skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Who is a more important market? 5 people that buy a laptop every 5 years, or 1 person that buys 1 laptop a year?

The person that goes to Best Buy to buy an "ultra value" laptop is not the same person that buys a $2000 laptop. And my guess is that $2000 laptops are more profitable to make than $100 laptops.
"On the other hand, members of a herd are usually genetically related, so it is possible that kin selection can also explain this phenomenon."

Wilson isn't proposing they are mutually exclusive, he is saying they are both right but to differing degrees.
yum-presto on Fedora uses deltarpm, which uses bsdiff.
Unthreaded view:
http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel.mm/63589
Agreed. Scala is a (relatively) messy language because it tries to solve the real-world problem of bringing working devs into the functional fold. Haskell was the laboratory, Scala is the factory.
New AMD powered tablet arrives in June for a reasonable $599
How is this app built? Open source code or closed source?
What type of server capacity is required to keep it fast?
How soon will you sell?
I think Apple meant something very specific as any other reading doesn't make sense. They are saying it is "above dispute". Apple knows what they licensed.
>Yet, strangely, self-sacrifice exists in the natural world, even though it would seem to put individual organisms at an evolutionary disadvantage: The squirrel that lets out a cry to warn of a nearby predator is necessarily putting itself in danger.

its obvious - just compare 2 species of squirrels, one which demonstrate behavior described above and another which doesn't. Which species would survive over time better? Without making complicated statistical calculations, the Nature has already calculated the answer - we have the squirrel species of the first kind, and not of the second.
It is also obvious why selfishness still exists - because altruistic traits seriously decrease the survivability chances of the individual specimen carrying the traits.
It can't. They still have to deal with acquirers, credit card issuers, and banks. No escaping that.
Though I believe it's been covered here before, and a little off topic, I totally agree that screen proportion is another huge issue.

It's for this reason that I can't bring myself to upgrade my Lenovo X61t. A 4:3 1440x1050 12.1" screen is vastly superior to anything available today. God, how I wish the new Lenovo tablets came in 4:3.
Knight-Mozilla Initiative: People-Powered News
First rule of usability: don't listen to users (2001)
Lady Gaga does what Anonymous could not?
This is because Lenovo has some obsession with buying the worst LCD panels available. Something about them not liking Korea or Japan suppliers, since the Chinese government is their largest shareholder.

I ordered a T61 back in the day, expecting a 1920x1200 LCD as specified. After decades of delay, I got my laptop, and they substituted a shitty 1440x900 screen instead. Not as ordered.

Thinkpads are still my favorite model of laptop for a variety of reasons, but their shitty fulfillment system and their shitty displays make a new Thinkpad purchase very unlikely. (In retrospect, they were just as bad when IBM owned them. Remember how the DVI ports couldn't do more than 1280x1024 because that is the maximum resolution that DVI is spec'd to handle. SIGH.)
So does that mean for example starbucks will buy iphones and ipads and pay monthly fee for data plans and use iphone as their cash register?
Well, she had a lot of help from the N fans who purchased the album.
The Roots of Object-Oriented Programming: Simula 67 [pdf]
Presumably it's still a known version. Just an older one.

You only need to keep one diff for each version you've previously published. Shouldn't be hard.
It appears you may have been misinformed.

Kin selection: organism X helps organism Y because it improves the prospects for the part of X's DNA that Y also has. The more related X is to something, the more willing X is to sacrifice itself for it. The most extreme example is also the most familiar: each of your cells has DNA identical to each of your other cells (if all is well). So a cell is completely willing to kill itself for the "collective", even at the expense of its own ability to reproduce. A less extreme example is that of a woman declining to pursue kids of her own in order to help tend her sister's, which could be adaptive when, e.g., food is scarce.

Group selection: members of a particular group (e.g., a tribe) are willing to engage in altruistic actions (e.g., suicidal defense of said tribe pre-procreation) even though doing so maladaptive at the level of the individual's DNA. This kind of cooperation is adaptive for the group as a whole, but not in the least for the individual. Groups that encourage this kind of behavior will outcompete groups that don't, so groups are selected for this trait.

