skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Part of the problem is that Powerpoint guides you to these terrible presentations (and Google Presentations is even worse). At least Keynote tries to stop you from doing awful things to some extent.

But at the end of the day it's really the people using the tool that are doing it wrong. People just need to learn the difference between a Presentation, an Infodeck and an Essay, and when to use each one.
Jesus, ads are again apparently the solution to everything... No, snapchat is not going to replace tv ads for example, even though pimple faced teens use it to send belfies.

But come on, are all these "startups" only capable of being yet another ad platform?
Whatsapp was revolutionary as they had no ads and actually made money by, gasp, charging the users for an excellent service (at a very reasonable price).
In February 2010, I got laid off. That job was the very first job I got out of college, I worked there for about two and a half years, and most of my time at that company was spent writing code in Python doing black magicky platform things that don't really translate well to other companies.

It took me two years to find another job, and during that time I went insane from stress for a while.

So many companies wouldn't touch me because almost nobody wanted Python experience. Even the few companies who were willing to accept a developer with only 2.5 years of experience wanted that experience to be in C++ or Java.
Ha! Lake Havasu City is largely where I grew up -- fun to see a link in HN. Havasu is a huge party town, so often throughout the summer you'd see hundreds of boats and drunk partiers around the bridge. Really weird sight.

The movie Piranha 3D was filmed in Havasu. Don't remember if they feature the bridge.
To an extent. I use iPython with RISE or a deck.js based system. I really like the deck.js method because my interface is vim.
I have the product you linked in the trunk of my car. So far I've had to use it twice and, just like you, it worked beautifully each time.

I wouldn't recommend it for your cell phone but it's way more convenient an emergency kit than jumper cables.
People who currently use powerpoint to be ineffective will find other ways to be ineffective without it. People also write terrible emails and create horrible documents. Ridiculous books are written. Zero-content instant messages are sent. Some people don't get how to use the phone. Shall we discard them all?
Actually, I'd like to second how impressed I am with Cortana. I got a windows phone a little while ago (really cheap, no contract, no love for the Android interface, etc) and was a bit skeptical of how useful it'd be at first.

After trying to ask it more and more natural-language questions, and having it speak useful answers back to me, it feels more and more like I'm in Star Trek.

I'm not usually that impressed by technology anymore (i.e. I still think lots of things are cool, but seldom do they surprise me), after being in the field for 30 years, but Cortana impresses the heck out of me.
I recently got rid of my Moto G in exchange for a $20 Nokia 208.

It's been great. I can still call or text my friends when we're out and need to find each other. I'm not reading reddit everywhere I go. I can still do USB tethering with my laptop. It has an MP3 player built in, as well as a radio. It even has Opera Mini, which does well in a pinch for settling bets via wikipedia. The only thing I really miss is maps.

But by far, the best part has been that it simply doesn't die. I charge it about every 4 days. It charges in an hour or less.
>imagine having to install a plethora of apps on everydevice...
Well, I don't have to imagine this because Youtube and Netflix both make you install apps. Flash and silverlight. You can opt-into the html5 streaming on yt, but that's still a change you have to make.
What was the call quality like? I'd imagine fairly good simply from the better microphone placement given the size of the thing.

PS: My old Blackberry can do 2.5+ days on a charge since I mashed the earphone socket and can't use it to listen to music. The music application seems to drain the battery for some reason.
Yeah, that's why I said "speculating", and they will also say that they are speculating, if you ask them to be careful.

(edited for clarity)
I had a steady corporate gig until 2010 when I decided to take a stab at doing contract work.

My third gig was for a large health care company. We completely redesigned and rebuilt one of their web applications. The whole time, my manager kept telling me they were going to convert me to full-time. Since this was only my second contracting gig, I thought I had it made, and stopped talking with recruiters thinking I was about to land a sweet full-time gig.

Two weeks before the project was set to wrap up (we already had a very successful "soft-launch") I was told I'd be done after the launch. I was pretty pissed, thinking I was just taken advantage of, not really understanding this is pretty much par for the course with being a contractor.

I was out of work for just under a month. The rough part was essentially starting from scratch after telling recruiters I wasn't looking anymore. You have to restart contacting your contacts, then waiting for an opportunity to get in front of someone, then get an interview, or two, or in one case, three before hearing back.

At the time I was doing a lot of vanilla front-end work. Lots of static sites, HTML5, CSS3 and some low level Javascript. I didn't have to learn anything new (the era of big JS frameworks and tools was still years away) so my transition was pretty easy from being unemployed to landing my next contracting gig.

The lessons I learned from the experience is to never stop talking to your network and recruiters. Once recruiters think you're off the market, they'll stop contacting you and then its up to you to contact them. It's always good to keep as much information flowing to you as possible, no matter what situation you're in. Even in my last full-time gig, I was still interviewing and talking to people up until I decided to leave.

