skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
it's not that hard to measure latency. point a video camera at the screen and measure how long it takes from click to completion of new screen load.

then pick ten web pages and collect the data.

then pick ten other common UI actions (not in the web browser) and collect that data too. there's some fudge here because the phones have different UIs so you won't necessarily be able to find identical actions but you could get a good idea.

it's entirely possible that the dev teams have instrumented builds that give them this info automatically. i would be surprised if they didn't, in fact.
It's pretty unambiguously clear that he didn't use the fruits of the vulnerability in a black hat way to hurt the end users, however.

No and I don't think that accusation has ever been made.

However; he has used the data very unethically and I don't think that it is reasonable for him to claim journalistic privileges or the cover of full disclosure to assuage that.
Exactly, long-term is the key. The majority of us are not going to be instantly wealthy (in the sense of money or passion).
There are plenty of opportunities out there. Not all of them are equal, but they exist.

He had an opportunity, but didn't take it. He'd prefer to sit and wait. If anything, it makes it look like the company is better off without him.
It renders some web apps unusable. Try reorganizing your Netflix queue on the iPad. Netflix's JS doesn't scale well to a queue with hundreds of items. On a computer running a modern browser, this means a lag of a couple of seconds. But on the iPad, it can be s full minute.
one page version:

http://nymag.com/print/?/news/features/67024/
I upvoted you for bringing clarity to why he was denied a public defender.

The fact that he can't get a public defender because no charges higher than the misdemeanors were filed against him is, like you said, a good thing. He misunderstood, and creates a conspiracy theory around it. This is likely the case with most of his other points in the essay as well.
> Kindly retract that he said "anti-semitism is okay."

Fair enough. He didn't say anti-semitism is okay. What he did do, which prompted my inaccurate comment, is admit to make "joking" videos about the genocide of Jews which are in egregiously poor taste. And then go on to make paranoid comments about the FBI manipulating the Jewish lobby and Jewish reporters to alleging that he bombs synagogues, or something (I wasn't too clear on this part).
The defense of freedoms often involves defending those who exercise them in a way that we don't approve of.
I'm pretty sure the Declaration of Independence was not written on parchment with a crudely drawn gaping asshole.
Apple’s Invasion of China Begins With This Shanghai Apple Store
I'm opposed to this, because a lot of times the personalities who do this are asking the question not because they want an answer, but because they want to show off in front of a large room.

You're also putting the speaker on the spot; rarely does the public question result in a meaningful conversation between the asker and the speaker.

If you want to show interest in the speaker's topic, talk to him after the presentation. It's a lot more comfortable for all involved, particularly those in the audience who genuinely aren't interested in anything either of you have to say.
Business stuff: ~$500/month
Life stuff: ~$1500/month

I had that down to ~$1000 total when I was living on the beach in Thailand and hadn't yet built anything big enough to require a fast machine at a collocation facility.
Why aren't we reading about that, and instead reading about zionists and why a judge denied him a public defender for a misdemeanor drug charge unrelated to the computer security issue?
(The post isn't comparing Android 2.2 to the iPad but rather to the iPhone 4 hardware and OS...)
http://flowplayer.org/
Negative Effects Of Panic Disorder And Anxiety
Panic attack and Anxiety can have various negative effects on your body. It can result in anxiety, heart palpitations, chest pain, head and stomach aches, nausea, breathlessness, and even panic attacks.
Holy crap. Pre-launch, so no revenue stream? $25k across 13+ people, plus office space? If you split the 25k evenly, that would be $1.9k each, or a yearly salary of roughly $23k.

What kind of developers are you able to hire for that paltry sum?

In SF -- We spend $30k/month on salary/benefits/taxes for 4 people (not including rent and other expenses), and even then we're paying below market rate. Our other expenses, including rent, add up to $4k, and we try to sock away at least another $10-15k every month.

Of course, this also isn't a "burn" rate. We've worked hard to build a business the old-fashioned way -- by making money with which to pay ourselves.
Agreed; and if he is being unfairly refused representation that is a serious matter.

