skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Are the others, in fact, just as bad?

Well, just one example that came to my mind from a documentary I watched recently:

http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/viewfinder/asia/2013/07/...
Why not adjust the crawl rate based on how often the site's content changes? If DuckDuckGoogle crawls me once an hour for a week, and notices that I only updated my content twice, why not scale the crawling back to a more reasonable rate, like once a day?
PR Sucks Because You’re Doing It Wrong
I want to agree with you, but with 2D the non-gaming uses were obvious and immediately saw use and I don't see that with 3D.
Tried the same thing and I might get 5 out of 20 channels in my area. Solution: move into the middle of the city. Not happening for me.

I can't wait until Aereo comes to my city.
It's really speed dependent, at the correct altitude and RPM propellers can be 85+% efficient in air. Also, while boats can get 'free' lift in water at speed your much better off with a wing aka hydrofoil because drag is one of those nasty velocity^3 things that quickly dominates.

So while a 2mph sub is more energy efficent than a 200mph aircraft the sub is rather impractical even pushing the sub to 20mph means the aircraft wins.
If you just want a map, "!map <address>" will send you to google maps with that address.
I am not convinced that that much of that $80/month actually goes to the production of these TV shows he watches. If it did, I think cable would have less ads, and I would also think that I wouldn't be paying $65/month to Comcast for cable modem service (no TV service).
I've got a calendar site that's used by <50 people. 99% of my requests look like:

"GET /calls?month=2&year=7206 HTTP/1.1" 200 2423 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"

It wouldn't be hard to stop (404 nonsensical years & disable the previous / next links that will get them there), but it is amusing that Googlebot has clicked on that "next month" link over 60000 times...
You had me at "reservable parking space"
Since it looks like you're on Wordpress, the supercache plugin (http://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-super-cache/) should help even on the cheapest Digital Ocean plan.
Business Models for Open Data
> But we don't. Moderating HN is no one's full time job.

I've always wondered who is changing the titles. Is there a bot? Or is someone really checking every single post to make sure the title is accurate? That just seems like classic busywork.
The bigger issue, though, is head-tracking -- something
Carmack's actively concerned with and working to solve
ahead of a retail release. "A lot of the work at Oculus
has gone into working out better position tracking," he
told us. "The tracking side is something that there hasn't
been as much of a push for and we're frantically working
on a lot of that, because that is one of the other really
large issues. But we expect that the next developer kit
will have higher resolution and position tracking
addressing some of these significant issues."

I find it incredibly refreshing when a company working on a hard technical problem is candid about the engineering challenges that lie ahead.
I believe you mean "Debt: The First 5000 Years". I'm still reading it. It's good for understanding these ideas, but it spends a lot of time in the beginning in "the language of debt" and how it relates to religions. That is interesting in its own right, but not why I picked up the book.
I have a dev kit, but unless you want to develop games, I'd wait for the consumer version. There's just too much missing in terms of resolution and positional tracking.

If you just want to demo the rift, here's a map of willing owners: https://maps.google.com/maps/ms?msa=0&msid=21608056830108037...

My Macbook Pro runs the rift just fine, but it all depends on the game.
Skeuomorphism is necessary to ease people into a radically new/different interface. Once they've grown accustomed to the new interface, then the skeuomorphism can be removed as it has gone from guidance to impediment. For VR, people aren't used to literally looking & moving around a 3D environment, so recreating the real world is necessary to ease them into the differences of the interface until they grasp it...THEN we can start changing what's perceived to express more abstract concepts.

