skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
People like analogies. Sometimes they're appropriate. Sometimes they're not. Take iOS and Android as an allegory for Mac and Windows. It might be superficially similar but that's as far as it goes.

IMHO tablets are similar. Android is, without question, a stunning success in the phone world. As is iOS, which singlehandededly transformed the mobile phone industry. People expect the same pattern to repeat in the tablet world.

I disagree. There are several fundamental differences:

1. Phones have a specific purpose, which for most people is the ability to make phone calls, send and receive text messages and use maps. I would guess that these are the three biggest uses of smartphones (but it is only a guess).

What's more, I think these account for the majority of actual usage. Apps are of course important but they are an add-on. Some people will use their smartphones almost completely app free (seriously). People I think forget this too.

Tablets are a different beast. There is much less inbuilt and obvious functionality. Apple has a vision of what the use case for this. I don't think anyone else really does (yet).

The ecosystem then becomes far more important and it's Apple with the music, movies/TV and, to a lesser extent, books (mainly due to Kindle, which is cross-platform). Android simply doesn't have this ecosystem so the use case for Android tablets for most people is a much tougher and less obvious sell.

I just don't see Android tablets (or any non-iPad tablets for that matter) gaining serious mass market traction for years to come.
Design patterns aren't
Have a look at the diagram under the heading "History of National Debt".

http://www.economicshelp.org/blog/uk-economy/uk-national-deb...

The British welfare state, including the National Health Service, was created around 1948 at the height of Britain's debt.

Arguments along the lines of "we're in debt" don't really seem to make sense.
The price has fallen from $17 pre-crash to around $12, but I can't tell if that's the risk being priced in or just the usual 40% daily volatility.
I really like his interview process. Having you actually install WordPress and troubleshoot a broken MySQL installation, while having full access to Google and other resources, is much closer to real sysadmin work than the type of interviewing that Google and the rest of the tech elite seem to like.

I am so sick of getting asked basic administrivia that you never need to know in your daily job, or can easily be googled within 3 seconds. Our brains have selective memory - we remember what is important to us.

If I have to sit through one more interview being asked about esoteric junk like the structure of an inode on disk or how to code an algorithm that you never use outside of a CompSci course in University I'm going to hang up on the interviewer.
Coincident with the debut of admin-less ChromeFrame support, this makes sense.
well nobody says we have to go 2x in debt to pay for healthcare, we just have to stop spending cash on nation building and we'll have enough for ourselves. Of course this probably means less money "defending the border" and keeping the country safe from terrorists, but at least we'll be able to feed ourselves.
You drastically overestimate the quality of the "medical care" inmates receive. Just last month, for example, the SCOTUS held that California must reduce its prison population by 33,000 inmates because of the inability to provide them adequate medical care. In fact, in its ruling, it said the system produced, "needless suffering and death."[1]

Americans are woefully under- or misinformed about the state of the U.S. prison system. Going to prison is hardly, "medical security." In fact, according to some sources, it accelerates the aging process, thereby increasing the need for the very medical services that, by their absence, aid along this accelerated aging process.[2]

Hyperbole such as that found in the parent post is not only totally useless, it actually does harm to both sides of the argument.

1 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/24/us/24scotus.html
2 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1308374...
Have you tried strongspace.com ?

Just like rsync.net but infinitely cheaper and based on ZFS. With a web interface [and ZFS snapshots]
A bunch of nasty comments on that link that I believe are unfair and unwarranted. I agree that learning Objective-C is one of the most difficult tasks for a new programmer, but since it's the only way to create good iOS apps, there's no substitute, so suggesting Ruby or Python is unhelpful.
"Large number of dollar bills stolen from bank, exchanged for other products at ruinous rates. So, that's the end of paper currency, then."

Obviously, this is a setback, but it's hard to say that this is the end of bitcoin.

