skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes - seriously. The amount of effort (person-hours etc) that goes in inside Microsoft to satisfy litigation demanded regulatory compliance is staggering.
Nvidia to Acquire Icera, Adds Software Baseband to its Portfolio
I doubt it - Skype is last on the list yet first on the list of paid products. The fact that groupon's rev comes from a percentage of sales doesn't really mean they aren't advertising based, anyway. It's pretty much the same as running CPA (cost per action) ads.

I think common wisdom is that they're valued based on the size of the local ad market and because of how hard it's been for others to break into local.
Perhaps I was too dry: everything you say is true, but you kinda missed the point ;)

Edit:
In retrospect realise that wasn't particularly helpful. I skipped an awful lot of Mondays for which the only consequence was utter joy at the two cocktail hours every other Saturday. Contrary to the great grandparent, a day really is just a thing.
Thanks for the feedback! We'll certainly work on the points you mentioned, although validation is no goal in itself for us.
We just hired our first frontend developer actually, so far we are still recycling the original (very well validating) templates an external agency made for us, but of course over time they've "broken" in terms of validation.

Optimizing is something we'll do for sure in our redesign since we'll redo all the HTML anyway. My guess is that it won't be a hefty difference as you suggest, since our pages already load in 1,6s on average for NL users (via Pingdom).

We can go a bit further in caching with Nginx too btw.

On your last point: to a certain extent it's true that the SEO or other marketing guys can also make tests. But in practice, for the most interesing tests you really need a frontender, the basic stuff you can do with VWO and some CSS hackery doesn't bring us much anymore.

Be sure that we try to eat our plate, but we won't eat it for the sake of emptying it. Desert might be more efficient, and there's always the next meal (day) with new opportunities that need chasing. You're 100% right in theory, but not in practice :)
i actually find that tv makes me more productive. i'm not sure why... i can just put on a season of futurama or arrested development and keep focused/keep coding.

without tv, i find i get antsy or distracted. if i put on music, i spend more time air drumming and rocking out than typing.
I have neither a smartphone nor a watch, but I guess I would prefer a watch because neither the manufacturer nor a third party are very likely to track me or do any other kind of spying on me. YMMV.
+1 for the reference to Edward Tufte/Charles Minard Napoleon map.
The aim of both the gold standard and bitcoin are to limit the power of governments and banks to defraud their citizens by forcing them to use fiat money.

> gold standard is a tool used by a central banking authority to promote stable prices.

This is the wrong way to look at it. The reason for central banks is to allow banks/governments to devalue/print money, i.e., to deviate from a gold standard.
Learning Modern 3D Graphics Programming with OpenGL 3
Only thing I would add is work on projects complicated enough that you would need to learn data structures eventually. Whenever I try to read about trees and hashmaps my eyes glaze over. It's only in practice that I find I learn data structures and how to use them. After watching something speed up, it is pretty easy to sit down and read some theory for an hour or two.
>> Choose a good editor.

> No. The more features and functions an editor or EDI has, the more crutches you'll routinely use when you don't need them. Which means you won't learn and grow as quickly. Choose something simple like Textpad, disable the syntax color highlighting, and make mistakes. Sure, it'll be a pain in the ass, but that's the best way to learn the quickest.

I disagree...disabling syntax highlighting is crazy advice. This is not endurance training with sand bags on the ankles, and there is no real long-term benefit of having a syntax-unaware editor. I'd instead recommend using an editor with basic support for many file types, like vim, emacs, or TextMate (or something like notepad++ for windows, which I can't comment on) to eliminate as much as possible the chilling effect on picking up something new, caused by "uh oh, my editor has no clue what this is."
Don't listen to him. He does not use Emacs. :-)
The first thing I do when someone tells me that they want to learn how to program is teach them how finite state automata work. If they seem to enjoy that, walk them through the NFA to regular expression proofs. Then we have a talk about the data structures that would be involved in storing and manipulating automata, regular expressions, and their input. Finally, I recommend that they start playing with SICP or How to Design Programs. The people that I've introduced to programming this way have a fairly sophisticated, "no-magic" attitude earlier than is normal. Introducing automata first provides a really good way to talk about machine model (automata itself) and programming language (how to specify the automata).
Inserts are much faster due to the log-structured merge-tree.
Top Cities for Start-ups
Also interesting:

NY Times: The Jobless Rate for People Like You (2009)

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/11/06/business/econo...

