skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it would be a difficult task to organize reserved units by time, as the author is implying. What would Apple do? Give you a specific time block of when to be there? Would it be ok to be late by 1 minute due to traffic? Would 20 people be in a particular time block, giving a little buffer. What happens with everyone is a minute late? It takes time to activate these things too, so what about delays in previous customer's transactions that push your appointments back? Ever been to your doctor after six peep ahead of you were late or their appointments ran long?

It's just not sustainable to schedule hundreds of thousands of people into time slots in a given day. Perhaps they could schedule you into thirds of the day, but then people will bitch and moan about that. They could schedule people for specific days, but then you know people will complain about that.

The reality is, most people who want it on launch day, want it on launch day, and as early as possible. They want to wait in a fair FIFO queue, however long it takes to get through it. This is evidenced by multiple years of multiple products delivered by Apple. A few people will complain about everything. If the guy wants one so bad, he can buy one on eBay, or better coordinate his travel arrangements ahead of time, right?

In all sincerity and open-mindedness, how is this Apple's problem when the world wants to buy their product all at once (even if they do emit mind control to cause it)?
Modular Hardware Architectures: A Concept for Application Performance
i don't know what all the big deal is about this 'flash crash'. they happen all the time in the futures markets. they are the risk premium for strategies that make a market automatically.

this is not a threat to the economy if that's what the concern is. it's only a 'threat' in conjunction with a perceived fear. in this particular case, it had to do with greece. in the 87 crash's case, it had to do with a collapse in the bond markets.

all high-frequency trading or program trades do is quicken the whole process. one can implement safeguards to make the whole thing slower -- or you can let the market participants take care of themselves and/or fix the underlying problems and ignore mass hysteria which will reset as soon as the absence of a rational reason for a correction is made clear.

i feel like the 1987+ 'crashes' are very different from the 1929 crash, etc. they are not in themselves a problem. so far they've always popped back.

which is not to say that our economy has been in good shape since 1987. but that there are deeper issues -- having very little to do with hft.
OK ... but it's still very hard to give you advice without knowing where you are today. I.e. what is your skill set and experience level(s), what sort of jobs have you been getting, etc.
very worth the read, cool stuff
Ask HN: is there an api out there for the worldwide postal system?
Is there a service that lets you send physical mail (into the worldwide postal system)? Sounds like it would be awesomely useful, and there's a huge business making really big machines that send lots of mail for large companies, so there's definitely money in there. If not, is that a good idea for a startup?
"I feel taken advantage of". Perhaps you feel taken advantage of in more ways than just this one?

ps: OF COURSE they should pay for it. Why are you (all) fighting over 20$/month? Frankly, that's ridiculous.
a) 2 (Meter Maid and QuickPic)
b) both paid
c) zero marketing
d) small (~$5k/year)

I wrote a post with some more detailed stats on Meter Maid sales: http://blog.zachwaugh.com/post/558531800/metermaid-sales-sta...
By being ridiculous about something like this, it seems like they don't value their technical co-founder, is that the real issue?

To be honest, I can see why you'd feel insulted.
Uh-oh :-) Just leaving a comment here as I created these slides and shared the URL on Twitter for a few interested parties to check out.. I had planned to finish and clean them up based on the results of a talk I gave today before promoting them online. So caveat emptor, and all that, but enjoy!

(And yes, I was reminded during my talk that memcached does expiration too! :-))
Well, I wouldn't have made it anyway, but I'll keep my eyes open for the next one. Maybe I'll be able to go then :)
Feeling insulted has its place :) It can make it more easy for you to demand respect when its lacking, or take action somehow.
Derek, I think what you've done is great and I wish you the best of luck.

