skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm working on a project with this and my weekend research found while there's a ton of Android 2.2 tablets that are cheap, none of them can rival the build quality or battery life of the iPad. The iPad in a kiosk sense does have a nasty issue: there's no way to block the home button but to build a case around it, or jailbreak it (which isn't a very sound thing to do operations wise)
I thought hat at first and then I watched the video and fully understood. A client in the BIOS would be fun but this solves real problems.
Same with startup ideas. However, we are rarely original in our ideas, so we often confuse coincidence with theft.
$5k is such a small amount and even some seed funding rounds will run up legal fee's not too short of that.

Personally, I'd sit tight on it until you get around $15,000-$25,000.
They're a sort of universal building block. In Christchurch at the moment (badly damaged by earthquakes over the last year) they're used to shore up loose facades, as baffles to stop or slow falling rubble, they've been refitted to contain generators and substations, toilets, and shops.
I buy my coffee each morning from a couple of guys who plopped a 10-foot container with an espresso machine on the pavement after their shop was demolished.
America Invents Act Exercises "Con-Troll" Over Patent Litigation
HTML5 canvas Trees
I agree with Gruber here, which may times I do not.
In this case the original article is way off base and he did a good job at pointing it out. In any case though, I don't look up to Gruber as some great technical expert as an engineer though.
Share & Discover Visual Content Based on Taste
Share & Discover Visual Content Based on Taste http://bit.ly/pjWuR8
TEFF x Chill Moody - Music (Video)
Talking about powerful engines, check out this rocket Engine sporting roughly 180.000 horsepower.

Made by a few crazy rocket amateurs in Copenhagen.

http://copenhagensuborbitals.com/heat1x.php
The Top Ten Lessons Steve Jobs Can Teach Us - If We'll Listen
Tyrion Lannister: DILF
Causes of Anemia
3 Popular Ways To Rev Up Your Article Marketing
I too think its a terrible idea but,
What a stupid question. (how much does Amazon cost with Prime?) I hope you realize that if you cannot figure out an answer to that questions in like 10 seconds yourself, you probably shouldn't be commenting things like companies pivoting.

(And an equally stupid answer. Prime is $79/year if you are not a (mom or a dad or a student))
Answer: People didn't need another Facebook. They already have one.
I've been a Netflix customer for over 5 years.
To me, Netflix is a company that does DVDs-by-mail well, and also trying to grow online streaming.

Online streaming as it is right now is a baby.
It grows fast as every healthy baby does, but it can't be an adult yet as DVD business is. May be it will grow enough in the next few years, may be.
So when Netflix announced separate price for DVDs and streaming, i cancelled streaming immediately, because it is not ready for me yet as a separate product I'm willing to pay for.
It was good enough to have it as an addition, as a nice extra feature, but not good enough to pay extra.

So, in my opinion, there is (was?) one thing that Netflix is(was?) doing well, and now, what is this company doing anyway? What are their business? Oh, it's a video streaming over the internet, just like Hulu or Youtube?

I think Netflix just shot itself in the head.
What's this Backberry OS? :-)
Perhaps they have to record if/when each client got the message. How would one record that without one write per client?
Must You Really Search Your Code?
Copland 2010 revisited: Apple's language and API future [2010]
Early morning my phone buzzed that i got this email from: Reed Hastings, Co-Founder.

only reading the title, i thought poor prince of Nigeria...
I recently started coding Obj-C in XCode and was very surprised that it's far less polished than what you expect from an Apple experience. That is mostly because an Apple experience is consumer-facing and much more time goes into making that a better experience.

XCode feels like a GUI for GCC, which it is. It's a whole pile of flags that you can set, tweak, etc. If you don't have some GCC experience, this is a bit of a hurdle. Project settings sometimes break (especially around code-signing), so keep your text editor handy. When things break the error messages can be cryptic and there's usually no 'double-click to get to the error in the IDE'. Obj-C is obviously C, but it's also obviously not and also not syntactically similar to, say, C# or Java (or Ruby, JavaScript, Python, etc). I found the step to Obj-C to be fairly trivial, but I thank time spent with C, GCC and Makefiles for that.

