skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No... if performance is already sufficient for most tablet users (and I'd argue it is - as an iPad owner I have my complaints but "it's too slow" it's really high on the list) then you won't see this happen. It will be some other product feature, like weight, or battery life, or cost, that will be the axis that you see competition focused on.

Marketing folks would love to have consumer focus on a metrics like performance that constantly keeps growing and outdating old products. Other metrics, like price and customer experience, are often just as important to buyers.

To give a parallel example, I don't think most HDTV owners are going to replace their set at this point for higher resolution. If you have 720 you probably don't care all that much about 1080 unless you're an AV geek. So that market is now competing on two other axes: cost (how cheap can you get it for a given size) and they're also pushing 3D.
8. Get people using Git (and more generally, get more people using version control for their projects)

9. Made it popular to post more than just projects (off hand I'm thinking about dot/config files)

10. Make it easier to actually provide patches to open source projects
Isn't that just for prototyping/development?
GitHub has managed to take advantage of the Git hype and make code social in a way that SF or Google Code never could. Today's SF, although powering lots of high profile floss projects, feels increasingly dated with its traditional developer-user model. Google Code is arguably even less social and definitely lacking in features. GitHub, finally, looks great, is easy to use and has a lot of small yet very neat features that making coding easier.
But then you still leave the user responsible for getting the site up and running under mod_wsgi, etc., correct?
Just curious, have you ever tried GitCheetah?
https://git.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/MSysGit:GitCheetah

I've never experienced the crashes you describe but I've never used Tortoise either. YMMV, I suppose.
Can't remember where but I saw a service that described itself as "buysellads for e-newsletters" the other day.
No it doesn't include them. It only applies to apps on Facebook.com. Also known as canvas apps or iframe apps. Connect apps also known as Facebook for Websites are still free to use AdSense...which is why I converted my app to be a Facebook for Websites app this week.
Casino-rules blackjack sim (by MIT bio undergrad/Wharton mgmt PhD student)
Thats a cool idea. I'd never heard of location-relevancy before, but it sounds way more useful to me than locations other big startup area: 'tell me where my friends are'.
Thank you! We want to judge to what extent companies from different industries have different conversion needs, and hopefully help a few HN companies in the process. This will help us evaluate a startup idea that we are considering.
Twitter Updates iPhone App, But "In-Stream" Ads Still Coming
So it has the potential of preserving your privacy and macworld spins that into a story that it is bad because what if the state wants to violate that privacy, well it might not be as easy as they would hope and that is a bad thing. It's very interesting that only one perspective is presented in these sorts of articles, it smacks of placement as part of an anti-freedom propaganda campaign orchestrated by governmental interests. Frame the debate not as privacy violation, but of terrorists getting away with something.
Real programming language as in a language that powers a large chunk of the most visited web sites on the internet?

I don't do any PHP myself and my few forays into it didn't leave me impressed but I don't see how you can disparage it as not a "real language".
Baidu's Online Maps Avoid Censors by Making China Look Like 'Sim City'
In this respect, I think github's killer feature over sourceforge is its focus on people instead of projects. Perhaps we could call it an increased democratization of open source.

Sourceforge is centered around projects. You have to register and get approval for each project separately (at least you did a few years ago, it has been a long time since I last went through the exercise). This left a significant percentage of projects with descriptions of the author's intent, but no actual code. It also meant that any third party contributions had to go back through the author (who might have lost interest).

I have never seen a project on github with no code. There is no approval process. You simply push and you are up and running. Forking allows others to start contributing right away without any action from the original author (and github really encourages you to fork projects). Then the tools that github provides makes collaboration way easier than it was in the past (pull requests vs emailing patches).

I agree with all of the things the author notes, but I really think this is github's killer feature. (Hope I didn't come off as too much of a github fanboy).
The unstated assumption here is that working hard in college actually pays off for a student later in life. Many college graduates end up doing work unrelated to their majors. Even those who do work related to their majors are required to take classes in things they don't need to know. And many college professors give assignments that take a lot of time without providing students much benefit.
I delete files all the time and so do you. Describing this normal and routine occurrence using the nefarious sounding and certainly biased term "destroying data" is absurd.
A good example: http://j.map.baidu.com/ib8C
Fox also aired the X-Files! Talk about an agenda!
Might not be the best example - but I think my overall point stands.
I have been observing startups for the last decade and SEO has definitely gotten way harder recently for startups. Believe it or not.
Successful Entrepreneurs should have Happy Family
With github, it generally feels like the focus is on a developer, whereas with something like sourceforge the focus is on the project/code. I'm not saying that like it's a bad thing either - I think it's generally been a positive shift.
Convert Ruby 1.8 to 1.9.2
> Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. - http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Weare police charge man for recording traffic stop
He wouldn't get any support calls because it would be very hard to get a paying customer to use a Java API like this. In particular, TakenBack.fold() isn't idiomatic Java.

