skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Disruption occurs when the incumbent more than meets the needs of its customers ("overserves"), and the entrant meets those needs well enough - and also meets the next-most important need of customers. (A very simple model of customers is that they have ranked needs - once the first-ranked need is met, they focus on the second-ranked need etc)

So, mobile phone voice quality is not as good as landline quality, but good enough - plus, you can use it wherever you are. Microcomputers are not as powerful as mainframes, but powerful enough - plus cheaper and smaller. While some customers in some circumstances may still need the extra quality/power of the incumbent, the big profits go to the disruptor.

Do console graphics overserve most customers? If not, how close are they to it? (Note: while there is obviously room for improvement, the key question is whether customers want that improvement. If they are overserved, the improvement just doesn't matter.)
Apart from the popularity of casual games, one test is that PC versions of games have better graphics than current consoles - yet, the console editions are outselling them. It seems that customers value something other than graphics.
In Admiral Gallery's book "Clear the Decks!", he describes how as commander of the Fleet Air Base in Reykjavík, Iceland he put a 0.25 bounty per rat caught. He noticed an immediate decline in rats, but noticed that he was still paying out about the same amount of money in bounties. He later discovered that his personnel were paying people at the British and US Air Force bases a dime per rat and smuggling them into the Navy base. He decided not to crack down on it since he was cleaning up the other bases.
"...enjoy enough to steal". Piracy != Theft. Say what you will about the economics or morals of piracy, but don't say it's theft.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_infringement
http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecm...

Big PDF. It's a bit dense, but unambiguous. Nota most bene, though: not every browser implements everything you'll read in the standard. But, if a higher percentage of JS coders would read and grasp the standard, we'd have less confusion about how to use the langauge, IMO.
"the impression I'm taking away from this dispute is that Richard is being banned not so much for his tone, but more for saying things that are true and that the people wielding the power to censor him are unwilling to hear."

I'm saddened that you have this impression, given that most of the things he complains about are duplicates of bugs that other people were able to report in a civil manner. As a developer, I know my software has bugs, and am appreciative when users let me know what they are. As a person, I don't feel I should have to put up with sarcastic, snarky bullshit when finding out about the bugs, or when trying to fix them.

"The success of open source rests on participation, and participation is a two-way street."

I know of at least one Thunderbird developer who quit because the atmosphere in Bugzilla was hostile. I don't know how many people decided not to participate because of comments like Richard's. Participation isn't the same as welcoming everybody, no matter what their effect on the community.

Also, I would totally read a blog post about the power politics of open source. :)
Ah ok. I that case I'll try them first :)
From the usage page:

* Hingleton - Derived from “helper singleton,” a class which turns another class into a singleton by enforcing that class's singularity.
* Mingleton - Derived from “method singleton” a class which has any static method that returns some state without taking any parameters.
* Fingleton - Derived from “field singleton,” a class which contains a public static field.
I have seen this literally - it's low down but it does happen.
That clause is by definition perfectly useless, because of its preample: "other than set forth in Section 11". So it does nothing to limit the license granted in section 11. It's just eye candy.

Now, if you could define clearly for me what "in connection with" in section 11 means: use such Content in connection with the provision of those services

Does "in connection with" include the need to make money on that free service by selling that content to a third-party? Where does the connection start and stop?
And incentives for ethanol use lead to rainforest destruction:

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1725975,00....
Earliest humans were bling-wearing cannibals
In case you are wondering why singleton's are bad practice in Java, here are two reasons off the top of my head.

1) Dependency hiding.

Singletons are rarely based around as parameters. Rather, methods simply access and modify them as necessary. This can be obviously convenient in a lot of places, but it makes looking at method signatures less reliable a way of determining dependencies.

2) Global state.

Singletons are global state, more or less, and are thus difficult to maintain. Bugs involving global state can be hard to detect, and global state isn't even amenable to testing, because the order of your tests start to matter. Side-effects bring a lot of troubles.

Edit: I guess this is redundant with the information on this page. http://code.google.com/p/google-singleton-detector/wiki/WhyS...
Thanks for the Tip :-) will likely go with @stripe then :)
I've had similar thoughts, albeit only for Google's sites. I would imagine this would be something more likely to be seen through Chrome (or even the Chromium OS).

My gut reaction is that most people wouldn't want Google on top of every other site they visit. Of course, I'm also amazed at how many toolbars I have seen people install and run concurrently in IE, so I could easily be wrong.
A privacy revolution would be to use client-side encryption on this sort of services, not change the TOS -- especially since questions about ownership of the data would become pretty irrelevant.
The commenters are morons who do not get it. Sadly, so is the article author.

