skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Nobody in their right mind uses Flash for anything important

I used teamapart.com a few days ago - it's a very impressive product, built with Flash (and Flex). I've never seen anything like it that doesnt use Flash.

Just because some uses of Flash are questionable, doesn't mean that Flash has no place. Its performance issues are, of course, a consideration.

Google's uses of Flash (OFTTOMH): Gmail's GChat, Street View, Charting for Public Data, Marketing for Nexus One..
I use facebook for social networking. Social as in socializing.

That is, I meet people in a social setting, such as a house party, a the choir I sing in, people that visit my roommate, or even potentially just random encounters in a public place. Then, I establish contact via facebook for future social activity.

In many cases, these people are already friends with someone in my friend list. This means that tracking them down is very easy. (It is also easy for them to track me down, if they so desire). I look them up on facebook, friend them, and the next time I am interested in inviting them to something they are easy to reach.

That's what networking is, by your own definition: interacting with people in your fields of interest. And that's what facebook is good at. The list of dormant collections that is a typical friend list is still an excellent tool for establishing new contact, even if you don't technically 'meet' for the first time online.

The purpose of social activity is not research, or content sharing. The purpose of social activity is to connect with other human beings and share life, because this makes us happy.
Thank you for the great comments everyone. I spent a few minutes playing with their app. It's already on the app store and it's free (so much for undercutting). While they've created a great app, I have a few ideas that may give my version a good shot. I'm going to sit down and have a think, put some more ideas together. Thanks again for the great input.
I use to wonder why there was an outside and inside part when doing FOIL. It was after that I saw the visual proof, and doing other types of multiplication with multiple 'parts/terms', that it slowly dawned on me that there's cross-components. It's the same sort of thing when you multiple matricies or covariances. You need the contribution from every combination of terms.
Use Better Tools to Be a Better Student in 2010
Check out some of his other projects: http://quadpoint.org/projects

Also, pastee is by far my favorite pastebin (also by him): https://pastee.org/
The point is sites are already using HTML video, websockets, canvas, etc etc etc.

The future is now for websites and browsers that support it.
Take a traditional laptop and swap the position of the keyboard and the screen. Then, make the keyboard detachable and turn the screen into a touch screen. Voila, tablet PC.

With a good industrial design house, someone could give it sex appeal, and between the iMac and the Macbook Air, thats the something different I'm dreaming of from Apple.
iPhone/iPod touch already have a YouTube client which works fine. And I'm not really going to complain too much if my browser suddenly can't show me annoying animated full-screen ads with sound...
Are you familiar with the history of RISC? The whole point of RISC was to shed a lot of the complexity of CISC architectures like x86. This effectively offloads a lot of the instruction decoding effort, reducing the complexity of the chip, lowering transistor count, and reducing die size.

At the same time, the RISC instruction sets were friendlier to compilers, with large register counts. RISC architectures were also ruthlessly optimized for the compute intensive tasks of the day.

So re: static/dynamic power decoding RISC instructions is going to fundamentally involve less dynamic power.
Youtube: has a native app

Online ads: I don't think the majority of users find that to be a problem

Uploaders: What are you going to upload that can't be done just as well with a normal file picker? I'd guess the thing is a big iPhone, not a small computer.
Absolutely. My day job does make the world a better place. But it doesn't resolve a lot of the very serious issues in the world.
I think you kind of missed something. The $ by itself in a variable name doesn't do anything. It's simply a notation to keep your DOM elements (and other variables / objects) separated from your jQuery wrapped elements.

$myDiv = $('#myDiv');

Now I know every time that $myDiv is already wrapped in jQ and I won't make the mistake of wrapping it again $($myDiv) in my code.
There is no real need to migrate to 64-bit unless you need to cleanly address more than 4 GB of memory. The case for the x86 migration to 64-bits was not so much the extra memory space, but the extra registers. ARM always had plenty of them.

