skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The study is getting top-of-front page coverage right now from wired.com
There's a pretty good chance (e.g. about 100%) that anything you would want to run on that high-end visualization system won't run on your laptop, and anything you would want to run on your laptop won't run on your phone.

If your definition of success is to be running on the broadest spectrum of devices with no regard to marketshare, adoption, or interoperability, then you're right - OpenGL is far more attractive than Direct3D. Ditto Linux over OSX/Windows.

My interests are driven more by market realities.

Having a wide breadth of device vendors and formats is NOT attractive when considering what platforms to target. This is one reason why games on iPhone are far more prevalent than Android - there are basically three iPhone revisions to worry about, compared to a dozen Android handsets that all have slightly different specs, capabilities, and driver bugs.

If OpenGL sees accelerated adoption over the next few years it will be because it's the chosen API of the wildly popular and relatively homogeneous iOS family of devices, not because it has the greatest breadth of hardware support.
Ask HN: How close is too close?
About a month ago, I was toying around with redesigning my website. I really love the simplicity of HN, so in what started as an exercise in "well, how hard would it be to copy the layout, but just use my database?" turned into something that I thought looked really good (well obviously, it was very similar to the layout on HN [differnt color, more stuff {tagging}, etc.])...

How close is too close? It's pretty obviously very heavily influenced by HN, but not quite an exact copy. Is this okay? Should I take it down?

I guess I'm asking because I've seen HN clones being okay in the past, but just wanted to double check before I stepped on anybody's toes (I couldn't find a license for HN...is there one?)
I think you're wildly mistaken. I live in sf and know plenty of people in this community. Think of all the old people, the parents of 18-22 year old kids, the precedent it sets, etc. I'd be pleasantly surprised if that goes through, but it's not the first time it's been tried and I'd put $100 right now that it won't happen this year.
You are right, the colors represent whether the strain is hybrid, indica, or sativa. Initially we played with coming up with some sort of hash based on the effects that would generate an rgb value, then similar strains would be a similar color. Couldn't get it to ever look very good so we stuck to the three color scheme.

Definitely already working on the deep linking to effects.
The Paleolithic diet is one of the dumbest ideas I've encountered in my entire life. Its followers tend to discount vast piles of medical research in favor of tiny experiments that suggest what they hope to be true. This kind of behavior is common for adherents of any fringe diet, but paleo goes a step further.

Even its concept is flawed. Some things it discards, such as wheat are barely changed from what our ancestors were eating long before agriculture or town settlements. One reason wheat was adopted so widely so early is that it didn't need to change much to be domesticated (see Guns Germs and Steel). Strawberries on the other hand, weren't domesticated until medieval times, and the same is true of many nuts, most notably almonds. Cattle has also undergone a far larger genetic transformation than many of our primary grain crops. Most damning to the idea of a paleo diet is that we have, too.

Human evolution has clearly accelerated with population growth. According to some anthropologists, modern humans differ more from those 5,000 years ago than those humans differed from Neanderthal.

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN1043228620071210

In short, the paleo diet rests on flawed assumptions about evolution, the history of agriculture and ignores the main body of nutritional research and is rightfully considered a fad diet by the NHS and similar organizations.

Edit: It's also horribly unsustainable. A hummer-driving vegan doesn't have anywhere near the ecological footprint of a bicycle-riding "paleo" dieter.
Everyone forgets about postrank.com (formerly aiderss.com) It is actually what I use to filter HN... but who knows, I may switch over to the HN50 or HN100 described above.
Ask HN: after a startup fails, what happens next?
Let's say that you're a 25-year-old technical co-founder of a startup that existed for 2 years but didn't go anywhere. The product was enterprise and, due to economic failures, you got zero clients despite a strong product. You've learned a lot, but your savings are at an end. Startup goes to life support mode and then you leave. You give yourself a title that represents the type of work you want in the future: Senior Programmer, VP of Research and Development.

We hear about the success stories but not the numerous failures. So... what actually happens next?

