skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
All your points are fair, but if Apple's value is just 3%, why don't we hear as many stories about other app stores? Android has a much larger userbase, but the common wisdom is that actual revenue in that store is much smaller.

Beyond the 3% in transactions you're paying for the review process, which while imperfect, makes parents pretty comfortable letting their kids pay $1M/day to the Clash of Clans/Angry Birds folks.

While getting featured is rare, you still need to pay the salaries of the editors who pick the best apps, the graphics artists who merchandise the collections, etc.

I also look at it as the subsidy that helps offset the cost of developing Objective-C, Swift, etc. You might argue that it's in Apple's best interest to develop that anyway, but I don't fault them for trying to recoup the cost.

Look at it this way, it's a progressive 30% tax that you pay if your successful, while keeping the cost of development low for beginners.

Really, I think the big thing you're paying for is access to a customer base that is much more likely to pay you.

I've had a couple products featured in the iTunes store despite not being super connected and had great success. I understand the frustration, but it's not like you're not getting anything in return.
Small note: the $200 million dollar figure wasn't for all of healthcare.gov, it was for the _authentication system_.
The world does not owe Oracle a place for Java as a mobile operating system. When you're the disrupted rather than the disruptor, your market gets destroyed. That's usually good rather than bad for society as a whole. That part isn't even actionable at law. So, Oracle: Deal with it.

Now, claiming that your copyrights have been violated is actionable at law. The Supreme Court let stand a decision that APIs are copyrightable (!), but Google still has a fair use defense that has not been ruled on.

If Oracle wins, Google's going to change the API for Android. Java will become less relevant, not more. Oracle may get some money for damages, but Java will lose.
NovaeCalc – Browserbased Open Source Spreadsheet
How long does Crater take to compile all (2792!) crates in stock on crates.io? It ought to be embarrassingly parallelizable. Is there a dashboard page showing the Crater results for rust nightlies?
Quoted from the notice re: sudo vulns:

"Multiple vulnerabilities existed in sudo versions prior to 1.7.10p9, the most serious of which may allow an attacker access to arbitrary files"

Just the tip of the iceberg though.. bluetooth kernel memory mapping, and more fun all in this update.
> "fill as many seats with bodies as you can, win the contract, and charge by the hour"

THIS MAN knows what he's talking about. I wish more people would be aware of this.

What's even more perverse? When contracts are awarded based on the above while factoring in "diversity points" - different minorities count for different numbers of points. I will leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out what perversity follows.
50 Years After the Riots, Watts Projects and LAPD Learn to Co-Exist
Salesmen? Packaging? We may both be talking about "software" but you're talking about a completely different kind of product than what one finds in the App Store.
Facebook user gets away with nearly a full day of trolling Target commenters
"Even when"? Should the boss be in those meetings?

All the agile talk is about empowering teams; yet the boss is monitoring every step. I'm with the OP; its another way to supervise.
Any idea what the compensation is like? Would the "tour of duty" be considered a sacrifice or is it a viable way to make a living for a talented engineer?
That example is just a simple Markov model. Using the 'T9' method of completing text is more of a novelty than something useful. I also have trouble with 'complete the sentence' type of programs because they don't actually create new ideas, they just rehash data. (It does have use in OCR, voice recognition, and typing/texting.)

I agree that the math can be complex, but I think it boils down to probability and the notation of presenting the ideas more than the underlying concepts. I feel like the most advanced math used in NLP is the log function, personally. Along with working with big arrays of data, or structures like Markov models and neural nets, which tend to be just arrays of numbers.

In a normal AI course, we had to form write-ups of contemporary AI articles, and one I found interesting was a model for summarizing text, including chapters, books, and other writing. The key idea was finding the most significant sentences in any given paragraph or unit and then using that verbatim.

It might be interesting to take some of these simple ideas and flesh them out with some of these advanced AI methods. For example, finding a more complete meaning of a book chapter and rewriting the summary.

