skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're missing that in order to use touch, just about every Flash game out there would have to be rewritten.

Flash and its event model are quite flexible, and there's no reason why you shouldn't be able write games for a touch based system in Flash. But you'd have to write them first, and ideally there'd be an event interface specifically for touch, or it would be overly complex.
Spy webcams activated 42 times leading to recovery of 18 missing/stolen laptops.

Occam's Razor time, guys: a) they were looking for stolen laptops b) it is all clever cover for a kiddie porn ring.
> such as the ones that exist in mainland Europe, where once a government is elected it can pretty much do what it wants to do without having to worry about partisan issues at least until the next elections come around.

The biggest difference is, the European Union has 500 million people spread under 29 different countries' national governments. The United States has 300 million people under 1 country's national government. The decisive action you're talking about would be more like the entire EU decisively getting something across than a particular nation. Things do happen faster on the state level.
Exo.blog responds again on the Win 7 memory issue
Hey Andrew, what about letting those videos be free, and selling DVDs per months, peoples can watch the content online for free (advertising support) in this way you keep growing and peoples willing to pay can order videos on a dvd, let's say each interview on a dvd cost 5 $. Next option, you can aggregate videos of each month as dvd and sell them for ~9,99 $ , and the next alternative will be to create an ebook from the transcripts of each month videos and sell it for a couple or dollars, you can organise this in topic (ebook transcript for freemium Business model, ebook for videos plattform entrepreneurs.....you can combine it as you want: we call in in mechanical eng variants)... That's my 2 cents. Some peoples may pay the 25 $ , but most of your users won't, if you want to go with the subscription , what about 1,99 $ /months * many users and steady grow?
75% Of Paid Search Clicks & Dollars Goes to Google
"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard." - H. L. Mencken
It's probably just because it's late here, and I'm over tired, but I'm having a real hard time understanding your complaint. Are you able to provide some examples please?
Also, Andrew Warner is not exactly lacking funds.

http://www.quicksprout.com/2009/04/08/the-andrew-warner-stor...

So he's charging because he can, not because he must.
Looks like a good alternative to Skype for business use?
It looks to me it has some nice features.
What do you think?
how would you place yourself relative to the article? in particular, do you feel that you are reacting to the sense that america is becoming ungovernable, or do you think that you are part of the reason that america is becoming ungovernable?
The numbers involved in web scale computing at turns excite, amaze, dazzle, and frighten me. 3,500 queries a second times four servers. Crikey. I know at least one system that cost a million dollars which doesn't see 3,500 queries a week.

And then you look over at Facebook or Google and a system munching through five digits of writes in a second looks like a quaint little toy.
That’s odd. I know long waits (not quite ten hours, maybe one, two or three) from specialized doctors here in Germany, not ever primary care doctors. I have to wait maybe thirty minutes for my primary doctor, probably not at all if I call him up in the morning and go there later the day or the next day.

I know that the reverse must also be true for some rural areas in East Germany, an unattractive area with low pay and hard work where the doctors are slowly dying out and nobody wants to replace them, but that really seems limited to rural East Germany.

Why is that?
checks and balances aren't unique to the usa, nor does calling them that change any of the analysis.

your checks and balances have to be, well, balanced. and that balance is going to depend on context to some extent. so the right amount / kind of checks and balances might vary from one moment to the next.
How do you get sales out of subscribing to Mixergy?
Is see two threads here. (1) How do you communicate with affected customers, and (2) Root cause analysis, ruthlessly done, with no BS and no excuses.

On (1), this appears to have been an outage that only a subset would have noticed, so the direct message to affected users looks like a good way to communicate. I've seen other ways of handling that, both 'broadcast' and 'denial', and neither is good.

On (2), the OP's use of root cause and the unambiguous identification of cause/effect/remediation is something that others should emulate.

If you cannot identify cause of failure and build mitigation/detection/prevention for every failure, every time you fail, you are destined to spend the rest of you career reacting to broken crap. Determining root cause of every single failure is lots of work, but so is reacting to broken crap every day and night. That gets old after a while.
Fred Wilson: The Golden Principles For Successful Web Apps
What exactly is your complaint about Ruby? Yeah they are different types but they all respond to #call. How is this less structured than Python?

Can't pas around non-anonymous callables directly? method(:function_name)?
europe is much more complex than you seem to think. the government in the netherlands has just fallen apart because consensus could not be reached over military intervention in afghanistan. and italy is very like the usa in some ways, with the lack of a central majority leading to an increasingly extreme right that relies on jingoistic, misinformed propaganda...
The Dark Side of Social Media and Privacy
What totally blows me away is that the health care bill, though it will surely reduce the number of unemployed, provides for no way to pay for it. I am generally against entitlement programs, but I am greatly in favor of laws or speech or rhetoric that make sense. Single payer made sense! It would have provided a means to reduce the ranks of the uninsured and had the ability to lower costs.