IIRC, the primary reason that group selection is thought to be wrong is that it (apparently) can't yield an Evolutionarily Stable Strategy (ESS) -- it will always be better for the persistence of any individual's DNA if that individual refuses to be altruistic.
Yatr: Our hack for the Techcrunch NYC Hackathon
The Square app does all the typical register calculations for cash too, then they just have a little cash holder box on the table where they put it.
Really looking forward to this. Never seen bug-tracking and video screen-capture in one product.
Fat, Lipoproteins, Cholestrol - very well explained
Especially the essays on Fat and Cholestrol:

http://www.thincs.org/Malcolm.htm#fat2

http://www.thincs.org/Malcolm.htm#lipoprotein
Netflix is for archived content, while Hulu Plus is for current-season content. I'm happy with the Netflix model and it's all I use. The problem with Hulu Plus is that there is some non-Plus content that you can't view as a Plus member (because of licensing). Also, they don't have _every_ show. Also, they don't have _every_ network (no CBS, for example - or Sci-Fi either, if I recall). Missing plenty of others. Also, they only have the current season of shows - and sometimes not even the whole season. And you still have advertising. A LOT of advertising. I had a free week of Hulu Plus and the first 40 minute show I watched contained seven full commercials. For a service that I would presumably be paying money for (more money than Netflix costs). I canceled Hulu Plus after that first hour and never used it again.

Even at double the price, Netflix would be a ridiculously good deal. My only complaint with them is that they churn through their selection so damn fast. How about they just KEEP South Park and everything else? There's nothing worse than logging in on a lazy Sunday afternoon to find that 20% of your queued content has just vanished, because they only had licenses to stream the content until 5/20/2011.
Yes. Why will nobody listen to these complaints? Reiterating the point I made above, this is a big issue for me. Lawyers don't need horizontal resolution. They need vertical resolution. Hell, almost every lawyer in my office (a few hundred attorneys) has dual 4:3 screens ROTATED 90 DEGREES (3:4). 16:9 is going in exactly the wrong direction.
I can't speak to what chrome does, but usually there would be rollup patches to take advantage of, cutting down the number of patches to apply dramatically. E.g. To get from 23 to 76 you might only need to apply 23->25->75->76. This would be slightly less efficient than going directly both in terms of time patching and patch size, but not terribly so (one can assume most patches are decently disjoint). Most importantly, this keeps the total number of supported patches manageable.
Does Twitter do photo/video hosting yet? Why not?
Hey Aure. Just a tool to create bug videos. No bug-tracking built-in. Integrates with most popular bug tracking tools (FogBugz, JIRA, Mantis, Trac, etc.).
Livescribe Connect upgrade lets you share doodles (video)
Creating sheet music with HTML5 canvas & custom data attributes
I think this is a very web-development-centric view on things. In fact, I dare suggest that the world does not revolve around JS, and the bulk of development, especially in-house, is done in fairly pedestrian languages (C++, Java, C#). Web developers tend to have more web presence, naturally, so the majority of public discussions and news may make it seem to be representative of the world.
This is why I use Flickr - they are similarly unambiguous about their terms of use. They even issued a statement reiterating their position when the Twitpic brouhaha broke initially.
I've used both on a Mac. When Apple started offering both, I agonized but finally opted for glossy and haven't looked back. My preference on most things is matte - I always opted for matte when people printed photos from something called "film."

Here's why glossy screens are better, for me anyway:

1) It's better in sunlight. Counterintuitive I know, but it's far, far better. Matte screens diffract light and render the screen unreadable. Glossy screens can be made visible either passively (in very strong light) or actively if the screen is bright enough (as many now are.)

2) Glare is controllable and not diffused on a glossy screen. With a matte screen, glare manifests as blobs, and spread across the screen. With a glossy screen, glare is localized and easily defeated by repositioning the screen.

3) Matte makes screens less bright. It's a translucent filter, so of course it reflects and absorbs light.

4) Matte filters can be added, but a matte screen can't be made glossy.