For all the familiarity people have with the abstractions of interfaces on 2D screens, they're still just a flat limited surface within the space of our visual perception, and required skeuomorphism to ease people into familiarity therewith. VR is a massive change, which has to start by satisfying familiarity via sufficient imitation of the real world; once someone gets comfortable using it to the point of foregoing real scenarios in favor of virtual ones, then we can start tweaking the virtual to do things previously impossible and yet are natural extensions of their new understanding of the VR interface.
What is Apple’s secret TV project?
LongBoard Capital's view on Microsoft
Would you like me to explain my response more clearly? :)
I get the intention, and this is gonna sound kind of reductive and shitty, but there's no social contract on the internet. If you built it this way, you gotta put in the moderation/engineering work, tighten it down, or quit your bitching.
As a statement of your beliefs it would be hard to be more concise. I'm going to need more than your or Carmack's faith to be convinced.
In Seattle, there is this place: http://pscs.org/

You might be able to find something similar in your geographic area, hopefully?
Have you tried Toshiba hard disks? I replaced my laptop hard disk several years ago with a Toshiba that was fast, quiet, inexpensive, and reliable.

More recently, after my network-storage USB Western Digital issued an error once or twice, I replaced it with a USB 3.0 Toshiba Canvio. It's also fast, quiet, and inexpensive -- plus it has 3x the warranty; WD only gives 1 year.

When I got my MacBook Air this Spring, I picked up a second one for some extra space. Unfortunately, I didn't get around to setting it up for backups before my SSD failed; but I've learned my lesson, my backups are now entirely automated.
It's "funny" how often there are posts for "_____ is shutting down" for things that are completely new to me. I'll go to the page and (many times) think "I would have used it if I would have known about it!"

If you don't advertise well (and correctly!), you can't expect to survive, no matter how good your idea may be.
I wonder what the cost of Hulu is if they were to eliminate ads? If I hazard a wild guess I could see it being around $16 to $20 which I don't know if people would pay for that.
It's not like anyone would know if they did.
Meet Raspberry Pi NoIR, an infrared camera board for low light photography
Excellent article! I'll link it on G+ and on the Programming Andorid page.

I would add to the list the fact that people buy apps most often when they have just bought a new handset. Supporting old versions is like making a retrofit product. The market is inherently limited and more costly to support.
DoD employee here - maybe it's just me assuaging my conscience, but I always like to think that in the case of working on software for weapons systems, I've merely helped make them more accurate - I have absolutely no control over what they are aimed at, and that's a bigger problem than I can solve. To put it more succinctly: all Americans are responsible for the leaders they elect, and what they do.

These days, I'm fortunate enough to work on training sims for demining. I'd have to recommend that if you are really concerned about being a potential party to killing, don't worry about it - until you vote. Or maybe even write a letter or do some activism. But the last thing you should do is cripple the tools you make for others to use in some sort of ignoble bid to be moral. That's not moral, it's unprofessional.
Yea, I think that's a pretty bad comparison. If you look at the IE graph you posted, it's less than 1% in the US.

Another graph that might make things easier to visualize (the blue and above is who we're talking about abandoning): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Android-dist-by-dessert.pn...
A friend came up with the idea of using a QR code sticker on the front of the unit, tracked by the laptop's webcam as you play. This way, you can detect the angle and distance from the laptop and do positional tracking.

Anyone wanna take that on and see if it works?
That shows me almost no content at all: http://i.imgur.com/iFEjq5h.png
So important to show versions of edits. Instead of having to argue about which version, we can read every version together and think it out for ourselves.
There's no institutional system that teaches parents to be competent. Unsurprisingly, many parents are not competent.
Ironically, this post is a good example of a title that makes sense on this site, but becomes ambiguous when taken out of context. Who is the "we" if you don't know the post is by pg?
> You don't get to avoid the whole balance of power/MAD card because your nukes were used for EMP only.

[citation needed]
I had an SSD replacement in July. Once they got the part in stock, it took about 20 minutes+reimaging time (Saturday at noon). Ordering the part took about two days (it actually arrived the next day, but only 10 minutes before closing).
If you compile

assert(foo(bar) == 0);

with NDEBUG, foo will never even be called. I've seen some funky bugs from this in the past, like people calling malloc inside an assertion... Works great during dev, release build has NDEBUG defined, no test coverage... You get the picture.

