skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This topic always brings me back to the same place: As a culture, when it comes to the "rich" and the "wealthy" we tend to focus almost exclusively on revenue (income) and assets (stuff). Anyone who looks at a simple income statement and balance sheet knows that there is a lot more to the equation.

If someone makes $500k and spends $500k, not only is their net income $0, they have added nothing to their net worth. Conversely, someone who makes $75k and spends $30k has a positive net income of $45k and adds $45k to their net worth. However, because we don't have nearly as much insight into the income statements and balance sheets of our neighbor, we compare our "income" and "stuff" to their "income" and "stuff" (as opposed to what we really should be comparing which is net income and net worth).

I'm also reminded of a great book by P.T. Barnum called The Art of Money Getting (http://manybooks.net/titles/barnumptetext05barnm10.html). It was published in 1880, but it's amazing how relevant it still is. He tells some great stories about life, money, and wealth. This is one of my favorites:

"I know a gentleman of fortune who says, that when he first began to prosper, his wife would have a new and elegant sofa. "That sofa," he says, "cost me thirty thousand dollars!" When the sofa reached the house, it was found necessary to get chairs to match; then side-boards, carpets and tables "to correspond" with them, and so on through the entire stock of furniture.

When at last it was found that the house itself was quite too small and old-fashioned for the furniture, and a new one was built to correspond with the new purchases; "thus," added my friend, "summing up an outlay of thirty thousand dollars, caused by that single sofa, and saddling on me, in the shape of servants, equipage, and the necessary expenses attendant upon keeping up a fine ’establishment,’ a yearly outlay of eleven thousand dollars, and a tight pinch at that: whereas, ten years ago, we lived with much more real comfort, because with much less care, on as many hundreds.

The truth is," he continued, "that sofa would have brought me to inevitable bankruptcy, had not a most unexampled title to prosperity kept me above it, and had I not checked the natural desire to ’cut a dash’."
does anyone know why the default location is cupertino in the ios simulator? i want to think it's because of speed (why take time to find your location during each run?), but i'm starting to wonder if it's because the difficulty in getting an accurate location lock on a wifi network for example.

i've found that detecting geolocation on a non-mobile device such as a laptop (even using the latest w3c navigator.geolocation standard) is pretty unreliable. it took me some searching to figure out that the function has an infinite timeout by default, which makes debugging interesting. sometimes just doesn't get the location at all. a professor had expressed the same sentiments in more length here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3397585/navigator-geoloca...
Website 2 Backup v1.0.1 Released
Thanks Alex, I sincerely hope to in the future, but it isn't in the cards for a few years! We do tastings in Chicago however, I can put you on the list if you send me your email: tony@chicagoteagarden.com
Heh. Until yesterday my linkedin inbox was filed with ignored offers from them
A brief reflection on the "Chinese Mothers" controversy
I'm just having a hard time understanding why they're ok with bundling the Flash player with Chrome, but not carrying an h264 decoder.
Rest in piece Hudson, long live Jenkins.
Delegates (1.0) are types specifying method references, anonymous delegates (2.0) are anonymous code-blocks making usage of delegates, and lambdas (3.0) are just defined delegates with generic variables.

"for" is different than "foreach", and "for" is there because the language being named "C#" it had to have some heritage from C. Also all ForEach methods are built on top of IEnumerable.

I.e. features are built on top of each other.

For the record I think implicit conversions are a great idea, that properties are OK, and extension methods are cleaner than open classes.

Not to mention, there's stuff you can do with extension methods / implicit conversions that you cannot do with open classes (and viceversa).
Consider the similar site Photoshop Disasters. That mocks the designers who make the images. But it's had value in pointing out the ludicrous editing that fashion ads and magazines are guilty of, twisting women's bodies into ridiculous impossible forms.

And, to some extent, has probably created some pressure on advertisers to not do that, because they'll be mocked.
> Sometimes specializing in just observation/criticism and not creation allows you more time to think things over from the standpoint of analysis, whereas creation demands that a large portion of your mental energy goes to the creation process.

This sounds suspiciously like saying that you're an "ideas man". The reality is that the barrier to creation is so low in the digital world that if you are criticizing without bothering to learn how to create, I have a hard time telling you apart from the guys who would generously let me do all the work on their idea for 5% of the profit.

If you have opinions on good design, put them into practice; don't just stand on the sidelines cursing at everyone who is trying.
My guess is patents. And they already have great H264 implementations. And hardware support.