After this it's mostly the same as anything else - which is diving into massive amounts of APIs and best-practices.

iphoneos-simulator is brilliant. Much, much better to work with than Android simulators (mostly because of the insanely faster startup time and the ability to change hardware on the fly). Another brilliant piece to find was Instruments, which is an Apple GUI for DTrace. Profiling and tracing execution on simulators and devices is a breeze.

I think memory management is a bit of a non-issue and I'm surprised that's even being brought up. That many programmers only know one language / IDE and judge everything else as inferior/bad/etc is a reasonable observation (if not a totally obvious one), but that's not going to change anytime soon.

TL;DR

- XCode has warts
- Obj-C is different than Java/C#
- Errors can be a pain
- iphoneos-simulator is brilliant
- Instruments is fantastic
- Easy to pick up if you're familiar with GCC
The most patriotic thing a person can do is to continuously know the value of them self and of others and to use that knowledge to do good.
This distinction between "reference counting" and "garbage collection" is either an Apple or Gruber invention. I've never heard anyone try to distinguish cleanly between the two before.

Use of (automatic) reference counting is not new (see, for obvious example, Python), and is certainly being used as a form of garbage collection.

There are many forms/strategies of garbage collection, reference counting is one of them. Trying to argue that we're never going to have "garbage collection" on iOS is utterly bizarre -- it's being added in iOS 5! It's just taking a different form.
Krantcents
EVE Online was my first thought for this. Given the name of the script I'm assuming you're in the CF. Do you know if CCP have started actively looking for this type of thing? I know some/most bots use similar methods from what I've read but unfamiliarity with Python means I have no clue how easy it would be to detect.
So sell me! Blackboard does a million things but I really only care about 1. posting syllabuses, links, and documents 2. making randomly generated auto-grading quizzes 3. auto-updating a gradebook.

Does your software do these things better? Does it do things I didn't even know I wanted? What are the big ways you hope to make the world of LMS better? Non-techies experience great pain learning complex new software, what awesome improvements justify a switch? I'd love to have some alternatives and some ammo to back them with.
Not sure why some have such a negative reaction to dressing well/looking good (#3). Look good, feel good is my motto.
I was a bit disappointed to see the HBase slide blank.

It has some interesting properties and it's rare to find real-world rapports about how it fares outside of Hadoop.
"Live CGI" in particular expresses something very important about the tech - that it can be used in combination with other on-set tools and props, and cuts out much of the "parallel workflow" that is currently required to composite a CGI scene.

You don't get the same concept out of "real-time" or "instant" because game engines are "real-time CGI," and "instant" has an existing association with "pre-packaged" - e.g. "instant coffee."

"Automatic CGI" might also work. It's not 100% accurate but it would provoke people to say "what's so automatic about it?" And from there you can explain how now the camera operator can move around a CGI set freely, etc.
ARC is reference counting in only the most literal sense; the compiler assumes all responsibility for managing reference increments/decrements and ensuring things are destroyed as soon as they are no longer referenced. It's garbage collection without any of the nasty downsides.

And Siracusa has been trotting out his pet theory about Objective-C/Cocoa being a dead end for years now. All of the articles he's written on the subject have made it clear that a) he has essentially no experience with the subject he is trying to discuss, and b) he's really, really bad at predicting the future of Apple's development landscape.

