skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"but the average physician is old."

this is a curious statement to me for three reasons:

1) the ipad has been hailed as a device for first time computer users—the very old and the very young or even the physically/mentally challenged.

2) if they type painfully slowly with two fingers on a tablet, how do they type on a laptop?

3) the layers of abstraction are much greater on a laptop than a tablet.

true, data input may be a little more tedious, but it will still be infinitely less tedious than dealing with paper files, with the added bonus of being instantaneously transferable should the patient be traveling. and if they are already using a laptop, then what is the dilemma?

anyway, the "old dog" argument strikes me as a lazy cop-out—but if true, doesn't bode well for the mental acuity of said old dogs. i've always assumed that doctors are innately curious, always trying new things tempered by the old things that work†. if these old dogs can't step out of their comfort zone to try something new, it doesn't give me much hope for their patients.

† i understand the toxicity of the new, when science claims to have found no difference between breast milk and formula, for instance, but gathering information does not necessarily equal an endorsement. and for the record, touch screens are very old technology, we just haven't been able to implement them in a mostly non-frustrating way until now.
It's not very fun, actually.
I've been using Mirah (a simple Ruby-esque language with basic type inference that compiles to Java bytecode without a runtime dependency), so at least I don't have to write Java, but the Kindle framework itself feels very beta.
My two apps have been bouncing back and forth with QA for several months---Amazon QA does an amazing and through job (including user testing + feedback), but it is frustrating to work around the framework so often in my application code.
For instance, it takes on the order of seconds to load and display an image (not the e-ink display, but actually reading the image into memory).
The framework requires that an app starts up in roughly 5 seconds, so I've spent a lot of time spinning up threads to load images in the background.
But then you need to make sure these threads are stopped when the app exits (or goes into screensaver), and the framework sometimes calls stop() before start(), &c. &c.
Oh, and you can only test this on the hardware itself, because the simulator doesn't emulate the Kindle CPU (it just runs using your system's Java)

To get more of a feel of what you're in for, check out this forum post + Java sample code:

http://forums.kindlecentral.com/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=...
Hiring Challenges Shouldn't be Limited to Developers
In response to your TL;DR :)

- XCode has warts: Yes, it does. Still, it is phenomenally better than other environments for efficiency now and is truly a joy to use. And we have few, if any, crashes.
- Obj-C is different than Java/C#: If you're familiar with one language, I can understand disliking that. I went from Java -> C# -> PHP -> Ruby -> Objective-C. That is quite a change! But still, I absolutely love Objective-C. It has everything I could ask for, including my favorite syntax ever created. Nothing is ambiguous to me and our team is able to crank from concept to MVP faster than any other platform by far. Better yet, the speed we can squeeze out of our code blows all other platforms away.
- Errors can be a pain: they can be. We ended up setting a standard syntax for logging actions so we could quickly drill down to errors. Wish it was easier and they can definitely improve here.
- iphoneos-simulator is brilliant: completely agreed.
- Instruments is fantastic: damn skippy.
- Easy to pick up if you're familiar with GCC: true.
It all depends on your definition of "some start up". A mobile fruit stand costs $25 for licensing fees and around $250 in inventory around these parts. On the other hand, launching a domain registrar is looking more like a startup business needing around $250-300K.

I would recommend you keep your eyes open for a problem, then build a solution to address said issue. Focus your resources on growing your user base and then your revenue slowly. Look into the term "bootstrapping" for businesses funded this way.
Kickstarter, IndieGoGo, Invested.in, Pledge Music, Sellaband and Spot.us.
why even bother thats the point. With a regular credit card, you'll have to request a new card and number, wait for it in the mail, and now change all your accounts that are associated with it. With my phone, remotely wipe my sd card / lock out my phone. Track it down, and restore. Much easier. I have missplaced my credit card before, and the loss of my phone is more noticeable and quicker in general than my credit card that I didn't realize was missing till the next time I went to use it.
They could trivially detect it but they don't seem to have made any effort. The confusing thing is that their EULA is worded in such a way that this kind of software is not actually in violation, so it's unclear whether they even intend to find people using these scripts. They tend to go after people who are visibly breaking the economy or cheating (and they do tend to use these techniques to do that). You can definitely play cat and mouse with a game developer when building this kind of software, but I consider it a waste of energy.

