skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In 2013, Amazon had 65% market share of online book sales [1]. It wouldn't surprise me if this was 20% higher now.

When customers walk into a Barnes and Noble (or any bookstore) and browse books but don't buy (for example, because they found a cheaper price online), they are most likely to end up on Amazon to complete the purchase. B&N did the work but Amazon got the money.

Amazon doesn't have that problem. They don't need to sell books in the store to "pay the store's operating expense" - they just need people to come in and browse.

Currently, Amazon doesn't compete for a high percentage of books (50%) moved through physical stores [2]. They are in the enviable position of being able to create stores that don't leak sales to competitors. This is the final nail in B&N's coffin.

[1] http://www.thewire.com/business/2014/05/amazon-has-basically...

[2] http://www.dailydot.com/business/ebook-sales-2013-revenue/
China have announced plans to research development of thorium reactors. The initial schedule put possible commercial deployment as not before ~2040. Some managerial rattling prompted more ambitious schedules, though so far as I can tell, that was based far more on wishful thinking (we want an energy solution sooner) than any significant technological breakthrough.

So, yes, even the can-do, optimistic Chinese see practical application of thorium / MSR designs as decades off.

Previously:
https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1uy239/energy_...
Interesting: apparently there is now an open visual Q&A training dataset: 254,721 images, 764,163 questions, 9,934,119 answers!
http://visualqa.org/index.html
Thank you, went to save it to my dropbox and found a copy already there...
Jetbrains moves IDEs to subscription licensing model
Heroin related problems are rarely caused by the substance itself, rather lack thereof.
5 Reasons Why Your Android App Should Not Mirror Your iOS App (And Vice Versa)
The latter problem seems to be solving itself.

Used bookshops are closing and selling used books online is getting less and less profitable.
Google confirms it will launch a drone delivery service in 2017
I'm a fairly short guy with short-guy hands. I like the larger screen. I don't try to use my phone one-handed. I stop whatever it is I'm doing with the other hand and use both of them.

Sure, some people can multi-task. I might even be one of them. But I prefer not to.
>There's also a correlation of consumption of any meat and health issues.

Nope. Meat is just an evolutionary adaptation which allows the human race to inhabit northern regions.

There are obviously some crosscultural differences in comsumption of meat, but there are no replicable studies that meat eaters of, say, Japan, Middle East, Greece, Georgia or Nepal are worse off than strict vegetarians of India.

This adaptation happened, perhaps, at Homo Erectus time, so, do not worry, everything is already OK.

What we never had in our long past are supplements and substitutes. One should look here.
I am about to go read the article, but after owning a 6s+ for the past couple weeks, I will give a few impressions first:

* Very very very large (this is a big-ass phone),
* Very very very very fast,
* Some good options in the UI for heavier Mac style 'fuzzy' text,
* Battery life is barely dented after a typical day of surfing and texting occasionally at work,
* Phone is 'slippery' and I have to use a special grip, wrapping fingers around it to hold it securely,
* Camera is fantastic, with people asking me 'what lens' are you using, assuming I'm on my Nikon SLR,
* Fingerprint unlocking is here, and works perfectly.

All in all, it's an incredible leap from the iPhone 4S I had before. $900+ is a LOT for a phone though.
I don't think Google's looking to decentralize in any way shape or form. If anything, they want to know more about a viewer and will be actively fighting to prevent decentralization... especially as it'll break a lot of reporting that advertisers expect.
This article was very fascinating. Some of the weights mentioned seem incredible, but it seems to know what it's talking about.

If you read all the way to the end you get an interesting angle -- this isn't just a historical piece! Then if you click through to the main page of the site it's on, it's bizarro world, like a news source that is the opposite of hacker news in readership, outlook, and what it celebrates. (Way more than you would think given the article in question.)

I'm glad to have read it!
Sorry to hear that you're unhappy with it. I think you'll be happy with the progress when you see the next updates. There's some work being done to modernize the interface and some of your list will be tackled by that. I would encourage you to take a look at my other comment in this particular tree of comments about Android. It might offer some perspective, not that it's an excuse but it explains things a bit more and might just help in understanding.

We really do want everyone to love our Android application. Personally, I feel they've made great strides given the time they've had. It's just a matter of time and our Android application will be right up there with our iOS application. We have some super smart people working on it and they're very passionate about what they do. I can't help but be inspired by a group of people who fight tooth and nail to catch up to a product that's much older (our iOS application).

I showed your comment to our Android developers so they've seen what you're requesting :)

Thanks!

Kyle

AgileBits
Out of curiosity, where are all the jobs supporting the people now living there?

Are they commuting to more urban areas?
Avigilon | Somerville, MA (Assembly Row) | Full-time / Onsite

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* Data Engineers * Backend Cloud Engineers * Javascript Developers * Front-end Developers * h.264 and Media Experts *

Avigilon is based in Vancouver with an office in the Boston area focused on analytics, research, and development.

