skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think Apple and Google can protect their distribution channels and support mobile web as an equal to native.

They can maintain the same approval processes, charge the same fees, and enforce submissions of your mobile apps to the same places if you want inclusion in their app stores.

For mobile web, it could be as simple as compressing a folder of specially named HTML and JS files or providing an absolute URL where the main "executable" HTML file lives.

In the end, Apple and Google can make the same amount of money from mobile apps vs native apps. I don't find many reasons they would care how the app is made (except that maybe they want "exclusive" apps that are only on one platform or the other --- or they want to not include absolute URL mobile web apps because you can submit an app and change it entirely the next day by changing the files on your server...though you could get around this by mandating that your app be submitted as packaged HTML/JS)
Hopefully this will help with their backlog. One problem I have with the way the invite system works now is there's very little feedback once you request an invitation.

I requested one a few months ago and I haven't heard anything about it since, not even a single email. As far as I'm concerned I'm stuck in the limbo of their backlog.

A yes/no answer would be preferable to limbo. Or perhaps allow Forrst members and/or the requester to comment on invite requests?
The part where you enter something to search for and it takes over 10 seconds for a result.
The analogy with Hacker News was not meant as a criticism. I personally think that Paul's interest in investing in startups--which may be more about passion than pecuniarum for all I know--actually makes Hacker News a better forum than if it were moderated (or meta-moderated) by someone with an interest in page views or the size of the community, to give two examples.

I had expected people to follow that reasoning and reply "Actually, HN is better because Paul Graham is more interested in nurturing startups than in selling advertising." I was mistaken and have learned that sometimes a simple, direct argument is going to get the job done while an indirect argument may just come across as noise.

Mea Culpa.
I agree in general.

Precision does help to some degree in chaotic circumstances. For example, when forecasting the weather, you know that it's chaotic. But the chaos takes a while to show itself.
1) Price is never, ever, ever, ever a feature. Price is determined by the features (it is the other side of the equation).

2) I haven't done market research, but are you telling me no other POS has wireless?

3) Who will provide iPods? How many will be lost or broken, this seems to add additional expense.

4) As a potential pivot, could you enable your system to run in restaurants with no servers, just food runners and have patrons order the food themselves? There is competition here as well, but it is less entrenched and probably easier to displace.
Wow, it looks great! Lots of features (CRON even!) and doesn't shackle you with MVC. Might be just the thing to reign-in my free-wheeling PHP style without being too restrictive.
Google is also not really a hardware company. Their primary focus is software.

Competing competently in the tablet market is really stretching Google's strengths as a company. I think they can do it eventually, but it's going to be a long learning process.
Hmmmm. This is a cash-equivalent -- or perhaps the SEC could see it that way.
The default should be rationals or even algebraic numbers?
I've got the ASUS Transformer, I was one of the lucky few who got an order in around midnight of the launch date (bought mine on BestBuy.com). The device is really quite fantastic, far better than the Xoom (which I've used but don't own) and cheaper. The IPS screen is just absolutely gorgeous to look at and really elevates it over the other Honeycomb tablets I've seen.

Unfortunately the keyboard docking station is largely vaporware here in the USA -- reviewers got them but I don't believe a single unit has sold at retail here. It is somewhat puzzling why the docks are even more scarce than the tablets since the dock is a relatively straightforward piece of electronics compared to tablet itself.
You should get a subscription to the New Yorker.
Why lock the platform into 5.3 without making use of 5.3 features (namespaces would clean the structure up a little). Why not use getops for the command line arg processing rather than your own __parseArgs function. The framework seems like a odd mix of procedural and oop paradigms. And considering it's a framework (and transactional), why did you not use PDO for the database access?

I'm asking out of curiosity only because recently I've had a lot of PHP work on.
There's definitely a market for such a service. I've been to many games and concerts and would gladly pay an upgrade if I could. However, I see this as a feature and not a full blown product. Tickets.com or LiveNation can easily add this feature in since they are already heavily integrated into the team's ticket inventory. What's keeping the big boys from adding such a feature already?