Obviously the answer is "you get a job", but what kind of jobs are available? Are you worse or better off than before you began the startup? Will you get enough "career credit" to be as well off as if you'd taken a corporate-ladder job for 2 years, or are you going to be seen as not having worked in a "real job" and therefore have to pay lots of dues and essentially start all over again?
That's terribly misleading, though. Facebook has huge clusters for performing offline business analytics. Therefore comparing them to Reddit, which presumably has a much smaller offline analytics backend, is not an apples to apples comparison in terms of efficiency.
Do you have evidence that reddit (or any site using a dynamic language) would reduce overall operating costs by switching, or is this an assumption on your part? What about development costs? What about time to deploy new features? What about the cost to make platform revisions? Do you have evidence that a non-dynamic language would really be so much faster that it would require less hardware? Perhaps the problem is not the language, but the chosen architecture?

What I'm really trying to say here is... prove it.
Uhh... jacquesm is following me around and writing about my life. This article is something I really needed to read. Thanks for writing Jacques!
If you get down-modded to 0, then you know you did something wrong. Humor is typically hit or miss, sometimes it kills, sometimes it doesn't. That being said, it is an online community and standard mob-rule still applies. I wouldn't dwell on a -4 too much (especially if no one will even comment to tell you why they down-modded). It happens, and no you're not a bad person ;-)
I would much rather have this book in dead tree form. It seems like it would be great to sit on the couch with.
The article closes with, "In some sense, Blekko's approach is more democratic--if any content is good enough for your friends, it's probably good enough for you too."

If I'm going to use a social search, I want to see things that:

1) Are liked by at least one of my friends.

2) Are not explicitly disliked by (a meaningful threshold, perhaps as few as 1) of my friends.

And really, I'm not so sure that I trust #1, but #2 could be useful to me. Especially when "friends" gets replaced with "Hacker News," then I'm much more interested.

In other words, I don't trust the sensitivity of a social network to get me what I need; I may have interests that reach beyond those of any of my associates. However, I do, to an extent, trust its specificity for identifying badness, and that's why I might consider a "social"-esque search filtering service.

Actually, Gabe, have you ever considered creating some sort of collaborative filtering tool for duckduck?
To answer answerzombie's question: No, Groupon is not sitting on a legal timebomb.

One of the reasons you would acquire a trademark is to establish a superior claim to a domain.
A domain, by itself, is not a trademark and does not establish a trademark.

Trademarks can be established in two ways: registration or actual use. Trademarks must remain in use to remain valid. Where you have competing claims to a mark, first in time takes priority.

In this case, while the original holder of groupon.com may have been intending to use the domain, he apparently never got around to actually doing so before Groupon filed for a trademark. At that point, Groupon's trademark would have been "first in time".

Plus, apparently the dude signed over whatever rights he had.
Most ETFs/commodity indices roll on the 5th through 9th business days. This is convention. It can be 1st through 4th, it can be 6th through 10th, or any other combination. It makes sense, however, to have it over a few days to avoid liquidity issues.

One common misconception: "buying" a "more expensive" future contract costs money. This is false. Futures are unfunded. This means it costs no upfront cash (except margin) to "buy" it. So let's say I have a future worth $70, I buy it, I wait one month, it's still at $70, and I sell it. No cash was ever exchanged. If now I "roll" to a future that's worth $80. I don't pay an extra $10. I pay $0, again.
There's not a chance in the world that reddit could get $8 CPMs. They might be able to sell ads on one or two subreddits for that, but I doubt it.
It would be nice if you elaborate a little.
Holy cow, guys... I just thought (perhaps mistakenly) that the commenter had missed the connection to AirBnB. Not a big deal.
I believe a Reddit blog post quoted AdBlock ratio at something closer to 30%. 50% is extremely conservative.
The exact meaning of terms like "beta" is subjective, but "release candidate" has the it right there in the name.