In our case the alliance ended up using it mostly for data mining and not for anything malicious or directly in violation of the EULA, since we had thousands of players to keep track of and doing stuff by hand was tedious.

At one point I was going to try and turn the HTML5 play-from-browser feature into a product and sell it for a buck, but CCP's community team (that supposedly approves for-sale addons/tools) doesn't respond to emails and WebKit has had an unfixed bug for years that causes it to crash your browser, so I shelved it.
Just a quick datapoint for you on EC2 vs SSD... we tried restoring a 30GB pgsql database to a Large EC2 with RAID0'd EBS stores for testing purposes. It took ~4 days.

I tried doing the same thing on a Macbook Pro i7/SSD and it took ~1 hour.

EBS disk performance is reliable, but miserable.
It seemed odd to me too that a single API call could cause that much work. Granted, I have no idea how the actual app works. But one way to do this is to have clients belong to groups, then record if a group got a message (few writes).

Then for each client pull the groups the client belongs to and look for new messages (possibly more reads than storing the messages on a per-client basis).

It's an extra database table and layer of indirection, but that's one way.
That's a common usage though, right? Apple's press release for the iPhone 3GS claimed it would make gaming "better than ever" and taking pictures "easier than ever." Sometimes, it's made explicit that we're talking about the past ("you've never seen anything better"), but even without making it explicit the meaning is clear.

http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2009/06/08Apple-Announces-th...
Haven't used Word for CV's in a long time, Google Docs is sufficient (save as .doc or .pdf from there if needed).
To be clear, we are still heavy users of Cassandra. We try and objectively match the tool to the problem and in some cases, PostgreSQL was a better fit but not all. In some cases HBase was a better fit.

Also to be clear, scaling is difficult, no matter what the tool. We've had problems with Cassandra, HBase and PostgreSQL (most recently Friday), no storage option is as good as we would like under stress.
except ARC is better than Linus was imagining in the above, because it manages to do it without the "explicitly visible" part

I haven't read the article you're linking, but how does ARC manage to keep this invisible?

The usual trouble is supporting legacy code. Even with C++/Boost, where there's a variety of _ptr templates each promising either automatic deletion or automatic reference count decrement at an appropriate time, you can find yourself in a situation where there's a legacy C function accepting and returning, say, wchar_t*. You simply cannnot avoid doing malloc/free or retain/release in this situation.
More than half of enterprises support consumer phones
DNSSEC Certificates now in Chrome Stable
Placebos Are Getting More Effective. Drugmakers Are Desperate to Know Why (2009)
Google not collecting information on every purchase you make?

Oh you meant for the users? I guess the short term gain is receipt maintenance. Long term you can get rid of the wallet itself. Long term we'll have biometric cloud authentication so you won't need the smartphone either.

There's probably some law enforcement angle as well; as physical cash transactions fade away, organized crime will be easier to monitor.
To clarify, we've had lots of region server crashes, mostly due to our own data model and generally not as a result of any intrinsic fault of HBase. To my knowledge, not many of these (any?) have actually resulted in a total HBase failure. The system generally degrades as it should.
I can't agree here.

Yes, there are a lot of people who turn their nose up at the OS X/iOS development toolchain simply because it is unfamiliar. They see the square brackets and write it off immediately.

But the argument that the toolchain is not polished is dead on. If you look at the work Apple are doing under the hood with LLVM etc., then yes, they are doing some very smart things. But everything on top of that is pretty damn dismal. Xcode is incredibly buggy. iTunes Connect is hell. There is functionality that is just plain wrong. There are features that are inexplicably missing. Version control integration is so poor everybody I know uses external tools instead. Code-signing is held together with bits of string. Functional regressions from earlier versions mystify me. Xcode build configuration is so much of a hassle that it's easier to avoid it altogether by putting everything into xcconfigs. The code quality in the templates is awful.

