skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No one is stopping us from asking TC to be a better source of unbiased journalism either -- which is what this post is about.
Why isn't ChromeOS (basically Android kernel + browser UI) not the tablet version of Android?

Because native apps are sometimes nice. A tablet that can't play Angry Birds is a hard sell.

Interesting comments about Google's development practices. My impression is that Honeycomb's problems stem from the fact that there was a hard deadline: they wanted to get the Xoom out before the iPad 2. If that's not how Google normally operates, that would explain a lot.
I am a 23AndMe customer and got an update notice of new findings a few months back. One genetic marker indicated that I might be 10x more likely than average to have Selective IgA Deficiency:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_immunoglobulin_A_defi...

Since college, I have had several serious infections which, when considered individually, are within the realm of random possibility. Pneumonia as a college freshman, an infection post wisdom teeth removal at age 23, several root canals, etc. However, when considered as a group, the existence of some underlying issue seems likely. My primary care physician ordered a screening test. Unfortunately, it came back negative. I was disappointed because, with such an explanation, I would have a greater understanding of how to take precautions in the future (proactive antibiotics before dental work, etc.).
...or not being in a market where no one knows how to make money. The best exits are for the companies that don't need to.
A company that doesn't make money buys another company that doesn't make money. The Silicon Valley economy exists entirely on its own with no relation to the "real world".
Well sure, I mean there is always the possibility that there is channel stuffing. But why take the pessimistic view that all the shipped tablets are on the shelf when you don't have any information. Things to note --

1. at amazon.com, the only site I have been tracking the tablets in actual sales, the Xoom is either #1 or #2 in tablet sales over the past two months. I mean, it is ahead of even the iPad 2 that is supposed to supply constrained. So all the guys who stood in line and brought iPad2's so they could sell for a markup -- finding it difficult to sell even for a $100 premium -- compared to the flop show that is the Xoom.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/electronics/1232597011/... (this keeps changing, so don't hold me to it).

2. the wifi model is flying off the shelf at some of the local retailers. did someone earlier mention out of stock situation in Canada?

3. the wifi was introducted on Mar 26th, a couple of days before their quarter ended

4. more channels and price points are yet to be introduced.
Hopefully, there's not much to worry about when it comes to the people doing open source work and working on MVC. The ASP.NET team is moving with Scott. In fact, I'm hoping that being inside a business unit that more directly profits from ASP.NET might end up getting the ASP.NET team more resources (almost everyone is shocked to learn how small that team currently is).
"Will I be prevented from purchasing a glucose meter because I can not be trusted to know my own glucose levels?"

Then again, the fact that you (apparently) don't know that home glucose meters are largely a hoax shows why they want to regulate DNA testing.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/health/policy/19monitor.ht...
MG stated in the comments of the disclosure piece Mike ran that other than the small amount of aol stock he received during the TC sale/becoming an aol employee, he doesn't hold any interests.
TweetDeck could make barrels of money if Twitter allowed them to run adverts. (of some capacity)
And you don't even get access to WiFi unless you sign up for 3G/4G service.

Nope: http://gregisdumb.com/2011/02/24/verizon-motorola-xoom-no-lo.... Not even Verizon could get away with screwing their customers that blatantly.
Don't Do What You Love
To the grandparent - what danudey said.

The iPad is fairly water resistant at the end of the day, we've had a glass spilled on it (!) and it was fine. There's a database that the app allows you to email to yourself to backup, and you can connect it via iTunes and use Apple's ridiculously cumbersome iTunes methods of dragging files in and out. I'm not happy with it necessarily, but the attitude I have as an iOS developer is "let's see what happens in iOS 5 to make file management/sharing/backup easier, it *has to get easier...right? right!?"

Think of it this way - up until recently, POS systems were monolithic things that were never updated. Web POS systems take the opposite route of just throwing out what you have and fixing bugs as they pop up, which definitely is easy. With the App Store, it's sort of medium – we can easily ship updates, but it might take 7-10 days. IMHO, it's not a showstopper though. If it was, then almost no software would have shipped before the Internet. You just have to rely on the fact that you're a good developer, with a good testing process.
TweetDeck is loved by it's audience, and Twitter has taken a lot of flack for breaking products recently. I think they'll leave them alone for the near future. TweetDeck presumably has a modest burn rate compared to Twitter, for it's impact.
I think the headline is about four words too long.
What makes you think that Twitter isn't profitable, or at least has some incoming cash flow that isn't pumped in by VC or the secondary market?
Racket is an exceedingly mature and stable implementation, with vast library support, of a language I have learned I don't really like (after writing my PhD dissertation program in it). It is still Lisp and that makes it miles ahead of conventional languages, and the library support is really nice, but there are a lot of difficult to pin down subtle philosophical points encoded in Racket by its designers that I don't like as much as, say, Common Lisp—the ones I remember are I couldn't figure out how to get a REPL in the context of a module, I don't like static typing in a Lisp and the module system in Racket encourages that, and I dislike Racket's native OO system but there were a few others. Clojure is more comfortable to me for some reason.