This site has a $10 bid: https://www.bitcoinmarket.com/market/orders/

Hardly the "end," though it's not a huge bid by any means.
I prefer to have my saved code at the ready, easily-browsable preferably via a browser-based colorized, tagged hubaju. I can appreciate this use case.
RescueTime Introductions (jobseekers to companies)
NC IDEA announces grants for 2011: $205,000 in Grants awarded
Did he explicitly ask Fake to hold off on the news, and to allow him to break the story? If a journalist called me and interviewed me, I doubt I'd even think about holding back what is a story to them unless they explicitly asked me to.
Not just handset manufacturers:

Cheap Chinese takeout is also going to be tough on the carriers. The problem here will be the collapse of the contract system and increasing phone sales through third parties like Walmart.
I want a tablet that has Wacom and stylus along with capacitive touch screen. Heck, throw in Windows 7 and I'll be happy. (W7 has great handwriting recognition.) W7 + OneNote would make a very nice (and expensive) electronic notebook if the tablet was thin and had decent battery life. I like to write instead of touch typing on a screen.
Well, that was dumb. Hospitals will treat people who are unable to pay. The hospital will arrange either lowering your bill or getting a charitable organization to help. When you have absolutely nothing left to lose, there is also always bankruptcy. Since he sold every last thing, that would have been a similar fate.

The people that really get screwed are those who have enough that they don't qualify for assistance, but still have some to lose in bankruptcy. This man could have found many other avenues.
This is actually pretty similar to what we've got so far internally at ep.io, albeit without the procfile and with a slightly more complex definition instead.

We're even running things like Redis instances off of a similar codebase, albeit one modified so the >1 server case is different.

Edit: Oh, and of course we're not exactly as open and launched as Heroku are. Just pleased to see that other people think it's a sensible way to build this stuff!
Not only is there no free magic Android tablet, customers don't have to worry about carrier lock-in. I would guess some non-trivial portion of the Android customers on T-Mobile/Sprint would have rather have an iPhone, but they can't because they are part of some family plan/etc.
lol football
Shoeboxed raises $1.43M in latest round
I think you have much higher standards for your books than for your TV.

GOT the TV show is being touted as the best TV show of the year. GOT the book is far from being the best book of 1996, yet I still believe the book is better than the TV show.

I believe that my opinion is the majority opinion. But it's nice to say that the TV adaptation is so good that a good case can be made for the other side.
Hey, check this out, Google already sort of does it. I didn't know that (probably because I have "web history" turned off, so I don't get customizations.)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2675292
Chrome Web Store Flatlines? Tech problem?
This only shows the last 120 minutes. Are there statistics about the last weeks/months? That would be better for making out trends.
Triangle Startup Happy Hour
And once again, they list specific version numbers for IE, Firefox, and Safari, but just say "Chrome" for Chrome, even though later it groups Chrome with the rest of the two most recent.

I guess it's because they don't know for sure what versions of Chrome will be the two most recent released, but it's still kind of funny.
Japanese ‘K’ Supercomputer Ranked Most Powerful
Moreover, the piece is riddled with incorrect grammar, punctuation, and capitalization. Such errors don't necessarily mean the piece is poor, but it does imply it. It also implies it wasn't edited well.

His piece ends with "It’s difficult to see what the currency has going for it." This statement describes his imagination, or lack thereof, saying nothing about bitcoin.
billforsternz's generalizations are probably based on available data.

Where is your story?
Firstly, you're addressing a different question than everyone else (even though I agree it's the right question), because you're talking about political viability whereas most people get stuck arguing about economic viability.

Second, there are a whole bunch of pieces to the system that keeps this in place. Relationships between lobbyists and government. Campaign financing regulations. Gerrymandering. SCOTUS interpretation of the commerce clause. If you started fixing a few pieces like those ... one at a time over decades ... you could change a lot of things.
Tubufy is a hobby project of mine with the goal of easily converting Spotify playlists to Youtube powered music video channels. The motiviation is really that there are so many good music videos being made (and has been made) that are somehow forgotten in this day and age. This will hopefully bring a little bit more of visibility to this art form!