That's the kind of AI work that I think people expect and are looking for from the NLP field, and it's not necessarily out of reach currently.
Replace "listening to music" and "headphones" with "working remotely" and it makes a sound argument too:

Some companies and managers don’t like you listening to music. They argue that your headphones will isolate you from possible important interactions with others and that a person who spends their days listening to music cannot do their job well. These are not solid arguments for me. If someone wants to interact with you, they will definitely find a way to get your attention.
And this is the point at which I'd just grab a Linux/BSD LiveCD and be done with Windows.
SUCH a great idea. Is the platform also open to broader art and craft forms (beyond traditional "art") - say quiltmakers or knitters/other fiber artists?
Yep. For me, the alternative to music is an open office. And I sit right on the edge of the dev area, next to a major thoroughfare. In an office with hardwood floors. I bought a pair of really nice insulating headphones and I still hear things.
Yep, it's possible to enable link time optimizations.
It depends on a few different factors, but your salary can be matched up to $158K. That includes DC's locality adjustment.[1]

[1] https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/salaries...
Came here to say the same thing. Know a few people who work there and they are doing some cool things.

I love how they work in the public and really advocate open source. One cool project is their analytics reporter: https://github.com/18F/analytics-reporter
Paid Upgrades Won't Fix Your Business
I had the opportunity to work with Rust >1.0 recently, implementing an image processing algorithm. Knowing that the compiler was looking out for me, a wingman of sorts, was quite the pleasant experience. When coding in C I have a very paranoid mentality, constantly questioning every line of code and its impact on program state/memory. It results in my C code being almost always free of memory related bugs, but the work is absolutely _exhausting_. Rust was great in this regard, dramatically reducing the amount of mental capacity expended while coding. Either the compiler would catch the bugs, or worst-case a run-time assert would catch it and point me directly to the problem.

The major criticism I came away with, due in part to the type of program I was coding, was for Rust's lack of implicit type casting (more specifically, widening). What I mean is, adding a u8 and a u16 is an error in Rust. Rust will refuse to implicitly cast the u8 to a u16. These situations came up very frequently while implementing my program because I had to do a lot of optimized, low-level math. The scattering of type casts throughout the program resulted in clutter without any obvious benefit.

When I looked into the problem, the arguments I saw against it were often explanations that Rust is meant to be explicit and non-magical. But Rust, for example, already has type inference which I classify as "magical". Implicit type widening is hardly magical. And I don't see how it would be confusing or result in bugs, as long as only safe widening is done implicitly.

I think those involved in the Rust project were just scared off from it because of C's bizarre implicit type casting rules which result in bugs for typical programmers. I can understand that, but it's not like it can't be done better in Rust. Besides, if Rust is meant to be a system programming language, won't math between differing types come up often? And wouldn't handling those cases gracefully be a boon to productiveness in Rust?
I share the philosophy, but a) this isn't volunteering, it's a job, and b) massively streamlining service delivery helps a LOT of people.

They're not facilitating spying or drone death, and they're actually cutting traditional overpriced shitty contractors from the mix, which is good.
Salary range is $116,021 to $158,700.

(From va.gov/ds/, where I work, I believe this is the same for all the other Digital Service teams though)
The Social Security Master Death File
He was not found innocent. He was found not guilty.

The court is not charged with determining the difference and issuing a finding of "innocent". They are only concerned with guilty vs not.

Contrast with NFL replay referees, which are for some reason (I assume entertainment/excitement) charged with choosing one of three outcomes: ruling on the field is overturned, ruling on the field stands, and ruling on the field is confirmed. The distinction between the last two is without a difference as to the outcome of the game.

