skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is true that mobile usage is going through the roof and there is no doubt there is a legitimate gold rush happening right now.

Nevertheless, I would like to raise a few points/questions with the reasoning in this analysis, somewhat in defense of the web:

1. Mobile apps provide a different mix of functionality when compared to the web (particularly on our PCs). Quite a few mobile apps are simply games, various time no-value-add time sinks and other similar non-connected activities. Hence, I am unsure about the merit of comparing 60 minutes inside of a web browser to 60 minutes on a mobile app. (On the other hand, perhaps facebook usage more than compensates for all this)

2. One reason mobile usage is so high is that our smartphones are always with us and many of us chronically play with them when we have more than a 15 second pause. Again, I am unsure about the "quality" of the interaction during these times.

3. It seems that many mobile apps - the huge hits notwithstanding - solve small, yet meaningful problems in a cool way. This is great, but it eventually yields a lackluster impact - both financially and in terms of the effect on society - and it makes for a real tough proposition to develop mobile apps as a team (read multiple people) and expect to sustainably "grow" a business. Yes, the barren solution space is huge, but the bang for the time spent is also smaller on average. In contrast, the web now provides really large flexibility in solving a range of problems at various depths.

4. It also seems that several impressive startups are leveraging the mobile platform as an add-on to their web-based presence, another channel to solve problems on or a value enhancer to the tech. There is 0 doubt in my mind that mobile is here to grow in this sense.

All in all, applications that leverage mobile have a large empty space to fill. However, people should not just jump into mobile because it seems to be the "rage".
This is awesome, but maybe consider persisting some basic parameters in the URL string so that I can bookmark a particular page that I like to check often?
It's long, but if you guys have seacademy, or sea.com then it makes sense. Otherwise, no :\
Reg, thanks so much for your comment. I'm really happy you appreciate the value.

It's very interesting that you put the focus in the descriptive language. I've been working on that for a long time. It's not finished, but some areas are clarified. Indeed, after reading your comment I think I will try to focus on getting somewhere workable with that part first.

This whole project is so big. It will be good to do it in the open and use as much help as I can.
1. If there's no evidence that you know the password, that's possibly a reasonable defense. When the police have a recording of you saying "don't worry, the files are on my encrypted partition", it's less reasonable.

2. I would seriously reconsider the decision to carry unknown contents through customs.
Paul Krugman's "The Theory of Interstellar Trade" (1978) [pdf]
Very cool. I can't imagine how annoying the controls are, though. Given how much Counterstrike relies on pixel-perfect aiming, it could be a very frustrating experience.
Definitely, we'd like to add more comparison as to how good of a deal you're getting, but just haven't had time yet.

The hatchback/sedan/... is on our roadmap too. It's a little tricky, because often sellers don't post it explicitly, and doing computer vision on the pictures, would be very hard.
Google Talk is plain vanilla XMPP (except the audio/video extensions), and any XMPP server can chat to any Google Talk user. The Google Talk client itself is shit and hasn't been updated in years, you won't be missing out on anything there.

I use Mail.app w/ GMail over IMAP and have no problems. I could switch to any other provider of course, but see no reason to do so as accessing GMail over IMAP doesn't have any of this social crap associated with it. Unfortunately, on Windows I'm forced to use gmail.com as no desktop client comes even close to Mail.app's fully integrated and optimized IMAP support. Outlook's IMAP support is STILL blocking/synchronous for most operations, hanging the entire software while it syncs headers or sends items to be erased. Thunderbird is as clunky as ever.

Google is the only one left, then. I used DDG for a while, but I think they need to step up their game with regards to simplifying the UI (i.e. remove the attempts at finding the info you're looking for for you or at least provide an option to disable this) and speed up both page serves and queries, w/ geodistributed caching, etc.

