skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
has anyone noticed the 'openness blog' where there's a custom scroll bar where if you want to scroll you have to DRAG it --- hey maybe it's because am using Firefox, maybe i should try it on IE :)

edit: maybe this will get me more down-votes --- has anyone noticed how on the 'About Openness' menu, something pops up on hover but you can't click it --- PS: to notice this wonderful effect you have to use Firefox 31

yeah, am pretty sure this site is not just for show ;)

also the copyright year is 2013 - maybe they are serious after all
It's an admission that the world is changing and they have to keep up.
And yet:

> There is a 12 percent chance of a Carrington-type event on Earth in the next 10 years
Nixon's speech incase Armstrong and Aldrin didn't make it back
Third Most Expensive Football Player for 2014
Other Microsoft Github accounts(I think)

https://github.com/msopentech
https://github.com/OfficeDev
https://github.com/Azure
as danial alluded to earlier, what is your opinion on taking stake in the MVP being built? so that both parties are invested in the success of the MVP, post 2 weeks?
> Clean water would become an issue first though. I don't know where the nearest lake or stream is

Under your feet. :)
It means Microsoft has decided that open source translates into higher adoption and a more successful business model.
No, they're saying they are going to be "more open", which implies they were already open.

No apology there (nor should there be).
There's also:

http://github.com/aspnet
Thanks. We changed to that (from http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/wp/...).
VUPEN sat on critical IE bugs for three years
Close.

GOOG sales: $16b for the latest quarter; FB sales: $2.9b; 5.5 fold difference

GOOG net income: $3.39b; FB net income: $791m; 3.84 fold difference
It isn't empty, although it has a very low particle density.

I assumed that 'clearing out' means the opposite, that the area now had a higher than normal charged particle density, and thus it was easier to pass through?

I'm also curious if anyone can give a thorough explanation.
Microsoft lays off thousands with bad memo
Five Retail Rules Flagrantly Violated by the Apple Store
We can't save satellites but when those begin to fail, we have 20 minutes to power down things before earth itself is hit.
And before it was built-in there were plugins - should really mention 'git diff margin' here. Most editors have this kind of functionality to show little git diff stats directly in the editor, but this one is really top notch as it can actually show the diff and let you revert to or copy the original lines. Can't live without it anymore.
Indeed.

But it is still my main OS everywhere, I refuse to bow to proprietary overlords. Despite these downsides.
Indeed, and Google Images search is pretty good with thumbnails.
> Copy paste, printing and networking. Biggest usability misses of Linux.

Hah. 5 years ago I switched my desktop from Linux to Windows because copy-paste suddenly stopped working. Suddenly it became impossible to copy an URL link from the terminal into FF's address bar. Then I said to myself I didn't have time for this s*t. I've never looked back after switching.
> What if the source code needs to be maintained internally? Our source code cannot be stored in "the cloud" where someone outside or most likely inside the CDN (our competitor) will take it.

It sounds like you are mixing up Github with Git itself? You don't have to host your code at github to use git. It's just one of the more popular ways for open source projects.

> The ant script is simple, but installing ant is not.

It isn't? Ant is packaged in most major distros; what kind of servers do you normally deploy on that doesn't have it?
Here's the canonical example I used to quote for multiple inheritance: "Implementing the design pattern observer".

You basically want to add public methods addEventListener(), removeEventListener() and a protected fireEvent() method. In Java you have no problem inheriting the interface for these methods. However you want to manually re-implement the damn implementation in each class that vends interface. I can't remember how many times I wrote these...

In C++ with multiple inheritance you can inherit both the interface and implementation, and you're done. It is one step further than Java interfaces.

These days, I don't use that so much and I would not miss multiple inheritance. I prefer to implement the design pattern observer through signals (boost::signal in C++, custom classes in JavaScript/TypeScript). C# delegates provide a good solution for this problem too.

