skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is true, we did put quite a bit of effort into properly forecasting demand. At the end of each day I'd count every piece of food we had left, feed that into some software along with some variables such as weather, and try to calculate what we needed to bake that night. Turns out even with an extremely short forecasting horizon, it's damn near impossible to accurately predict how much fresh bread people want in any given day at a particular store. (I'm not sure if we did use one standard deviation, and if we did that would only account for 68.3% of variation anyways). I've literally been screamed at for not having any whole-grain bread left 10 mins. before closing time.

If I was to manage this non-profit store, I wouldn't bake according to expected demand. In this particular scenario, a reasonable amount of stock-outs would mean that you have more money left at the end of the day to donate to charity rather than covering the production costs of waste. (Of course you would want to avoid creating ill-will with too much stock-out).

But the real reason this makes sense for Panera is that they're already donating a ton of goods to charity everyday. For this store, instead of donating bread, they'll be donating cold hard cash that people fork over. Great PR and great for the community.
I feel the same way, and it's not just about spelling. When I've been reviewing research proposals, I always get an instant bad impression if it's clear that they haven't followed the proposal preparation instructions, ie not proper sections, shrunk the font to squeeze more text in despite explicitly being told not to, etc.
More interesting is Mobile Safari.
The flip side of that, is that AT&T isn't charging $3/month for visual voicemail.

AT&T was a compromise from the beginning. But there are pluses and minuses to that; and the minuses hinge pretty heavily on physical location.

Further, no-one saw the jump in data usage coming. I see no reason to expect Verizon would have done any better with it. I frankly expect VZW complaints to start kicking in next year, if they keep selling Droid devices they way they've been.
I am very interested in Wave as a freeform tool for distributed team collaboration.

But I am very cautious about trying one little thing, seeing if it works, then adapting. Hell if I would come up with some big Wave solution for the team to use and expect it to work correctly.

More worryingly is putting internal team data on Google servers. Can't we have a local sever copy to play around with? (I asked the Google Product Owner for this in an email and got the typical bupkis response) I thought we were all just one big open family around here. If I could play around keeping the data local, I could develop and evolve systems that I could then share with the rest of the world. If not -- that's going to hamper adoption, at least in this area.

I am very optimistic about Wave long-term. Short-term is another matter completely.
I wonder, does Kindle for non-Kindles also run Kindle apps? I just tried to search for Kindle Apps on Amazon, which was a bit difficult (as some books also have "games" in their title). It seems apps are just mingled with the books - maybe apps basically are books? So they should work?
This is fucking brilliant. The word that comes to mind is "enlightened". I wish there were a thousand times more such experiments in our society.

I also like how realistic the founder of the program is. He says explicitly that the program does not fix these kids (and presumably isn't trying to do so) but that they change somewhat from undergoing the experience. This sounds like someone who knows what he is doing.
Two full-time projects?! That's dedicated. Don't burn yourself out!

Thanks. I will check out duggmirror's code.
Given the state of the patent system, I think that these are not horrible patents. Sure, I don't like them either. But remember that the patent system is supposed to protect things that are obvious after you've seen them, but which aren't that easy to think up. We've all seen the technologies, so of course they are obvious to us now. But were they obvious at the time?

Take, for instance, patent #8, "Method and system for identifying and obtaining computer software from a remote computer" (see http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sec... for details). It covers a system for having lots of machines keep themselves up to date with a central repository. Obvious, right? We can all think of a ton of examples. For instance Debian's apt fits virtually all of the claims except the ones involving payment. (For some reason Debian doesn't worry about that much. :-) )

But look when it was filed. November 27, 1995. That's well before apt. In fact it was the same year that Debian first released dselect. I don't know if dselect was advanced enough back then match the patent. If so then that is prior art and I'd suggest that Salesforce's lawyers look carefully at it.