Additionally if he has broken no actual laws then that needs to be cleared up and he needs to be apologized too.

However I feel there is an important distinction between defend and approve; I would, for example, represent him. But I don't condone his approach to disclosure :)
While that's certainly true, this is also to the credit of Lars Bak, the lead programmer on V8. There just aren't many people on earth who have his experience building VM's [1].

Disclosure: Googler, huge Apple fanboy.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lars_Bak_(computer_programmer)
$109/mo

$100 for rent at a co-working space
$9 for unfuddle
$0 for heroku
You obviously didn't read the next paragraph:

"Writing computer code to process the data "took less than two days and produced results similar to other independent analyses. No information from CRU was needed to do this"."

Personally I can understand them not wanting to "fully comply", given the number of FoI requests they would've received and their tone. Have you seen the vitriol over at Climate Audit?

edit: It gets even better a bit further down: "Asked whether it would be reasonable to conclude that anyone claiming instrumental records were unavailable or vital code missing was incompetent, another panel member, Professor Peter Clarke from Edinburgh University, said: "It's very clear that anyone who'd be competent enough to analyse the data would know where to find it. It's also clear that anyone competent could perform their own analysis without let or hindrance.""
Humans see 4 colors, not 3
I agree with what you write re: bargaining with the leasing agent - a couple of my friends have got really good deals recently by simply saying "I'll take it now if you include 3 parking bays and give us a shorter-term lease" or equivalent. Now is actually a really good time to lease space if you are certain that it's the right thing cash flow wise.
It sounds like the author does relate his distaste for online advertising to ads on conventional media. He notes that he doesn't listen to commercial radio or watch commercial television.
Although I completely agree with you, and I'm sure most HN-type people would. I doubt the restaurant owners would. The idea that a website has to be flashy and fancy is well ingrained by now.
You can eat and live on $45 a month?

I see that you're still maintaining other full-time employment (which is a good idea, IMO), but let's be serious. True burn rate is more than just hosting costs.
Really, it's a video, not everyone wants to watch a video.

Can I assume it's a joke product rather than a real product?
> Comparing S3 to an offsite RAID volume seems like apples to oranges.

And that was exactly my point. Amazon is selling apples and I want an orange. Tarsnap is an apple pie and is the perfect kind of pie I want. But I want an orange pie.

I would be ok with a service that didn't give me online access to my data. Run a very large stack of removable SATA drive slots. Copy incoming files into two of them in two locations. Store them securely when they are full. Fetch them back when I need to restore. That should cut way down on the CapEx of all the NAS/SAN hardware S3 has to run.
I find his use of Ragel generated state machines fascinating. He uses them in ways I wouldn't typically consider, very clever stuff.

I'm on the lookout for nasty code of my own that can be replaced with a state machine.
Here's my take on the whole office expense thing:

http://www.expatsoftware.com/articles/2006/12/chamonix-branc...

If you're going to spend money on a building with room for developers and a fast internet connection, there are much cheaper places to find that building than an office park in the suburbs.

Kalymnos, for instance, has apartments you can rent for $20/day in the off season, which is why you'll find me there this fall.
Having your PayPal account frozen is only a problem if you don't move your money OUT of PayPal after you receive it. If you regularly transfer money into your company checking account, then you won't have any real problems. In the worst case if PayPal freezes your account then you can still mail people checks. Keeping your money in PayPal is kind of dumb anyways, since it doesn't earn interest. I've been using PayPal for two years without any problems.
Isn't that part of what the Semantic Web is supposed to be?
A good moderator will have a question ready for each speaker, just in case there are crickets.

I've certainly seen dumb and ideologically or politically motivated questions, but I think almost any discussion is better than no discussion. And if you can't publicly discuss your topic, you've no business presenting on it.
Open Directory RDF Dump (e.g. Google Directory using it)
http://rdf.dmoz.org/
I see burn rate as the expenses of the company, not of the person. Right now I don't need the company to pay me for living expenses because I still have other employment.
Seven Entrepreneur Disciplines You Can Acquire
I don't like it because it's too cluttered. (5 columns, seriously?) You never know where to begin reading.

