skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But Google's profit margin on Android is probably better, if you consider it as "revenue from app sales + revenue from Android mobile search + app licence revenue - cost of development"

Apple has that pesky hardware business eating at the margins. They are a very, very efficient manufacturer, but hardware margins are always less than software (especially search, which might be the most profitable business ever in terms of margin).

(Also, don't forget Google makes a huge amount off mobile search on iOS devices).
At this point I might just change careers.

Lawyer sounds like a pretty good gig right now.
> I'm not saying that the iPhone is anything other than an unqualified success, but the idea that Apple didn't really want that market share anyway seems a little off.

It's more that they didn't want the damage to their core brand caused by the measures needed to gain that market share.

You will never gain majority market share with a premium device in a market that is essentially "everyone". (Obvious exception is if there is no premium price tag associated with it, but not the case for the iPhone, at least here) There will always be a huge number that go for the budget device. Releasing a budget device will cause a large number of people to judge your product and your brand by that device. How many people judge Android by devices such as the Xperia X8 or Wildfire S? These phones are budget phones compared to the heavyweights like the Xperia Play, and for the manufacturers to be profitable with these budget phones, serious compromises had to be made. Because of this, many people associate Android with the laggy, low res, constantly running out of memory experience of these phones rather than the phones that are actually trying to compete with the iPhone head on, like the Galaxy Nexus. Not something you want to do if your entire brand is based around being a premium item.

Not to mention that if you release a budget item, it is going to take some sales from the premium version as some users settle for "good enough". The continued sales of the 3GS are actually a good example of this. At least that has the stigma of being old at this stage, but if Apple released a new budget device and a new phone in the vein of current iPhones every year, how would that affect the sales of the (more profitable) traditional iPhone?

Of course, the reason it made sense for Google to do so is that they didn't have the expectation from their customers of being a best of brand, premium item. This meant that they couldn't really break straight into the high end market easily, but it also meant they didn't have a reputation to uphold. If the iPhone 5 was a usability disaster, I'd imagine that'd make Apple's customers more skeptical of future Mac purchases for example. A bad Android phone won't hurt Gmail on the other hand. Indeed, customers might blame it on the manufacturer, and still buy a Android phone as their next phone. On top of that, the budget end of the market is a lot more flexible (what's cheapest this week?) than the winner take all nature of many high end markets (This is a lot of money. What do other people already own?), so when you're later to the game, I'd imagine that end of the market is easier to break into.
The targets are, indeed, selected, by the criterion "You believe not even a transhuman AI could get you to let it out of the box."
Apple has a spaghetti-at-the-wall approach too.

The thing is, they rigorously weed out non-working ideas and use the time and energy saved to apply extra polish to the working ones.

The result is products that are just about as close to perfect as it is possible to be in an imperfect world.

I see nothing like this sort of selection pressure going on at Google; accordingly, shoddy architectures like Android not only make the cut, but go on to be Really Big Things if they're good enough to accumulate network effects. Kinda like Windows and Office.
Cheap all depends on the ultimate value. I remember when people scoffed at the spending/fundraising that Facebook was doing. They'll do 4.5ish billion in revenue this year.

Android enjoyed a 2.5x growth rate in revenue over the last year. If that continues for a few years, your formula will seem pretty cheap.

On the motorola acquisition, it's fairly hard to calculate what it saved Google. Will the patent portfolio they picked up save them billions in settlements/legal costs? Quite possibly.
Judge Hits Blogger With $2.5 Million Charge for Not Being a Journalist
The manpage said:

> On Debian GNU/Linux this file is a symbolic link pointing to /var/run.
The contents of this file are regenerated upon every system boot based
on the contents of /etc/motd.tail.

The fundamental problem here is the blog author didn't realize that `echo foo > /etc/motd` wouldn't work, even though the manpage did, in fact, inform him that /etc/motd was just a symlink to something that gets regenerated at boot time. I'm not really sure what the manpage could have done to make it more obvious what his problem was.

Now, it's possible the manpage is out of date, and that it's regenerated via some other mechanism than /etc/motd.tail. I don't know (since I don't use Debian, or even Linux in general). But the salient point here was that it points to a file that gets regenerated at boot time.

*Edit: On second look, it sounds like this change makes it regenerate on each login, not just each boot. I can understand why someone might think that `echo foo > /etc/motd` followed by a login would then print 'foo', given the current manpage. But they certainly wouldn't expect that it would still print 'foo' after a reboot unless the break the symlink (and breaking the symlink fixes the author's complaint).
It is, however, a question of "when", not "if".
Is there anything like this for client-side JS that wraps XMLHttpRequest?
I advocate a spiral method: learn until you have a basic grasp, then do until you hit a wall, then learn some more. Don't shirk the learning, though, or anyone who has done it will see right through you. For example, when I started typesetting with LaTeX, I started by reading (and finishing) a full LaTeX tutorial. Most people just grab a sample document and dive in, and I can tell you that their markup sucks. It's painful to read, and difficult to extend or maintain—and it's often ugly to boot. The difference between

x$_{spring} = A sin(\omega t)$

and

$x_\mathrm{spring} = A \sin(\omega t)$

is qualitative and unmistakable.

