skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Now a good way to single out the Hacker News Readers would be to identify males in the computer software industry who suddenly and significantly updated their profile questions shortly after November 23'rd 2011....would love to see some real data on how much action these users are getting!
Seems like a cool idea but have you considered what role your popularity plays in all of it? I consider myself a casual visitor to HN and more of a lurker than anything yet I still recognize your site immediately meaning you've gained traction with random folk like myself let alone more hardcore members.
Spotify continues march across the globe
I am not sure about Spotify and Dropbox. I do know disqus uses django. Ref - http://www.slideshare.net/zeeg/djangocon-2010-scaling-disqus
"how is buying Yahoo going to plug the holes?"

Volume.
AppMobi Open Sources Its Mobile Platform
Why the HCG Diet
http://hcgdietpackage.com Brings You Answers to Frequently Asked HCG Questions. Visit us for more answers to your HCG questions.`
The web browser is being sold to developers as a "general applications platform" to compete with native applications.

Since native environments often give the developer a greater degree of language-choice freedom as well as greater degree of access to complex APIs, I fail to see how offering the same freedoms in the comparatively miniscule browser API would cause the complexity to outweigh the benefits.

If browser makers just standardized on a language-neutral runtime like the JVM or the CLR then no central committee would have to be responsible for maintaining support for specific languages.
Something similar: https://github.com/kemayo/sublime-text-2-git
Excellent story and impressive discipline. What was your prior experience with computers or technology in general?
That's not an accurate analogy. You have the books on your kindle (and in your backup if you made one). They're yours, you bought them. I have the right to access material that I own, even if that means removing the DRM from it.

The article is really light on details. Without more information I really don't see why this story has legs.
Terrified of cybersquatting, businesses battle plan for more top-level domains
You go ahead and make a browser that breaks like that, and I'll go ahead and spread the word to everyone I know how crap it is, and generally do my best to wipe it from the surface of the earth - on the principle that it thinks the page encoding is more important than delivering value to the user.
Tech start-up MyCyberTwin named one to watch
Then don't go there. Seriously.
Patrick is falling into what, I call, the marketing trap. I like some of Patrick's advice, but I wouldn't follow this... ever.

Patrick has a nice little niche business but that's all it is, a niche. Niches, by definition are really small, focused and low in demand.

In a niche, the stream of new customers eventually dries up and the temptation is to move further and further over to the marketing dark side to keep the ship afloat.

Deceptive marketing tactics work, but they shouldn't be necessary. If that's where this is headed, then just go full darkside into scamming and call it a day.

Grey and black hat techniques are a bad as crappy products, terrible service, bad systems and stolen ideas. If you wouldn't think of using any of those, then don't use scammy marketing.

If you find yourself pursuing deceptive tricks, it's a sign your niche is not big enough and your product is not high enough in demand.

This is the most common trap analytic/scientific minded business owners fall into.

Many people on HN have voiced concerns that the current crop of startups are increasingly using deceptive practices to boost their businesses.

A well planned business should not have to do this.

It's one thing to decide to be purposefully evil, but rationalizing it as necessary is amoral and possibly illegal.
Google retail chief gives Christmas marketing tips
Personally I believe that optimizing for the technical user is much more important than user-friendliness in developer tools, especially window managers and text editors. Most people don't have the desire or the motivation to write full-featured developer tool extensions, but those who do should have the full power of a language like Haskell at their fingertips.

I think the fact that no one has bothered to write a limited configuration format is telling. It seems to indicate that people who have learned Haskell don't see any benefit in it and appreciate the flexibility offered to them.
Disclaimer: I work for Google.

JavaScript doesn't have integers. I suspect that the Dart VM will support integers with overflow. So yes, I suspect in that case they are different.

I also strongly suspect this will not be a significant edge case in practice: if you use integer types in your dart code, then you clearly don't want doubles to result from a calculation. So the only unexpected "surprise" you would encounter there is if you expect integer overflow but get doubles. If you are writing code that expects integer overflow to happen a certain way, you're doing it wrong. If you're writing code that doesn't expect integer overflow, and you want integers, then you're going to be fucked either way. Either you end up with doubles and type errors or an overflow and your result is wrong.