Or you could just use Google SSL, but disable all cookies for that domain.
What is your opinion of the value if not $350?
http://clemens.endorphin.org/TKS1-draft.pdf

You can also use a scheme like this to improve your chances of making your expired key data unrecoverable to forensic techniques.
You are underestimating the rate at which the number of possibilities to be searched explodes exponentially. Read the paper on Denali, an optimizer that conceptually tries all possible instruction sequences to compile a piece of a program optimally. Even though they used sophisticated pruning techniques and state of the art combinatorial solvers it didn't work for anything beyond a couple of instructions (less than 10), and AFAIK nothing practical ever came of it. Say you can currently successfully synthesize instruction sequences of length 6. The thing with exponential growth is that even if computers became a million times faster, then you might be able to achieve instruction sequences of length 9, not of length 6 million.
Its no simple matter; its a full time job for at least 6-15 months, with a team of between 2-80.

For example, when I worked at SCEE we ported Little big planet to PSP from PS3, and that was 14 months with 40 odd people full time.

It can be much quicker than that, but in general you have to worry about getting the engine working on the new platform.
Nice interface. A few thoughts:

* There is no way to get back to the home screen. If I want a blank slate I have to manually clear out the fields.

* I can't bookmark searches, send them to friends or search for multiple models at the same time because everything is cookie based. Having my search from my last session come up when I enter http://www.carsabi.com/ is also a bit creepy.

* Clearing the "max price" field is broken. All future searches come back with zero results. Refreshing the page shows "$0" in the field.
I'm always curious to see what these statistics would look like if they were broken up by user demographics. And also by HTML5 feature.

Sure, 1/4 of users might experience problems with HTML5. But what really matters is what percentage of your target market will experience issues with the HTML5 that you use on your site.

Conversely, if you're targeting smartphone users then you should probably be developing a mobile version of your site anyway. And if you are doing that, then having Flash on your main site won't create such a problem with reaching mobile users. Not that it doesn't get rid of the need to make sure your site degrades gracefully.
My impression is that Bing is getting better and better. I WILL switch to it IF they provide date filtering for all searches. (For example it's impossible for me to use Bing for searching on HN because I get out of date results, while on Google I just apply the "last 24 hrs" filter).
Might be. Hopefully not. I have done a huge amount of programming though, so it's not like the reflection comes from ignorance.

Under the mess of spaghetti code that anything out there is now, I see a clean structure of code trying to come out. I want to help it come out to the surface.
Very well done! Make it for rooms for rent as well please...
I went back to hosting my own email and chat on VPS. Check out iRedMail for a nice easily-configured FOSS mail package and ejabberd for a nice XMPP server. XMPP federates with google talk, so I can still chat with @gmail.com friends.
After buying a $40 premium charger which has very stringent standards (for some reason, any particular NiMh battery has about a 50% chance of being recognized as something chargeable after each use), I gave up on rechargeable batteries. If they've made them more reliable and less self-discharge-happy, it might be time to retry.
Web UI regression testing using CFSelenium, MXUnit, and ImageMagick
I'm also using Sonic's "Fusion" bonded ADSL. At ~9000 line-feet from the CO, I'm seeing 12 mbit/sec down and 4 up. A coworker is also on Fusion, and sees 16 down and 5-7 up. She's far closer to her CO than I am to mine, though.
Apple Announces First Quarter Earnings ($46BB Revenue)
Interesting. Building a community of tech startups is probably key to feeding more talent to zappos longterm too. He can also fund companies that solve some of zappos key problems and have them close at hand.

I'd be very excited to see a follow up to this every 6 months to see how things are coming along. Rebuilding a city is tough
Google talk is pretty replaceable with many other jabber based servers, and clients, and enough variance that you can generally find a solution that works best for you. afaict, Jabber messages can cross from and too the standard google talk jabber domains.

Search, I still find myself using google from time to time, but my default search is duckduckgo, this is greatly helped due to the fact that it's simple to search from google instead by simply adding !g to the search, additionally, you can do similar things for !gmaps !gimages !bing, this feature alone makes ddg a trivially better google replacement for default search.