I never was big in reading newspapers (physical or online) but I like reading the NYT in my itouch. The interface is much simpler than the front page and it's focused on the content, without too many ads:

http://a1.phobos.apple.com/us/r1000/040/Purple/7b/6a/5d/mzl....

http://a1.phobos.apple.com/us/r1000/012/Purple/49/8c/db/mzl....
I like that distinction between business stuff and life stuff. Burn rate is also valid from a personal finance point of view.
The declaration of independence has about as much legal standing as weev's blog post.
Skeptical Authors on Climate Science
Members of the development team come "on and off" during the process. We kept IA in-house to ensure specs and continuity - we aren't locked into any vendor / supplier should we want to switch and bring all development in-house.

Office space is $1,700 - this is up in Vancouver, BC. Again, a bombed-out economy lends itself to finding deals.

I cannot go into the level of developers, but I can say some are presenters at tech conferences, attend the tech conferences, and have built startups before. Again, we manage costs by bringing on people at the right time, for the right amount of time.
I got the impression this was more for people who can't (or don't want to) code.
Amazon Public Data Sets: http://aws.amazon.com/publicdatasets/

It is fast and easy to use if you are already using EC2.
That's why I think it's interesting to make this distinction when reporting burn rate.
Except that T61 destroyed their usability in the name of a shiny new design, and drove away a ton of active users. I loved the old T61, but find the new site completely unusable.
It sounds like you're opposed to bad questions, not questions. If you're listening to a talk that's at all interesting, you ought to be able to manage a good question by the end of it. If the audience genuinely doesn't care about good questions, then that's their fault for sitting there.
This post and comments here have convinced me I need to learn more about Finite State Machines and how to apply them.

Can anyone recommend some good educational material about using finite state machines in software development?

My Google searches find theoretical papers and not practical applications.
I've caught conversations between teenagers waiting outside the door for the bus, and I shudder to think what English is going to evolve into if we're not careful. Thank goodness for "It Pays to Enrich Your Word Power", which I read frequently for years. :-)
You mean like how research 2000 hasn't complied for kos? Its not science if its not open and independently verifiable. Raw data doesn't a computer model make.
I feel for the guy, though I think he should have considered the $40K job a little more.

Sounds like what he really needs to do is get the hell away from his parents who keep making excuses for him and trying to be "understanding".
I have been thinking of this for some time. A "merge with" would be great to help the clutter and then the good conversations that happen would not be lost once one is closed.
This brings to mind the wider discussion of DIY fabrication (MakerBot et al) and while it has been dismissed by many "experts" there are distinct advantages for companies who can benefit from the added agility it provides(in this case, delivering your product on-time vs. wrangling with external companies, who probably don't consider you important in comparison to "big" companies).

Perhaps having your own "pick-and-place" wouldn't scale up to Wal-Mart levels of demand but having a small end-to-end factory of your own gives you the ability to satisfy early-adopters who are willing to pay a little more to be "first"; and usually drive mass purchasing down-the-road.
Is there something fundamentally different in the approach taken in Froyo that makes for this kind of speed improvement?
My Conway's Life screensaver for Mac:
http://twilightedge.com/mac/crepuscularlife/
You're being downvoted because the article is comparing iOS4 to Android 2.2. Both are operating systems. iOS4 is on both the iPad and the iPhone.

In fact, the iPad and iPhone 4 are very similar in hardware as well. The most significant difference is in RAM, where the iPhone has twice as much as the iPad.

Mentioning his or her experience on the iPad is completely valid.
You don't say which HTC phone it is, but I don't think any of them have 2.2 yet...
hum...

Sometimes the min/max/close buttons do not appear. Making me have to go to the "firefox" button and hit exit.

