skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Going by the summary of the plot, it seems like Gibson and Sterling, Stephenson is also dipping into War on Terror as a setting.
Correlation proves causation, we've always been at war with Eurasia, and trickle-down economics.

- Things educated people don't believe
The mystical $250k first became "rich" back in 1993, when it became the top Federal income tax bracket, while $200k became "rich" way back in 1943 for the same reason.

$250k 1993 dollars in 2011 $370,000
$200k 1943 dollars in 2011 $2,500,000
Excellent post. It applies to any area of creativity and making things.

I like the way he put a link to this comment section on his blog item as well. Smart.
Given the ease of use of modern backup systems

They have improved, but I do not think we are there yet. For example, I do not know of any system that regularly verifies backups. Time Machine, for example, could lose a directory of photos from five years ago without noticing it. If, then, your main disk fails, The photos are, for all practical purposes, gone forever.
Are you certain that it makes totalitarianism less likely?
If you don't want to read through the wiki, here's what I've gathered (though I may have misunderstood what they're doing).

This looks like a workflow management system, where you define a dependency graph and their system automatically puts messages in queues, pops them, and executes a step. It seems like it solves the boilerplate part of distributed computing - managing message queues and fault tolerance. Please correct me if I got this wrong or missed something.
Using Video Conferencing in Your Business
Gmail | Display your inbox as feeds
This is fantastic! My mind is spinning with the industries that you could benefit from this, but didn't have the time/resources/focus to roll this sort of (very difficult to scale) system on their own.
Ten reasons Ph.D. students fail
As an entrepreneur, an "inventor", and a patentholder: I believe this is simple:

(a) if you're planning on staking a claim on a patent, get a patent lawyer (no part of this bill reduces the need for IP lawyers; whether you like the concept of requiring IP lawyers or not is besides the point).

(b) if you're not planning on getting a patent (and I think you shouldn't, for simple pragmatic reasons), just publish what you're doing as soon as you can, and you'll have established a prior art track record.

The reform we're talking about changes the mechanics of competing claims for a patent, but it doesn't make prior art harder to establish (my understanding is that in a variety of little ways it makes prior art easier to establish).
Maybe its time for a poll?

Anecdotally, we do Android development but not iOS.
Correct. The ARM M series doesn't even have floating point hardware. The M3 is intended for real-time, low power applications, and is indeed a fantastic replacement for 8 or 16bit microcontrollers.
I'd be interested to know where you saw these "pictures".

There's a group of people who like to paint the picture that the US is devolving in to a Dickensian nightmare. There is always room for improvement, but as someone who lives here and has traveled extensively I don't think you can say that "lots of people live in squalor".

Sure, we have 300+ million people, so you can find people who are homeless and living on the street, but that would still be the case even if the government offered unlimited free housing.
Hacking Life - What are your Energy Drivers?
Or sense of purpose.
correlation != causation.

the 28-day window was solely a way to lower the cost of buying dvd's. Those savings went into buying more streaming licenses.

And the the grandparent - the dvd company isn't _required_ to work with the content creators, but it would probably be dumb for them not to.
Bloomberg Radio released for iOS
You are correct. I almost qualified the statement as such, but figured "pretty much" was good enough to get my point across in a hurry. My point being that zlib compressed 24-bit RGB values in a PNG is normal. It's a different approach than lossy DCT quantization used in JPEG.
Looking at the scatterplot data, I'm wondering about the actual value of the scoring or the site in general. People are all over the map on most photos I browsed (the scatter plots look like shooting targets with points everywhere around the axes).

Interesting experiment. You might consider revamping the controls to something less like a graph and more like two sliders with Introvert/Extrovert and "Smart/Dense" as the scales. The graph model makes me not want to push it to the extremes for some reason (not necessarily because of the pictures).
Thanks for the correction. I had a different impression when I first read some of the comments, but now I see I was mistaken.