It's not a release candidate if you literally state that it is not a candidate for release.
Of course U.S. Immigration sucks for founders. You don't think we're actually pro sensible-immigration, do you? The U.S. Immigration system is about importing cheap labor (which is why Republicans support it) and NAMs to replace whites (which is why Democrats support it).

50% of the children in born in the U.S. today are Black or Hispanic.

Unless you know of a way to fix all the problems in Black and Hispanic populations that seem to keep them from having any significant presence in professions requiring an education or IQs over 120 (and we've tried to fix those problems for 150 years now), the U.S. will be Brazil in 20-30 years.

Educational reform has moved the Black-White gap maybe 1/5th of a standard deviation over the last several decades. And that was the easy part. Honestly, the rest is probably genetic, and simply won't budge even if you turn the public schools into sharashkas.

Good luck, all. The demographic ball is too big to stop now, even if every state turned into Arizona tomorrow. The moving hand has written. Enjoy your bowls of red.

P.S.

If you are now busily writing me 50 reasons why the black-white gap isn't genetic, don't bother. That was an aside and irrelevant to the central point. What matters is that it's something that seems impossible to shift with current methods even when vast resources sluice against the problem over many years. And you only have 20-30 years to come up with a solution. Smart money is way against you.
I don't get why Intel is pushing x86 so hard in the mobile market. I understand them wanting to keep x86 for desktops, as desktop apps need to be compatible. But mobile apps still need to be customized. Nobody will want to install Excel (for PC) on their mobile, even if their mobile has the horsepower to run it.
I work in search quality at Google, and while certainly not everyone agrees that it's a problem, a lot of people do.

I could write a lot about this, but the central issue is that it is very very hard to make changes that sacrifice on-topic-ness for good-ness that don't make the results in general worse. We're working on it though, and I suspect we'll never stop.

I think a lot of the promise lies in as you said, identifying the tangentially related article, or as I like to frame it, bringing more queries into the head. We've launched a lot of changes that do exactly this. (But you are right, it is difficult, and fundamentally so. Language is hard.)
Israeli Scientists Increase Computer Memory Capabilities
The STAPLE Act was/is meant to address Ph.D. graduates of US science/engineering schools, giving such a fast-track to permanent residence:

http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h111-1791

Not clear when/if it will become law though.
Yeah, IIRC Delta had free wifi while they were testing it and Virgin's was free during the holiday season.

And yes the wifi alliance has some biases, but Wakefield (http://www.wakefieldresearch.com/) is an independent research firm.

That's a good point, though about charging in order to throttle bandwidth concerns. But that comes at a potentially high cost in public perception points. All it takes is one airline to say "Everyone should have free wifi, so now we do!" and there will be a big jump in people complaining about having to pay for it.
I wonder what the best money-saving optimisation would be?

Whilst it sounds like a lot of money remember that the whole sites annual EC2 bill could easily be paid for several years by one of the Newhouse brothers (who own Advance Publications, who own Conde Nast) selling one of their Reubens or probably just giving up their bank interest for a month (est. about ¼-million USD per day for the poor one : 1day of 2% annual interest on $4.5 billion).
Is Yahoo Japan poised to switch to Google Search?
Actually they're even lower, since the 3 year instances are so much cheaper than the 1 year over time.

(1820 * 57) + (910 * 23) = $124,670/yr in reservation fees

Changes to

(2800 * 57) + (1400 * 23) = $191,800/3yr in reservation fees

Which, when spread over the 3 years, brings the cost down by $5,061.39/mo, making the final cost there actually $17,328.98.

Of course this assumes they're doing 3 year reservations, but I don't see any reason not to on their XL instances (I could be wrong though, not sure how open Conde Nast is to logic like this).
I read a passage on a standardized exam once that led me to believe that of the US and UK, only the US was adversarial, and the UK was more inquisitorial. The point of the exam passage was the contrast: in the UK, for example, both sides had to present all of the evidence they had. Not so in the US. Perhaps it's more of a sliding scale between the systems than a dichotomy.