I'd much rather 100 guilty persons go free than to wrongly convict a single innocent as a critically important ideal. Any "reform" that has an obvious mechanism that would bias the system to erode that in favor of a lesser benefit is cause for concern for me.
they/them are non-gendered by the older (grammatical) meaning of "gender".

he/his and they/them both have well-established non-gender-specific meanings in the more recent (social) meaning of "gender" (prior to that fairly recent linguistic evolution, words had gender and people had sex -- while its useful to have a term for the distinct feature of people referred to by "gender" as distinct from "sex", its a very different thing than grammatical "gender", and grammatical gender doesn't have a 1:1 mapping to linguistic constructs whose semantics refer to social gender), though he/his also has a gender-specific meaning (and there is considerable potential for ambiguity between the gender-neutral and gender-specific senses of he/his.)
Paying for the review process is not a feature! That's the software equivalent of how oppressive governments will execute a prisoner and then send their family a bill for the bullet.

Apple is making billions from the App Store. It doesn't cost anything close to that much for Apple to build their developer tools. They were giving those tools away for free long before anyone had even heard of iOS.
The Mac App Store is still not the only option. Buy your software wherever you like.
I think a common example along the same vein is the analogies trick you always see. It's been demonstrated to death at this point but the great thing here is word2vec more or learns to predict the next word using hierarchical softmax so he's not technically "wrong" since this is the training objective. It's good to clarify it though.
Is that a thing? Like a corporate subscription cost for aggregation and social sites?
Bitcoin isn't just "anonymous cash", it comes with very real-life tradeoffs. A hash might be anonymous, but if you are ever linked with it, all of your transactions are public.
Ok, I feel dumb now. never knew this feature.

Thank you for telling me this!
That looks like a cool product. I think a school teacher/curriculum principal would be more successful in getting a bulk purchase made with lesson plans available(I would focus on commoncore curriculum to hit the widest audience).
git commit --allow-empty -F <(curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/thiderman/doge/master/doge/static/doge.txt)
Color Trademarks
And it takes a long time to do so, so the spike will not come like it does with sugar.
Anecdotally, that sounds about right to me. I typically like to program while listening to music. This is fine as long as the logic flow is straightforward. If it's something simple I can listen to anything. If it's moderately complicated, I'll switch to something without lyrics. If I get to something really challenging, like having to reason about race conditions or how the program is going to recover from a sudden power outage, then the music needs to stop entirely so I can focus.
Would be nice if you explained in more detail what exactly do you mean. IMHO, this is too reductionist. I can only guess:

I imagine punishment works better on children but worse on adults. I imagine it works better against psychopaths than people who have empathy. I imagine it works better on people who coldly calculate than on people who impulsively give to emotions. I imagine it works better on people from the same ingroup than from the outgroup.

Each of these items alone can explain why you can see the effect psychologically but not socially.
It's impossible to prove that these allegations were false. So there's no reputation to lose.

The only ways i can think of to prove innocence (in general) are a) an alibi b) finding who actually did it.

Both of these don't work here, you can't have an alibi for the whole company for 10 years, obviously. You can't find out who did "it" because there's no concrete example. At the very best you can prove that others did it too.
With LTO, yes. I always forget if #[inline] does or not.
Oops, sorry, guys: Apparently that
"quiz" doesn't apply to
everyone who does serious programming.

E.g.,I decided to base the software for
my startup on Windows instead of
Linux.

Why Windows? One source for
nearly everything in software I
need except what I have to write,
my favorite editor and scripting
language, Knuth's TeX, and Firefox!
So, I get Windows XP and now 7, Windows
Server of whatever years, old copies
of Office and PhotoDraw (good enough
for my purposes), SQL Server, IIS
(Web site front end), .NET, ASP.NET,
ADO.NET, huge on-line Microsoft
documentation, in most of the really
important ways really
well written,
lots of books and fora,
lots of expert users,
and, surprisingly, if have a really
good question, then some good on-line
support from experts from Microsoft,
for free.