I still have the impression that Reed isn't "getting" the two biggest complaints:

1) Customers who use both services are unhappy about losing the integration between them.

2) Quikster is a monumentally bad name

(Yes I know it's misspelled. I would look up the correct spelling, but that's exactly the point. How do you spell it without looking it up? And how exactly did they come up with the name with nobody on the team saying, "Hey, my Amway friends tell me it's not Amway any more, it's Quixtar." :-)
> Even though the cutting edge is a lot less stable, it's by far the better investment, since the technology's lifespan is longer. Plus, generally a lot more pleasant to deal with.

I'd disagree on both counts there actually.

First, if something has already become a notable "legacy" technology then it's probably going to exist for a long while yet. There will still be people writing C++ in 20 years. I'd feel a lot less confident saying that about Node.js. When balancing the equation you have to factor in that most new technologies will never gain significant traction.

Second, there are different sorts of evolution around technologies. C++ or Java as a speciality now aren't inherently interesting, but they're disproportionately used in fields that I find interesting (information retrieval, real-time systems, signal processing, low-level programming, finance, big data, etc.). I find all of those more interesting than Rails in 2005. Much of that is personal preference, but again in older stacks the interesting things are the problem space, not the stack itself, while with newer stacks, there's more novelty value.
How Information Became a Thing, and All Things Became Information
I Am T-Pain is 125 in top grossing on the app store. You're contending that that ranking means $15k in monthly revenue (given their .99 price point)? In May of 2010, this ranking on the grossing chart would get you $2300/day. Presumably 1.5 years later, that ranking would get you considerably MORE revenue, no?

Ref: http://blog.iteleportmobile.com/quality-over-quantity-how-we...
Arduino Stoplight Web Server (for site status monitoring)
You have a spelling error there in the last section header - should be "leisure and hobbies"
The other way of looking at this data is that Android developers need more help [edit: on StackOverflow] than iOS developers. Which does not imply anything on popularity but tell something very interesting on the quality of the SDKs or developers… (I'm neither an Android nor iOS developer)
New Me Accelerator Companies - Start-ups Founded By Minorities
Windows 8: The era of post PC begins.
Netflix’s Qwikster Problem: Twitter Account Controlled by Weed-Smoking Elmo
98% of everyone else where exactly? In Manhattan, NY the average household income is $121,000, while in Cullman, AL it is $41,000. Sorry, $250k in a major US city is "just making it" for the average family.

Meanwhile:

47% of Federal tax filers pay none, ZERO, taxes. In 1988 the burden shared by the bottom quantile that actually paid taxes was 8.7%, while it was 4.3% by 2006. The two quantiles, one that pays no taxes, and one that pays minimal taxes, consume >95% of Federal entitlement programs.

(Sources Non-Partisan Tax Policy Center http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/)
This is a great little summary article of pieces of wisdom acquired through experience and reading thought leaders. I do wish they linked back to the source articles for the people they are quoting, but useful none-the-less.

However, I think the NTF should learn to code, as a means of learning the terminology, and build some early part of the project. If nothing else, it will go a long way with your understanding of how to treat the technical founder and subsequent technical hires. NTFs have a tendency to trivialize what it takes to code, design, trouble shoot, etc. As an NTF that learns to code, you won't know but a fraction of what your technical hires know, but you'll appreciate how hard the job is.
Bottles used to light poor communities
All papers published by Microsoft Research
Thanks for the clarification.
Is there really much demand for such a board?
what's the difference between this and hotornot?
While I don't disagree that Android is certainly popular and growing ever more so, I don't think the methodology in place really justifies making comparisons of "popularity". This is a place where the homogeneity of the iOS platform really comes in - there's a pretty limited set of devices, which eliminates a lot of the "how do I get Android to do X on Y handheld" questions that would distort their numbers. The Android APIs have certainly been evolving more rapidly in the timeframe under question than iOS, as well - there's a broad base of previously answered questions to draw from without asking another one.
"Netflix has one thing that most streaming video sites don't, and that's massive market penetration. In my living room, I have 5 devices capable of Netflix streaming, as well as every mobile device I own."

