skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Good question, what are the Android/iPhone market numbers outside the U.S.? I suspect that Android might have a lead in undeveloped countries since there are lower cost models available. I'd love to see the data.
It'll be more interesting to see if he goes in the second time after he's had his idealized misconceptions about prison knocked out of his head.
Feeling good is not the purpose of the comment voting system.
Believe it or not, we actually spend more government money on healthcare than most countries where universal care is offered [1]. And still have all these uninsured.

That's without even including the absurd amounts of private money. Just the government layouts, which don't cover close to everyone. Let that sink in.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_care_system#Cross-countr..., http://seekingalpha.com/article/146992-comparing-u-s-healthc..., http://www.oecd.org/document/30/0,3343,en_2649_34631_1296873...
Except he won't get medical attention in a city/county jail until he is near comatose.

Maybe in federal prison he would only get the bare necessities and certainly not anything serious to deal with pain.

Plus as a felon you just gave up a whole bunch of rights you took for granted.

It's far from ideal but if he was willing to go this far he should have sought a city with a medical college and teaching hospital. There would still be a bunch of hassle and compromise but it has to be better than being at the mercy of the city/state's apathy while you are locked in a 6x8 cell.

I cannot believe we are nearly three years into the big insurance reform (remember when it was going to be healthcare reform?) and yet the changes are meaningless for most people. I think we need to keep changing "leadership" every election year until the politicians get the point.
This isn't a particularly new idea - the term 'three hots and a cot' goes back a long time. I've heard that a lot of the homeless people here in Boston commit petty crimes to deliberately get caught to escape the cold outdoors during the winter, or to receive dental care (although I should mention that I have not personally confirmed this). This is also mentioned, though without citation, in the Wikipedia article on homelessness: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Homelessness#...
Living Through a Currency Devaluation
I don't remember, but it was close to Heathrow, so you may have a point.
The compact framework has traditionally been horrible and kind of a joke. I hope MS has either ported the proper .NET framework or greatly improved the compact framework for WP7, if not it makes the choice of no native code support even worse.
Technoriztic
I think #1 covers it.

It feels a bit awkward to even refer to file-level hashing and lookup as de-duplication as it's more commonly known in block-level de-dupe.

Regardless, on documents it's probably safe to assume they get close to 2:1 compression ratio. I'd assume that the de-dupe of large binaries is a huge part of what makes running such a business on very expensive cloud-storage systems financially viable.

Would Dropbox work financially without it?

They could offer a non-de-duped version at much higher cost for the security minded, but then they've implied that the basic version is fundamentally flawed.

Just an interesting technical barriers to think about (IMO).
Don't all browsers have password managers built in? I've been using Firefox's and it seems to work pretty well. As far as I can tell it's stored encrypted on the disk (and my sync server) so I'm not sure why a external password manager is better... I'm happy to be enlightened.
Tim Armstrong: Why isn't our terrible company overvalued like the others?
Not sure I agree with any of it, but I definitely object to claim that btc lacks liquidity. Most of its liquidity problems are caused by the crappy USD banking infrastructure. The #2 exchange, Tradehill, is adding traders like crazy. It takes traders literally 10 minutes to move their bitcoin onto the Tradehill exchange but it will be another week before their USD will get transferred in.

When MtGox reopens in a day I expect a run. MtGox is rolling back trades, but some withdrawals almost certainly made it through so there is some concern they won't have the funds to cover. If MtGox survives the run I think btc is stronger than before the crash. I give MtGox better than 50:50 odds. They've been pulling 1.3% of every trade, or more than $300k in the past month alone. There are daily withdrawal limits so MtGox has time to make trades on the (depressed) open market to fill any holes.
This article does not understand bitcoins. The value of BTC did not drop on Sunday. What happened was the value of BTC, on on exchange, dropped momentarily because of a hacker selling large amounts very quickly.

MT Gox was compromised, but bitcoins themselves do not rely on MT Gox or even exchanges. The currency is fine.

This "experiment" is largely unaffected by this single market crash.
If a password is compromised, is a "similar" password also compromised?
How To Download All Cydia Apps For Free
Among the other free software packages available through Cydia but there are also several hundred packages for sale through the Cydia Store with a commission setup similar to the Apple App Store.To get paid Cydia applications for free you actually have to add following repositories in your jailbroken iOS device. Below are some repositories links where you can get all Cydia Apps for almost free of charge.
If one were to port a game, then before displaying the buffer, one can generate vector graphics before sending it to the frame buffer. While you can potentially display both the buffers, I am sure the vectorization phase will be computationally intensive (thus low fps).
I've always thought this type of person was called a 'generalist'. I like devops a bit better.

The problem I've found being a devops-type person is that hiring managers have a hard time figuring out what you do and why you're valuable (author of post excluded).