Also, never assume as a contractor your employer will bring you on full-time no matter what kind of bullshit and blue skies they keep selling you. Always, always, always assume when your contract term is up, that's it and plan accordingly.
I pretty much agree with the post, even more — I like to agree with it. But there's a problem.

The problem is there's no stuff like "web/native app": there's a bunch of functionality that solves user's problem to greater or lesser extent. Although there are needs which are technically complex, usually what the user can ask for is pretty simple. Clean UI, button here, button there, some lights and pop-up notifications, a couple of graphics, which actually represent something pretty trivial internally. Sometimes the data needs to be pushed to or retrieved from some centralized storage or it needs to talk to some other "service". "Browser" is absolutely awful and pointless invention, but unfortunately we have accepted it somehow and learned to satisfy the needs of typical customer using it. HTML might be stupid and CSS might be inconsistent, but it's actually pretty easy to make the UI user wants with that and a handful of js code.

As a bonus, it will work on Linux, on Windows, on Mac, your Android phone and even some not-a-real-OS which happens to have a capable browser.

And what we have on the desktop? I don't know a single good UI framework for Linux ("good" in a sense it would make it easy to achieve what I want). There's somewhat usable WPF for Windows, which still doesn't really allow to implement anything user could wish for as easily, as I'd do with HTML. Somewhat usable, but pretty verbose is Android UI framework. I don't know what happens on Mac. And, yeah, none would be compatible between different platforma (except Qt, maybe, which is overly complicated by itself).

So there isn't much choice between "web and native". The "native" is currently pretty much non-existent.
Thanks, they are my thoughts exactly but I wanted to see what others thought.

There are already 2 co-founders but me being the only technical person, I wanted to bring on another technical person to speed things up.
>Evan Spiegel Reveals Plan to Turn Snapchat into a Real Business

Let me guess: showing ads?

If advertising was banned, 99% of the web would lose its "business model" overnight...

...but the rest would be actual businesses with actual customers paying for their products.
I think it can work as long as it's kept simple with high contrast, low content and no transitions or animations. A good tip if you are running an event is to ask the speakers to provide slides in PDF format (with one slide per page, no builds). This forces them to keep it simple.
"and not, really not, something they just read verbatim from the slide!"

That interferes with the very popular use of distributing powerpoints to be read verbatim as official company policy etc. Its a micromanagement tool. You will read exactly this syllabus line as written in class. Its very difficult to get micromanagers to divest themselves of a powerful tool.
Looks like a Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon, 2nd Generation based on the modifier keys.
Google Chrome gains MIDI support
I honestly don't get what you want. You can install qt4 and qt5 as separate packages. This is actually how several distributions resolve this.

Why is it an issue that they're not both called "qt"? Why would you actually want to different things with the same name.
I still use winamp, but I may be a madman.
Really? Why not ban Word because people write bad books?
"On the web you get to choose what kind of product you want to be."
Not free, but I use Klok (http://www.getklok.com/) and enjoy it
This solution uses Maven behind the scenes, but the Maven interfacing is governed by JavaScript code
But having URLs or discovery or social features is orthogonal to using web tech, especially in the front end. Eg. Spotify had all of those in a tight little native client, before they rewrote it with web stack with controversial results.
APIs are eating the world
That makes perfect sense. And I'm assuming that you would only be interested in an equal split. Otherwise, I can't see why I would bother working on someone else's idea without as much of the reward with the same risk. Would that be accurate?
Russian, Japanese and Chinese Take Top Spots in ACM Programming Contest
> their original intended purpose, an aide memoire for the presenter to actually present

No. That's how they are currently used. They should be used to add value for the audience's understanding. Empathic slide authoring is quite difficult. I think mainly because people get into this anxiety of wondering what, exactly, does my audience know? What will I remember? All of a sudden, you've got six levels of bullet points and no one in the room can complete sentence.
I got magnetic tape from Ikea, couple of old bookends and build my own with Kinesis Freestyle. Magnetic tape on keyboards and bookends keeps them together, yet easily separable if need be. And believe me, learning to type when you can't even see where your hand are in regards to home row is suprisingly hard.
While that's a pretty significant range, it seems that we could store the entire commit-log in the same amount of DNA that 100 cells normally store.. 10,000,000 cells on the high-end. Which is still only a few milligrams of cells. Impratical of course, but interesting.
A 2K day rate is par for software security, software security consultancy utilizations run hot at around 85%, and security is a cost center.
Sorry to hear that. Care to share where you are located? I'm also doing Python and would love to better understand the market. If you prefer email, it's in my profile.
Iran waged a cyber attack against the oil ministry
Saying "one of the answers" is a very modest way of referring to your own answer ;)
I don't use it because I don't like Metro UI apps but a large part of the list you give is already supported in Windows 8: calendar, contacts, photos (thru OneDrive). Some are available in a cross-platform fashion (calendar, contacts via MS account) others require a Windows Phone (IE opened tabs sharing, some systems settings). So I don't see them being removed from Windows 10 and don't really understand what you are exactly disappointed about.
The distance between fallers determines the energy requirements for communication. The lower person will also experience slower time than the higher.