All these articles, like the Economist's, are just looking at passing the health care bill as a binary decision, where passing it equals progress, and holding it up equals lack of progress. Every bill these days, after it goes through the congressional meat grinder, comes out as a spineless piece of pork, and unless a magazine like the Economist (who ironically refuses to compute the economics of health care in this article), can point this out, then they, in my opinion, have lost the authority to report.
This is long, but interesting so let me try to summarize.

In early 1900s, two lines measuring 4250 feet each were hung down a mine shaft on several occasions in order to calculate the radius of the earth. Scientists expected the bottom of the lines to be closer together than the top, but the opposite was found to be true. The bottom of the lines was 8.2 inches further apart than the top. Several theories were put forth to explain the reasoning behind this, but all failed to account for the large discrepancy from the expected results.

This was my favorite theory:
One central tenet of Teed's philosophy held that the earth is a hollow rock shell, and we live and walk on the inside surface of this shell. The entire universe, which is mostly an illusion caused by gravic and levic rays and light, lies within this shell. This complicated view was called the cellular cosmogony, the earth-cell theory or the Koreshan cosmogony.
Does it really matter what technology they use?

I think they have a much more fundamental problem.

* Compared to github or bitbucket or any of the way more modern alternatives (even the SVN based ones) SF.net has terrible collaboration tools.

* It is riddled with banner ads.

* It times out most of the time on basic services

There was a time when SF.net was the best, but it has been made completely irrelevant by much much better alternatives.
U.S. government poisoned alcohol during Prohibition, with deadly consequences
Does a Startup Business Plan Really Matter?
Aren't the interviews done in Flash?
The 42 times they were activated in case of stolen laptops are pretty clear cut, but there are apparently other times those cams were active as well, and there is pretty hard proof that this concerned laptops that were not stolen.
"And trained lay health workers, paid perhaps a fifth of a doctor’s salary, handle 80% of the calls, so only 20% get passed on to doctors."

This is what need to be done in an organized way even without a call center. A lot of patients don't need a person with knowledge of every tissue/bone, salts and systems knowledge. Just the diagnostic knowledge for common ailments.

In most of countries today a patient goes to a doctor (with 4-5 year education) and then to a specialist with a complicated issue. We need to add another "doctor" category which 1-2 years education to filter the patients.

The problem is that this idea will be vigorously opposed by the doctors associations/cartels who are going to lose because of reduced number of patients.
I tried watching the EventVue interview http://mixergy.com/eventvue-josh-fraser/ which is less that a week but behind a pay wall.

How can the bandwidth be high if it is being hosted on justin.tv? I would suggest an advertising model where there are short 20 second ads (maybe 5 per interview). Though I really like the interviews, 300 ponds a year 20 interviews is way too high (I watch about 2 a month).

Best of luck Andrew, I hope it goes well!
If we were to make () call blocks, then we would have to make ()'s in function calls mandatory, so that we would get something like foo()() to call the function _and_ the block.
Heh. I've been reading the various discussions about all of this, and having considerable experience digging into internals to find performance problems, it still seems to come down to one thing.

Does it _feel_ fast?
Thanks - there is some good stuff in there ... even if there is a lot of repetition.
I agree, Apple is prob not going to do it, but the problem is not "absurd" or "impossible". That's my main point. The author of this article gives up and says it can't be done. I disagree with that. I gave one of many possibilities. I prefaced it by saying it was wild guess, but again, I don't think it's impossible.
That doesn't explain why they punished a student for "improper behavior at home". Clearly, his laptop was not stolen.
We already have this facility in the US. They're called nurse practitioners. Walgreens runs clinics staffed with them. They can run a strep culture, prescribe antibiotics, and presumably handle 80% of the rest of your medical problems.

Nurse practitioners may be the future of US medicine. That'd be a good thing. A 400 seat medical call center, on the other hand, seems dystopian. I'm hard pressed to name a single business in which consumers have been well served by call centers.
Most of us agree that enlightened absolutism is the best form of government. However, so far nobody solved the problem of ensuring a steady supply of good kings.

By the way - its not just apple. Any company is essentially a dictatorship. But most of dictators are scared or clueless so they rely on layers of committees upon layers of committees to do their work.

What I took from the article is that getting a product to market at McDonalds is hard - because of logistics behind getting all the ingredients to the restaurants in time AND getting through all the layers of people who don't want to take (or cant) responsibility.

