skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's not worse than Microsoft.

Apple does not have a monopoly in mobile devices. Apple is acting as a distributor and asking for a cut for being that distributor. There are other equally viable distributors - web apps, Android, maybe even WP7.

I'm sure the Angry Birds or Pixelmator people don't begrudge Apple taking a cut for giving them a massive amount of marketing and promotion - as well as an ultra-simple way of receiving payment (still a major stumbling block in the online world).

The key thing is how they enforce the external restrictions. It does make sense to say you need to offer the same terms externally as inside the App Store - to the consumer. The problem is that this can appear totally unreasonable to the developer. It all depends on enforcement - if they go after 30% of Highrise revenue because 37Signals have a native client we will know things are wrong.
Michael Abrash said something like Woz's quote also. Once you know it /can/ be done it somehow becomes easier. Often the less you know the better you are.

Example, in his black book abrash tells a story about working at number nine. Their got word that one of their competitors had put a FIFO buffer on one of their cards (this was the ISA period 386 era). The staff at number nine panicked. They were so close to being finished their design they didn't have the space for a FIFO. So they put a single bit write FIFO in.

Then they taped out and went to market, praying they could compete. Then the other card came out on the market.... with an 8byte read FIFO. At the time video memory was /dead/ slow, so everyone designed their programs to never, ever, ever read VGA memory. Instead you wrote to a virtual buffer and flipped it to the screen.

The results, number nine absolutely creamed the competition for some time. And people still didn't read VGA memory.

Moral: sometimes just knowing it can be done is all you need. and often too much knowledge will send you down the wrong path.
in a vacuum...
I haven't used AutoCAD since R13 and I was still a teenager working in an engineering office, but it was one of the best GUI/CLI hybrids I've ever used. You could learn with the GUI, and it would parrot the CLI commands in the command window. Eventually, you'd familiarize with the CLI commands through pointyclicky GUI usage and just rip through work at ridiculous speeds.

Mapping the commands (lisp-based DSL if I remember correctly...) to left-hand-only single key macros while your right hand moused the coordinates on the canvas ... holy crap was that fast. You could whip up fully qualified engineering drawings in a matter of minutes.
To me, the entire idea of IP is trying to artificially shoehorn the idea of property ownership onto ideas. Physical property is a zero-sum game. For me to make $20, someone has to lose $20. Intellectual property without patents isn't. If I can make something, then other people can as well. But when you have a patent, it turns into a zero-sum game just like physical property.
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A) forgive my pedantry, but I'm not sure that having illegal property seized in a civil proceeding counts as punishment. Distributing child porn is very illegal, and I don't see any benefit in allowing the domain to stay up while the trial proceeds.

B) I am not a fan of ever-expanding civil asset forfeiture policies either. But some things are illegal to possess and thus subject to forfeit in the first place. The contraband nature of such items are established before the seizure warrant issues, which is what happened here.

I agree with your aim, but not your analysis.
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Don't restaurants inside theme parks charge more for their food than outside? Maybe I'm wrong and have been visiting the wrong theme parks but that has been my experience.

They can get away with it because once you're inside the theme park, it's convenient to buy your food in there, instead of hauling it in from outside.
This isn't really a test of string theory. It's just applying equations that look like string theory to a different domain. From the article:

"Duff emphasized that this is only a test of string theory as it relates to quantum entanglement, not as a description of the fundamental physics of the universe."
> What company in their right mind takes an existing feature offline that users have come to rely upon while they develop a new version of that feature...

Tumblr? They pulled the exact same nonsense with search -- and other features, too.
Read this: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/23955/adobe-sponsore...
I'll bump the Aptfolk mention as well.

I work on http://tenderapp.com, a customer support system that Aptfolk uses with a lot of their clients.

Ash Ponders, the founder of Aptfolk, was doing support for Atebits Tweetie back when I first heard about them, as well as a number of other higher profile Mac and web apps.

They've done a great job with everything I've seen and are working on extending out a number of of services like high-end screencasts and video work, as well as documentation writing (something EVERY developer hates to do).

I've been doing professional customer support for web applications for over 6 years now, not to mentions the countless moderator rolls and communities I've been involved with over the years. This is definitely a market that's been long overdue. It's probably one of the most difficult roles we have to hire for here at http://entp.com as a small company with a tech savvy user base. Not only do you have to talk the talk and be fairly tech savvy, you have to understand and adapt to different types of users and cultures.