Plots unemployment by race, education level, age and sex.
And the thing is, if chucking HN (or: chucking HN and similar internet distractions) enables someone to free up enough time and energy to do something good ... they're less likely to write about it on the internet, and so we HN junkies are less likely to hear about it.

The other thing is that when someone stops (say) watching TV and it turns out not to make much difference to their life, we probably won't hear about that either.

Sampling bias is a powerful thing.
I can summarize.

in a purely free market people won't want to do business with people who violate others' property rights since you have no guarantee they won't violate yours.

traditionally, guarantees against this have been ethnic. "well I know he won't enslave me since the norm is to only enslave blacks, therefore we can both happily profit from the slave trade and are no threat to each other."
Why would you want to close your account? That's like throwing out your rolodex.
Read "Cache-Oblivious Streaming B-trees" http://supertech.csail.mit.edu/cacheObliviousBTree.html
It' LSM with faster searches.
In this case I think it's a bit simpler. GroupMe was born at TechCrunch Disrupt Hack Day 2010, and is probably the biggest success story of that event by an order of magnitude. Hence, they got a lot of TC coverage early on.
I think it's great that they are actually looking at users. Hopefully that will bring it up to snuff. I think they are within shooting distance, and they are moving fast.

The other big problem has always been applications. For example, I need Adobe's tools and Wine has never done it for me. Hopefully the cloud will make this less important. I already find myself popping into pixlr and coming away satisfied. Now I just need After Effects and gigabit broadband...
Protests over low AT&T data caps, high penalties for violating them
While I understand the reason to support social network sign-ins, I'm certainly tired of seeing sites that require it. Hopefully this trend will end at some point.
Hacker Releases Second Video of Enhanced XerXeS DoS
Does anyone buy this analysis? No, not the idea that someday there may be more apps in Google's app store than Apple's, but the drawing straight line projections and marking a circle around the intersection and looking at the date axis and saying "OK, that's the day!"

Shouldn't there maybe be an obligation to think about the data you're analyzing. Like, maybe some of those Android apps represent apps that were available for iOS? Maybe the "researchers" should look into the percentage of Android-only apps and iOS-only apps and try to see in which categories there are growing or shrinking leads for one platform or another?

This "finding" seems more like a typical attention-whoring move. It's like, in 1998, posting a poll asking whether Sun or Microsoft or Yahoo was going to buy Apple. It's designed to gin up outrage and therefore attention. Don't feed the troll.
I hardly watch TV anymore, because I find all programs of the national TV mindnumbingly stupid. Commercial stations have the same braindead programs. Movies are reduced to vehicles to shove as much commercials before your eyeballs as possible.

I still have a TV in my living room, tho. Once a day I watch the news.
I assume he is not counting servers...

I thought netbooks a few years back were what was going to get Linux to "normal users", but Canonical barely managed to get anyone to ship netbooks with Ubuntu bundled in the boom year (when I bought an Eee, with their terrible Linux version on it and then installed Ubuntu netbook edition). And then Microsoft managed to push Windows back onto netbooks.

Right now there is no touchscreen Ubuntu, the netbook edition is folded into the standard one, and the only vague hope would be ARM based machines (Nettops, or desktop), but these are still not really shipping in any volume, and Microsoft has announced Windows 8 on ARM so that only gives a short window of opportunity, and not likely a 200m one.

The tablet option is a lot of work, and up against Android (and Meego), with rather less momentum.

So, I think that just leaves the geeks still? There are only in the thousands not millions of Andrroid developers though. Some people (like me) have come back from a few years on Mac to Ubuntu, but not a lot yet.