Do I see an end for the McDonalds?
You think medical care provided by effectively anonymous caregivers over the phone is a good idea?
Syncing != Replacing. If you were forced to sync your iPhone's contacts with MobileMo, there would be no way for you to get around that like there would be on Android. That was my point.
Minor point, but since the laptops in question are Macbooks, there is most certainly a visible indicator; a little green light next to the camera comes on when it is active.

Overall, I agree with you though, there really are no safeguards to stop administrators from abusing their power. They only thing that I can think of to help curtail this sort of abuse is restricting the use of their remote control software to the networks explicitly provided by the school.
Here's a question: if you have a barebones join table like

create table feed_items (item_id integer, feed_id integer, created_at datetime);
create index idx1 on feed_items (feed_id, datetime, item_id);

how much slower is that covering index for your query of

select item_id from feed_items where feed_id=42 order by datetime desc limit 10

than the mysql/memcached/redis trifecta, and why not upgrade your database machine to a 68GB EC2 instance? Writing's definitely going to be slower, but you can batch transactions every 10 seconds or so, and 9x the RAM will be a big help.
The example which most immediately pops to my head is for subscription businesses: watch the Wufoo interview. They drop three important bits of information in fifteen seconds: the most popular plan is the middle one, the highest grossing plan is the most expensive one, and Andrew adds that another business (CrazyEgg) similarly found that concentrating on the needs of the higher end of the market was much better ROI on time than concentrating on the $9 / mo customers.

People have burned through hundreds of thousands of dollars and learned less about pricing than was included in those 15 seconds.

Andrew draws out gems with sufficient regularity (signal to noise ratio: quite high) that I'm fairly confident I'll grab at least one idea and improve my business as a result of it.

On the subject of price points: I wonder what the above says about basing one's pricing decisions on the opinions of people who think $25 is a lot of money.
a little dated but fun
The number of filibusters currently being invoked is unprecedented, though:

http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/01/the-rise-of-clotu...

http://thinkprogress.org/2009/03/31/republican-filibusters-s...
"I'm hard pressed to name a single business in which consumers have been well served by call centers."

And certainly not in health support. A doctor/nurse needs to look for clues by looking at patient present physically. His expressions, general health, walk, any marks on his skins etc etc. Sometimes a patient will not tell something really important to his doctor because he (patient) might think it irrelevant.
Good point. The interviewees had an understanding that this content will be freely available and now that's changed. Then again, maybe he told them the content will be free but there is a possibility that one day it will not be free anymore. Either way, the better approach would have been to leave existing interviews freely available and start applying the pricing structure from the present onward.

On another note, I'm glad to see Andrew turning Mixergy into a real business that can be self-sustaining. As entrepreneurs, we should all be able to agree with that.
I hate the idea of Flash on an HTML5 appliance, but the article and (as of 10 AM ET) the other posts in this thread miss one obvious way of supporting this with no extra buttons/toggles and no double clicks, click-hold-clicks, or other unusual behaviors.

If a user touches a Flash zone, show a cursor, and have the cursor moved by the iPhone's accelerometer. Tap to click.

For elements such as the video player example, the cursor (just as on PC) can fade after time, and a tap or shake would re-show it.

For most of the scenarios he mentions, using accelerometer to drive a hovered cursor would be a particularly intuitive solution.
Is that light hardware or software controlled (in other words, does it come on as soon as the camera is powered up or is it a function of the driver to enable the light ? Can that be bypassed ? Or would you need to modify the hardware for that ?)
We do it in the status quo in a few very limited fashions: for example, many hospitals have a line for new parents to call in where they will get a nurse who will listen to them, calm them down, and tell them that $SYMPTOM is within normal operating parameters for their new infant and that they should not panic unless $CONDITION happens. My sister in law is a maternity nurse, and she works on one of these. She's a wonderful woman who would be equally wonderful talking you through it if you were in Calcutta when calling her. I assume there is some wonderful woman in Calcutta who can do the same. That would free my very expensive sister in law to do stuff which more uniquely requires her considerable expertise.

90% of medical care is low-skilled well-understood grunt work. Much of it is readily identifiable as such. There are huge structural disincentives from building our medical care processes to take advantage of this.
Because they themselves are bound by confidentiality rules, either by contract or by regulation (HIPAA, etc), and the NDA is part of the due care they have to take to ensure employees and contractors can't violate those rules.

It's been a little while, so now I'm wondering: what are we debating here? Clearly, large companies will demand NDAs, and clearly they are unlikely to back down for a 5 person web shop.
Almost all interviewers profit. So I don't see why an interviewee should be offended that Andrew is profiting.

Most interviewers profit by charging advertisers. The advertisers then become the customers and the viewers are just "users." By choosing to charge his listeners directly Andrew is making his viewers his customers.