For a compiled programming language on
Windows it seemed that I had basically
just two choices, C# and the .NET version
of Visual Basic. So, which one? Well,
first-cut, the two are nearly equivalent,
that is, offer essentially the same
access to the .NET Framework and
the common language runtime (CLR).
So, really, the main difference is just
in syntactic sugar.

Well for the sugar part, C# seems to
borrow the sparse, obscure, deliberately
idiosyncratic syntax of C, and I don't like
that, regard it as inefficient, for coding -- writing, reading, or
teaching. Visual Basic has a more
traditional flavor of sugar I like
much better for writing, reading, and
teaching. So, I selected Visual Basic.

For JS, ASP.NET writes a little for me,
but so far for my Web pages and
everything else I have yet to
write a single line of JS.

For C, I've programmed in it and
have a little of it from
open source in my project
and otherwise regard it as
walking or riding a bicycle
instead of driving a car.

SQL? Sure: I'm using SQL Server.
But so far my SQL queries have
all been quite simple. So, I've learned
what SQL I needed but likely couldn't
pass a good test on SQL. I have a plenty
good enough background in the theory
and intentions of relational database,
e.g., from one of Ullman's books, and will
dig into more complicated SQL statements
as needed.

So, net, my software development is significant
and doing just fine, but for that "quiz"
I'd be lucky to get 10%. So, the quiz
is not a good evaluation of everyone
doing serious software!
Even with that, "about 15% of Steam games run on Linux" applies to the large, existing body of software on Steam. Many of those have been around for 10+ years.
At the moment we are using 60 r3.xlarge spot instances each running a single build at a time, and as of a few weeks ago it took maybe two hours. It hasn't been optimized.

There is no web dashboard yet (the website[1] - which runs Rust! - is quite minimal), but it's coming.

[1]: https://crater.rust-lang.org/
Building CircleCI's Front End with Om [video]
Yep. 18F is great, and the teams work together on a lot. Here's more on why it works that way: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9802888.
Did you by any chance click on the "real" link first? That could have set a "not really from Google" cookie.
Depending on what your startup is, a lot of your early customers are probably going to be in the Bay Area. But yes, I was referring to the investors.

"Anyway, here's a startup protip: make a business that is growing revenue like crazy"

Really? That's all? And I'm sure that to make my product better, all I have to do is write code with less bugs!
The user is signed in which will skew their results. It is above the Alphabet wiki, does not replace it, and both are far below articles related to Alphabet Inc.

[0] http://i.imgur.com/pFoR2hw.png
Sugar is not, and it did not exist for practical purposes for average people before the 20th century.
There is a very important point missing from this: volume. Despite the decibel range being vast, you really only have three options when choosing the volume of your music in regards to how it affects your brain.

At higher volumes, music will drown your internal monologue. If you find that your brain tends to constantly bikeshed instead of being productive, louder music will probably help with this. The downside is that if you are the type of person who focuses on lyrics instead of melody, you may find yourself more easily distracted by them. Something else to consider is that music containing very loud bass (think dubstep) might actually be detrimental to focus at higher volumes.

At lower volumes, the issue with lyrics goes away, but your internal monologue persists. A counter-intuitive benefit (though usually at very low volumes), is that you tend to lose a lot of the quieter frequencies in the music, and your brain starts to process everything differently while it attempts to fill in the blanks or discern unintelligible lyrics. This can actually lead to more creative potential for some people. I can reliably recreate this on-demand, and it has greatly helped with both songwriting and programming over the years. Though, to be honest, I end up blasting death metal 99% of the time, because it's just more fun when it's loud.

Then there is the Goldilocks zone. The perfect volume for you, and you alone. It is a very small decibel range and can be very difficult to find, especially considering the drastically different audio production between albums. But if you can manage to find it, you'll notice that lyrics and dynamics don't distract you, it drowns out the monologue, and likely helps with creativity.

