skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"A cup of coffee is worth more than almost every app on the store."

That is a "hard pill to swallow," but it's true and poignant. The problem is not only systemic (i.e. Apple's fault). It's that many developers jump into creating apps withour conducting market research to prove that their products will have a long-lasting utility from a consumer's point of view.

I don't mean to be cynical or overgeneralize. To be fair, not all apps are created equal. But in my experience, the vast majority seek to provide a fleeting sense of entertainment (as opposed to utility). And the more practical apps are simply unimaginative iterations of existing solutions (e.g. fitness trackers and to-do lists).

We need to think differently about the purpose and expect more from them in the way of tangible impact on consumers. For instance, the Robert Wood Johnson foundation is using apps as part of nationwide campaigns to inprove childhood nutrition.
I think this metonymy helps reinforce the idea that there isn't a conceptual difference between hardware and software, or that they are inherently a single integrated product.

If you value various aspects of keeping hardware and software separate, then not reinforcing this association -- and instead trying to draw the distinction -- is valuable.

A lot of people in a discussion like this will point out that many computer users don't know what an OS is in the first place, or don't draw any distinction between the computer, the OS, and the browser. That's true, but avoiding using the individual proper names of these things makes it even more true!
Door Dash raises $2.4m (YC S13)
This is why we have Data.Dynamic which does safe dynamic types.

It almost never comes up because it turns out to be virtually useless, but that's a story for another time.
... and vice-versa
Oakland robberies surge as investigations sputter
That is exactly what I suspect is going on.

Feel like hacking something? Do it, then call yourself "Anonymous" to make sure you get attention for it. Have a new 'hacker group' and want something to give yourselves some credibility? Call yourself "Anonymous". Got hacked and need somebody to blame? Blame it on "Anonymous", who can prove it wasn't? Caught some 'hacker group' and want to make yourself seem impressive? Say you caught the head of "Anonymous".

Basically everyone involved loves the idea of there being an "Anonymous" because that concept is so useful to everyone.
It's funny how Bell Atlantic has the 20th oldest domain name ... and they put a hyphen in it.
All through high school and most of college I knew I wanted to be a programmer when I grew up. But when I was about to graduate I suddenly had to decide what kind of thing I wanted to program. I have many interests; too many to study them all. So I know a little about a lot of things but I have been unable to get jobs in those areas. (Graphics, compilers, AND operating system internals to name a few that the OP mentioned.) So basically since I couldn't decide I'm stuck with the "general" stuff. My experience is similar to OPs, basically, but I haven't figured out the solution. I have a vague plan of becoming either important enough at work to pick my projects and help with product strategy or else to become an independent developer.

Complicating this plan, though, is the fact that I put more emphasis on family than on work satisfaction. If I have to put up with a boring job but get to live in a nice house in a nice community and spend time with family, that might be worth it. I'm just not totally satisfied that it is yet. But I can't go risk everything in a San Fransisco start-up attempt.
Only that you're likely to get a "NO!" answer from Legal or from Corporate Security or some internal organization that's quite opaque, has veto power, and deals with US Government contracts, or has security clearances or something like that.
Back them truckloads of tablets worldwide was shipped. But all of them were market failures. Only iPad have traction + mindshare.

BTW: "it's fairly clear the opposite is true." The opposite of what?
The current way certainly isn't working, and has left some areas of Wikipedia devoid of editors willing to put in the effort required to keep editing in the face of determined trolling.
Lane, I don't know if you remember me, but I saw your name and instantly thought "Of course Lane would build something this cool."

AWESOME job with this, it's both fascinating and well laid out!
Would this work as a tool for indie game designers instead of Flash?
Maybe this is great for PHP, where DBGP is the standard, but...

I tried this for Python and was greatly put off by the need to download an obscure debugger tarball from ActiveState with some weird license on it, then (according to the vdebug documentation) run a very long command line by hand passing the name of the script every time I want to debug something.

If I am going to trouble myself with that, it's hard to understand why I don't just run a standard standalone debugger which works in the expected way, from the command line. I definitely don't see how it reproduces the experience of (say) pressing a debug button in Visual Studio or Xcode.
Do keep in mind though that writing JS for the web is one of the few instances today where an app is expected to run flawlessly on several completely independent implementations. Put any other language in JS's place and you'd probably have gotten a similar number of incompatibilities between browsers (especially since many/most of these incompatibilities are actually in the DOM -- an API). This is a symptom of software diversity, not of JS.
Author here, sorry about the spikes where people do not actually live. A lot of users put only their country and not city, and I didn't want to throw that data away.