I have just one little piece of unqualified advice. In the last couple paragraphs, the blog post felt a little too much like marketing spiel. I get that you're a non-tech (me too) but be aware of that line. It can easily put people off.
This is exactly why I like asking naive questions on Hacker News - thanks!
JavaScript/HTML seems to have caught up to Display PostScript at last. Nice.
Today relying on a GPU solution translates to vendor lock-in, it makes you much more dependent on a particular set of hardware and even a particular OS/driver stack.
Logistics Are Put to the Test at Wimbledon
If your startup can't afford a working expense like 60$/m for internet access for the cto, just shut it down already. I mean, seriously. What are we even talking about here?
Simulating the World Cup Knockout Stage
By way of comparison, the Wii launch in my part of Japan was organized with kanban cards and high school student labor. Three cashiers, two pickers, one manager with a clipboard of all reservations and sole responsibility for bowing. They blew through a hundred fifty transactions in 25 minutes. Toyota would have been proud... well, OK, Toyota would have said now do it in 24,but there would have been an edge of pride in it.
And it's a sad thing when someone's identity hinges upon his being part of the elite

If being one of the elite means she/he is accomplished in something, and that's truly the root of identity, then that's not a sad thing at all.
Do you wear a jacket to keep you warm or because it says Prada on it?

Did you go to school to get a piece of paper, or to learn something?

NB: I interview the state grad. Stanford is a plus, but hot-startup is a huge maturity flag for me. Also, if i'm hiring I will go look at the courses at that uni. Assuming you're < 25.
DIY - How to Grow Lung Tissue
1) no.

2) quit.
This is awesome. +1
Targeting the iPhone 4 Retina Display with CSS3 Media Queries - WaltPad
Or you can just link to your friend regularly?
Definitely. I even emailed support about it and the response was 'This is not supported' -- like they had never heard of it. Go figure.
I was working in a Cincinnati bookstore for one of the Harry Potter book releases. I was dressed up as Sirius Black. I think I personally handed out about 250 books at the rate of 3 every 2 seconds, and I was one of only several. We had all of those kids out the door and the doors closed well before 1 am. The kids were entertained by planned activities, and we had the parents come up and pay to get a voucher well ahead of midnight. At the stroke of midnight, it was voucher-book, voucher-book in rapid succession.

That's the way you do it!
Are you willing to drop the fast-internet requirement?
Addendum: Moving right along with the "will make it good" idea... http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1459629
Skip Lists: A Probabilistic Alternative to Balanced Trees (pdf)
I bet this seller was one of PG's first clients at ViaWeb.
P2P Content Delivery Networks
J7 source code:

http://www.math.uwaterloo.ca/apl_archives/j/early_j/src/
Start with this (a more realizable goal):

http://www.amazon.com/Selected-Computer-Science-Language-Inf...
Tuna's End
Don't spend 10,000$ on a server for 2 years, spend 300$ on an AWS server (the big one) for the first month, and from then on you're getting cash in (as you mentioned), thus paying for future months. Solved.
My office had the usual dress causal atmosphere until one day our new manager decided to make his mark by having dress up Wednesdays. So I decided to wear a formal complete with gloves(glad to know Ada did it too). I was the belle of the ball. I no longer work there but the guys have continued the tradition in my honor and dress in tales and top hats. :)
I'll update this thread in 3 months. After we launch our Android and iphone app in coming weeks.
but you think you know all the answers and they're so obvious that you can be smug and condescending about them.

With the exception of me stating my opinion that appropriating private property is immoral, I have simply been stating facts. In fact I can tell this discussion has degraded because you have resorted to ad hominem attacks.

Black and white proclamations about "government this" and "free market that" are used by 2 kinds of people : demagogues, and the useful idiots who follow them. Which are you?

Sometimes the extreme view is the correct one. Just because it is extreme does not make it inherently wrong. You are the one being dogmatic. And I'm not even saying that net neutrality is wrong. I very clearly stated that it should remain open for debate - it is not an cut and dry issue.

"Freedom and equality for all" - I take the extreme view on that. Does that make me wrong? If you view the free market as a moral issue then this comparison does not seem so far-fetched.
Thomas Sabo Charm Carriers, Charm Up Your Life
Yah, I don't think restricting access to self-described porn has all that many downsides. Governments that would do that, already restrict it, this just makes it easier for them, but the benefits to parents far outweigh that.

