mds101

Just joined and heard that SpaceX had commanded Dragon to retreat from ISS. Can someone explain why? Also, what is the blinking section on the Dragon spacecraft?

You should try out Sublime Text. I have used it on all three platforms and it works pretty much the same on all of them.

You are not really going to get much traction on HN with the infromation you have given. Do you have an idea or project you are working on? If you do, please post details about it, and somebody might find it interesting and reach out to you.

I believe the difference is you ask a question to a specific person. And all these questions and answers are laid out on a single page in a nice interview style. And considering that most of the guys being asked and those doing the asking are all pretty smart guys, it makes for super interesting reading. Not that you would get any of that from their landing page though. Read the page for Patio11 to get an idea of how great it is.

The Tacocopter post is something that appeals to a lot of hackers. It's a wicked cool and potentially super dangerous idea. It intrigues people on HN. Hence it is discussed to the death.

Your post is titled 'feedback please', and yet you have not really mentioned what you want feedback on. Is it your business idea? Is it your YC application? Neither of these are mentioned here. Even if they were, the most that HN users could give you would be something along the lines of 'I'm sure YC is not averse to funding non-tech people.'

In addition it is very actively developed and updates flow in often. Also has quite a large number of useful plugins.

Yes, you are correct. I guess what I was trying to say was that there is no way to make a fair comparison between Napster and Spotify - it's not even an apples to oranges comparison.

I too appreciate being able to browse other people's collections. I was only ranting at the way the author chose to write that ('Insight into somebodies personality').

So just because Napster had built in chat and a wider illegal catalogue it becomes better than Spotify eh? Also, why would I want to know the personality of some ramdom guy on the other side of my p2p connection? This is mostly a fluff piece with absolutely nothing new or interesting being said.

Most meetups are posted on http://hackerstreet.in/

I'll second this. I recently setup Jekyll on GitHub and was pleasantly surprised by the ease of getting it up and running.

That doesn't really make much sense. If reading articles is your main application for the device, why not buy the iPad 2 especially after the huge price drop?

>A LolCat page could get 250k likes on Facebook easily, but could it consistenly get 5,000 likes a week for a year? Maybe staying power should be more important than overall popularity.

Exhibit A: The Cheezburger Network. That said, if you change it to work such that it's personalized for every user, so that it only shows emails from people who are important to them, rather than emails from people the system considers to be important, then maybe people will appreciate seeing emails from the LolCat page of their choice.

Also, a better way to measure importance would be to go through the user's sent items history and map out the people they email most frequently. I once wrote a classifier which classified email contacts as important or not important based on the sent items history of the user and it worked pretty well for me.

You could also use Bayesian classification of the contents of the emails the user sends and the emails to which the user replies and use that data to determine if the user would like to see an email, based on it's contents (rather than the sender).

Well the Marwadis and Gujaratis have been traders and businessmen since ancient times. It's kind of like the son of a farmer being a farmer himself. How many daily wage labourers have started their own businesses? Or for that matter, how many IT MNC employees have?

I do not know if there is a bigger proportion of Chinese/Russian/Egyptian businessmen, but I do know that the amount of social stigma attached to leaving a well paying job to do a startup is significantly higher in India than in most other countries.

How many people have you heard stealing 1,72,00,00,00,000 rupees? And how many have you heard stealing 10,000 rupees? My point was that we get worked up for one time theft of XXXX rupees, whereas we consider thousands of class C government employees demanding anywhere from 1000 to 10,000 rupees from hundreds of people everyday as passable.

Also, why should I not blame middle class Indians for what they are (not) doing? The middle class in India is a huge section of people. If you want something you should be prepared to risk everything and fight for it. If you are not willing to risk it, then you deserve what you get. Imagine the benefits we can reap in future if we are willing to duke it out now.

Also, this risk averse attitude is the reason why we were ruled by the British for 200 years. Only once people started risking everything they had did we get the Independence we deserved. Why should fighting inept politicians who are ruining my country be any different from fighting a foreign aggresor?

I believe you misinterpreted his words. Being an 'Indian businessperson' itself is not done much because of the 'play it safe' attitude. Yes, Indians are that risk-averse.

>the reality is that we are a dirt poor country with not just deep institutional problems, but also moral and psychological ones.

I was searching for the words to express this for more than ten minutes before I read your comment. The key here is 'moral and psychological problems'.