In other words, he's basically defined the question so that only people who think like him can answer it. And yet, this isn't the only way to write a tic tac toe solver.
Huh? You said this:

> Wait - Prosecutors can infer guilt because I purged my hard drive?

Right after quoting this:

> "The fact that data has been purged does not mean a human knowingly did it (e.g. accidental guilt).

How did you manage to infer the exact opposite of what you just quoted?
We'd love to get feedback on our application as well, but we're not based in either of those places. Can any alum review it remotely? - over email, phone..?
I have a small but growing daily stock-related newsletter (3500 subscribers in 45 days). So far, I really have no methods of monetizing it and the monthly sendgrid bill doesn't pay itself. If that service existed, I'd give it a try.
See how "PG is hurting the kids"? :) anyways, seriously I also find it hard to believe that someone with this kind of skill is willing to work for minimum wage. And seriously a successful startup will never be built by someone willing to work for minimum wage! Sorry to say this but you got issues bro!
That's not necessarily true. If salary increases over time, you would expect him to hit median halfway through his/her career, on average (assuming rate of new programmers joining and old ones leaving is about the same). Of course, if more are joining and the population is increasing, s/he could hit it a lot sooner assuming s/he doesn't drop out.
In more detail: Wendy, the creator, is a blackjack aficionado with a science background who wanted to build something to explore the probable returns of various standard blackjack strategies, given various parameters such as number of decks, number of shoes played, bet size, and starting bankroll.

From the site: "This simulator gives you some idea about how your bankroll may fluctuate during a playing session. The 'player' in this simulator follows the blackjack basic strategy, and the rules are based on those of a typical Las Vegas casino."

Please don't think this is a web casino spam.

The sim is implemented in NetLogo. AFAIK source isn't available, but maybe she'd release it if asked.

She's interested in feedback, I suppose from anyone with related knowledge or interests.
Sure there is a lot of knowledge work associated with what you mentioned, and with most products out there. But there is a many-orders-of-magnitude difference between the manual labor aspect and the IP aspect of bringing a product to market.

(I know I'm taking a leap here, but) I believe this scale difference is a necessary part of the equation. There has been a growth in knowledge based jobs precisely because of growth in population plus growth in productivity in the output of manual labor jobs. In a world where production costs are near zero because its fully automated, there is still the built-in costs of the materials themselves. This puts a cap at how cheap a product can become. Unfortunately, 60% of the population now has no money to speak of so even a fully "optimized" price is too much. There will potentially be many dirt cheap products but not nearly enough customers to buy them.
All I can say is LOL
BitBucket's popular in the Python community, and I see a fair amount of stuff on Google Code. Open-source projects who want to use git but prefer a FOSS forge tend towards Gitorious. Some people even use Launchpad, although that tends to be mostly just Canonical.

Of course, none of these sites are Source Forge. Too little, too late.
As a Ruby developer its sometimes hard to know if a particular Gem is still being actively maintained or if there is a better, more recent alternative. I find that Github does an outstanding job solving both problems. If there haven't been commits in the last year (6 months?) I'll generally look elsewhere. That elsewhere is generally the "Network" page. :)
From what I've seen, a Github profile now influences the hiring process too.
Not a great example, but it's still disturbing to me how aggressive and universal SEO has become in the last few years. It's starting to feel like a 'virus writers versus Windows 98' situation, but with Google as the monoculture under assault.
This is an exercise in "How much can I enforce through the type system" rather than "How usable can I make the API."

It involves a great deal more type system calisthenics than I find "practical" in API design.
Disappointment
> I really don't use the maximise button ever, then again it is generally considered "broken" in Mac OS X anyway.

OS X doesn't have a maximize button. The purpose of the green button on OS X is to size the window based on the content, not on the screen size. For example, for a browser window it generally maximizes height and sets width to the minimum size that does not require a horizontal scroll bar.
Just to clarify, I never mentioned aid.

What's rational does of course depends on what axioms you have.

I guess its not obvious, so I'll explain my thinking.
I think there are two broad scenarios.

Scenario 1: You care about increasing well-being and life-expectancy globally in the system. In which case the money better spent making those who currently die young, live longer.
After all, if nothing else, it is extremely inefficient to have all those people dying in their prime.