Now, I have to admit I never followed up on this, maybe the passage was fictionalized.
Ha, definitely not. I meant it in the way that in California I could get it for things I have, but can't in WA.
Sadly, no: I just imported the excel spreadsheet that's on the page j-g-faustus linked to. :)

However, you can just cut-and-paste a traditional HTML table into Google Docs, and in most cases, it works exactly as you'd expect. Automating that is left as an exercise to the reader. :)
I was thinking that my numbers seemed high, but mentally chalked that up to the fact that they do $overflow pageviews/month. Thanks.

Still though, I agree. At something like a $2 CPM (which is NOT that hard to get for someone their size) they'd still be pulling in insane money for just one ad unit.
The Amish are also intensely collectivist. Its likely that they would not allow others in their community to fail without first helping them a great deal.
I run 2 Reddits on my calculator watch using C++ and CouchDB so clearly the technology is at fault here.
Oracle's Ellison: Pay King
How many steps you need to install Erlang on your machine: "sudo apt-get install erlang"?
Secrets of the First Moon Landing: All Nighters, Lost Footage...
Allow me to add another data point to your survey: software developer/entrepreneur own a four-year old crappy laptop and a netbook dual-booting Linux/win xp, have a MacBook pro for work. Just got an iPad and there really is no better way to keep a bunch of technical books on-hand. My favorite sins are lust and vanity :)
That's with a 5-cent CPM and a 50% block rate. Those are laughably conservative numbers. The actual numbers they could pull would be massively larger.
But also note that sometimes the "microsoft tax" manifests as a discount. Getting a cheapo Dell with windows, at least used to be, just a tad cheaper than assembling a similar spec'd one yourself. But I still assembled my own because it was a fun learning experience and you can focus more on getting a (more) future-proof motherboard and a solid PSU.
Actually, I'll call you on that. I think our collective addiction to air is HORRIBLE. Air oxidizes our tissues, causing aging, shortages prevent us from getting the most physical exertion, etc. If we didn't need air, we'd be much more capable. If someone could figure out a way to free us from this burden, we'd be better off running farther, staying young longer, and much much more.
Sigh... if their analysis is correct, and it seems to me Arstechnica is almost always correct, it really, really saddens me if Apple is sort of abandoning the Mac lineup for the iOS line up. Even though I no longer have an OSX machine, I still feel very fondly for that OS. :-(
There's actually a semi-secret version of the Ruby on Rails Tutorial book already updated for Rails 3.0.0.rc:

http://railstutorial.org/book?version=3.0.0.rc

Shhh... Don't tell anyone! :-)

(The official release of the Ruby on Rails 3 Tutorial book should happen some time in the next couple weeks, probably slightly ahead of the official Rails 3.0 release. Of course, the tutorial will also be updated after Rails 3.0 final drops.)
Might want to consider how many of their users use adblock of some sort.
Free PDF Field Guide to Typography
Users are actively hostile to ads in general. Reddit's userbase, in particular, has been spoiled by the staff's similar attitude towards ads. The fact remains that computing power, bandwidth, and storage takes money, which is easy for your average hostile-to-ads user to forget.

If they dropped in AdSense units, there would be an uproar for about a week, then people would adapt and life would go on with a significantly bolstered revenue stream. Worst that happens is that more users would still be adblocking, but given their page view volume compared to their expenses, I can't imagine that even that would be a net loss.
What is toadjaw? The homepage didn't seem to have any info.
x86 architecture is their core product (or rather the foundation for their core products), so they problably try to push it forward whenever they can, like Windows for MS (Windows Phone on a device without any actual windows...).
It's what they do for thirty years, so I suppose they think it's part of their DNA and will fail if they try anything else.
Re-read the post - I did, and at a very conservative number. :)
So, in summary, you asked different questions during a different time period and came up with different responses, but still feel happy claiming that the forrestor report somehow validates your own results? why?

"these are people who wanted to take a personality quiz"

that is exactly my point. what subset of iPad users want to take a personality quiz? there is a clear self-selection bias there that you are, for some reason I dont understand, entirely ignoring.