Now, a decent replacement for the gmail client, I haven't been able to find something satisfactory web-based, or even as a desktop app. I use thunderbird for work emails, but it seems to be a little... lacking.
Sure, sorry, didn't mention on the article, Prolog is the closest thing that exists, although I think Prolog commits at least one cardinal sin that breaks the really great properties (/cut/) and it just doesn't get deep enough.
Apple reports record $13.06 billion profit
As long as it's not a modal one...
I've noticed that the kind of listings for "e30 m3" versus "1989 m3" is going to end up being from a different kind of owner...
What you want to do is to have a password that decrypts the content to something innocently looking. If the encryption program has the feature to both "dual encrypt" and do an ordinary encryption it should be hard to prove anything :) Not sure how you go about doing that algorithmically though so it would resist reverse engineering the program
No, we're only going to throw people in jail for possessing random data and failing to produce encrypted documents we have evidence they possess.
9Gag.com: Fastest Growing Startup You've Never Heard Of
> There’s a full-on war for developer talent that the company has already been struggling with– along with every single startup and sexier large companies like Facebook, Twitter and Zynga.

What makes Zynga, Twitter and Facebook "sexier"?

> Then again, a lot of what we’re hearing is from X-Googlers. Google has been competing for employees for a while by simply shelling out more cash. Perhaps newer hires are just there for the paycheck, more than the much-vaunted mission.

What percentage of Zynga hires are there for the paycheck as opposed to the "mission"?
Google Foes Fighting Social Search Ignore One Truth
Apple reports record Q1, biggest quarter ever with 37M iPhone, 15.4M iPad sales
DOJ criminal antitrust revenues top $1 billion for 2011, up 78 percent
It is, though the intercity one is very expensive. Its usually cheaper to go by car for multiple people, despite the high gas prices.
Bikeshed: The Hyperdimensional Tar Pit
pretty good, although for craigslist, there is really no sense in letting someone search within 14 days.

anything that's a good deal is gone almost right away

I lost out on like a dozen cars before I bought my last one. And that was only because I saw the ad get listed in the previous 5 minutes, and went right away to test drive it.

As far as feedback, 1 bug - when you scroll through the makes, it keeps hiding. Especially annoying if it's a brand at the bottom of the list(i.e. Mercedes).

Feature wise, the map of the car's location isn't that useful, much better would be to just list how many miles away the person is...and maybe even estimate the time to get there.(i.e. I remember thinking oh 30 miles, not that bad...then you spend 45 minutes driving to and from there, and pretty much your entire day is gone, just to see one car)
So I am relatively naive when it comes to declarative programming in general and have not yet read this paper (I will after commenting here), but that said...

Don't you have to (at the very least) tell the compiler how to do things? To reuse the example from the article: when you tell your friend to get you a beer, at some point your friend has learned HOW to get you a beer. Similarly the compiler will need to know HOW to do things that you declare. Sure it will be great when we can just tell the compiler that we need this list sorted in reverse alphabetical order but at some point someone is going to have to program the sorting algorithm on the back end.

Am I way off or are we just talking about a hypothetical future when compilers are (even more) black boxed and we don't have to think about them anymore?
Roundcube is a pretty poor email client when compared directly to gmail.
hi (didn't downvote you but just fyi) its likely you were downvoted for a ccomment which didn't add anything.
I disagree. If you can be jailed for refusing to decrypt data on a computer seized under a legitimate warrant, then you can be jailed for not having the password for encrypted-looking data on a computer seized under a legitimate warrant. A warrant does not imply guilt, so this means innocent people may be imprisoned.
Recently added to ted.com :
Lisa Harouni: A primer on 3D printing: http://www.youtu.be/watch?v=OhYvDS7q_V8
Revenue: $46.33 billion

Profit: $13.06 billion

iPhones sold: 37.04 million (128% YoY growth)

iPads sold: 15.43 million (111% YoY growth)

Macs sold: 5.2 million (26% YoY growth)
If an office had a policy of shredding old financial paperwork and that policy was faithfully followed on the day after, say, the COO was whisked away for embezzlement, would it count as evidence tampering?