A better idea would be to capture the return value in a var and do the assert on the var.
> Titles on HN are not self-expression the way comments are. Titles are common property. The person who happens to submit something first shouldn't thereby get the right to choose the title for everyone else.

Your assuming that the original "title" is relevant to the point of the submission. Or that there even exists a "title" in a meaningful way. People might be making a submission reflection some content in an article that does not relate to the title, or where the title would be misleading or irrelevant.

A title might not be "comment", but it is part of the submission - why shouldn't the OP have the right to set the context of discussion? It's not like it prevents others from raising different point in the comments.

> The only option is to revert to the original title, which is at least what the author intended.

The original author didn't intend for their article to be shared and discussed on HN. And why their "intent" is terribly important in the first place escapes me somewhat.

> the increasing prevalence of mean and stupid comments has a much higher priority than the fact that authors' original titles are not maximally informative.

Yet you obviously do care enough to apply this policy in a forceful and unwarranted way. Why not just leave it then, and provide a "report editorialization" button so poorly worded or sensationalized titles can be brought to the mods attention, just like bad comments.

You think you are improving HN with this policy but your not, or just don't care about the holistic value of a submission, including it's title, to the culture of HN. Which is rather sad.
The Leap itself isn't very practical with the rift/VR since it needs line of sight with your fingers and tilting your hand sideway causes a loss of detection of most of your fingers. You would need multiple sensors at different locations to overcome this which doesn't seem practical. I find wands (razer hydra) to be useful, like how a mouse is more accurate than touch. The multiple physical buttons and extra controls like analogue joysticks and triggers is a benefit too.
I think that this proposal would ultimately be to the detriment of HN. I don't want to have to click through your blog to get to the article, even if you have the purest of intentions and aren't just looking for ad impressions, just because HN moderators cannot be arsed to exercise discretion when re-titling posts.

I want to be able to read a link, get a reasonable impression of what content is behind it and why it was posted, click it once, and then read the content. Anything else is a sub-par user experience.
Has it actually been proven that Wal-Mart is detrimental to small retail business?

I know, it seems obvious on the face of it. Wal-Mart comes to Mayberry, and Walker's Drug Store and Foley's Grocery and Weaver's Department Store can't compete and go out of business.

...except weren't those already nailed before Wal-Mart got there by Walgreen's and Safeway and JC Penny?

I suspect that when a place is big enough to support a Wal-Mart, it's already attracted enough big national chains that the small guys are dead or dying.
Rethinking the digital marketing funnel
sharmi,

Thanks a bunch for catching that...fix made.
Because of how cable companies often price their internet-only package. I think it's about $10/month less than internet + TV, in my case. So I strongly suspect I'm helping subsidize things that aren't related to my internet usage.
This is cool. I remember having this on DOS in the late 80's. Never really got into Pascal though.
Reminds me a bit of terrible zero-tolerance rules that you see in schools nowadays. It's easier to enforce a "simple policy" with no exceptions than to make judgements, but that doesn't mean it's better.
Apple's Secret to Success is Hiding in Plain Sight
Not sure if you are serious. But I would assume he meant that he learned this before and later decided to buy the car either way.
Which search engine do you use in its place?
Well, let me know what you think once you read my blog post.

Site is back up now.
..Turbo Pascal was sort of shocking, since it basically did everything that IBM Pascal did, only it ran in about 33K of memory including the text editor. This was nothing short of astonishing. Even more astonishing was the fact that you could compile a small program in less than one second. It's as if a company you had never heard of introduced a clone of the Buick LeSabre which could go 1,000,000 MPH and drive around the world on so little gasoline than an ant could drink it without getting sick.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000023.html

I miss Joel's writing!
Why we don't use iOS Storyboards and you shouldn't either
Thanks. I'll install that.
You know, if you posted a link to your page here, you'd probably get a few more signups.
I agree that submitting the original source will, in 90% of cases, be the best option.