Since his first article calling Objective-C/Cocoa a dying platform, we've witnessed the introduction of an entirely new platform based on them (iOS), an enormous surge in usage and demand for Objective-C talent, and massive overhauls in the language (Objective-C 2.0) and memory model (first a conservative garbage collector, and now ARC). Siracusa has been out to lunch on the subject for years.
Static analysis to prove that code doesn't run out of memory is cool. However, completely refusing to use heap allocation, because of the possibility that some heap-using code will run out of memory, is completely insane. The ridiculous things you'll have to do with data structures to avoid using the heap will introduce more bugs than this prevents.
Yes, you have to account for that. Also, tail recursion should be fine, if your compiler is smart enough. (I guess since the program is looking at assembly, it couldn't tell optimized tail recursion from a loop.)
I think you're probably right. I just found a website (feedfliks.com) that let's me see a lot of details about my Netflix usage. There are some pretty clear patterns there. Television shows, comedy specials, and the type of movie you'd typically see on TNT, FX, or AMC are available on Netflix Streaming. Theatrical release movies are not nearly as popular. So, you pretty much nailed it. Netflix wants to be Comcast. They don't appear to care much for their movie service customers.

As it turns out, I've been using giving Netflix money to be a company they don't want to be. Silly me.
May be they could've locked the old price for existing customers (or given a steep discount on the new price), and only apply the increased price for new customers? That could stop the hemorrhage in the short/medium term.
Thanks for the kind words, everyone. When I was writing the talk I was worried it'd be too tied to our/my experience, but at least people found it a little entertaining. The video should be posted soon; the Q&A was interesting and brought up some pieces that I glossed over during writing.
Generally I agree. This one caught my eye because it addresses such a basic problem that it seems more realistic to expect this one to actually make it from theory to practice.
> The enormousness of the developer base for Windows and Java is such that many developers feel that those environments are “normal”, and anything different is by nature inferior simply because it’s unfamiliar. They’re offended by Xcode/Cocoa/Objective-C, in some way, because they feel entitled to their familiar languages and tools.

Gah - I was with you through the article, maybe not agreeing with everything he said, but did he have to come off like such a jerk in the last sentence? You're painting with pretty broad strokes to call people who aren't very enamored w/ XCode "offended" and "entitled."
You know you have your credit card blocked with one phone call, right? And that those not relay on it being on and having internet connection.
Oh! They're one of those development groups. I give them 2 weeks before they are overtaken by a lean start-up doing the exact same thing but without the ORM nonsense. </sarcasm>
> [...] when you fire up Apple’s Xcode and start building CocoaTouch applications in Objective-C you’re going to come face-to-face with a toolset that has not had the sort of love put into it that the open source community has put into the Java toolset and associate platforms, or that Microsoft has put into VS and .NET over the past 10 years

I think I'd have to agree with this statement. As someone who's recently started developing in Objective C and coming from a Java / Eclipse background, the toolset provided in Xcode seems to fall short of what Eclipse has to offer (I can't speak for Visual studio).

For instance I don't think Xcode does proper static analysis. I.e. it doesn't allow me to produce a proper class hierarchy for a class I'm using, nor can I run a command to see a call hierarchy on a method. And refactoring isn't 100% accurate either, and also very limited, i.e. I can't extract methods from a code fragment, and also once extracted, move that method into another class without issue (typical workflow for extracting helper methods).

It's not to say I can't do good work in Xcode. I just have to be aware of it's limitations and keep accurate documentation as I code, instead of relying on the IDE for a lot of the heavy lifting.
I basically treat my phone the way I would a windows machine. I download lots of apps without too much concern for their integrity, because I really have no way to track what's going on on it (is there tripwire for android?.) No way am I going to put financial information on it.
As part of my degree I had to work in a team developing on some ancient Dell PDA that ran a crippled version of Java 1.4 so I can feel your pain. My favourite bit was having to pull out the SD card from my machine, insert it into the device, run the code then plug it back into my machine to pull my logs so I could see what just happened!
I've written 2 iPhone apps in Xcode and am now working on my second Android app in Eclipse. Words cannot describe how much I prefer Eclipse over Xcode. I should note that my background is Java. There's just something about Xcode that I cannot get used to, even after writing 2 apps in it.
I used ps (in favour of pdf) whenever I can get away with it. Especially if I am the consumer of the data and can decide which format somebody else prepares for me. E.g. when downloading scientific paper there's often a .ps version.

