skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't doubt that Apple has vastly greater profits than any of its competitors, but stats like this are cooked to make the ratio seem even more impressive than it already is. The notion that a feature phone and an iPhone are substantially in the same market is silly. It's akin to categorizing ThinkPads and land line handsets as part of the same market. Of course, journalists optimize for the most dramatic headline, not the most informative or truthful article, so we're not going to see many apples-to-apples comparisons on this subject in the tech press.

Also I have a non-rhetorical question. Apple, and several of the competitors graphed here, have many lines of non-smartphone products. Is this graph tracking the profit/loss of their smartphone divisions only, or profits of the company as a whole? If the latter, then the comparison is silly, isn't it? And if it's the former, how does this analyst account for costs shared among multiple divisions, such as iOS development (which is a cost that's shared with their iPad and to some extent even their Mac divisions)?
IMHO the best part of the article is in the italian exemple: considering wine as just a kind of food or as a way to get high is a cultural thing. Usually it's both, but one of the dimensions prevails.

I can not talk about Italy, but the same seems to happens in France: we try to accomodate the plate with the wine. In such a situation, you do not drink to get buzzed, but because it tastes good with the plate.

IIRC I was served my first wine when I was 10, but that did not turn me into a wino. I still enjoy wine - with good food :-)
Thanks for the suggestion ! We'll have to look into the EPG, for now we get the TV listings data in another way ;)
Right now we only have 2 STBs, and their input is captured by 2 video cards (http://www.blackmagic-design.com/products/intensity/). We picked this one because it has a very nice C++ SDK. Ideally though, we'd have as many STBs as we can to get more screenshots !
How come your search system doesn't appear to know chemistry? That is, I searched for "CCO" and found ethyl alcohol, but I searched for "OCC" and found nothing. Are you only doing a text search on the SMILES rather than a canonicalization first?
The remarkable thing about Apple of late is not that they target a profitable niche (which is a given with their product pricing), but how much they grow their niches. They did it the iPod, iPhone and iPad.

If Apple stopped selling these things tomorrow would other vendors capture the surplus? Or would people just go back to spending more money on other things?

Whether Apple exists or not, it doesn't seem like other vendors can raise their margins because they are in such a foot race. Apple has somehow risen above the fray through a combination of doing integrated hardware and software better than anybody and mastering the supply chain. Where HTC and Samsung are trying to one-up each other on screen size, Apple holds onto their margins selling a smaller screen for a higher price. This seems crazy until you actually use the latest Android phone and you're like "Why the F can't they get the screen to work half as good as an iPhone".
Try to peruse academic literature in light of your own research and interests.

Related is Richard Feynman's method, quoting https://findings.com/joejanowski/document/18782:

Richard Feynman was fond of giving the following advice on how to be a genius. You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say: "How did he do it? He must be a genius!"
A good read also: http://paulgraham.com/addiction.html
Thanks. There are a few things I want to add, e.g. a better sequencer, variable tempo, quantisation, local persistence of loaded samples and sequencer data, zoomable waveform for finer grained editing on longer files, etc. I'm quite busy so who knows when I'll get around to it?
Song Collection-Wanna be updated with latest Indian movie songs?
For me, the sensory distraction of people walking back and forth behind my desk is far worse than in front of it. Even if I have headphones in - vibrations from footsteps, someone bumps my chair, etc.