I probably should've checked the specificity of the location and only thrown out the data for large countries like Russia and China, or distributed it across all other data points in the country.

Interesting project if you want to fork it!
Not entirely true. A lot of times resolutions are just double the normal one, so the SVG image scales perfectly and looks good.
> They are using lua. They just have a front end to lua that uses javascript syntax, it would seem.

Regarding the limits of how far this Lua / javascript combo can or should take us I refer you to the words of Roberto Ierusalimschy, creator of Lua, himself (I agree with him):

> I must confess that I would be very reluctant to board a plane with flight control implemented in Lua or any other dynamic language.

http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2008-10/msg00405.html

I think if the goal is to make little gadgets that put large block letters over jpegs of cats and post those jpegs to social media sites, Tessel's software side is on the right track. It might not be so great for "internet of things" gadgets that interface with the real world, in real time, in novel ways.

(in fairness their hardware looks interesting, though currently overpriced)
The concept that we should shoot those who hold ideas we don't agree with rather than engage in debate

And your form of argument is ad-hominem. Not exactly the moral high ground.
He should contact the ACLU + EFF instead of asking for donations.

But hey maybe the donations will help too
Sure, people from North Dakota tend to carry ID cards identifying themselves as "members" of North Dakota, and tend to decorate their vehicles to signal their membership as well.

You can search somebody and generally reasonably determine if they are a North Dakotan. Can you say the same of Al Queada? Are there literally "card carrying members" of Al Queada?
I agree with nickler. Constant communication is key for solving so many of the problems that will arise during the course of your start up. If communication is bad now, then it will only get worse during the difficult times.

Find a co-founder with the same level of commitment that you have. Don't settle.
A cup of coffee is like temporary marijuana to drown out the dreary feeling of going to work. To me, the value is much much greater than most apps, no question. Coffee to me is like having a shower. Sure, a shower is basically just splashing water to your body.. but it's also one of the few places where you can think to yourself with no distractions.
Hi,

We are glad you are trying out GWD. You are correct that it seems like a bit of overhead just to render a simple rectangle. However, as alphakappa astutely observed, there is some overhead to parse the JSON data which describes the various shapes and to render those shapes in canvas(es).

What you see is the entire canvas rendering library used by GWD. That code will be reused for additional shapes you create, including more complex shapes you can create with the Pen tool.

You bring up a great point though. In most cases, you probably don't need to draw shapes (and the overhead that comes with the runtime). If you want to rectangle elements on stage, a much better option is to use the Tag tool (the fourth tool from the top) and add HTML elements such as DIV and give them background colors and modify the border styles using the Properties panel.

We are working on our help documentation to educate our users in how to optimize their content in both size and performance.

Thanks,
Google Web Designer team - aka the ones tasked with making this application. ;o)
Looks like it's a rebrand of Motorola's Ninja:

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/07/ninja-...

via @ElliotGeno
Exporting a bitmap is easy, and will always look correct when rendered.

Exporting SVG is difficult, requires specific tools, and is gonna render differently depending on the browser.

SVG solved a problem exactly no one had.
lavabit.com has a paypal donate link
Is there a big AT&T datacenter there or something? I've shown up as coming out of there on so many Geo-IP sites over the years, DSL, cellular, T1's...
Why YC startup Strikingly skipped China, Japan and headed for South East Asia
I'm getting a blank screen in Firefox.
I forget the exact slogans from wartimes past, but you can't win on the battle front until you've won the home front.
> If you can afford to replace everything you own out of savings, good for you, but most people can't.

Exactly this. The advice I was always given is that if you can afford to replace x (whatever x is) if something bad were to happen, then it's better not to bother. But if you can't, and x is necessary for your life, then you need to accept insurance as a necessary evil.
The problem is, there are lots of ways to learn that programming CAN be fun (and this site is a great place to learn about places that seem to offer exactly that).

It's not that I do a job in a field that I hate. I have a crappy job in a field that I love. I'm convinced I could resign much more easily if it were the former case..
I see, it is an interesting point, thanks.

For me, that would be one of the main reasons against SVG
To say it's "skewed" is an understatement. Any market in which a group can collectively take a dive, then revert their losses while the winners commit (save) the upside is destined to be exploited.
I'm surprised file size hasn't been mentioned as a mother major reason.

With tools like ImageOptim, and ImageAlpha, you can make PNGs INSANELY small with 0 or an imperceptible loss in quality.

For example, PNGs do insanely well when you have few numbers of colors that are repeating often. I've had had images that were 640px by 960px (pixel style art) that compressed down to sub 3kb with no quality loss. Good luck getting that with an SVG.