Send me an email if you're interested in solving interesting problems in the areas of security, video, streaming media and high definition cameras. I can be reached at christopher . kopec at avigilon.com or apply online at https://careers-avigilon.icims.com/jobs/search?ss=1&searchLo...
I'm not an Android developer so I hope my mental picture of what GCM does isn't off.

> My sense is that this isn't because you find the communication over GCM to be inherently offensive (it's just a tickle, after all),

Using GCM still means that Google could suddenly stop to relay the messages for some users, right? (Say, those who seem to be using a non-official reimplementation of GCM...). Then the service would suddenly stop working for these users. So I'd still rather be able to avoid relying on the GCM backend at all, if that's possible.

> What I don't understand is why nobody just writes an API-compatible open source implementation of play services

Couldn't the Play Services API change without warning? It is sensibly designed so another implementation wouldn't be too hackish?

People shouldn't have to reimplement such things by mimicking Google's API. In principle, there should be a documented and stable standard, not hacky reimplementations.

I agree, though, that probably the way to go would be to first build a different messaging system like this (maybe using XMPP as a backend?).
What constitues a user is not unclear.

A user is both someone who uses the compiled software (pushes the button in your example) or a developer capable of modifying the software.

A developer doesn't need the freedom to redistribute the software to other users without also respecting their freedoms.

Dual licensing does nothing to hurt freedom, as a user of the GPL licensed software your freedom is protect, both to use the software, and to modify it for your usage.

Needing to assign copyright to make upstream contributions may hurt the rate at which the upstream project develops, but in no way hurts your freedom.
Help developers track the code in their apps at SourceDNA (YC S15)
It seems like the media has been trying to will a crash in global markets to happen with the amount they've been going on about this.

How biased are their opinions and what do more neutral experts say about the direction the global economy is heading? Honest question as I am not an expert.
2,000 year old 'computer' discovered: Tech and shipwrecks rewriting human history
I have always preferred and used Fedora over other linux distros. But the non-availability of Fedora LTS as resulted in a continuous upgrade of my machines, which is daunting.

I have now chosen the RH/Fedora variant CentOS for all my machines - desktop, server,e.t.c.
> They can adjust it to integrate, and claim confusion or delay while rounding up source code.

Then sue them for damages immediately. If they offer up their source code during the lawsuit then great! If they don't then you get damages.
Oh not saying its bad at all. Investment is good. Just a comment on what seems to be a global trend.
Seems to be fine now.
Apparently the FDA/DEA disagree, as methamphetamine is legal in the US and doctors can prescribe it for attention issues or obesity. Sales are somewhere above $10M a year. (This is just for methamphetamine. Other amphetamines like Adderall sell like 100x more.)

Whereas diamorphine, aka Bayer Heroin(TM)[1], is deemed to have zero medicinal qualities.

The DEA is almost certainly wrong (as usual), though if amphetamines were easily obtainable at good prices, the market for meth would likely crash.

And you're right that real opiates (to contrast with dirt mixed with fentanyl and sold as "heroin") seem to have little negative effects. Most of the damage is due to the legality and financing issues, which are entirely artificial. (Opiates are incredibly cheap to produce.)

1: Trademark stolen as part of WWI "reparations".
That's an optimisation. It's not core to the React model.
If DOM mutation was ever to be faster than the cost of the diffing then they'd just remove the diffing and your applications would still work the same with the same API.
When I worked on a video search engine for UK football (soccer) clubs, we made the whole thing static.

We figured that inputs to the search was from a static range, i.e. these players, those games, that league, this type of incident (foul, goal, celebration, etc).

Then we pre-calculated all possible combinations and fired them through what we called a "cache cannon".

It was highly parallelizeable, simple to store on disk (we stored JavaScript files whose names were the form inputs), and worked extremely well.

Even for something like a search engine, unless you're doing full text search over a very wide corpus, you can look at pre-populating a cache and that cache actually being stored on your web servers and being directly addressable.

The design above, allowed that search engine to work over the weekend peak of 2 million users. That's where it shone... we just did not have to worry about the thundering herd with a pre-populated cache.
No, Developer Edition version 44 releases today. Stable will be version 42 after the release.
This would seem to be an area where senders could alter behavior to make things work better with this...maybe being explicit about the question and options.
Mostly investment properties as far as I can tell, renting to students, singles, that kind of thing. So fairly mobile renters, they commute to where they need to be.
How much time do you spend testing some mildly complex web app, by the time you're done with it? You're probably testing a ton as you go along, but a lot of stuff in an airplane can't be tested until the whole thing is assembled.

Then consider that even a smallish airliner is about a thousand times more complex than your web app. The software running on just one of the many computers alone is vastly more complex than your web app, not to mention the huge quantity of complex and often custom-designed mechanical equipment and such, plus the intersections of all these various pieces.