More to the point, moving ARM to 64-bits is relatively simple - and the ARM cores are so small even if you had twice the silicon area for that (a worse than worst-case-scenario) you would end up with a core that is still a fraction the size of a tiny x86. A Cortex core occupies less than 2 square millimeters.

With cache.
Ask HN: List your Etherpad alternatives
Etherpad is down right now. Hopefully it will come back up soon so everyone can export their pads.

In the meantime I thought it would be good to make a list of open source etherpad sites.

piratepad.net
faxpad.org
lolpad.org
ietherpad.com
primarypad.com (in future, only for UK schools)

Please comment on your preferences and any others you've discovered!

So far, there is no replacement for the account and business oriented side of etherpad (please enlighten me if you've found one).

Thanks everyone!
API Design Matters
It seems like, at this point, Facebook (at least revenue/usage wise) is more and more about social gaming than networking.
Do you really believe one could port Office 2010 to them?
This is classic case of "talk yourself out of doing something". You got past the hurdle of actually starting, so now finish.

You think gowalla said, oh crap, foursquare beat us to it, we better stop?

If there is not already a clear category winner, then that spot is still completely up for grabs.
Actually, I was under the impression that you were putting the blame for sub-par code on jQuery, not on the people using it. I agree that most of these practices a at least a bit odd, but thankfully jQuery does not force any of them upon you.
Wikileaks were recently looking for some technical help.
I've always wanted to use my web skills to create a site that generates revenue for a charity. Perfect example: http://www.freerice.com
Something like this will never become widespread unfortunately. See, banking has it too good right now. They get to charge people strange fees, and credit interest AND they get to charge per transaction on credit cards as well. This means they get paid whenever transactions happen. With this system it becomes so laughably cheap to pass money around, it will be like going back to cash, which means there doesn't need to be a per-transaction overhead. As such, lots of institutions would lose out on the money they get now. Such things scare the large existing banks, so they won't support it until they have to. No merchants will accept it, for the reason that no one uses it. Thus you end up with a chicken/egg problem.
It's neat but why would I want a transparent display?

If it was 100% transparent when it was off and not transparent at all when I was using it (with the ability to control transparency) then I can see it being useful. Anyone know more about this technology?
The iPhone has supported YouTube through a native application since it launched. It does this by streaming the MPEG-4 video directly instead of using Flash as a player. Every other video site does this as well, and they don't even need a native app or any server-side weirdness. The only reason we don't do this on the desktop is inertia.

the majority of online display advertising

Which no consumer gives a flying fuck about and many actively oppose. It isn't "important". Nobody would desire Flash just so they could get Flash advertising.

Facebook and countless other uploaders

The iPhone has no user-visible filesystem for these to interface with. Even if it did, it isn't as though Flash is the only way to upload files: it just happens to be a way that skirts around browser limitations. A native application (even on the desktop, like Flickr Uploadr or iPhoto's Facebook integration) does the same thing.

I'm not trying to say that Flash is dead. Obviously it is in use all over the place. I'm just saying it's not a vital thing to have in anything new, and can cite the iPhone's success in the past few years as an example.
Plan9 had a whole lot of interesting things. Unfortunately for me, it has no Django, Emacs, Firefox and OpenOffice.
It really isn't. Mainstream sites still play video with Flash, and I doubt that is going to change in 2010. But, we'll see.
I think we're just lucky that the paradigm for a desktop computer is already settled.

Imagine if Apple started out as a company that distributes music and designs handheld devices before creating a computer. It's not hard to see a Mac OS that only lets you buy apps from an app store.
What will it take to switch.

Why does he need anyone to switch? This competitor has just launched their product. That means they have very few users and almost no brand recognition. 99.9% of the world will have no idea who launched first and won't care.

You don't need to convince anyone to switch from your competitor's product. You just need to convince people to use your product, which is a problem you already had. In that sense, the launch of a competing product shouldn't affect your roadmap at all.