This is not the same as general purpose censorship, which I do not think should be made easier to censor.

Do remember that someone in a different (more permissive) country voluntarily described his stuff as porn. So you don't really have an issue of it being applied incorrectly.
> Long story short, S-PLUS is geared towards statistics (better modules, functions, etc).

This is still an extremely uninformative answer. Oh well.
If I remember my networking classes, a GSM device is normally connected to a single BTS (tower) at a time. (Hand-overs between two towers are the major exception, and they're very brief.)
Lisp as a secret weapon
Is $29 for a case really that expensive if you just bought an iphone?
Now, I took a PL course before my working career, so I don't have a frame of reference, but does it really make a difference?

Most people judge a language by a) what the syntax looks like and b) what other people say about the language. If you have a formal understanding of programming languages, you can make an actual engineering decision about which language to use instead of being herded from trend to trend with your mouth agape at each marvelous reinvention of old CS concepts.
this is a no way a paypal alternative. in paypal you pay to arbitary email. and in this "alternative" - you actually need to go thru some screening process to open seller account..
A web service replacing a document format?
I got my comment deleted on this thread. Is it forbidden to comment on the link you submit?

(The comment was neutral, nothing aggressive)
Gmail is down for me in Albuquerque
FTA -

| So, naturally, the design evolved to meet requirements - and efficient transmission and reception while being held by a human hand are simply not design requirements!

This is analogous to saying driving experience doesn't matter as long as car pases emission tests which is certainly not true (I hope). People don't buy phones because it passes FCC testing they buy phones to make calls! If you don't factor human hand into your design, word of mouth will kill the phone.
The pace seems too fast to me. Working through some of the exercises should be attempted and these are not your typical textbook exercises.
500 years ago the only way a human could go faster than, say, 20mph was by jumping off a tall structure. Even 200 years ago nobody knew much about the nature of the Universe outside our own Solar System, nobody knew how atoms worked, nobody knew about fission or fusion, nobody knew how the Sun worked, automobiles, computers, heavier than air flying machines, and spacecraft were as fantastical and unbelievable as any Greek myth, perhaps more so.

Since then humanity has grown by leaps and bounds. Conquered diseases. Conquered limitations of distance. Learned many of the answers to the Universe's deepest questions. We know how stars work to a degree that would astound an astronomer from 1800. We know the age of the Universe to an incredible precision. We've spied on the microwave echo of the big bang. We've sent humans into space repeatedly and landed on a neighboring planetary body. The Universe is a big place, we've only barely started to explore it and understand it, but we shouldn't ignore how far we've come.
It wasn't deleted, you cannot submit both the link and the comment (see the FAQ)
i think it's pretty cool
I think a lot of people (me included) just though of Scribd as a YouTube of documents -- taking advantage of unlicensed material to juice up Pagerank, and then somehow converting that into a revenue stream. It also seemed kind of annoying to launch a Flash player just to view a PDF in a now, double-scrolling window, however I'm reminded, while reading this technical post, about the Ycombinator interviewer who said: "where's the rocket science?" Clearly, we're seeing some smart developers tackle a tough problem, and for a broad audience. I think they have a bright future!
Computers Make Strides in Recognizing Speech
There are just too many variables to predict properly a single world cup match. Things you might not think of right away can completely change the outcome: weather, bad referees (even good referees doing just a bad call), combined strategies, bad player changes, to name just a few.

It's part of the taste of watching football, you can't be too sure about what's going to happen and very often even recent history data doesn't match outcome.

Perhaps this teaches how modeling highly unpredictable events shouldn't be taken lightly.
Craig Venter’s synthetic life and its implications
I don't know about Gtk/Qt, but the 4/5 change is a difference, not a breakage: the N900 comes with a stylus, so your Maemo 4 stylus apps will work fine.