Or to the point: if you use a remotely-stored encrypted volume with a dead man's switch as a day-to-day security policy, would it still be trivial to charge someone for evidence tampering?
NYU prof releases app to predict whether a company will fail
> This would, in my ideal dream world, also allow the app publisher to make app changes at will without waiting for an appstore review.

This is the main reason it won't happen; app store review is one of the key parts of Apple's positioning.
> Or will everyone have so much dirt on everyone else that it just stops to matter anymore, this could in fact lead to a more honest and liberal society.

I think we already have that (well, at least at the medium-to-large-company level), it's called company Christmas parties.
I'm not so sure. TrueCrypt is first and foremost an encryption program. The fact that you have it might suggest that you encrypted something somewhere, but it doesn't directly suggest that you took the time to use its advanced "hidden volume" capabilities. So even if the police can say "hey, this looks encrypted, and you've got nothing else which looks similar, decrypt it for us," they are still stuck on "hey, we didn't find the evidence we were looking for -- maybe you have a hidden volume?". You say "I don't" and the judge says "GRR ARG DECRYPT IT NOW" and you say "I can't, it doesn't exist, I really am innocent, please get the scary men away from me."
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Apple Reports First Quarter Results: $13.06 Billion Net Profit
Yawn,

I can relate to your problem very much. I've also tried multiple software and finally I have come back to use notepad on Windows. I have done a small setup to make my todo list simple and accessible:

1. Press f5 to get date time stamp

2. List down all your task without numbers one below the other in the beginning of the day or as the tasks get assigned to you.

3. As you complete each task write DONE in front of it.

4. At the end of the day group all the tasks with DONE if front of them below the date you completed, pushing the rest of task below

5. Come back next day to your task list and add an empty line. The tasks without DONE are still pending, follow from step 1.

How to make your todo list accessible on a Windows machine:

1. Created a "TODO" directory and add a text file call it todo.txt

2. Create a shortcut of the file, rename it to "todo" and cut-copy-paste the shortcut to C:\windows\system32

3. Now press "Windows key + R" and type "todo" in the command window. This will open your list.

I have been using the list for over 6 months now and this is how it looks:

9:39 AM 1/16/2012

DONE ESA Request retrieve the lost records

DONE Update the email notification when esa request status changes

9:04 AM 1/17/2012

DONE Follow up with CA about MS Project installation.

10:23 AM 1/19/2012

DONE Site Usage Report 1. Change Column order 2. Sort By 3. Relative Path

3:55 PM 1/20/2012

DONE Complete the code for MUSE FeedIn

Document the feed in issue from Pedagogue.

MUSE Win 7 MUL compatibility

Clarity DDS BO Server specs.
9Gag.com: Fastest Growing Startup You’ve Never Heard Of
At the party level, or just to "politics" in general?
To me I see everyone of those issues as a lack of technical diversity on the side of management and other decision makers. If what a company needs is CRUD and forms and their needs are no more than that, then there are existing players in that market. Oracle and SAP being the examples, sure they are not sexy but if all you need is off the shelf accounting or off the shelf authentication these players provide those solutions. Further, management that only know these tools some times commission custom development in these systems, which turn into the monsters projects that we all hear about. Too often we see people implement fully custom systems when a component based system like SAP would do, and conversely we see people develop fully custom systems in SAP. The right tool for the right job is appropriate, unfortunately not many managers have the technical breath to make those tradeoffs and leave the decision up to their development team. If said team is a custom software development team then only have custom development knowledge to draw from.
FT replaces iPad app with web app
I will look at the project, sounds interesting. If it's like that, I can only

I know declarative doesn't solve the problem of correctness. It's really difficult to define correctness per se! But what such an approach really gains is that you can forget about off-by-one errors, unforeseen cross-conditions in stupid details, so much repetitive code, etc... you will still have the higher-level problems of programming, the efficiency problems, the spec-correctness problems, etc... but nowadays you have those, plus the nitty-gritty details of programming in our paleolitic languages!