Longer term, you should be worried about the huge imbalance in resources. That's solvable, though: if you get any traction with your product you can raise funds and hire a team.
Agreed.

Find a portion of the target market that is unserved, or poorly served by their app, and differentiate your app to appeal to them. If this means making it narrower, good.

The only sort of competition I'd strongly discourage is straight-up head to head competition. You have to differentiate yourself somehow, even if not on a technical dimension.
You don't need to. There are surprising connections. E.g. between partial differentiation and algebraic datatypes: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Haskell/Zippers#Differentiation...
As a developer, that is sound advice. As a user, it's silly. I don't get to decide which websites use flash and which don't, and technical limitations don't dictate which sites I want to visit.
Yes, I know. My point is that most people won't know/bother doing

$myDiv = $('myDiv');

They'll simply use $('myDiv') all over the place which will be horrible.
This is only amazing because it is in JS in a browser. Pretty boring from an audio DSP perspective.

That being said, audio programming is way behind the rest of the RAD movement. ChucK is the only thing close to RAD audio programming, but the project is run academically.
Ask HN: Insights into securely distributing binaries (call home)?
Say I have an application I would like to sell, for the sake of argument a war or a jar. I want to sell a license s.t. each registered user can only run on N machines simultaneously. I'm thinking of a call home where some secure sessions are negotiated and binaries can stop running if they are not authorized. I'm sure there is a lot of work on this area, can someone point me at the generally accepted techniques?
This looks awesome but I couldn't easily find a price on their site (maybe none announced yet?).

Also, I'll be holding out for the Android version (if they make one).
Assuming your technical skill is related to software: More and more non profits, charities, and even for profit companies that are serving the greater good, are using a lot of open source. Contributing to, or improving, open source projects is one way to make a difference.
The Android in my iPhone (iPhone knockoff built with Android)
Amazon was not the first bookstore.

Google was not the first search engine.

Did they give up?
you have to believe that your way is the best way to solve the problem.

I disagree. You have to believe that your way is Good Enough.

Good Enough plus effective promotion equals sales. Best is a recipe for Duke Nukem Forever.
"How is selling their software at an attractive price to the market classed as distortion?"

Because it stifles competition?

Besides that, this arguments ignores the other part: the one in that Microsoft restricts what kinds of netbooks can be built by modulating license price for the machines.
Traffic Sources - Google Code
I guess my third option is to concentrate more on finding those connections. Thanks for the feedback.
One of the things you have to consider is Apple's strategic goals beyond the Tablet or even the iPhone.

There's a larger strategic issue here. HTML 5 is going to reduce a lot of the need for Flash and Flash in turn is going to be forced back into it's traditional market of providing streaming media solutions. In that role they are Apple biggest competitor both in format (Quicktime) and content (streaming media competing with iTunes)

By keeping Flash off the iPhone and the tablet Apple is taking their very high income audience and telling web site developers "Support us or risk losses in advertising". In doing that they're using the iPhone and the tablet to further the company as a whole. Something that might be worth losing a few sales in the short run
It's not the product. It's not the marketing. It's not the tech. It's not the market. Actually, it could be any of these things.. the key is to know what your competitive advantage is and run with it.
You should go to the VCs that usually compete with the VCs that invested in your competitor. This other groups' funding has created a "gap" in the portfolio of other VCs that you could fill. There is the first-mover disadvantage: they have to maintain backwards compatibility and they are now deeply sunk into their UI and marketing. You can learn the lessons they get from feedback. This is like free product testing.
Dropbox + vi?
post link to other startup
Hmm, I never thought to price them individually. I'd just assumed that the kit would be cheaper. I wonder how many kits they sell based on that assumption? Oh well. Even with shipping from hacktronics it was still $5 cheaper than sparkfun's base price before shipping. I built radios and stuff as a kid, but I've never done any micro-controller programming... should be fun. :)
After Brain Drain, China Is Luring Some Scientists Home
Your conclusion is a non sequitur. While people cannot discern individual events a 60Hz, most will perceive a CRT monitor as slightly but disconcertingly flickering, an effect that only vanishes at 70Hz or more (I once had a co-worker who didn't notice that 60Hz flicker and opted for more pixels over higher frequency in his XF86Config, nobody else could look at his monitor for extended periods of time...).