Technically Tubufy is a medley of jquery/node.js/php/libspotify mostly playing in harmony.

A clickable example: http://tubufy.com/spotify:album:5SDdZXG7vS9zFcTNkC0P9g
I'm torn on this. On one hand, screw all the rioters. On the other hand, what exactly will they do with these pictures? The second shows a guy with his arm around his friend, holding a bottle of soda in the other hand. His face is uncovered, his friend's covered. Will he be brought in just for being in the vicinity? Who knows what kind of database is being built from these pictures and how some random picture might affect this guy's future when maybe he was just helping his friend.
Arrington doesn't claim to be a journalist, but Sarah Lacy, who backed up this sentiment on Twitter, should know better.

You call sources to get the story right and to protect yourself against libel, not out of kindness.
Adobe targets iOS, BlackBerry & Android with updates to Flash Builder and Flex
Beyond that we (North American) have rules betters suited for an abundance of medial personnel, rather than a shortage: You need a regular doctor visit to renew benign drugs like Ventolin or Insulin, we have nurses cleaning up vomit instead of janitors, and licensed dental hygienists are not allowed to clean teeth unless they have a dentist on site [1]. Which would be fine, if we had doctor, nurse and dentists to spare, but they seem like comparatively easy things to fix if there's a shortage.

[1] http://thinkprogress.org/yglesias/2011/05/26/201125/legalize...
SV Event Tue-June-21: How to Choose the Right Incubator for Your Startup
Being a 4th year student at UW on a coop term in California, I can somewhat relate to your situation, although - knock on wood - all my coop terms have gone great.

Now, you'll probably disagree with me but I recommend you stay at your position. The truth is - you're not thinking too rationally. There are other steps you can take to improve your situation than to just quit. First try talking to your manager at work - I assume you took this position by choice and therefore you want to get some things out of the job. Ask if they can offer you those things.

If that fails, talk to your co-op advisor in Calgary, that's why they are there. Don't be a rebel just for the sake of being a rebel, it won't help you.

If neither of those situations work, then you go to work and work on whatever you want to at work. Code your own things, and get paid by the company for doing so.

4 months isnt a long time, and even if you have a crappy term, it will still teach you a lot about things you should not do next time.

I hope this opens your eyes to coop - seems like you made the mistake a lotta students make of picking the place with the highest salary and the one closest to home. Instead, pick the job that you enjoy the most and get the most out of.
A lot of people I know (non-tech) have no idea that Android tablets exist. They only know of the IPad.
20 years ago computers were a rich people toy. They quickly became a near necessity. Same with cell phones 10 years ago.
Redolf is a simple online music service with playlist support. You can search & play songs, add songs to playlist and share a song or entire playlist with others.
On the other hand I've got a 7" nook colour and my girlfriend has an iPad, and while I admit the iPad is better in many many ways (and the Android is better in a few ways), I still prefer the 7" form factor over the 10". So while I'm certainly tempted by the iPad, I'm not getting one until they release a 7" version.
Interesting line up:

Jonathan Abrams, Entrepreneur, Founders Den
Dave McClure, Founding Partner, 500 Startups
Adeo Ressi, Founding Member, TheFunded.com & Founder Institute
Kindra Tatarsky, VP Silicon Valley, Astia
Cameron Teitelman, Founder & Managing Director of StartX
Moderator: Chris Yeh, VP Marketing, PBworks
If the Fed wants to nip it in the bud they can just go after people converting Bitcoins into dollars or goods for money laundering.
So, do you actually have any numbers to answer the grandparent's question? I'm guessing $80,000 USD + benefits (or equivalent) at a minimum.
I don't understand what point you're trying to make.

I'm sure there are many instances where the chief executive of a charity does not take a salary or personally contributes more to the charity than their salary.
KeePassX is still vulnerable to a keylogger on your local machine.