(Yes, there are certain types of images that PNGs are a terrible solution for, however, really, what I mean here is, right tool for the job.)
Had my attention for only three minutes!
Any thoughts what the European location that seems to be southwest of Berlin. Seems to be between Hannover and Leipzig, but there are no major cities there, and it's strange that its bigger than Berlin.

EDIT: Could be people who just wrote "Germany".
Please for the love of god less of these generated development tools. I remember having to clean up a frontpage/dreamweaver generated codebase, kill me...
Silicon Valley Snowdens are a 'paranoid' bunch
Show HN: A Mobile app web demo product
a) GPL code doesn't justify submitting user queries to Amazon without seeking explicit user permission
b) It should be opt-in service, not an opt-out. By default, this should be switched off.
c) That doesn't mean this feature isn't a spyware.
Ah! This makes sense. My first thought was "wow, impressive showing in St. Louis..."
One weird trick to furnish your new home for free
The usual problem with this kind of visualization is that, as you add more data, you get what is basically just a population density map.

What would be interesting is to see where there are more Github users than you would expect by pure density of internet users.
That was the biggest surprise to me. I know Houston has over twice as many people but I didn't expect the numbers to be that large of a difference.
He wanted me to work for 60 days without pay

Run.
Assuming you're referring to the health-care fiasco, tha is not a "petty squabble". It is seen as an existential threat to the nation, and the drive to de-fund it comes from The People. If its half as badly implemented as they say it is, they're right to do whatever they can to kill it.
I used SVG to make some interactive demos of some methods for solving ordinary differential equations. At the time, I remember being frustrated by the poor documentation available for the scripting aspects.

Naturally, there are a number of web resources, but none of them felt authoritative (in the sense of complete coverage). Furthermore, they used different techniques, so it was hard to integrate code samples from different sources. Finally, some had outright errors (my vague memory is that some of this was due to the documentation being written before a working implementation was available).

All of this had the effect of making me feel like SVG was a bit of a backwater. I liked the technology, and was willing to use it since I had total control of the machine I was going to run the demo on. However, I didn't feel comfortable with the idea that I could make the demos public and have them run anywhere.
The simplest solution (from the implementor's perspective) is probably to leave it to the user to reassign one. Allowing multiple-letter specifiers helps here. Coming from a C perspective, that's what I would prefer.

You could work out all sorts of namespacing and automatic reassignment schemes, of course.

I can't think of anything without trade-offs off the top of my head (I double that anything exists), but in my (limited) experience it's very workable.
Firefox+NoScript does a pretty good job. Typically, the domains that host the JavaScript to run the ads have no JavaScript I actually want executed.

If there's an exceptional case I open it in a Chromium private browsing window.
I think SVGs have failed so far on the web because of a sort of "paradox of choice": As soon as you use SVG images, you'll be tempted to make them do things you can't do with PNGs, but you still end up in a world of hurt if you attempt to do this.

Chiefly among these new features are (1) inlining directly into html (2) making them interactive via javascript.

Both #1 and #2 are possible in theory, but in my experience these features are very painful practice... both of these are still very buggy. That's the problem with SVGs: Most of the new "options" they open up are still not ready for prime time.
I didn't even read the story and I know this is going to be dumb.

There's no such thing as a free lunch!
If you're wondering why Andreessen Horowitz felt github was worth the 100M dollar investment, look no further than India and China. These massive populations are yet to be tapped for the most part leaving a great opportunity for future growth. For a company that has been profitable from the get-go, things are only going to get a lot better in the long run.

Awesome job on the visualization btw.
By all means use hard tabs to your taste, but if it would help anything to use spaces, why not configure the editor to handle that for you and forget about whether you are emitting ASCII 9?
I'm still impressed it only takes 26 letters, in words of average size around 5! By comparison, 1000 continuous dimensions seems positively resplendent with expressiveness.

FWIW, 2^61 > 26^5, so even the binary vector 2^1000 has an expressive space about 2^939 times larger than 26^5 (all possible words up to 5 letters).
The majority of those changes aren't visible to users. As a corporate developer, I can tell you that it's extremely hard to get funding to make even the most necessary technical changes to an existing piece of software. Normally, the best you can do is sneak it in with a big redesign that has features worth paying for.
Element Hiding Helper lets you target page components based on source. It has a standard filter for ads and other filters for egregious social buttons/trackers.