(I'm not knocking your product, b/c I'd love to use it once it becomes a available).
I didn't notice but now I realise that you are right. Would changing the article so that it didn't directly quote the show, instead referring to someone theoretical that the reader is attracted to, make it less distasteful? The article could credit the show without going into specifics.
Also people writing floating point off because it does not fit well into situations where you have evenly divide something (e.g galaxy into picometer sized voxels) show fundamental lack of understanding how floating point works. One of the biggest reasons floats are used is that error propagation is much better when floats are used in many numerical algorithms.

In a nutshell. If you want coordinates in galaxy use fixed point (or in game level). If you want to calculate values of hyperbolic trigonometric functions or whatever use floats.
ICloud Predictions — Shawn Blanc
Ubermedia really got screwed on this one.

They went from having significant leverage and controlling a lot of tweeting marketshare...to losing all that.
Google and Facebook are different companies. This story is about Facebook.
When code runs slower in one JS implementation than another, why do people say that "real-world" code is slow?

Just because the JIT missed an optimization-- in this case, repeatedly appending to a string-- doesn't mean that it's a bottleneck for the JS that browser run into in the wild.

People don't often run jslint or jsunzip frequently, they run jquery and do lots of DOM accesses.
1) Fair, but to a restaurant owner who is staring at Micros package X that is $15K for a basic two terminal + a few printers set up, we look pretty darn good.
2) Not reasonably priced. I know Micros does, but their handhelds are propietary hardware that costs in multiples of iPod touches. Their terminals are, again, in multiples of iPads.
3) Up to the restaurant. They don't get broken, them 'walking off' is an issue, but a management issue. If you have 3 at 5 PM, you better have 3 at 10 PM or your staff has to answer.
4) Certainly, but I'm not a big fan of that because it compounds issue #3 dramatically and I'm not sure any restaurant would want to do that. Also, it would require a dramatic 'prettying up' of the UI to make it more lively.
Hrmm...isn't that how the free-market works? It is precisely because you have no alternatives why you choose the work you do.

If you can be a surgeon, you will be. If you can't, you won't.

But whatever you decide to do, you can excel at it and move up as needs be (in most free societies anyway).

You don't need to do this, so you wouldn't be their ideal delivery man. If you were, you would probably lose a few lunches and that would damage their reliability....which hurts their system and company.

So the free market has priced you out of that job - because you wouldn't likely work for the pittance these guys earn.

All of that being said, if these guys save and start to do other things, they too can eventually move up and possibly even start their own company that allows their past employer to outsource some functions to them!

That might not happen, but nothing is really stopping them (cultural nuances aside, like caste, etc.) aside from good old fashioned drive and hard work.

Edit: Plus you are missing the point. I am not saying that those delivery men are what is impressive. What is impressive is whoever put the system together that allows them to have the six sigma reliability when they are depending on thousands of illiterate men. That! is impressive....in my humble opinion.
I actually had something like 12 SSD failures in the same machine in about 18 months, including 3 of those being an OCZ Vertex 2 and one Intel X25-M. Failures ranged from working fine to completely failing and not even being recognized the next minute (!), to sudden very very slow read/write and drive errors leading to complete failure. Eventually I talked an Apple genius into replacing the logic board in the cursed MBP (second gen unibody, 15", replaced the hard drive instead of opting for the optical bay) and it's been running smooth with a newer Intel X25-M for 4 months now with similar usage patterns.