A business naturally tries to please its customers. To the extent that advertisers' and viewers' tastes differ, we can expect Andrew's business to change for the better: it will be more pleasing to viewers.
thought provoking response. obviously true in a general sense, but there's lots of argument to be had over the specifics. I suppose the short response is that I dislike dishonest government. if a government isn't really a democracy but rather something else then the power should not be allowed to go cloaked. the illusion of control by the common citizen causes wasteful misdirection of resources.
"Last Train from Hiroshima" author says he was duped
So, like I said upthread, we're already in the process of divesting day-to-day care from actual MD's. Go to a Walgreens clinic next time you have a sore throat. Even if you have strep, you'll get taken care of without ever setting foot in a doctor's office.

It's easy to see that taking the load off overqualified, overly expensive doctors is a good idea, which is why this idea is actually being implemented.

What I'm more interested in is whether we think it's a good idea to have those providers working in call centers. Because, from what I can tell, the economics of call centers are almost exactly opposed to customer care.
The US arguably has a more unbalanced system than parliamentary democracies. The US system places the head of state and the head of the executive in the same person, the president. This can lead to a kind of reverence around the president, where directly and harshly criticising them leads to accusations of unpatriotic behaviour.

European governments, meanwhile, are not easily placed into a single bucket. For example, a government can fall over a vote of no confidence, which is much less involved than impeachment. Governments made up of coalitions - which are more likely with e.g. single transferable vote election systems - are often forced to be centrist to some degree, because they would fail a vote of no confidence should they anger one of the coalition parties too much.
Exercise worked for me too. It makes a GREAT difference on me, even an hour day of exercise counts.

I don't know how to make my diet better.
I subscribe to the video podcast and I have a bunch of old ones I haven't watched yet. I wonder if he'll shut that down..
Video Chat coming in future iPhones/iPads?
nonviolent revolution? whuh? there's never been such a thing.
Salt Satyagraha produced scant progress toward dominion status or independence for India, and did not win any major concessions from the British.

in the ensuing chaos

Communal violence killed an estimated one million Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs

not to be a jerk, I just get sick of the dominant paradigm which holds that action without the threat of force has ever, in any way, significantly shaped the power structures of human civilization. you've been brought up on docility propaganda.
If you were one of his interviewees, you'd understand that hard work must be rewarded. Business models change with time. Every successful entrepreneur (including his interviewees) knows that. I highly doubt they'll perceive this as bait & switch.
I still don't believe you. So the numbers are made up? "15 minutes" -> "entire planet"? How much for 10 minutes? And for 1 minute? Is that obvious too?

So you think it's very obvious that it's impossible to build a chatbot that speaks chinese for 15 minutes in a computer like the one I'm using now (even one that claims to be a child for example). And why couldn't we just clone a Chinese person brain and say it's a computer? Why do you think a brain snapshot would require the size of a planet?
the elephant int he room on the healthcare debate is that studies overwhelmingly show that greater access to health care does not result in increased general health. this is because more than half of current "best practices" in the western medical community are actively harmful, are of completely unknown effect, or are known to do nothing.
Yep. And that's a really simple game. Good luck to folks trying to play more complicated stuff.

The model just doesn't make sense unless Flash developers program most games' input in two completely different ways. I can't imagine that'll ever happen, but even if it did, it'd be years until then. In the meantime, every alternate-universe, Flash-having iPad user who could see an app but inexplicably could only partially operate it would blame Apple.
We need Andrew to interview Andrew about this decision:)

Also, Andrew's lack of posting in this thread tells me that he is sitting back and watching the natural reaction rather than tainting it with his own participation.
>The system works fine for day to day politics, but it breaks down horribly when decisive action needs to be taken.

That's the point of it, though. The system was intentionally designed to make it difficult to get a law passed, on the theory that any bill that can survive the process to become a law and then withstand reviews from the judiciary regarding its constitutionality must be pretty good and important, or it wouldn't get passed.

The Constitution and the form of government it establishes is there to abrogate the powers of the ruling class. The whole point is to make it difficult for the government to do things.

There are some exceptions; for instance, the President is Commander-in-Chief and generally is granted at least some leeway in the unauthorized usage of force if there is an imminent danger to American citizens, though technically only the Congress can authorize a full-on war. Some other emergency powers are reckoned to the President or his municipal equivalents in the case of martial law, etc.

Our government makes some allotment for extraordinary powers when the exclusion of them would cause significant destruction, but in general the idea is for things to go slow.

This isn't really compatible with the way our government is used today, which is sad condemnation of our generations, imo.
I'm not sure, because I haven't really looked at any of the api's, but I'm pretty sure that it's hardware controlled. Internally it's hooked up via USB, and none of the software I've seen has used the camera without the light on (including non-Apple software).
This is interesting. Could you elaborate a bit?
Ah, I need to learn to read :)
A day in the life of an Air Force drone pilot