I also use it to remove annoying sign-up overlays and Google+ notifications when I search.
Redesigned Martin Jetpack deliveries expected to start in 2014
This is true, but it's still much better than pixelated blur or aliasing. Also, most of the time you have the same problem when authoring a bitmap with vector tools too, unless you very carefully target a specific output resolution. If you really need pixel precision you can always use bitmaps, but vector is perfectly fine in many/most cases.

I wonder though - would it be possible to apply hinting to svg with javascript?
Everything you said is pretty much spot on, but I think the overarching point that isn't really spelled out, is that people do actually spend money on apps[1]. There are important pricing considerations in that going from .99 to 1.99 you don't normally lose >50% of buyers. Once you've crossed the barrier from free to paid, another dollar isn't a big deal. Also, IAP and other methods of giving people trials helps. Overall the point is though that people do in fact spend money on apps.

[1] My longer response to this article - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6471131
In the department that he was hiring for - graphics, marketing and writing - there IS a glut of talent and the candidates probably WOULD jump through hoops. But I would like to hear more - or anything - about what "data" is provided by the Jobularity approach.
Thought so too, but when you publish they let you add FireFox / IE CSS prefixes (on by default)
The Casino, not the gambler, counts on a constant stream of money coming in with the occasional large chunk of money going out. Insurance companies operate the same.
Eventually computers will be talking about us behind our backs in these high-dimensional vectors, only occasionally translating down to English approximations, to humor us. "Goo goo, gah gah, human?"
What the Non-technical Need to Know about Tech
Ask HN: University checks for cheaters when delivering code assigments. How?
My university checks for possible cheaters when delivering programming assignments. by inputing them to a program that gives back the probablitlity those two programs have code copyed of each other. How does the program work in essence?
Okay, I have a crazy idea. I don't believe the answer lies in a digital solution. Our bodies adapt and can filter out a lot of background noise, our email boxes and phones are just the same. We filter them out. So you need a loud reminder.

What you'll need:
1) 1x Egg Timer. Its need to be mechanical and loud. Crazy loud. An mechanical alarm clock is just as good but it needs to be loud. This has to be on your desk, within your line of sight.

2) 1x Day to Day diary if you travel, or a piece of A3 Card if you work in one location.

3) Golden or silver star stickers (yes folks we are going back to school).

Premise:

1)Pick a task to complete (if its a big task, break it down into workable small chunks).

2)Set the Loud egg timer to fifteen minutes.

3)Go. You have 15 minutes to accomplish this task.

4) When the timer goes off. Stop. Have you accomplished the task? If yes, put a star sticker in your diary or on the piece of card but keep this out of eye sight. Write down the task you accomplished. If you didn't complete the task, no sticker but doesn't matter. Keep going.

5)Start a new task with a completely different subject matter. Set the timer for another 15 minutes and go.

6)Once you have completed this cycle four times. Stop. Set the timer for 15 minutes. You are free to surf any social sites, check your phone, email etc but when the timer goes off. Get back to it.

7) On the Sunday of every week, publish how many stars you got on your blog, in a public post. No need to detail the exact tasks but a summary of what you accomplished, would be good.

8) At the end of the month, write a summary on your blog. Repeat for every quarter. Then at the end of year, write an end of year review. Publish it on your blog.

Goal: To fill the page of your diary or the A3 Card with stars so that at the end of the day. You can see what you have accomplished. However the main thing is, its not the stars you've stuck on (which is just a simple gamification), its keeping your mind occupied.

The publishing your achievements on your blog is for a public record.

Notes: Don't use your phone, computer or digital timer. You'll just block it out. An mechanical timer is best because its loud and in your face.

If you are really serious about the money, donate it to a worthy cause.
I'm sorry to be so pedantic, but your math doesn't seem quite right. Should it instead be
(1/100,000 chance of burning down each year) * ($200,000 cost if it does) = $2 per near expected damages?
There are two distinctions here: between America and India/Bangladesh, and between then and now. Construction or industrial work in South Asia was never a secure path to the middle class. Education has long been the way forward in those countries. In the U.S., skilled blue collar work was considered a path to the middle class, but those days are long behind us.

Today, in the U.S. engineering presents a secure alternative to liberal arts degrees and living with one's parents, just it has historically presented an alternative to manual labor in South Asia.
I think this sounds a lot like burnout and the sooner you admit it to yourself, the sooner you can think rationally about it and address your psychological needs and start feeling somewhat better. You probably need a total break from it for a while.

I think that almost any particular sort of work can be either wonderful or terrible depending on a lot of other factors:

- autonomy

- relationship with coworkers/management/clients

- work/life balance (cliche, but there's really something there)

- possibilities for learning new things in the course of the work, etc.