The first few failures I wanted to chalk up to SSDs being flaky or my being sent refurb drives, but given that I had so many in the same machine and no problems in any other desktops and laptops I tested SSDs with, I just want to blame the machine.
No, you're right. It's not Google's fault that someone at Motorola didn't have the balls to say, "This just isn't ready for prime time" and put it off until it really was done. But Google is still dragging its feet on making Android ready for tablets. They've had a year with an already successful model to look at. Building an OS isn't trivial, of course, but their commitment is clearly not behind producing great tablet software.
Sony online gaming unit shut down in second attack
I think you're referring to bone animation. With bone animation, there are 4 "weights" per vertex. Each weight refers to a specific matrix in a "bone matrix palette" (array of matrices).

Typically, it's performed as:

// start in local space. Deform by bone matrices.
float3 pos = 0;
for ( int i = 0; i < 4; i++ )
pos += vtx.boneWeight[i] * ( vtx.pos * boneMats[ vtx.boneIdx[i] ] );

// transform from local space to post-projection space.
return modelViewProjMatrix * float4( pos.xyz, 1.0 );

In other words, a model is deformed (animated) first, then transformed into worldspace.

------------------------------------------------------

You may have done this instead:

// transform from local space into world space.
float3 pos = modelMatrix * vtx.pos;

// deform by bone matrices.
for ( int i = 0; i < 4; i++ )
pos += vtx.boneWeight[i] * ( vtx.pos * boneMats[ vtx.boneIdx[i] ] );

// transform from world space into post-projection space.
return viewProjMatrix * float4( pos.xyz, 1.0 );

This will exhibit the quantization errors you mentioned, and is correctable by re-ordering the operations.
Interesting find, but I don't know if it's applicable. He probably doesn't know too much about glucose meters, because he's not diabetic.
Well, the new system seems to be working with dramatically different speed. I just applied and became part of Forrst in the span of about five minutes.
"Why is this so shocking? I keep seeing people point out that he was near by a military academy. There's plenty of documented history of US and Russians spies in each other's agencies."

Its odd because OBL wasn't a low level clandestine agent. It's like if we had found Saddam Hussein next to a military base in Jordan.
If memory serves, Anders used to report to the Product Unit Manager for C# (even as a TF). Although, I'm sure DevDiv has reorged several times in the past four years, and my recollection of the org chart is no longer accurate.
Mobile Couchbase for iOS
I think you misunderstand what the term means. For example, the control rods in some nuclear reactor designs are held up out of the core by electromagnets. Thus even in the event of complete power failure, the rods fall naturally, stopping the reaction. Since failure results in a safe state, this is referred to as a "fail-safe" system.

By contrast, if you were holding a lump of antimatter contained by an electromagnetic field, a power failure would result is the antimatter escaping confinement and annihilating with your body, releasing an unimaginably large amount of energy nearly instantly. This is what you might call a "fail-deadly" system, because a failure results in a decidedly unsafe state.
You can say the same thing about flipping burgers at McDonald's, or dealing with annoying customers at Sears.

The service industry is an unenviable place to be in, no matter where you are. I don't particularly buy that being in the "delivering lunches in the rain" business is a good indicator of particularly disturbing poverty.
Well, geolocation didn't take long to incorporate, hopefully the rest will follow.
Thanks. That's not normal. We're definitely experiencing some slowdown from the traffic spike.
Hurray! :)

Ok, no, no that's not fair, but it'd be nice to see people move over to other languages, if only because many of them strongly encourage the use of web frameworks which inspire (or force) better coding practices.

It'll be refreshing to see that my data isn't being compromised by every website I visit because their PHP/MySQLi code is vulnerable to SQL injection...
cpanm and PSGI author joins DotCloud
There are plenty of those, like this:
https://github.com/Mashaper/mashape-php-library
(Disclaimer: I own a whole stack of Apple kit, including an iPad, and some AAPL).

I've not played with a Xoom, but it keeps striking me that all of the people launching Android tablets are totally the wrong people to be doing it. Apple has (at least) the following things going for it:

1) It gets great deals on components and manufacturing
2) It maintains very consistent retail pricing
3) It does a lot of retail itself
4) It gets 30% off the top of all app purchases on the device
5) It gets ?% off the top of all music/movie purchases on the device

Points 1-3 are good for initial profit margins. It means they're making decent money on every iPad sold.
Points 4 and 5 are good for ARPU (average revenue per user) - it means you're continuing to make money from every device sale, long into the future.