If it is not, then finding prior art may be a challenge. People today are used to subscription-based software distribution. But pick up Founders at Work and read the interview with Arthur van Hoff about Marimba, which was founded in 1996 (after the patent was filed) and was in the business of subscription-based software with automatic updates. He talks a bit about how new the idea was, and how it was difficult to get people to try it.

That tells me that, at the time and with the way people were used to working, this technology really was new and innovative. Now I really, really hope that someone can find prior art and smack Microsoft down. I don't want this kind of patent to threaten software I use.

But as far as patents go, this seems relatively good. (The fact that it is still bad is an argument against software patents in general, and not this particular patent.)
As an initial cut, I'm thinking shared to-do list (with multimedia, wiki, and real-time features) is kick-ass enough to use it.
I will try it for a few days and see if I can substitute Google. I always try new search engines but none seem to be as good as Google.
Google Previews Chrome Web Store — An App Store For The Web
On the other hand, Apple had to release WebKit, due to KHTML license (the same for CUPS).

Other Apple open source software has exactly zero adoption outside OSX, which is also a reason why they are open source. Apple knew they will be not adopted.
Couldn't Amazon have built an integrated book store linked to the Amazon account, rather than to the iTunes account? Or is that kind of think also forbidden on iPhones? So basically all e-commerce apps would be out?
I'm sorry but that's a pretty weak argument. So does that mean that any company with patents should just suck it up if someone infringes instead of defending their IP? Regardless of what you think of the validity of patent, it was granted and MS has a right to defend it.

If you put in time doing research and then spend time and money patenting that research because you believe it to be innovative (subjective), would you just suck it up and "try to make your own software better" if someone copied your work?
The VP8 codec represents a vast improvement in quality-per-bit over Theora and is comparable in quality to H.264.

Interesting to see Mozilla support the idea that Theora provides markedly worse quality-per-bit than H.264.
> if ... you've crossed the line and should be subject to civil action from the person you are purposely harming. That's not a criminal thing, but a civil thing.

That doesn't seem to be what's going on here, though. I agree Corbett has the right to sue for libel or defamation. But the linked article is talking about a grand jury, which is only involved when criminal cases are brought by the state, i.e. brought by Corbett in his official capacity as Attorney General.
It may be a sad thing but maybe it's what was needed for offshore drilling reform. This is (on the grand scale of the Earth and its ecosystem) no where near life-ending; but big enough to make an impact.
"Thinking outside the box might be facilitated by having a somewhat less intact box," says Dr Ullén about his new findings.

That really resonates with me. My most creative, disruptive insight only really comes to me when I'm teetering on the edge. That said, I definitely have to pull back from the edge before i can do anything useful or sustainable with it. Anyone else feel the same way?
There are presumably hundreds of Twitter accounts criticizing Corbett, and these two hardly have gigantic followings. I'm assuming he's trying to prove something besides "these twitterers don't like me."

I doubt he has the public's best interest at heart, except insofar as doing things the public would like will make him more likely to be elected governor. So just randomly subpoenaing two Twitter accounts doesn't seem an effective way of going about that.
Regarding 1, that's a huge problem I had with every college writing class I took. Either the argument being made is correct, or it's not. The fact that Joe Bloe, PhD agrees with me doesn't change things one way or the other.

It's almost as if my professors wanted to instill in me the belief that I should trust credentialed experts rather than trying to figure things out for myself.
No bet.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-30684_3-20003895-265.html?tag=mnco...
Not surprisingly, I disagree. First of all, you are lumping WordPress the open source software and WordPress.com the hosted service together. My post is about WordPress.com which uses the continuous deployment model and has a very solid security track record (as good or better than any other large scale web service like Facebook, GMail, etc). Also, our fast deployment model helps to very quickly fix whatever problems there may. Finally, though I can't speak for WordPress.org because it's separate from Automattic, they have developed a very effective model of responding to security issues and auto-notifying and -updating people.
The Demoscene -- an Overview
It is similar to Android in the sense, that it works using the same principles.