The real solution: get rid of awful overhead florescent lighting. Ok, not that easy for most of you, but I think Steve Jobs probably wants those gone as much as he wants Flash gone. Any word on lighting at Apple?
I'm certainly going the other way. After working almost exclusively in dynamic languages for almost 10 years I'm finding it enormously refreshing to have the help of the compiler again when I'm writing Scala code. Even the primitive type system of Objective-C is a welcome change. Of course, occasionally you need an escape hatch. But, in my experiences, the good static languages give you enough wiggle room to do this when you really need to.
Firefox has long used bsdiff to distribute both security updates and major release updates:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Software_Update:MAR

While Firefox updates in the past were not as quiet or seamless as Chrome updates, Mozilla is moving in that direction as part of the new "rapid release" process:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/RapidRelease
Based on the title, I was hoping to learn from this article why the PC industry was out of touch, but I only learned that it was, which I already knew.
Oh, there must be something else wrong... It cant be only the load. I mean, they can just spin up more EC2 instances right? Isn't every application infinitely scaleable in "the cloud"? (tongue in cheek)
Conversely: some companies call products 0.1 beta 0.1 when they really should be 1.0. To me, when you release something to customers generally, that's (at least) 1.0. Calling it "beta" seems like a disingenuous way of avoiding taking full responsibility for bugs.
Physics of the Angry Birds Slingshot
What kinds of libraries are available for Ada? Half the reason I use C++ is that half the code I need to write is already available in mature libraries.
A Pair of Billion Dollar Shoes
Often with game updates to get around the fact that patching the compressed multi-asset files directly would not be efficient (as a change early in the file would mean the rest of the file to the end would need patching unless they had the foresight to use something like gzip's rsync-friendly option), the patch would unpack the compressed resource files, patch them, then recompress. Depending on how granularly the assets are distributed amongst the installed files and how many of them were being touched by the patch this could be a lot slower than just reading the compressed file from CD to hard-drive which is what the installer would do.

Of course this means that if using the multi-diff method of update distribution you would need to be careful about your selection of compression arrangement to avoid the same inefficiency (unless the saving in bandwidth for the client and the package storage servers is far more important than a bit of extra time spent on the updates client-side)..
Personally, this is a tough one for me. I live in the college town of Davis, and love my local bookstore and the downtown with small shops. That said, buying books on Amazon with Prime is tempting and, at 8.75% sales tax is another plus. (Of course, the biggest is buying electronics...)

Also, the loss of tax revenue is killing the colleges I represent, but this bill is a band-aid solution and a comprehensive federal one that applies to all states equally is probably needed.
I haven't had any bad experiences with Earth Class Mail, although they are a bit pricey especially for their street addresses. I travel out of town quite a bit and UPS/FedEx delivery people are beyond unreliable to my home and the two other addresses I use, so I have most mail and about half my packages shipped to my ECM address.

The mail scanning is a huge bonus when I'm away for a long period of time, and packages can be stored for weeks (or even indefinitely, if you want to pay for storage fees) to be picked up at my leisure. Doing things on my own schedule wherever I want and not worrying about the UPS guy leaving a package on the front lawn while it's raining is a great thing.
More accurate title would be "Overwhelms Amazon's Music Download Service"

EG - no instances of downtime for the regular site / commerce.
Patent trolls meet the Long Tail :/
They aren't saying "above dispute", they are saying "has not been disputed" (and implying that it will not be disputed, but it could).
Good point.

Too often on the Internet, irrationalism gets a bad rap, when in reality it is responsible for generating some of the most interesting and profound material. Rationalism is the dogma of the age, and it is firmly entrenched in engineering culture as the way of building systems. It isn't the only component -- we need systems where the designer had a clear vision, and a certain taste that pervades everything. Engineering students should have at least a basic background in aesthetics, because the concepts are important to building systems that have empathy for their users. (Your mother doesn't want to learn Linux, nor should she.)