Damn evolution. At some point, monkeys inclined to facing into the cliff wall got eaten.
Unfortunately all evidence so far seems to indicate that online approaches to learning, on average, do not work very well. To be clear, meta-analyses continue to reveal that schooling, as it exists now, works as well or better than tech centered or online education. I do not find this surprising, if you do not change the philosophy and pedagogy, no repackaging will overcome the serious inherent flaws in the approach. This is particularly pronounced in math Ed and I encourage anyone to dig into the research on what good teaching and learning of math is characterized by.
Look like the API I am using is hammered

I am using http://api.ihackernews.com

I will look at issues when I am home.
Not really, I'm still convinced that DRM is completely counterproductive, but with regards to criticisms of flash/silverlight being short-sighted because these are necessary components of essential DRM solutions, the fact that those solutions can be done without flash/silverlight would seem to discount that.
That is the prestige issue.
Facebook: A fistful of dollars
It's interesting to me that all of your examples are also very important aspects of being an excellent Dungeon Master. I never made this connection between teaching and DM'ing before.
No. Sounds like the API (http://api.ihackernews.com/) is randomly on or off. I need to look at alternatives.
Interesting point.

Wouldn't it also be true that the top X% are actually the least likely to take classes at udacity? At least, the way I'm imagining it the top X% are those spending the most time preparing for a traditional university.
Make advertising more relevant and less annoying- MixRank is hiring engineers
The issue is that I did not like and do not agree with the statement "Google and Facebook would never exist the way they do today without the free software movement."

(There's the trivial sense of "way they do today" in the Microsoft, which uses some BSD technology in Windows, would also be here in the "way they do today" without that technology, but it would be generally the same.)

Do you agree with the above statement? If the free software movement had not existed, would Google and Facebook be seriously different than what they have become? How so?

Also, who is a member of the free software movement who also uses primarily a BSD license?
The title of the post is "A Solution to CPU-intensive Tasks in IO Loops"

There's no reason to make up a more inflammatory one. It only serves to guarantee a less productive discussion.
I know you're writing a response to the "Node.js is Cancer" article, but I'm glad you didn't title the article similarly. So what's up with the hacker news submission title?
The problem is that KA (and as you point out, many others) believe that lessons are "delivered". This assumes what Paoulo Freire described as the "banking model" of education and it is fundamentally wrong. People do not learn through delivery and people or organizations perpetuating a banking model are misguided and should be challenged.
Yeah I wasn't expecting the issue. I think the API I use is getting hammered. Gauges said I have 1k unique visitors in 20 mins.

http://api.ihackernews.com is all I can find but alternative one is what I'm looking for.
In Australia, all States have something similar. Google won't be able to pull this sort of garbage in Australia now!
Thanks for suggestion. I'll update the site tonight

Sorry for not working since API isn't responsive. :-(
Actually, I disagree. Australia has very strong consumer protection laws. Google probably got worried when they started looking into the reasoning for them breaking their contract.
this is exactly how i feel about khan academy. a lot of how and no why.
The problem I run into when trying to use a different image editor, like Gimp, is that sometimes my clients send me PSDs with complicated photoshop layer masks/filters that come across wrong/weird in anything else.
it's glitchy and flickers. chrome latest on PC
No. The API I am using might not work. I need to find powerful API than http://api.ihackernews.com
Yes, but AOL is a subscription service. Phones last 2-3 years tops. In that time frame if your product is made obsolete you can lose your pants overnight regardless of whether you sell 10s or 100s of millions of units today. Large marketshare is no guarantee of anything in the fickle tech world (look at Nokia), so I'll take profit over marketshare.
I had one of those. If anything, it made me MORE paranoid. Before, I only responded to noise. Easy enough to fix, put on the headphones. But with the mirror, I can now see constant movement out of the corner of my eye. all. day. long.
The post is called "drinking games" and it doesn't talk about drinking games at all. Which is a shame because after traveling and drinking a lot in different countries I've found that drinking games were one of the most interesting thing.

For example, chinese people love to play with dices, or shouting games, hand games... french people love to play card games when drinking. Canadian people love beer pong... Which us french people find stupid, it's dirty and it's such a hassle to play.

Although I love Malcolm Gladwell, surely not one of his most interesting article.

PS: I also noted that professionally, alcohol is a huge part in Asia. Japan, China, Korea, you are supposed to get drunk with your boss, you are suppose to get drunk while concluding a deal...