Scenario 2: You care solely about increasing your own well-being, and not about whats best for the group. In which case, you'll keep your money to yourself, and try freeload off other peoples investment in longevity research. Because, unless you are exceedingly wealthy, your contributions will make very little difference to the overall research effort, but will make a very large difference to you. (Maybe you get sick, or circumstances change; for most people, their money has higher utility kept for such circumstances, than donated to a common research effort).
"liberals (whose ideals have paradoxically been claimed by conservatives in modern America)"

Resolving the paradox is easy. "Classical liberalism" [1] basically won, but it won a long time ago. If you stick to "classical liberalism" you're basically being a conservative in the stick-to-the-old-stuff-that-works sense. (Because you should never use the words "conservative" or "liberal" without being clear about exactly which meaning you are using. Leave them adrift and they are worthless.) What we call liberals today is not where the term started; call it "progressivism" if you like. But absolutely there is a way in which an older meaning of "liberal" matches up with the modern meaning of "conservative", without contradiction.

I wouldn't say it is correct to say conservatives have "claimed" liberal ideas; conservatives are (broadly) the ones who, for better or worse, never let go of them in their classical liberal form, while the term "liberal" moved on over the years and turned into something totally unrecognizable by the original meaning of the term. (I do not mean that as any sort of moral judgment. It is simply an observation that language shifts over time.)

[1]: In this sense: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_liberal
As if you didn't need more reasons to resent the iPad...
The article may have a point about startups that are "informational sites," but not everyone is doing that type of startup.

My startup is in enterprise software and services and I had more than $200k in additional revenue last year due to SEO (of course it took me two years to get any decent SEO traction, but it was still worth it). I should note that I didn't go after primary search terms, but got this mostly through long tail keywords that were directed at my niche.
Isn't this always the case? Startups exploit media or approaches that are new, overlooked, or both. If they weren't doing something odd they wouldn't be startups.

When they succeed, that focuses attention on the new media and techniques, and leads to crowded fields. Then the next generation has to come up with something else. Groupon did not grow on the back of SEO. It grew on a combination of Facebook, Twitter, cold-calls and good old-fashioned copywriting.

It may still be possible to succeed using some overlooked wrinkle of SEO, or SEO plus something else. It's even more likely to happen if everyone takes your advice to ignore SEO... except the one startup that doesn't.
knetworkmanager having a bug doesn't shock me, though my VPN seems fine in fedora 14 / kde 4.5.5. I did once have to start a wireless network from the command line after knm just refused. While not ideal, I'm sure you could run gnome's nm-applet instead - I don't think your vpn issue is indicative of a general kde quality issue, though everyone has their own standards. openSUSE 11.4 will be out on the 10th - it might be worth trying their livecd for a polished kde-centric view. I feel like Canonical commits most of their resources to their gnome build.
Please keep us updated when you have time. I have been interested in doing something similar to this, possibly in exchange for some design work on one of my own projects.

Now I've just got to find the time.
I've thought about going bicoastal with short-timers in NYC while maintaining my (thankfully rent-controlled) apt in SF, where is a good place to look for startup-y NYC gigs?
A statistics teachers from another class in my high school had a rock-paper-scissors game at the end of the year. But the catch was, you had to bet your mark in the game. If you won, he adds 1% to your final mark. If you lost, you lose 1% from your final mark. Of course, there was a statistics lesson at the end to be learned from it.

Even though it appears to be that you both have an equal chance to win (both of you have 33%), why would someone offer you an equal game unless he had some sort of advantage that you aren't aware of?

The trick was to look at the opponents hand while it was still going down. If you're throwing rock or scissors, your hand will be clenched the whole way down. If you were throwing paper, you will probably open your hand halfway down your throw.

So when he sees you opening your hand, midway he will change his to scissors. And if it doesn't stay open, then he will use rock, since between rock and scissors, rock will either win or tie. It required a bit of hand dexterity, but he practiced wing-chun, so it wouldn't have been a problem for him. Of course, the trick doesn't work 100% of the time, so you were allowed a maximum of two tries discounting ties, preventing kids from getting winning streaks.

It was a pretty interesting lesson, and I was glad that I skipped my statistics class to go to his.
You seem to be assuming that knowledge-based workers can deplete the corpus of knowledge work.

I don't think that's the case; once one program is written, another will be needed, once one drug is discovered, there will be still more diseases to cure and more side effects to eliminate.

I'd even go so far as to say that knowledge work is growing and will continue to grow - The more you know, the more you know you don't know, right? There wasn't a need for working on computers or airplanes as short as a century ago. Now how many people are employed in those fields?
I think this is the video Gell-Mann is talking about where Feynman "advocated on national television that people not brush their teeth": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsgBtOVzHKI&feature=playe... . He doesn't actually advocate it, but uses it as an example of how to look at the world.
WebGL game: Tankworld
It's basically a PITA for corporate taxes for a company to accept free work that contributes to their bottom line, as well as the AOL case noted elsewhere.
BitBucket actually does everything GitHub does on that list of ways that GitHub supposedly changed the world. In fact, I find the BitBucket interface generally easier to use and easier on the eyes -- and, my God, the colors on the GitHub issue tracker pages are fucking awful.