So right now, I am not convinced...
Interesting use of scrolling to express the magnitude of evolutionary scale
They are loosing the unixes too. This has always been a big winner for Qt. What toolkits run on most operating systems? There sure aren't many of them and they mostly suck.
Don't just "build buzz": Use social media to make money
Care to elaborate? I'm aware there are conventions, but can't see how they help when you're compounding daily and a day disappears.

Say Bank A lends $10M to Bank B on Monday at 0.1% per day. On Tuesday B pays $1k to A. The following day is a Thursday. How much B owes A? $1k or $2k? $1k sounds reasonable but unless you modify your date library you'll probably get $2k.
I wouldn't say that all laptops have a 'complete' disregard: some are better than others. The MacBook Air keyboard is surprisingly comfortable.
I was thinking more along the lines of 'accessing their own specific API (maybe even a private, undisclosed API)'.
Building Jabber Chat Bots in place of redundant web applications
I spoke at a conference recently on building jabber chat bots as interfaces instead of getting end-users to run scripts on their machines. I find it an interesting way to present scripts to non technical users
All I know about publishing is from reading Charles Stross' blog (especially http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/04/common-m...), but doesn't manuscript-submit in November 2011 and publishing in February 2012 seem awfully fast?
> I've been doing this for 30 years and have never lost anything.

Just because it works for you doesn't mean it's good advice. I don't doubt copy+paste has worked for you for $LONG_TIME but I wonder whether you would say the same thing if you had started using $VERSION_CONTROL_SOFTWARE $LONG_TIME ago.

Having finally gotten into the habit of doing all my development with the help of version control I can't imaging going back to copy+paste or project/backup/YYYYMMDD. Yes it works but all it is is a poorly, and incosistently implemented manual version control system with none of the advantages of a real VCS.
All of the antitrust stuff of the last decade has really tamed Microsoft. I'm not sure they'd do that. I really wanted to like Windows Phone 7, but have lost faith and think WebOS may have an opportunity to overtake them if HP plays their cards right.

Microsoft's biggest hope for penetration is the Nokia partnership. Two frightened dinosaurs huddling in a cave as the comet approaches...
I would love that. Even on my Macbook it only works in Safari (with bugs).

I chose to use the Java stack (LWJGL-Libraries), because Minecraft uses it (compatible enough to be successful).

Would like to do it in WebGL, but a JS-only version is not possible on current browsers. There is simply no way I can set the mouse position.

Anyway, I hope I will find the time to hack something together which will make it compatible.
You don't have to pay in dollars, but you must accept dollars to settle a debt.

You and I can have a contract where I buy a cow from you today in exchange for an iPod next week, that's a valid contract. But if I cannot produce the iPod next week, you must allow me to give you a quantity of legal tender currency (US coins or paper dollars) to settle the debt.

If you require payment upon receipt, however, you can refuse to exchange the cow for cash.
ideally it would skip the rss feed. most static sites are just plain html files, they have no rss feeds.
Why the Internet makes life less awkward
I thought it was a cool idea too. Lack of control means manipulation of rankings might be a problem to solve. You would need to ensure that spammers couldn't flood the system with fake information.
A long tome ago when I was an MBA student, I asked my prof and peers why does company X buy company Y, when both X and Y are healthy companies, in the context of techology companies. The most common answer is "synergy" or cost savings . But my point was that if acquirer is a mature company and acquiree is a young startup, the young startup would have a higher growth rate than the mature company. Also the young startup would have more freedom than a mature public company, whose decisions making would be rigid as they are driven by the quarterly earnings expectation. It seems to me that the savings /synergy would be dwarfed by the dampening of the growth rate of the startup. Not to mention that the startup would bleed talent as they move on. Consider Cisco and Flip : Flip stopped innovating and taking risks after the acquisition and was eventually killed off. I understand Netflix is not a startup but they are just as scrappy and I believe their best products are yet to come. Yahoo has also acquired so many companies and I do not believe they managed to achieve their goals at all( unless it was to make Mark Cuban a billionaire). In my opinion, if the management of Amazon thinks they have excess cash, they should just pay dividends to the investors.