I wouldn't want to force other people (especially non-geeks) to learn about data formats they don't care about. And after all a pdf is still better than MS Word.
You are very right; I should have tried to have us move to physical hardware before we did. Definitely one of the things that I would have done differently, in hindsight.

The larger EC2 instances (especially for always-on systems like primary databases) do get quite a bit cheaper with the 1-year reserved instance reservations, so if you are on EC2 be sure to get those as soon as you're at a somewhat stable point.
glusterfs is what we use at work, and I have seen some fairly strange behavior from it during heavy FS traffic. Makes me a bit nervous.
Totally agree. It seems that patriotism applies only to "normal" people, not to those huge businesses that operate internationally, across borders. Also, in an age when no country could exist in isolation, what sense does it make to think of just "my country, my society"?
Sorry about that -- I couldn't speak as much about our Hbase experience, but I can speak to the toll its taken on our ops team so far, which is very high, with lots of crashes.
The data is encrypted, and besides, with any non cash purchase, almost any bank/creditor will reimburse you any amount that is stolen up to a certain several thousand dollars. And you can bet if /anyone/ compromises it, Google will sick every lawyer they have after them.
If you're looking for a jvm implementation, there are at least a couple:

https://github.com/rkapsi/patricia-trie
https://github.com/jfager/functional-critbit

The latter is my own, with a focus on memory efficiency (by my benchmarks, it uses about 40% less space than patricia-trie for the same data set). Would love to get some extra eyes on it to figure out how to trim it further or speed it up.
They practically begged her to explain why she doesn't deserve to be removed from their system. Since she didn't, I can only conclude that they were correct, and she no-showed 4 times, making OpenTable look bad in the Restaurants' eyes.

Good riddance to bad customers.
Unfortunately, on the macro-scale, we've run out of green pieces of paper and are actually just issuing them IOUs at a higher value than the cost of the goods.

In layman's terms, we're cashing out our hard-earned savings for meaningless, disposable trinkets. It isn't going to last, and when it's over, it's going to _hurt_.
We make heavy use of queue and internal messaging systems. This discussion was solely about the data storage layers, which always causes us more headaches than the messaging/queuing systems.
Thanks for the thoughtful response.

Regarding our situation: the company ran for about 4 years. We raised a couple rounds and had customers like MTV and Sony, so it wasn't a total flop or anything.

I'm not actively hurting -- I've had two companies since then, which both quickly failed without funding or the drama of extensive hiring & firing. But I do talk to lots of early-stage founders, so I often reflect on that first failure when I see it happening in others.

I also see the stories in the PR circuit which don't quite ring true, but which are still some of the only guidance new founders receive. Like yours, my experiences suggest that reality is a lot messier and more ambiguous than that.
They break immersion even worse than the loading screen, and they feel incredibly tacky. It cheapens the whole product.
Android, iOS, and BlackBerry here.

While Android and iOS have great Tools, I still hope RIM is going to release a great Native SDK for QNX.
Yeah, but since when did intellectual honesty ever bring visitors in? The bigger the paintbrush, the more people flock to agree/disagree on it, it seems.
20+ Fresh and Unusual Fonts
Here’s a collection of unusual fonts to enhance your designs. We hope you’ll find this selection useful. Enjoy!
Look man, just because the government created a packet switched network doesn't mean it wouldn't have happened eventually. Yes, war creates technology. Doesn't mean you should go bomb all the things.
I find the reverse connection that people make amusing: "You wear nice clothes, ergo, you are a bad coder".

It's like a website. You want your website to look pro, it sells you. You want to look pro, it sells. you.
If only there are tools for sharding PostgreSQL. Easy sharding is still a major weakness in relational databases.
What they are saying is it's the death of the PC for casual people, which I somewhat agree with. There will always be desktops around, no doubt, but will the general population still be buying them in 10 years when they can just hookup a tablet to their big screen ? I don't think so, no reason.
I was hoping that Urban Airship actually made urban airships.
Ask HN: Competing with the crowd and not becoming RIM.
I work in a content industry that is in a massive revenue transition. Our old very profitable customer base is moving to newer sources of content that are much cheaper to produce than our internal costs. The quality is nowhere near the same standard but the new market segment doesn't need high quality, the barrier to good enough is getting close. The writing is on the wall although likely 18-36 months out. I don't want my company to be another RIM/Palm/Motorola disaster that just ignores the problems. We're working on automating as much as possible to reduce our own internal costs but there is a limit to lowering our costs.

