellite-chinese-space-j...

In any case, I hope more countries put more space stations up. It would be great for space tourism and other human endeavors.
You Can Now Explore the Large Hadron Collider on Street View
SecondMarket goes all in on Bitcoin
What do you mean by CCCP "not updating"? It got an automatic update checker last winter and is actively developed.
Thanks for the detailed information. That certainly clears things up a bit.

I've been using Paypal micropayments for the past year or so and it's been the best bet for $2 transactions (I pay 6%+$0.05 for cross border payments). Ends up being $0.17 per transaction. I haven't come across anything that beats that by a large enough margin so as to replace Paypal yet.

The only downside is that Paypal is applying the standard 6% fee to $20 transactions as well (as opposed to the lower 2.9% fee), so I either need to route these transactions to a non-micropayments Paypal account or do something else with them... this is what I am currently working on solving. The difference doesn't come out to be much for a $20 transaction but with higher transaction volume it will certainly stick out as a sore point.
He said the distributor that ships books to local bookstores would also have to ship them to Amazon. So he can't both stay out of Amazon's channel and be in the local bookseller's channel. Presumably he wants his book in local bookstores.
Probably won't happen. China will probably take a clear lead within a couple decades. There isn't enough return on investment in a space race and the US won't have the extra money.

Kudos to China for taking the lead in the 21st century. Look at how they built the world's biggest high-speed rail system in such as short period of time. Next year it will carry more people than the US domestic airlines.

http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/chinas-high-speed-rail-move...
I use it here and there as well. I combined it with meteor to give a presentation without having to screen share. https://github.com/phillc/meteor-impress

Example: http://phillc-cd.meteor.com/

Open in multiple tabs and click the following button in the top left and move around.
It's a pity all these "better-than-Paypal" companies only serve US/Canada/sometimes Europe. Paypal owns the whole rest of the world! Maybe they can now help internationalize Braintree instead of imposing their badness onto it. Also sad that you can't sell hair extensions with Braintree :?(
Ah yes, the #not_quite_estonian_mafia or as some commenter put it on the site #foreignermafia (as opposed to the #estonianmafia label that goes around every time an Estonian start up is mentioned). In all honesty I'm very happy to see foreigners achieve good results with their start ups in Tallinn. I would love nothing more than to see Tallinn become this international hub for start ups.
interesting point about the notifications from cellphones being random (and thus addictive like gambling). Perhaps mine would be less random if I were to use the "different sounds for different people" feature...
Is there any evidence of this? Besides 800m in cash
Yes, the increased flexibility is something to highlight...

- We have an 'extended weekend' edition. That's weekend plus one day if you can convince your employer; If not, then just do > 14 weekends.

- We'll have a rolling release; you can pause the retreat, and come back. We know life interferes sometimes.

---
We also seem to have a bit of a functional/machine learning bent, at least on this first batch. I'm a data scientist, and my network reflects that. Limist is a more serious clojurean, he has a talk on euroclojure coming.

We also have a couple of people from the top 5 HN posters coming on this or some future batch.
"Speaking to RTÉ News in Dublin, Stripe chief executive Patrick Collison said he and brother John have no plans to sell the company. He said they already have experience of selling a company early in their careers and saw what that involves."

http://www.rte.ie/news/business/2013/0903/471900-stripe-laun...
The video interviews with Patrick are worth a look too.

Patrick is 24, his brother is even younger. I am with Stripe from the day they launched in Ireland, it was easy to choose them over the likes of Braintree and Paymill who aimed for simplicity but still required quite some formalities. Also, Paymill is Samwer brothers, a turn-off for some entrepreneurs and developers.
Hmmm, this appears to be an insightful article. I think I'll read it thoro--oooh, coffee's done!
A lot. http://www.maxmasnick.com/2013/07/19/fastmail/

HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6069944
Software is not just development, there is also a maintenance perspective. If I have a bug report in a complex piece of code it's a lot easier for me to write a test that covers the use case and work from there then building, fireing up a test device, etc.

Or when refactoring a piece of code that renders UI, write some tests to verify a couple of common cases and then refactor. Run the tests and I'll know whether the output is the same.
I think I would excuse this behavior in large cities, or when you feel overexposed to stimulation. I mean, it DOES take a ton of effort to be attentive to every single human that you encounter, whether it's in an mundane setting like a subway/shopping mall, or at work. Especially if you live in a huge city like SF, or NYC.

If you don't distract yourself once in awhile, by immersing yourself with something like a smartphone, I imagine it's very easy to get drained out with so much stimulation.

I mean, if we lived in the caveman age, or even the medieval ages where we encountered the same 20 or so people every single day, then yes, there's no need for the smartphone, but in the modern day, I think it's almost necessary to survive mentally. I look at it this way: Humans were not meant to live in highly populated areas where they interact with a thousand strangers every single day.