Now look at the Xoom or the Galaxy Tab or any other android tablet currently available or announced and think very hard about which of the above points apply. I think you'd struggle to apply anything other than point 1 and even that probably only applies to Samsung. Most of the vendors do small manufacturing runs, sell them wholesale to retailers and get no money from end users until it's time for new hardware. The only exception to this I can think of would be revenue sharing deals from the mobile networks on the 3G models. I don't know what kind of deals these would be, but my guess is that the networks would demand pretty cheap unit prices on the hardware.

So who could do better? The obvious answer is Amazon, they could at least get points 3, 4 and 5 (and 3 strongly suggests they'd also get point 2) and what are they doing? Running an Android app store right now. If they can make a good tablet (and the Kindle hardware suggests they should be able to), they could really make a splash with it, and that would help them improve on point 1.
Sony might be able to, in that they could arrange point 5 and potentially 1 and 2, but my general view on Sony's ability to execute in the 'digital lifestyle' arena is very very negative ;)

Alternatively perhaps Samsung's desire to copy Apple's hardware will translate into a desire to copy their services. If they could get deals on content then they could get points 4 and 5 and differentiate themselves from the Android crowd.

That's my take on part of the tablet world. I also think Android badly needs some really slick tablet apps - on a par with iMovie and GarageBand, both of which are stunningly good.
Show HN: The World Is Spiky: Our 3tap Hackathon Project
This was a submission to the 3tap Hackathon by myself and gon - Code and full description are here:

https://github.com/danielsoneg/spiky-world

It's inspired by Richard Florida's "Spiky World" article from The Atlantic. We're pulling in "For Sale" posts from 10 different categories and comparing them across 10 different cities to show which cities "spike" in which categories compared to the rest of the country.

Note this was done in a couple hours - it's Very rough and only runs in browsers which support WebGL.
Maybe:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/02/us-binladen-dna-id...

"Results of the DNA tests should be available in the next few days, the official told Reuters"
Show HN: Realtime Website Traffic Heatmap
What a terrible example of parenting. When your baby is crying as the result of an injury, you should stay with them and comfort them until their pain has subsided and they stop crying.
This was a submission to the 3tap Hackathon by myself and gon - Code and full description are here:

https://github.com/danielsoneg/spiky-world

It's inspired by Richard Florida's "Spiky World" article from The Atlantic. We're pulling in "For Sale" posts from 10 different categories and comparing them across 10 different cities to show which cities "spike" in which categories compared to the rest of the country.

Note this was done in a couple hours - it's Very rough and requires a browser that does WebGL.
Also Google Buzz (yes, I'm one of its four users). And even aside from that, on Android it's easily my favorite Twitter client, and now my only hope is that one or more of those alternatives or Dave Winer's latest project or something else will save us from Twitter.
1. More people, I think, are likely to buy an iPad from Apple.com rather than Amazon.com, so the fact that Xoom is higher-rated than iPad there doesn't mean much. IMO.

2. I have yet to see one in Canada, but I'm not really looking. However, it's certainly possible that people are always out of stock because they're only ordering 1 - 3 of them and there's definitely people out there who will buy things because they're not from Apple.

3. Granted.

4. If they're having problems with the channels and price points they have already, they're not likely to do much better outside. Motorola's built on the mobile phone channel. Building up a channel outside of your niche is hard.
I bought Land of Lisp when it first came out, but I just barely started reading through it a few nights ago (school keeps getting in the way). I believe the stated intention of the book was to teach any lisp (but the book uses common lisp). The first guessing-numbers game would be trivial to translate to Scheme. I'm assuming there will eventually be games with graphics, and I'm not sure if those will be as easy to translate or not due to library issues.