Source: None. This is completely anecdotal, albeit from many people.
If you spend some quality time reading IETF mailing lists, you'll learn that it's all "opinion-based commentary". I'm a little confused as to what your argument here is. The IETF works by means of people persuading other people to support proposals. That's the entire mechanism.
"If you’re unable to convince friends to start a business with you, PG says it’s a vote of no confidence. But, what if you’re like me and you don’t have a lot of entrepreneurial friends? Or, maybe you do, but they don’t want to work on your ideas? It doesn’t really matter what your friends think of your ideas or you in regards to starting a business–the votes that count come in the form of paying customers. Since it’s cheap and easy to spot faults in unproven business ideas, early votes of no confidence, even from well-meaning friends and family are standard fare. Expect and take them with a grain of salt. Some of the best companies today sounded pretty dumb on paper yesterday."

This is probably the clearest refutation of Graham's single founder section I've seen.

I'd expound a bit on one of the later points:

If what you're doing is somewhat domain-specific, only the opinions of people in your target area and market matter. You might know a lot of people, but if they're not in your target area and market they might not get it. If you're getting negative feedback from them, it might be irrelevant. The only negative feedback you should listen to is from people who really get your target area.
Postgres and Transparent Data Encryption (TDE)
Oh, you mean the preference for women, minorities, and veterans? Yeah, that's an interesting issue. It's great in theory, but in practice ends with quite a bit of additional bench stuffing to increase preference. And then to start a company and compete for contracts, even if you're a rockstar engineer who just happens to be white and a man, good luck competing against an 8A. It's hard to complain, because I see the value, but at the same time, UGH.
Navy doc here. One project where a huge difference could be made, now, would be if smart people could hold Leidos to task with the new military health care system. It's something like $16 billion dollars and "integrating with the VA proved to be too expensive".

Many thanks to the folks at 18f and the US Digital Service.

How far behind is government IT? I'm trying to get the Navy HPC systems (the cutting edge, right?) to "modernize" to Python 2.7.
Stop government from putting Chelsea Manning in indefinite solitary confinement
Twenty years ago I listened to an audiobook version of a poetic translation of the Iliad. It was just eye-opening, vastly better than reading the book -- went from frequently being tricky to focus on to just right. Not surprising, seeing that's how it was originally meant to be heard.

I've been meaning to follow-up with Beowulf, but haven't gotten around to it yet...
I definitely agree, this is a pain point in Rust today, and it's something the core team would like to address. You might glance at the thread here for some of the tradeoffs: https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/implicit-widening-polymorp...

If we can reach consensus on a design, such a feature can be easily implemented. I'd love to see an RFC on the topic (https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs)!
"DNSSEC improves the situation" is (a) false and (b) a concession to the narrative that DNSSEC is worth doing.

Someone actively engaged in trying to prevent centralization of Internet trust, and decoupling it from the Five Eyes governments --- a worthy goal, I think --- should be adamantly against DNSSEC. But here's Snowden doing the opposite.

It's not because Snowden is disingenuous. I think he's a true-believer. It's because he doesn't understand DNSSEC.
I know this is just my $0.02, which I generally avoid... but:

I would be very skeptical of this entire article, having worked with researchers from Kaspersky for many years. They are terrific partners and care deeply about infosec.

Also, Kaspersky has been known in the past, which they have disclosed, for planting red herrings in malware archives, because they accused (and were right) of other vendors just looking at what Kaspersky blocks and just automatically copying it, without actually doing AV research. That's not what they are being accused of here...

Finally, Joseph is a great journalist, but this article stinks in terms of providing actual evidence.
It doesn't share much in common with the article, but I believe this immediately because the same thing happened three times over the last two years with different people in my street. All with new and rather nice Audi models. Opened without any damage, the dashboard completely rampaged (nav, radio, airbags etc removed)

I won't be surprised if there's another, even more serious vulnerability in Volkswagen locks. The security researcher who found it probably sold it to the bad guys, totally understandable after reading how Volkswagen handles security reports.