What would be the benefit, to them or their users, if they used WebM?
Actually, if you have such negative expectations, you might be pessimistic enough that even success wouldn't make you happy.

But for other people, yeah, things coming out that much better than expected would be a good thing.
The Optimal Quantity of Violent Rhetoric
That would imply decoding in software. H.264 is currently decoded in hardware on those devices.
You can equally argue that Apple's stance on video and on Flash is hurting users.
Doesn't Credit Suisse have pretty active HFT desk?

Just another way to shaft their own customers, isn't it?
I'm kinda tired of this Google openness, especially when it so congenially damage their competitors. It would have been different if they never implemented it in first place, but this now it just looks like a move to target Apple.
Keep in mind Apple devices have HARDWARE h.264 decoders. It may not be as simple as you think.
Apple is fully behind HTML5 - http://www.apple.com/html5/
Rate my startup: Simplton
It has been almost 8 months since I was shellacked in the hacker news comments (which I totally appreciate btw) for bad design/ui/ux.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1282132

Simplton is back after a total overhaul. I am hoping it is better but don't pull any punches. Please be "that guy" (or gal).

http://simplton.com
and
http://simplton.com/screenshots
Yes, in the financial context they have a low risk profession. They can have greater than 90% confidence that if they do the same thing they did the previous year (likely, working very hard at a task they are very skilled in), that they will earn about the same amount they earned that year, usually adjusted up for inflation. Do you disagree, or are you using some other definition of risk?
Isn't this basically Glympse minus the timer element?

http://gigaom.com/2010/12/17/8-apps-for-the-new-smartphone-o...
The father, apparently. "I prefer this to the alternative."
Great work guys! Do you have plans to support UK/EU cards in the future?
It's sufficient only if you conflate design and visual aesthetics.

Since the blog in question hammers on apps that don't follow the Apple HIG, a document dedicated to the argument that good design is a lot more than visual aesthetics, this is an oddly contradictory position for him to attempt to occupy.
Comment of the year right here, folks. +4 already too. Thank heavens its a throwaway, how embarrassing.
Yet they don't remove flash. Wouldn't that also be in the best long term interest for users?
There is a real conflict when designing systems for control of these types of processes, between "too much alarming" and "not enough alarming". They both have the same consequence -- a lack of trust in the control software. The too much alarming case is obvious, but the too little case also leads to a lack of trust like this:

1. software doesn't alarm when operator thinks it should

2. bad consequence

3. thoughts of "software doesn't work"

4. valid alarm not trusted in the same way too many false positives.

This sequence of events is not necessarily rational, but it is human non-the-less.

There is a lot of really cool work going on, and a lot more to be done, in this space. Current best practices include lots of training for operators, who do an awful lot of "flying the factory by feelings and hunches", rather than by good, informed software interaction.
HTML prototypes are good for web applications but not so much for marketing type websites. I use HTML prototypes as a tool for getting the initial set of requirements and setting some scope.
>"rage at the way Apple flouts the HIG."

I don't see any of the rage at http://readthefuckinghig.tumblr.com/ being directed at Apple. Somehow I suspect it would be hard for one who holds the guidelines in such reverence to do so.
I love to hate on Apple's decisions, but this is just ludicrous.
What are you implying?

That he is wrong and the price is too high or that there are few that would be willing to pay the price today?

If it's the former I disagree wholeheartedly. If it's the latter then - well played sir, for depressing me on this fine Tuesday.
I mentioned that in the blog post under "The competitive scare"
I thought it was because the rest of us were just lazy freeloaders or otherwise morally undeserving!
| Income inequality in the United States is higher than in any other advanced industrial democracy and by conventional measures comparable to that in countries such as Ghana, Nicaragua, and Turkmenistan. It breeds political polarization, mistrust, and resentment between the haves and the have-nots and tends to distort the workings of a democratic political system in which money increasingly confers political voice and power.

Queue the libertarian rhetoric to rationalize this with another meritocracy (blame the poor) argument.
I'd say the vast majority of apps area ripoff. The majority are available on various websites for free.
Ya, me too.

ducks
Do you not like Todd & Holland? I live down the street from it and it seems pretty awesome to me.
Has everyone so quickly forgotten that Flash will soon support WebM playback? It's a significant point in the discussion. With any flash capable browser having WebM support, along with native support in Firefox, Chrome, Opera... it seems there is some sense in this move.