Changing things as entrenched as JavaScript while maintaining backwards compatibility is messy and hard. Especially given some of the horrible characteristics of the language. I'm glad someone's at least trying.
Oh. I had assumed that the blatant ad was a fake, tacked on by patio11 for just that reason.
Yes it is still relevant.

The only thing stopping my non-programmer flatmates from using Ubuntu is only MS Office.

They are envious of the interface and the ease at which I get all sorts of packages without worrying about malware.
Or, for another alternative, w3mman, which is bundled with the w3m browser. Tabbed manpage browsing in the terminal with URLs converted into links and "foo(1)" converted into a link to the man page for "foo". Don't leave home without it.
Fun fact: it used to be codified as 6.5 times minimum wage, but was changed in 1996 to be fixed at 6.5x the current minimum wage of $4.25, which is why it is such a random seeming number. If the law had not been changed in 1996, the current value would be $47.12 per hour, which would exclude many more hourly workers.

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c101:S.2930.ENR:/
"I wrote spark in bash shell. From the start, this gave me a huge audience."

It also helps to be a prominent employee and user of a central developer community, with over 800 followers.
Nothing meaningful for programming really. I knew enough about MS Office to be dangerous.
I think it's interesting Groupon is giving all these large tech companies a ton of leverage with their future deals.

I can just hear the Google people in their next pitch meeting to some great start-up, "You don't want to end up like Groupon do you?"
What Can I Eat On The HCG Diet
http://hcgdietpackage.com Brings You Answers to Frequently Asked HCG Questions. Visit us for more answers to your HCG questions.`
"I have the right to access material that I own, even if that means removing the DRM from it."

Not according to the DMCA you don't.
Accessing material you bought - what are you? Some kind of terrorist?
The resulting fragmentation along device type is the biggest problem for developers. Google is trying hard to unify the phone and tablet, but Amazon is throwing a wrench into that strategy. Amazon can dictate the terms of Android tablet app distribution, further complicating matters for Android developers.
Patio11's ad is an image, and would be blocked. But you're still right, in that the closer one gets to mimicking unpaid content (such as Google or Reddit's sponsored ads, which are text) the harder it is to programatically block.
Google is a search company. Owning the platform is Google’s way of making sure they own search. Google does not care about facilitating app sales because they can make 15-30x the money from search.

It's interesting that an ex Googler who implies this is based on inside knowledge would say this.

It illustrates how different their priorities from Apple, who care about 3rd Party developers because they provide key differentiation that adds value to the hardware.

Google's approach leaves differentiation to the individual manufacturers, so the manufacturers have an incentive to want distinctive software on their hardware. That's why we see the motoblur, sense, etc.

I suspect Samsung would love to operate their own App store, but of course they can't because they'd lose Google's support.
The entire "desktop computing" paradigm is coming to an end. Overlapping windows, buttons, icons, cascading menus... it's over. We're entering the next phase of computing, touchscreen, voice, hand gestures, AI.

No, Linux desktop is no longer relevant.
"It clearly says "sponsored content""

Haha no it clearly doesn't. If it was about doing things clearly he would stick to banners and highlighted ads.
It doesn't even matter what bias'd SEO guys with twisted morals think, anyway.
The majority gets to decide what's right, and obviously the majority thinks it's wrong.
Nobody likes to be treated like a fool.

What if when you clicked on a HN story, a third of the time it were an ad?
Maybe we could generate false comments to minimize the difference between organic and adverts...
Anyway it'd just be content that the webmaster has put there.
With a little warning in the footer, to stay morally sound.
This is the kind of thinking that makes XML RSS feeds break entirely when someone happens to use an ampersand in their blog post.
> Have you ever had the after-the-Superbowl conversation?