I have not touched Java since 1.4, so maybe there is a more elegant way to solve this now...
Actually Chrome had most of these features and started removing them again.
The term has evolved over time, but it definitively had negative connotations, at least at the beginning.

From the Wikipedia article> This word comes from English dialect geek or geck (meaning a "fool" or "freak"; from Middle Low German Geck)... In 19th century North America, the term geek referred to a performer in a geek show in a circus, traveling carnival or travelling funfair sideshows (see also freak show).
I am wondering: if the large power transformers are the most critical asset, wouldn't it make sense to try to protect them in Faraday cages capable of sustaining high levels of current without melting down? The cost of such cages are likely to be much much smaller than the cost of power outage lasting months or years for millions of people.
>but I assume after a disaster we would massively increase the rate of production and it wouldn't be as bad as some make out

Unfortunately it's not so easy. A number of the raw materials have quite limited supply and even after production, transportation is very time consuming.

Transportation can be shorted by producing locally, but in 2010, only 15% of large power transformers (>60 MVA) deployed in the US were supplied by domestic producers[1] (although domestic production capacity is increasing):

LPTs require a long lead time, and transporting them can be challenging. The average lead time for an LPT is between five and 16 months; however, the lead time can extend beyond 20 months if there are any supply disruptions or delays with the supplies, raw materials, or key parts. Its large size and weight can further complicate the procurement process, because an LPT requires special arrangements and special rail cars for transport.[1]

For more than you ever wanted to know on the subject, see the following:

[1] http://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2014/04/f15/LPTStudyUpdat...
I assume we would just use generators in the meantime. Yes, this is expensive. Very expensive.
While the hardware is cute, it's not the real story. It seems like most of the large computing companies essentially migrate to being vast operations-centric organizations once they find a hardware/software mix that earns money and scales. Now Amazon is selling access to part of that infrastructure, and we have mechanical turks as well. No individual actually even knows what they do anymore, rather they just approximate some kind of notion and only ever check when measured state moves out of defined parameters of normalcy. Next step... [TRANSMISSION TERMINATED BY ORDER OF SKYNET]
Sounds like a good time to use the equity equation:

http://paulgraham.com/equity.html
This is somewhat true. However, any developer who's got even the smallest amount of development skills will be able to make the leap from Obj-c to Swift with relative ease. Most of what people end up learning when doing iOS/Mac code are the frameworks, and they're functionally identical (except for syntactic difference of course).
Anybody else missing "protected" access? Looking at the semantics of "private" I doubt it's coming...
Besides, isn't the challenge of learning new languages what makes being a developer fun? :)
Nukes can shut down pretty quickly but take a long time to get back online.

Also, if enough of the grid goes down you'll have black-start issues in places.
Would anyone care to chime in on why Facebook's income tax rate is so high?

"GAAP income tax expense for the second quarter of 2014 was $595 million, representing a 43% effective tax rate. Excluding share-based compensation and related payroll tax expenses, the non-GAAP effective tax rate would have been approximately 36%."
Can you make money from building mobile apps? [Developer Survey]
Ask HN: How important is the app icon?
Hey folks,

I'm releasing an app in a couple of weeks if all goes to plan. My question is, how important is the icon/logo? Should one hire a professional designer for this? Do you sketch out your idea first and then take it to a pro?

It's interesting to look back; it appears most startups make do with anything (e.e Sergey Brin's Google logo with GIMP) but it seems more and more are very polished.