Culture is hard to teach though, and for an independent developer to be able to offload support quickly when things grow to people who have a clue what they are doing right out of the gates, that's a huge win.
Wrote an introduction to hosting a while ago if anyone's interested:
http://openmymind.net/2010/10/26/An-Introduction-To-Hosting

Goes beyond VPSs and tries to look at the different options, plus the options typically available.
I dont think the internalization principle holds up in todays life when the number of devices / tools / software we use is exploding. In a slower moving world with few tools there was an incentive to mastering the tools and then exploiting your skill. I personally find it useful to partition tools into two categories - the ones that I want to think about and the rest that I want to use without much thought.
Access private members in unit tests
My Puny Human Brain: Ken Jennings on playing against a supercomputer
Though a bit dated, I wrote a performance comparison of some of the providers mentioned in this article: http://journal.uggedal.com/vps-performance-comparison
Internalizing interaction is better when you want users to make a thoughtful, creative contribution to your community (or use tools which will, basically coding, CAD'ing, crafting; i.e. Threadless, Newgrounds, Etsy).

Externalizing interaction is better when you want to provide a mental framework to drive behavior (e.g. most viral hooks or premium upsells; i.e. Farmville, Facebook, App Store).
Don't think for one second you have any choice. You absolutely must fire him. Companies start to suck because of these people.

I highly recommend exchanging a generous severance (6-8 weeks) for a signed agreement waiving his right to sue for wrongful termination (and anything else).

Every day people sue companies because they know how easy it is to get them to settle. Get him to sign an agreement and pay him for it. Get a lawyer that specializes in labor law (in your state) to draft the template.
Good question - I wonder what the default breakdown of public vs. private shares for FB users are and how SERPs are weighting FB shares vs. tweets/retweets. Does anyone know what percentage of content on FB gets indexed?
In what way does Tornado not support psycopg2? Because the Tornado code includes some convenience functions for working with an unmodified MySQLdb driver, I assume that FriendFeed also used the MySQLdb driver with no modifications. If the MySQLdb driver works with Tornado, shouldn't psycopg2 also work?
All of those are examples of websites that would or do suffer from excessive use of javascript.
How are they going to get there? They could very easily pump up the shader count to get something that is "100x" performance, while not actually being 100x as powerful for general purpose operations. The graph looks shady to say the least.
As you say disk IO is a sore point with VPSes but it's something that in many cases isn't an issue or at worst can be worked around.

Many websites have production rigs involving DB machines with a lot of memory, web workers that rarely do IO and files stored in CDNs or S3 so the disk problems are less of an issue.

As you point out though when your dataset fiscally or practically won't fit in RAM then disk IO catches up to you and I'd certainly appreciate an SSD's random seek time.

It's also important to remember development becomes an entirely different beast with cloud infrastructure though. Even the best tested and reviewed code can't approximate all the variables in production so being able to launch an exact mirror of your production rig and throw recorded traffic at it becomes an amazing test. This is something not feasible in the past.
A small clarification: :-)

Being fairly new here at HN, I was not fully aware of the popularity of this community and actually speaking, the only context in which I made my observation was a comparison of general traffic/interest/engagement levels between HN and LATimes.
I can't imagine it won't, at least the next couple times.

But each time, it seems, takes less and less time (we were farmers for thousands of years, hunter gatherers for hundreds of thousands of years but the industrial revolution is only a couple hundred years old).

And when we can no longer use humans? I don't know, but it seems that the only way we can ever end up in that situation is if we have achieved general ai, which is to say that we will be at the cusp of the singularity.

The industrial revolution may have made the work horse obsolete, but it had only one use. Humans have many.
Exactly. That approach is the biggest benefit imo. With working copies synced via dropbox you can just switch Machines and continue were you left off without having to push incomplete/not working code. You also get a cloud backup of all your local changes for free.
Just dont work on a working copy that is out of Sync, but since you are only using this yourself, chances of corrupting something are much lower as with the approach described above.

For people with multiple machines this is awesomeness. Everybody else still benefits from the extra backup layer of dropbox.
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Canada: New Attacks on Two Government Departments
The only completely safe way to do this is to have a detached work tree in your Dropbox folder and your repository outside of it (i.e. set GIT_DIR and GIT_WORK_TREE, or provide --git-dir and --work-tree/core.worktree). That way each machine can automatically sync uncommitted work tree changes, which avoids the "push a crummy commit because I'm leaving work / boarding a flight / on a boat" problem, but you still use the conventional Git mechanisms for transferring objects between repositories, which avoids the "I'm afraid of conflicting refs / repository corruption" problem.
Bankruptcy != closing down

See: tribune company, gm, chrysler, delta, us airways..
I don't think the down-vote was necessary. I agree it will always look bad, and obviously they need to do better. But there's no logical inference about the quality of the work they do for clients that can be made from them not securing themselves. In particular, if they are busy and thorough with clients they may not have the time to sort themselves out. As the saying goes...