I wish I could offer a more definitive answer, but I'm just not far enough into the book yet to say.
A store can sell out of anything if it only had a half dozen in stock to begin with. This is especially the case if the store doesn't have an agreement with the supplier to return any unsold stock after N days. (This kind of free lunch hedging is probably how most units were shipped, if this 25k units-sold floor is true.)
Arrays do seem to be the way to make Chrome happy, although unfortunately they're slower for everything else:

http://jsperf.com/backreference-copy

I don't see why you say an array is a more appropriate datastructure for the algorithm, though--that seems very much implementation dependent. And at the JS level, arrays support operations such as splice that strings do not, suggesting that they'd typically be implemented with a more sophisticated datastructure, and hence slower at primitive operations like index access. (Perhaps V8 notices that these expensive operations aren't actually used, and creates a fast, basic version instead.)
"He probably doesn't know too much about glucose meters, because he's not diabetic."

Seeing as glucose meters are basically only used by diabetics, your assumption that most diabetics would know that glucose meters are fraudulent seems empirically false.

Virtually all diabetics use glucose meters, despite the fact that they are basically the Iraqi IED detectors of medical hardware.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/04/world/middleeast/04sensors...
Actually, no, they don't. They do have a link to a page that discusses the differences, but they themselves don't on the page you reference.

I'd appreciate it if people were more accurate in their titling.
> But why take the pessimistic view that all the shipped tablets are on the shelf when you don't have any information.

Because that is the default, conservative position to take. The null hypothesis, if you will.
Is it really fair that a child's access to health insurance for the rest of its life depends on decisions parents made?

What your thought experiment really shows is that market based health insurance is hard to justify ethically, and that at least some level of health care should be paid for on a more equitable basis (such as through a public health system).

In addition, issues like information asymmetry mean that there is no happy medium between unregulated health insurance and a full public health system.
PHP's biggest problem is the people who demand OO features out of a procedural language.

If you want classes, namespaces, anonymous functions, etc. use a different fucking language. Don't bitch when the feature you want is a shoehorned in piece of crap.

Stop polluting an otherwise useful language.
Is it wrong to celebrate Bin Laden's death?
Depends what "actions" you are taking. In the United States, if your house is raided by law enforcement acting in good faith with a warrant, valid or not, evidence they collect during the raid will be admissible against you.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good-faith_exception
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Sony loses 12,700 credit card numbers
Wow, your catharsis really comes through in your writing. If nothing else, maybe there's a memoir in all this ;) Seriously though, stay positive and stay in the habit of asking people for help when you're stuck. And don't just ask investors, 'cause their agenda might force them to say 'double or nothing' every time. Ask friends, other tech people, people who work on FOSS, old college professors, online friends. You need to develop, but you also need to spend a lot of time in front of other people. Also, make sure you're doing something you like. If the work is not rewarding, find something that is.
Has any one created any Windows GUI's using Racket and if so, what was the experience like? I,ve been learning Clojure and having a lot of fun but not a big fan of Swing, so hoping Racket might be a better fit.
Switzerland Hotels Are Where You Can Get Whatever You Need
For me:

1) computer equipment pretty inexpensive (the more costly stuff is at the end of its life cycle anyway).

2) Important Data is backed up to the cloud

3) I am completely innocent of any Child Porn issues, and only minor issues with copyright (I do enjoy some fan sub anime).

4) Totally willing to sue for damages.
It's really annoying whenever anyone declares a widely used platform as dead.

PHP, like most things, has a lifecycle. If we know anything about scripting languages, they're incredibly resilient. PERL, for instance -- a language nearly 25 years old -- seems to be updated with less frequency than PHP, but continues to be used and developed. Not just to maintain legacy infrastructure, but to build new products.

Even if we're witnessing the sunset of PHP's development -- which I doubt is the case -- it'll be a very long time before it dies.