Which is not to say that you should not absolutely go for it. Fantastic environment all told and if you aren't coming to it with preconceptions then it's probably a better place to start learning than something as baroque as CL.
I started bringing lunch to work recently. At home we can cook lunch that is cheaper, healther and tastier than most things I would get around where work. It is only a matter of making a little extra to have for the next day or make larger pot on the weekend.

However one thing that is lost is experience of eating together if you are the only one bringing lunch. We just talked about that recently and that it not be under-estimated as far as I am concerned. There is important gossip being discussed, and in general I chatting with coworkers about random (non-work related) stuff. Sometimes I would even eat my lunch then still decide to walk with them and walk back just for fun if the weather is nice.
Why is this so shocking?

Er, I never said anything was shocking....

There's plenty of documented history of US and Russians spies in eachother's agencies.

I don't tend to think of West Point as equivalent to the CIA....

In fact, I have read stories about the area I grew up in (suburb of DC) with CIA safehouses, etc.

Sure, and if the claim is 'OBL was hiding right under the noses of the ISI', I'd have no problem with it. What I disagree with is the notion that 'OBL was hiding right under the noses of the Pakistani equivalent of West Point'.
No paradox: Yes.

Your network will start working for you only if you share your idea. You will be surprised how many people come of the woodwork to say, "Oh, I heard you are interested in this space - I have this person you should talk to; I read this report on your market; I have this angel you should meet..."

You are afraid someone will steal your idea? Don't flatter yourself so much. You can be sure there are 5 other people other there at the same time who have a very similar idea. Ideas are cheap; it is only execution that matters. And there is no way you can best execute on your idea without getting all the feedback you can get and finding all the resources your network can provide you.
Some of the highend, big-dollar audiophile tube stuff is now coming out of China... the tube factories moved to lower-wage areas (out of the USA) and to places like China. Someone capitalized on the combination of (easy available tubes) + (ability to be able to custom-assemble in small qty) + specialized design.
This is super exciting. One day when I'm wealthier than God I'm going to donate some money to the guys who are trying to find him.
Anyone interested in saving lives by making a cheap/tiny one of these machines?
In terms of the language stuff I think we're safe - Anders Hejlsberg [1] - is a great steward of the language and the C# team seems very interested in sensibly adding new components to the language, whether or not Gu is still around to involve himself with the ASP.NET side of things.

[1]:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Hejlsberg
Aye, actually I ran into that a year ago and took a bit from it, thanks for bringing it up again, I forgot about it.

The main caveat is, the article assumes that servers would be carrying around iPads - we've found iPod touches are more than sufficient and iPads acting as centralized hubs like a traditional POS work well.
PHP is dead.
Another unzip implemenation https://github.com/tlrobinson/zipjs (should be easy to adapt for browser use)
The problem I see is that, because such a low percentage of Americans purchase health-related insurance policies, even relatively small increases in propensity of those with diseases like Huntington's to buy-in would have huge impacts on the expected cost of an insurance company's policyholder pool.

According to this article, an individual can know with near certainty that he will become symptomatic with Huntington's disease in the future if certain genetic markers are present:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huntingtons_disease

[I am clueless about most genetic diseases, btw]
Not only does Twitter make money, but TweetDeck raised it's first round of funding little over 2 years ago - it isn't ridiculous to spend that long building a product before monetization. No need to be so down on this.
Yes, and yes! Core Data + Bonjour + KVO are absolutely magical, it's a truly distributed system, you always can see whats going on accurately.
Smaller than Bloom filters
Why the past tense? It's still going. As far as I know, they plan to charge for over 10k notifications/mo when they get a bit more traction. I use it on my Android phone and it's fantastic.
Volume of conversations with people on Facebook != volume on Twitter != volume on email != volume on IM != volume on the phone != volume IRL. [1]

Also it varies drastically year to year. I'm betting this wasn't the case 60 years ago.

Maybe I'm a special case.

Edit: [1] I mean that the social graphs vary drastically between social networks. In fact there's almost no overlap with people I talk to on each network. Kill them all?
Interestingly, when I was in San Francisco I had to look in 3-4 different stores before I found one with Xooms in stock, the others had all sound out apart from the display unit.

I guess SF is a fairly large outlier when it comes to tech products though.

Personally I'm very happy with mine; the browser is definitely rather buggy right now but that's it - apart from that the software is great.
Thanks for your feedback - we'll definitely take that approach with the next set of videos we'll shoot.
Server, four long years. My cofounder is an owner.
Legal dispute in 3... 2... 1...