Then add in the fact that bugs that get through testing in your web app probably mean you have to fix it and redeploy, while bugs that get through aircraft testing result in dead passengers.

Three years seems pretty reasonable to me.
Meth and Heroin addicts tend to be poorer and prone to criminal activity, than pharmaceutical amphetamine and opiate users. Additionally, adverse reactions, are more likely when the drug is unregulated.
Maybe for some applications (low usage residential), but not for all. Certainly not for energy-intensive industrial applications. And if you're running lines to industrial sites--which are located all over the country in all sorts of areas--you might as well hook up residential developments to the grid as well to be more efficient and cost effective. That's not to say that distributed generation is a bad idea, or that it isn't going to happen. It's not, and it will. But it'll still be connected to the grid. No one's really proposing doing away with grid connections, outside some very limited and specific types of situations.
Can't wait for the first reported package theft via fishing net.

In all seriousness, this is a good thing if we approach it smartly. Drones are small, do not consume a massive amount of fossil fuels to operate, scale really well, and likely will lead to other interesting advances in logistics, aerospace, etc. Sure there are concerns to be addressed, but I see this as inevitable.

Frankly I'm left wondering where FedEx, UPS and the USPS are in all of this. I'd be curious to know what % of their revenue comes from shipments that are small enough to be carried by a current-day drone (let alone what they might be able to carry down the line). Obviously they have some protection in certain markets because of things like the weather though (good luck flying one on a decently windy day in Chicago).
Did you read the same article I did? Or at least did you get to the bottom? IMO they seem to be saying something very different to that - eg:

> Before you enter the rat race, I urge parents to question what and against whom you and your kids are racing. It doesn’t freaking matter where your neighbor’s kid went to school. It just doesn’t. Please stop comparing, judging and drawing conclusions. The kids feel it. They know it’s happening, and it is hurting them very deeply.

They aren't complaining about the school - they are passing on their lessons of their mistakes to other hyper competitive parents.
I am curious (and afraid to look): How much breakage and backwards-incompatible API changes are there this time 'round?
Alumina is Al2O3 generally, and usually it is polycrystalline. Sapphire is specifically Al2O3 in a certain (very hard) crystal structure.
How Google’s AMP project speeds up the Web–by sandblasting HTML
I offer my condolence's for the author's loss. It sounds like his father was truly a great man. However, the author didn't even mention the Israeli occupation, the apartheid system that oppresses the Palestinians, and Israel's outright rejection of a two-state solution. That is the cause of such violence, not social media.
Knowing Google, they'll be working on that by the time they release this.
> Amazon have a huge advantage in this by giving the buyer an assurance that the present will be well received. You can buy a book for a 5 year old relative without knowing what a typical 5 year old actually likes.

Individual variation is significant enough that I don't think that Amazon's data-based understanding of (say) typical 5-year-olds does much to provide assurance that a gift is right for a particular 5-year-old.

If the particular recipient actually is an active Amazon purchaser -- especially with a strong rating history -- you might get some assurance, but that's a different thing (and more applicable to online than in-store sales, probably, anyway.)
It was fairly obvious once I started studying this stuff that the idea that a head of state should be immune to certain laws that keep commoners in line. It would suck if the President had to wait in line at airport security. You don't prosecute the President, you impeach him. The class of wrongs he can commit is wholly different than that of his people by virtue of his position. Note I never said that a sovereign and his people need to be under the same law. That doesn't really work. What's important is that his powers are limited and circumscribed to a select few, with all others devolving to the people.

Many, many important battles have been fought to change the nature of power between state and nation to form a real difference from the normal state of affairs. That is what I'm arguing is the real crux of the matter.
Why can't Slack run irc servers on their own equipment? The "integrations" would just be IRC bots running on private Slack servers, no?
"With the maturation of browsers, many features that used to require dynamic code running on a server can be moved entirely to the client. Want comments on your website? Add Disqus, Isso or Facebook comments. Want social integration? Add Twitter or Facebook’s JavaScript widget to your website. Want real-time data updating live on your website? Add a squirt of Firebase. Want search? Add Swiftype. Want to add live chat support? Olark is there. Heck, you can even add an entire store to a static website with Snipcart.

The list goes on and on, as a whole ecosystem of purely browser-based add-ons to websites is emerging. Apart from that, modern web apps built with Ember.js, AngularJS or React are often deployed entirely as static websites and served directly from a CDN with a pure API back end that’s shared between the website’s UI and the mobile client."

--

I'm not sure I understand. It doesn't seem to me that a fully single-page, AJAX web site is truly "static". If much of the utility and content must be paged in via client-side JS calls, that too will contribute to load time and the same problems that are attributed to dynamic document generation. It may be all asynchronous and fancy, but from a UX point of view, the content isn't there until the data's retrieved. How's this any different than arguing for a grid of IFRAMEs?