I know there are a few initiatives in this area, I really want to have an everyday tool that allows using that kind of approach for everyday problems. It will just make everything so much better for us programmers!
The most common declarative programming language used in SQL. In theory the optimizer takes my declaration and builds an optimum (or at least decent) set of step in the database engine to accomplish what I have declared. With all the work in this limited area, database optimizers get it really wrong quite a lot (Sybase 12.5 was bad enough on big data that forcing order of joins and indexes was needed).

I am not sure we are at the stage where the computer can be trusted with the "what". Most new learners need to be told step by step the "how" and computers seem to be at that stage. Prolog is a nice counter-example, but even it can get itself into some real trouble.

I agree programming is broken, and I agree the whole program knowledge is just painful, but I am think there are some steps before full declarative. As much as I dislike the old VB, it did have a very vibrant component market. That concept didn't seem to evolve or make it to the server. I look at Mongrel2 and wonder if the component approach could be applied. Regardless, I think the biggest problem is lack of ability to separate the pieces of a big project effectively no matter the eventual solution.
Prolog is a kind of declarative programming, but the two concepts are not the same. From the link: "declarative programming is a programming paradigm that expresses the logic of a computation without describing its control flow." This can be implemented in any way one desires.
The perl dependency is from LLVM. Rust uses Python for utility scripts, "Just Because."

Also, you left rustc off the list of languages required to compile rust. :-) It's self-hosted.
I'm not too happy with the situation in Seattle myself. Currently I've got $60/mo 1.5/384 DSL service from MegaPath (formerly Speakeasy). Business line to my home, very reliable. It's just not fast enough for some of the things I want to do.

I can't get FiOS from Frontier at my apartment, even though there is service about two blocks down the street. And I have no desire to do business with Comcast.

Clear is out of the question since I want to start doing video broadcasting.

Not sure what to do here. Move to a new apartment? I might end up doing that for unrelated reasons, and just make FiOS a requirement for the new place.
I'll help what I can. I had a very similar idea, sparked by a conversation in college with a fellow CS major. He was saying how much he liked to program and I said that I hate it. My reasoning was exactly the same as yours, but perhaps broader.

I'd like it if we could get to the point where you say very plainly what you want in your native language (English for me), and then that is interpreted and perhaps more questions are asked by the program until it can implement what you meant. Obviously the problem of NLP is a massive one that will likely never have a perfect solution. There are also the problems of logical inference (if you think this is easy, look up the CyC project). I don't think we should let the current constraints of technology hold us back from designing something better, however.
I had the opportunity to interact with a couple of Zynga guys on the train once shortly after the "we're clawing back your RSUs or you're fired" fiasco. The good news, for Zynga, is that it didn't seem to hurt morale for those guys. The bad news is that they didn't care and had an "as long as it's not me" holding-out-for-the-big-bucks mercenary attitude.

But then, maybe Zynga's just a morally bankrupt go-for-the-bucks mercenary company so perhaps they're a perfect fit.
It would still be possible to copy the hard drive at a lower level before password entry. You could then compare before and after password entry and see that large chunks of data have been modified.
These "wipe the drive" decoy password scenarios would never work in real life unless their forensics team was really inept.

There would be copies made and the drive that has the encrypted volume would likely be accessed with a "Write Blocker" forensic device, or in a virtual environment, etc.

This technique would only tip your hand that the volume contents changed after entering the password.
Do you really want to be a victim of an arms race where every extension tries to outdo all other extensions when it comes to rewriting affiliate links, etc?