Haven't other's tried implementing new UIs for craigslist, only to be "shot down" by craigslist? [things like this were mentioned in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=963561 ]
Boulder, CO or Bozeman, MT

RightNow Technologies - http://www.rightnow.com/

We are looking for talented individuals for an open Senior Frontend Cloud Engineer position at a fast growing, fast paced cloud services company.

At RightNow, our mission is to Rid the World of Bad Experiences. Our cloud-based customer experience suite empowers companies to provide high end customer support via online interactive chat, web, email, phone, facebook and twitter. We power the customer experience for large organizations like Nikon, Orbitz, Tivo, Sony and more and we manage interactions with more than 8 million customers every day.

This is an opportunity to work with an agile team of creative individuals who are involved in cutting edge cloud technology within a successful, fast growing company. We're looking for web developers who know web technologies inside and out and write clean, well-designed, readable and elegant code.

If this is you, prove it by submitting your resume using our github application: http://github.com/rightnowtech/rnt-webdev-application.

For a full list of open positions at RightNow and more traditional resume submission, please see our careers page: http://www.rightnow.com/company-careers.php
What's the future?

i) Trains

ii) Cars

iii) Buses

iv) Airplanes

v) Subway

vi) Trolleybus

vii) Segway

viii) Helicopters

ix) Others

I don't have an answer yet.
Tweetdeck could run adverts just fine, Twitter just didn't want them running them in a sketchy in-stream manner, which I think is fair since their whole app just sits on top of Twitter.
Perhaps more judges would see this light were they the ones behind such ambiguous IP addresses. Surely some judges have open wireless networks at home. Would it be illegal to put a computer in range of a judge's house, have it search for child porn, and pipe anything it downloads straight to /dev/null so that it isn't actually stored?
Slowly but surely, there are new Honeycomb tablets being shipped. In the US, this past week has seen the release of two new tablets: the Acer Iconia A500 and the Asus EEE Pad Transformer. Both of these tablets have functioning SD card slots, showing that the lack of a working slot is Motorola's fault, not Google's. In addition, these have some neat features that, as I understand it, the iPad does not support, such as USB host mode (allowing use of a USB thumb drive, external HD, keyboard or mouse). Both of these devices also sport prices lower than the Xoom.

I am particularly intrigued by the Asus device, as it has a keyboard accessory that effectively turns the tablet into a netbook. For me, this type of versatility can have real value. Unfortunately, Asus has not done a very good job of supplying enough devices to meet the demand.
Thank you! Getting more eyeballs on the site has had the effect of mostly making me feel like I'm illiterate and blind. :P

Good call on point of sale, I had never thought about the distinction before.
Could some share his opinion about other players in the Twitter ecosystem? I am thinking about Seesmic that has acquried ping.fm, is bonding heavily with Salesforce.com.

Are they still a relevant player in the field?
Azure definitely has some hurdles to overcome still. I was actually down in Redmond visiting the Azure team a couple of months ago and both complained and learned a lot. It seems their original focus for almost a year was building corporate migration tools and features which I think really hurt them in the community. But thats because those big companies were large paying customers. There are a lot of features that are just now getting the attention they need. (Table Storage, Caching, etc) Hopefully with those issues resolved it will be more attractive to other companies and developers.

I think its funny that you bring up WPF/Sliverlight because I've been fairly against the technology in general and have avoided it whenever possible in my .Net career. I quickly fell in love with ASP.Net MVC and will stick with internet standards when possible.
The box says Motorola. That means they signed off shipping it. Even if any problems with it can be placed firmly at Google's door, it still says Motorola on the box. I think that was the previous commenter's point.
> Errr....that makes it even more impressive.

It is the opposite for me. How bad would it have to get for me to run around in the rain on a bicycle to deliver someone's home-cooked lunch to their office? Pretty bad. I would have to be pretty deep in poverty before I would start considering that. I guess one person looks at this as the triumph of free enterprise, another looks at it as how desperate the situation can get for some. If it is the only job they can get and they have hungry children at home, you bet they will get that 6 sigmas of reliability...
I am not so concerned about the regulation of DNA testing's quality as I am about availability of information.
In other news: it looks like flippity.com changed to working as an eBay search engine (found after following link in what I referenced above), interesting.
Graph of the Tweet activity on the evening of Osama's death.
x, where x is less than 10. To be honest, it looks like it's going to be a lot of hard work to get people signed up and interested.

It's a tough marketing problem: how do you get to people who haven't already invested in another solution down this road, even if our solution is much cheaper we're still talking in the thousands to switch over from someone who already charged them tens of thousands. The answer is to find people who haven't, which means finding restaurants that have not opened yet. Not easy work.
Had to look it up, and only three were older than 10 years old. VS (going back to the first version), VMWare, and Final Cut Pro).