To cite just one example, there was a lot of ruckus about the 2G Scam and the Lokpal bill recently. We believe that the guy who got 17200 Crore rupees in kickbacks is a corrupt SOB and should be punished to the maximum extent, but when it was revealed that a leading anti-corruption crusader was actually stealing money from the sponsors who invited her for talks, we dismissed it as a 'small amount'. This kind of 'it's not a crime if its done at a small scale but it's a crime if its done on a large scale' mentality is present among nearly everyone.

Also, another huge problem with Indians is that we as a people do not wish to risk anything. As a result we will never fight for something that should be rightfully ours (like a Government that does it's job). Urban voters are generally brainwashed by the charisma of our politicians or are bought wholesale with a few thousand rupees and a bottle of liquor. Rural voters don't really care who they vote for. As a result we keep alternating between the same two sets of thugs. Will we get out on the streets and protest for better governance like the arabs did? Never.

So, the West can paint many pretty picture and call it India, but this is a country in massive disarray, and the fact that it hasn't already collapsed is purely by chance.

>Eventually someone is going to iterate their software past Apple

Actually somebody already did. Microsoft gets a lot of flak for its design skills, but I think they did splendidly with WP7. Having used a Lumia 800 for a week I was extremely disappointed to go back to my iPhone 4S. I believe that the future of the smartphone market is a battle for supremacy between WP7 and Android, and I for one am rooting for WP7. Apple's last 'successful' iPhone might well be the next one they release, unless they have got something incredible cooking.

And just like that it's disappeared.

Yes, it would definitely have been lesser work to just use Cocoa. And yes one of the main reasons for choosing mobile web apps is that they are cross platform.

Having said that, I still applaud the guy taking the time and ploughing in so much effort into something that he wanted to do. I appreciate the true hacker spirit in striving to create a webapp that looks and feels totally native. Kudos to the OP.

Actually you cannot downvote submissions on HN. You can only downvote comments.

But according to the article you intend to provide an API to allow programmers to integrate the iPhone as an input for their existing games. Does that not mean that you are positioning the iphone as an alternative controller? Or am I seriously misinterpreting the article?

Also, I'm quite curious about this 'new kind' of game that is suited to touch controller gameplay. Could you give some details on that?

It's great to see this kind of innovation in controller development and I'm very excited to see the way in which these controllers evolve. Having said that, I think touchscreen based controllers are bound to bring disappointment. Most serious games require the player to maintain a fine balance on the controls and tactile feedback is a huge feedback factor to the gamer. Touchscreen based controllers cannot provide this tactile feedback.

Another factor is that when I hold a button and stick controller, I dont have to look at the joystick, I can give my full attention to the game. Again with touchscreen based controllers I have to keep looking at the controller to make sure I'm pressing the right button, and the split second I spend look at the controller could get me killed. it will be interesting to see how these problems are worked around.

Hacker News itself is open source. AFAIK the source is available (minus the antigaming measures) along with the latest release of the Arc language.

It's the time interval in minutes after which your comment becomes visible after it is posted. Presumably in order to let people edit/delete impulse comments.

In my experience the best way to learn a language is to use a book and read/write enough to have a basic hang of the language. Once you have the basics down, force yourself to start thinking in that language. Make it a game: each time you get an entire sentence of your thought process correct in that language reward yourself. If you make a mistake punish yourself.

The disadvantage to this method is you need a lot of discipline to keep constantly forcing yourself to think in a new language, and you will spend a lot more time when thinking.

While quirky 404 pages like these are a nice change from the plain boring old 404 messages, I wonder if a lot of sites are losing visitors because of 404 pages like these. Has anybody got any stats about how many people see a 404 and never visit the site again?

What I would like a 404 page to do would be something like this: Take the example of a content site, which has recently moved some pages around. If I land on the old URL which was linked in some other post, I would like to be transparently redirected to the new one rather than have a 404 thrown in my face. Similarly, if the link is a typo and no such page actually exists, it would be nice if the site tries to 'guess' where I want to go based on the URL and then provide a list of suggestions.

There are a large number of companies still using GoDaddy even after hearing so many horror stories. Even some YC companies use them. If I had to choose a service provider, then I would most definitely forego the ones who are reliant on GoDaddy, even if it they are really awesome. After all being there trumps being awesome by a huge margin.

I guess it's time customers started calling up these companies and telling them that the reliance on GoDaddy is something that they are worried about.