It is not similar in the sense, that on iPhone you have some specific usage scenarios you can use with multitasking. On Android, it is open-ended, you can multitask for any reason you come up.
And yet it isn't anyone's fault, the response went perfectly to plan, and we'll have another one because we won't learn anything.
Yes, anybody that has tried Firefox 3.7alpha beta can tell it is much faster, and this is even before Jaegermonkey is operational.
"...enable publishers to dramatically reduce bandwidth costs by outsourcing media distribution to users."

That is a very bad title. All it does is shift the bandwidth costs from the publishers to the users. BBC tried to do this and caused problems for their users. BBC was surprised by the problems they caused, everybody technical said "we told you so."
Seeing this makes me angry because it was avoidable.
When I've designed XML files in the past, I use the "tags and attributes" principle. The entire file is tags, and ignored whitespace between the tags. All the data is in attributes. Looks a lot nicer IMO.

What I don't get, with XML in the real world, is why people prefer this...

<A><B>1</B><C>2</C></A>

instead of my preference...

<A B="1" C="2" />

With the first form, you need to write out each tag name twice, and there's ambiguity when whitespace appears between tags. Yet that's what most XML out there looks like. Maybe I'm just odd,
Venture Pimp: snaptic is where I will begin uploading my brain
Microsoft and Intel are two other notables that are missing.
I think before they were just claiming that Theora's quality was "good enough".
Totally unrelated... Where can I sell the domain name wave.io .... Thoughts?
Blog spam:
http://googlewave.blogspot.com/2010/05/google-wave-available...
Of course they published the specification in 80's, it would be difficult to do anything without it, as PostScript is programming language (for a specific niche, but Turing complete).

What they didn't publish at the time was Type1, as they wanted to be the gatekeeper for publishing T1 fonts (see similarity to Apple?). It didn't take long and T1 was reverse engineered, despite the obfuscation.
Are apps HTML5 "open-standards" only? Flash use in apps OK? How do payments work? Does the app store work with Mozilla, Opera, Safari, etc?

I've got a million questions!
And they just announced at Google I/O that they are open-sourcing their in-browser editor, and (finally) specifying and publishing the client-server protocol.
See also http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/386/F...
The company I work for is currently looking for people interested in machine learning & data analysis and I've interviewed a fair number of people that have a background/story similar to yours. The one piece of advice I have is to spend time learning how to take raw logs and munge/join/split them into a format that you can stick into R. Get good at a scripting language, understand what map-reduce is, play with PIG or Hive if you can. Are you considering leaving your PhD and going into industry (it sounds like you are).
I believe some substantial chunks of Apple open source (Grand Central Dispatch and LLVM) have been or are being adopted by FreeBSD. I'm not sure how much, though, these are part of the FreeBSD project itself.
It's now becoming very clear that the year of Linux will never come. It is obviated by a cross-platform free web browser that gives you access to an open web "OS." For now, Chrome (or Chromium) is that browser. Google snuck around the free operating system problem by changing what "operating system" means.
Adobe CTO Demos HTML5 Tools at Google I/O
There are VC's who code. If you want to call Graham a VC (does he like that title?), there's your archetype.

Then there are VC's who spend their 1-2 years in "industry" before applying to a top b-school to go into investment banking, and that industry time is spent with a software development title.

Beware VC's who claim to code.
I seriously would like more people to explain their experience if they tried this, but unit test and integration tests are no substitute for QA. Especially for a young startup trying to get traction, I seriously can't see how this is beneficial to have possibly a buggy to low quality app with possibly several bad deployments. How do you avoid the problem of continuously putting out small fires, rather than looking at big picture type problems with this continuous deployment cycles ? Am I misunderstanding the process ?
Vic said chrome app store apps are just regular web apps, so I think anything that is fair game on the web is allowed in probably.
Is there the theoretical possibility that Google could turn around and use the patent offensively? Rescind their grant? Or are we all now guaranteed safe to use it?
I thought that, but never said it :)
This is absolutely outstanding news. Google gets some flack for privacy (some deserved, some not), but it's undeniable that they care deeply about the health of the Web.