No insights or deep thinking that you couldn't have gotten from a 4/chan thread, with better pictures.
Looks like that leaked layout a month ago was the real deal:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2650580
From the end of the article: "But overall, it doesn't feel like a must-have upgrade to me." Except that Apple does not really fix many bugs in previous version of their software unless they are security issues or really huge problems that a lot of people complain about loudly. Upgrading is usually the right choice and for 29 bucks it's not going to hurt the pocket book.
> You asked what the difference was. I told you.

I didn't ask what the difference was. I asked what difference it makes what difference the name makes in context of knowing the difference between tmux and iterm2 - what is terminal emulator and what is terminal mux and what is a combo, as long as it gives me what I want.

I believe the discussion was centered around why would someone switch to iterm2.
you could always use css:
http://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/flip-an-image/
If you happen to use Firefox, I can recommend the iReader extension.
http://www.samabox.com/extensions/iReader/
I have the exact same problem. IMO what happens is you start to learn all the ways things can go wrong, edge cases, bugs, etc and you realize how fragile your code (and other's is). Throw on poor time estimates and you learn how difficult it is to produce quality, reliable software on time.

The way I think about it is if you do question your abilities and know you're fallible, you're ahead of 90% of the other programmers out there. Because you are thinking about all the edge cases, performance, reliability, maintainability, etc, you are going to create much higher quality code than someone who is 100% confident in their abilities.

Also, if you've seen quality code and worked with people smarter than you, you'll no doubt improve (as long as you're humble enough to learn from them :) )
What are some examples of "seat belt" and "airbag" changes you see shops making?
Pythons and boas have been pretty successful. Realize that venom is not a silver bullet; have you ever noticed venomous animals very often pursue very small prey?

Venom has a place and a use, but just because you've got venom doesn't mean you're a superior predator. In fact, it seems to me it is most often used simply to allow a delicate animal to hunt prey that can hurt it- not because the prey is fearsome, but because the animal is vulnerable.
What do you mean with "something"? The brains of the voters?
It seems to me the guy with the hidden snake farm and the "unfortunate fires" his fellow snake farmers had might lead to some problems with that plan.
None of them support youtube.
I would look at Capybara before using webdriver directly in Ruby. With Capybara, with one line of code, you can change from using webdriver, to using the native rack driver, or a full headless browser setup like capybara-webkit, or akephalos for headless httpunit (which runs javascript).

https://github.com/jnicklas/capybara

drivers:

https://github.com/thoughtbot/capybara-webkit

https://github.com/bernerdschaefer/akephalos
Sounds to be the same as "The law of unintended consequences"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unintended_consequences
This is from Wikipedia:

The mainstay of malaria diagnosis has been the microscopic examination of blood. Although blood is the sample most frequently used to make a diagnosis, both saliva and urine have been investigated as alternative, less invasive specimens.

Areas that cannot afford laboratory diagnostic tests often use only a history of subjective fever as the indication to treat for malaria. Using Giemsa-stained blood smears from children in Malawi, one study showed that when clinical predictors (rectal temperature, nailbed pallor, and splenomegaly) were used as treatment indications, rather than using only a history of subjective fevers, a correct diagnosis increased from 2% to 41% of cases, and unnecessary treatment for malaria was significantly decreased.

It certainly sounds as there is use for diagnostics tools.
... or Excel resources
Saying that Android penetration is small now means nothing regarding growth potential. Mobile phone usage in sub-Saharan Africa has exploded over the past decade and is responsible for greater mobile banking penetration than there is in the US (despite our incredible Android penetration).

The fact that this technology is being built means that mobile clinic operators can take advantage of faster, easier, cheaper, more accurate diagnostics in the field. When will an everyday consumer enjoy the ability to self-diagnose a blood-borne disease? When someone gets AIDs in the US, can they self-diagnose?

The need exists and this is a great step forward.
"When this was realized the reward was canceled, but the cobra breeders set the snakes free and the wild cobras consequently multiplied."

What if they had announced that rewards would stop being offered in a month? That would give cobra farmers a chance to cash out on their supply.
Cute. Even the current photovoltaic cells do not make economic sense. Why should a five times more inefficient method be better?

If anything, they should look whether there are other temperature gradients they could use for this, but I suspect that the conversion still is not great.
Let me use the analogy of a bank for a minute...

I need to keep my secret cookie recipe safe. When I take it down to the local bank, they offer to put it inside a locked box with only one key and then put the box in their vault.

If law enforcement shows up with a warrant, the bank is legally obligated to open the vault and hand over the locked box.

Now here comes the curve ball... IF the bank kept an extra key to the lockbox, they can be compelled by law enforcement to open the box. Otherwise, it is the law enforcement agencies responsibility to either get a locksmith to open the box, or force me to provide the key.