In Canada, people drink alone, they drink alcohol in front of other people who don't drink alcohol, they don't wait to drink...

In France, people always drink with other people, if the other doesn't drink alcohol then one can't drink alcohol, we have to wait until everyone's poured and everyone has cheered before drinking the first sip.

Also in France it's common courtesy to bring a bottle when you come to a party, meeting and to share it with everyone. I learned the BYOB (Bring your own bottle) in Canada, which I find really anti-sociable.

PS2: There are a lot of local, regional alcoholic drinks, but beer is something I found everywhere.
Disappointing that it didn't even touch on what I see as one of the central items of Khan Academy: the "watch lectures at home and do homework with teachers" methodology.

That seems like the most interesting bit -- one that could get a great teacher to expand their influence across many more students than they could otherwise. (ie, they have more time for 1-on-1 help since they do not have to put so much time into lectures)
>AT&T has witnessed first hand what having Apple in your corner does to your marketshare, and they will not fuck with that.

I'm pretty sure AT&T/Cingular was the largest wireless provider before the iPhone. Perhaps the iPhone kept them going while they would have been bleeding to Verizon*, but it's hard to say.
Lodsys Reexam Update - New Prior Art?
As many readers of this blog are likely aware, Lodsys has asserted that many application developers are infringing claims of its U.S. Patent Nos. 7,222,078 and/or 7,620,565 (I’ll refer to them as the Lodsys Patent Claims).

While these patents seemingly expire August 6, 2012 (as a result of the priority claims and the terminal disclaimers that were filed in each patent), Google nonetheless continues its quest to invalidate the Lodsys Patent Claims. It is worth noting, that once a patent expires or is invalidated, it cannot then be infringed by anyone.

In summary, Google initiated Reexamination proceedings with respect to U.S. Patent No. 7,620,565 (Reexamination Control No. 95/000,638) and U.S. Patent No. 7,222,078 (Reexamination Control No. 95/000,639) seeking to invalidate the Lodsys Patent Claims. The patent office adopted a majority of Google’s proposed rejections. In response, Lodsys submitted Declarations seeking to overcome the patent office rejections (and particularly U.S. Pat. 5,965,505).

The Declarations submitted by Lodsys identified a number of reports authored by Daniel Abelow and Dr. Barbara Flagg. Interestingly, these reports were dated Spring 1991 --- which is more than one year prior to the earliest filing dates of the Lodsys patents.

Google, seizing upon this, now proposes a number of additional rejections and enforcement issues based on these reports. For example, Google now proposes that the Lodsys Patent Claims are invalid under 35 USC 102(b), because:

1.	one is not entitled to a patent if the invention was described in a printed publication more than one year prior to the date of the application for patent, and the reports predate Lodsys’s relevant patent application by more than a year;
2.	one is not entitled to a patent if the invention was in public use, more than one year prior to the date of the application for patent, and the Declaration/reports indicate such a system was pilot tested and open to a number of students; and
3.	one shall be entitled to a patent unless the invention was on sale in this country, more than one year prior to the date of the application for patent, and the Declaration/reports indicate Harvard accepted a proposal (arguably prior to Spring 1991) that was successfully completed.

If Google is correct on any of these points, the Lodsys Patent Claims appear to be unpatentable or invalid.

Google also notes that Lodsys never submitted the reports to the patent office despite its obligation to disclose information that may be material to patentability. A violation of this duty with respect to any claim could render all claims unpatentable or invalid.

In sum, the Lodsys Patent Claims seem to expire this summer and Lodsys’s efforts to keep the Lodsys Patent Claims from being invalidated have seemingly opened up a lodestone of new arguments that may be used to mitigate their impact.