Dogfooding is not so appropriate, regular testing of software/cooking through continuous use is quite different to infrequent security attacks. Perhaps they are testing intrusion detection ;)
Or this one:

"Big congrats to @IBMWatson & the amazing team behind its Jeopardy success. Watson is the real deal. Now: rematch on Dancing with the Stars!"
I'm glad they're working well for you, but I'm not working on rumours - I just spent over a week and about a dozen phone calls trying to fix a mistake they made. Eventually they did accept that the mistake was at their end, but until that point their service was appalling. To their credit, though, they did seem to take a lot of notice of the feedback form I submitted.
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I want to hold a trial before any punishment can be meted out.

You may be in luck. It just so happens that at least one member of the US Supreme Court doesn't believe punishment can be inflicted before conviction because the entire concept of punishment requires a conviction. That's right, there is no such thing as pre-trial punishment by definition.

As for B, you can't always sue to get it back. In fact, under my understanding I'd say you rarely can.

http://reason.com/archives/2010/11/29/covering-their-assets
>Also, slightly contradictarily, natural selection/evolution don't provide much pressure for a species to change after it's gotten wildly successful.

It provides pressure for the species to change to adapt to its wild success (e.g. to become "fat and lazy"). That development of the wild success may also lead to significantly changed conditions (e.g. global warming as a result of the wild success of homo sapiens)

>Have we had any physiological brain changes since agriculture?

it is only 10000 years, and yes, we had. The physiological changes are observable even for the last 100 years.

>And now that medicine is becoming so effective, natural selection doesn't really work on the fitness of people, just their ability to have more children.

that phrase sounds like oxymoron.

Anyway, natural selection is like Newton's laws - it can't be turned off. It works non-stop. It ensures fitness to whatever current conditions are. In particular, right now, it ensures fitness of human species to the condition of "medicine is becoming so effective".
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2221039
Amazon.com
I personally don't care about apple very much as a company and own a few of their products. My reasoning for it was simple:

1) I can't use Windows. I need to be able to open an actual terminal, so Windows has never really worked for me. I don't have anything against Windows or Windows users.

2) I've run a number of distributions on my laptop from Gentoo and Slackware to Ubuntu and Redhat (I stopped before Fedora). I've never gotten good battery life, even on the most custom kernels and running only fluxbox, a shell and a web browser.

I need a web browser, a terminal, and a music player from a computer and good battery life. Apple/OS X does it for me, but I don't fall into the fangirl category and stay up waiting for a new iAnything to be released nor do I rag on them.

Is there a place for people who just use what works best for them?
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I'd say VPSs are great if you're CPU bound, okay if you're memory bound, and terrible if you're disk IO bound.

Basically, CPU time is an abundant resource that's easily partitioned, but can be shared. So, you're guaranteed your share, but you often actually get more than your share.

Memory is strictly partitioned. You always get your share, no more, no less.

Disk is almost impossible to partition fairly (performance, not space). Furthermore, the more active disk users there are the worse the total performance is, so if you're unlucky enough to have a neighbor that uses a lot of disk IO than you effectively get double screwed.

What would be interesting is if someone came up with a VPS with dedicated disk resources, but as far as I know no one has done that.
So you're saying that it's OK as long as the charges are serious enough?
Thanks for this Mohit - we take privacy very seriously, and only collect the necessary data to auto-complete collaborators emails within the widget.

Key board shortcuts are a great idea, that definitely increases accessibility and speed.

We do have a user guide: http://www.taskforceapp.com/guide - and we also maintain a getsatisfaction page.
Seems to me they should let people click their buzzers as soon as they want to, and then just take whoever clicked first. Having to wait for the question to finish being asked seems like it makes it a lot more random rather than skill-based.
Then by all means build such a single-server Watson clone and program it!

What's the prize? Can I get the same access IBM had, including a show appearance if my implementation is competitive enough?

(I'm not saying the task is easy enough for an unpaid hobbyist to attempt; I am saying IBM's 10 racks of 9 maxed-configuration machines seems more designed for promotional optics than to match the task at hand.)
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cool idea. good luck!
I wondered the same, yet you have xobni, rapportive and this fresh new task-force.