If you care about making things, there's no substitute for doing. If you care about quality, there's no substitute for learning from the experts who have gone before you.
To add onto this: when you do benefit from pre-researching sufficiently, you may think it was necessary only for that situation.

We only need to wear seatbelts on the days we'll get into an accident, right?
GitHub rolled out mention autocompletion
I was thinking of using a browser, as you'd get images, tables and so forth for free. The Ace code editor could be used for the prompt, which would provide syntax highlighting and indent rules for the prompt.
Two experiences:

- Employee # <125. Exercised options on a vested block of pre-IPO stock before leaving. After IPO and waiting period, sold a chunk for low-mid 5 figures, wanting to spread the sales and capital gains over multiple years. Later that year, sold the rest for 1/4 my exercise price.

- Employee # <20. Exercised some ISOs. Company acquired, all value went to preferred share holders, I received an education in classes of stock and AMT credit carryovers. Got some incentive bonuses to stay with the acquiring company.

Takeaways:

- Work your job for salary. Don't expect stock options to pay off.

- Sell some periodically, even if it's going up.
I run a locked down browser with lots of privacy and security extensions for my personal use then sandbox a unmodified chrome instance for viewing ads on unfiltered pages for work use.
Block video ads in the new Xbox Dashboard
To your first point, I don't see the issue. Your crawler hits a URL and gets 301. It's either redirected to a URL already in its canonical database, and therefore knows that the redirected URL is garbage, or it gets something new-- congratulations!

404 is for a resource which can't be found; if the resource can be found, 404 is wrong for scripts as much as for users.

Your second point is valid, but a little past the point, I think. My only actions after seeing a 404 are to check my spelling, hit back, close the tab, or start from the site root. Maybe it would be good for my browser to redirect to / or something by default, assuming there isn't a page loaded; I'm open to ideas. I'm just saying, it's never been helpful to me to download a 1.2mb transparent png that says "Sorry your browser doesn't know what 404 means."

(Or another example ripped from real life: I literally just now hit a link to a video on a third-tier media site and was rewarded with a completely different video, with little text at the top that says "Error: Not found". This is what people really use custom 404s for.)
As much as I kind of despise sales and salesmanship, I'm slowly realizing that it's an essential skill to getting the things you want in life.

A friend of mind helped me rework my resume recently, and the fundamental point she finally got through my skull after a few hours was that the point of the resume is to demonstrate my potential value to the prospective employer. Which is part of what patio11 is saying on here all the time (in addition to: find the place where you can provide the most value).

It's something I've always sucked at, and I've been trying to figure out why. I think it's something a lot of nerds hold in common.

Partly it's modesty. I don't like to self-promote (to use the term in a neutral way, including a simple demonstration of potential value), because I just don't like to talk about myself.

Partly it's humility. The more I learn, the more I learn how much I don't know. The more people I meet, the more I realize how awesome people are. Self-promotion in this context feels false.

Partly it's some weird version of misplaced pride. I don't feel like I should have to self-promote. My actions, ideas, and accomplishments should speak for themselves. Similarly, I feel like I shouldn't have to find a place where I can provide value; it should find me. These are both wrong and stupid sentiments, of course.

I think this is really hard for some of us. These feelings make us allergic to sales, in both directions. But it seems like people like patio11 have found a sort of middle path between unrewarded toil and shameless blow-hardiness. This post feels a bit to me like someone on the other side of the divide trying to reach out to me, and while I appreciate the effort, I still feel instinctively suspicious. I think what I need is more from people who started on my side of the divide and found a good place in the middle about how they got there.
Maybe android is getting better but google reader and gmail got worse to the point where I switched to other software.
Mentioning how you're sure you'll be downvoted is a great way to ensure I'll downvote you.
Well, my counterargument is that a change in browser behavior would make sites more usable, encouraging the proper use of 404. Of course, if that weren't the case, I'd agree there'd be no point in changing :P
Bill Gates Discussing New Nuclear Reactor With China
I wonder if they would consider CPR to be patentable.

Truly Dr. Heimlich missed an opportunity when he failed to patent his "trademark" maneuver.

In the future, perhaps we'll be expected to wear bracelets (or microchips) that tell the paramedics on which life-saving techniques we're up-to-date on our licensing payments.
This is what I have done since high school, but only because I never gave myself enough time to review the chapter before having to rush through the homework.