If this kind of quality were foisted on end-users, there would be uproar. It's the opposite of Apple's "just works" philosophy. It seems the application-level dev tools team is where they stick all the students and new hires who don't know what they are doing.

I think the fundamental design of Objective C is a little old in places but has held up remarkably well over the years. Cocoa has a fantastic design. But christ, the development tools at the application level are a fucking embarrassment.
The Heroku guys are doing some seriously awesome things with Postgres. I can't wait to see where they go with it; the whole community will benefit, I'm sure.
Applying Object-Oriented Programming
Tantlinger had many patents http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Tantlinger
Mr. Diesel (I didn't realize there was a Mr. Diesel) also patented his inventions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Diesel

I note that all the great pioneers seem to have patents: Mr. Birdseye, Mr. Morse, Mr. Bíró, etc.

Is it just that we remember these people, because they were successful? I note that where there's patent, there's dispute. Were these people just the winners of litigation, and history is written by the winners? Were the other inventions just as good, or maybe better, but they didn't get the funding, or didn't have as good marketing, or weren't as aggressive?

I'm not sure; but it is certain that these guys did invent something, and did bring it to market to make a difference. I just wish patents worked better for software - so that some of us could one day be celebrated in the same way.

BTW: I'd like to see more of this kind of article on HN.
From the slides it's not 100% clear, but as Erik from Urban Airship commented here [1], "[they] are still heavy users of Cassandra."

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3015475
Even when they didn't want to buy own hardware (colocation also costs), they could use some decent dedicated servers. They are usually more reliable, faster and cheaper than EC2. Also most startups grow slower than the time needed to rent & tune new dedicated machine for increased traffic. I don't believe many people are firing up hundreds of instances one day and kill them another day so it would really justify usage of EC2. I think it's just a habit: people start with EC2 because they think they will need ultra-scalability tomorrow and then there's lock-in - the cost of switching to another infrastructure is just too big. In the meantime the ugliness and performance problems of EBS start to bite them, but it's too late.
Whatever happens this will make a B-school case study very soon. The case where a company decided to be pro-active in picking a market vertical based on incomplete data. Weather case will have a positive spin or a negative one, only time will tell.
As a streaming customer I hope they will work on enriching their library.
Shoot me an email on what you're trying to do. I'll let you know if I can be of help.
My take on the problem:

http://www.quora.com/Aaron-Greenspan/Paying-With-Your-Phone-...
What you call "fluctuations" most of us call a downward trend. And the fact that you think that it's "same as it ever was" is somehow a positive thing is somewhat disturbing.
1 in 3,200 chance NASA debris will hit a person this weekend
Success side by side
I like my Chinese-made laptop more than green pieces of paper, so it sounds like a win to me.

That's all well and good until the Chinese have all your green pieces of paper, and all you have to eat is your laptop.
What I've learnt from giving and receiving product feedback
Partial Flops are worse than total ones. And PR circuits, well, they are PR. Shaded reality at best. And if you have
had 2 companies fail without the drama, quickly, then you have learned the lesson I most wanted to make sure you knew before you ended up to your ears in unnecesary guilt.

You have managed to get up and get it going again.

I wish you all the best in your coming endeavours. And if there is a HN way to send a poster your email address, non-publicly, then let me know and I will send you mine.
I am quite sure you have learned many things I would be interested in learning, and I'd love to swap adventures in money-making land.

best,
Grävling (which means Badger in Swedish)
What is interesting to me is that I could replace "Objective-C" with "liberal" and "Java" with "conservative"; or "Eclipse" with "Democrat" and "Xcode" with "Republican" - and this article and all articles like it will fly just fine on CNN, Fox News, etc.