Case in point: Apple (mostly).
This. Glossy I can deal with, but it's very annoying that it's difficult to find an affordable portable with good vertical resolution. Time I spend viewing web pages, coding, editing docs, using a terminal, etc and would benefit from increased vertical resolution: a lot. Time I spend watching movies or TV shows on my laptop: almost never.
True enough, but we're talking about reading around 20 characters that are raised from the plastic and typically printed using the same font on all cards. As far as OCR tasks go, it's pretty simple, and OCR is an established, evolved technology.
Not sure how this is related to hacking ...
Well no, because selection operates at the level of the individual, not the species. A "defector" mutant squirrel without the instinct to cry out when it sees a predator would have an advantage over the regular squirrel.

Some folks have done those complicated statistical calculations, and I believe the current consensus is that group selection is a pretty minimal effect, except in exceptional circumstances.

On the other hand, I'm not sure this is a great example. As a big scary potential predator I've scared away many a predator in my time, and y'know what? They don't cry out at all! They just run!

Does anyone have experience with screaming squirrels?
I think there is need for a Twitter image service designed for artists and journalists. Something they can brand (logo and colors) and display clear usage terms/licensing. Possibly watermarking and licensing/payment as well.
On Confidentiality
365 Days of Rackspace Cloud
Test Driven Development for Startups
Agreed, as such we all support streamlined sales tax; pretty much the best way to fix this IMHO.
It seems that you didn't actually read the post. Your comment is only in response to the title, and it's actually a good example of what the post was trying to combat.
Richard Dawkins' Response to E. O. Wilson's Attack on Kin Selection
Once an hour is fine. What do you need to do that's so urgent that you can't plan ahead more than 45 minutes?
GCC definitely has a warning for 0.5 -> int (likely -Wconversion, but I've not checked). It also has a warning for setting a pointer to "false" (-Wconversion-null). However, turning that warning on in a codebase where every warning breaks the build was challenging because of false positives. We're able to remove false positives and narrow the scope of the warning to just the buggy code in many cases with Clang, and that allows us to turn these warnings on much more aggressively.
Where the boardroom is bits by Steve Blank
The problem is that nobody knows what a "gene" is. It's a pseudoscientific term that implies we know where to find traits (which could be conserved by evolution) in a genome. We don't.
I used some 3M anti-glare film which I believe was this:

http://solutions.3m.com/wps/portal/3M/en_US/Vikuiti1/BrandPr...

On a 44" LCD television. I got it through a window tinting contractor who had a relationship with 3M (they bought their window tinting film from them).
Richard Branson: Creative thinking, challenging the status quo
That's kind of this guy's shtick - he's the mind behind the esteemed soundManager2 library (http://www.schillmania.com/projects/soundmanager2/) that makes managing audio in the browser easier with js+flash.
Dropbox Case Study: Epic Scale, One Year Later (video)
Kingsgate Consolidated - Perenjori
This articles serves to point out something more significant, which is how broken Amazon's review system is:

> However, the damage has already been done, as users are meting out one-star ratings in droves, most of which deal with Amazon’s slow service as opposed to the quality of the music (although some reviews in the lower bracket did dub the disc “disappointing”). As a result, the album has a relatively low three-star rating.

Can't Amazon allocate some resources to find a decent fix to this? It doesn't exactly make it desirable to use their platform.
Lonely startup founders: Pitch yourself to wimen
Indeed. Even more annoying is that adding high-res, anti-glare makes it a custom order for the 15". Apple Stores only stock the overkill $2599 15" version with the high-res matte screen.
When the Boardroom is Bits
I've seen this "10-20% slower" meme several times, but I've also read several accounts of 10-20% faster runtime performance.

All I know for sure is I compiled my codebase with Clang for the first time yesterday and the compilation time was absurdly short. I thought the compiler was broken. And it enables excellent tools like clang_complete for Vim code completion.
Most art is most definitely rational, deliberate, and reasoned. It doesn't appear so when you're thrown into the deep end (personally, although I'd been exposed to it countless times, it took me a while to appreciate work like that of Mondrian). Blocks of code look equally irrational to non-coders.

All the great Renaissance painters were as obsessed with math as they were pigments. Their art is accessible, so probably appears rational. Modern art is also rational, but understanding why it is rational sometimes means the viewer needs an understanding of its history, or the artist's intentions.