I'm not American and don't live in America, so no, I've never watched the Superbowl or talked about it, or its ads, afterwards. Over here when there are very popular sporting events (the World cup every four years, or maybe tennis every year) people talk about what happened during the game, not about the ads.

But fashion magazines, yes, point taken. But as you say, there's nothing but ads in them; people buy them just for that. Ads are not interfering with other content in fashion magazines.

Anyway -- in my experience, once people know about AdBlock they can't do without it. Therefore I'm wondering what's going to happen when everyone knows about it (which will happen eventually).

What you're saying is that many people actually like ads; you may very well be right.
I like the simplicity of Github for Mac. It's a very clean interface. Still, it feels like it's designed for an iPhone screen, not a computer screen. I've been enjoying SourceTree* recently because it shows more on one screen--seems like a good package for when you outgrow Github for Mac.

* http://www.sourcetreeapp.com/
Self-Sabotage -- The Enemy of Business Success
The article shows us that nowadays anyone can easily start learning a programming language or even a framework, that the internet is an incredibly useful library for those who seek knowledge and that tabloid headlines like "How I became a programmer in 12 weeks" still get our attention.
How would you build a startup to make jazz more popular?
So I am a huge jazz fan and have some spare cycles to invest some time and energy into a something and thought it would be an interesting project to try and make jazz more popular.

My question - how would you go about building something that made jazz more popular?

In particular, I'm living in NYC and am thinking starting with the aim of making jazz in NYC more popular is the way to go.

Any/all ideas appreciated.
One more try to get through to you then I'm giving up.

Here goes.

What are the arguments _against_ open source?

What if someone says, "Open source means poor quality"?

You can look back on the last 15 years, choose some examples of open source software and rebut that with evidence.

I would make this rebuttal.

You apparently would as well.

Now, what are the arguments _for_ open source?

You could say "Open source produces high quality software."
Note: Not "can produce" but "produces". As in always.

You could say that.

I wouldn't.

I wouldn't make that argument.

I would argue open source make sense because the source can be reviewed and corrected if necessary, without being dependent on a proprietary vendor.

Hope this is clear.
thank you. I uploaded a the php code of the example site you saw in the video: http://bobbelderbos.com/src/moviecollection/site_php
Apps are easy to replace, the web is not. Google thrives in a massively fragmented world because that's where search matters. Google dies in a single platform world owned by Apple.

Fragmentation makes developers' lives more difficult, makes users' lives more makes difficult, but drives people to the web as a unifying platform. Google's cost of customer acquisition may go up in the short term, but Google still makes all of the money from search at the end of the day.
Agree with you on the results pages. I've found that Google's become much more cluttered since the "instant results" redesign and add in of the Google+ and preview buttons. I feel like the page even seems clunkier.

Regarding quality of results though, wasn't Google accusing Bing of directly copying search results somehow?
Great update, I love the line-by-line committing. One thing that would sell me on this app, though, is having an interface for repo issues. Without that, this is more of a "Git for mac" than a "GitHub for mac", in my opinion.

Keep up the great work guys!
LHC antimatter anomaly hints at new physics
Exactly, it's time for us to transition to a CLR for web browsers and allow people to continue deploying plain-text javascript which the browser can compile, or let them deploy precompiled byte code written in their favorite language.
I've been a user of okcupid, on and off, for several years.

at this point, I dont really even look at scores anymore. I can tell based on profile text alone whether I'm likely to get along with a person.

but this is age and experience, not math.

I'd rather okcupid had a feature that tells me what things are going to cause fights between a person and myself after we date for a while :)
It'll just be another inflection in the long-running cycle between thin and thick clients. I think the last time it reached this pitch was mid-late 90s, when Microsoft, Yahoo, @home, AOL, etc. were trying to make their online services and portals the be-all of the mainstream's Internet Life.
Forget Shopping, Friday Is Update Your Parents' Browser Day
I was a computer geek from way back, had a few BBSes in the late 80s (yes, I'm a child of the 80s & 90s), learned QBasic & VisualBasic back in the day, and tinkered with Python for a few years off and on... mostly off. Other than that, nope.