I've received comments that my resume is too unfocused -- they'd ask if I wanted to be a sys admin or a developer, to which I'd answer "both!"
Look for the blue dots. If you see blue dots then the answer is no, sorry to disappoint you -- that wasn't the end of Bitcoin.

- http://bitcoinmonitor.com/
I think Bitcoin is a terrible idea, and doomed to failure. At the very least, there is a long, rough road ahead. But he left something off the list, something new: electronically anonymous.
(Re)defining Competition
I said micro-USB, not mini-USB.
Here and Now (NPR) just did a story on how the military is using solar power, right now, to provide electricity for remote bases and soldiers on the field. The military's adoption of solar power is providing the scale that solar companies need to improve manufacturing needs and drive additional R&D.

The initial motivation is that it reduces the stress on their energy (read: oil) supply chain, but they've found that adopting solar is also cutting down on the number of batteries each soldier has to carry to power the gadgets that have become part of modern warfare.

http://hereandnow.wbur.org/2011/06/06/military-solar-power
(the meat of the story is actually in the audio, the text is just a brief summary)
Can I suggest that the IDs be something a bit less generic if you're going to hardcode them? People might already have 'next' and 'prev' as IDs for other things. (Not that they'd be in the right, either.)
Unrelated, I love the imagery you're using. Daemons and wizards.
I don't want an iPad. I want an Android tablet (waiting for a good one). And I know there are a lot of Android users who think the same way.
Chromification of the Operating System
Though the 'experiment' has shown the grave consequences of a security breach. They might be able to fix the current problem, but markets are about trust, and the doubt that this causes cannot be undone. We all know it can, and will, be hacked again.
I know you said you're working on a blog post, but I'd be really interested in if you could elaborate on the challenges inherent to building tablet software -- I build big enterprise-y software that is on Windows Mobile phones and Windows tablets, and I find the tablet part to be much easier in terms of designing a usable interface for the form factor.

Are there particular things you have in mind that are much easier to design for a phone than for a tablet?
I have never read his columns but the obituary makes me want to have a look.
Look at the right column, under "Most popular" is a tab "My Posts". His other most popular article is titled "The End of Facebook". Looks like "The End of ..." stuff sells well.

And, I don't agree with his conclusion. Paper sheets and butter may be anonymous too, but its difficult to store it in digital form. Duh.
History of Programming Languages - funny but mostly true
By James Iry
Not enough software and non-competitive prices are exactly where Android on phones was three years ago. And both are those easily, almost inevitably, fixable. We are talking about a moving target, a target that pulled off the same basic trick once already. The apps will come and the prices will drop. I still haven't seen a compelling reason why the iPad is any different than the iPhone in this regard. Apple is betting against an entire industry, and you very, very rarely win betting the house (disclaimer: I am sure Apple will still profit handsomely and own a decent percentage of the market).
Oh noes!

I go by programming geek. Same name for my blog. I'm working on a side project called Answers Geek.

It's only a matter of time I get sued for being a geek I guess.
I like the idea. If there is a niche for a git hosting alternative, you guys have found it at the right time. I wish you all the best.
Actually, what I wanted was an extremely lightweight netbook that could run Android apps, but Bluestack hasn't taken off yet. The fact that the keyboard is removeable is a huge bonus because it drops half the weight and size.

There will probably be something in the future that does more of what I want, but this is good enough to get me by for a few years.

As far as I know, the iPad can't do what I want, even if I replace 'android apps' with 'ipad/iphone apps'.
That has nothing to do with Universal Healthcare, and has everything to do with the fact that there are not enough doctors. Which is unrelated to Universal Healthcare -- just look at a country like Austria, which has very good social insurance, and absolutely tons of doctors.

Here, the education to become a doctor is free, and there are lots of (free) childcare services available to average people. So a person need only have enough money to survive, and need not pay for school or babysitting above the age of about 3, and graduate a medical doctor without debt.

That is how my mother-in-law, who grew up rather poor, became a neurologist after she had her unplanned baby (my husband).
U.S. Government Wants to Double Prison Sentences for Hackers
Sony has already announce 2 tablets.
But 'everyone' wants to be a hacker these days too. Read the top left corner of this website. We fought for a decade to redefine the word in the eyes of the public, and yet its quickly become defined as most any person interested in startup culture.
Similar things have happend on stock exchanges, with automated micro-second trade algorithms running wild. Now those exchanges have learned from past crashs and installed limits and market fluctuation. Bitcoin exchanges will learn and do similar things. It's only just starting.
Just for example: Let's say I want to log into google's jabber service with a non-web client (pidgin or something). If I used firefox's built in password storage I could not easily log in. This applies to passwords that are not web based. In addition, firefox's security is not very strong. By default they are stored unencrypyed (Security -> Saved Passwords -> Show passwords ... That button wouldn't be there if they weren't unencrypted).