The analogy is as follows:

Two BASE jumpers leap from the top of an infinitely tall radio mast in a vacuum, one after the other. They are in free-fall, so do not directly experience the effects of gravity, but the increase in the gravitational field as the distance to the singularity decreases will be detectable as a pseudoforce in that reference frame.

The first jumper writes a note on a baseball and throws it at the second. The second also writes a note on a baseball and throws it at the first.

The concern for the first jumper is not whether the baseball can be thrown back to the top of the radio mast, but whether it can be thrown hard enough and accurately enough for the second to ever reach it. The concern for the second is whether the first can catch his ball without exploding like a paper sack full of wet spaghetti.

The other thing to consider is that both fallers will "see" multiple images of the other, and of themselves, because there is a direct light path, the light path that twists around once, the light path that twists around twice, and so on. Images further away will be lower, slower, and older. If you aimed correctly, you could send messages to your older self, but I'm not entirely certain if your older self could reply.
Doesn't work on mobile?
As long as the investment context is disclosed, why shouldn't there be long range, high-risk investments available in the market to interested buyers?

Edit: I agree with you that the risk is very, very high. But, it at least gives a non-zero potential for investment return - which on that level is better than, say, Kickstarter.
Open Source Circular Economy Days 2015
So the customer/users want a native app!? Fine, I'll just bundle the web app with Webkit (io.js) and they'll be happy, and I don't have to worry about the app breaking in new browser versions.

Browser based applications are much easier to distribute and adds a security layer, so that you do not have to worry as much about trojan/viruses, compared to installing executables from cr4cksnh4cks.com

The browser is the perfect container. And it also helps a bit that the API's are super easy to work with. Making even the novice programmer productive and able to create powerful applications.

One reason why native is bigger on the smart-phone market is that Google, Apple and Microsoft want to completely control their ecosystem and lock people in. What I can not understand though, is why Google does it, as the majority of their income still comes from the word wide web. They have however made major advances on that front lately, to there is still hope.

As the virtualization technology advances, the gap between running on bare metal and in a container continuously decreases. So there will be little incentive running native/bare metal in the future.

We have a long way to go though. If you want to build something that make full use of the hardware, you still should go native. But I hope that changes in the future.
It's not necessarily a bad thing to have dissenting opinions. $100m is a LOT of money, especially for an experiment. As an IPO, to raise that amount of cash at what is essentially an angel-round's worth of information seems... aggressive. Cool idea? Sure. Doesn't mean everyone has to jump on board. An echo chamber isn't helping anyone either.
Have you checked QML? It is kinda mix of "native" and "web".
We had a mayor (McGinn) that wanted to connect neighborhoods with light rail and trolleys. We voted him out to get the crazy tunnel plan. And after spending all this money, we're going ahead with light rail and trolleys.

Everyone's been hearing about Bertha and the tunnel calamity, but almost nobody's heard about the trolley that connects 6 neighborhoods, was installed in about 6 months, and it's already done.
You're right. 1000x I agree that TBL's http specification and the html specification is not TCPIP and DNS.

However, that wasn't the level of conversation I was trying to have.

There is another viewpoint of http+html that is not the specification. That viewpoint is the usage of http/html/TheWeb.

For example, the White House is building made of stone. It is not a human. So how can newspapers say "the White House has signed the Internet Freedom Act into law." Well, we're not getting anywhere going round and round in circles insisting that stone buildings have no agency to pick up a pen and sign a document and that only a human like President Obama can do it. There are multiple meanings of "White House" and we seem to get along fine with it.

There are also multiple meanings of "web." It's possible for the industry to invent a totally separate word besides "web" for the abuse/reuse of http+html as a transport for apps but that didn't happen. If a startup in Silicon Valley has a goal to release an app that makes use of TCPIP+DNS with the best chance for wide adoption, they can entertain the idea of using a custom UDP+port scheme... or they can just piggyback on http. They didn't use http as Tim Berner-Lee's specified in 1989. It's the out-of-spec usage that's adding new color to what modern "web" means.

I'm not saying I approve of it or it's technically superior. They didn't ask TBL's permission for it to evolve that way. Is it anyone's fault?! Too late to assign blame now. It is what it is. The phenomena I described above exists no matter what label we give it. It would be awesome if another word besides "web" described it but it doesn't exist (yet).