Chrome (2008)

Firefox (2004)

OneNote (2003)

Sharepoint (2001)

iTunes (2001)

Windows Media Center (2002)

Camtasia (2002)

VMWare (1999)

Git (2005)

Garage Band (2004)

Final Cut Pro (1998)

Creative Suite (2003)

True Crypt (2004)

Visual Studio (1995)
Five words. ;)
relevant:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/04/04/110404fa_fact_...
This is a space that does require some disruption.

Good job.
My favorite Android bug: "Android dev team ignores its own bugtracker"

http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=7589
I've always wanted to mount a big electromagnet in my doorframe like in Cryptonomicon.

The main reason I haven't is that there is a 100% chance I'd forget to deactivate it and fry my own hardware. Probably within a week of installing the magnet.
Does your browser support websocket?
The courts have long recognized that one can sue someone whose name is not known at the time of filing the action and then use the court's subpoena power to find out the person's name through an ISP. This practice has been in place since ISPs came into existence and it makes sense for the situation for which it was devised.

The problem here is that the mass-infringement actions have twisted this otherwise legitimate process into something warped and grossly unfair by using the name-gathering process to target people who are then told, "pay up or you will be exposed as a downloader of porn" (or, in other cases, you will be subjected to a major infringement lawsuit that is not worth defending).

Federal judges have enormous power and this judge (and many others) have simply said, "I won't let my court be used as an instrument for a shakedown," using legal niceties about jurisdiction to justify the matter formally. In effect, they are tossing the mass-infringement lawyers out the door, telling them their model won't work in their court. This is indeed the right outcome for this sort of abuse.
TweetDeck is also the only mainstream Twitter client I could find that supports Identi.ca (and other federated Status.net derivatives).

I'm betting on s/is/was/ very soon.
The magic of the app (from an engineering perspective) is really Core Data + KVO + Bonjour. Sometimes it feels more bubblegum and sticks than anything, but it really is magical after all the kinks were worked out.

I wish I could open source the framework, but at this point it would be an engineering effort to tease out the code and it's also giving away a lot of secret sauce.
Women Shine in the Hedgefund World
I said that the journalists should try to be unbiased, not that they themselves should be. It's a very subtle difference, but I know that it's impossible for them not to be unbiased. They are human, after all.

The problem that I have with Arrington being allowed to invest in silicon valley startups, while maintaining his role as an editor of TC is that it presents a pretty clear conflict of interest.

That knowledge alone would make me, a reader, question the intent behind any story. It makes it hard to take any of their coverage seriously, because for all I know, Arrington could be using his readership to enrich himself over actually reporting interesting news.
"the Android big picture" == "throw enough crap at the wall and some of it will stick" ;)
You say "1.0/0.0 == +infinity" like it should be surprising, but it makes perfect intuitive sense to me.

You assert that it's "easier to insert a bug with floats", but your first example (NaN) is one which programmers shouldn't be worrying about. The only case you'd want to check for NaN is in debug code (an assert).
RavenFS & Rsync
Osama bin Laden's death sets Twitter record for tweets-per-second
$1.93bn Funding for Social Commerce Startups in First Trimester 2011
No you're not crazy, this really is as pointless as you think.

I had no idea that was the point you were trying to make. But I still don't know the reasoning behind your claim - to me, it makes sense for casinos to spend money looking for and kicking out card counters.
The terms of this debate often seem wildly 'provincial' for want of a better word. 99% of the people yammering on about 'hiring the best' don't operate companies that could hire the actual 'best' under _any_ circumstances.

Unless you can offer some combination of industry-leading salaries, major prestige, the opportunity to publish and/or work on their own stuff (if that's what people want), etc. you're not getting the best. Maybe very, very good. But not 'the best'. If you're not hiring for a Tier 1 research university or Google or Microsoft Research (in a different era), or paying massive salaries in the financials, ... think about it.

This isn't simply snark. As long as people aren't getting to hire Thompson or Knuth or Lampson or whoever, they are in fact making compromises of sorts and should be thinking hard about what those compromises mean, rather than just proclaiming that they only hire the 'best of the best'.
And I thought arbitrary precision integers and rational numbers were for mathematics.
UNT Supports Student-Run Ventures with Contest
We'll have to look at speed, it's something I'm concerned about because we don't have a huge sample size. I know the restaurants we tested at got up to speed after each server had worked 3-4 shifts, but I'm 100% sure it could be better in several areas.

Reshooting the video is probably the first priority after fixing mistakes on the site, thanks to your comments and a couple others. Thanks for the feedback, hearing things like that from someone really makes it clear what work we have to do and how we have to do.