Why does the "firefox" button take up all that space? If they are going to copy Opera and add the "firefox" button, then copy Opera and make it look good. (talking about maximized window)

Moving the tabs is still really bad. Chrome and Opera both have really smooth transitions and opera even adds nice preview windows.

On the flip side

It feels much more responsive. I don't care about the actual numbers just the feel.

The new addon manager that they copied from chrome looks much better, then the previous and even chromes.

The loading circle on the tabs is really nice touch. Its nice being able to see how far along a tab is in its loading phase. This is a feature I see all browsers copying very soon.
I hope I didn't come off sounding rude or anything. Just trying to help :)

I think you'd be safest simply not serving the custom scrollbar stuff to mobile browsers, they usually have their own 'custom scrollbars' anyway.

Good luck!
Killer quote:

"If you talk to 20 people," Scott said, "you’ll find only one in manufacturing and everyone else in finance

Umm, no...
>Apple's products have almost always been lagging in terms of spec sheet

This is incredibly untrue. The iPhone has dominated virtually every benchmark until very, very recently, owing to a more efficient CPU, and a vastly superior GPU (the Samsung Galaxy S is pretty much the only device that beats even the 3GS).

The iPhone is always talked up on the merits of its spec sheet, whether it's screen technology, case technology, GPU speed, browser speed, and on and on. This has always been its edge.
Sorry about that. We're seeing intermittent issues with our Passenger installation. And we're currently upgrading the machine... we should be more stable, in a few minutes.
Ask HN: Useful articles on how to structure mail announcements for SaaS apps
Hi everyone,

I'm looking for good resources on how to structure email announcements for an SaaS app (specifically, b2b, with plenty of web-unsavvy users behind Microsoft Exchange servers).

I know about litmusapp.com for testing the emails, and I'm looking more for the high-level advice that answers the following questions:

* How often should you send announcements to your user base?

* What sort of stuff should you announce?

* What are great ways to structure the contents of the announcements so that they're actually read?

* What are things to avoid?

* How to present the contents of the announcement so it's actually read and perhaps actioned (e.g. when offering a time-limited discount)

* Any good examples of great announcement emails to get inspiration from?

Etc... (so, business-y articles rather than technical ones).

Thanks for your help.
I'm not so sure about that.

It's impossible to "monitor" who sees your online advertising if you scatter it to the four winds of the web. :-) I was using the cute cats as an example anyway. You can control a little bit of your marketing by targeting websites that deal with your services, but if you rely on social networking places like Twitter, Facebook, etc., it's just going to be a real mess.

Besides, isn't it more cost-effective right now to reach a lot of different people for absolutely free - then to rely on expensive SEO hunts, and targeting advertising to get the niche? :-)
Yeah, Android still doesn't have the Apple logo so you can give it a chance (just saying; And getting downvoted)
Thanks everyone for the comments and for sharing this article. You guys are great. ~ Mario Vittone
Amazon enters online grocery market
Designing A Facebook Fan Page: Showcases, Tutorials, Resources
The number and "tone" of the requests is irrelevant.

If they want to ignore or not "fully comply" with FOI requests - they shouldn't take public funds.
cool, hip,

I agree but
cutting-edge software developers?
Please they work for Microsoft and Google. People on this forum have a way of deluding themselves. 37signals et. al. aren't the Cutting edge software developer, people who create Flume-Java are.

This forum consists mostly of latte sipping, hip crowd, without any CS degrees and lack of knowledge of Maths.

Microsoft employs as well as attracts some of the best software devs to its platform.
Also it makes stuff easy for them unlike Objective C.
The iPad is still on iOS 3.2 (unless you're running a pre-release developer build for it).
On the internet at least the solution is simple. It's called Ad-art (http://add-art.org/). Advertisement elsewhere, such as on billboards is more problematic to deal with, but if you are at the cutting edge of augmented reality this is not necessarily a problem either. http://blognostic.wordpress.com/2010/06/01/what-augmented-re...
iOS4 isn't on the iPad and won't be for several months.