The reason I don't use LastPass is because it is proprietary. I use KeePassX over firefox because it has better security, can store associated details (Comments field which I can put, for example, what my secret was (I randomly generate those too) and so on), and can easily be used for passwords that are not for only web based stuff.

The most important detail would be the fact that passwords saved in browsers are only useful in the browser, not for apps etc.

As another random example, firefox couldn't save, say, the passwords of sites I ssh into or the irc keys I need to authenticate myself on various irc servers.
> Even though the American corporate tax rate is 35%, nobody pays that.

Is she saying no corporation pays that or just drug corporations?
True, but I don't live in SFO and have no interest in living there, as I'm trying to leave the country.
i can summarize this pretty easily. competitors that see the argument like "apple is giving 1GB RAM for 500$, i'll give 2GB RAM for 500$!" are really missing the whole point. when you buy an apple phone / mp3 player / tablet / computer you're probably well aware that with the same price you can get a more powerful/feature rich device elsewhere, but you decide, instead, to invest in a brand you trust because has given you other reliable, innovative products that you already own and you know the new device will integrate seamlessly with whatever you already have, or you're buying "the iPhone", not a generic smartphone, the iPad, not a table, an iPod, not a mp3 player, so there's really no choice because apple is the only one doing it.
Google discontinues support for IE7 in Google Apps
BBM Users Get Creative To Make The Service Act More Like Twitter and Tumblr
Paper sheets and butter may be anonymous too, but its difficult to store it in digital form.

Yes, he completely misses the point. It is digital and distributed. Moreover, the old adage about newspaper titles rings true here: If a newspaper title ends in a question mark, you can probably replace the entire article with the word "no".
The problem is that we're in debt, and there's no one to pay for it, especially with the costs of healthcare increasing, rather than decreasing, as they should when technology improves.
Nice, just 14 hours later and this is now item #152 on HN. :-)
I guess that would put 1 of the top 4 slots in the Android court. I wonder which will have more traction with consumers: HP or Sony.
And I'm arguing that his displeasure with GitHub's price comes from the fact that he's underestimating the extra amount of time he will have to spend as a user of CodePlane because CodePlane is not remotely as polished as GitHub. I'm arguing that this extra amount of time will not be worth the difference in price.

Yes, I get that. I just don't agree, and presumably he doesn't either.

It's not just collaboration and web stuff, it's reliability and security. Would you seriously trust a tiny service like CodePlane to store your code? Both ensuring it won't be deleted and that it won't be hacked into? If DropBox has trouble with those issues, would you trust a low-budget one-man-operation with your 50 repos?

And GitHub started as... what, exactly? A tiny low-budget one-man operation? Everybody's gotta start somewhere. Maybe CodePlane doesn't meet your reliability and security requirements today, but there's nothing saying it won't in 3-6 months.

And regardless, this is Git we're talking about. Every repository clone is a full backup. If you're still concerned, add a post-commit hook that also pushes to another server you control, or set up a cron job that does rsync every now and then. I'd do the exact same thing on GitHub as well -- why would you trust GitHub to never have an issue that might render their backups useless? It's certainly not the first time this has happened to a service that does their own backups. If there's data you really care about, you must maintain your own backups. At the very least use an online backup solution (or something like Dropbox). Maybe not something you control, but at least it's pretty unlikely that both services would fail at the same time.

When people evaluate programmers they often have to rely on far-from-perfect metrics, like university credentials. Putting emphasis on GitHub and ignoring the other forges is not ideal, but it's such a big improvement over the old ways. It's hard to get new metrics accepted into the mainstream.

Yeah, that's true. That was more of a mini-rant on my part than an endorsement of anything non-GitHub.
It's complex and there are a lot of characters to follow, but many of them are developed very well - which is rare on TV and wonderful to see.
Universal health without universal control?
All Work and No Pay: The Great Speedup
The Android tablet market is still in its early life, and the problem is the initial manufacturers screwed up on pricing, but overspeccing the tablets, and then charging more than $500, without even a Wi-Fi only version.

But I think people will be surprised that Android tablets will take off in the second wave of Android tablets, when the Tegra 3 chip shows up in them, and Amazon takes the market by storm, too. That should push iPad's market to under 50% by the time iPad 3 is released. And that will be just the beginning.

And I know there have been stories how competitors can't build a tablet for a low price, but that has been already disproven by Asus, which has pretty much identical specs with iPad, yet it's $100 cheaper.

The Amazon quad core Tegra 3 tablet is rumored to be priced at $450.
Yes, it is possible to install Google Chrome without having local administrator rights. It installs itself into the user's "Application Data" folder. A user cannot set it as the default browser without having local admin, however.

If an administrator installs the "multiple user" version of Chrome on the computer (which is installed in the "Program Files" folder as per a normal app), the next time a user runs their "single user" version of Chrome it will display a message that the multiple user version has been installed and their single user application is uninstalled.