It does seem a bold strategy, I would have probably waited at least a bit longer.

Edit: Oh, "These changes will occur in the next couple months"
<rant>
"de facto standard" is a meaningless, self-contradictory phrase that really boils down to saying "But this is the way we've always done it!"

Standards are not de facto. Standards are things created by standards bodies. The word has an actual meaning. Trying to twist it to mean "the way we do stuff now" (as your argument for h.264 does) or "the way I want to do stuff" (as many arguments for HTML5 (which doesn't have a standard yet) do) is intellectually dishonest.
</rant>
I'm actually really terrible of letting go of work, but one of the things I noticed is that part of that is the fact that I'm trying to keep track of too much in my head.

"I'll have to remember to copy config file X over if I move process Y to machine Z tomorrow"
"I have to factor out that piece of code, this will be the 3rd time I've written something similar"
"Call person about thing"
"Email other person about other thing"

Instead, with my piece of paper, I remember one thing:

"I need to read my notes tomorrow".

It allows me to focus a little better.
The article repeatedly points out that it "feels like" a cosmic conspiracy, while never actually claiming that's the case. In fact the article makes a fine point that there is no conspiracy. My take away was that in the pursuit of the truth of a surprising hypothesis a surprisingly high percentage of scientists and their peer-reviewed journals gloss over some of the major underpinnings of the scientific method, like data that directly refutes a finding and a reluctance to reconsider a new world-view in light of evidence that suggest said new world-view is likely false.

Of course, we could all just go back and read Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions again and realize that science, as a human endeavor, is still usually susceptible to human weaknesses. It's the radical idea that gets glossed over, until it doesn't. Then everything changes. But do you have the balls to go back if it turns out that that which changed everything was more than likely false?

Also, let's not go claiming things that can't be proved. Like that the universe doesn't care what we believe. How can you know a thing like that?
People are not afraid to buy expensive things with phones
Here is some data from our users on what kinds of searches and wishlists people there are for local products using our iPhone and Android application. It turns out people like to buy and sell larger items, regardless of screen size.
I'm sure the reasons are just a) they wanted to hard-code a location for the simulator, since it doesn't have a GPS, and b) Apple is located in Cupertino.

For my GPS-app, we have code to simulate fake GPS readings on the simulator.
It's true that my impressions are based on all I've known about the backgrounds of execs I've been impressed with, rather than a proper survey / random sampling. Perhaps the 80% come from more mundane middle management backgrounds; I don't have enough data to tell.
Because Apple uses h.264 in all their hardware. They have implementations on firmware so they could accelerate video on their iPhones, iPads, iPods, even making specific hardware for it.

This makes this videos to perform great on their hardware, fast and taking less resources(more battery),it lets them make things like editing video in real time on your phone, but only works for one codec.

If they use software codecs, all their competitive advantages are lost on mobile.
Because Flash is an established "standard", while the HTML5 <video> tag is not.
Google dropped their own O3D plugin to adopt the open standard WebGL. They also sunsetted Google Gears to push HTML5 offline storage (some say prematurely)

They also based their browser around Webkit which is promoted by their main rival Apple (although based on the original KHTML) and many Google engineers are bullish about the Apple endorsed LLVM for the Portable Native Client code.
well they are nothing alike. Flash player is a free but proprietary implementation of an swf player. H264 is a licensed and patented codec specification.
Bacteria Work as Hard Drives
Apple's stance on Flash does hurt users. But its stance on vodeo? Hardly. They chose an established, proven format that has hardware decoding capabilities. That means they could include it cheaply, and in a way that doesn't drain battery like a software decoder would.
Great story. But look how times have changed. I can't imagine many company leaders today choosing to stand their ground and put their own heads on the chopping block. I'm not sure when it happened, but this kind of servant leadership doesn't seem to exist today.
Anyone have recent examples of stories like this?
it doesn't drop internet when it rings, it drops when you answer. right?
Mainly this: http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20100520/googles-royalty-...
I think you mean var, not val.