"a container format based on a subset of the Matroska media container"

I wonder what reasons they have for not using Ogg, or at least real Matroska? I notice their container format doesn't support subtitles, and is "undecided" on tags. Why on earth would they drop such important functionality, especially when every other modern container supports them?

It would be nice if Google and Mozilla add support for VP8 in Ogg or Matroska, so users can continue to use existing processing tools for web video.

e: Looks like there's already an Ogg mapping for VP8 at < http://people.collabora.co.uk/~slomo/webm/ogg-vp8.pdf >
An Elegant Design: Maildir
The contrast of the site is so bad that I had to hit browser back button after a couple of minutes.
They demoed a Flash game (Plants vs. Zombies) and a Unity3D game (Lego Star Wars), so you can use plug-in based applications.
this can be easily corrected by some config parameters. please take a look at http://www.projekktor.com/docs.php#install
BTW, http://everytimezone.com/ rocks! I've been using it quite a bit. Great work, hugely useful, free, and no pretzels.
I think this poll is silly. What is the point of this? You're bound to forget somebody.
One blog post, many headlines (especially for HN)
The Generation Gap in Your Office
Use http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/ or just disable the stylesheet (View -> Page Style -> No Style in Firefox).
I think it's much more readable with white on black than black on white. But of course if you disagree, which is fine -- some people do -- you can use readability, as in mbrubeck's post.

I'm not quite sure why some people really like black/white while others like white/black. Maybe it's something psychological, or maybe it's just room lighting.
Earn-Outs (Almost) Never Work
A long time. No one is going to stop serving up h264 if they already do; at best, this will only slow new adoptions. However, maybe I'm wrong; it would be interesting to see Youtube, et al do something to push on Apple... perhaps using h264 only for low resolutions or something. I don't think that anyone can afford to just cut off iPhone and iPad traffic by going flash-or-vp8 only.
(sorry I want to reply to the reply but there's no reply button for it)

Saying there are no s-expression parsers for non-Lisp is ridiculous.

This one's http://sexpr.sourceforge.net/ for C, it's been in sourceforge since 2002.

perhaps you prefer one in :

Javascript - http://planet.plt-scheme.org/package-source/dherman/javascri...

Perl - http://search.cpan.org/~nelhage/Data-SExpression-0.34/lib/Da...

Limbo - http://man.cat-v.org/inferno/6/sexprs

I shan't go on
Not a link, just what I remember. You are welcome to Google it ;).

At the time, PostScript documents could use Type1 and Type3 fonts. Type3 fonts were basically bitmaps, anyone could create one. Type1 fonts were entirely different matter - they were nice outline fonts and there wasn't anything similar. The problem was, that Adobe didn't publish specification how to create such fonts. They wanted everyone wishing to publish a font to go through them (for a fee, of course; I cannot help myself but it reminds me Apple and their App Store).

In the end, it didn't work. Microsoft and Apple joined and created TrueType. The Type1 format was reverse engineered. Later Adobe capitulated and joined MS with Apple to create OpenType, which is open and is superset of both T1 and TT.
Hello, my name is Aaron, and I will be your question answerer for today.

- Anything that works in Chrome can be an app. Flash apps are OK (one of the demo apps at the keynote, Plants vs Zombies, was a flash app)

- We haven't finalized exactly how payments will work. We know it has to be good, because it needs to be better than what you could do yourself.

- The web apps in the store will most likely work with Mozilla, Opera, Safari, etc, because those are pretty modern browsers that implement most of HTML5. But the tight integration with Chrome (the "install" experience) is Chrome-only, at least for now.
Summary: It has a crappy spec. Not better visual quality (yet? ever?):

http://mirror05.x264.nl/Dark/website/compare/vp8.png
http://mirror05.x264.nl/Dark/website/compare/x264.png
Glucose biofuel cell could revolutionize medical technology
Chrome Web Store Will Allow for Web-Rich Content
There were a number of us that built a Skype clone right after the initial Stratus release. Video/audio/text chat works pretty well over P2P, but you still need a centralized server for the initial connection (Stratus) and a way to get around firewalls (STUN/TURN).
In terms of both raw talent and writing ability, Jason's blog is one of my favorites. You can depend on him for solid analysis, clear thinking, and good writing. This article is worth reading.