So do you still think Amazon buying Netflix is a good idea ?
That's one point: CFS means it's more fault tolerant and simpler to run (only one type of node), with equal-or-better performance. You also get multi-datacenter support essentially for free.

The other big win is you can run analytic queries against your realtime data (data in Cassandra columnfamilies/tables, rather than a blob interface like CFS/HDFS) instantly, with no ETL. (An example: http://www.datastax.com/docs/0.8/brisk/brisk_demo.)

Finally, Brisk takes care of integrating the Hadoop job/task trackers with Cassandra automagically, which otherwise requires fairly deep knowledge of both Hadoop and Cassandra (http://wiki.apache.org/cassandra/HadoopSupport).

Brisk also integrates the full stack (including Hive queries) with DataStax OpsCenter: https://s3.amazonaws.com/uploads.hipchat.com/6528/23268/uohl...
I'd like to see a proper source of this (other than Android Police / iPhone Download Blog). I have used MyWi without having any special settings for tethering (my provider doesn't supply those), and it worked just fine; it would be a bit silly to go through the trouble of setting up a hotspot and making sure you're actively routing the data to the 'wrong' APN.

(Note that iPhone Download Blog is the one calling MyWi by name)

Also, if this is the case, wouldn't it be easier for AT&T to just disable the tethering APN for you if you don't have the tethering option? That would seem to be much more effective.
Easier to do it that way. Just like how it's easier to devalue a currency for a nation rather than give every single individual in the country a pay cut!
As an iPhone developer, I just don't really care anymore about the size of one app store versus another. It's all about which store you can make real money from. Apple has paid out over $2 billion to developers (data from March 2011) and what has Google paid to Android developers? $50M? $100M? A tiny percentage compared to Apple.

There are so many blog entries at the top of HN about Android developers who made $500/mo from their apps. Guess what? $500/mo is nothing. $500/mo doesn't even pay for rent. If you write an iPhone app that doesn't look like Interface Builder exploded and you don't make at least $500/mo then you're pretty much a miserable failure. I have friends that have built the simplest, most inane iPhone games on a Sunday afternoon that make over $1000/mo.

The successes of iPhone developers absolutely dwarf the articles I've read about Android developers' incomes. I'm not talking about big game development houses either, I'm referring to 1-3 person teams (designer, coder, coder typically) who make tens of thousands of dollars per month. I'm personally friends with at least a dozen people who have apps that make this much. It's not even a surprise anymore when a nice-looking iPhone app makes $50k in its first month.

The reality is that iPhone developers who make decent apps make a lot of money. I don't care if the Android Market is 5x the size of the App Store if Apple is still paying out billions of dollars to developers.
Interesting. Why do you want textures? And what kind of textures? Do you mean green boxes should look like grass?
We really are hiring like crazy. Lots of new developers already this year. Especially looking for tech-ops people right now.
Bubble - Torture for the Kiddies (America's Future)
I wouldn't write off Qt/Embedded just yet. Nokia has regularly made noises about their wish to eventually use Qt on Series 40.

Series 40 is their dumb-/featurephone OS. It powers most of the billion phones that Nokia sells yearly, and it's not set to be replaced by Windows Phone. There's no way OpenGL ES will make an appearance on those devices for a long while.

The Qt 5 announcement made a point of emphasizing maximum source compatibility between Qt 4 and 5. It seems likely to me that Qt 4 will still see some development from Nokia.
David S. Rose – Father of Angel Investing in New York
Good idea. Will become especially important, when the game gets a real multiplayer mode (there are only bots right now).
Doesn't seem like they're doing real testing, it seems more like they're doing after-the-fact usability tests post-feature freeze:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2449981
If you go to the update posts (there's one for each month), he lists the submissions he's received so far.
Been using QML for about 16 months, since it was in a development branch. I believe it has alot of potential for development of frontends and also I see it as a kind of a replacement of html which was created with static documents in mind, and then got aumented with other paradigms (css, javascript, dom, etc).