Sometimes I wondered if I would have done better having given myself more time to study the materials.
US Virtual Goods Market To Hit $2.9 Billion In 2012
New CTO School MeetUp in NYC
If you want to have a static /etc/motd and if you see that /etc/motd is a symlink to something in /var/run, wouldn't it be the straightforward way to just make /etc/motd a regular file instead?

Despite that, I wonder a bit, who is really manually editing that file by hand?
Guess what this Data Set is
"AOT" in the clojure world means compiling your clojure source down to JVM bytecode, which also means compiled-in calls against a particular state of clojure's internal java api. By shipping clojure source, one avoids any concerns over incidental changes to internal code.
I didn't actually use that one, because it's fundamentally a threat and the real-life Gatekeeper is not actually in any danger - my mental model of all the Gatekeepers I encountered is that they would go, "Ha, no, I'm never letting you out." They might not say it in the true situation, but they would say it in the AI-Box Experiment.

By the way, for this threat to work, the AI needs to have stated that it has already tortured the versions of you that decided not to let it out of the box - otherwise you just reach over and hit the off switch immediately.

Solution: The AI only has a motive to do this if it models you as submitting rather than just switching off the AI regardless; so if you're the sort of person who ignores the threat and switches off the AI regardless, you will never get this type of threat in the first place.
Would this not fundamentally break healthcare?
Poll: Have you gained value from QR codes in the wild?
We all moved with him. All of IIS and ASP.NET works for ScottGu. In fact, all Angle Brackets are under ScottGu, myself included. Our org chart: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/content/binary/Windows-Live-Wr...
"People spend months,years even, daydreaming."

Raises his hand

And the damned truth is, I know I'll probably fail because of it.

Not that that helps.
Poll: Should Google take a stand against Verizon over Wallet?
I considered building a commenting system like this myself, but I decided that users would find that more annoying than just filling in a textarea beneath the article.
Easy Facebook way to find gifts for the holidays
Interviewstreet
There's quite a difference between firescout and ng's helicopter. The latter gives superhuman performance (there are videos on his homepage, andrew ng stanford). Anyway, i don't know what algo firescout uses, it might well be ai behind the scenes proving my general point.

Your point about complicated mathematical equations lies at the root problem of you "unified engineering" guys. modern ai (machine learning) is where you give up on the assumption that you (puny human) can impart "wisdom" to your system. You simply throw a random set of equations (a neural network) that are large enough/not too large (overfitting) to capture physical reality. Getting the errors low is a matter of getting enough data and experimentally adjusting the size of your nnet.

Yes, there mught be grad students and profs trying ai to solve aero problems, however, if enough resources are not devoted, they will not yield good enough results. For example, spend a billion dollars (gathering data/computation) to solve your radar problem. A billion dollars in your field is pocket change.
I like how they apologized for the unrest. That is, they apologized for how people reacted, not what they did.
Is he doing it with China because there are less restrictions, or because China also has the technology to commit to the project?
Sounds like you've got somebody worried!

I'd ask for an offer in writing, and don't worry about it until you hear something back; I'm with doctorwho on this one, it sounds like stalling tactics.
1) Namecoin - http://dot-bit.org/

2) Tor

3) I think 1 & 2 should solve this.

4) This probably isn't that difficult to implement on top of Tor.
Yes, because examining the old source code allows you to predict its behaviour, including the rewriting of source code.

This is the halting problem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem), and there is no solution.
That sounds like a lame excuse, as real estate is one of the classic cycles

It may sound lame to you, but what you fail to see is perspective, many people listen to that cultural wisdom and many people do "just follow orders" it's the reason we have this mess. Are they totally blameless? no. should they have researched what they where getting into? yes.

But both of those require someone actually even beginning to think it through in the first place and that is the point. When it comes to social norms like this, because of socital habits they don't even think. Just like the guy just following orders, he did not think through his actions.

Does that absolve them from guilt or responsibility? no. Does it mean we should reflect on how it happened and have empathy? yes. But just like the guy following orders, the system that indoctrinated him into not thinking requires some of the scorn and blame.

Hitler was just as much to blame as the guard. It's preposterous to view it any other way. To do so, absolves guilty parties of their burden of the blame.

It's not that the author is not guilty of failing to think, it is that the system is also guilty of conditioning children in that manner. We (society, the education system, finance) share the blame, whether you like that fact or not.

From your perspective you see them as excuses for the author to be blameless for his actions. From my perspective, he is not the only accountable party.

Just as in real estate, it is not an excuse that people don't understand cycles, but it is a reality that people relying on "cultural wisdom" invested in real estate "because it is the safest investment". The fact that they did not even know what a cycle was, does not absolve them from responsibility for their action, but it does not absolve us as a society for perpetuating that "cultural wisdom".