Perhaps this is just the beginning, helping you getting things done, by first organizing your mail, transforming them into traceable tasks, and next would be a full blown task-force solution
I was put off by the derogatory terms for people doing legitimate work. If you feel these jobs are being obsoleted by technology, fine. Don't insult people who have them.
Not asynchronously.
I disagree with that definition of spam, it's more like "freemium". Pay for the convenience of not having to scroll to the bottom of the page? Or simply pay for the answer if you want it and you don't know about the scrolling thing - it's their right to charge for content. All they're doing is advertising that they have the answer and trying to make sure as many people as possible pay to find out what that answer is, because that's their business model.

It's fine if they're irrelevant, it's fine if you'd prefer to be part of a stack exchange community, it's fine if you block them in Google or only search "site:stackoverflow.com how to shot codez" so you never have to look at them again - but the scathing retorts treating these people as valueless carrion who don't even deserve to be on the internet is completely unwarranted!

Really, what I object most to is that people are attacking the characters of those involved and calling them slimy and sleazy because they chose a subscription based business model for their Q&A site. A valid decision that has obviously worked.

It's not like they're Jamster ringtone club tricking kids into spending thousands on their phone bills to get an animated crazy frog singing the most insipid song ever created, they're just providing a service and trying to get money in return.
One suggestion: goal URLs should use a salted hash key, so that they aren't so easily guessed. Alternatively, implement some kind of access control so that you can only see goals you are a party to. Otherwise, seems great, I'm trying it out!
"I can't move an Android app onto my iPhone either, despite its lack of DRM, and whether the blocker is legal or technical is irrelevant."

That's actually Apple's fault too. There is an Android runtime for iOS (http://www.xmlvm.org/android/). However, as far as I understand Apple's store rules, such a runtime must not be used for applications.
As the author of this post, I want to make clear that I did not originally title this thread or submit it. In this post, I made every effort to convey respect to the hosts of this event who quite obviously had great motives.

For all of the people out there who are interested in fostering female tech founders, I hope my feedback was useful.
Physical property is only a zero sum game if you steal the money.

To make twenty dollars you have to create and sell something that is worth more than twenty dollars to the buyer. This is possible because not everyone values things the same. If you have a bread factory you have enough bread that you will value it less than me, who would otherwise go hungry.

So yes, you lose a bread and I gain one, but you value the price higher and i value the bread. Who lose?
Yeah, the battery life thing is a real killer. My work computer is a sony vaio running linux. I like it well enough but it only gets 2.5 hours on a new battery! It's far and away the biggest drawback of this computer.
True; some people haven't even learned to use search/replace properly, let alone macros in their word processing tool.
Some tasks they spent hours or days on could be done in a few minutes, given just a little bit knowledge.

Then again. Does Joe Sixpack benefit from being more productive? After all, usually they aren't paid more when they do more work, so there isn't that much incentive...
>as opposed to selling treasury notes to voluntary buyers; in essence, borrowing.

...from the Federal Reserve, which printed money for that purpose. "Quantitative easing" is printing money just as surely as if they'd fired up printing presses at the mint.
The paper (unfortunately behind the ACM paywall) makes for very interesting reading.

There are a couple of points in the paper that aren't mentioned in the article.

The first one is the the difference between low and high NFC (need for cognition) individuals. The paper defines NFC as follows: A person with a high NFC loves to seek, reflect on and reason about information, whereas someone on the other end of the continuum only thinks as hard as (s)he has to and is inclined to rely on others. Their results show that low NFC folks actually took longer to complete the internalized version of the task while the high NFC folks took longer to do the externalized version. This reaffirms Haldar's point, but with a caveat - his conclusions are applicable only to "power users".

The other interesting thing was that both low and high NFC individuals got started on the task much faster (the paper calls it time to first move) with the externalized version. Presumably, all the individuals were told they _had_ to complete the task while in the "real world" many might have just given up. If you're designing an application, this is a useful lesson, getting started should be easy (i.e., an externalized interface). I guess this is also traditional wisdom, but it's nice to see this confirmed by peer-reviewed research.
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I have been working for more than 3 years on a similar thing. I have to admit that you nailed it focusing on a simple interface with just the essential features. I still like mine better of course ;) but I am overloading mine (notepub.com) with features very few people use, just because I am having fun at it. And I do not have the capacity to expand to mobile apps, so I am kind of stuck.
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needs? is there some type of law for this where you live?

Have you seen the list of production sites running on EC2? (http://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/) Linode also has some pretty impressive sites...linode.com probably being the most obvious one.