I feel the QML language is in a embrionary state yet, they are writing the use cases and writing the language at the same time, which will in time show some redundancies in the concepts they use now. Example: 1)there should be more (multiple) inheritance so that we could derive from QML elements like we do in OOP; 2) there was no ability to access the items ids like in a DOM tree.

But what sets a project IMHO is the ambition and the goals. And this team has both, and their work will deliver.
How RSS flows through Twitter and vice versa
Video Chat for college students
In Qt 5 the entry point for applications can be QML instead of C++.
We expect that all UI will be written in QML. JavaScript will become
a first class citizen and we expect that a lot of application logic
will be written in JS instead of C++.

This is very worrying. They are basically moving from being a tool to
being a platform or a beast of that sort. They are going to adopt V8
too. It all shounds like they are trying very hard to be the next cool
thing. In other words, they are building a totally different beast and
risking they fanatic user base.

In the end, I'm under the impression that there's a brillant guy who has
been recently hired and who is backed by the execs. That guy came to the
office one morning with his 7 pages "technical" proposition (because the
guy has a bit of technical background, y'a know) and said Qt was cool
stuff but he had a vision for the app^Wproduct.

Or.. they are trying to kill Qt.

Oh, and I'm disappointed.
It's not scientific but I still think it has value. Two different firms have forecasted a month that they believe the Android app store will overtake the Apple app store in numbers. This metric has value and it's what research firms are paid to do.
American Actress Jessica Burciaga Latest Hot Images, Pictures & Wallpapers
I don't really think this satire is very funny. But maybe thats just me.

Honestly I was hoping for some serious arguments.
Agreed. Right now this is technically "Search for static BLOG sites". If you had the ability to scan simple HTML files as well, it could work for any HTML site, even if it weren't a blog site (or another site type that has a time-ordered list of posts in an RSS feed).
lol...so true
Try different music? Anything without words is good when you're working - I lean towards ambient or chillout.

Not that I don't like heavy music, but as you say, it doesn't really work as something to have on in the background.
Michael Zeller: the lawyer who sued CBS over piracy explains his thinking
"So, the claim of being P2P goes to the wind first"

It depends on how pedantic you are about the term "P2P". I guess you could argue that any P2P network that includes supernodes is not a true P2P network, but in practise I've never heard that objection.

"If the buyer claims he got it 1 month ago (and shows a proof), then the seller needs to check a month worth of transactions, just in case it was double-spent. Note the terrible asymmetry of the attacker's and the defender's costs."

Not really. Finding out whether an address can spend a coin is just a hashtable lookup. It's not like we have to use linked lists!

So the cost for the defender is trivial. An attacker, however, has to orphan the current block chain, which requires controlling at least 50% of the computational power in the Bitcoin network.

For instance, let's say Alice gives Bob 1 BTC. Bob waits for 6 confirmations before accepting it as valid, which is the standard length the official Bitcoin client uses. This means that there is a chain of 6 blocks verifying the transaction; if Alice wants to double-spend, she needs to get rid of that chain, which she can only do if she can produce a longer alternative block chain. This means she has to produce blocks at a faster rate than everyone else on the network, which requires that she possess over 50% of the computational resources.

"Does he realize that in a distributed system nodes might have totally different opinions on the number and length of those branches? And that those opinions might change. It is easy to imagine nodes hopping between branches with no global agreement possible."

No, because clients always choose the longest block chain. It's possible that for a little while the block chain will branch, but that situation is inherently unstable; eventually one branch will produce a block faster than the other, and everyone will switch to the winning branch.
"I went to <$xyz> school. I am good." Short answer: No.

Some of the best coder/hacker types I've met in India were self-taught. I have never met/interviewed a truly outstanding candidate from any of the "top-line" schools ever. Sad, really. What was worse was the arrogance of some these so called grads.