And those devices are electronics, which have the shelf life of dead fish. You have to stay relevant to make it into the next generation of products. Nobody is pre-bundling a service that a) has a small subscriber base or b) doesn't have good content.

Moreover, many devices (like my own television) let you trivially download apps from any provider. I got amazon streaming on my television on the day it was announced. Being installed on a device isn't a competitive advantage when anyone can do it.
pretty sure Leon_ is talking about the Mac App Store, not iOS.
Fighting Information Overload With The Impending Doom Engine
"distributed computing boilerplate" ha, I like it
Show up. Physically go to the startup and say you're there to help and ask what needs to get done. Worry about a contract/salary later on once you've shown you're solving headaches.
AWS supports Windows Server 2008 R2 Cluster Compute/GPU
Hah, MLM and affiliate company. I feel the HN worm has turned when it is being used as a base spam source.
How Eldarion Delivers Value to Clients with Gondor
Jefferson Rolling Over in His Grave
Maybe the HN crew wants DVDs to die. But none of my non-technical family has any problem with DVDs. They work in just about everything. They're easy to lend out. They're easy to find (both in stores and when sitting on a shelf in your house).

For my part, I still prefer DVDs because I actually like owning the disc. But more than that, I have a 25 Mbps FiOS connection and somehow at least once a week when I'm streaming something, Netflix dynamically changes the quality. It's more annoying than skipping due to scratch discs and the quality comes out terribly. I have no idea if Verizon's playing games, but as long as ISPs lose out with streaming media, I wouldn't want to bank on that business.

I'm not looking forward to a world without physical media where content providers and ISPs can dick us around with arbitrary pricing for content.
I would classify many of those as design decisions. Many of those seem like unavoidable were natural consequences of other decisions, but I agree the distinction isn't clean cut.

One of Tim Cook's strategic manufacturing decisions, as I recall, was to literally corner the market of NAND flash memory since the heyday of the iPod. Apple did and probably still does preorder a commanding proportion of the world's NAND flash production every year. Is that a strategic decision or just the natural consequence of consistently forecasting that you'll need that much NAND flash?

It sounds like I'm minimizing everything by deeming it "not strategic", but if you're going to characterizing the work Apple does, I don't think you'd be that far off characterizing it as intelligent people working out the natural consequences of a very small number of strategic decisions. If you're Apple, and you're going to make a touchscreen phone that doesn't suck, using Mac OS X technology, keeping Flash off, setting up the App Store the way it is are all consequences of that.
you nailed it. Plus iOS have better documentation and there's a ton of books and online docs, support, etc.

This is Google we're talking about. Support is virtually non-existent.
The Most Patriotic Thing You Can Do
Each article is linked - click on the name of the person or organization quoted.
Can you say plutocracy?
I generally also trace stack usage by filling the stack with a fixed pattern and watching it in my trace probe.
I wonder how much the name "Moodle" hindered its adoption.
I'm not surprised that this is true among the population of stackoverflow users. There are many thousands of devs that have no use for, no time for, and don't care about sites like stack overflow, though. (like me...)
RAID doesn't play well with TRIM from most SSD chipsets... it's not a panacea.

As SSDs are maturing it looks like there are two distinct markets where hard-disks can't go:

1) In servers, vendors offer cards that tie directly into the PCIe bus, bypassing SATA (

2) For laptops, one can look at the Macbook Air and it's SSD chips. Right now they are connected via SATA, but if that becomes a limiting factor, I see how that would be bypassed as well.

For now HDs and SSDs are very similar, but SSDs (which are essentially flash memory) can and will go where HDs cannot. They are quite different.
Seth Grimes: Free Text Analitycs 2011 Report
I would note that determining maximum stack usage is similar to the halting problem in some cases. One must carefully restrict how the program is structured for this analysis to be valid. As is stated, any sort of recursion or mutually dependent functions are out, and the use of function pointers could also cause issues.