"I'm amused by a commenter who after 5 minutes of review feels confident enough to slam a study that took multiple people dozens of hours to complete"

mytype, Im not slamming it, its amusing, Im just pointing out the obvious. its not science you were engaged in, its opinionated blogging. Your blog post would have lost nothing if you had just skipped the dozens of hours work to implement the poll.

Its not a useful poll in any sense of the word.

Its a non-random poll of self-selected facebook users and gives your post about the same degree of additional validity as the personal anecdote below regarding the people I know who own iPads gives my posting.

"It's not complete BS either though"

in what sense of the word?

from a scientific POV it is a poll from a totally non-random sample with entirely unreliable results, into which you manage to project conclusions that happen to suit you.

That is not intended as a slam, it is simply a fact.

If you are unhappy with that fact, you should try harder next time to use a decent user sample.

or phrase things differently. Although the poll doesn't talk about iPad users as a group; not even close; it does give a clear result of what a subset of iPad owners, who belong to facebook and chose to take a personality quiz, might be intending.
VERY cool website! I noticed that none of the HD links would get a Newegg reseller (mostly Amazon and Buy.com). Is this because you don't have access to Newegg data or are the prices typically much higher?
Apple was explicitly campaigning against this, it's addressed in the article:

> The Electronic Frontier Foundation argued that jailbreaking one's iPhone should be allowed, even though it required one to bypass some DRM and then to reuse a small bit of Apple's copyright firmware code. Apple showed up at the hearings to say, in numerous ways, that the idea was terrible, ridiculous, and illegal. In large part, that was because the limit on jailbreaking was needed to preserve Apple's controlled ecosystem, which the company said was of great value to consumers.

----

Also, a previous article: http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2009/02/apple-sides-with-m...
Seems to be specific to IT companies. Plenty are starting in biotech.
I think the best way way to conceive of technological progress is in terms of node density, where each node is a person. That is why I define the following terms the way I do:

Web 1.0 lets individuals create and express ideas

Web 2.0 lets groups create and express ideas

Web 3.0 lets societies create and express ideas

Notice that what causes each qualitative shift are new inventions/innovations that allow for increasing densification of nodes. Notice also that it's a rather beautiful idea in the mathematical sense, because web 3.0 is different from web 2.0 in exactly the same way that web 2.0 is different than web 1.0.

That's why I hate this whole "web 3.0 is the semantic web" meme, because it's completely arbitrary and lacking in any parallelism.
Indeed, for the price of a trans-Pacific first class ticket, you could stay in a hotel room designed to look like a first class cabin, hire a comely young lady to bring you (and only you) all the cranberry juice you could drink in 16 hours, eat the best meal in town, get to pick your own movie, and have your doctor prescribe you something so that you spend the next actual plane flight unconscious.
I disagree that the only use of the original video is to determine the source. I don't care who the source is and I am still interested in understanding WikiLeaks' claim that super computer time was necessary.

If releasing what was leaked to them would endanger the source, they should say so. They have not released what was actually released to them if indeed what was released to them was an encrypted file.

I think there is a good case for the existence of an organization that disseminates and preserves these historical artifacts. It is becoming less clear that WikiLeaks is that organization.
PG said newsyc currently gets 60,000 unique visitors per day, and the # of ppl following these twitter feeds is barely 1% of that.

Though that doesn't say much to what percentage of the 60,000 are even users or logged in.. I suspect it's not a high percentage.
another golden essay. i love the concise writing style.
I defined bad as things you don't want to want. E.g. because while they give you initial pleasure, they might give you net less pleasure in the long run. Though that isn't the only reason you might not want to want something. For example, you might dislike the environmental cost, or the thing might conflict with some principle you held.

I don't think there's a sharp distinction between "real" addiction and other types. I think there's a smooth continuum. Even among things at the extreme, like addictive drugs, there's a continuum.
> almost every middle-class to upper-class person

Okay. That is only a fraction of the population of Brazil, which has long had one of the highest Gini coefficients in the world.