So there definitely is some room for quality improvements above 30Hz, but the amount depends on the viewer and the technology (flat screens do not flicker even at 60Hz, and it is almost always preferable if you animation frame rate is the same as you video refresh rate [edit: or an integer fraction thereof. From which premise we can mathematically prove that there is only one acceptable frame rate for TV sets: the least common multiple of 30Hz (NTSC video), 25Hz (PAL and SECAM video) and 24Hz (movies), which happens to be 600Hz. Way to go, my dear marketing departments.] ).
also try marketing techniques along with the release of your app
Facebook Hacked?
Que (PlasticLogic): $649 / $799 to read.
The Reverse Phone Screen: Call Your Potential Employer And Interview Them
Don't forget that NT was originally multi-platform. There's nothing fundamental stopping Windows from running on different processors. The porting effort is mostly in the HAL.

Office is another story and would need work, although if MS ever carry through on their original plans to convert all their apps to .NET compatibility should come for free.
Windows EULA in plain English
What follows the “no-fly” list?
I don't think it's necessarily a mistake if your goal is to strong-arm the industry towards abandoning Flash.
There are various proprietary solutions to this, and for better or worse, flexlm (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FlexNet_Publisher) is the first that comes to my mind.
The which-state-is-richer bit is a huge fallacy. I would argue it's much more difficult for an education system to function in much of California because of the wealth gap created by the tech and entertainment industries. These industries poach a lot of talent, much like the way the finance industry did in NYC. If I still lived in NYC, I'd probably be teaching on the side because my day job would be boring. But I'm in California, so I'm going to try at a startup instead.

This wealth gap also makes it difficult to educate disadvantaged kids because similarly, the rich districts poach teachers from the poor districts. Again, first-hand experience in NYC, and I see the same factors at play here in the Bay Area. Only up in SF where you have an abundance of lifestyle (cough hipsters cough) folks do you have schools that are much better than their funding levels ought to indicate.

All said, it's probably not a good idea to raise your kid in a state where the economics are tilted against the education system. So yea, Texas wins... but that's a pretty stupid win.
Some people might be surprised to hear this but such visualizations are part of the curriculum for the CBSE of 10th grade (maybe 9th also) students in India. They have to do such things for lots of equations and some geometrical problems. This is called practical Maths, and comprises about 20% of our marks. We have to solve puzzles and do other fun stuff with math visualization.
You mention 'They created a really great app with all the features I was working on'. Thinking about your use of the plural of feature, I'm wondering if there is a way to pare down the feature set and provide a lightweight solution (as a differentiator to this competitor)? What is the one (or two features) that provide the real value in the app? Go for those one or two features and make it very simple to use.
It works for me. That's why I've never been interested in adblocking software. If a site annoys me, I just don't go there any more.

That's why I've hardly ever read any of the nytimes articles that get submitted here. Because they put them behind an irritating signup wall. There's accounts you can find on google but I really can't be bothered.

It's not like there's a shortage of websites doing the same thing.
Sure, if Sales is your only goal. I'm not talking about being a perfectionist, but I'm talking about putting out the best product that you damn well can.

Why aim for mediocre?
I'm sorry, I can't find that page anymore. I found it twice in the past, but I can't get back there.
I'm not sure about this. Or I should say I am sure this is wrong for me and I'm not sure about anyone else.

I do about 1/3 of my internet surfing on my iPhone, at least an hour or two a day and I rarely miss the Flash. In fact, I'd say I'm actually glad it's not there. Most of my major online annoyances are Flash powered.
While existing institutions could use it, I agree that they probably wont.