LastPass with 2-factor auth should be more secure than KeePassX, however, your point about it being proprietary is well taken.

I also think LastPass has a very good reputation for full disclosure - when the salted hashes of master passwords were compromised in 2010 it was very refreshing to see the CEO come forward and give immediate full disclosure to the public about the implications, and why you should change your master password.

I also find it refreshing that if you have a strong master password, even someone compromising their entire database should not give you reason to worry - it would be similar to someone getting a copy of your KeePassX database - it's still encrypted with high-grade encryption.
I live in LA but I don't get out much (health problems)
For sufficiently fungible products, the "Market Maker as Exchange" model works really well. What you'd basically have is high spreads for retail investors, and lower spreads for institutional investors. So your consumer-facing company would make a spread and then flatten its exposure by trading with other market-makers.

This gives the "Exchange" more flexibility than Mt. Gox has. It can offer more competitive prices when it's worthwhile, and pull back if trading with retail customers gives it too much net exposure. That's better than having a fixed fee for matching people with market-makers.

This is a rough approximation of how forex works.
Anybody else? More input pls!
The fact that all the tools can push to github make it easy to switch, which I just might do again. bzr was great, except for the fact that it just doesn't have that much traction...
I've been working with Flex for the last few months, and I keep feeling that "great" is not in Adobe's DNA. Adobe's DNA seems to be "Features! Features! Features! Good Enough Features!"

I would kill for Adobe to go into each of their development tools and products and spend a year without adding a single feature - instead, they just obsessively make existing features better. Faster. Easier to use. Can anyone mention an Adobe product they love? That they wouldn't like to see a more elegant replacement? I include Photoshop and Illustrator in here, by far their two best products.

Okay, so I'd like to also see a Flex->HTML5 builder, but if and only if it can match the speed of their current solution. (And I'm sure they're working on it.)
The NHS in the UK was designed to be a healthcare system free at the point of delivery. It has become such a part of British life that I would say it is now part of British culture. However, it has grown into something that cannot be sustained in the long term and now people cannot imagine ever paying for healthcare. I am now living in the US and have very good insurance and have access to far superior facilities when I was in the UK, but if I had to choose between the 2 systems I would choose the NHS every time. Access to basic healthcare should not be a privilege, but a right. I know the costs may seem prohibitive, but how can anyone justify not providing it whilst spending billions on defense? Surely spending money to save lives is better than spending money to take them.
I'm sure they could have done everything in Erlang, but they mentioned that they only have four developers that do Erlang within the company. Erlang developers aren't as prevalent as Python/Ruby developers.
My feeling is that the guy with his arm around his friend has more to fear from over zealous citizens than form the authorities.
If you're like me, you probably don't know what Node-Index is.

"This module is a (sic) implementation of a (sic) append-only B+ Tree [index] fully written in coffee-script."

https://github.com/indutny/node-index
Only 2 things missing, Turbo Bass button and a "This is not a toy" warning label.
Dubai Armani hotel continues to add towards the promotion of Burj khalifa
In theory I agree with you, but at some point people are going to get tired of the upgrade forces and stop using Google apps.
Facebook (14)
In my experience, a tablet has a much more specific purpose than a phone: to view web pages. I'm willing to bet that 99% of iPad usage is for web pages, apps that are essentially just iPad optimized web pages, and games that could have been done in a properly touch-enabled Flash (which may not exist yet, but will come eventually).
The science of hangovers (video)
Happy to discuss this, jannes. Your points are well-taken: when we first launched the ability to see why/how results were customized, we added a link at the top-right of the search results (the Search Engine Land article has a snapshot from those days).

But there's another guiding principle that things on the search results page need to "earn" their pixels. Since personalization is a second-order effect and very very few people ever cared enough to click the link and get more info, eventually that link made its way to the bottom of the search results.
Actually, it kind of does.

Why, ultimately, did Windows initially achieve market dominance? Because it evolved from MS-DOS.