Stay tuned.
Act on Acta now if you care about democracy and free speech
Creating a 360 Degree Digital Marketing Strategy
It's out of control until you live across the alley from the evil twin of the DNA Lounge (jwz's club), which serves to minors, who puke outside your back door, and which winks at the coke dealers who operate out of the alley behind the place. Then, it turns out, you do want someone to complain to.
I figured I'd need roommates to make things work. What I didn't think of was how far Berkeley is from Menlo Park/San Jose. Seeing as I may not have a car for a while, I might have to consider moving to San Jose.
Bottin vs. Google
For one thing, it's theft. Google not only terminates you but keeps the balance of your advertising payments, potentially going back for months (when Google must have considered all the advertising you were running for them valid, or they'd have terminated you then).
Papa John’s Offering Free Pizza for Super Bowl | Word News24
The Youtube video linked in the footnotes of this essay appears to have been censored.
Why Mathalicious is wrong about Khan Academy and engineering education
Are you a better programmer now than you were 5 years ago? How do you know? Has anyone evaluated your work and told you are now 18% more efficient than 5 years ago?

It may not be 100% accurate (since we are all masters at deluding ourselves), however it is possible to self-assess. Speaking as a teacher I know that my work is much better than it was 7 years ago (when I started). Simply delivering the material so many times has meant that I now have far more effective ways of describing and teaching certain concepts. I know that 7 years ago teaching a 10th grader how to iterate over an array would have taken 5 false starts and 4 weeks worth of instruction (bearing in mind that many lack motivation). Now the same content takes half the time because I can anticipate what kinds of questions will arise and how to deal with them effectively.

Oh and teacher evaluation is hard. Teachers fear it because it's done by non-teachers to teachers. And as some comments on this thread indicate the world is full of monday morning quarterbacks who have lots of opinions without any real experience.
Would be instructive I think to compare the average total compensation of startup engineers vs the average total compensation of hedge fund engineers. I wouldn't be surprised if the former were skewed a bit higher by the Microsoft, Google's, Facebooks.
Concentrate app: Eliminate distractions to work on OS X
Wow.

My children and my children's children are my continuation. They are me.

No, they aren't.

More than that, your infinite existence is harmful

Citation needed.

Otherwise, your children will have to compete for resources not only with everyone else, but you as well.

Yes, that's why we're so much worse off today than we were when the human population was 100 million.

Death is as natural as birth.

As is a 50% childhood mortality rate, people with bad eyesight being eaten by bears, cancer and Alzheimer's.

To break that cycle is a perversion in itself and would destroy any concept of humanity that currently exists.

Wow.

Aging is terrible. Not only does it cause immense suffering and reduced quality of life, it's the major cause of the impending Medicare fiscal train wreck. Although by your "logic" we could get rid of all of that humanity-destroying medicine and solve that problem...
The Software Reuse Complexity Curve
Yes, but they're much happier making budget hardware, handing over the majority of their profit to Microsoft and fighting tooth and nail over bread crumbs than they would be otherwise. Gotta pursue your dream dont'cha know. It's a freedom thing. Also, even if they make a loss, they will make it back in volume. (since that appears to be their actual business strategy, whether to place sarcasm tags around the preceeding sentence is left as an exercise for the reader)

Small nitpick: roughlydrafted was _always_ a pure fanboi site with little or nothing of interest to say.
Access to education is the problem Kahn Academy solves for me. I changed schools a lot as a kid and was kept back to repeat classes I had no problems with because the new school would teach classes at a different rate or in a different order.

Even in classes that I didn't have to repeat I was board a lot in class. (Bio, Physics, Math) I wasted a lot of my youth that way and while it was annoying then, it angers me now. Getting 100% on a class or test wasn't hard and shouldn't have been the limit of my education.

If this was available then I would have pounced on it and tried to test of classes. (If that was available of course, but that's another topic for discussion.) If my parents had some other way for me to get out of grade and high school they would have taken it.

This style of learning wont be for everyone. But it works for me.