This is a classic innovators dilemma where a bunch of small new services could form, be ignored, grow and eventually replace the status quo.

I wrote a long 5 post article series about this last summer, which has spawned the Agile Banking community behind OpenTransact:

http://stakeventures.com/articles/2009/06/29/risky-business
I usually set those in the body text in italics or something, perhaps with the display version of the typeface if I am so fortunate. But I guess that's not the way people do it these days.
All of the problems he has experienced sound like they have more to do with Google Checkout than anything specific to Nexus One
What percentage of an Atom is devoted to decode? Atom is around 45 million transistors. The PPro which also decoded to mini-RISC had 5 million. Somehow I don't think the Atom is really burning that much space/power on decode.

You and gvb seem to imply that an ARM (RISC) chip which does less work per instruction somehow does more work per clock. I find that surprising. Otherwise, what is meant by the "emphasize raw clock rate" comment?
Counterpoint: an iPhone has about the same computing power as the first-gen Xbox. People will eventually put a commensurate amount of development effort into it, and you will have to compete with them.
Web Laureate Insight, "Cacoo: Export as PNG"
There are times during the app's runtime that it is perfectly safe to collect all generations, and times when we would rather not do a GC.
Does anyone know what the nature of the bug is? The article lacked on this aspect unfortunately.
In case this isn't obvious: expect whatever protection you employ to be cracked if your product is ever successful (and maybe even if it isn't).
Agreed; anyone serious is sub-ms
I never really understood why that would be the case. What can people do with that information that they couldn't do otherwise?
I've been looking into it a lot as well. It really depends what your BI is supposed to handle. Is it analytics with very wide but very flat tables that you don't join much (or at all)? Is it complex queries joining many tables together to respond to ad-hoc queries?

I recently needed to support the first case and found that one of the best cost/performance solutions for us was infobright given that a lot of our existing base and reporting can stay as-is since we used heavily partitioned mysql myisam tables but it was getting slow (and crashy) and even slower every day.

In the near future I plan on supporting the second case because I'm getting a little tired of having to write up new reports myself. I've automated pretty much all the frontend stuff so that generating new reports is mainly a question of plugging in the proper sql queries and massaging the resulting data appropriately (which may be why I find it so boring) and it'll only take me a day or two to write new reports on a new part of the business but I'd much rather pass that off to marketing and teach them how to do it themselves.

For the second case, what I think is very promising and will be prototyping very soon is a combination of LucidDB and the Pentaho BI Suite. (Check out a demo here, it's pretty impressive: http://demo.pentaho.com/pentaho/ )

Truly complex predictive reports I'll still have to handle myself but those are interesting because they at least require problem solving. The rote historical analysis reports I'd prefer handing off for good and the other departments would love to handle it themselves since they wouldn't always have to wait until I had time to get them their data.
Best of Vim Tips
Make Your Message a Success
The was a really good overview on the art of the pitchman on Last weeks On the Media: http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2010/01/01/05. For example, did you know that Ron Popeil is just part of a whole family of pitchmen?
When can I get it in contact lenses?
There's no reason why this functionality should be in sed when it can be implemented on its own and re-used. IIRC there's an an example script to for that in _The Unix Programming Environment_. Better to use sudo than have everything implement its own sudo-like functionality, etc.

See "UNIX Style, or cat -v Considered Harmful" by Rob Pike (http://harmful.cat-v.org/cat-v/) for a longer discussion of this.
Uh... then why is there a frame rate counter in the bottom right of the screen giving variable numbers between 40-70? :)

I agree that the smaller file looks jumpier. But it's still reporting the same frame rates as the bigger file, which leads me to believe the jumps are an artifact of translation somewhere. Certainly nothing seems to be "locked".
If those sites have email set up correctly, you can sign up for free pro accounts. Just go to /ep/pro-signup/ at any etherpad domain.