We're about to be stampeded by the crowdsourced companies using nearly "free" users/workers. So how do we survive and thrive in the future? I'm hoping to hear from others in similar scenarios. This is the same issue of newspapers, radio, etc...

So far we are considering:
1. Moving from a customer paying model to an advertising model.
2. Creating an eco-system around us to provide our content in new forms.
(P.S. Sorry for the throw-away email)
Track N Trade Takes The Crown For Industry's Best Trading Software
More information http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.ietf.tls/8822

It looks like it uses a chosen plain text attack that exploits the multiplexing of multiple requests over the same SSL socket level connection that by design share the same key.
And that's not a good thing which is why we should strive to minimize it, however impossible it is to achieve perfection.
Well, I think the generally agreed upon meaning of "garbage collection" is something along the lines of "automatic memory management at runtime" (garbage piles up and gets collected) while "automatic reference counting" is "automatic memory management at compile time" (there's nothing to collect since nothing's gonna build up).

All those terms sometimes get used differently in different contexts sometimes, but I think that's what's usually meant by them.
Yeah, real-world n-body is very hard. But astronomers can do it with said amazing integration methods. The thing is that they tend to do it for known start states.

With Snoopy, our major masses are Sol, Terra, and Luna. Their dynamics are not trivial, but we have precise and accurate models. And we can drop a massless particle into the model and make really strong predictions, usually, about its position in 42 years. (Only usually because it might do complicated things like skip off our or the sun’s atmosphere, but we can overlook that.)

What I’m trying to grapple with is that I don’t see how they’ll know where, and along what vector, to insert Snoopy. Say we know its start state to within ±100 m (x, y, z) and ±0.01 m/s (dx, dy, dz). I don’t think it really matters how well your methods conserve energy at that point – they’re working on too rapidly widening a volume of possible configuration space. Or is there some kind of attractor/anti-chaos effect that I don’t understand here? I’m honestly asking; I only have little bits and pieces of the knowledge here, and I’d be very interested to know the details of why my incredulity is unfounded.

we can exclude huge volumes where it certainly never went. It's probably still very close to the Earth-Moon system.

Granted we can exclude huge volumes – the vast, vast majority of the space in the solar system. But say we know it’s within 0.1 AU of Earth’s orbit (not Earth itself), in a solar orbit as the article suggests. Wolfram Alpha says that’s still a volume of about 3e24 km^3.

And here’s what’s worse (as far as I can see). Say we’re lucky and, by ruling out slingshot effects and so forth, we know it’s in a medium earth orbit instead of random solar orbit. That’s a volume of about 2e14 km^3. Say we’re even luckier and also know it’s at lowish inclination. So in terms of the volume in the solar system, we have it basically pinned down. The thing is, that still leaves us something like half the solid angle of the sky to examine with telescopes.

In other words, as long as we’re using optics that can identify it at all, its distance doesn’t really matter as much as the projected area, the area of observed sky as opposed to real volume, that it could be in. And I have trouble believing intuitively that that can be narrowed down very much when we don’t know the starting state well in any dimension other than time – but I really would like to be convinced otherwise.

I think the parsimonious explanation here is probably that they had much better starting observations in 1969 than I’m imagining.
I never suggested outlawing any industries. Just pointing out the flaws in his post.

Our modern society is set up so that it takes our primal urges to the extreme, making it BAD for the individual, but probably good for the overall economy. Our choices are hardly rational because we don't understand how our genes and primal urges work subconsciously. That's why men cheat, do drugs, and self sabotage ourselves.