If the "White House" can act as a synonym for "human", it's not impossible for "web" to act as synonym for "whole internet stack." (Again, the synonym mapping is using the other evolving definition of "web" instead of the official RFC specifications.)
I'm not in favor of the line which the grandparent is arguing but perhaps there's an argument to be made that Uber is, in effect, "eating the seed corn" of the industry and valuing private gains over public losses.

Universities like CMU are responsible for recruiting and training the next generation of great roboticists and there's a difference between responsibly harvesting researchers from an institution in a way that allows the lab to maintain its culture and bounce back vs plundering it in such a way that would take many years to recover from.

It's a prisoner's dilemma style situation where all companies involved in robotics would benefit from a thriving academic robotics community, even if it would be more competitive if those researchers were in house. Uber was the first one to publically defect which might cause further defections to the detriment of everyone.
My favorite example was the Gettysburg Address - choppy idea presentation and too much distracting colors.
Ask HN: What was the startup that makes devices for cloud-based desktops?
They were featured on HN awhile back and I must not have saved the link nor is it turning up in my search for those terms.

Basically in the video they made and sold small terminal boxes (fit in the palm of your hand) with the standard KVM and network connections so as to function as a regular desktop workstation except it was all in the cloud. (..or on a local server?) That's all I remember! Thanks!
For me, it isn't a positive / negative thinking thing. What I struggle with is the series of steps that this company goes through which have it justifying a valuation of even $100M (which it won't because nobody IPO's all of the equity, so for a $100M raise they are probably assuming a $1B valuation).

If you have some thoughts on how that would work please share them. I'd like to learn.

I'm guessing (and I will know more when I read their S-1) that they build their test track, they prove out the concept, then win a contract to build a larger one from one of the states? So how far does that $100M get them? Does it get the 5-mile track built and operating? Looking at other complex projects, say the London Eye, which cost $100M in 1999. And it's just a Ferris wheel. I don't know of a 5 mile rail project that has cost less than about half a billion but I would certainly grant you that those tend to be bid on by cost+ contractors.

So I'm just trying to connect the dots on how they "go to market" as it were.
2B videos per day. Wow.
I think it is wrong to blame the tool. It all comes down to usage.
Bingo. I use Powerpoint to highlight the key points I'll discuss on any particular slide. Very high-level, broad, 1-2 word descriptions. It helps people keep up with the flow (if they zoned out for a few seconds, for example), and reminds them afterwards when they review the slides.
Yes. We had a query language that let us string together AND/OR/NOT filters as a tree and then the backend could decompose and query off of it. We'd have a data service per document type being queried. In our situation, customer feedback aggregates, vertical aggregates and customer feedback datums were different. So a page containing components using both would necessarily have two data services working independently.
I won't defend that project specifically because I know nothing about it, but I would like to offer a couple of comments:

As a passenger, I have always found the experience of riding rail to be far superior to riding a bus for a lot of reasons including but not limited to speed and comfort.

A train generally has much higher capacity than buses, and if well utilised, a lower operating cost per passenger. An ideal transport system will use trains for the high traffic trunk routes and a tightly integrated bus system as feeders for the train line. It should never be expressed as an either/or proposition. Both are necessary.
I'm clearly missing something important because otherwise somebody would have built this already, but instead of using the fans for levitation as proposed, why not keep using the magnets?

I'm imagining a tube with (8?) magnets equally-spaced around the perimeter so that the carriage inside automatically stays centered in the tube. We already know how to toggle the magnets to produce forward motion (see maglev trains). Could still use the partial-vacuum to keep drag down. And you remove the single-point failure mechanisms of the fans on the carriage and minor misalignment of tube segments.
Dante Turns Seven Hundred and Fifty
Power Point is ubiquitous because it offers improved communications. Just because some journalist isn't old enough to remember slides and overhead projectors doesn't mean such things didn't exist. If there's a shortcoming with Power Point it's that it is based on the idea of printing everything out rather than dynamic interaction. It's an old paradigm, but it's hard to beat something modelled on the physical world.
Breaking down real-time payments: Secure Authentication
>Spiegel seems like a really cool guy with a heart in the right place and is probably a genius.

What do you base this opinion on?

I guess he might be cool but I don't think the press about him indicates genius or a rightly placed heart.
What is Career Hacking?
techdevman: Your account is shadow banned. Looking at your history I think it was for your first article submission. It seems in error. No contact info in your profile so I wrote this reply.
Show HN: APIBoard, Interactive API Documentation with JS-Powered Workflows
Ha, as someone who has worked in the public sector the army (hell most of the defense community) essentially RUNS on PowerPoint. They should certainly move away from it but there are so many workflows that have been established for so many years moving is going to be painful and likely require custom solutions for each type of report.
Ok, so who is this person you are referring to?