This approach provides a good baseline. However, I'd highly recommend empirical testing as well. For example, create a sufficiently large stack, initialize the stack with a known bit pattern and then check the high water mark after fully exercising the program.
Aren't there some synergies they would be missing out on by splitting into two companies? For instance, their recommendation engine.
> Actually, isn't Quixtar the name of a MLM scheme?

Yes, Quixtar is Amway.
List of changes in Star Wars re-releases
Android developers need more help from StackOverflow than iOS developers. Aren't there private forums for Apple developers, that you can only see if you are a registered developer?
hotornot lets users rate others based on their attractiveness.

judg.me lets users judge others, not on how attractive they look, but on their perceived social and intellectual capacities.
And you focusing on plant suffering is distorting my position. By killing plants, we stop them from being alive and furthering their goals, for our purposes.

By focusing on pain and suffering you are implicitly drawing the line I mentioned about important/non-important living things there, and calling other views 'absurd'. But you aren't objectively right.
If they are using number of questions as the benchmark I would buy your argument. It doesn't matter if pageviews is considered. Developing for Android and searching for a solution related to android need not happen from an android device. Most developers don't code in their handhelds.
It looks like the same app is available for android, though it doesn't have all the features yet:

https://market.android.com/details?id=com.drchrono&rdid=...

If the versions are the same in the future (so the same app is available for android tablets), why would doctors/hospitals choose the iPad over an Android device? Would there be any compelling reason for doctors/hospitals to want one over the other?
I think they should fire the person who convinced them that the best first question a potential customer should have answered should be "home office? personal? corporate?"

The fact that they don't allow you to select from their entire range turned me off from ever considering them years ago.
Sneaky way to get your resume on HN. :)
If you judge by StackOverflow activity, barely any developers use DB2.
My money's on powerpoint 2007 or later. Could also be visio.
What Netflix is missing here is that consumers are buying content; not DVD-by-mail; not streaming service. Some customers aren't streaming service candidates because they don't have the home networking infrastructure to make it work. Some customers would prefer to be streaming-only customers, but they can't get the content they want through the streaming service alone. Combining these two services has generated the mass market appeal that Netflix has capitalized on.

We (my household) are about to embark on a study of all the content we've watched through Netflix in the last year. I'm going to compile a list of every movie we've watched to see which titles are available streaming, and which are available only on DVD. I'm even going to give Netflix the benefit of using their streaming catalog as it exists today, rather than trying to back-date it (not sure I could do that if I tried). I have a suspision that the majority of the content we watch is available on DVD-by-mail only.

If that turns out to be the case, I have an important message for Netflix: If you want me to be your customer, it is your responsibility to deliver the content I want. Don't force me to choose between two arbitrary delivery mechanisms for your own reasons. I understand that Netflix has their own internal business agenda, but let's not forget who pays the bill each month.
Building Apps On Top of Your Genome: OAuth For Your Health Data
If you find this interesting, you may be interested in previous discussions:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2842632 : 46 days ago, 10 comments

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3009276 : yesterday, 4 comments

It has been submitted many more times, mostly with no significant discussion, from many different sources:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2307972 : 193 days ago,

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2757047 : 68 days ago,

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2816556 : 53 days ago,

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2994086 : 5 days ago,

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3004324 : 3 days ago.