. . . but somehow GitHub gets so much attention that many people think it's the only code hosting site in the world, just like so many idiots think that Ubuntu is the only open source operating system in the world.
A Look at Influence and Charlie Sheen
Yes. You install dropbox software on all the computers you want to share the files on and dropbox synchronizes the dropbox folders on all the computers. When you copy a file to the dropbox folder on one computer, dropbox copies the file to the dropbox server (in the background) and then down to all the other computers you installed dropbox on.

Dropbox says they encrypt the files, but they hold the key so the encryption doesn't guarantee privacy. You can encrypt the file before putting it in the dropbox folder which will guarantee privacy (to the extent that your encryption is strong), but you have to decrypt it on the other computers.

Keepass is an example of an encrypted file that should be safe when copied via dropbox.
Y'know, there are some projects that haven't had commits for a while because they do exactly what they're supposed to do, and don't need a bunch of commits. I consider it a good thing when a project gets to the point where nobody can find any bugs and they stop adding features because it has enough of them already. I sure as hell don't want my quick, clean, elegant, productivity enhancing window manager to turn into a featuritis infected monstrosity like OpenOffice.org, after all.

---

edit: Actually, my window manager of choice has basically been abandoned by its developer several years ago, and it's still bug-free, stable, and lacking basically nothing. I finally came up with a feature enhancement I'd like it to have today, after using it for five years with no complaints or wants -- and that enhancement is really just an improvement of an existing feature.

More to the point, it's an enhancement that no window manager has, so I'm likely to need to write the code for this feature enhancement myself if I want it badly enough. I may pick up maintainership for the project to do just that.

Think about that a moment: one feature enhancement requested in have a decade, merely an extension of an already existing feature, and it's something entirely new to window managers as far as I'm aware. This thing has had no need for additional code in all that time, and it has been better as a result of all that.
The same is true of BitBucket, and kinda Google Code as well, you know.
Why Virtual Maps Dont Work In Grocery Stores
Facebook keyboard shortcuts
Was it Journalizm?

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/540913
End visa cap on experts
Don't twist my words. I have read Hardy's work more carefully than any other author, having cut my teeth on the Course.

The colonial and classist attitude is pervasive and shapes his mathematical aesthetics.
I didn't think he was bragging, and I'm totally willing to believe that he just wants to teach better. I just think that he's wrong to believe that (a) the 45x difference is surprising, given the way he seems to have taken his measurements, (b) that given his observed 45x difference, we should then expect there would be a similar 45x difference in programming speed on tasks not based around the material in his course, and (c) that this is evidence of some sort of deficiency on the part of his students that he as an educator should fix. I don't think his problem is ego; I think his problem is an unusually flawed way of comparing programming speed.
Yes, I should clarify. I don't think any of the MVC-variants encourage business logic to be in the controller. The differences are really in the view and controller layers.

I suppose, strictly speaking, the others -- MVP, MVVM, MVT, etc -- aren't properly called variants of MVC, but they're all aiming for philosophically similar divisions of responsibility.
It's not 'purposefully broken', and your brother wasn't giving you the 'party line' – he was relaying a fact. To charge over USB, Apple had break the USB spec without compromising compatibility or destroying existing USB peripherals. To do that, the hardware was modified to vend more amps over the bus but only when handshaking has occurred between the attached device and the OS drivers.

If you'd installed Apple's drivers in your XP instance, things would have worked fine.

If you want to argue that Apple should have made their changes public so anyone could re-implement, well, that's a different discussion.
Yes and No. Engineering definitely applies science. But a common misconception is that "scientists find out stuff, engineers apply it." Therefore somehow science is a kind of foundation.

In reality the relation is quiet symbiotic... Both fields depend on each other and stretch human ingenuity to the limits.

Engineers and inventors start applying knowledge way before scientists understand how things work.
1) Edison did not keep reading journals about photons, electrons, chemistry of filaments and so on... he starts off with what he knows and uses clever strategies(sometimes even brute force or groping in the dark) to minimize the effect of the unknowns.
2) The wright brothers did not wait for the emergence of the theory of fluid dynamics to make plane fly... they observed birds and kites and what not. Created a wind tunnel using tools they could easily afford, and basically figured out how to iterate like crazy... something like what a modern startup would.
Network programming with Go
LongReads: a refuge of long-form articles in this Twitter-crazy world
NASA Scientist Dr Richard Hoover claims to have found evidence of alien life
`show xxx` which is `diff -c xxx`

There is a subtle difference. git-show is meant to show an object. A commit is an object, but so are other things. A more descriptive name would be 'git show-object.'