This ought to be worth something too, though.
Why Facebook Is Winning The Great Tech War In India
Isn't this prohibited by the FCC?
That was a red herring. It was the Bing toolbar watching what users were clicking on. So it picked up Google's results, but also everything else people were clicking on. I wouldn't be surprised to find that Chrome does the same thing.
Funny. I didn't realize that I had Adblock Plus installed until the I noticed the images in the blog post were missing.

(Apparently, Chrome syncing will actually install Adblock for you when you switch computers(!), but will leave the default lists set. I had it on without any lists, and just blocked the egregious stuff... except now I suddenly blocked everything.)
this whole thread is ridiculous, because he clearly stated that he did contact amazon several times, with no result besides "sorry, we don't know/can't say what's going on either"
Since I started working as game developer, crunch has been always around. I won't comment on whether it's good or bad, whether it should be paid or not. Just this:

If you have worked more than 12 hours, and sometimes 20 - how the fuck one drives 20 miles back home? I have a friend (also game developer) who rides from Santa Monica down to Carlsbad every day - ~100miles each direction. And they had to crunch a lot.

Hopefully for me, and everyone around I'm just a mile away from work...
If Amazon didn't care about owning app distribution, they would include the Android Market on their devices to make them more desirable to customers. They wouldn't have put the efforts in convincing me to put my apps in their store while imposing draconian terms (even worst than Apple!) where they control the prices developers' apps are sold. They wouldn't give away apps to get people to use their store.

Amazon goes as far as using writers to rewrite the descriptions of all apps before they are put up in their store. That is not the behavior of a company that doesn't care about app distribution.
Personally I'm refusing to buy DRM'd books at all, and it's also so far kept me from buying a Kindle (which, if I were to buy it would be only used for non-DRM content).
They aren't intentionally being pricks; they just don't care. Caring costs too much. It's cheaper to have an unresponsive automated customer service system that lets a certain percentage of customers suffering from edge cases fall through the cracks. This guy was the unlucky one today.
Yes, but look at the other terms he mentioned, which are not at all brand specific. What that tells me is that many of Google's users take that ad to be Google's suggested best result.
And if you don't want your private conversations recorded simply refrain from speaking? There is a long history of privacy protections afforded to the general public.
Microsoft's Craig Mundie On Siri: Been There, Done That (Video)
I'm aware of that and didn't imply otherwise. But the storage mechanism is for the history, not for the materialized files in the working directory. That's going to be the same for either git or SVN, since they're checked out. So you're talking about comparing git's history DB to SVN's metadata files. The metadata files are effectively constant cost whereas the git history grows with each checkin. They get quite large.
I've been using sourcetree lately, really, really enjoying it - though line committing is pretty cool, I have apps hosted in places other than github though.
I've been a Groupon defender (lots of downvotes to account for it!) but would agree that while cashing out early is reasonable, the magnitude in this case was breathtaking and, as you note, probably indicative.
"Amazon does not care about app sales"

Amazon would have to be blind to their own success selling one type of virtual good to kindle owners for them to not care about selling another type of virtual good to kindle owners.

As others have pointed out, the fact that they went through the trouble of building their own App Store proves they care deeply about app sales.

What's more, the low margins on the kindle fire prove they not only care about app sales (and book sales, and movie sales, and music sales), they're relying on them.
Great. I'll have to check that out. Thanks for the link.
Well I don't see what the issue is, then. They do the same thing for porn or anything else that could be remotely offensive. I don't have a problem with that. They aren't blacklisting torrent sites; they're just not suggesting them.
Or, revision and simplification. Reagan's elimination of bracket creep springs to mind.

an AMT for corporate income might be a useful limiter. We'd like you to grant options, we'd like you to donate charitably we'd like you to do a bunch of stuff, but at the end of the year, we still want X% of your income.
I love sourcetree, plus it works on my old macbook pro running osx 10.6 in 32-bit.