While I only have a surface-level understanding of video encoding and compression techniques, there are some very good criticisms here. That said, I've been reading through the libvpx source for the past 20 minutes or so. Jason repeatedly slams the quality of the source. The code is much cleaner than he suggests and rather well-commented.

Better than H.264/main or not, I'm excited to see where VP8 goes. With implementations in Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and Flash, it's off to a good start from day one. We'll see where it heads from there.
Flying Planes with Coal?
Or as a Theora dev said, it has no spec, and Google's mistake was calling this 94-page thing they released consisting of an intro textbook crossed with copy-pasted C code a "spec".
Google Webfont Directory
Ben Horowitz: Stop asking if people will scale
CodeIgniter and Amazon API for beginners
I see you've edited your initial comment to read differently. Ah, the joys of HN :)

Like most things internet, "need more data" seems like a reasonable position to take. Is there a legit criminal case? If the purpose was to impede his job as AG then probably yes.

The wider point was that this article was propping up good guys and bad guys and expecting us to come along and respond in a knee-jerk fashion. There are cases where the AG may be acting entirely correctly. Perhaps this is not one of them. Don't know.
It seems like creativity is a state of loose association while execution is pure hustle. Startup founders have a unique ability to tap into both worlds when necessary, maybe even simultaneously!
The TechCrunch post provides more information than that link. If you just wanted to help people find the source so they could judge for themselves, say something like "source" instead of "blog spam".
How was it avoidable?
I can't seem to find anyway to enable it in Free Google Apps, anyone got a link?
Google launches store for web apps
Among all the companies out there that are arguably violating these patents, they choose to go after a high profile, successful, primarily online company who has been in business using these technologies for years. This is highly selective and to me indicates that the GP's point probably has some validity. Can anyone really argue that Salesforce of all companies has somehow infringed on Microsoft's IP? If they had been enforcing these patents earlier on and enforcing them uniformly, it would have seemed much less of a patent-troll style maneuver.
In the 90s the demoscene was really quite exciting. Second Reality was groundbreaking and opened my eyes to what was possible on our pokey old 486s (plus it was awesome to show off to your friends). Going to demo events and realising there were plenty of fellow hackers in Australia doing cool stuff, and having a chance to hack along with them was also a lot of fun. Good times.
No special development toolset required, just publish a text file with the proper metadata and you're good to go. They're even planning an integrated payment system.

This could be huge.
The license includes a "perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable (except as stated in this section) patent license." - http://www.webmproject.org/license/software/

You'll have to ask a lawyer whether it's truly irrevocable, but clearly that's the intention.
I could see them forking to manage threads and processes differently. Tabs are managed by thread in Firefox whereas by process in Chrome. I prefer the look & feel of Firefox, which is why I use it, but when Firefox crashes (usually because of a plug-in) the whole thing goes down, not just that page. Not a trivial change, but certainly worth trying out imho. It would likely win back market share too.
At the time, Win32s/Win32 was definitely easier to develop for than MacOS classic.

While Win16 was definitely very similar to MacOS classic, Win32 brought better multitasking and memory management, so developers could tell good bye to memory handles and locking/unlocking them.

The tools for Win32 development were also better. There was a range of compilers and IDEs you could choose from (not only Microsoft, but also Borland or Watcom). For MacOS, you had the terrible Apple tools or Codewarrior kit.

Note that the apps that were created on PC, never crossed to Mac (e.g. AutoCAD or 3D Studio).

I'm not saying that PC market share was not primary motivator, but at the time, PCs were technically better.
VP8, WebM, and HTML5 video
This is an aside, but I object to the notion that money equals speech.