Clearly a story that hackers gravitate towards, although it's interesting how little discussion it engenders.
Hosteling International
A Hostelling International no Brasil conta com mais dois Hostels filiados a rede para satisfação de quem aprecia conforto e qualidade desta hospedagem tão procurada por jovens brasileiros. Os novos Maceió Hostel, localizados na Praia de Pajuçara e Ponta Verde, contam com acomodações diferenciadas e atendimento personalizado. Possuem as opções de quartos com 2, 3, 4 ou 6 camas, com banheiro privativo em todos
I just rewrite the stack function to use heap (eg, a queue) instead of stack.
You're absolutely right, I should have included from StackOverflow above.
Do you have any advice/insight into picking a category for your app? I've noticed that some of the rarer categories are pretty dead... is the easier path to the top-10 more advantageous than a 'properly' categorized app? How much leeway does Apple give you in picking a category?
and OSX.
That sounds very inefficient given that every processor of which I am familiar has built-in support for a stack. Could you elaborate a bit more on your approach?
Which is fine, when the device in question is programmed to evaluate them itself. Applications can't do that yet.
The demo could use more work to better represent the problem that the project is trying to solve. It makes it seem as if the button is going to kick the demo off.

What might be better is some sort of "Find Waldo" and the mouse pointer guides you to him. Or a pseudo-tutorial that it helps you walk through.
How we got our first 100 SaaS customers
I look forward to hopefully knowing what you've discovered! It'll be an interesting study, I'm sure, and I'm intrigued as to how it goes. Best of luck with it!
Sounds a bit like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow-based_programming

I'll have to read through their stuff to see if they have some interesting ideas for my FBP implementation :-)
Why doesn't someone start a project to crowd-source the reviewing of these patents?

There are 150k patents issued in the US every year, which works out as some 410 a day. For a small company, that'd be a gargantuan task. Let's say half of these are software patents. That's 200 a day.

All you need is about, what, 1400 programmers to volunteer a few hours every week to review the 1400 relevant patents and flag them up for "wait a minute, wtf". If those are then rejected, it will make spurious patent filing a costly and pointless endeavour. If the patent office isn't reviewing stuff, it sounds like we have to take that into our own hands.

1400 programmers for a few hours a week doesn't sound that impossible. Presumably the EFF could help on the legal side. Or am I missing something fundamental?
Show HN - Pozzle, an Event Management x Social Rewarding app
The Cortex-M3 microcontrollers are awesome. Much more powerful than the older 8-bit architectures available at the same price, and amenable to industry-standard tools instead of just the compilers and IDE sold by the manufacturer. I think this move just mirrors the general industry trend toward the ARM architecture. It's become difficult to justify using one of the old 8-bit architectures anymore, except at the lowest extremes of price or power consumption.
For those who didn't know, the featured app, "drchrono" is from a YC W'11 company. Congrats!
Netflix has closed captioning now. Works great on my Roku 2.
I love that they're doing this. It does, however, bring up one disadvantage that the paper record does not.

Suppose you're sitting in the room with your loved one and you want to see what the doctor wrote about their condition and treatment suggestions. You can pick up the records and look through them, and ask questions about what you don't understand. With the iPad, you're kind of left out in the cold and at the mercy of whoever is there. That's a weakness of the system I'd like to see them address.

BTW, I'm not saying that you'd be able to understand all the medical shorthand on the charts, which is definitely a language unto itself, but you'd at least be able to have a starting point for a conversation. "Hey, what's this..?"
While the methodology used is somewhat lacking (as lots of others have commented on here) I don't think the claim sounds entirely unreasonable either.

Anyone on any platform can develop Android-apps. At least any platform with a JVM, and that's quite a few. Only people who have invested in Mac-hardware can create iPhone apps. That represents around 7% of the machines out there (according to wikipedia :1). Mac- usage may be rising, but Mac is clearly the underdog, and developers are not that different from most people. So the statistics implies that most developers are not using Macs.

So if we accept these terms as reasonable, and they remain reasonably unchanged over time, there being more iOS developers than Android developers would in fact be a very, very strange thing.

I'm not saying this data proves anything, but I don't think it proves anything the other way other as some commenters here have hinted (like the Android SDK being of significantly lower quality than iOS SDK).

I can't possibly be the only one here thinking along these lines?

:1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_system...

Edit: Downvoted? Why? Genuinely curious here.