Github for mac sadly only works for 64 bit machines from what I understand.
I just hope that however any of this falls out, Flickr survives and starts to see some attention. I really, really like Flickr (pay for it even) and don't want to see it die. I actively dislike the competitors in the social photo uploading space (cannot stand Picassa's UI, and Facebook is, well Facebook. Photos are not the primary function there). Flickr suits my needs just perfectly.
Facebook has 800 million users. All semblance of "exclusivity" and "cool kids club" has long since dissipated, but they've still added 300 million users since last summer.

The method by which they launched the business seven years ago is not very relevant to predicting their IPO success.
I'd say Apple cares about owing app distribution because it provides the differentiation that increases the desirability of their devices. Without distinctive software, Apple doesn't really have anything that can't be quickly knocked off.

Google doesn't care about owning app distribution because they don't make money out of devices so differentiation is a problem they leave to the manufacturers. They just want to make sure Apple doesn't end up owning enough of the mobile space to threaten Google's ad business.

Amazon cares about owning app distribution because retail distribution is what Amazon does. As the retail of digital goods displaces the retain of physical goods, Amazon seeks to establish its position in the delivery chain, or risk losing out.
Netflix Admits Problems With Desperate Cash Grab
From "Hack" to "Popular Project"? So, what, Linus and his Linux kernel? ;)
耳ツボダイエット
I'm Asian. What social stigma?

I could probably pay less by living elsewhere, but $1000 that stays within the family > $500 to some landlord with whom I have no connection. Also, I'd miss out on Mom & Dad's awesome cooking.
I have never claimed the choice between '==' and '===' is stylistic.
How does this impact California? I understand that they have their own law related to IT staff.
I'm sorry but you can't become a _programmer_ in 12 weeks. You can become a pretty good code wrangler, you can put togeter a decent website or an application but you still have around 10 more years to go (as shown above/below http://norvig.com/21-days.html).
I think it's transitioned from exclusive cool kids club to "Well everybody is there, if I'm not, I won't have any idea what my friends are up to."
Microsoft Said to Sign Non-Disclosure Agreement With Yahoo
I do not think it is as black and white as you describe it. The way I see it: if somebody falsifies a complete repository, the only way to detect that it was changed is by comparing its content or a hash thereof with that of a (supposed) copy that is more trusted.

That is true for any digital archive, including those made by any SCM system. The only thing where git differs from svn in that respect are a) that it computes such hashes for you, and (typically/AFAIK) shows those hashes in its UI, and b) that it is typical for people to store those hashes on other systems. The net effect of that may be large or small, depending on the number of people keeping a copy who will not blindly copy changes from the 'main' repository.
I don't plan to, but that's not really the point. Because at some point it becomes, "Don't go where?"
AtomicInteger, Volatile, Synchronized and Raw: Performance and safety
Racism and Meritocracy in Silicon Valley
Crowdsourcing Darwin's experiment on human emotions
I don't understand who still sees ads.

I've been working in IT for over 15 years, with hundreds of highly proficient people. I've met one person who runs AdBlock.

Or do (most) people actually like ads?

I saw a statistically significant survey a couple of days ago that said ~25% of people "liked" or "liked a lot" ads on mobile devices. Over 40% were undecided, and ~15% "neither liked or disliked" mobile ads. only ~20% "disliked" or "disliked a lot" mobile ads.

The effectiveness was another thing altogether - interestingly, they didn't seem to be any less effective for people who disliked ads.
Cuisinart SS-700 Refurbished Solitary Serve Espresso Brewing Bundle
Star Office is awfully good.

Office productivity isn't the only issue. The issue is they already have Windows, and Office on their computer so there is no real advantage after switching to a free alternative, and there are some REALLY HUGE disadvantages like having to edit bash scripts to manage your computer.

Linux desktop failed. The sooner the Linux community gets over it and starts to focus on cloud stuff (virtualization, management) the better.