You can see my effort at theoctopusapp.com.
FreshBooks Raises $30M
A user (growupkids) from the industry posted on this below:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8078076

>I work in commercial electrical power. No they don't. Because they aren't required to. It's all about costs. So unless it's about known risks (read PRA), no they don't protect against it. You need to spend money where the risks happen.
Google "Startup Lawyer If I launched a startup 2014", which sums up most legal questions including equity splits. Founders Dilemma by Wasserman covers the topic from a scientific research point of view.

tl;dr as far as I remember from that book: Make sure it is fair, and enough equity for both to be motivated. You have to discuss with each other to find out. It can be everything between 95/5 to 50/50. If you value the friendship more than you value the company, you should go for 50/50. Otherwise 50/50 is not a good option according to Wasserman's research.
Neat article. I think OP is trying to discern _how_ to map the friend's contributions to outcome of the company.
This means free software cannot every be sustainable (other than if it had corporate backing of some kind). Making money (or more correctly, rewarding those who create value) needs to happen, otherwise, the machinery that lead to the creation of the software will eventually wear away. After all, bills needs paying.
I read it[0] as compared to "life, but not as we know it", meaning alien life, and therefore thought it meant all carbon-based, DNA-powered life of the type found on Earth would be destroyed. (Except for the damn cockroaches, obviously.)

[0] Edit: The HN story title has changed, and was originally "A solar storm nearly destroyed life as we know it two years ago"
Xiaomi mi4 specsheet
When time stood still A Hiroshima survivor's story
Wouldn't this leave a bunch of white space on one side if the screen width is not an exact multiple of that size? That doesn't seem like a good solution to me.
"'I am afraid for my life, I must say, because I cherish my life,' he said in an interview, showing no signs of ill health at the time."

Ugh, what a shame, fingers crossed he's the 10% that survives the disease.
Yes, faulty memory.
Is there a reason we should stick with the newspapery multiple-column layouts? My impression is that they are a relic of the printing-presses era of newspapers and are difficult to read anyway (word-breaking is often, it's hard to trace back to previous reading spots compared to scrolling etc). That layout may look familiar on the eye, but that doesn't make it good.
The browser could distribute the white space between columns to avoid this.
I'd be very cautious in publishing a link from a forum. The last thing you want to do is to spread a rumor. Layoffs are mostly well covered by the media.
People who are doing this for the first time care a lot about the numerical split but people who do this professionally care a heck of a lot more about vesting. Whatever you choose, your outcome will be a lot better with a defined vesting schedule. The standard one in the Valley is (for both of you!) "four year vesting with a one year cliff", which means that 25% of the eventual grant is durably yours on the 366th day and then 75% gets parceled out in equal increments every month for the next 36 months after that.

I'd be inclined to have the company write you an IOU for your cash contributions so far, and split it 50/50, perhaps with one of you getting a tie-breaking share. The company can dispose of your IOU like any other short-term debt of the company at some point in the future when it has the financial wherewithal to do so. [See below about IOUs.] Your vesting clock starts 3 months ago, your partner's starts as of the day when he becomes full-time.

I cannot emphasize enough that your equity split is not nearly as important as "Does bringing this guy on uniquely make this business successful and do I have confidence that we will both be happy with this arrangement 5 years from now?"

Edit to add: As I get older and wiser, I am coming to appreciate the discipline of separating one's personal and business finances and explicitly receiving written acknowledgment for transfers of money into one's company. These feel like moving money from one pocket to another in the early days, but they are not, and explicit written confirmation of that fact will make your life easier in a lot of futures.

For example, I know one entrepreneur who, like many, tightened his belt, ran up substantial personal debt, and put blood sweat and tears into building a company. Professional money came into the company. Without documentation that he had loaned the company money, the best resolution would have been asking the other stakeholders to approve increasing his salary so that he could cover his "personal" debts. Had that documentation existed, he would have had ample authority to extinguish that debt in the ordinary course of business, and it would have likely had favorable personal tax consequences.
5% would be absurdly predatory for essentially a cofounder. (If they're building the company from the ground up rather than merely shaping it, then they're a cofounder.)
A good 3d GUI for DF would be challenging. Usually[1] most of the game takes place in corridors/caves that are underground, so the naive approach would have everything obfuscated by solid rock.