But, in the other 10% of cases, between editorializing on HN and editorializing on a blogspam post, I'd prefer the latter as it would still allow someone else to submit the original source with the original title.
Mother of God. How much induction is that?

Is the magnetic field more or less powerful than one of those industrial-strength magnetic junkyard cranes? Will my wristwatch run backwards? Are my tap dancing shoes safe to wear around these things?
• Change the Trackpad plists to allow both two-finger tap, and bottom-right click. Apple took away the option to set this from the GUI in Lion, for some reason.

http://apple.stackexchange.com/a/105705/50905

• Add "System Files" and "File Visibility" to the list of Spotlight options

• Install "EasyFind.app" so I'm not at the mercy of my Spotlight db (as useful as Spotlight can sometimes be)

• Install Services like "WordService for Mac" to alphabetize text, or convert text encodings

• Install my own services to do things like "chmod +x" or "copy file contents as base64" or "copy path to this file as text" (I'd die without this) from the GUI

• Set "System Preferences > Keyboard" to "All controls" to uncripple key commands

• Install "KeyRemap4MacBook" and enable Fn+J/K/L/I as cursor keys

• Install "Display Rotation Menu" menulet to switch between portrait/landscape

• Install "SizeUp" to move/resize windows

• Change the Finder setting to allow text selection in Quick Look previews:

"defaults write com.apple.finder QLEnableTextSelection -bool TRUE"

• create a softlink to my "~/Library/" named "~/Library /" (or alternately just chflags nohidden)
Ha, that would've been sneaky! As it happens, I was pretty insistent that we stay out of the process, and that the experiment run naturally.

The reason was that I've seen this kind of thing go awry when the company interferes to try and make itself look good (ie: http://www.fastcompany.com/1773610/column-was-crowdsourced-s...). Our writing pool and management system is solid, so there was little to worry about.

The other reason that this worked well is that Dylan wrote from a set of notes that outlined the story he wanted to tell, rather than letting them write something totally from scratch.
On topic: secret Carmack projects make me very excited. The fact that he mentioned that other oculus content creators were with him in Denver drives up my hopes that its an engine specifically created with the rift in mind.

Off topic: I could listen to Carmack talk about this stuff all day, but putting up with the interviewer saying "sure" at the end of every single one of Carmack's sentences made the video really painful for me.
As a cordcutter on the fringe of my metro area I don't get many channels OTA. This would be a huge boon for me.
I would argue that is a lesser problem than nobody who is interested in PHP clicking through to the HN discussion because they don't have any indication that the post is about something they are interested in.

Anyway, re-titling horribly editorialized posts is fine. The problem is that the person/people doing it seem to exercise little to no discretion when doing it.
Maybe it will not be the same when Android 4.0 turns 3-years old.

Android 4.0+ is just much more mature than 2.3 in terms of UI and API.
Most people buy apps when their device is new-ish. Three year old phones are fine. Five year old phones are fine. But you are not going to sell the users of these devices an app that you started writing today. And you won't lose customers if you stop upgrading them, either.
Top Gear also made a Bond submarine car:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfOwSTXP-3o
There are all sorts of things it would be "nicer" to have Paul Graham doing for me for free. Writing fuzzers. Making coffee. Doing laundry.
Criticizing Elon Musk on HN? Not a smart move, bro.
Personally, I have noticed a multi-year trend towards serving that 95% at the expense of the 5%.

I'm usually flamed or attacked for suggesting it in most forums, so it's very nice to see people experiencing the same thing with Google

Hangouts is the perfect example. Instead of an easily sortable, easily curatable list of contacts with an easy way to see if they're available or not... now the whole product is shiny, with flashy animations, very little user control of any part of the software, and a whole bunch of Google's "we know best" design ideas like a "special mix" of "recent*" contacts that you cannot alter in any way without actually removing a contact from Google entirely.
It's probably a command & control vessel that does real-time stuff (flight/listening post telemetry, intelligence gathering).
> It might change gaming, but as a non-gamer I don't see much point.