Think of it as pre-notifications vs notifications vs limited backgrounding functionality changes on iOS. The older apps still work fine, they're just not taking full advantage of the newer features.
Is $300 really that much to get some bumpers, if you just bought a new car?
It's definitely not, but if I had purchased an iPhone 4 I'd be more than a little bit pissed off about this response. One of the most advertised and promoted features of the new iPhone is it's stunningly beautiful design. To then have to stuff it in a case that hides that design and makes it look like pretty much any other phone... just seems wrong.
Apple: Hold Different.
Do you wear a jacket to keep you warm or because it says Prada on it?

Did you go to school to get a piece of paper, or to learn something?

The analogy doesn't quite hold. You make it sound as if all educational quality is the same, and you're only paying for the name. That's just not true.
Arrogant Jobs On iPhone 4 Antenna Problems: 'Just Avoid Holding It That Way'
Well, that's really just an unfair value judgment.

True, everybody's identity comes from somewhere. The question is, where they get it from? My identity tells me that waiting in line for 6-10 hours for an iPhone is ridiculous ... categorically rejecting it. Life's too short to derive meaning or identity from an iPhone. You shouldn't rationalize by arguing, "Everyone's identity comes from somewhere."
It is becoming clear that the days of a simple dumbphone are coming to an end.

So the question is: can a mobile phone company reinvent itself to build small handheld computers that happen to make phone calls?
No, but on my 3g I dont use a case simply because that makes the phone bulkier and most cases make you drag your entire pocket out along with the phone.
It sucks for app devs but it's good for the customer. Until the platform has matured halting progress is a bad idea. Otherwise you're stuck supporting legacy crap forever and cannot move forward fast enough, especially in the mobile space.

You could argue that Nokia should have been doing this R&D behind closed doors but considering the openness of the platform that may or may not have been a wise choice.
Trevor Cox, president of the UK Institute of Acoustics, has an article in New Scientist explaining how they make their noise.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19041-what-makes-the-s...
Well I have interest but no experience ;)
Bad title.

The key piece of the argument is: "I get frustrated when an inexperienced candidate looks at a 200 person company against my 25 person company, says they will pay $10K more and takes that job because I won’t match their offer. That’s frustrating, because I know, as many others do, that the basis for the decision is wrong. I can’t say if it’s right or wrong, but it’s certainly being made based on bad metrics."

That sounds a lot more like 'inexperienced developers are accepting jobs to get a little more money while I'm offering them a lot more equity.'

To make a rather cynical counter-argument, one might say that these inexperienced candidates are actually being quite savvy, and taking a much more sure bet (a very well-financed company that's offering more money right now) instead of taking the riskier one that they think has worse odds of panning out.
I think the technical aspect isn't the only one. There's also a psychological dimension that makes is different to just block a whole domain vs. making a list of thousands of sites.

Wouldn't make a difference in some places, but I bet that in some borderline cases, it could push them over.
xz is backward compatible with lzma. It can both create and decompress lzma archives, and it has a tool with the same command line options.

lzma is depreciated by its author in favor of xz.
As a Canadian who uses PayPal to pay for things directly from my bank account, I'll believe it when I see it. No PayPal "alternative" that I've heard of will let me do this.
Sal Khan's Gel Conference talk about the Khan Academy - Great video
The problem I have with offline HTML5 applications, on the iPhone at least, is that when your phone thinks it is on the internet because AT&T is servicing it with 4 bars, but only providing a few dozen bits per second of effective bandwidth.

So your user decides to run your application and touches the icon on the home screen ("not a desktop").

• Your application launches and displays your splash screen instantly. (Everything from here out is your fault in the user's eyes.)

• Safari decides to use HTTP to verify the manifest file and see how things are. It also, perversely, does a query to load the splash screen that is already showing.

• Now your user stares at the splash screen for 60 seconds wondering what kind of an idiot you are and how badly you must hate him while AT&T shifts a couple thousand bits of manifest response to you in their most profit enhancing manner.

This can be mitigated by pushing cache times up, but you either push them to infinity and explicitly change URLs to catch updates or roll dice with your user's experience.