It is amazing how predictable humans are, and how far people will go to exploit that predictability:

1. Draw line in sand.
2. Throw rocks at both sides.
3. Profit.
SSL broken.    (TLS 1.0 cryptographic attack that works.  Not just fake certs.)
"multimedia"

:)
The Oatmeal on Netflix + Qwikster
for many, the value proposition of apple products means that they less expensive—that is, they cost less frustration. this is not always so—you consider a card reader and usb-slot and keyboard dock to be a net win, but not everyone feels that way, and considering the dearth of honeycomb apps still, it's no surprise that not everyone feels that way.

anyway: putting out (and i paraphrase) ipads aren't a better value for most is either uninformed, dishonest or plain trolling.

for the record, i like the transformer—great screen, pretty fantastic hardware, but good is hardware without great software?
Maybe this is because of my Ops background, as I was a sysadmin for close to a decade, but I don't understand the aversion to buying actual hardware.

When you're starting out, you go with something on the cloud -- EC2, Rackspace, Softlayer, Linode, or whatever cheeses your hamburger.

That's just common sense. There's no reason for a fresh web or mobile startup to have tens of thousands of dollars of server inventory, bought for the anticipated rush of people that want to get in on the 'social synchronized tuba-thumping' craze.

But when you hit the point where you're spending $10k a month on cloud hosting and your team is having to put out performance fires thanks to the shared hardware, why not just buy servers and throw them in a datacenter?

Amortized over a year, you'll spend a lot less on capital (network and hardware), and a lot more on labor, as you'll need at least one more team member to handle the on-call rotation load.

Apologies if this is rambling -- it's about 7:30am here, and I'm a bit low on sleep. :)
It's pricey and often complicated to incorporate NFC at this stage. The phones that have it so far are more like experimental/reference platforms than anything else. When NFC is available on combo chips it will be everywhere, and manufacturers are just starting to commit properly now - Samsung and Acer have indicated all their future smartphones will have NFC within the last few days, BlackBerry is going the same way, and dear old Nokia could be too. Basically, it is still early days...
I am a university professor who occasionally uses Blackboard. Some thoughts:

I certainly agree that Blackboard is overpriced and somewhat painful to use. I don't use it much. I mainly create my own web pages from scratch, which I find to be about as easy as using BB, and rather more conducive to my aims (which include making most course materials available to the public).

But then there's this:

> It forces, and reinforces, an entirely teacher-centric pedagogical model.

Um ... that assumes that the BB area is the class, which I find rather silly. I use my websites (and BB now & then) to get information to students, including handouts, announcements, solutions, links, and source code. I could do all this on a physical bulletin board, but the paper cost would be excessive, and it would require students to type in source code, instead of simply downloading it.

But my website is not intended to be some collaborative space where students learn together. On the contrary, the model I follow is to provide my students with resources, and allow them to learn as they see fit (together, if they wish; sometimes I require it). After all, high school is over. My students are adults. They run their own lives. And there are plenty of collaborative learning spaces around here. They are called "tables", and they are used a lot.

This is not to say I'm against the online-collaborative idea. Certainly, if someone figures out how to enhance the educational experience with some kind of computerized thingy, then I say more power to them. Let's get lots of start-ups in this area to come up with lots of interesting things. But in the mean time, I don't feel obligated to somehow "manage" my students' total educational experience.

> The very concept of a “learning management system” may itself be wrongheaded.

Oh, certainly. But after all, "learning management system" is just a term invented by marketing people. We don't have to take it to heart.
That's not an excuse for radically inflated prices.
On the contrary, I see more and more pdf usage.
Word is just a mediocre tool for editing documents and it is not supposed to be an exchange format.
Sharding with triggers is possible. It really helps that PGsql has Transaction DDL. If you need to create a new shard and rename the database table underneath, you can do it all in a transaction.
A math degree from Caltech is more impressive than a law degree.
You should check out redis if you haven't yet.