It will have a disruptive change to more than gaming. Here's why I believe so:

If you look at human history, we started with writing, then newspapers, then radio, followed by television. The way in which we consume media hasn't changed from television/displays. Virtual reality is the next evolutionary step in media consumption. The final step being human-computer interfaces.

I think because it enters us into a new realm it will be disruptive.
The Tipping Point of Tune-in marketing part Deux
Maturity and longevity, mostly. For really serious projects, I prefer to mitigate my risk by picking something that's been mainstream for a long time and isn't likely to die off. I'm not saying Clojure, Scala, JRuby, etc. are going to die off. Just that it's too early to tell.

Also, it's not exactly the same ecosystem. Yes, you can use all the Java libraries. But the ecosystem also includes the dev environment/build system, the written material, and the peopleware associated with the language. You don't automatically import all of these from Java just because you're using the JVM.
Which was about the last time it was under active development. I always liked Dopplr but they just stopped caring post-acquisition.

TripIt is about as close as you can get to a functional Dopplr these days.
Even if I dont know the book, the site shows that the author failed when 'his first web app' got some minimal traffic, of 1200 visitors (estimated by 12 points) in one hour.
Has anyone from HN actually taken any of these courses and could comment on them from personal experience?
Yes, we can only really accurately say:

"Linux is playing a role of some significance in the latest
ship for the US Navy."
To me, a submitter is an editor

To be fair to PG, this is not his view. His view is also not unreasonable. By delegating editing to the publishers, he provides a defence against PRs astroturfing HN. So, he is able to kill two birds: lower overhead and higher signal to noise.

The obvious problem is the edge case, where the original title is hopelessly too general (although perhaps was accurate in the context it was originally published). Along with the other edge cases (obviously false/misleading or flamebait). The latter are subject to moderation (per his note above).

The "out of context/overly general" situation is the grey area, with no easy fix. It seems a smaller price to pay than the having PRs editorialize every post (option 1) or people blog-spamming externally modified links (option 2).
True, but there is overwhelming consumer demand for Apple products. Can't say the same for commodity Android devices.
I find people who vehemently debate relatively esoteric HN policies like title changes a little odd. In order to function, every ship needs a captain. PG is the captain of this particular ship. If you don't like a policy, you can suggest an improvement and see if he decides if it's worthwhile to make a change. The HN people are always very responsive and thoughtful, so you can't fault them for ignoring their users or making ad-hoc decisions. If you happen not to like the decisions of the captain of this particular ship, you're always welcome to get off at the next port. It's pretty simple, so I really don't understand where the complaints are coming from.
... you can learn to code!

Couple options:

If you need something not too intensive you could go with Treehouse (http://teamtreehouse.com/) which has really good topic-specific videos and interactive quizzes.

If you can afford the money and time then go with something more intensive such as a bootcamp - I recommend Flatiron School (http://flatironschool.com/). You'll learn a whole lot in 3 months.

There's also Thinkful (http://www.thinkful.com/) which has curated content, 1-1 mentorship and uses a project-based approach.

Once you have the foundation (and overcome the many frustrations and roadblocks you'll face as a beginner) you'll be way on your way, with a new and valuable skill.

Full disclaimer: I work at Thinkful
Great analysis. One thing he missed: Kickstarter.

Two weeks ago I launched "Learn Ruby on Rails" with a Kickstarter campaign:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/909377477/learn-ruby-on-...

(You can read more about the book here:

http://learn-rails.com/learn-ruby-on-rails.html

if you want to help with a new book for Rails beginners).

In less than two weeks I've raised over $4000. Significantly, nearly a third of revenue is from people who found out about the book on Kickstarter. So, Leanpub is great, but first, do a Kickstarter campaign. You get advance sales, a significant market channel, sales of a book at multiple price points (customers choose different pledge levels), and the additional boost of time-limited, event-driven marketing. Publishing is not dead; it's booming thanks to new market channels like Leanpub and Kickstarter. And yes, you have to build a following first.