I'd put a release number in the URL, set the expirations to doomsday, and bump the release number for each update, but the URL of the first page loaded in the app is fixed when the user bookmarks it onto the desktop.
No, he cut to the heart of the matter, and this apparently makes you uncomfortable.

By the way: I've lived in Chicago all my life

Enough said.
His app may be a silly toy, but it's still more useful than "blows" is as a criticism.
Voyager 2
Reminds me of Ron Garret's article on Lisp at JPL ...

"Having a read-eval-print loop running on the spacecraft proved invaluable in finding and fixing the problem."

http://www.flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.html
It is good to see some competition in this space.

Amazon and Google tried before, it will be interesting to see what approach Visa will take to dethrone Paypal.
it reads like it was written by an MBA-type who is upset that successful people are ignoring the gospel truth

Did we read the same article? That's not what he was saying at all.

Jason and company are big fish in a little (technology) pond, full of people who are run-of-the-mill IT types in non-tech towns. It's given Jason a big head. That's his point, and he's dead-on. Where you read "MBA" into that is beyond me.
Considering those bumpers probably cost less than a dollar to make, and are apparently quite essential to the product working properly in some instances, the $29 is kind of a slap in the face. On the 16GB model the bumper costs 15% much as the phone itself. The bumper probably costs less than the packaging you throw into the trash. (which is not required to make the phone work properly)
Not at all. Whether they hire from around the world, Jason is still from a technological podunk town. He ain't from the big city, and he's presumptuous enough to believe he knows it all anyway.
I see there may have been a misconception here; I haven't built this app. I discovered it while looking for an alternative to Google Reader.
Apple is simply trying to revolutionize the way we hold our phones
http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/1904.html
"Putting this iPhone 4 in your pocket will likely couple more energy into your body (you bag of salt water, you) than did the first generation model. Yep, I predict it will be worse."

I hope this isn't dangerous to your health.

He is buying one, so I assume not.
It's better actually - the censor does not have to decide, the publisher of the material decides.
I haven't noticed this. I had to purchase a cable from an Apple Store, and I was approached by an Apple employee that had an iPhone with POS software and a credit card reader installed, and I was out of the store in a few minutes.
I really hope that they're successful. I feel like GPGPU is too immature of a field for it to already get locked down two one or two implementations.

That said, they've got a long road ahead of them. GPU development iterates much more quickly that that of CPUs; there has been an entirely new hardware architecture (Fermi), three of four driver updates, and two major CUDA API revisions released by NVIDIA in the 6 months since I did my independent study on the topic.
You were probably down-voted because you committed a basic error in logic. Every single iPhone 4 is running the exact same software, iOS 4, so you contributed noise to the discussion, not insight.

You wrote: "I've watched multiple videos where data transfer rates dropped significantly when the antennae are touched in the same way making me think this is not just a software problem."
$29 for what amounts to a repair module for your phone does seem a bit pricy, considering it's broken from the factory.
It's not always I/O speed. You can notice when installing CPU usage goes to 100% (or fans kicking in) for BWT/LZM* and not for the DEFLATE (unless you use -9 or something like that.) While you install something at least one of your cores is unavailable for anything else.

This affects energy consumption, too.

And think about both mobile and servers. Those systems are usually more sensible to high CPU load.

I have a draft blog post with analysis of different protocols with valgrind and other tools. But it is so much data to present and graph I never get around to finish it :(
Aaaand we've come full circle again, where people start to realize that Apple is, like Microsoft, a gigantic company that doesn't care about anyone.

Maybe we can all move to open-source platforms, so that we can fill the Blogosphere (tm) with self-righteous bullshit about Ubuntu before being swept up by the next commercial trend. Gee, it took a shiny user interface and a meticulously-engineered corporate image to sucker in that last batch, how low can be set the bar this time?

I hate humanity.
My guess would be that it means taking four years off from his career would be seriously detrimental to some other goal, e.g. continuing to feed his family.