Cubism is a great example of this: it might appear irrational for the artist to paint a subject's eyes and their nose on the same plane, but it is not. Cubism is a process in which multiple vantage points are presented at once. Even though it is not a mechanical process dictated by strict rules, it is indeed a process.

while i
--i
subject.angle = random() * 360
# copies a nose, eye, etc.
feature = copy( subject.facial_features[ random() * 10 ] )
paint( feature )

Edit: I'm afraid I didn't express myself clearly -- by `rational`, I mean: reasoned, thought out, and deliberate.
Dropbox Case Study: Epic Scale, One Year Later (slides)
Now who said you couldn't have 2000 friends?
Sport Meets Online Gaming to Save Lives During Hurricanes
I'm not sure that really proves your point. You've made about 2.8% annually over 13 years, not including your borrowing cost, agent fees, etc.

On the other hand, the S&P 500 returned 8.25% annually between 1993-2006. Say you put 10% down ($8500) and spend $800/year total on taxes, repairs, etc. (probably low). If you'd invested in an index fund, you'd have made $42,000.
It sounds like he is toying with 3.0 in the comments later on.
From the letter:

Apple intends to share this letter and the information set out herein with its App Makers and is fully prepared to defend Apple’s license rights.

The letter explicitly states they think their rights include being able to let developers use the technology.

Because Lodsys’s threats are based on the purchase or use of Apple products and services licensed under the Agreement, and because those Apple products and services, under the reading articulated in your letters, entirely or substantially embody each of Lodsys’s patents, Lodsys’s threatened claims are barred by the doctrines of patent exhaustion and first sale.

At this point, isn't Apple saying there is nothing to hold developers blamess for?

Apple intends to share this letter and the information set out herein with its App Makers and is fully prepared to defend Apple’s license rights.

This seems pretty clear (if not within full legalese) that Apple will go after Lodsys if they don't retract the letters.

Bigger question for me (as a legal noob): What is Apple's recourse? Is it to sue Lodsys for breach of contract? Would a cease and desist request be part of that?
The really interesting thing is that this indicates that Amazon really is copying the bits around to everyone's locker, rather than just saying "user x has rights to song y". Otherwise why would it take so long (12 hours+) just to give me access to these songs?
Check out the references at the bottom of this post: http://www.visualmess.com/ .
The question this brings to mind for me: When will we be able to rotate laptop screens?

Obviously it's not a tech problem, and instead a matter of convincing someone this is a wanted feature. How do you go about such a campaign?
It depends on whether you consider delivery and packaging to be part of the product that Amazon is selling. If you buy something physical twice and it comes broken both times because Amazon is packing it poorly (which has happened to me), is that relevant for a review?
I don't disagree. That's why I said it's a remote possibility. All I know for sure is that by not even bothering to veto the bill, Perdue assured defeat for a cause she says she supports.
The Architecture of Open Source Applications (open book)
In the past at least they have gone in and removed all such "misplaced" reviews. (Manually as far as I know.)
What happens if I told you your garage door will open for 30 seconds on the hour, every hour?
Found a summary of what this actually is at: http://morganlinton.com/when-the-boardroom-is-bits-keynote-b...

Lean Launch Lab is a great way to update board members on
what you’re doing with your startup and easily allow them
to track your progress and follow-along.

Looks to be part Basecamp, part internal blog, part board meeting minutes.
I pay $50 a month to my cable company to get TV shows with ads in them.

$8 per month is not bad to fill the gaps in Netflix or Amazon Prime.
Isn't that what SRV is for? It even has priorities. Not that web browsers use it to locate web servers, of course...
Would like to know more about it before giving an email address.
How MediaTemple's Project Backlog Is Completed
I definitely don't use NewEgg enough to make that worth it, compared to Amazon.
Starbucks already has wifi. Don't most payment processors use some sort of Internet connection these days?
Real-time blog comments in Go, backbone.js, socket.io and redis
Jive Buys Microsoft Office Collaboration Plugin OffiSync For Up To $30 Million