That said, of course faster javascript is a benefit. Shaving even fractions of a second off web operations has huge benefits for users and results in much higher usage and happier customers.

When the performance bumps are imperceptible, it will be time to make a distinction. But on mobile devices that's still quite a ways out.
I was thinking this exact thing while reading his article (losing the benefit of caching external files locally). It would be my guess that this does improve performance for single requests (like an article that gets popular on HN...), but as you said, reading 50 pages would be worse.

Still it's very cool, especially for a minimalist blog.
No, it's not. It's the difference between lightning and a lightning bug (with apologies to Mark Twain).
As a former Bronze Cross I also agree with btilly. I practiced swimming for thousands (training, competitively, and pleasure) of hours before having to save my first drowning victim. If you don't have the experience you are going to put yourself and the other person at great risk.
Apple bans 'fraudulent' developer from iTunes
I'd suggest a frequency of no more than once per week.

Once per month for a regular newsletter-type mailing might be appropriate, with occasional emails for special announcements.

That's my position and I'm sticking to it!
Is there any commonly used web app which have cpu intensive javascript code?

I would assume that most of the time would be wasted on rendering and downloading, and that javascript runs a fraction, even unmeasurable time.

From SunSpider website: "This includes tests to generate a tagcloud from JSON input, a 3D raytracer, cryptography tests, code decompression, and many more "

How often are this things really done in a browser, and are they really the bottleneck?
Uhhh ...

1) "he gives the data to a journalist"
2) "in summary weev did not publish the data in any meaningful sense"

Really!?
Cheers, I hadn't thought about contributing to documentation as a good starting point.

I had assumed I wouldn't be contributing core code, my motivation is simply an urge to code more outside of my day job, and to get some good/fun experience doing it.
C# 4.0: The industrial response to Lisp?
Yes, by grossly overestimating the ratio of content to ads, and ignoring the fact that they can be ignored in those media too. My newspaper ads can be removed and thrown away - the first thing I do. My radio station is 50 minutes of music per hour (or 100% if I listen to public radio). Tivo solves the television problem.

He's a precious fusspot.
Right, so it's entirely appropriate to benchmark arbitrary computational metrics, but benchmarking UI metrics is inconceivable?

I don't understand your argument - true shitty engineers can ruin a UI, as well as they can ruin a JS interpreter. The point of testing and benchmarking is to evaluate the relative "performance" in each of these domains.

Measuring page loads on an array of popular, representative websites, or measuring the latency between user interactions and some visible response are some examples.

Also, having a group of real people give subjective ratings I think carries more weight than people give it credit for.
Thank you. He certainly did make such videos which he claimed to be parody adding useful balance to the Israel/Palestine debate -- I think we would agree that this was not useful, but I don't believe his intentions were anti-Semitic.
That is because you only hear about those cases where it did not work out.

Take a look at for example Apple's release notes for a security update: dozens of fixes, most reported by external companies and persons, all with proper attribution.

I'm fairly sure that the process does work most of the time.
In ambitious India, workplace etiquette rounds out the coursework
Once upon a time, my dad told me that I should always make a point to ask at least one intelligent question at every conference. I think it's great advice.

Worth adding that your question should be concise and clear. Far too many times I see cretins asking so-called "questions" that are nothing more than an excuse to ramble on about their own opinions on the topic.

Tip: If your "question" begins with "I believe that" and doesn't end with a question mark within about 20-30 seconds, it's not a question. Keep it to later or earn the hatred of everyone else in the room. I was at a singularity conference (UK Humanity Plus) a few months ago which seemed filled with idiots who didn't know how to ask concise questions - or thought that the question time was their chance to ramble on about their views on the topic at hand. I really honestly believe that those people should be forcefully kicked out of the room and barred from later talks. Wankers.
And when the time appears the same (both at 2 hours at the moment), there is always the item number, 1493907 for this submission and 1493937 for the duplicate.