It's ideal for the counter use-case and with bit of smart thinking you can fit a surprising amount of data into a 32G or 64G machine (and then you can always shard).
EBS disk performance is reliable, but miserable.

EBS performance is unreliable and miserable.
There, fixed that for you.

However, EBS also has a couple things going for it. Namely: easy snapshots, fast/seamless provisioning (need another 1T?), mobility (need that volume on another instance?) and quite a fair price point when you take all that into account.
Well you made me realise its not solving the wallet problem, as you will still need a card as many outlets won't support the transaction type. There are plenty of other reasons to carrying a wallet, security cards for example, loyalty cards.

So its definitly not solving the wallet issue.

I won't be buying into it as I leave my phone all over the place. Plus I travel abroad a lot and already deal with way more fraud that I'd like anyway. Total pain dealing with banks to get all the fraudulent transactions reversed after getting home :/ anything that automates the process for me also automates it for the bad guys, so I'll be a late adopter thats for sure.
Yes, Redis rarely keeps me up at night, besides making me worry about what I'll do when I run out of RAM :)
Thank you for making the original template! I've used it for the past few years and it has been great!
What are the practical consequences of this?
While most of this is fine, you shouldn't use the work candidates produce as you risk falling into a huge legal quagmire involving IP rights, employment law and exclusivity contracts.
to fix that just add to the img, style="border: 0pt none;"

<img width="230" height="" 40="" alt="Download for Free" src="/images/button-demo.png" style="border: 0pt none;">
SQLalchemy (the orm that they're using) actually comes with some nice sharding hooks and examples.

I used to complain about the lack of "out-of-the-box" sharding middleware myself, but came to realize that this is really something that belongs in the application layer for all but the most trivial use-cases.

However, there is no reason why full-stack frameworks such as Django and Rails couldn't grow meaningful sharding support.
An oldie but a goodie (it's been posted before). I think this phenomenon is so interesting I was hoping for a fresh discussion on what may cause this.
Yes, but the actual release states that they plan to jointly develop this (3M and IBM), not that they even have this adhesive, let alone the tech to stack the chips and do the interconnects.

Really, this is an announcement of the development of vapourware, it doesn't come much more tenous than that.

IBM seems to be pretty desperate for the spotlight lately.
GBP/USD Analysis 19/9/11
Webkit (Chrome, Safari) console.log is broken.
On the other side of this, those who signed up for Computer Science are also equally unhappy having to settle with the often pedestrian world of cookie-cutter-CRUD web development.
"Wrong" in what sense? pg has said in the past that downvoting as a way of disagreeing is fine on HN.
Apparently placebos are now as good as 'real' medications at preventing death across all diseases:

http://www.bmj.com/content/333/7557/15.full

(Or at least all diseases that have had adherence research studying the mortality risk with both drug and placebo therapy.)
Okay, that makes more sense. It just sounds like there's a lot of touching going on. So, what % of your notifications require synchronous db writes?
Rdio and Streaming Music Services
agl's C translation written in literate programming style:

PDF: https://github.com/agl/critbit/blob/master/critbit.pdf

Repo: https://github.com/agl/critbit
IMHO:
"Patriotism" != handing money to your government.
"Patriotism" == doing what is best for your country (i.e. the people).

Believe it or not, the government does not alway's have the country's best interests in mind. The example I always use is the Wall Street bailouts. Tax-payer dollars were used (mostly against tax-payer will) to bail out reckless banks and provide golden parachutes for undeserving CEOs. Sometimes the government will even hurt the country when it is trying to do the right thing - it was one of the major catalysts in the current recession, because it backed entities like Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae and their "toxic" mortgages.

If you want to do something good with your excess money, the government probably is not the best charity to donate to. A simple rule of thumb: the more hands that money passes through, the less money comes out the other end. If you want to be patriotic, give your excess money DIRECTLY to those who need it most.
Thanks. BTW, Caesar's _The Gallic Wars_ is available online from MIT: http://classics.mit.edu/Caesar/gallic.html