References:
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Chrome/thread?tid=31d0...
http://www.google.com/support/chrome/bin/answer.py?answer=11...
Lessons learned with my first tmux experience
My reason for not using LastPass is because it is proprietary. In fact, there has been an XSS attack on them in the past which was somewhat successful. I use KeePassX because it allows me to avoid laying trust on any proprietary entity. At present if LastPass were to have another security flaw (and hey, security flaws on web-facing servers are all too common) you'd be out of luck. With KeePassX security is local. The worst case for me is someone stealing my database and trying to bruteforce the password (hah, like that'll happen). This requires them to have physical access to my computer. Anyone can take a guess at your password because it's a web based service.
You said it right. That is what these "hacks" may be designed to do so it's important to see it for what it is and not to let the idea die.
Blazing-fast code using GPUs and more, with C++ AMP
I agree, there just hasn't been a killer Android tablet yet. I was suprised at how laggy the Moto Xoom was. I've had hopes for Playbook but even that killer hardware has flopped on the software front.
Interview with MySmartPrice Co-founder Sitakanta
Thanks for the advice, sgentle. You're right on the masters thing. I checked again, and that is, in fact, what I was looking at - the university department I was looking at just didn't offer a doctorate.

Do you know if a company needs to sponsor my visa in the same way the U.S. sponsors H1-B's? Do you think that would cause any difficulties after my wife's student visa expires?
Not that I necessarily agree with this but...:

If an individual has otherwise flourished in a society to the point where they can afford to have other members of a society provide them those services, then they are (despite medical appearances) apparently fairly well adapted.

The issues arise when they are not using their money to give themselves these advantages. (Perhaps it is inherited money, or perhaps it is provided by the society itself).
The "no one to pay for it" argument doesn't seem to be uniformly applied to to various highly expensive military adventures.
It's a focus thing, really. I suppose it depends on perspective.

With a phone, right, you have this 3-4ish inch screen to work with. You absolutely have to focus. You've got a gun to your head requiring focus, commanding the basic flow of the application fit tidily within the confines of this small space, this teensy viewport the user has into what they're working on. Now, it's still possible to make crap (definitely) but the kinds of mistakes you're able to make are limited by both space and what the user can realistically accomplish with the limited time and tools inherent to the phone form factor.

Now. You get to tablet land. Holy shit! Look at all this room. I can put things here, and over here, and this place is nice – and then you have this jumbled, unfocussed mess. For me, the tablet gives you a lot of rope to hang yourself. Since the form factor isn't compelling focus and clarity, now you have to do it yourself.

I love the luxury of creative constraints. Tablets just have fewer constraints. A blessing and a curse, to be certain. Lots of great stuff you can only do on a tablet, too.
I'm really fascinated about competitiveness in emerging markets, wonder if other people have had similar experiences in their companies?
You're missing a trick by that near-final slide of the DDG input just being an image - would be neat if it were a fully functional DDG search form.
If you did say it the other way, spin is just what it'd be.
Totally valid. I'll change that and push it on the next nightly. Thanks!
Hell hath no indifference like the status quo. A problem or market doesn't exist until it can prove that it's painful enough to find a solution.
How To Stop Websites Resizing Your Firefox Window
Thinking over Apple’s value
It is just starting, and there's a long way to go before its fair to compare any aspect of them to your everyday stock exchange that we know. And again, they have to retain trust to get there. Who's to say these countermeasures and limits won't be specifically targeted by a future hack? They're too easy a target.
Getting a Git repo setup with a web accessible interface is not trivial and for the time spent doing it, you could be doing other things like ... you know ... writing code to make you money.
Ah, thanks for the clarification. "API interfacing" was formulated a bit quickly (then again, don't you interface with an interface?) -- perhaps I should have said "using API's".
Now, I just hope that they too won't move their production base to China after taking the DOE grant like Evergreen Solar had done after taking the $43million grant from MA.
Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/15/business/energy-environmen...
Almost starting to feel bad for them. Not quite yet though. With 41 employees they're probably spending $400k/mo on salaries + overhead? Hopefully they'll figure something out soon.
It's interesting that you bring up the financials as a negative compared to the U.S., because the picture you paint sounds almost exactly like what I'm living right now. Barring folks who run their own business, salaries for developers in my experience really don't rise to what I would call the upper-class.

Just FYI, the U.S. also taxes worldwide income on its citizens, although you get something like a $90k automatic deduction, plus the ability to deduct money you pay in foreign taxes.
You missed the option of SpiderOak. It's very similar to dropbox and, to my knowledge, has impeccable security.
Ask HN: Which mobile app has the best friend invite flow?
I'm looking for the apps that have done a good job at this.
While my car currently needs to be repaired, I don't go around saying that cars are silly. The US tax code is a broken mess, but that is just an implementation problem.