Dropbox is the bank that keeps an extra key, even though it creates legal liability. Furthermore, they lied to you about keeping the extra key when you first stored your cookie recipe.
Not if you consider the resolution would be much higher then anything technically feasible. You might not now what you want to focus on before hand, but if the system is setup you can go back and decide what to look at.
What was your design brief for this? The results are so cool,
so should the brief.
It seems to me that the word "gifted" has been diluted to mean "meets expectations."
Note the author's confusion of "millions of artists" and RIAA. You're not giving the middle-finger to the RIAA, you're giving it to the artits. Ha ha ha.
(UA employee here)

Urban Airship also supports C2DM as a push transport for Android.

The Android library can operate in a hybrid mode where C2DM will be used if it's available, and will fall back to Helium otherwise.
A better option is to simply set the reward lower than the marginal cost of raising the snakes or other pest to begin with. So that there is a benefit to killing and turning in one that is encountered but not for a primary enterprise - the real problem is lack of both economic understanding and long term thinking on the part of bureaucrats.
After I've read her article, I would say I have high regards with her.
Oh go crawl back under your he-she-it rock, Randall Munroe.
Many things one can relate to in there. For example, I just realized I also like praise for vanity/insecurity reasons. That's also the reason to write this comment.

Confidence? You need to become a little macho to survive in business, but it's also addictive. Overconfidence is a double edged sword, it's good to keep the humility to yourself.

Whether having your own job/business can change you? I believe not, it just allows you to be 100% yourself, disinhibited, not trying to cover up the sharp edges of your character that you usually cannot display when you are a gear in a corporate machine. For me it was also sort of like going back to childhood.

And it's a lot of fun (but i think that's the endorphines from the sense of power you get).

Historically, excluding feudal and industrial/postindustrial europe people were a lot more entrepreneurial, they would either be farmers, cobblers, smiths; in general people were in charge of their art. Maybe they were also happier back then.
You still don't get it. It's not neccessary to diagnose for malaria via blood. Malaria patients know they have malaria in almost all cases, because they are familiar with the disease. As soon as the symptoms show, they take the tablets. If the problem is not fixed, then it was not malaria. But if you live in a malaria area and you have the typical malaria fever, 99.9% of the time it will be malaria.

Blood diagnosis is unnecessary and expensive. Just take the pills.
Agreed. It was abrupt, and I thought for a second I must have scrolled too far or accidentally switched tabs.

If there must be one (and I'm not against them), I would suggest the NY Times style slider. It's unobtrusive and smooth, so I know where it is coming from, and doesn't get in my way if I want to act on it. (Granted their objective is to bring you to another article.)
This is a nice story, but I'm not sure it really adds up.

If you're breeding poisonous snakes to turn in for a reward, and the reward goes away, are you really going to release live poisonous snakes, or are you just going to kill the ones you have and not breed more?
These services have some serious barriers to entry. I created one of these, http://wacchen.com, I think it was the first. When you search for instapaper for video, the first 2 results mention my app. I am not actively maintaining my thing anymore because I realized there was going to be a hiccup in any wide adoption; Youtube. Youtube does not, and probably will never allow people to download that content. 80% of what most people bookmark are youtube videos. Sure some sites out there can be scrapped, but at best your business will be in murky territory. I wrote about this on my blog as well. http://alexkessinger.net/2010/11/15/why-instapaper-for-video...

Someone is going to crack this nut, but they will need to figure out the youtube problem.
If the scan can be expanded to other blood-borne diseases, it could potentially be useful. But it's pointless for malaria.

Malaria is a bit unique among diseases in that it's a parasite and not a virus or bacteria. I'm not sure this method extends to non-parasitic diseases.
Thanks Sahil, was it at Echelon? I wasn't there during the conference (my teammates were) but glad you like it :)
This is what happens when you let Professor Frink publish papers.
Pair.io: on demand cloud pair programming environments
It looks nice, but it doesn't feel quite right.

Too much functionality depends on iconography, which leaves me having to map pictograms to actual words. It's OK for me to read some words. You're going to have to translate the interface anyways.

And there's very little use of contrast or color to help determine what is going on. My blogs and the reading list don't have a lot to differentiate each other, so I was initially confused where I would even go to post to my blog.

Also, the "New Blog" button is confusing. Are people really creating that many new blogs that they need a huge, highlighted button for it? I thought it was to make a new post (using "blog" as a verb, really), so I was confused when I click it and got something else.

Pretty attractive update, but fairly bad functionality and usability.
"Criminal" doesn't mean much these days. You're probably a criminal yourself if you've driven a car in the US or if you lived in the US after 1980 between the ages of 18 and 21. (I don't remember if Canadian law is as absurd.) The question is whether a petty thief is gonna cap you because you caught him stealing your laptop, and the answer is that it's very unlikely. The statistics khafra posted at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2743973 suggest that, on average, you'd have to confront thieves between hundreds of times and tens of thousands of times before getting killed.
"The position of each particle is a point in R^3 so the position of all particles is R^(310^80)."