After all, if your page is a minimal HTML DOM harness for a bunch of JS, can one really be said to have "loaded" the page simply in virtue of having loaded the stub HTML?

Or is this argument based mainly on either the implicit premises that (1) not all the functionality and components are used at once? or (2) that much of any given site's functionality can be off-loaded to third-party components (e.g. Disqus) which can all be loaded in parallel from different network sources?
> It only becomes odorless at deadly concentrations.

That is really strange. Because at non-deadly concentrations it seriously stinks. Do you know why it has this weird backwards smelliness property?
Good thing China has all of those Treasury Bonds to sell.
I ran a hotel reservation network here in China about 7 years ago. We signed over 3000 contracts nearly exclusively by fax (I think one or two were email). All of our rates updates from partner hotels were faxed in. I built an Asterix/Hylafax based solution with a custom workqueue that worked brilliantly and XMPP IM'd employees to let them know how their fax send was progressing.
They might as well just announce in a PR that they have no idea what they're doing.
I've been putting away in my 401(k) for 10 years. My overall rate of return is ... hmm, it's ~66%. That seems off, so I guess I'll have to research this more.
Sorry, with respect I don't really understand your criticism.

I asked for incentives because I'm not aware of any strong ones, aljones replied with what they thought was such an incentive. But, am I obliged to agree? If I disagree, should I not point this out and continue the discussion in a constructive manner?

Additionally, cook up particular parameter values - I don't understand what you mean - we are talking specifically about the 2 year lifecycle of a phone, and the manufacturers' incentives for keeping it as such - I didn't bring that in out of nowhere, that's what we were originally talking about!
From your description I'm not quite sure where in the stack Irmin belongs? Is this to be used by web application developers? I assume note, as this looks like it is targeting more OS level development work?

Pretty cool stuff. I am also working on a distributed database, https://github.com/amark/gun , that operates at the high level (web/javascript) rather than the low level. Although it looks like Irmin can be used in the browser? https://github.com/talex5/irmin-js ? Would love to hear some clarification.
> If my thumb cannot reach the url bar of the browser and all of the keyboard without repositioning my hand, the phone is too big.

I know this isn't the question you asked and you've already moved on, but for others, there is a way around this problem on the iPhone. If you 'soft tap' the home button twice, the entire display shifts down about 3 inches.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3CTKI6pRlQ
To paraphrase Groucho Marx: "He may look like a fraud and talk like a fraud but don't let that fool you. He really is a fraud."

What I took away from that article was that the root of the feelings of insufficiency, or fraudulence, stem from the individual's impossibly high standards or negative perfectionism. But to say that someone has 'impossibly high standards' is another way of saying that they have an inflated self image. The conflict, or sense of fraudulence, emerges when the gap between their self image and their actual achievements becomes too glaring to ignore.

So, simply feeling like a fraud doesn't necessarily absolve the person from actually BEING a fraud. And although it may feel better to justify to yourself, in an ironic inversion, that only the person who acknowledges their fraudulence ISN'T a fraud, it doesn't actually solve the problem of impossibly high standards or negative perfectionism -- let alone the very real possibility that they ARE fraudulent and allowing their self-doubt to keep them fraudulent.
It paralyzes the nerve cells in your nose.
Sorry, that was awkward wording. I meant that these mundane objects are significant now because they are hundreds of years old in a country (US) where the vast majority of houses are at most several hundred years old, cars last a few decades, and our most common objects like cell phones and laptops get cycled through almost annually.
> A lot of the failure is actually on the parents here.

That's the point they make in the article. Urging other parents not to fall into the same mistakes they made, and how much better things are now having corrected them.
That's a very broad conclusion to draw!
The same way Amazon started by offering just books on its online store and then expanding, they are probably now doing the reverse with a physical book store..
the one I know for sure about involved visitation.

wives and girlfriends are asked to smuggle something in for a significant other inside of themselves. a toilet trip later it gets removed and passed off, and voila. even a small amount can curry quite a bit of favor and of course cash. because of the risk involved, the price is well marked up.

seems like the guards would have to be on the take, though, because I'm not sure how the inmate is supposed to get it from the visitation room back to his cell.

I'm sure they have something figured out, anyone who can light a cigarette with an outlet is bound to be a crafty cat.
Restoring Mars: A Strategy to prepare Mars for human colonization
Same functionality.
Focus: Two Modes of Balloon Bursting Revealed
How long has this "China is about to crash" story been in the news? It's been around for at least 10 years. There's an article almost every month. I should write a big FAQ about why the Chinese financial system doesn't follow western financial system rules and link to it whenever these articles come up.
Shanghai Hacker News Meetup (Nov 5, 2015)