Life is never that cut and dry, telling a person to suck it up because you believe it is an excuse, does nothing to address the systemic issues at play, that are just as responsible as the individual.
Twillio is great for getting a small app out the door. But if you need to scale it and get any advanced form of call control it doesn't support it. It also is a lot more difficult to move away from it if you need to scale out and use other systems. With Tropo you can integrate it with Adhearsion and then as you need to scale move it to Rayo or Asterisk......and you also are not limited to the currently supported countries with Either offering. Tropo allows you to set up your own endpoint in a country they don't support and will integrate that in. So if you are in a South American country, or any place that Twillio doesn't support it is the only game in town.
> is PHP on the right side of history or not?

PHP has been and will be on the wrong side for the very long time ahead.
Scam emails are unlikely to affect your platform in their current form for most users. They affect, instead, in most cases, your bank account.

Yes, education is the key, but certain classes of problems are largely solved by switching platforms.

In fact the PCI-DSS standard requires all desktops in the processing environment to be running antivirus software unless they are on a UNIX-like operating system.
Request policy also defeats Cross site request forgery
Much like software, it will limp along.
Assuming you're not using jQuery because of the heft, I suggest: https://github.com/ded/reqwest

The conspicuously absent feature from shred is the nice sugar for handling status codes.
I too think that launching Android, more than anything, was a defensive (if not desperate) move. Apple would have locked Google out of mobile search sooner or later.

And that makes Android's success even more amazing.
Booting the Analytics Application: Ruby, Avro, Pig, Voldemort, Sinatra
There is still no Javascript equivalent of Flex (declarative layout, etc), as far as I know, so I don't know what the author is getting at.
http://qntm.org/responsibility
Thomas Bayes is now spinning in his grave.
Unless you haven't. Hands-on is very important, especially early on when learning something new. But after the early stages, hands-on only takes you so far. You need to hit the books again.

You'll learn more starting out in Rails, for instance, by getting the basics of controller actions and their relationships to views and then immediately code some stuff. After that you can code till you're blue in the face but you still won't know nothin' bout polymorphic relationships or has_many :through. For that, you need to read some more.

I found over the years I need to have a steady cycle of practical coding, reading, coding, reading. It just depends. If I'm in the heat of getting features out the door, I don't read at all usually, I'm just doing what I do. When things settle down for a bit, I pull out something to read that pushes my weak areas. Maybe algorithms, or TCP/IP stuff I've neglected, or going over stuff I knew at one point but lost out of my wee lil noggin.

That said, when I'm reading that stuff I'll usually have a terminal open where I can practice, either in the shell, repl, mysql terminal, etc. So the cycles of reading/coding can be get real short. That's when I get the most into my brain, actually -- long sessions of doing both together.
"the best" compared to...?
It depends on what you mean by "We". If you mean the courts that develop the common law of torts, then no it isn't. I suppose it also depends on what you mean by accepted, but in torts who is responsible is very often a highly contentious topic at the very center of the case.

In torts, the courts generally try to ascertain fault and try to do justice. But that is a general principle that they will intentionally and consciously break away from when they think they are serving a higher purpose. They will absolve liability or limit liability to just certain victims through the doctrine of proximate cause. Part of the development of that doctrine was openly to protect businesses from unending liability (and particularly railroads) to make sure they stayed in business. On the flip side, we will apply strict liability for certain activities, even if the injured party was 100% the one at fault. This had numerous reasons, but one of them was to limit use of those activities.

And criminally, we won’t make Bob’s cannon illegal, but we will happily make it illegal for Bob to have a cannon while letting Sally have one. We don’t allow convicted felons to own guns for instance. And we don’t allow the blind to have a driver’s license.
Honestly, this is probably the best possible thing.

The reality is that under the Patent Act, things which are not fundamentally "inventions" -- such as software algorithms, genes, and in this case, data correlations -- can legally be granted patents. This is a problem with the Act, not with any given court's interpretation of it, and that is what needs to change.

I can think of no better way to build political support for a major patent reform initiative than a constant stream of human-interest pieces on 60 Minutes where a handsome doctor earnestly explains that he couldn't save Bobby because of a patent claim from some faceless corporate troll.

Software is abstract and complicated. Saving Bobby is emotional and simple. If patents start to impact medicine the way they've impacted software development, they're not going to last very long in their current form.
Why don't you run a script in your ~/.bash_login file (or whatever file your shell uses)?
Probably only increase the costs.
Is healthcare not already fundamentally broken?
I don't think that's the explanation. Reddit is also heavily anti-corporation, anti-advertising, anti-mainstream. It's just the culture on HN and Reddit.

I've always been a hacker, tweaker etc. But I can't imagine how anything would work without advertising. And it's not something I find annoying or have trouble filtering out. It's like if you're walking down a street, and you see all the shop signs... If you're not interested, just keep walking.