[1] Obvious nitpick: some players do indeed challenge themselves to build everything above ground.
Give Me A Hammer
Oracle Linux 7 is now available (Oracle's Linux Blog)
If I was in your potential business partner's position, I'd ask for 50/50 vested with a schedule of (say) 12 quarters, so every 3 months I'd get 4.1% of the company, with a cliff of 6 months to test whether the relationship will actually work (e.g., no equity transfer if the relationship breaks down in that time) That would recognise the work you've done already, but also appreciate that if the business lasts a long time the initial work will become less important. There's no good reason why you should have more equity than your business partner after a few years - by that point the risk each of you have taken is effectively the same.
IntelliJ (by JetBrains, the company behind Resharper) has similar functionality, for all the VCSs it supports. Very nice feature!
how ironic!
The problem is you would need to repeat this experiment every day for 8 months - and even then that's not enough data for a new parent to be confident. It only needs to go wrong once remember.

You're playing the odds. Some children die because they get accidentally smothered in their parent's beds. You can either take the (very small) risk that this will happen and sleep with your child in bed, or you can just not play the game at all.

And for most, I think whilst the reward is "good", the failure is just unthinkably horrific.
Ya, sadly Toady has basically said "I don't get multithreading, and it is so far down the list of things to do that it might happen in... who knows when."
Which were explicitly dismantled piece by piece in the lead up to the war: the thing Cheney and co. did was ignore the analysts and ask for raw intelligence data, absent the interpretation by people who studied the region for decades.

Interestingly, this exact problem is what is also cited as one of the reasons the Soviets thought the Able Archer exercise in 1983 might be a real NATO pre-emptive strike: senior spies in London and elsewhere weren't told to send their analysis back to Moscow, just their observations. Meaning they defeated the entire point of having spies in place to start with (people who lived and understood the culture being able to explain it to others).
I don't think hes argueing of the whole web.. hes talking about javascript. Eg websites that could and perhaps should be apps. This is different from a website that provides information.
IMHO multiple inheritance is a bad solution to this problem. I would be more inclined to use a DI pattern and inject an event manager wherever it's needed.

Even when multiple inheritance is genuinely useful, it still feels dirty to me. PHP actually has a nice feature called traits, which is essentially compiler-assisted copy & paste. It means you can re-use code without duplication and without the confusion that multiple inheritance can bring.
Here's a link to an in depth talk & infographic that'll help you see a more detailed view of what might impact how you approach equity splitting someone.

http://blog.saasu.com/2014/03/28/ceo-insights-webinar-record...

Disclosure: I work at Saasu but think this is relevant.
A lower initial mortality and a longer incubation time combined are the differences between a really bad virus for a small number of people and a potential global pandemic.

This is very serious.

So far Ebola was not capable of killing a large number of hosts because it killed swiftly and symptoms occurred very shortly after contracting it.
What you've done to date is simply what was required. All of the really hard work is in front of you. If your partner isn't worth an equal share they're not worth being partners with.
I'm pretty sure we should retain them, although they are not required as often.

The problem is that beyond a certain width it becomes infeasible for the eye to correctly jump back to the start of a line. There's some research on this, but I can't find it at the moment.