Why did MS-DOS have market dominance? Because it ran on PC compatibles.

Why did PC compatibles have market dominance? Because they were drop-in replacements for the IBM PC.

And why, despite being relatively late to the market, despite having a relatively high price tag and a really ugly grey boxy look, did the IBM PC have market dominance? Because IBM put their product into the hands of their well-established and reputable corporate sales network dedicated to selling IBM hardware, and they sold it all over.

Of course, this argument is incomplete and flawed because I haven't used the words Lotus 1-2-3 yet. Unfortunately, the fact that killer apps also sell hardware comes as little relief for Android. The closest thing to a killer app that Android has come up with so far is Flash support. Unfortunately, with mobile Flash it's still not clear who is doing the killing and who is doing the dying.
Will MtGox buy bitcoins from me?

AFAICT, yes.

Will the NYSE buy shares from me?

Yes, the NYSE is a building full of member broker dealers who will, in fact, buy shares from you when the proper conditions are met. (I.e., you need to be worth their time).
Thanks for the pointer. I have updated my small C wrapper around the Solar Designer implementation to fix the bug too. See http://github.com/rg3/bcrypt/
I like radio because it is random and unexpected - to me. I don't have to set a playlist of any sort or even own the rights to play the song.

I used to listen to Pandora mainly for that randomly played music. I rarely even vote on Pandora and hate when it asks me to. Now that Pandora has listening caps, I barely use it.

A guy at worked pointed me to tune-in, and it is now my site of choice for online music/radio/whatever.
As an Android fan, I'm actually encouraged by this.

Look, when you're buying a tablet, you're buying into an OS/software ecosystem. Yes, people are buying Apple because it's Apple. But they're also buying Apple because of the App Store and because of a proven track record of apps they enjoy and find useful (assuming some previous iPhone/iPod Touch ownership).

But Android doesn't really have the brand thing so much with regard to the individual manufacturers. I have an HTC phone right now, but I don't feel much loyalty to HTC. My next phone might be made by Samsung or Motorola. I don't much care, because I'm loyal to Android, not to the particular manufacturer.

So in that light, the US numbers for next tablet purchase are 50% iOS, 33% Android, 9% RIM, and 8% don't care. And that's not bad, considering that Apple has a good year's head start on Android wrt tablets.
I haven't heard of SpiderOak before, but from their site, it sounds like you create the equivalent of a private key on each device you use, so that your data is encrypted on the machine itself and never visible/readable by the SpiderOak servers (roughly). Is this correct?

How easy do you find SpiderOak to use otherwise?
While I agree that the ecosystem for tablets is more important than for phones, I'm not so sure this will automatically lead to a Windows/Mac situation. Windows benefited a lot from lock-in and network effects. These are becoming less relevant as more services are online. Obviously this is true for web apps, but even native apps usually have a large online component, think Facebook app or Kindle. Because of this, it's much easier to switch to a different platform.

That said, Apple is of course trying to create that lock-in by creating an ecosystem with content (music, movies, etc.) that only works on Apple devices. So you might very well be right that Android tablets won't get any real traction, but I think the forces are less strong than they were for Windows and Mac in the 90s.
No, and I obviously didn't make my point clearly enough. It was to stop thinking that you have to offer a minimum of $x to attract people. I tolerated a 49% drop in effective pay rate to work somewhere I loved.

Offer a really great place to work, at a minimum.
I've actually had this same experience with Postmark as a developer and user of the service. I told a couple of people I was using it instead of standing up my own server or whatever other solution and nobody has understood why. In terms of Postmark, having one less thing to have to worry about with my startup is great, especially when it's something as potentially hairy as sending email. But it's hard to get others to understand that, even when I'm not selling it.
Not really. The previous seizures were over copyright infringement/IP issues, rather than hacking. It's possible that the DHS (who were behind the seizures before, as Customs is a part of them) is working on it, but they likely don't have the necessary paperwork or process in place for "hacking sites" instead.