There's a theory that says the the maximum information content of a region of space is proportional to its surface area*. (Honest!) This result is related to black hole physics: information has to be represented by mass and/or energy, and thus curves the space-time continuum according to general relativity. Try to put too much information in a region of space and it gets cloaked by an event horizon.
You are right that regular mirrors absorb or scatter light energy. However, to get 100% reflection it should possible with a setup where the light is getting refracted or bounced off critical angle.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_internal_reflection
This is commmonly used in Fibre optics.

Its more of an engineering challenge to come up with a setup to view your past than a theoretical one!
Stealing from Zynga
My designer friend works in the same building as Zynga. He says, "They bought our building, and we have under a year to get out. And we've been here 18 years. We walk into their offices and steal food and sodas every day. They suck, so it balances out with the stuff we steal."
thanks for your explanation. But, what is a singleton?
Data Compression Explained - Light reading for the weekend
As companies get larger the likelihood that they are well managed decreases significantly.
What's wrong with having a 5% market share? Safari is good, and so is Opera. Both are great when it comes to compliance to standards (Somebody correct me if I'm mistaken), and are pushing the envelope as much as the three big players. Also, Safari (or, like, 99% of it?? Somebody also correct me if I'm wrong) is open source in the form of WebKit.

I don't get this mindset that says that everything now needs to be a monopoly or duopoly. Why can't small players participate too?

What happened with choice?
I actually think that "many women" isn't exaggeration.

Similar issues are discussed frequently in many forums. It's only you don't know what you don't know!

Edit: Ok. I exaggerated. But we really don't know.
Are you saying we should all just trust the laptop thieves of the world a little more? Maybe stealing a laptop is the worst thing a thief will ever do; maybe not. It's not unprecedented for a criminal to murder a witness to a relatively minor crime in order to avoid a third strike conviction. Is it worth the risk to find out?

There's a difference between "living in fear" and "minimizing risk" just as there's a difference between "living without fear" and "courting danger."
A more accurate headline is: Myspace drops below LinkedIn.
Interesting novella: http://www.booktrope.com/book/after-life
My gripe with global state (i.e. singletons) is not testability, maintainability nor correctness. It's nothing more than bad object-oriented design, or lack thereof.

I've seen this time and again - even this week, as I am doing some major refactoring in old code - singletons are used exactly where someone was too lazy (or too busy) in order to do a proper design and review. I cannot count the number of proverbial SomethingManager singleton classes I've seen.

At most, singletons should be used in a single point of entry to a module. From there on, even if other classes should be used once, their singularity will be derived from that single point of entry that contains them.

Rule of thumb - stop using singletons. In 99% of the cases you will see a much better design exists.
http://watchlaterapp.com can do it. You buy credits ($0.01/min) to download a cached copy (to an ipad, I think you can do web too), but as others have mentioned, not for YouTube.
You're a lot more likely to end up dead scuba diving than arguing with petty thieves, and you don't even get a free laptop out of it.
This was great, Patrick.

I've been going through a hugely eye-opening period of my life where I'm learning lessons that your article echoes. The largest of those lessons are: A) Your main obligation is to serve yourself and to allow yourself to make decisions you are truly happy with, and B) Much more than "It's not about what you know, but who you know", I'm finding that it's really about "what you know about how to deal with people you don't know." And for me, not knowing about the latter prevented me from realizing the former, and your story about missing the Delta flight not only validated those points to me, but really hit home.

Additionally, I'm finding that the way I viewed my dealings in life and overall progression as a person was completely backwards: I would look at my past attempts, from social to professional, as a long string of failures that would only continue to stretch onward, both discouraging me and crushing my confidence. But in looking at my attempts as isolated, bunkered events, the spread of potential damage is significantly decreased, which has done quite a bit to boost my confidence in that I'm more willing to take that much more of a risk. If the bomb blows up, leave the bunker and move on to the next one with your newly acquired knowledge and experience. And no one really remembers that bomb exploding as the explosion was merely a psychological dramatization. I know you somewhat touched this point in a more business-negotiating context, but it's one that's had a universal effect on how I deal with others in any context.

Anyway, really nice writeup; I enjoyed it quite a bit! More articles like this one would definitely be appreciated.
Was anyone else looking forward to an article about always being to bail out when GI Joe's laser hit your plane/helicopter/whatever?
I'm sure many people mean to kill them or they keep them for awhile as pets and then at some point they escape. Look at FL with all the boa constrictor/python problems they have.