If you were using val you would do:

class Kitty(val purrVolue: Int)

which would turn out to be in Java:

public class Kitty {
private final int purrVolume;
public Kitty(final int purrVolume) {
this.purrVolume = purrVolume;
}
public int getPurrVolume() { return purrVolume; }
}
"It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat." - Theodore Roosevelt, April 23, 1910
Have you even read the blog? The UIs in question are, for the most part, immediately recognizable as bad. It's not about artistic or aesthetic interpretation. It's about this is not how any sane or competent person would design UI.
Stop trolling. Your reply is off-topic. Parent was talking about a trend he is noticing, you're shouting about openness.
Where I live, It's rural and all the GSM and CMDA are in the kinda sorta 1 bar on a good day category. The only one that works everywhere around the island is Sprint's IDEN network (which they got from Nextel), but the phones are really expensive, the plans are worse, and there's no coverage anywhere else.
Mastering this idea of helping people reach their goals
I know anecdotes aren't data but I doubt she's unique in this regard.

Yes, my experience is the same. Don't discount the power of free minutes for calling inside your network. If all your friends and family are on Verizon, not only do you worry about your phone bill going up, but the network effect of everyone else saying their bill will go up too is intense.

I've been trying to change networks for years, but my wife has always successfully talked me out of it, not because of my contract (which would go down on T-Mobile) but because hers would go up so much it would be a net loss (she likes to talk to me, which I guess is a good thing :) )
Agree - we primarily do product development, so it's usually relevant for us. I will say we've implemented HTML prototypes for checkout processes in the past with some success as well.

Can you elaborate on how you've used them to set scope?
On Google Dropping Support for H.264 in Chrome
It is thinking contrary to this man's words that cause the general public to say things like "Sure being x-rayed at the airport is invasive, but it's better than the alternatives".

We should never give up freedoms because of random and incredibly rare acts of violence.
Global Warming explained
Criticism isn't often worth anything, just demonstrating a sterile person trying to find other things to do than make. Until we see some world class design from the anon behind FTFHIG, their opinion is worth 0.

Alexander Pope's Essay on Criticism -

'Let such teach others who themselves excel,
And censure freely who have written well;
Authors are partial to their wit, 'tis true,
But are not Critics to their judgment too?'
A paper which explores success and failure when using freemium (PDF)
Yet the number one reason there isn't a codec specified in HTML5 is because Apple blocked it.
AFAIK they're not going to stop handing off video tags to Flash Player, because they never started doing that in the first place.
LunchTree Hits Bay Area for Random Geek Connections
I think the part about TPM simply isn't true. The reason OS X doesn't run on normal X 86 machines by default doesn't have anything to do with the TPM, there even isn't a TPM anymore in modern macs. You could use the TPM similar to how you can use an eToken to securely store your private key and sign stuff in hardware, it doesn't pose any limitations on your system.

Read this for more in-depth info:

http://www.osxbook.com/software/tpm-emulator/

http://osxbook.com/book/bonus/chapter7/tpmdrmmyth/
Very impressive :) Thank you!
I'm sure they'll do that after Adobe sends an invoice to the Gnash project.
From the bits and pieces that I have read, there are some very real patent questions still looming.

Jason Garett-Glaser put together a great comparison of h.264 vs VP8/WebM. Check it out here:
http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/377

His summary: the spec is really terrible, the performance leaves a lot to be desired (though, there is a lot of room for optimization), and it 'copies too much from H.264 for comfort'.
Boston Android Meet-up Recap 1/10/2010
The kid who merely has 1560 SAT and state violin awards won’t get into Harvard. The people running admissions for top-tier schools are looking for freshmen who are “well-rounded” as well as smart, and they want a “diverse” student body as well. If you show up with exactly the same extracurricular activities on your resume that a thousand other pushed-to-overachieve seventeen-year-olds all over the country have, you are at a disadvantage.
I know this is an uncommon argument against HFT - I've only heard Tyler Cowen pushing this argument, but it's the one I find most plausible.

As I said, a certain amount of HFT is a good thing. If I thought it was harmful, I'd quit my job as an HFT programmer and find something else [1]. I'm just pointing out that there are costs, which don't necessarily outweigh the benefits after a certain point.

[1] This was a major reason why I quit my job as a postdoc, rather than trying to become a professor. I believe college is mostly rent seeking and I don't feel it's right to participate in that.
I think this is a great idea. I would add one feature: send a 2nd text message when you're within 1 mile. (Or whatever distance you choose.) My girlfriend wants me to notify her before I actually get to her apartment. Having my smartphone do this for me automatically would be awesome! (This way I don't need to use my phone while I'm driving.)
CDMA iPad coming to Verizon, too, says CFO