Smaller screens obviate the need for this, some of the time. But I've seen a lot of layouts which just compensate using white space - that fits with current design trends, but tends to mean I have a 27-inch monitor with a strip of content down the middle. It looks clean and minimal, but I suspect columnar text will come back into vogue at some point, and offer greater information density.
Is it too much to ask for .NET to be opensourced and on github?
Interesting - hopefully these make it into Firefox & Chrome - time will tell, but they seem like they could add value.
FWIW, I have the feeling that the best exit for Github is getting acquired by Microsoft. Github is a large, savvy, community, constantly sharing interesting and valuable projects. I think MSFT needs that public perspective of being 'open', valuable community, new technologies, etc. The enterprise side of Github also plays nice with MSFT.
Are you sure that 1-year cliff is a good idea for founders? A lot can happen in a year, and founder disputes are A Thing; and it sucks for the person with 49.9% to be in a position where any unresolvable disagreement in the first year means he walks away with nothing.
I love how microsoft.github.io redirects to microsoft.com/openness which instantly brings back the feel of webdesign from the 90s. In my opinion they could've made a statement here, actually demonstrating by example that they're moving away from their previous corporate image, with a nice landing page, ala facebook react's github.io page.
Developing your style of code
Part of me is very excited to see such an advancement. The other part of me (the one that has been "beaten" by MS for so many years) just doesn't trust them. I would most certainly check their code but I would be extra-super careful before using their code! I would consider even using an anonymous or home account to login github and download their source!
Thanks! The idea behind the First Impressions game is that you are able to learn something about each prospective match rather than offering a purely looks-based app. This means we ask for a little bit more information on signup.

None of the information in the onboarding is required though- you can play 2 of the 3 available games without completing a profile and by just clicking save.

(Sorry for the delayed reply!)
That is chilling. As wise people have said, be always on look out for any exponential trends because that's what would change the world. In this graph, although data is limited, it appears the number of cases are doubling every month. At this rate we can easily hit 10,000 by end of year. And THE 10,000 is almost always a magic number where tipping point occurs and power laws becomes unstoppable then on. It is a chilling graph. I'll keep an eye on this every month now.
My experience is it should always be evenly distributed at such an early stage (3 months is still considered early). I've started two companies and it has never failed me. This eliminates any drama and holds each founder accountable for the work that is required. If you don't trust this approach, then there are deep underlying issues that need to be addressed first. This could be not trusting the incoming founder to make up for the time that has passed while you were running the company initially.
Interesting Links from Harvard's Intro to CS Class
How is information density important on the web? Scrollable pixels are essentially free, as opposed to paper.
That's a pretty broken way to run a business IMHO. Also completely illegal in Europe
alleged

A single post on a forum is hardly compelling. I would say the lack of any media reports are more compelling.
Maybe because I chose a laptop specifically for use with Linux (ThinkPad T530), but it works perfectly. Everything. Even WiFi, sound, suspend, Fn keys, fingerprint reader, everything.
BitTorrent is completely neutral and just a mechanism for distributing content which can be contrasted with the others. Anywhere where there is a deliberate attempt to bypass restrictions on the availability of data then you may get into trouble. Even more so when you bypass then attempt to monetise like with 3Taps...
To be fair, their javascript mousewheel hackery breaks mousewheel scroll on all three major browsers. I guess they think people still click and drag scroll bars, so didn't run into the scroll wheel problem during cursory "testing".

There's another interesting bug, if you click on the thin part of the scroll bar, below the thick bar representing visible content, the bar centers on where you click. If you then click above the thick bar, the top of the bar moves to where you clicked, rather than centering on where you clicked. Apparently the developer(s) believe that consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds (either that or testing is).

On mobile (android), that scrolling section is disabled and all the content displays normally.

@dimitry it's not 1px, even in IE, when I view the page. They shouldn't have tried to make a custom scrollbar without more testing, but they evidently thought the stock scrollbar look didn't measure up to the grandeur of the rest of the microsoft openness page.
Shame that mouse wheel doesn't work, but you can click on the scrollbar (which is not obvious, because it looks like it's 1px wide). And I used IE.
Makes me wonder why did they want a custom scrollbar in the first place.
I was working on a developer tool which had a lot of users (~500k) where we were using a stock icon. Not until a much later release we changed the icon that was designed by a professional designer. Few of our users did complain that it didn't look great in their Mac / Linux docks! Story on mobile might be a bit different but from my perspective, unless I don't pin the icon to my dock (in which case I use the app A LOT) I generally don't seem to care about the icon as long as its decent.

EDIT: I guess this is on the cards, but you should first redesign the landing page on octopusapp.com. All the best!