On a side note, I've personally used Khan to teach my friends, my siblings, and myself the basics in subjects we've gotten rusty in or never covered growing up. I quite enjoy it.
This is called caves and commons

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?CaveAndCommons

which is not very common because then the company has to buy both caves and common space for everyone.
Using QR codes to geocode video
It works fine for me. Could be a graphics card issue?
I've seen "management by walking around" go very badly. I worked in a company where status pings were a 2-4 times per day occurrence. It made it really hard to get anything done because these impromptu meetings wasted so much time and energy. I think the guy was just bored... And used to having 10-20 reports (instead of 3) which would make 2-4 status pings per day less intolerable.

It's not quite enough to say I quit that job (after the manager failed to mend his ways and gave a ridiculous rant about the incompetence of the team as justification for the insanity). I fired that jerk.

Standups may be annoying but at least they're scheduled. I still think daily team-wide (6+ people) standups are still a waste of time, but at least it's a documented waste of time.
And in the 1950s, you'd have been fired (at best) for flirting with your same-sex colleague.
If we're talking aspirational spending, no, we're not.

It's not the median, but the marginal cost to advance to the next level.

In 1947, to go from the top of the first quintile by income to bottom of the top 5%, required increasing your income 501%. In 2001, the differential was 685%. Wealth disparities tend to exceed income (your marginal savings and/or investment growth increases with marginal income).

http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/DistributionofIncome.html

A similar relationship is shown in this plot:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_Income_Inequality_1967-...

Another relationship is to consider ranking determined by mean (not median) income. If half the wealth and spending power is in the top 5% rather than top 20% of households, then the relative wealth of the lower 95% has decreased -- they're not keeping up with the Jonses.
How Do I Close/De-activate/Delete my HN Account?
Hi,
My account has been deaded. I haven't received any explanation as to why this occurred, and in fact I wasn't aware of it until someone managed to get a message to me that it was.

I don't care really, if HN wants to dead my account, fine, but I should at least be able to close, delete or remove it.

Or, can someone tell me if dead accounts are automatically removed after a period of time?

Thanks,

o2sd
Performance on iPad 1 is abysmal for most everything.
Your first paragraph is fallacious.

If the graph includes feature phones then that will necessarily dilute Apple's profits since they do not make a feature phone. Therefore that makes Apple's numbers appear less impressive.

I don't have an answer to your questions, but I'm sure Mr. Dediu would be happy to answer them transparently. He's not a journalist cooking sensational stats, he's a serious amateur analyst who tries to make revealing graphs with an intellectual honesty that is refreshing and a community-driven feedback process that is producing better punditry than most of the professionals. I know a lot of people have a chip on their shoulder about Apple, but it is possible to be both interested and impressed by Apple and also still be a rational observer.
I don't think the problems that inspire education reform will go away until a large number people with clout re-conceptualize the whole notion and function of education. Education ends is too conflated with nationalist and career ambitions. If students were given the encouragement and support to complete relevant projects that can translate into attractive college applications or on-the-job skills, students would be better served to enter the workforce and would probably more effectively see the relevance of their actions. It's difficult to test student success and standardized tests, organized by specialist subjects, become irrelevant.

Marshall McLuhan (in the sixties) talked about how instant access to information made specialization in education less relevant. He predicted that schools would cease operating under the industrial assumption of specialization. In fact, many other hard boundaries - work/leisure, education/employment - would become blurred and resemble more pre-industrial, and even pre-literate, sensibilities. Unfortunately, technology moves so much slower than ideology, and people are treating the "jobs of the future" as if one learns math, and then one can work in some math-making factory, or something, for the rest of their life.

The dichotomy the author presents is irrelevant. Khan academy and mathalicious.com would both serve a project-based curriculum quite well.
You did read the bit about how Google was arbitrarily with-holding the advertising revenue his site had generated?

Sounds illegal to me.

If my bank decided they didn't want me as a customer anymore I'm pretty sure I'd want my deposits back (!!!). If I did some work for a customer and then they decided to keep the work, but not pay me, and wouldn't say why, I'm pretty sure they'd end up in court ASAP.